Glory to the Resistance

online leftists will see a leftist activist doing leftist activism and bend over backwards to find a way to be mad about it

call me cynical but i think when you do something that makes you an enemy of the US government, you're allowed to plug your patreon every once in while

Is that why you bullied the trans femme of colour with it/its pronouns into deactivating its Tumblr for telling y'all to stop memefying and merchandising white saviours and pay attention to Islamphobia? Is that why white exclusionists and white inclusionists both kept accusing it of transmisogy?

Is that why the "no fly list" tags were full of Alvin and the Chipmunks jokes and Holy Fucking Bingle and white queer discourse with only about 3–4 info posts about why Muslim children were on a watch list?

Is that why every single fucking time we tell you that our humanitarian crises are not yours to derail and memefy and """"cope"""" with, you complain that it's so very unfair to accuse of you of being white privileged and callous and send a barrage of hate at whoever dared to be openly angry?

Is there any human tragedy of Black people, Natives, immigrants, Global South and Eastern Europeans, be it war or wildfires or protests or state violence or economic crashes, you people haven't memefied and sold the shit out of??

Do you have any idea how fucking indecent it is to profit off of helping us? Our people have to flee our countries and be terrorized at borders and treated like criminals and detained and hunted and killed and you think you're entitled to fame and profit for sitting white and untouchable in Switzerland? Do you have any idea how many of our activists have been tortured and murdered?? Where is the merchandising for that??

You are complicit. In a thousand different ways, every single day, you let us know that if we ever challenge the status quo and inconvenience you with our demands to be treated like humans, we will be silenced, ignored, punished and left to the dogs. And you have the fucking audacity to wonder why your countries are white supremacist hellholes that wipe their asses with Black and brown lives.

Fuck you.

As of this writing, Goncharov has been added and removed from the Martin Scorsese filmography Wikipedia page 7 times.

Y'all also need to understand that Goncharov is a simulation of a public disinformation campaign. People aren't harmed not because it's "just a movie" but because we let each other know that it's fake. It's what makes the gaslighting non-malevolent. If we learn nothing else from this, let it be:

1. Never trust images

2. Always look for primary sources and follow citations and cross-reference, never accept things from exerpts, secondhand sources or just because you hear the same thing over and over

3. Be desperately grateful that free collaborative databases like Wikipedia, Letterboxd and IMDB are staunchly defending their integrity no matter what. If we stop being able to trust any of them for any reason, no matter how small, a key if rudimentary verification tool gets compromised and a knowledge community destabilised. If we can't trust the small stuff, we can't trust the big stuff.

Not being able to rely on the protection of community ethics is how we devolve from a mutually co-operative community into a pit of voles out to eat each other.

-----

Edit 1: Someone pointed out that "non-malevolent gaslighting" is a contradiction in terms. But what we're doing isn't harmless and as you can see it's easily veering towards disinformation and abuse. It always had that potential. So a better term would be "harm-reduced gaslighting". The willingness to bring others in on the joke, tagging unreality and regular reality-affirmation and legitmate databases defending their integrity are all harm reduction mechanism essential to keep this from going from an intra-community meme to malicious disinformation and abuse of neurodivergent people.

Edit 2: "Misinformation" is merely wrong or inaccurate information. "Disinformation" is conspiracies, hoaxes, phishing, media manipulation, propaganda. Disinformation is deliberate manipulation of info to serve someone's agenda. This is why there are Disinformation experts and entities both local and international to help fight it. The two terms aren't interchangeable.

Edit 3: Turns out I've been misled about voles. They're just as harmless and social as other rodents, and smaller and shier too. Idk why FF.net was called Pit of Voles in the 2000s then. 😂😂 I always associate the the term with blood and teeth. Sincere apologies for the vole slander.

I’m glad SOMEONE is pointing out that this fake movie is a disinformation campaign that is deliberately gaslighting people for a laugh. I can appreciate that most people are content to let others in on the joke, but it’s been legitimately frustrating to see some people with large platforms only indicate with their tone that they’re playing along with a big inside joke. 

Tone is incredibly hard to convey while typing and interpret while reading, more so by autistic people, people with intellectual disabilities, seniors, people with chronic or temporary psychosis, etc. etc. 

