Space-cadet-25 - Spaced Out...

@theminecraftbee hey dude, so i read this little thing of yours and i got SO Plagued By Images i did this :D

Sorry if this comes of as rude, but do you ever feel like there's a lot of hatred for romance favorable people in the aro community? I'm both arospec and acespec and sometimes feel like I'm faking being aro because I'm romo favorable. Ace spaces have a lot more positivity for sex favorable acespecs, but aro spaces kinda feel super hostile to romo favorable arospecs. As if me liking romance is disgusting and a betrayal to most aros. Idk it just doesn't feel right when people who are fully aro attack the ace community for being "sex-negative" (which is untrue and acespecs exist) and then turn around and shit on arospecs for liking romance. People preach a lot about how 'aromantic' is a spectrum, but sometimes it feels like romo-repulsed fully aromantics are the only valid kind of aros and us romo favorable aro-specs are frauds. That kind of sentiment is exactly what kept me from identifying as arospec, it was the ace community that made me feel like i can be a valid aspec even if I'm favorable. I kinda really want the aro community to get rid of the weird bias against aces and even more than that I want the aro community to genuinely accept aro-spec people. It's literally helping no one and isolating fellow aspecs. (Sorry if this is offensive to non-ace aros as I'm acespec as well as arospec. That's genuinely not my intention. I'm just venting my frustrations as a fellow aromantic person)

Hello anon, thanks for confiding in me :)

I'm a romance-indifferent alloaro myself, so to be honest I'm not sure if I'm the best person to vent to? However I can speak to you as someone who used to ID as aroace, and has been in aro, as well as ace spaces respectively for a while now.

I personally haven't come across any aros showing blatant animosity towards those who are romance favorable? Once again, I'll admit my personal attitude toward romance might make me a bit blind to noticing such interactions.

So I wouldn't use the word hatred. Inattentiveness? 100%.

By no means do I want to one-up you, or invalidate your experience, because I do get where you're coming from. The ace community as a whole isn't sex-negative though, but I think I'd be lying if I said sex-negative rhetoric isn't very rampant in ace spaces. You'd be surprised, aces saying "sex is gross, why would allos even engage in something that disgusting" and anything along those lines are very easy to find, sadly. But I digress.

I definitely wish romance-favorable aros, but especially arospecs (greyro's, demi's, cupioro's, etc.) who experience romantic attraction, had more space to talk about their relationship with romance and the like, without you guys feeling like you're "breaking the aro code" or "betraying the aro community."

There's no right way to be aro; we're a spectrum, with an array of experiences shared among us. I hate the fact that those differences have to be points of conflict.

I'm sorry to you, other romance-favorable aros and arospecs who feel like, or have been told that they're not aro enough because of their personal relationship with romance and/or romantic attraction. No one should shun you for it, and anyone who does straight up doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about, and need a time-out; that shit isn't helping anyone.

I hope I got my point across? I wasn't as attentive of issues like these as I should've been, but I'll try to be more conscious going forward, so thank you.

-Y.

If you're fifteen or older an still sleep with a stuffed animal please reblog this.

What's this? An excuse to use my mc Jack design?

[Reblogs are better than likes! Please reblog!]

This clip is currently living in my brain rent free

in the wake of dracula daily and subsequent ongoing discussions of the antisemitism that drives the book, i thought i’d throw together a very brief primer based on little strands of research i’ve done in the past around some of the history that scaffolds dracula. i’m not trying to scold people for participating in the more lighthearted end of this cultural moment – i love dracula, i’m also reading dracula daily and enjoying everyone’s little jokes about jonathan harker and his paprika and so on – but i am trying to provide what i hope is a somewhat useful resource for deeper engagement with the text, a necessary critical skill if you want to have anything meaningful to say about it. i’m not really interested in coddling people’s feelings about antisemitism, and i think it’s in everyone’s best interests to provide a little bit of a framework for how we approach and think about and talk about what is a pretty unambiguously bigoted book.

for what it’s worth, i find the most productive way to approach this text, as with any text that emerges from a tradition of immense violence (ie. pretty much any work of english literature from the nineteenth century, all of which write from the heartlands of imperialist plunder and the formation of nationalist cultural norms) is as a historical document. there’s a difference in these discourses between a piece that’s made today, where we might ask why we’ve allowed particular cultural conditions to facilitate the telling of narratives that are attempting to naturalise conditions of bigotry, and one created in 1897, where our relationship to that historical moment should be one of self-reflection and analysis with an eye to informing our understanding of present-day violences. my point is that a text which locates itself within the british antisemitism of the late nineteenth century is one which can enhance our understanding of that antisemitism and its present-day legacy.

