Steve Rogers did, in fact, realize that something was off when he saw the outline of the woman’s odd bra (a push-up bra, he would later learn), but being an officer and a gentleman, he said that it was the game that gave the future away.
No, see, this scene is just amazing. The costume department deserves so many kudos for this, it’s unreal, especially given the fact that they pulled off Peggy pretty much flawlessly.
1) Her hair is completely wrong for the 40’s. No professional/working woman would have her hair loose like that. Since they’re trying to pass this off as a military hospital, Steve would know that she would at least have her hair carefully pulled back, if maybe not in the elaborate coiffures that would have been popular.
2) Her tie? Too wide, too long. That’s a man’s tie, not a woman’s. They did, however, get the knot correct as far as I can see – that looks like a Windsor.
3) That. Bra. There is so much clashing between that bra and what Steve would expect (remember, he worked with a bunch of women for a long time) that it has to be intentional. She’s wearing a foam cup, which would have been unheard of back then. It’s also an exceptionally old or ill-fitting bra – why else can you see the tops of the cups? No woman would have been caught dead with misbehaving lingerie like that back then, and the soft satin cups of 40’s lingerie made it nearly impossible anyway. Her breasts are also sitting at a much lower angle than would be acceptable in the 40’s.
Look at his eyes. He knows by the time he gets to her hair that something is very, very wrong.
so what you are saying is S.H.E.I.L.D. has a super shitty costume division….
Nope, Nick Fury totally did this on purpose.
There’s no knowing what kind of condition Steve’s in, or what kind of person he really is, after decades of nostalgia blur the reality and the long years in the ice (after a plane crash and a shitload of radiation) do their work. (Pre-crash Steve is in lots of files, I’m sure. Nick Fury does not trust files.) So Fury instructs his people to build a stage, and makes sure that the right people put up some of the wrong cues.
Maybe the real Steve’s a dick, or just an above-average jock; maybe he had a knack for hanging out with real talent. Maybe he hit his head too hard on the landing and he’s not gonna be Captain anymore. On the flipside, if he really is smart, then putting him in a standard, modern hospital room and telling him the truth is going to have him clamming up and refusing to believe a goddamn thing he hears for a really long time.
The real question here is, how long it does it take for the man, the myth, the legend to notice? What does he do about it? How long does he wait to get his bearings, confirm his suspicions, and gather information before attempting busting out?
Turns out the answer’s about forty-five seconds.
Sometimes clever posts die a quiet death in the abyss of the unreblogged. Some clever posts get attention, get comments, get better. Then there’s this one which I’ve watched evolve into a thing of brilliance.
Listen, there is an approximately 0% chance that Luke Skywalker doesn’t speak Huttese. He is fluent in Huttese, and probably in multiple dialects. He was beyond any doubt perfectly capable of communicating with Jabba the Hutt directly, in Jabba’s own language.
But he doesn’t. He insistently uses Basic when talking to Jabba, and he makes Threepio translate Jabba’s words before he replies. He acts for all the world as if he needs the translation.
Which he doesn’t. And Jabba must know damn well that he doesn’t. Because he introduced himself as Luke Skywalker, and that’s an unmistakably Tatooine name (and a slave name, at that).
Conclusion: Literally every word Luke Skywalker speaks throughout his interaction with Jabba if a veiled “fuck you.” Every single word.
see i know that we all like to make fun of luke skywalker, hick farmer from the back of nowhere, thinking that shooting womp rats with the space equivalent of his dad’s old rifle is somehow sufficient preparation for taking down the death star; but i love the idea that actually womp rats are six foot abominations of teeth, spines & poison and bulls-eyeing them is actually excellent preparation for the rebellion. think about it: swarms of six foot rats, and some skinny kid with an outdated weapon taking them out, cool as paint. hardened soldiers whisper scary stories to each other, about the monsters who scavenge in the sands, stripping a camp of everything living in five seconds flat, and luke just saying oh, womp rats? they’re nothing. great with a bit of butter and some toast.
REMEMBER THAT HE TOLD WEDGE, “THEY’RE NOTMUCH BIGGER THAN TWO METERS” LIKE THAT’S SOME MINOR INCONVENIENCE
BIGGER THAN TWO METERS
Wedge: So, you’ve been to Tatooine
Han: Yeah
Wedge: Womp rats?
Han: Sure. Chewie uses ‘em for bowcaster practice. Kinda gamey tasting. Sandy colored fur, lotsa teeth, little over two meters…
Wedge: Luke wasn’t lying???
Luke (head inside X-wing panel, tinkering): Why would I make THAT up?
Honestly, I’ve always thought that farm work on Tatooine, unintentionally, must have provided a fairly excellent groundwork in establishing Luke’s baby Jedi skills outside of an academy context.
There are of course the aforementioned womp rats, which are both terrifying and a fantastic way to develop shooting skills.