I hope someone does a serious analysis of this “mostly harmless” disinformation campaign and how easy it was to convince a large number of people with various talents in content creation, with large and small followings, to participate in a mass gaslighting event for a laugh.

And use that to look more critically at the massive disinformation campaigns that led to over 1 million COVID deaths in the US alone (and still counting) along with the incredible shared delusion that is the US GOP and its even more malicious subsets, including the cult of Tr*mp that tried to overthrow the government by force.

There's been quite a few academics and teachers I've seen who want to do an analysis of this meme. It really is fascinating as a simulation exercise, if rather unfortunately lacking in harm reduction protocols. But then it's not like a protest where there are leaders who can establish boundaries and strategies at the outset and take accountability for the actions of the actors. It's entirely dependent on community ethics, information sharing and consensus.

I also really think that we should do a post-mortem of the last week. I'm fascinated by the things that the construction of the lore revealed about Tumblr users, both good and bad, but also I think we can use greater awareness about triggers, tagging, detecting disinformation and where the lines need to be drawn. I have like 3 Gonchposts still racking up notes and from what I see, people are predisposed to be kind and helpful, they just don't know how. The assholes are very much in the minority (and they're noted assholes. Like a couple of times I searched a blog before blocking and beefing with people was clearly a lifestyle choice for them. And then there was also a nest of covid truthers which...we should probably keep an eye on that). It's just that it's quite hard to reach enough people. Hopefully if something like this happens again we can reduce the collateral somewhat.

As of this writing, Goncharov has been added and removed from the Martin Scorsese filmography Wikipedia page 7 times.

Y'all also need to understand that Goncharov is a simulation of a public disinformation campaign. People aren't harmed not because it's "just a movie" but because we let each other know that it's fake. It's what makes the gaslighting non-malevolent. If we learn nothing else from this, let it be:

1. Never trust images

2. Always look for primary sources and follow citations and cross-reference, never accept things from exerpts, secondhand sources or just because you hear the same thing over and over

3. Be desperately grateful that free collaborative databases like Wikipedia, Letterboxd and IMDB are staunchly defending their integrity no matter what. If we stop being able to trust any of them for any reason, no matter how small, a key if rudimentary verification tool gets compromised and a knowledge community destabilised. If we can't trust the small stuff, we can't trust the big stuff.

Not being able to rely on the protection of community ethics is how we devolve from a mutually co-operative community into a pit of voles out to eat each other.

This point about simulated disinformation is fascinating. We can formulate a "Goncharov" rule when examining information about an event or trend or what-have-you: If this information could have been fabricated for Goncharov, it could be fabricated for this.

There's probably a more eloquent way to phrase the idea but I like it.

I love this idea! "Is this real or just a Gonchpost?" "Are we being Gonched?" 😂😂 It would be such a useful check, especially considering how many people on this website just believe that any twitter screenshot is real (I saw somewhere that the person who created the Cybill Shepherd tweets were slightly terrified of how many people were willing to believe them, and even the initial Letterboxd review poster had to be like "no this is 100% my work"). Those photos of Goncharov billboards and that Roger Ebert newspaper article genuinely freaked me out a little.

(I've edited that reblog to amend that "non-malevolent gaslighting" is a bit of a misnomer, and "harm minimised gaslighting" might be a better term.)

Also to stop and consider if something was posted as satire. "Yeah his dad's a license plate." We're really irony-impaired on this site. Idk it's not like we can make it happen but it would be cool if it did.

As of this writing, Goncharov has been added and removed from the Martin Scorsese filmography Wikipedia page 7 times.

Y'all also need to understand that Goncharov is a simulation of a public disinformation campaign. People aren't harmed not because it's "just a movie" but because we let each other know that it's fake. It's what makes the gaslighting non-malevolent. If we learn nothing else from this, let it be:

1. Never trust images

2. Always look for primary sources and follow citations and cross-reference, never accept things from exerpts, secondhand sources or just because you hear the same thing over and over

3. Be desperately grateful that free collaborative databases like Wikipedia, Letterboxd and IMDB are staunchly defending their integrity no matter what. If we stop being able to trust any of them for any reason, no matter how small, a key if rudimentary verification tool gets compromised and a knowledge community destabilised. If we can't trust the small stuff, we can't trust the big stuff.