i also want to clarify that i don’t intend to reduce the bigotry of dracula to just the antisemitism – it is clearly shaped by broader strokes around racism and imperialist race science in particular, but the specific british-jewish cultural history within which it is grounded happens to be the one that i have a relatively coherent understanding of, and wanted to share. i don’t at all intend to frame this as a complete account – i’m more just putting what i have to hand out into the world for others to do with what they will and ultimately come to their own conclusions about the text and how best to engage with it.

i think it’s worthwhile to also touch briefly on the fact that dracula is by no means alone in invoking antisemitism where vampires are concerned – what often gets missed in discourses around what vampires can represent (parasitic capitalism being an incredibly common discursive invocation, to the point where it’s kind of embarrassing that so-called marxists can’t make the very short leap) is that much of the vampire mythos is shaped by antisemitism. the draining of blood closely resembles a blood libel, ie. the smear that jews drink the blood of christian children; the state of being repelled by a crucifix should be self-explanatory; the construction of the vampire as a parasite leeching off of communal social formations forged within white imperialist societies closely reflects anxieties regarding the allegedly parasitic presence of jews both in eastern + central europe and new immigrant communities in britain. the vampire is immortal as the jew is eternal – the ‘eternal jew’ is a nazi smear drawing from the antisemitic canard of the ‘wandering jew,’ which in turn dates back to the thirteenth century. the vampire threatens the national body and so does the jew. the rush to point to the vampire as an apt metaphor for the parasitism of capitalism too quickly falls into the mire of discourses that entwine capitalist violence with jewish populations (jews are all moneygrabbing leeches and so on), and redirects anger towards capitalism into antisemitism. whilst the history of the vampire as a folkloric figure is far richer than just ‘jews bad,’ it is undeniable that this cultural scaffolding exists, and informs dracula even before stoker comes to personally intervene in discourses of antisemitism specific to the conditions from which he was writing.

this excellent paper on dracula and the gothic response to anxieties of imperialist decay – ie. fear of a ‘reverse colonialism’ – that did the rounds on this website a few days ago covers a lot of important and helpful ground for this text, and i would highly recommend giving it a read. what it misses, however, is that dracula is rooted not only in these abstract notions of imperial decline and external threats to ‘britishness,’ but in the very definite, concrete historical moment in which new discourses of antisemitism were emerging in britain – and that is the history that i want to touch on now.

in 1882, in the wake of the assassination of tsar alexander ii for which the jewish population of the russian empire were scapegoated, a set of highly repressive laws known as the ‘may laws’ were passed. in short, these laws heavily restricted jewish freedom of movement within the empire, almost entirely limiting jewish settlement to the pale of settlement (a portion of land in the westernmost part of the russian empire, encompassing modern-day belarus, lithuania, and moldova, and parts of poland + ukraine) and restricting property ownership + establishing strict administrative quotas across various sectors that severely limited jewish participation in russian society. this in turn brought about expulsions of portions of the jewish populations of moscow and st petersburg where these quotas were exceeded. crucially, these repressive laws were tightened over the next decade, which, alongside a series of brutal pogroms, caused mass emigration of the ashkenazi population from the russian empire. one significant epicentre for jewish settlement at the end of the nineteenth century was the east end of london. this was, of course, coterminous to the writing of dracula, in which an eastern european man imbued with a number of antisemitic smears attempts to inculcate himself within the population of london and imitate britishness with the eventual intent of sucking it dry – you see the very obvious lines being drawn here.