There’s beggar’s canyon for piloting. And if Phantom Menace brought us nothing else, it actually showed us the living death trap that is beggar’s canyon. He’s not like zipping around the Grand Canyon, he’s literally goofing off in a place that killed off a shit ton of professional pod racers. So needless to say, Luke’s had a chance to develop scary good reflexes, information processing, and spacial relation skills.
The Lars’s economic status means that they had to make do with ancient, crap equipment. Luke would have learned how to make incredibly fine tuned repairs, and keep shit going forever. And sure, he never built a C3PO or a pod racer, but honestly, if he found the materials to do it, he probably would have used them in a moisture collector.
And there’s even combat experience. From what we know about Tatooine, a farm like the Lars Homestead, would have been at risk for attacks by raiders, Jabba’s goons, and any of the terrifying hellbeasts that populate that planet. It’s not like Jedi temple training or anything. But Luke definitely learned to be cool under pressure, even when outnumbered or with really old, shit equipment.
I would just like to note that in The Old Republic MMORPG (set three thousand years before the movies) the womp rats are not only two meters long, covered in spines, with teeth as long as my hand, and sometimes DISEASED
BUT THEY ALSO ATTACK IN PACKS
You think you just pissed off ONE rodent as long as you are tall? Oh no. It’s calling ALL SIXTEEN OF ITS FRIENDS
AND THEY ARE ALL AIMING TO BITE YOUR CROTCH OFF.
*THAT’S* what Luke grew up sniping to keep them away from the droids and moisture vaporators. *THAT* (and Beggar’s Canyon) is what prepared him to take down the Death Star.
Womp rats are bad news.
My favorite thing is that they are just one example of how Luke doesn’t know he’s from a Death Planet until he leaves it.
i’m just going to reblog this so you can all enjoy the excellent commentary about my space son who is equal parts sunshine and tempered death
So you’re saying he’s not from Space Nevada, he’s from Space Australia
I see a lot of posts going around talking about the need to be critical of fanfic, and how we gotta watch out for the messages we’re sending
Well, here’s one thing I’m gonna need us to be critical about:
Every statistic I’ve ever seen says fanfic authors are heavily female (or nb)
And Tumblr, which is a fairly US-centric cross-section of fandom, is filled with this discourse about fanfic writers who create pornography
I need us to stop and think about why we’ve decided that fictional sex is the most damaging thing anyone could ever find on the internet
I need us to think about the culture we live in, which encourages us to be sexually available (to straight men) but punishes us if we (sluts) enjoy it
Because here’s the thing: fanfic is not coming from a position of power and prestige in our society
It is a niche genre primarily written by women, for women, for free
And it is a place where many of us do find power in exploring our own sexuality (or asexuality)
Even when that exploration takes us to gritty, horrifying (or cathartic) places
I’m going to need us to think long and hard about why we’re prioritizing fictional characters over the needs of real women
And I’m going to need it to stop
Fandom purity wank is absolutely about control over women and women’s sexuality. There’s nothing ambiguous about it.
Just think about the hot-button issues in the fannish community, the topics that consistently and reliably get people worked up into a lather, the themes that provoke the nastiest conflicts and inspire the most dedicated resistance movements. Think about the fights that are most likely to spill out over their cyber boundaries and start affecting people in the real world – in public harassment at cons, in doxxing and ‘outing’ to family and employers, in malicious legal allegations.
It’s about sex. It’s always about sex.
From the constant tantrums over ‘problematic’ shipping to the righteous doxxing of ‘pedophiles’ (which in current tumblr parlance means anyone who draws or writes canonically underage characters in romantic or erotic scenarios), fandom’s big efforts at moral reform always seem to revolve around restricting and controlling the sexual expression of the majority-women community. You won’t meet many people who stay up past their bedtime to scream at strangers on the internet about unethical portrayals of non-sexual violence – unless, of course, they suspect the women involved in its creation are getting off on it. You’ll struggle to find an anti blog dedicated to the insidious social ills of torture whump fic, or goopy hurt-comfort where all manner of human suffering is put on display for the viewer’s enjoyment. The purity crew dress up their agenda as a desire for collective self-improvement and raised moral standards, but they don’t seem too worried about aspects of public morality that don’t somehow tie back into sex. What they’re upset about is the same thing conservative minds have been upset about since basically the dawn of time – there are women out there in the world doing icky sex things without the permission of their communities.
And these people, these moral guardians, they’ve gotten really good at couching their fundamentalist views in progressive language. They don’t say ‘you’re to blame if you provoke men to rape’ – they say ‘your fic normalises sexual violence and contributes to rape culture’. They don’t say ‘women ought to be chaste’ – they say ‘your fantasies are socially harmful and you owe it to the world to be more self-critical’. The messages are the same and the desired outcomes are literally identical.
The core assumption underlying all of it – an assumption that I’m sure our puritan forebears would find deeply comforting – is that women’s sexual expression is a matter of public concern, and that women are directly responsible for upholding the moral standards of their communities by restricting themselves to a narrow repertoire of publicly controlled, socially condoned sexual outlets. Anything beyond that repertoire is a grave moral breach.