Not being able to rely on the protection of community ethics is how we devolve from a mutually co-operative community into a pit of voles out to eat each other.

-----

Edit 1: Someone pointed out that "non-malevolent gaslighting" is a contradiction in terms. But what we're doing isn't harmless and as you can see it's easily veering towards disinformation and abuse. It always had that potential. So a better term would be "harm-reduced gaslighting". The willingness to bring others in on the joke, tagging unreality and regular reality-affirmation and legitmate databases defending their integrity are all harm reduction mechanism essential to keep this from going from an intra-community meme to malicious disinformation and abuse of neurodivergent people.

Edit 2: "Misinformation" is merely wrong or inaccurate information. "Disinformation" is conspiracies, hoaxes, phishing, media manipulation, propaganda. Disinformation is deliberate manipulation of info to serve someone's agenda. This is why there are Disinformation experts and entities both local and international to help fight it. The two terms aren't interchangeable.

Edit 3: Turns out I've been misled about voles. They're just as harmless and social as other rodents, and smaller and shier too. Idk why FF.net was called Pit of Voles in the 2000s then. 😂😂 I always associate the the term with blood and teeth. Sincere apologies for the vole slander.

It’s not fucking “gaslighting” and people like you misusing specific terms for describing interpersonal abuse into meaninglessness does far more tangible harm than Wikipedia vandalism for a joke. Nobody is being “abused” by Goncharov jokes, no matter how mean-spirited, but your total misuse of terms like gaslight and abuse do make abuse harder to recognize and combat!

Questions:

Why do you believe mass-scale lying that causes people to question their reality, to the extent of vandalising legitimate databases to propagate the illusion, is not gaslighting?

Why do you believe mean-spirited jokes aren't bullying?

What makes you believe emotional abuse can't also be social and systemic? Especially considering abusers leverage systemic privilege and power to victimise people in their interpersonal relationships?

And what makes you dismiss the neurodivergent and psychotic people and people with gaslighting trauma who have been telling us that it causes them considerable distress when the fake info posts aren't tagged "unreality" and people refuse to drop the bit when they ask if it's real?

Good lord I’m not dismissing people with gaslighting trauma, I was gaslit and abused for a huge chunk of my life, and you’re participating in the destruction of the only language we have to talk about abuse and that has tangible harm. The same thing happened with “triggered” in the early 2010s, it was valuable terminology that’s now unusable, and it’s extremely frustrating to see the same happen with gaslight and abuse now

I don’t know how to explain to you that words mean things and that someone lying about Goncharov being real, even if it’s hurtful, is not gaslighting, abuse, or even bullying, because those words all mean something beyond “lying” or “being mean.”

There is no systemic emotional abuse or gaslighting because, again, that’s not what those fucking words mean, and when there is harm or lying happening at a systemic level or by those in power, we use different words for it, because it’s a fundamentally different thing happening!

I’m trying to be polite because I don’t think you have any ill intent but it’s frustrating beyond words to see someone actively make the world worse for people who have been abused and gaslit by misusing our language into meaninglessness, and then couching that process in the language of social justice.

I think it’s fine and good to tag posts like Goncharov jokes with unreality, or even better, explain to people who could be harmed by this what’s happening and what the joke is, but please do that without using terms like gaslight and abuse and reconsider the way you’ve been using them.

You haven't answered my questions, you didn't respond to the posts I linked and you continue to not back up your arguments.

Abuse is defined by effect, not intent. Making neurodivergent and traumatized people question their reality and being lied to when they ask if it's real, and being out of the loop in the middle of a site-wite illusion that people are trying to manipulate real-world databases for, is in fact abuse and can trigger psychosis. This is explained in the posts Iinked.

You can be socially, systemically and institutionally gaslit. Medical gaslighting, for example, is the leading cause of PTSD in disabled and chronically ill people. Disinformation for the purpose of manipulating narratives is called political gaslighting and media gaslighting (be careful googling this because the right-wing has misappropriated the term).This all comes under epistemic gaslighting, an important sociological phenomenon and social justice term. The idea is not without critics, but here's another article that argues for its use.

