feotakahari

A lot of people would think the Pure are contradictory. They're very Christian, but also very Rationalist. They're superstitious, but they pay lip service to studying and finding things out for yourself. To me, they represent something specific.

Someone on social media said that wearing COVID masks made children forget how to smile. People asked her where she was getting this from, and she said she looked and saw it. It was bizarre, but it was her observation, and she wouldn't be dissuaded.

The Pure are the ultimate triumph of her way of looking at the world. The Pure are the treatment of one's subjective view as the true objective, rational view, with no room to doubt or reconsider. Whatever you know must be true, that's what you perceive, and because you perceive it, you know it must be true. Anything outside what you can imagine simply doesn't exist, and if it persists, you make it not exist. Any person who isn't part of your social order will be killed and forgotten, and it will be like they were never there.

When people use a cherry-picked study to argue that gay men are proven to be bad fathers, that's the Pure. When someone said trans women rape cis women all the time, but the mainstream media covers it up, that's the Pure. Hell, that RWBY fan who said it's morally bad to ship Yang and Blake, because it's obvious two people traumatized by the same abuser will inevitably retraumatize each other? They're small-scale, but they're still the Pure. The Pure are in every conspiracy theory, and every attempt to make the world "make sense" that pretends the world has an obligation to make sense to you.

All those stories where elves or aliens or whatever see humanity as children need to follow the metaphor further and make aliens abusive parents.

El Paso, Elsewhere looks like it’s about a guy who fumbled his vampire GF, and then it’s about a vampire who fumbled her human. In some sense she does loves him, but she misses being the vampire lord and having all those other vampires to order around and intimidate, so he’s the one person she has left to order around and intimidate. He seems to me like he would have been fine with being dommed, and she could have just accepted and trusted in the authority he gave her. But she needs to prove to herself that he’ll fear and obey her, over and over again in increasingly cruel and pointless ways. Even more damningly, she can’t accept responsibility for her actions. She justifies, shifts the blame, or simply refuses to respond, and the closest she gets to admitting she did something wrong is saying she knows he thinks she hurt him.

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Morton’s Fork: when you call a sixteen-year-old an adult, that often means you’re going to do things they don’t have the power to fight back against. When you call a sixteen-year-old a child, that often means you’re going to abusively “discipline” them.

Probably an obvious take: when folks say “men should take care of women,” they tend to be really bad at planning for what to do when men within their community don’t take care of women. Women can easily end up in situations where they need to protect themselves but aren’t allowed to.

A less obvious take: I think the same often goes for “adults should take care of children.”

Conservative Christianity is what happens when you can’t recognize the is-ought gap. God is capable of doing anything to you, so there’s an immediate jump to the idea that God ought to be able to do anything God wants. It’s unsurprising that so many of these people think they ought to be able to do anything they want to children who depend on them for care.

Remember when people were saying that Gamergate dude abused Zoe Quinn, and other people were saying Zoe Quinn abused him? From all the information that came out, it sounded like their whole relationship was such a mess that deciding who was the pure, innocent victim was beside the point. I think about that when people argue whether Depp or Heard is the pure, innocent victim.

Reinterpreting the prince, the princess, and the dragon, only it’s a Rescue Game with the respective rescuer, victim, and perpetrator. When you run out of dragons, you start accusing princesses you don’t like of being dragons in disguise.

About those people who think reading Twilight makes you think abuse is good. Did they read things that made them think reading Twilight makes you think abuse is good?