Malificandy - Salt, Spite, & Everything Slight

I've seen discussions sometimes about how fanfiction-based fandom culture is heavily influenced and dominated by people who are not cis men.

One thing I haven't seen discussed as much though is how much of fandom in general is shaped by neurodivergent people.

I mean, you have autistic and ADHD people with special interests or hyperfixations collecting information and writing detailed meta, connecting very strongly with characters and fandoms. I would not be surprised if the percentage of autistics in fandom communities was significantly higher than in the general public.

And that's not even getting into other types of neurodivergencies and how they influence fandom culture.

I sometimes see people try to divorce fandom culture from the idea of being a "geek", and I understand that this is sometimes because of the association with the sexist geek stereotype, but I also know that there is a connection between the two concepts, and it's probably us neurodivergent people.

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.

like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.

here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.

TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.

Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”

all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that

I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.

But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.

In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.

On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”

like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not

“But there was one scenario in which the Autistic people left a positive first impression: when people read a transcript of their words instead of seeing and hearing the Autistic people saying those words, observers rated them as more likable and more intelligent. In fact, in the scenario where observers just read the written words of Autistic and non-autistic people, they rated both groups the same. For non-autistic people, the written transcripts were their lowest-rated mode of communication, although only by a small amount. For Autistic people, the written transcripts were their highest-rated mode of communication by a very significant margin. Written communication is the great social equalizer. Remember this if you start to fear your Autistic child is spending too much time interacting with others online and not enough time interacting with others face-to-face. Online communication is a valid accommodation for the social disability that comes with being Autistic. We need online interaction and this meta-study demonstrates exactly why that is the case.”

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Autism and the Burden of Social Reciprocity | Sparrow R. Jones unstrangemind.com

(via dickensign)

The tragedy of Gaza was caused by people pretending it is humane to leave people under a bloodthirsty dictatorship

Palestians have received greater international aid per capita than Europe during the Marshall Plan.

But because they are ruled by rich mad men with disregard to human life, including the lives of own civilians, that couldn't be enough to uplift them.

Which was always obvious, but people insisted of it not being obvious.

"Lawrence it's the fucking Taliban" gives similar vibes to "Harold they're lesbians"

actually nuts that the US hasn’t had a female president yet

i’m really upset by the amount of goyim that have the desire to convert but are ardently ‘antizionist’ to the point of excluding any perceived zionists.

i love when people convert. member of the tribe! many of my irl friends and mutuals are jews that converted!!

but it breaks my heart that there are people out there that want to cherry pick their own idea of my religion and people.

i didn’t get to choose. i was born into jewishness with family already in israel. israel as a concept is intertwined with my literal existence, every prayer i learned from birth is in hebrew, the shema begins with a call for israel, my uncle is an israeli rabbi, and i go by my hebrew name with a lot of my family and shul.

at this point in time, zionism is agreeing that the jewish people have a right to self determination in their ancestral land. which is israel. it is still the very same israel my family has been yearning for since before it was ever renamed to Palestine.

please don’t expect to come into my home, decide it’s also yours, then pretend like i don’t exist because i don’t fit your idea of it.

if you refuse to listen to all jews, you will never be one of us.