it goes without saying that the establishment of a new immigrant population in london would stoke the sort of reactionary sentiments that we can locate in dracula; however, we might look beyond just a loose historical correlation and consider the possible relationship between the whitechapel murders (colloquially known as the jack the ripper murders – whitechapel is located in the east end if you didn’t know) and stoker’s novel (published seven years after the last of the murders) amidst the adjacent discourses that said murders generated. in addition to the fascination with an ‘underside’ to victorian society in which sexual + social moralising was inverted and voyeurised by the moralist bourgeois class that these murders, targeting poor sex workers, amplified (think the kind of sensationalism we see with true crime culture today – very much the prototype of that), the projection of sensationalised sexual degeneracy and lechery onto the murders in turn invoked antisemitic discourses in which the east end’s jewish population became a nodal point of sorts where these spectral anxieties could be projected. a physical description of jack the ripper at one point included a dark beard and a foreign accent, with a sketch that added a hooked nose, and the famous goulston street graffito in 1888 which read ‘the juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’ has, though unproven, been treated as though it were written in connection with the whitechapel murders. john pizer, a jewish man, was at one point arrested for the murders (and later released), and police reports around this referred to emergent broader anti-jewish sentiment in whitechapel. the point is, there’s a case to be made for the whitechapel murders having amplified already-extant antisemitism in the east end, and a further case to be made for this specific blood libel adjacency to have shaped bram stoker’s novel. (to compare; this is, for example, the same discourse that scaffolds the joke in what we do in the shadows about laszlo being jack the ripper.) whilst we don’t know that stoker consciously, explicitly had jack the ripper in mind, 1) it is a theory that has been critically posited before, and 2) at the very least, the novel’s unambiguous antisemitism that locates itself most prominently within a blood libel would have been informed by discourses specific to london, of which this was a major one.

that dracula himself is something of an antisemitic caricature is, i would hope, obvious; and of course, the text is laced with the language of physiognomy and the fear that an immigrant might sufficiently imitate britishness to the point of being able to pass himself off as british wholesale. to take this further, we might, for example, think about how stoker depicts lucy westenras – a ‘blonde, demure’ white woman representative of the british imperialist fantasy of white womanhood becomes a vampire and feeds off of the same children that she (as a white woman) is socially conditioned to care for and reproduce, thus rendering the vampiric threat as one that targets white women and their reproductive roles within the imperial social formation. we might similarly point to the whitechapel murders and the simultaneous sensationalising of sex workers’ murders against the figure of the ‘good’ bourgeois white woman + the subsequent anxiety that the jewish population of the east end might represent a real, immediate threat to london’s womanhood.i don’t want to be overly didactic about this book, and i think that after a certain point this scaffolding is such that people can go away and do the work themselves – like, i’m not going to sit here drawing out point after painstaking point about how dracula is peppered with the language of race science and imperialist anxiety at points x, and y, and z. my intention here was to provide a bit of specific background context for how & why this novel came about, from the relatively meagre well of information that i have to hand. my closing remarks might be that we could use all of this discourse as a launchpad for thinking about the points of convergence of subjugation within the vampire myth, and what that can tell us about how imperialism refortifies itself + against which values it does so – in dracula, in sheridan le fanu’s carmilla, in samuel taylor coleridge’s christabel, and in the broader corpus of myth to which all of these texts are responding, we can identify repeated convergent themes of othering the jew, the irish population (le fanu was anglo-irish and a popular reading of carmilla is as representative of the colonisation of ireland), the homosexual (dracula is incredibly homoerotic, and both carmilla and christabel are fairly explicitly lesbian), the racialised + colonised populace, and the projection of lechery and sexual degeneracy onto all of these subjects in the ultimate interest of reifying white gentile imperialist sexual formations. the somewhat effete feminising of dracula comes against the masculinising of the imperial british man, for example; the ‘othered’ populace exists in threat & opposition to the imperial norm (and the feminised jewish man is a classic of antisemitism, eg. as far back as the medieval smear that jewish men menstruated). all of these figures clustered under the broad umbrella of the vampire are rendered as threats to reproductive white heterosexuality, and as such, to the reproduction of the imperial order, and to capital, and i’ve always found this to be the most elucidating angle from which i can engage with the text critically. i hope at the very least this is a helpful little conjunction of Thoughts that people can do something with?

Chocolate guy did it again

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I hope they keep Annabeth’s eyes and hair dark. Black girls deserve to be able to be portrayed onscreen as magical without having any of their features altered to look more white. The “magical Black person with light eyes/hair” is so played out.

Annabeth was blonde in the books to overturn the stereotype of dumb blondes. Black girls (especially Black girls with neurodivergencies/learning disabilities like dyslexia and ADHD) are shown as smart and capable onscreen significantly less than blonde girls. I’m so happy that they’ll now get to see themselves shown as clever and special and important.

If anyone has any issues with Black Annabeth, they can get over it.

“You’re the one who asked if the Cod Empire had stories,” Jimmy says, sitting next to Scott by the edge of a mangrove island. In the distance in the swamp, they can watch several young codfolk attempt to play—Scott doesn’t know the name of the game. Something that involves a lot of treading water and throwing a ball around and makes Scott look exhausted just watching it, at least.

