28 yo | Aro(?) | Ace | Enby | Critter & overall DnD enthusiast | Uni drop out | Multifandom | Part time videogames player.
Aspec exclusionists, TERFs and MAPs not welcome.
unfortunately i Do feel better when i clean my living space and eat enough fruits and veggies and go outside and generally remember i am a mammal :| real pity that knowing this does not make it easier to do those things
[ID: an edited meme showing a Black man looking out across a street with text above them reading “I bring a sort of “just pirate it” Vibe to the conversation that my “which streaming service is that on” friends don’t really like”. /end ID.]
in less than a year and a half the italian government has: worsened the living conditions for immigrants (which were dire already) with new “reception centers” that is really just a fancy word for a place that is worse than a jail; continued to let hundreds of people die at sea or deport them back to libya; cut the funds for public healthcare and education; favored the gentrification of historical city centers; suppressed and silenced protests for palestine all around the country; called for the arrest of peace activists; turned a blind eye on the inhumane conditions of an italian antifascist activist detained in hungary; called for a daspo to all singers (lmao???) who express their dissent (or literally anything even vaguely political that doesnt align with their ideology) on live, PUBLIC state tv; put forward their plan to leave the south in utter subservience to the north and made the police beat up the southern mayors and governors who protested against it; made the police beat up the students and activists who protested outside RAI (state tv) buildings in several cities against its shameless censorship of those that speak up about palestine, as well as its continued support of the zionist narrative through which the news are filtered; done absolutely nothing to mitigate the embarrassingly high percentage of deaths in the workplace or the even more absurdly high percentage of femicide.
and now they’re trying to pass a law that criminalizes any critique of israel by lumping up antisemitism and antizionism in the same category so that if you even dare say hey maybe we should stop killing palestinians you could be legally prosecuted.
but they opened a few parks so i guess they also did good things
Newsflash: people and good people are not synonymous.
If you portray a villain, that villain has thoughts, emotions, desires. Maybe even loved ones. They have things they want. They have reasons for what they do. And none of this excuses their villainous acts.
If you portray a good person, all of the same things apply. Thoughts, emotions, desires, loved ones, things they want, reasons, etc. And when you look at the acts they commit, you think to yourself, “That is a good person. I consider this person heroic, someone worth emulating.” Whereas when you see what the villain does, you think, “Man, that is fucked up.”
The entire difference between a good person and a bad person is not whether or not they are people, but whether the things they do and their reasons for doing them are good or bad. So you can portray a bad person, who abuses people, as having emotions, and desires, and thoughts, and they can still be a bad person.
So yeah. The OP says “bad people should be written as if they are people.” This is true. “Normalizing abuse” is what happens when you write bad people as if they are incomprehensible evil monsters with no common humanity with the rest of us, because this tells abuse victims, most of whom love their abusers, “You’re not really being abused because the person you love is not a bad person! Bad people are 100% evil monsters and the person who is hurting you obviously has feelings!” No. Bad people are people. When you write an abuser, write them as a person, with thoughts and feelings, because real abuse victims know that their abusers are people, and you don’t want to convince them that their abusers can’t be abusers because only monsters are abusers. You want them to understand that abusers are human too, because they already know the person abusing them is human. What they don’t know is whether or not they can consider what’s happening to them to be abuse.
^^^
Antis: “Only good people are actually fully human beings! This totally isn’t fascist or anything!”
“If you write well-rounded, deep, believable characters you’re a fucking abuse apologist!”
This is way too similar to that god damn “if you write characters being traumatized/in traumatizing situations then you are fetishizing abuse and you’re bad!” Like stories need conflict and sometimes being involved in conflict can be traumatizing, do you really want to consume only media that is entirely Good People Doing Good Things, Everyone Is Happy And Nothing Bad Ever Happens?? Because that’s sounds like a whole lot of boring to me
Given the alternative that we’ve had forever now, where characters go through intensely traumatic shit but have absolutely no trauma whatsoever - thus conveying the message that the problem is YOU, YOU’RE the only one who breaks like that - I’m gonna have to say I’ll take the realistic portrayals of trauma.
There is something, I think, to us as a whole, as humans, that is INSANELY disturbing and difficult about viewing irredeemable, evil people as PEOPLE. Like, we cannot accept that people who do things like commit genocide or murder people or abuse people are, in a lot of ways, just like us. That they have families and feelings and complex inner lives. And my gf just summed up why the portrayal of evil people as something apart from human is such a problem:
Because it keeps us from confronting evil when it DOES actually show up. It keeps us from confronting other people, who we know, who espouse hatred. Because how can this person, whom we know , who maybe we are even friends or family with, be an empty evil husk? It’s what keeps us from addressing things like racism, fascism, white supremacy- you name it.
When we dress up evil people as something apart from us, when we act like humans are inherently better than the evil people we see in media, it means that come being faced with a person who is doing abhorrent things, we are unable to process that. Because we feel like humanity and evil are incompatible.
You know it’s funny but we really need more bad people depicted as real people because it’s meant to be a warning to what you can become if you aren’t careful. Antis are good examples of that because they genuinely don’t realize how evil their behavior is because they think they are doing it for the greater good or with the best intentions justifies it. People are always the hero of their own story and if you can’t recognize that you are capable of being a monster then you will become a monster because you see everything that you do as good. It takes any complex thinking about morals out of the picture because you aren’t a laughing disney villain so why should you be concerned if your decisions hurt people if it wasn’t apart of the big picture or plan you have.
Think the Original The Lorax where the bad guy was viewed as complex and had good points even though he still was the bad guy. He was complicated and Kids could understand it through Seuss’s writing that he was just a person. Then look at say Ursula or Makeficent who had the complexity of a wet napkin and few kids could imagine themselves becoming. Obviously some kids can imagine themselves as them but which story really teaches you that good people do bad things or bad people don’t always realize they are bad.
It’s not some evil pro villain thing to make bad guys real. It’s a warning that you need to be careful because you could easily become the bad guy even if you have the best intentions.
it gets worse: funi had an option to buy anime outright. but, it was bought digitally, and now CR has said that they’re not going to honor that, so if you bought anything from funi digitally, CR are taking that away from you
This is absolutely insane but the part that I find funny is that there isn’t a community on earth more dedicated to piracy than western anime fans. For ages the only way to even get your hands on anime and manga in the west was piracy. I literally don’t think Crunchyroll could have picked a worse group to try the “we’re a monopoly so we can charge you whatever we want” play on. I doubt there’s a person over the age of 25 who saw that and thought anything other than “welp, okay, piracy it is then!” like honestly the Crunchyroll executives are out of their fucking minds with this one.
I know it’s an issue that boys are not taught emotional maturity amd women are expected to take care of them but please do not think that therefore it must be true that women ARE taught emotional maturity. Like please take a look at all of our mothers and tell me you honest to god believe that