To anyone who’s reading this – and there’s always a few – thinking, “this is just deflection! [X hot-button topic] is really bad and harmful!’, I’d like to encourage you to sit back for just a moment and think about why it is, exactly, that you feel the best and most important place to wage your war against moral corruption is in one of the only pockets of popular media that women unequivocally control. Of all the spaces in the world where you could be fighting for your view of a better society, you’ve chosen a place where women come together to share the fantasies that mainstream culture refuses to let them indulge. Why?
It’s bible banging bullshit in a progressive mask.
This tea is lovely.
Huh. Well, as a woman, i find it interesting that OP seems to think any critique of women BY women must in some way be…anti women? I’m not certain what’s trying to be said here. If you’re talking about the men, both inside and outside the community who DO INDEED critique women for all sorts of things, i’m right behind you in saying that those men need to shut the fuck up about women’s sexuality and it’s expression. That’s not their lane and they need to stay the fuck out of it. But by you’re own admission, majority of fan writers are women or NB, and since most of the critique of fan works seems to come from within the community itself, it stands to reason that we are in fact, talking about women and NB’s critiquing themselves yes? right?
Bible banging? repressing women’s sexuality? uhh, no. i don’t think that’s the case here. i really really don’t. Does that sort of thing happen in fandom? Of course. Does it happen WAY too often? Shit yes. And if all you were saying is exactly that, i’d be slapping that reblog button no issue. But that’s not all your saying, is it? Seems to me that the heart of the message here is all about your desire to ship as you please, and nary a quibble allowed to be made. After all, that would be repressing your sexuality right? Normally i’d agree with you, even on this, buuut for that tiny tiny issue of rape and CSA kinks. You know, the ones that are so obviously written by abusers for abusers it should practically come with a sign.
So, as a woman, and as a childhood sexual abuse survivor, i gotta ask you, can you seriously look me, and all the other rape and CSA survivors in the eyes, and say you truly think it’s ok for someone to create a fan work that romanticizes these issues, or apologizes for abusers in some way? You really think that’s ok? You think it’s okay because it’s a woman doing it? or because that’s her kink? Really?
I mean…i’m going over and over in my head how i can possibly show you how this idea makes me feel, but i’m failing. Utterly. So, please, explain to me why it’s so much more important for someone to post their daddy kink than it is for me or so many others not to relive their own trauma.
yes, i can look you in the eyes and say fucked up things happening in fanfiction are 100% aok even if you, a total stranger with full control over your media experience, aren’t into reading it.
not thrilled by you calling me a “fucking pedophile” in your tags as if disagreeing with you is somehow sexual violence against children, or the way you’ve just called a person an “abuser” if they write about fucked up stuff and deemed the audience abusive for reading it.
you don’t know these people, you’re projecting your idea of immorality onto complete strangers and declaring them unclean, as if those of us who are survivors are polluted by our experience and must not talk about it where decent people might see.
maybe don’t dip your toes in the discourse if you’re planning to engage in victim shaming while you tell people to lay off victims. it’s pretty shitty being rando-splained that sexual violence is somehow my fault because of my unclean behavior, and you have crossed that line tonight. i have had a lifetime of that nonsense, and you’re not welcome to perpetuate it here even if you’re 99.9% certain you know who the bad guy is, and 110% sure it’s not you.
edited for rarr.
“Huh. Well, as a woman, i find it interesting that OP seems to think any critique of women BY women must in some way be…anti women?”
It’s called internalized misogyny. Being a woman does not make you automatically exempt from being wrong about your perceptions of other women. In fact, this internal policing is one of the shittiest, trickiest, and most effective tools of oppression the patriarchy has got.
I will also note my observation that many antis are victims of older, male abusers, often family members or care givers with authority over them, but they go after the often young queer, female and non binary producers of fan works as if it was the source, and that they (the producers) specifically caused this particular event, and that’s fucked up. That is absolutely playing into and reinforcing the oppressive power dynamics that let’s actual abusers get away with shit, by not holding them accountable for their specific, direct actions.
I get being scared, and powerless, and not having much if any recourse against the people that hurt you, especially if you’re still under their influence. But flailing at strangers on the internet because you want to pass the hurt on to someone else and make yourself feel more in control again is absolutely a no-no. You are punching down, and left, and right and pretty much every direction but up, and someday most of you anti’s are going to have enough time and distance to process that, and you are going to feel really god damn awful about it.
ALL OF THIS.
too tired to write a proper coherent essay about this so here are some things i’ve been thinking about in relation to this:
1) this is not the first time we’ve been having this conversation in this particular form and i can trace the discourse about public morality and responsibility and the poor impressionable hysterical wimmens whose sensibilities are now excited and senses inflamed by consuming this lurid, pornographic literature all the way back to the discourse surrounding the advent of the novel as a form of writing. yes, those dry books by walter scott once inspired the same pearl clutching as an adult writing teens in romantic & sexual relationships (for some reason, always the fic writers, never the pro adult published authors who get targeted by this ire) do today. people are being neither revolutionary or thought-provoking when they revive this strain of discourse again. cis straight white men have been doing this to us for centuries.