And as I have said elsewhere: wider social gaslighting is a key component of interpersonal abuse and victimisation. Partners, children, employees, students, disabled people – people see them being abused or evidence of their abuse and trauma and then minimise it, dismiss it, or pretend like they didn't see anything. It makes you question your memories, experiences and feelings. Worse, most people who do this don't intend to harm you; they're just conditioned into a set of beliefs and worldview that makes abuse invisible to them. It's what makes it so hard to acknowledge abuse to yourself and self-validate your own hurt and fear, because it involves understanding that you are seen as acceptable collateral to your community. As social animals realizing that our tribe won't protect us is extremely traumatic and it's very difficult to ever feel safe again.

It's disingenuous to compare the use of gaslighting to the way the word "triggered" has been mocked, misappropriated and devalued by ableists. Nobody is mocking or devaluing the word here. This kind of humour – pranks, "bits" and anything that involves tricking unconsenting parties (as opposed to say, a magic show where people want to be tricked) and the general manipulating of narratives – necessarily crosses boundaries and toys with people's trust in themselves and others. There is an inherent danger and harm in this kind of lying. That's not to say that this kind of humour is always bad and wrong, just that the line between good-humoured fun and bullying can be subjective and easily crossed over. The ability for people to find the truth, tap out or opt out entirely of our shenanigans is the very real line between annoying and cruel. And even then, there are people who might be too afraid of being mocked or lied to that won't ask, and people whose previous gaslighting trauma is triggered by this version of it.

I would gently ask you why you're so upset and opposed to the idea that you might be engaging in something that has the same consequences, or some version of it, for people that you have yourself experienced. It's very important to understand that gaslighting can be inadvertent. The social gaslighting through conditioning I've mentioned earlier, and also clinging to your personal narrative and insisting only your reality and memories are valid are the most common ways we abuse without meaning to.

But aside from all of that, there are many things people do that may cause inadvertent harm to others. We live such wide and waried realities that it's impossible not to infringe on each other's boundaries when living in the crush of humanity. They are allowed to be angry about it and you are allowed to respect that but keep enjoying the things you do, in as ethical a manner as possible. We are not responsible for how others experience the world, but we do have an obligation to be responsible and minimise harm to the vulnerable by practising informed consent. It's not black and white. It's just that there is a line, and it must be seen and adhered to.

As of this writing, Goncharov has been added and removed from the Martin Scorsese filmography Wikipedia page 7 times.

Y'all also need to understand that Goncharov is a simulation of a public disinformation campaign. People aren't harmed not because it's "just a movie" but because we let each other know that it's fake. It's what makes the gaslighting non-malevolent. If we learn nothing else from this, let it be:

1. Never trust images

2. Always look for primary sources and follow citations and cross-reference, never accept things from exerpts, secondhand sources or just because you hear the same thing over and over

3. Be desperately grateful that free collaborative databases like Wikipedia, Letterboxd and IMDB are staunchly defending their integrity no matter what. If we stop being able to trust any of them for any reason, no matter how small, a key if rudimentary verification tool gets compromised and a knowledge community destabilised. If we can't trust the small stuff, we can't trust the big stuff.

Not being able to rely on the protection of community ethics is how we devolve from a mutually co-operative community into a pit of voles out to eat each other.

-----

Edit 1: Someone pointed out that "non-malevolent gaslighting" is a contradiction in terms. But what we're doing isn't harmless and as you can see it's easily veering towards disinformation and abuse. It always had that potential. So a better term would be "harm-reduced gaslighting". The willingness to bring others in on the joke, tagging unreality and regular reality-affirmation and legitmate databases defending their integrity are all harm reduction mechanism essential to keep this from going from an intra-community meme to malicious disinformation and abuse of neurodivergent people.

Edit 2: "Misinformation" is merely wrong or inaccurate information. "Disinformation" is conspiracies, hoaxes, phishing, media manipulation, propaganda. Disinformation is deliberate manipulation of info to serve someone's agenda. This is why there are Disinformation experts and entities both local and international to help fight it. The two terms aren't interchangeable.

