Trains in Anime (and other random opinions)

A year and a half ago I asked permission to do a follow up to this comic by edendaphne and drew the sketches for most of it in my sketchbook.

He tried.

if you are non-american then it can be dangerous to hold beliefs about your rights that are only applicable in the US.

i am australian and i have seen young australians have completely us-american perceptions on the rights they hold (or do not hold) in regards to protest, police officers, self-defense, medical care, higher education, debt, and legal proceedings. i am not talking about "boooo americans" i am talking about the genuine danger it might present to have us-centric assumptions in high-stakes situations

Chloé

HUG FOR A BUG

also featuring a sketch i abandoned once i lost track of all their limbs:

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

I'm not talking about gay and black people or interracial couples in media and society, etc etc, but like... idk, mundane stuff like fandom antis, right? It's a small population, but it's so incredibly grating on fandom enjoyment, that it feels like some fandoms are completely overrun. "Everyone in that fandom is a hater."

Or, oh, far less mundane example — homophobic comments!

I see ONE person in a reddit thread be homophobic (or a few if it's a large comment section, whatever the equivalent of 5% would be), and I'm thinking "Oh, they HATE us hate us over there." Bc I'm also, emotionally, still upset over the homophobic comment I read last week when my browser loads this next one. (ADHD probably doesn't help lol. Last week can easily feel like yesterday or even five minutes ago.)

The fact that I didn't even remember/notice being upset in all the intervening time between then and now is irrelevant. The fact that I read 20+ threads between then and now without a single peep of homophobia is also irrelevant.

The brain doesn't really care about small details like "facts."

It felt afraid/threatened then, and it feels afraid/threatened now, and it's starting to develop a certain ~sense, a subconscious wariness, about the experience of going on reddit.

(Which... that wariness likely makes it hyper-vigilant and more likely to notice homophobic comments it might have otherwise skimmed over, reinforcing the experience.)

Thus, over 15 years, I have become convinced that Reddit is informational (esp in the age of Google becoming useless), BUT is also irredeemably homophobic, racist, sexist, etc. etc. despite the fact that I mostly curate my experience and stay off egregiously unpalatable subreddits.

Some things feel threatening for good reason. Racism, homophobia, misogyny are scary bc they can portend real harm. (Even fandoms with too many fans willing to harrass and death-threat others can result in real harm.) It's good to know how to deal with that fear, but the fear isn't unwarranted.

Other things, like seeing a black person at a shopping mall, you know, doing their shopping... or seeing a somewhat broad-shouldered woman in the ladies' room going about her business, you know, going into a stall or washing her hands... these things are threatening bc someone has conditioned others to consider these things threatening.

Who did it? Why? What did they stand to gain from your fear?

Generally — money, power, and control on a scale that the casual pleb racist/transphobe doesn't get so much as a whiff of.

Unfortunately, these aren't questions people are asking themselves so... we continue to try to integrate through education (history, science, critical race theory) and through exposure in non-threatening contexts (sesame street, will & grace).