2) this same discourse was repeated with the rise of the gothic romance which, okay, walpole may have kickstarted it, but eventually it became a genre for women and by women. i’ll say a lot of the themes and concerns of the gothic romance are repeated in darkfic today, so its worth looking back at what was said to those women – what is still being said about this genre, without ever interrogating why someone might choose to write the stories in this form without reflecting on the authors’ inferred personal morality and inherent “unfeminist” inferiority – and how, ultimately, it did nothing to actually change the pervasive social structure of the time but did plenty to remind us that women are inherently silly and stupid and full of unruly and awful desires.
3) the ‘all depictions must be pure and edifying’ is a peculiarly Victorian strain of thought and is one of the reasons why, for the longest time, children’s lit was this bizarre genre in which children were saintly and suffered beautifully without complaint and were in the end rewarded for their adherence to christian virtues – while the naughty children obviously were frowned upon and went on to be inherently defective and awful till they became the criminals they were destined to be. thank god there were writers who decided to write a form of children’s stories that were ‘realistic’ in that they were not moralistic handbooks designed to browbeat children into submission to the perfect Victorian ideal OR ELSE, but instead for children to read, relax and have fun and probably develop some ability to think critically for themselves and recognize when children in the stories were acting like asses without necessarily having it punished on-screen.
the idea that depiction = endorsement, which is so inherent to the negative discussions of darkfic, noncon, dubcon and even fucking unhealthy relationships (why would i want to write about it, you say? you don’t understand? for that, see #4) is frankly ridiculous and i have no qualms calling it neo-victorian because it is, quite literally, about the aesthetics of morality – performative morality, instructional morality, predicated entirely on individual action and personal responsibility – rather than an actual discussion of ethics, of what it means to live in an inherently ‘sick’ society (a patriarchal society, a society in which we are hurt one way or the other either by people, by our social milieu, by our culture and by our media) and what actual structural social change would look like. it ain’t healing or helping people, it’s just concerned with making sure we present ourselves properly OR ELSE (or else you are literal trash, you are the worst, you are not only an apologist, but you feed rape culture, you are a pedophile, you are the very thing that hurt you in the first place.)
4) PERSONAL TIME. when i was twelve i wrote my first short story and it was about a girl who was angry, lonely and hurting – so she destroyed everything. quite literally burnt it down. this was not good, did not glorify god and also worried my mother, so instead of sitting me down and asking me why i wrote this story this way, what was i trying to say, my mother rewrote that story for me. quite literally. in fact that whole story was jossed and what we wrote was a thinly plagiarized version of the story fly away home. why? because it was uplifting and hopeful.
this is what i mean by performative morality. antis don’t seem to care about the actual whys and wherefores of any given fic so much as its existence, so much as the fact that it stridently exists on its own terms and is there, is glaringly messy and awful and not at all part of any of the ‘good’ narratives we tell ourselves about marginalized folk. this is the soul exposed (kind of) and presented for all to read. amazing! some people like thinking about the questions these awful things present. some people don’t. that’s, i think a far position to maintain.
what is awful is this demand that only ideologically pure and innocent stories get written and yet again, we’re forced to remember that these horrible bits of ourselves, the demons we’ve been struggling to exorcise and the parts of us we’ve been trying to excise, need to be hidden. this is not revolutionary or helpful. we can’t talk about being vulnerable and open and radical love as healing process, healing as a social process, if we’re going to insist we only do this the stiff upper lip way and keep all those horrid horrid things out of sight, smile and wave boys everything’s all right. the story you find personally offensive might be the story which clarifies something for someone else – and might even give them someone to reach out to.
5) to resume the problem of depiction = endorsement – i resent the idea that somehow teens are going to be so naive that they can’t be critical of what they read and therefore, that things can’t be written that aren’t 100% pure. its actually really fucking patronizing to assume that their mental faculties are so underdeveloped that they can’t draw the line between a fantasy, or the exploration of a taboo subject in an artistic medium & what can be endorsed and explored irl. chances are the average teen is going to be exposed to far more worse stuff by just studying lit in their schools – shakespeare, for example, really doesn’t demur or shy away from serious adult themes, and i think at some point everyone learns yeats’ poem about leda and the swan which is well, a rape story in essence – and anyone who has the remotest interest in mythology will have had to grapple with the complex morality of the greeks. give the average fourteen year old credit; most of ‘em come into work of fiction with the implicit assumption ‘do not try this in real life’. most of ‘em will also walk away with a great deal more awareness of what a socially ill world looks like than if they hadn’t read it (i know i understood what the patriarchy looks like much more by reading plays like Ion and Medea when i was 14than if i’d gone ‘oh ion is a problematic story best not read it’. it is problematic. that’s how i learnt to be leery of male characters and male writers and patriarchal societies.)
