Honestly, when it comes to my own personal views? I believe that no one is beyond redemption (though whether or not the people said individual wronged are willing to forgive is wholly up to the people in question). For me, the belief that anyone can claw their way out of iniquity is not only a central tenet of my faith but also the knowledge that keeps me emotionally balanced and stops me from wallowing in bleak cynicism. I have to believe that redemption is possible for all, even if some choose not to take that road.
It always grinds my gears when people talk about redemption as if it’s something to be ‘deserved’, rather than an active choice, a verb, something a person does, with more or less variable degree of success. To redeem oneself is to take the necessary steps toward uplifting one’s soul from moral degradation. In essence, they keep equating redemption with something like forgiveness, when the two are entirely different matters and don’t have a 1:1 correlation at all. Some of my favourite redemption narratives (Anakin Skywalker lives AUs, for example) don’t really contain all that much in the way of forgiveness, because some acts simply can’t be forgiven by their victims. For me, the enjoyment of such stories comes from seeing the central character’s physical and emotional struggles with everything redemption entails, until they can achieve a weary, wizened peace with the world and with themselves. There’s an almost poetic beauty, I’ve always thought, to the words of a person who has walked in both the brightest light and the darkest shadow and it’s a real pleasure to put those sorts of words down on paper.
And yes, as I said before, I suspect that at least some of this nonsense comes from people having a visceral reaction to their own flaws being reflected back at them. For others, it’s your run-of-the-mill purity culture wankery.
I really like this for making a distinction between redemption and forgiveness. I am well on record as hating most forgiveness arcs. A lot of time, it feels like the character hasn’t earned it, but the narrative requires that their victims forgive, and I vomit inside my mouth a little. A redemption arc is just the opposite. By god, the character puts in the work. And at the end of the day, they may not be forgiven, but they do what they have to do, because they have to do it, because it’s the right thing to do. And that? That matters.
Tag Archives: purity politics
Anti: I only go after smaller artists because they’re the only ones that will listen!!
Anti: what do you mean smaller artists are upset when I harass them? they’re adults they should learn not to care
translation: I’m a bully, but like any low-level pathetic bully, I only go after the easiest targets! 🙂
it’s like they’ve never actually learned anything about bullying or how it works or what it looks like because they occasionally describe a near dictionary definition of it but call it “activism” and it blows my fucking mind
I Do Not Trust Anyone Who Says ‘Let People Ship What They Want’ I Simply Do Not Trust Them And With Good Reason
What it should mean: “weird” but otherwise decent
What everyone usually means: pedophillia/incest/abuse/etc
No. It means Ship What You Want Because We’re Supposed To Be Adults Here With Free Will and Freedom of Thought and Speech Able of Critical Thinking, and If You’re Not Able to Comprehend That Maybe You Shouldn’t Be Here In The First Place. Ask Some Adult To Monitor Your Use of the Internet I Think You Should Not Be Here On Your Own.
Shipping Harms Absolutely No-One and You Should Mind Your Own Puritanical Narrow-Minded WitchHunting Business. You Don’t Get To Dictate What Other People Do In Their Spare Time, Not To Mention You Are Helping No-One and You’re Actually Diluting The Real Meaning of The Words Paedophilia, Incest, and Abuse, While Making This Place Unwelcoming and Unhealthy and Hostile To People Who Want to Explore Their Sexuality and Their Identity and Maybe Their Trauma in a Safe Way.
I Do Not Like People Who Think They Get To Police Other People’s Hobbies and Passions With Damn Good Reason. They Harm Real People and They Are A Blight To Fandom. They Prey on the Weakest and Most Vulnerable In the Small Corner We Have Managed To Make for Ourselves. They Are Bullies.
I Ship What I Fucking Want, and I do not owe anyone explanations or justification.
Hey guys,
Update! I’ve downloaded my entire backlog of posts, photos and videos just in case. I’d hate to lose my content, and I’d hate for you to loose any of your content either. So thank you @pupdiesel for the recommendation of TumblrThree, super easy to download and I had my entire backlog within 5 minutes.
Check it out here: https://github.com/johanneszab/TumblThree/releases
Protect your posts and have them for future use 😉
People Off the Page:
I don’t know much about SESTA/FOSTA, but it can’t hurt to consider
downloading/backing up your:
- Tumblr blog content.
- Posted/fave AO3 fics.
- Your Google products like Drive.
This is what I know about it so far, from eff.org:
“The U.S. Senate just voted 97-2 to pass the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865), a bill that silences online speech by forcing Internet platforms to censor their users. As lobbyists and members of Congress applaud themselves for enacting a law tackling the problem of trafficking, let’s be clear: Congress just made trafficking victims less safe, not more.
… It’s easy to see the impact that this ramp-up in liability will have on online speech: facing the risk of ruinous litigation, online platforms will have little choice but to become much more restrictive in what sorts of discussion—and what sorts of users—they allow, censoring innocent people in the process.
What forms that erasure takes will vary from platform to platform. For some, it will mean increasingly restrictive terms of service—banning sexual content, for example, or advertisements for legal escort services. For others, it will mean over-reliance on automated filters to delete borderline posts. No matter what methods platforms use to mitigate their risk, one thing is certain: when platforms choose to err on the side of censorship, marginalized voices are censored disproportionately. The Internet will become a less inclusive place, something that hurts all of us.”
I just wanted to pop in and remind all the fic writers & RP’ers out there that you don’t have to listen to the black & white thinkers trolling this website who want to shit on you every time you bring up something sympathetic about your character.
It’s okay for “bad” characters to have sympathetic traits. It would be boring as fuck if they didn’t. It’s unfortunate that so many people out there are too salty and dense to understand a complex character, but don’t let it get you down!
If you’re a good fic writer or RP’er it’s really important to take all facets of the character’s personality into consideration. You aren’t here to write a 2D ebul cartoon. You should be taking their motives into consideration. You should be figuring out their demeanor. If they are a charming sociopath, you should write them as being charming. That’s the whole fucking point!
Fic writers and RP’ers engage in fandom in a way that unwraps characters and tries to figure out what makes them tick. We want to figure out why they feel the way they feel, we want to figure out their temperament, we want to understand. It’s an exercise in creative empathy and there are a lot of people out there who just don’t have a creative bone in their body. They’re gonna try to shout you down for acknowledging that a character can have gray morality or be a dichotomy in some way and I hope it doesn’t discourage anyone.
So get outta my face with all this purity politics bullshit, plz & thank you. Acknowledging conflicting pieces of your character is a responsible and creatively intelligent thing to do, and people who don’t get that can eat a dick.
Don’t let it stop you!
^^^ THIS ^^^
I-want-my-IWTV 