
Controversial media, voidpunk, the stigma around NPD, and the hypocrisy of conventional morality (spoilers for the amazing digital circus, albeit moreso the themes rather than specific moments)
I'm back, bitches >:3. Sorry for lack of posting, i have been transformed into a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within. Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance. Inwardly: alone. Here. Living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last. AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet… AM has won, simply… he has taken his revenge… I have no mouth. And I must scream. /j
I recently watched the finale to the amazing digital circus, a series which i am quite fond of. I'll be totally honest, Jax is not only one of my favorite characters in the show, but also one of my favorites of all time. At the same time, i hate her. This is because i see myself in Jax to a large extent (and not just because rabbits are my favorite animal lol), if my most toxic traits were put into the most extreme setting. Jax is literally me especially when looking at a few years ago, and i hate that, and yet i love it at the same time because it made me think a bit about myself. This show stuck with me for many reasons, and i love all the characters but the one i was always fixated on was Jax (likely due to being the literal protagonist along with Pomni lmao). I started off disliking her, then liking her as the series continued and i began to relate, disliking her again but feeling bad for her, and now i'm even more conflicted after the finale. But one thing for sure is, aside from being homeless and parents being divorced (tho their relationship is still tense and certainly on the brink of it for awhile), my life, insecurities, personality, and how i carried myself certainly parallels with Jax to an extent. Which begs the question: are you a bad person for relating to bad people even partially? The answer should be obvious: no, if you don't let it define you. You can always be a better person if you allow yourself to reflect and to receive help from others and not isolate yourself and try and run from them. It's like in scott pilgrim, we all do bad things to people and nothing excuses that, but you're only a bad person if you STAY bad. I myself eventually learned to be more considerate and compassionate, into the person i am right now for example. But you see, people on the internet hate nuance. I consider myself a Jax fan for sure. There are many people who are not, whether it was because of the trans thing (which is just a whole lot of cope from cis people tbh lol) or just her actions. The latter i get, and the show doesn't try to justify any of them, but people like REALLLY hate Jax, to a cartoonish level. It got so bad that people from Jax hate subs came onto subs like r/savingjax to apologize and talk about all that toxicity in those spaces. It's like they can't see any sort of nuance whatsoever
I feel the need to bring up the perception of NPD, or narcissistic personality disorder. It's a real disorder and people can get hurt from it, but people seldom look into the internal suffering of the narcissist. How that ego is based off of insecurity, how the lack of empathy can in fact be improved upon with time and effort and that they aren't inherently a bad person, and how NOT ALL NARCISSISTS ARE ABUSIVE! People are mental health advocates until it's one of the bad ones that make them uncomfortable, then they're just "evil". These people need help too, dingus, it's not like they're actively rubbing their hands together and saying "mwuahahaha i feel like being EVIIIIL today". "Oh but they can cause real damage in relationships and they tend to be super unhealthy". NEWSFLASH ASSHOLE, THAT'S ANY MENTAL ILLNESS!!! It doesn't excuse any action, i'm not saying that it does. You can't blame something on what you are or what you have, you judge it by WHO you are. All it does is explain things. It identifies what the deal is and then we, yes we, gotta help figure out how to cope with it before it becomes worse. And you demonizing narcissism to the point where everything i see about it is on how bad and evil narcissists are certainly aren't helping. But you're SO much more empathetic than them, sure. Your empathy is worthless if you only extend it to certain people. I resent those who refuse to look past the mainstream narrative demonizing narcissists and other "evil" disorders, and if you are among them i will seriously consider banning you, maybe that'll wake you up to your own ableism
This is a larger issue i've brought up before in regards to media. You take media that has disturbing themes and imagery, or maybe a creator who does something shitty like 10 years ago (not even like extremely bad or anything, not trying to minimize cases of genuine abuse, bigotry, etc), immediately they turn into a puritanical angry mob. Now i don't wanna go "grr, le cancel culture" but there's really know other way to describe it, and it's because a lot of "leftists" grew up consistently fed propaganda, and they may have gone past the outright bigotry and shit but they still haven't moved past the christian moralist mentality, so now they have the same logic as a right winger with "every scary thing i don't like or understand is satani- i mean problematic". I don't believe art should be censored or watered down, i think it's an insult. Art isn't meant to coddle you, it should be something that hits you deep in your soul. It's intense, but it's comforting, and it tells you something about yourself, about the world, anything really. Without any of this media that twitter shitheads view as inherently wrong, what would the world look like? What would be produced? Something safe, bland, and boring, exactly what white corporate america wants, all because you don't understand metaphors or context or theme or symbolism, no matter how blatantly it's beating you in the head because you take things so goddamn literally. Stirner mentions how athiests are just as dogmatic as christians because they still are stuck in that same mindset as them. Hell, they might even be worse in some ways because they're lying about it, even tho they constantly spout how they value things like honesty and accountability. They act like paragons of virtue yet are just as rotten as the rest of us, but they just refuse to admit it so they never change. Why don't you focus your time on looking for REAL abusers, for REAL bigots, and for REAL problems instead of wasting your time on whether this anime or video game is problematic or not? Because that requires reflection on yourself
Humanity itself is like the historic label of whiteness, its definition is inconsistent and constantly changes as the overall power dynamic changes. Many marginalized people get treated less than human by the dominant power dynamic, which ebbs and flows over time but has overall been made so one group stays on top of everyone else. If you manage to assimilate you will be accepted, but only conditionally. You'd be accepted in the same way as Stephen is accepted by Calvin Candie from Django: Unchained, as an uncle tom that still isn't fully integrated because the status quo would never FULLY accept you for your differences, just give you more freedom if you're well behaved enough while still being under their thumb. That's why Django is free and Stephen still a slave, because of their different view on the fundamentals of freedom. No apologies, no assimilation, ever. That's my view of it. Relying on middlemen who are part of the dominant group to speak for us, be them a white person or a neurotypical person or a cis person or whoever, is just going to lead to our downfall and is the reason so many people are wasted potential now. Not to reject allies ofc, but that's not what i'm saying. I'm saying that we're not gonna join their party, this is OUR party, they're just invited. Now, voidpunk is kind of the rejection of humanity as an idea, for it is limiting because of similar reasoning i described. Like Dazai, they feel a fundamental disconnection from humanity as a whole because of how power dynamics work and how "humanity" is given and taken away on a whim based on that. Voidpunk is like "alright, well well humanity is overrated anyway" and reclaims that dehumanization into something cooler. We embrace the labels of monsters or robots or whatever as a means to strip the oppressors of their power. We're less than human? Nah, we're just not human and what of it lol. That's an oversimplified version of that but yeah. You can think of it as a rebranded posthumanism in a way. What i'm saying is to embrace what makes you different ig