6) i’m much more worried about books that present themselves as good and non-problematic romances than i am darkfic or fic in general, which i’ve generally observed is usually rigorously tagged for and covered with the appropriate disclaimers (and somehow, like one of the commenters mentions, its always these labelled fics that attract attention rather than the ones which are labelled as something else and have their own problems – which again, performative morality; its easier to go after a visible target than a non-obvious and insidious one).
in fact i’d much rather have critical discussions about what is ‘romanticization’ and what constitutes rape culture in fiction – why is something “bad”, in what ways does a text fail to convey what the author was trying to say and why – so that we can think critically about its tropes and forms and presentations, than these ongoing blanket statements that ‘x person is romanticizing abuse because they wrote a particular pairing/trope/whatever’. did you read the fic? did you understand what they were doing with it? did you actually engage with the work at all? do people really park their brains so much while reading they can’t delineate the difference between fiction and reality? teenagers read a lot more heavy stuff in school as part of their literary curriculum, i promise you – and incidentally, its this same argument that’s led to the banning of books like Brave New World in some curricula, because of their ‘negative’ themes. ironic, because i can’t think of a book that teaches criticality and awareness than Brave New World.
7) i mention it earlier but its worth reiterating again: darkfic is almost always tagged. this means there are trigger warnings all over this shit. there’s something going spectacularly wrong if even the sight of a trigger warning is enough to set people off, or is supposedly creating an atmosphere of hurt or an unsafe space. there are tools and technology to keep this shit out of your sight. if someone ain’t tagging, ask them to tag – if they refuse, unfollow, walk away from them (in fact give them a wide wide berth in general imho). but like, what is the point of a fucking witch hunt because of the existence of these tags? unless, of course, what we’re aiming for is to purge this heresy so we can only do rightthink and rightthought all the time, even in a society that is more or less hell-bent on fucking us up right from birth?
ETA:
8) way too many fanwriter friends have privately confessed to me that a) the current atmosphere makes them literally terrified of writing anything that explores anything dark or vaguely problematic because they’re afraid someone is going to misread exploration for endorsement (and lbr, it only takes that one match for the smear campaign to get going) and b) that they are actually afraid to talk to other fannish friends about the things they want to explore because they have no idea how those friends are going to react and whether or not they will end up being the Next Big Wank and callout. this isn’t healthy. this isn’t a healthy state for a community to be in at all. fannish creators can only control responses to their works so far – the original definition of death of the author declares that the reader fills in a lot of the gaps with their own social milieu and their own ideas. you literally cannot be expected to create a work that everyone will understand 100% because surprise! no one comes from the same background or the same worldview and no one responds to a work in exactly the same way, in exactly the way the author intended.
like, we have got to abandon this idea that there’s something like ideologically pure and perfect sex because there isn’t or the fact of wanting to write about bad or problematic sex being enjoyable being bad because it isn’t. humans are weird. brains are weird. fantasies are weird. none of this necessarily makes people bad, least of all when they know they’re never going to act on it.
look, its not healthy at all for us to have been pushed to the point to have designated friends who will ‘get’ this shit and not write up a callout post for us, or who will not bring this up if ever the friendship dissolves or a grudge is formed for whatever reason – and friends who are ‘not safe but enjoyable’. and i’ll go one further and say: i’m actually really fucking tired of doing the whole performative ‘i know i am garbage but consider this’ bullshit, because i would like to launch straight to ‘here is some porn, enjoy’ or conversely, ‘here is some pain, enjoy’. it is psychologically taxing and its infuriating because fandom is meant to be a form of relaxation, in which we bond over the things we love. anon hate and callout posts and doxxing are not revolutionary praxis and at least two of those have highly dubious origins in the SJ sphere (that’s another discussion to be had).
99% of the books I read from age 10 onward would not pass the “healthy relationships” test. I prefer reading about healthy relationships, personally, and I’ve pretty much had to stop watching/reading mainstream stories because I’m tired of it… and honestly, people coming after fanfic authors about that shit feels like going for the ground fruit, y’all need to start reaching upward and tacking issues that matter, like actual child abusers. You want something to fight? Fight the system and the ideas that allow people to preach morality, practice callous depravity, and climb to the highest seats of power.