Edit 3: Turns out I've been misled about voles. They're just as harmless and social as other rodents, and smaller and shier too. Idk why FF.net was called Pit of Voles in the 2000s then. 😂😂 I always associate the the term with blood and teeth. Sincere apologies for the vole slander.

It’s not fucking “gaslighting” and people like you misusing specific terms for describing interpersonal abuse into meaninglessness does far more tangible harm than Wikipedia vandalism for a joke. Nobody is being “abused” by Goncharov jokes, no matter how mean-spirited, but your total misuse of terms like gaslight and abuse do make abuse harder to recognize and combat!

Questions:

Why do you believe mass-scale lying that causes people to question their reality, to the extent of vandalising legitimate databases to propagate the illusion, is not gaslighting?

Why do you believe mean-spirited jokes aren't bullying?

What makes you believe emotional abuse can't also be social and systemic? Especially considering abusers leverage systemic privilege and power to victimise people in their interpersonal relationships?

And what makes you dismiss the neurodivergent and psychotic people and people with gaslighting trauma who have been telling us that it causes them considerable distress when the fake info posts aren't tagged "unreality" and people refuse to drop the bit when they ask if it's real?

I feel like there is the need for a term that describes gaslighting but the perpetrator is not one or a few persons, like if the thing doing the gaslighting is sistemic or dozens of people then is something else, is harmful, is bad, but is something else. Or at least it would be useful that other term.

Like it sounds weird or lacks the correct impact (to me) comparing

-My teacher is constantly bullying me

to

-The goverment is constantly bullying me

I dont really speak english so if someone could tell me the other term that would be helpful

I get what you're saying. "Persecution" is a more appropriate term for what the government does because it has systemic power and control over your entire life, unlike the teacher. But "gaslighting" and "abuse" are not so informal. You can be socially, systemically and institutionally abused as well. Medical gaslighting, for example, is the leading cause of PTSD in disabled and chronically ill people. Then there's political gaslighting (e.g covid truthers).

I also found this really interesting article debating the use of "gaslighting" to describe sociological phenomenon.

Plus, wider social gaslighting is a key component of interpersonal abuse and victimisation. Partners, children, employees, students, disabled people – people see them being abused or evidence of their abuse and trauma and then minimise it, dismiss it, or pretend like they didn't see anything. It makes you question your memories, experiences and feelings. It's what makes it so hard to acknowledge abuse to yourself and self-validate your own hurt and fear, because it involves understanding that you are seen as acceptable collateral to your community. As social animals realizing that our tribe won't protect us is extremely traumatic and it's very difficult to ever feel safe again.

As of this writing, Goncharov has been added and removed from the Martin Scorsese filmography Wikipedia page 7 times.

Y'all also need to understand that Goncharov is a simulation of a public disinformation campaign. People aren't harmed not because it's "just a movie" but because we let each other know that it's fake. It's what makes the gaslighting non-malevolent. If we learn nothing else from this, let it be:

1. Never trust images

2. Always look for primary sources and follow citations and cross-reference, never accept things from exerpts, secondhand sources or just because you hear the same thing over and over

3. Be desperately grateful that free collaborative databases like Wikipedia, Letterboxd and IMDB are staunchly defending their integrity no matter what. If we stop being able to trust any of them for any reason, no matter how small, a key if rudimentary verification tool gets compromised and a knowledge community destabilised. If we can't trust the small stuff, we can't trust the big stuff.

Not being able to rely on the protection of community ethics is how we devolve from a mutually co-operative community into a pit of voles out to eat each other.

-----

Edit 1: Someone pointed out that "non-malevolent gaslighting" is a contradiction in terms. But what we're doing isn't harmless and as you can see it's easily veering towards disinformation and abuse. It always had that potential. So a better term would be "harm-reduced gaslighting". The willingness to bring others in on the joke, tagging unreality and regular reality-affirmation and legitmate databases defending their integrity are all harm reduction mechanism essential to keep this from going from an intra-community meme to malicious disinformation and abuse of neurodivergent people.

Edit 2: "Misinformation" is merely wrong or inaccurate information. "Disinformation" is conspiracies, hoaxes, phishing, media manipulation, propaganda. Disinformation is deliberate manipulation of info to serve someone's agenda. This is why there are Disinformation experts and entities both local and international to help fight it. The two terms aren't interchangeable.

