:pleading:

I'm December Holiday.

Note: This is NOT the order of the brackets. While Side A contestants will only be fighting Side A, and Side B will only be fighting Side B, both images are in mostly alphabetical order (except for the times I fucked up), NOT the order of the brackets.

I do not currently know when polls will be going up! Probably within a week! I'll edit this post when I'm sure!

To reiterate what this tournament is about: This is about characters that feel strongly coded as systems, while not canonically being systems. (while it's not a strict DNI, do note mod is anti-endo/tulpa/willo/etc and this tournament is focused on systems formed through DID/OSDD/other CDDs.)

If I have made any mistakes, don't tell me this was a lot of work as is lol

(Full list of contestants in plain text is under the cut)

HEARTACHE OF CHAOS - THINGS NEVER SAID.

I was being facetious with the trick part lol but you know the joke "I might be racist, but you're mean and that's worse?" It's the root of that. We discussed it back when we read White Fragility. You can see it in Trump, Elon Musk, and your average Tumblr racist:

They really, REALLY want to be liked. Not just liked, no that's not the right word, but validated.

Think about it this way. Racism is the status quo; the default, right? Part of maintaining that default is through normalization, and that includes the solidarity necessary to reinforce that (DiAngelo called it white solidarity).

So, if being covertly racist is the status quo, then that means you will be socially rewarded for being so. When you get rewarded, people are nice, friendly, relatable, they keke and haha right alongside you. But when you confront someone's racism, you're not socially rewarding them anymore- the spigot of validation has been paused! Instead of taking it as a valid critique, you are seen as socially punishing a person. You're being MEAN, because the validation I got from everyone else's also-racism was NICE!

That's why when you confront racism, you HAVE to stand firm on it. You cannot feed into the desire for the validation of their behavior. That's what makes a lot of people snap. The blowup is meant to stop you, to force you back into compliance! The only one being punished really is you for bringing it up.

And hell, if not socially validating a bigot is punishment... 😐 Why would that be... A bad thing? We're not hitting you with rocks, we're just saying we don't fuck with you and your behavior. (But that's also a part of really all of the books we've read in #cbc book club so far; that antiracism is seen as violence.)