Picking on (yes, I do mean picking on, as in BULLYING) people writing fanfic might make you feel good, but it means you’re being an asshole rather than actually accomplishing anything good in the world.
if you doubt the fandom purity crusade is anti-woman, all you have to do is look at my social landscape. all the women, trans men, and enbies all around me are getting bombarded daily, but i, a man, hear not one squeak of condemnation.
i’m as ‘problematic’ as anyone, but there’s no whisper campaign about me, my url’s tag is not full of “ugh can you please stop putting @jumpingjacktrash on my dash” posts, my reblog chains never get sucked into a wank vortex because “oh my god i can’t believe you reblogged from them they’re a pedo” or whatever. sometimes people quietly block me, which is fine. no one gets in my face about it.
but my nb spouse, who is not a content creator and whose primary fandom ‘sin’ is refusing to endorse hatred of any kind, who has only a few hundred followers compared to my 5000+, is regularly attacked and derided for whatever thought crime it’s fashionable to accuse people of that month. it doesn’t matter one bit that accusing a trans person of transphobia is silly, or that calling it ‘predatory’ to give sensible advice to kids in a public text-only medium is frankly horrifying in its badness. it doesn’t matter because it isn’t my spouse the crusaders are really talking to when they say that stuff. they’re talking to people from their past, or to themselves in a scrupulosity-fueled nightmare. they just have to direct it at a ‘safe’ target or they can’t say it at all.
and who’s a safe target? women, trans men, and enbies. disabled ones, if you’re especially frightened.
i feel mostly a kind of exasperated sympathy for kids who are so deep-down terrified of men that they have to blame women for the abuse men dealt them, because the mere thought of confronting men petrifies them.
but that doesn’t excuse the behavior. it only explains it.
been thinking about that one post that went like “forgive me father for i am back on my bullshit” and you know what, that’s a really theologically sound understanding.
like the modern concept of ‘sin’ is so melodramatic, and it’s almost totally wrong. people think of it like a felony conviction, like you gotta Pay and you’re a bad person. but really it’s more like “man quit that shit, it’s not good for you.”
for example, gluttony’s not a sin because some arbitrary metaphysical balance is tipped by it and dumps you into the reject bin. it’s a sin because an unhealthy relationship with food messes up your life and can make things rough on the people around you. back when all the texts got written, scarcity was a big deal, and there was this cultural Thing of overeating so much you had to go puke so you could eat more. nowdays it’s stuff like being such a foodie that you pay outlandish prices for hyped up ingredients, or molding your life around ‘cleanses’ and the latest ‘superfood’. it doesn’t make you evil. you’re not a bad person. it’s just a huge drain on your resources and it distracts you from just living life and being a human being.
but people call anything chocolate ‘sinful’ and then think it’s virtuous and wholesome to restrict their calorie intake until their body screams for mercy, or to insist on the whole foods equivalent of wolf nipple chips because that’s more ‘clean eating’ than the foods the proletariat have access to.
i most of all wish we could get away from labeling anything genuinely sexy as ‘lustful’ and treating healthy sexuality as a bad thing, while not recognizing that the harvey weinsteins of the world are what the sin of lust is actually talking about.
being really into your datemate is not even slightly sinful. referring to attractive people at a club as a ‘catalog’ as if they’re products you can just decide to obtain, that’s where you start heading wrong.
tl;dr: the popular imagination has ‘sin’ completely backwards.
i think that most ‘sins’ are, at the most basic level, pursuing your own self-centered, short-term satisfaction over any larger common good, because that’s what breaks societies down. virtues are just the other way around: altruisitic, long-term work for others, even at an individual’s expense.
so like, the sin of gluttony: when people in a society are starving and others have so much money and food and toys and land they couldn’t ever even touch all of it in their lifetime but they keep on taking more and more for themselves, that society collapses. temperance, prudence, and charity are all about making sure everyone’s needs are met before any individual pleasures are addressed, and that society does a lot better, less people die.
lust? if someone only cares about satisfying their own sexual desires, at the expense of everyone else, we all know how badly that goes. wrath? when people act out their anger issues instead of resolving them, you get feuds, mass shootings, wars. pride? vainglory? no one likes having to deal with those shitheads. don’t be those shitheads. despair? sloth? no one likes hauling the dead weight of people who have given up, either, who wallow around in their pain and helplessness. try to have hope and contribute something to the world.
like, a society is always going to encourage prosocial behavior and discourage antisocial behavior, because if it doesn’t, that society will dissolve. the seven deadly sins don’t even have to be deadly on a spiritual ‘you’ll burn in hell’ level, they’re disastrous on a very mundane, real-world level too.
come to think of it, if you’re mindful of being part of a society, of being in some way responsible for other people’s wellbeing, the sins and virtues / dos and donts…. just seem kind of obvious? and making people remember they’re part of a bigger group and have more of a purpose than just individual self- indulgence is basically what organized religion is for. so that’s kind of cool.
All fanwank aside, never forget that Tolkien’s actual, ostensibly canonical explanation for why the Fellowship didn’t just ride the Eagles to Mordor is basically “because the Eagles are huge assholes” – and given Middle-Earth’s demonstrable track record with trusting people in positions of authority to do anything constructive, that’s probably not an unreasonable concern!
@siliquasquama replied:
The eagles used to be pals with Manwë himself. They used to guard
GONDOLIN. Ferrying a bunch of people hither and thither is beneath them.