Edit 3: Turns out I've been misled about voles. They're just as harmless and social as other rodents, and smaller and shier too. Idk why FF.net was called Pit of Voles in the 2000s then. 😂😂 I always associate the the term with blood and teeth. Sincere apologies for the vole slander.

It’s not fucking “gaslighting” and people like you misusing specific terms for describing interpersonal abuse into meaninglessness does far more tangible harm than Wikipedia vandalism for a joke. Nobody is being “abused” by Goncharov jokes, no matter how mean-spirited, but your total misuse of terms like gaslight and abuse do make abuse harder to recognize and combat!

Questions:

Why do you believe mass-scale lying that causes people to question their reality, to the extent of vandalising legitimate databases to propagate the illusion, is not gaslighting?

Why do you believe mean-spirited jokes aren't bullying?

What makes you believe emotional abuse can't also be social and systemic? Especially considering abusers leverage systemic privilege and power to victimise people in their interpersonal relationships?

And what makes you dismiss the neurodivergent and psychotic people and people with gaslighting trauma who have been telling us that it causes them considerable distress when the fake info posts aren't tagged "unreality" and people refuse to drop the bit when they ask if it's real?

Basically "there's something everyone sees that you are missing and it never quite makes sense and everyone assumes you know and it feels like you've slipped into a slightly different reality" is what paranoia can feel like.

Our brains gaslight us, and we already don't trust our memory and our perception. So we have to rely on the actions of others to tell what's normal and what's real, so if everyone around is saying X Happened but I don't remember it, why don't I remember it, can I trust any of my perceptions ???

And it all kinda spirals from there. A lot of these things - especially for me - is about a fixation on Figuring Out if Something is Real. And if my logic is telling me that it isn't, but everyone around me says it is and it's weird I don't think so, well. That can be upsetting, to say the least

Thank you for explaining that. I wasn't sure how to word that aspect of it. I appreciate it!

I'm getting a little bit tired of the people trying to paint the conversation around "transandrophobia" as some kind of "both sides" issue, like what's happening here is just a political disagreement between one side who's telling the truth about being victimized and one side who's lying to further ulterior motives, and nobody else can figure out who's telling the truth (":(")

You are not confused wayward children caught between two potential liars, incapable of thinking for yourselves, and forced to sit on your hands and wait until someone or something comes along to tell you what to think.

You cannot solve this cute little math equation you've invented by deciding that The Most Victim Must Always Be Believed, picking out your victim of choice, and handing them victory by default.

Look at me. Listen to me. Look me in the fucking eyes.

I am not here to argue about a word. I am not here to claim victory. I am not presenting a "side". I am not a variable in a math equation.

I am talking about my personal experiences as a trans man. I am giving a platform to other people's similar personal experiences. And I am not here to argue with you about whether those things happened or not- they did. They happened.

If you don't believe me when I say that, if you need to evaluate my level of oppression against other people's levels of oppression to decide whether my reality is real or not, and if you need to rely on half-baked repurposed radfem theory from 40 years ago to figure out whether trans people are lying to you about their lived experiences, you are, frankly, not ready to engage in this conversation.

I am using a word as a tool to describe my experiences. I do not care if you want to use it, too. That's not what the conversation is about.

The things the word describes are real. They happen. Some of them have happened to me, and all of them have happened to others like me.

Put on your big kid pants and engage in the actual conversation here:

Do you believe transmascs when we say we have experienced oppression? Do you believe us when we say we have faced violence? Do you believe us when we say we're struggling and need help?

If so, it shouldn't matter what word is being used. You should want to help us.

And if you're spending more time hemming and hawing about the word than you are actually giving a shit about the experiences we're describing and the help we're asking for, well. It's time to own up to the fact that you're not really interested in figuring out which trans person is a hapless victim and which trans person is an evil conniving liar.

You don't give a shit, and you want an excuse to continue not giving a shit.

Oh?? My?? GAWD???

