five months pass...
one month passes...
one year passes...
four months pass...
man alive - probably the right thread for it, i don't have much to say about it myself... the problem with a lot of this stuff is that it's so marginal that, like, the people it affects it _really_ affects, but the people it doesn't affect...
i'm particularly starting to find myself less and less online... twitter becoming overtly institutionally evil has kind of reduced my contact with it. people i know are less likely to use twitter, less likely to be engaged with the Discourse. and some of those folks are on bluesky or mastodon and some of those people are too busy getting evicted to do much on social media. i mean honestly the one upside of having a group of friends who are constantly in crisis is that it really cuts down on my exposure to twitter drama.
but i did happen to run across this:
This will be the average congressional hearing in 2055 pic.twitter.com/jbN8kV9ikZ— Jen Deere 1986 (@oxyjene1986) April 1, 2024
and i can tell i'm getting old because i only really know like half of these. i have no idea what "the captive prince" even is. "hazbin hotel" i haven't really seen but i have a group of friends who are really into it, and i don't really know what's supposed to be "problematic" about it.
but what bothers me is kind of the flattening of "problematic", the way it gets used as code for "untouchable". i've seen this a lot with my BPD - like, i have serious problems and they affect me and the people around me and, like. if people cut ties with me as a result of my behavior i _actively support_ that, i mean it hurts like hell and it's not what i _wanted_ but it's absolutely fair. but that's not how people use "problematic", it's used like it is here, where it's like oh you have friends who have friends with this person who did this bad thing, why are you doing that?
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ok i'm gonna get deep into early christian history here, fgti if you're reading this maybe you'll appreciate my nerding out here, but what it reminds me of is this early christian heresy called donatism. it's a really interesting heresy to me and one i find really relevant to online culture.
so the big thing to know about christian persecution is that there was really only one big, major, pan-roman persecution, and that was the diocletianic persecution. after the "crisis of the third century" - basically the collapse of the First Roman Empire - after about 50 years or so rome kind of got itself together in a form that was still an "empire" but was different in a lot of ways from what came before, like more of an overt military dictatorship rather than just kind of implicitly a military dictatorship like it was before. one of the more important emperors was diocletian, who did a bunch of things and one of them was saying "ok we need to get serious about the Christian Problem", christians were, like, getting more and more prevalent. like maybe up to 10% of people in the empire were christians at this point.
so diocletian was like, goddamn, these guys are a threat to traditional roman civic religion and was all "repent or die". kind of like the spanish inquisition honestly haha. anyway a lot of christians weren't actually down with the "martyrdom" thing, including some bishops. which was important because bishops, at that time, were basically how you made new priests, you had kind of a lineage, like this person was ordained by this person who was ordained by this person, there wasn't like a Central Bishop Authority or nothing
anyway constantine, in hoc signo vinces, christianity is no longer an anti-imperialist resistance movement but a tool of imperialism, yada yada yada, but christians are mostly like, hey, cool, rome has stopped trying to kill us, that's nice.
the thing is that a lot of christians who renounced christ so as not to get killed, they were all "well, i only did that so i wouldn't get killed, i actually really believe in christ". and some of them were bishops, and since they were bishops, they started ordaining people.
and the donatists were like, hey, wait, that's bullshit, people were out there dying for what they believed in and you actively renounced your faith and now you're saying basically "psych!" and going on ordaining priests like nothing happened here? like you kinda gave up your moral authority to ordain priests when you renounced christ to save your own skin.
i mean honestly i can't say they didn't have a point, but the thing was it didn't, like, really work out in practice. because there's this lineage, and there's no central authority, and it devolves into well, was the bishop who ordained you actually ordained by a fake bishop, so for all you know you're a "real priest" but the donatists are like no you're not, and ultimately i guess like the woke donatists wound up eating themselves. or something.
