meirl
2 paintings going to Italy in October at the @talesofart_gallery, curated by @sashabogojev ~ thanks for inviting me 🙏 🇮🇹
The trend with fandoms nowadays seems to be:
– Praise the living daylights out of a show and shove its greatness in everyone’s face
– 2 years later, pick it apart violently and insult everyone who still enjoys it in as edgy a way as possible because negativity is cool
!!!
uhh maybe marginalized ppl were excited at the possibility of a show (such as su) representing them, only to be rightfully angry when the show ends up racist, homophobic etc. anyway, super bad post all around
I feel like a lot of hardcore accusations of problematic and offensive content that get thrown at media that was previously lauded as progressive come from a few sources; first, the creators are often a lot more accessible than the creators of mainstream media. you can message rebecca sugar on twitter personally to call her a racist bitch, but you can’t do the same to, say, jj abrhams or another large-scale creator. likewise, you can’t stand on a streetcorner and scream at people until they agree to stop watching law and order, but you can certainly bully large groups of people online until they stop supporting an independent creator.
second, the fandoms that tend to form around progressive media tend to be younger, more volatile, looking to media and fandom as forms of activism. mainstream media they can write off as garbage, but progressive niche media that makes a sincere attempt to represent marginalized folks must be Absolutely Perfect. the idea that a piece of media can have good parts and bad parts, that it can try and only partially succeed, but that that partial success is still worth something, is completely lost on many young fans. either its irredeemable garbage or its the literal messiah, there’s no in-between. so if a show falls short of perfect, as is inevitable, then it goes straight into the “total garbage” pile and must be condemned by the masses.
genuinely trying to represent certain groups and making a few missteps is not the same thing as being ignorant or malicious. making a sincere effort to mean something to folks who don’t get a lot of things made for them is something to be proud of. would you rather go back to the times when fucking nothing got made for us? when the only characters we saw that we could relate to were only there to be made fun of? you’re spoiled by a rush of new creators who took “go make your own thing then” to heart and set out to make content for people like them, you have the gall to look at what they’re trying to do and spit on it for not being better. no creator owes you shit, no creator has to bow to a bunch of teenage bullies who do nothing but demand and harass, that’s all there is to it.
Dear lord can everyone please read this post because it’s so relevant
“queer” is such a useless term. if i tell someone im bisexual, they know i am attracted to men and women. if a man tells me he is gay, i know he is a man exclusively attracted to other men. if someone tells me they are queer, it tells me nothing about them. it doesnt tell me who they attracted to. it tells me nothing about that person.
It tells me they’re trying to be a extra lil bitch and that I shouldn’t be friends with them
No, you probably shouldn’t, for their sake.
yall realise thats exactly the point, right
queer covers everyone who is noncis or nonstraight
it covers the identities you want to erase or disallow from the community
it doesn’t immediately tell you private information about someone’s sexuality or gender that you aren’t entitled to
and the person in question may not even know themselves, but queer is what they know they can always use if they’re not sure except they know theyre definitely not cis/straight
you hate it because it’s too inclusive and too broad. It’s supposed to be inclusive and broad. If someone tells you they’re queer then all you need to know is that they are in some way not cis or straight and other than that it aint your business. If being told someone’s identity is none of your business pisses you off, thats a you problem
i am so tired of peeing. i drink the water, which i apparently need to live or something, then i have to go put the water somewhere else five minutes later. i drink the water, i go to a place to un-drink the water, i wash my hands, i leave, then i have to drink more water. guess where that water ends up? not in me! i give the water to my body and like a child it tosses it out and demands more. all hours of the day all hours of the night no matter what i am doing my life is interrupted by piss and this is bullshit
This sounds like it was written by a powerful being that is trapped in a human vessel and keeps having their plans thwarted by bathroom breaks.Â
You know too much.
i knew in the 2nd grade that standardized testing was bullshit. harry potter book 4 had just come out and i was at a good part. harry had just put his name into the goblet of fire.
during the standardized test, we were allowed to keep a post-test book on our desk. i diligently got started on part 1: english. at the time, all of the answers went on the same sheet, but all of the questions were in different booklets. so i finish all my english questions, read in my extra time, and then it’s part 2: math.
i realize i have answered all of my english questions on the math portion of the answer sheet. at first, annoyed but undeterred, i’m like. okay great i gotta erase every bubble. but i get bored around question 5 of doing this because… like… harry potter is sitting on my desk and i could just give them the wrong answers. so i answer maybe 10 whole questions in the math portion, copy the english answers over to where they actually belong, and then crack open the book and call it a day.
i obviously failed. this is the real life, not a movie. my parents were called in. i had scored in the lowest percentile. i was bad at math. i was concerningly bad at math. i could have done better just guessing than how i did with the english answers.Â
if this was just a funny story, someone would ask me “why did you do so badly when you usually get fairly average grades” and i would have said “i wanted to read harry potter, not take this stupid test.” but it’s the real life, and nobody asked. instead, i was branded stupid and bad at math. i got placed in a lower math than i needed to be in; got bored, stopped paying attention. knew i was in the “worst at math” group, started saying “i’m bad at math” and 100% stopped trying because the further i fell behind, the worse i got. through the rest of my academic career – until senior year in high school, i never got above a c on a math test, because i was “just bad” at math.
i had undiagnosed adhd. the only reason i know now i have adhd is because at 22 years old, i finally went to a therapist, who effectively said, “are you kidding me you have the most obvious case of attention deficit i’ve ever seen.”
but nobody had been looking. my one test grade had given teachers permission to not look, because, obviously, i was bad at math. the one time i got 100% on a math test – that one time in senior year – i remember my math teacher looking at it and saying “it’s clear that if you just focused, you could do the work.”
in college i’d take a math class and i actually “just focused” for the first time in my life – meaning i treated math as a challenge, but one i could overcome with the skills i’d learned all on my own, through constant work and practice. i got the highest grade in my class. i still think i’m bad at math.Â
which makes me wonder: how many people got fucked over because of something stupid like “i was too preoccupied with harry potter”. who had nobody looking out for them. who slipped under the radar because – come on, aren’t some people just bad at things?
THIS IS PRETTY MUCH WHAT HAPPENED TO ME. The only difference is that I get test anxiety and I get distracted by the pattern of the stupid scantron tests (SURELY THE ANSWER CANT BE A THREE TIMES IN A ROW EVEN THO I KNOW THE ANSWERS ARE RANDOM AND SO VERY WELL COULD BE) and end up messing up my answers so that I can make the answers not form the patterns that I’m starting to see emerge (even tho I know there is no pattern because the answers are random, I still have trouble blocking that out, even if I try to cover up the answers I’ve already filled out).
They put me in the lowest math group, then when they saw I was bored, they moved me to the highest, where I had missed a month’s worth of lessons, and thus did shitty on tests, so they moved me back down, then saw I was bored, rinse and repeat, for my entire elementary school math years. Math is the ONE subject where I struggle with the basics (and even though I passed the class, I feel like Calculus would’ve made a lot more sense if I’d had a better foundation) and I attribute it to the fact that my elem school teachers didn’t use their damn heads and realize that duh I’m not going to ace parts of tests where I missed the lesson because they were too busy moving me around so they could label my math ability level >_<
Astronaut bird 