Is anyone going to bring up the point that Barry and Iris have no business trying to parent a young woman only a handful of years younger than them who they literally met a week ago? If they aren’t comfortable in the roles Nora sees them in they could have just gently led with that saying “we prefer to be called Barry and Iris for now, not sure we’re ready to be Mom and Dad.”

I mean yeah, Nora is being irrational by projecting her feelings about her mother on a woman who won’t be her Mom for years. But if you’re not going to understand the rationale for that, then you should also hold Barry and Iris to the same standard that they’re being irrational by taking a parental “I know better than you” stance because they actually know jackshit about either their daughter, the future and how to parent.

So where does this whole “Barry and Iris are great parents who know exactly what kind of parents they will be and Nora should STFU” come from? At least be consistent about why you can’t empathize with two women at the same time, jeez. It’s called misogyny and purity culture

Good thing I was going through for something. Why didn’t tumblr highlight that a reply was added on reblog? I need to get off mobile lol.

Here’s my thing. I don’t think it’s irrational. Iris is Iris. Like I said to someone else the person is the same and Nora has already had the experience it doesn’t matter that in this time Iris hasn’t done it yet. People who have a problem with Barry in the future come all the way to the past to deal with his ass (that was partially a joke but it is true). Time no matter if it bends back or forward if it doesn’t erase the occurance the feelings from it still reside.

The whole Iris and Barry KNOW spill is like the shield of the fandom. Say anything about the two on the situation and it becomes thebexvuse that is used. I’ve broken this situation down several times and I’ve had no one actually reply back with an appropriate debate. It’s always that or simply Nora is wrong she needs to shut up. It’s disgusting on two levels. The moment they make up though they’ll pretend like they never had a bad word to say about Nora because she will then be in the place of fulfilling their fantasy - being the good bred offspring. There’s a reason I find this so side eye worthy but I won’t put it out there because the situation is already bad - but I find it interesting the take on these two women - def vs eachother for people who watch the show.

I think blaming present Iris for something future Iris did is not logical or fair but imminently understandable from a human perspective for the same reasons you said. It's just that the thing I keep hearing over and over is that Nora is being immature and irrational by "taking out" her anger on present day Iris. My point was, if it is so irrational for Nora to see Iris as her mother, then it is equally irrational for Barry and Iris to see Nora as their child and behave like they know anything at all about her life, her needs or her situation. It's a definite double-standard.

The Westallen fandom has a history of being completely unable to empathize with more than one woman at a time. They have let Barry get away with awful gaslighting callous behaviour to other women while demonizing them and defended it as a catharsis of racial oppression (as though being subjected to male bullshit doesnt happen to women of colour) But Nora is black and quite literally the daughter of the black icon they're defending and they treat her the exact same way as any white woman who dared share the screen with Iris.

The truth is that for them a woman can only be idealized or demonized, nothing in between. If Iris is to remain a peerless goddess then everyone else must either be her subject or her rival. It denies Iris's fallibility and her humanity and dehumanizes her as much as it does anyone else. It's misogyny disguised as veneration.

The only real love is taking a good look at everything that could make someone ugly and still finding the beauty in them. This rejection of all or any fault in a character and refusing criticism of her is not love - its a creepy cultish infatuation. They don't love Iris West, they just need an excuse to hate women.