… and the fact that they’d regard literally saving the world as beneath their dignity is a big part of why they’re huge assholes.
you should totally rewatch the first movie and pay close attention to what Steve’s face does. Or doesn’t do. Because Steve is not a puppy dog, Steve does not wear his heart on his sleeve, Steve is still and steady and tries so very hard not to be easy to read because Steve’s life is pain he cannot share for fear of having his personhood literally revoked. Steve is stand-offish. Steve sees that you’re angry with him and flatly makes light of what he’s doing that’s pissing you off. Steve will give one-word answers to shut you down. Steve doesn’t meet your eyes until he’s finished speaking. Steve rarely smiles and when he does, they’re rarely bright–they’re small and mostly in the crinkle of his eyes and god forbid you make him smile when you’re arguing with him because then they’re sharp and bitter just like his laughter.
Steve Rogers starts fights. Steve Rogers lies to your face. Steve Rogers stands as straight as he can with his crooked spine because he refuses to let you assume he can’t. Steve Rogers is not a golden retriever, he is a sickly, pissy little cat who will bite the shit out of you for trying to pet him.
Sometimes I think about the fact that there is exactly one time that we hear someone express surprise at the fact that Aang–the Avatar– and his companions are children. And it’s in the second episode, from Zuko:
From an out-of-universe perspective, this makes sense. And it wasn’t something that surprised me when I was a ten-year-old in 2005 when A:tLA first aired. One of the tenants, I think, of adventure children’s television is that there is a degree of wish fulfillment. Children want to be taken seriously as agents, and so it makes sense from that vantage point, that everyone takes the Gaang seriously as agents except the person portrayed as an antagonist.
But, I think this also makes sense, heart-breakingly and unlike other children’s adventure television, from an in-universe perspective. This is a world ravaged by bloody, bloody war for a hundred years. A world in which child soldiers are commonplace. We see countless examples of this throughout the series:
When we meet Sokka–fifteen-years-old and in-charge of security for his village–he is training small children to be soldiers. This is played off as something of a laugh, but if Aang hadn’t returned in the second episode, I think we’re supposed to think that Sokka very much would have tried to lead these little boys into battle.
Jet and the Freedom Fighters, who practice guerrilla warfare (fairly successfully) and regularly raid Fire Nation outposts, are children. Jet, who I think we are supposed to assume is one of the eldest of the group, is sixteen when he dies (according to the Avatar wiki).
The Kyoshi Warriors are one of the elite-most fighting force in Avatar World, eventually taken seriously by the Earth Kingdom military and given military jobs. And the general of the Kyoshi Warriors, Suki, and the eldest member of the group (again according to the Avatar wiki) is fifteen. She can’t have always been the eldest member. I’m willing to bet the older women are sent off to war, and Suki becomes the eldest member and the leader by default. (Much like Sokka–probably why they connect so well).
In Zuko, Alone, the soldiers in the village threaten to send Lee off to join the army at the front, and based on the mother’s reaction, and what we see of him when he’s tied up, this doesn’t seem like an empty threat, and it’s probably not the first time this has happened to children in the Earth Kingdom in villages like these.
I could go on.
So of course, after living in a world of child soldiers like these, no one is going to bat an eyelash to learn that the Avatar–perhaps the ultimate non-Fire Nation soldier–is twelve-years old, and his companions aren’t much older. When Aang starts to bring this up himself to Yue, for instance, Yue doesn’t seem to understand. He’s the Avatar, he has to save them, she insists. Who cares if he’s a child?
But the Fire Nation Army isn’t filled with child soldiers. It doesn’t need them. Fire Nation children are in school. It is adults that make up the Fire Nation Army.
And, (with the exception of Azula and her gang), when we do see a Fire Nation child attempting to take on the role of an adult member of the military, he isn’t taken seriously. (E.g. Zuko, and the way Zhao brushes him off.)
So of course it is only Zuko, who grew up in the absolute center of the Fire Nation, and, though he is banished, hasn’t really seen much of the reality of the war until he meets Aang, that looks at the Avatar and remarks in surprise that he is a child.
(If anyone is interested, I wrote a fic that deals with a lot of these themes. It can be found here.)
This is not only an excellent analysis but I think it also ties in to one of the greater themes of the show as a whole, namely these kids are entitled to a childhood even in a broken world:
“Normally we would have told you of your identity when you turned sixteen, but there are troubling signs. Storm clouds are gathering.”
“I fear that war may be upon us, young Avatar.”
In their fear the Air Nomads were going to make Aang the first child soldier against the Fire Nation. In their rush to skip four years they lost a hundred. Aang rejects that role early on and constantly rejects it even as he accepts his responsibility as the Avatar.
He reminds Katara that she’s still a kid. When he connects to Zuko the first time it’s through the language of all the fun he used to have with his friends in the Fire Nation. Team Avatar takes the time they need for vacations and to make new friends. In doing this they start to heal the world person by person.