“Yeah, but I don’t get it. Don’t fables normally have like… morals?” Scott says. “The ones I knew did.”

“I mean, I’d say the story about the catfish was always pretty clear to me,” Jimmy says. “Doesn’t change, but adapts. It’s willing to eat anything, but not change who it is, and it outlives the goldfish, who change all the time, because of it—”

And Scott stands, distant from Ren but still covered in blood, red crystals floating around him. He raises his sword silently, then he sits down with the axolotl and waits. He’d finish it himself, but he’s always simply tried to survive, survive without changing who he is in the process. He doesn’t know if he’s succeeded. His teeth taste like iron and bile. If he’d been about to throw up, though, he would have done it days ago. Maybe that’s what victory tastes like.

“—that’s a moral, right?”

“Other people change the goldfish though. The goldfish don’t choose to change. That’s… that’s the point of goldfish breeding, Jimmy.”

“Yeah, and they die if you breathe on them funny. Don’t you know what a metaphor is? You’re the one who said fables normally have lessons!”

Scott sighs. “Yeah, yeah. Fine.” He sighs. “The oyster one, though.”

“Well that one’s just literal. Did you not know you can crack open oysters to check water quality? They’re a good indicator!”

Scott throws his hands up. “No! I didn’t grow up by the ocean! And the story’s more like that an animal just kills the oyster one day, and it finds out the pain the oyster had been preventing—”

And as Jimmy bleeds out on the grass, he realizes he’s bleeding out for them a second time. He hears, distant, Grian justify himself, but all Jimmy feels is like he’s somehow been cheated. He’s been killed first, again. The first name in a bloodbath of them. How is that fair? He’s never asked to die first! He’s never asked to die at all!

“—which is just. Really sad for the oyster?”

“Scott, they’re oysters.”

“They’re fables! We were just talking about metaphors!” Scott flops back. It’s undignified. He’ll get leaves in his hair, and mud all over his clothes. He doesn’t care. Here, the mangroves in the brackish swamp water smell like salt and something he hadn’t smelled anywhere else, and it doesn’t smell good, really, but he’s figured out it smells like life, and also maybe Jimmy, in a way that makes it easy to not care quite so much about appearances. Maybe it’s the bird in him, he thinks jokingly. He does have wings, and so many of the birds come to roost around trees like these.

They’re quiet for a while, Scott flopped back, children screaming and laughing in their game, and Jimmy watching all of them.

“Did you have a favorite?” Jimmy finally asks.

“Would it be cliche to say the one about the lovers? The seahorses, the one who builds a beautiful thing for his lover.”

“They die in the end, though.”

“Yeah, but, like—”

The war never comes to the hobbit hole. It’s funny; in the end, the two of them had gone to the war instead, when it came looking. Maybe they’d known better. Maybe, thinks Scott, in the afterlife their four hands had built, maybe they’d known better than to taint it.

“—the things they made were real.”

“Huh.”

Jimmy helps Scott up again. He looks at Scott in the eyes in that way that makes Scott either want to kiss him or strangle him. Scott’s never fully decided which, which probably makes it all the stranger that he’s sitting here, getting covered in swamp water and talking about fables.

“And yours?”

“Mine? Oh, uh, it’s one—funny, I think I learned it from Lizzie? I have no idea why that would be.”

Scott raises an eyebrow.

“It’s simple. It’s just that all things start as water, and all things will be water again one day.”

“…what? Why would that story be your favorite?”

Jimmy is quiet for quite a while.

“Maybe it’s because… no matter how badly we were to mess up…”

And he watches the explosion and he runs, he runs, because he doesn’t know what else to do.

“…no matter how bad of a decision we have to make…”

And Scott looks at the sword, and looks at Xonorth, and he doesn’t know what else he could do.

“…we’ll always end up back where we started.”

“That’s… oddly optimistic,” Scott says, although he’s not really sure that’s what he thinks about it. Somehow, instead of optimistic, it makes Scott feel like he’s somehow both too big and too small for his skin, thinking of the world like that. Thinking of everything going back to how it started.

On a circle, once again, they agree on their rules, and they shake hands, and they make their kingdoms. Again, and again, and—

“Well, I do like to keep cheerful when I can!” Jimmy says brightly. “Oh look, they’ve finished with their game!”

“Yeah,” Scott says. “So they have.”

happy gf 10 year anniversary