“Sometimes I think we must all be mad, and shall one day wake to sanity in straight-waistcoats.” This is probably the single quote that summarizes why I’m so personally attached to Dracula. One of the major things that I think modern audiences have trouble parsing in the text is that the heroes are living in the rational world of modernity and all of them have a very hard time believing that what’s really causing all their problems is a supernatural entity. For people reading the book today, one can’t really hear the word “Dracula” and not immediately make the connection to vampires. There’s a weird assumption that follows that there’s something amiss when the protagonists don’t pick up on the signs that the Count is so obviously a vampire. Jonathan is frequently dismissed as incompetent for failing to sacrifice his nascent career based on the warnings of the Transylvanian locals. Van Helsing’s hesitation in telling his skeptical protege that he suspects vampirism is seen as senseless, rather than being read as a cautious measure to ensure that he can continue to treat Lucy with what he believes will be most beneficial towards her. The reality of Dracula is, however, that everyone in it is stricken with doubt and this doubt is incredibly important. In addition to the trouble the principals have rectifying a vampire in the “up-to-date with a vengeance” nineteenth century, the bulk of the narrating cast struggles with afflictions that, however they might have been addressed in the 1890s, would definitely qualify as some form of psychiatric illness today. The idea that Mina or Jonathan or Seward aren’t actually experiencing what they’re experiencing, but are “mad” crops up over and over again. The Harkers struggle to believe the content of Jonathan’s journal and even after Mina’ assault they continually feel that the situation they face is somehow unreal. Seward, whose function in the book is on one level to have his worldview proven wrong, is continually plagued with the specter of madness as he tries to make sense of the reality of vampirism. In the manuscript, he even questions his sanity at the moment he opens the door on the night of October 2/3, comparing the ensuing scene to something out of an opera. I can’t speak for everyone, and I’m hesitant to go into very much detail, but this sort of doubt and constant second-guessing, even in the face of what should be convincing evidence, is very much how I’ve found mental illness and abuse interact. Abusers often rely on their victims inability to correctly recognize what’s going on as abuse, and this is especially true in cases where the people they prey upon don’t always have a consistent relationship with reality. As Van Helsing eventually says, Dracula relies on the modern world’s refusal to acknowledge him as his shield, and I think this defense goes far deeper than just his reliance on the legal authorities to take his side against the protagonist’s. For much of the book, he relies on his victims explaining away what he does as nightmares or delusions. He relies on people’s self-doubt and sickness convincing them that they’re the one’s in the wrong. The quote above, is honestly more terrifying to me than anything else in the novel. It suggests an infinite number of doubts that are terrible to contemplate. It hints at a world in which the heroes are chasing a phantom, and have quite possibly slaughtered a woman in a near-death trance in their pursuit of it. It’s this sort of conundrum, this inability to discern whether what’s hurting you is external or internal, that makes the combination of abuse and mental illness so excruciating, and the novel, at least for me, is constantly addressing that sort of terrible fear, which is something that’s incredibly important to me.

I was sort of typing up a mawkish “Here is why Dracula is so phenomenally important to me” Dracula day post, but I found this in my super-fun nostalgic crawl through this Dracula-saturated blog, and I apparently said a lot of what I wanted to say two and a half years ago.

What I will say now, with some more time, maturity, and a Master’s degree to my name, is that what takes the novel’s treatment of easily doubted and hard-to-quantify horrors and makes it so completely, achingly meaningful to me is that what ultimately combats doubt is human empathy and love; it is a book about initially isolated and terrified people coming together, believing one another, compiling proofs, and determining that what afflicts them can be confronted and conquered. Jonathan begins to recover and to take action once Mina and Van Helsing confirm the reality of his experiences. Jack can begin to abandon his skepticism when he discards the dangerous and myopic materialism with which he’s been flirting and starts to rely on the empirical observations of others. The book isn’t just about a move from doubt to certainty, but from human isolation to human connectedness. The very act of creating Dracula, a story that tells the story of its own creation, is one in which people come together and collaborate in an attempt to quantify the thing that lurks in the darkness that edges their own textual contributions. Van Helsing is apt when he talks about Mina as the “light of all lights.” She’s the beacon of compassion around which everyone flocks, but she is also the work’s primary editor; she is the author of Dracula, weaving together everyone’s puzzlebox narrations into a shape that can catch the creature waiting just outside of them.

And… Renfield, who I will always always hold to be the most heroic character in the novel, is probably the most dramatic example of the shift from isolation and darkness into compassion and light. He moves from the selfish monomania of trying to prolong his own life indefinitely to sacrificing that life on behalf of another once he’s treated like an actual human being – from caring about the immediately quantifiable business of lives to the unknowable business of souls. He’s the character who, due to his madness, should be and at times definitely is most vulnerable to the sort of evil the Count embodies, and he’s able to say “Screw that. Out of compassion, I will pull this unquantifiable, nebulous, doubt-inducing son of a bitch out of a goddamn cloud and punch him until he stops!”

And that… that’s the sort of thing I think people who are able need to do and people who are in need need to hope for; that’s the sort of thing that at’s the heart of Dracula for me and at the heart of why I’m so stupidly attached to a goofy vampire book.