Aang most succeeds as Avatar when he finds balance between childish things and adult responsibilities. This rubs off on everyone. Sokka goes from desperate to be taken seriously to someone who sets himself up for a laugh, because he knows his own strength. Zuko spends season 1 as an imitation of Ozai, ends the show as someone who can lead a country and smile openly at a goofy drawing.
They are all still very young with too many responsibilities on their shoulders. But they’ve also carved out an important space where they can be children with each other. All things in balance.
Imagine being in a relationship in which you are treated like an equal, consciously and unconsciously, sexually, emotionally, socially, romantically, without being bound by gender expectations, without risk of pregnancy (or having your reproductive rights taken away from you), without feelings of inferiority, without being mistreated or neglected because men don’t understand your body and can’t be bothered to learn how to give you pleasure (or that you even deserve pleasure). Imagine having a reciprocating relationship with someone who knows how to touch you and how to talk to you, who will never abuse you or take away your consent. Imaging feeling powerful, safe, like the default rather than the specific or second-class. Imagine not requiring special handling by awkward, inconsiderate men who were never taught any better. Imagine being allowed to touch and enjoy and indulge without apprehension. Imagine being able to trust your partner. Imagine knowledge and understanding, someone who sees your depths and treats you the way you’d treat yourself if you hadn’t been told from birth that you weren’t worth it.
Girls aren’t “making them gay.”
Girls are fantasizing about being equal.
I have wondering about this in fandom for many years and reading this just made me tear up. I figured this was a big reason, but breaking it down to this extent made me so extremely sad. I realized a long time ago that even if I met the nicest guy in the world, I still have to battle all those things mentioned above. Just being friends is hard. I don’t have a happy history in this area like a lot of women and I have major trust issues with men and I wish somehow that wall could be broken down and we could all truly be seen as equal…as people with value. If you have all of the above with someone of the opposite sex then you are really lucky. See women are expected to give all those things listed above and settle for not getting them in return. I believe it’s a rare thing if you have it returned. Like I said, if I was with the nicest guy in the world I will always doubt myself, think he see’s me as different, talk to me different… Why? Because that’s our experience. This world raises us to believe we are worth absolutely nothing. The idea of being equal is one of our greatest fantasies.
It’s sad that it has to be a fantasy.
It’s totally sad.
But on the other hand, slash writers are some of the most empathetic people I know. And they’re great educators, too, probably in ways they might not expect. A good slash fanfiction writer can help women understand their desires and overcome some of those feelings of shame and worthlessness.
Think about how many girls have learned how to masturbate thanks to slash fanfiction.
Sometimes just knowing that we’re all reading and enjoying the stories is an immense comfort. People will tell you that slash is trash, that fangirls are desperate and pathetic, but ladies telling ladies that they’re allowed is a powerful thing.
Yeah, oh man. This is. Yeah, this is a lot. I especially feel the taboo surrounding female sexuality to the point that even though I’m Pretty Gay myself, I’m uncomfortable with my own sexuality (not as in orientation) and also dealing with the sexuality of other women. Like in some ways, I am always hesitant to appreciate sexiness in women because we are almost never shown female sexuality in a safe, respectful, and equal way and it still freaks me out.
I will never forget — and I wish so *badly* I still had a copy — the essay one of my exes wrote before she gafiated, in which she talked about how the act of writing slash and being part of the slash community in general had allowed her to “write herself back into her body”.
To, essentially, take off some of the blinders and filters western culture had put on her, all the things that had convinced her that, as an “overtall, fat, awkward, anxious, and altogether unattractive” person (she did have some anxiety issues, but none of the rest was true by any measure but all the lies we’ve ALL been told), she deserved neither happiness, nor romance, nor anything resembling sexual parity or satisfaction.
We met through fandom — she later told me she’d been quietly lurking on my mailing lists and around my websites for two years before she ever actually spoke to me — and we had four good years together before our relationship started to fall apart.
And, while not all of our happiness — together and separately — can be laid at the feet of the various slash goddesses, quite a lot of it can be.
Slash wrote *me* back into my body, too — several times, in several ways. Slash connected me to genders I never could’ve imagined, or could’ve imagined being *worth* connecting to in the days before I really understood the possibilities inherent to taking the media I had been given and *transforming* it.
We are *here*, and our pleasure is worth it — our pleasures, plural, are part and parcel of our identities.
And, you know, some of us, after we’ve been writing slash for a good, long while?
Find new ways to express those pleasures when women are there, new ways to understand those aspects of our sexualities — our *identities* — which include *hetero*sexuality.
It’s a journey. A process. A continuum. A spectrum. A *multiverse*.
AAAAAH! Thank you so much @dirtydirtychai !! It’s always a joy when someone’s writing about the psychology of fanfic gets back out into public circulation. We need these essays – they are part of our history and part of our validation.
Thank you 🙂
women deserve sexual pleasure. the fact that this is a controversial statement is at the heart of why slash is so popular with women AND why there’s no shortage of crusaders ready to explain (with horrible enthusiasm) that it ‘shouldn’t’ be.
just moving along like everyone else 