May 2012
“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”
—Vincent van Gogh, letters to Theo, 1880. (via bigmagnets)
“Not being assaulted is not a privilege to be earned through the judicious application of personal safety strategies. A woman should be able to walk down the street at 4 in the morning in nothing but her socks, blind drunk, without being assaulted, and I, for one, am not going to do anything to imply that she is in any way responsible for her own assault if she fails to Adequately Protect Herself. Men aren’t helpless dick-driven maniacs who can’t help raping a vulnerable woman. It disrespects EVERYONE.”
—
Emily Nagoski. (via rapeisnotajoke)
#Oh my God #THIS #FUCKING THIS #I would like to print this out #and staple it to the forehead of every guy who’s tried to tell me that women ‘just need to be careful about where they go/how they dress/how they act/who they flirt with’ #because no #the only deciding factor on whether or not someone gets raped #is the presence of a rapist #and guess what #they are EVERYWHERE #including but not limited the local bar #your high school #your college dorm building #your workplace #your group of friend #your family #and if you’re telling me that laughing at a guy’s jokes is the equivalent of telling him I’ve given up my right to say no #then you are the problem #not me #YOU
(via madeofglass)
"it's just a video game/tv show/movie/book"
…created by real life actual people in the real life actual world.
The media we consume is not created in a vacuum. Writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Media is a reflection of the world we live in. Good speculative fiction in particular has to be grounded in some level of realism for us as human beings in a mundane real world to identify with. Fantastical characters are often given less fantastical traits in addition to the strange ones in order to make them more relatable to the audience. I can’t especially identify with an alien assassin that has eidetic memory considering I’m not green, I don’t kill people for a living, and I forget where I leave my house keys half the time, but I can relate to a story about a father trying to do right by the child he abandoned and neglected. That’s a kind of universal idea, even if the parent and child in question are aliens on a space station.
It doesn’t matter if it’s an elf with magical tattoos, or the pilot of a starship, or a wizard, or a secret agent, or a cyborg or a vampire or whatever. People come to these stories bringing their own individual life experiences, and it’s natural for people to be reminded about things in their own lives. There are people in fandoms who experience the kind of things fictional characters go through in their real lives.
When a story includes sensitive real life topics such as abuse and prejudice, people who experience things like that are going to look at them—and the fans who discuss them—with heightened scrutiny. It has to be handled with care, and discussions surrounding them need to happen with sensitivity.
Most importantly, it doesn’t matter that it’s “just” a game/show/movie if the fictional people in question are saying the same kinds of things/behaving in the same kinds of ways that people do in real life when confronted with similar situations, and fans perpetuate the same kinds of harmful narratives about fictional characters that are used to hurt real life actual people, including other fans. That’s when shit starts getting real.