like sometimes yeah it sucks that people who actually denounced christ are out there saying "oh yeah i'm super duper christian" like fuck you where were you in chicago?, but man you just gotta let that shit go
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anyway tho i wanna get back to "problematic" as a euphemism for "untouchable" because of the two of the media properties in that tweet i _do_ know, they're like very different. i mean i haven't seen "attack on titan", it's not really the kind of animne i go for, but my understanding is that there's some questionable fascist subtext in there somewhere, the kind of stuff that makes you go "hmmm i wonder if there's something deeper going on here". like "problematic" in the same way that... like another deep cut, there was this debate for a while over whether "the celestial toymaker" was racist against asians. because it turns out "celestial" was an old obscure derogatory term for chinese folks and if you look at it michael gough's getup in the episode has kind of a chinoiserie thing going on. and i think eventually they figured out that it's not racist against asians and apparently RTD brought back the character in a special last year which i didn't watch because clinical depression, but without the "celestial" part because that bit was maybe a little bit problematic. like the bigger problem with that story is the gratuitous use of the n word for no goddamn reason in the story's second episode, that's not really _problematic_ that's just goddamn racist is what that is.
now i could be wrong here but i feel like attack on titan is "problematic" in the same sense that, like, the celestial toymaker was arguably a racist caricature of a chinese person. (which contrast with "talons of weng-chiang" which _does_ contain severe racist caricatures of chinese folks, again, not "problematic" just racist.)
anyway contrast that with harry potter which, again, i haven't really read... i've heard that there are some problematic depictions in there and i honestly can't speak on that one way or another. of course that's not the problem with harry potter. the problem with harry potter is that its author is, like, probably the most influential person in the british anti-trans movement, which has been _very_ effective and which has been _very bad_ for anybody in the uk who happens to be trans. and it's still very effective, and things keep getting worse for trans people, and rowling is still working really hard to keep making things worse for trans people over there.
like to me that goes a little beyond just "problematic". and if someone says that none of that has anything to do with harry potter, respectfully, i call bullshit on that. i only speak for myself, other trans people can and occasionally do differ from me on that. speaking as a trans person, though, i do think supporting harry potter serves to make rowling powerful and influential, and the effects of that power and influence are directly harmful to trans people in the uk. to me that goes beyond "problematic".
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see when you flatten out all this stuff it becomes this moral equivalency thing. i mean shit i got _problems_, i got shit-tons of problems. i've done some fucked up shit, i've had some supremely bad takes, past and very probably present. i have _problems_ and i deal with them the best i can. i mean my whole BPD thing, i act in certain ways and sometimes people are like "yeah i can't deal with that". fair! more than fair! but then some people are like "oh don't talk to kate she's _problematic_". like i do my best to take responsibility for my problems and deal with them. "ok nobody talk to kate" doesn't, like. doesn't help.
the thing i keep coming back to is when kendrick put out "mr morale" or whatever and the only thing anybody wanted to talk about was "auntie diaries". and within 24 hours of that song coming out some person, who was trans, was tweeting that anybody who had a problem with kendrick saying "faggot" in that song was a "secretly racist tenderqueer".
and i mean i like that song, even though it's probably not the best song on that album, which i admit i've only really listened to once. i agree with that song. i self-identify as a "faggot", though i'm careful about how or when i do because some trans people are uncomfortable with that and i wanna be respectful.
and i keep coming back to it because it says something important about how, like, purity culture or cancel culture or whatever works. like the people who they go after the hardest, it always seems to be marginalized people. i mean i don't believe in all that "punching up/punching down" stuff, like the idea of privilege hierarchies, i don't think that works out too well in practice, but like the person who made hazbin hotel isn't a white man, this is a show that speaks deeply to queer experience, and, like, what... one of the characters is homophobic? like you can't really give an authentic representation without representing homophobia, without representing sexuality sometimes in some pretty blunt terms. and if that's "problematic", it's not the problem of the people depicting them.
none of this is remotely _new_, people were saying shit like this about gangsta rap when i was an ignorant teenager in the early '90s, and it was just as fucking stupid then. it just irritates me that you try to talk about genuinely hateful and bigoted people like rowling and suddenly it turns into dunking on, like, kendrick lamar or w/e. come the fuck on.
― Kate (rushomancy), Tuesday, 2 April 2024 14:34 (two months ago) link