Hogwarts Legacy - Whimsical Wizardry
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
- Start date
I don't think anyone said that unless I missed it, I think the defence/boost may have been on a different matter (am not on Twitter). It is, OTOH, something I would cheerfully bin off friends for (doesn't fit under the difference -of-opinion heading).
Firstly, cultural ideas of a third gender, people existing outside the binary, etc have been around for many, many centuries-- often until they were stamped out by Christendom or by colonial force (as in India). Much longer than most traditions.
Secondly, "tradition" doesn't lend legitimacy anyway. Not one iota.
"Ha! None of that is canon! I refuse to accept as canon!"
...in seriousness, yes, you're right. However, I'm quite confident in describing orcs in LotR as being evil as:
-Considering how evil operates in Arda (TL, DR, Abrahamic inspiration, Morgoth is 'fallen,' he can't create, only twist what already exists), on a fundamental level, it's fair to say that orcs are evil.
-No orc in the entire Legendarium has ever not been anything other than a monster. Whatever Tolkien's thoughts on the matter, none of this ended up being translated into the works themselves. The closest I've seen is in Rings of Power with Adar, and while I find Adar a fascinating character, he still does heinous things to achieve his goals. Orc welfare ends up being at the expense of everything and everyone else.
True, but another important thing about Tolkiens work is that it is presented as fictional mythology/origin story, not a fictional history. It is supposed to be a set of legends and narrations and he basically always had particular narrators in mind. And we do get occasionally hints that some stories are told differently elsewhere or that we don't really know all that much about cultures that are not used as viewpoint.
One of the inspirations he mentioned were the tales of Charlemagne's Paladins and i would not be surprised if that was roughly the level of biased storytelling that he would allow himself.
Of course he still wanted orcs to be evil and twisted. But while he never really solved the "evil orc with free will" problem, he hardly ever wrote anything about orcs that was not supposed to be knowledge and speculations from their enemies. That avoided the topic of potential good orcs/orc redemption.
On one hand, we have people been attacked (that is, criticised and condemned) for playing a game based on the works of a famous transphobe and on the other we have people being attacked (that is stabbed to death) by transphobes. Both sides!
oh no they didn't go after amouranth did they? quick send an update.Meanwhile people are systematically going through all the streamsrs possible to harrass them.
I think the person who'd verbally attack someone for playing a videogame has more in common with someone who'd stab someone for being weird than with a person who can separate the art from the artist and doesn't let the real world get in the way of a good fictional time enjoyed in a vacuum free from real world concerns.
The through-line is an inclination to cause misery to others due to some sort of reasoning that is valid in your head, as opposed to live and let live.
This is why we should celebrate people who play the game, they're not gonna be stabbing anyone anytime soon, they have too much love and joy in their lives to do that kinda thing.
True. All pretty shitty behavior.
Not the same level of shitty. But that isn't really an excuse. Just because murderous hate mobs exist doesn't mean organizing not murderous hate mobs going after unrelated targets improves the situation.
This whole boykott attempt and accompaning bullying has done more damage to the trans movement than Rowling over her whole lifetime.
Unless this results in actual anti-trans legislation, I doubt it. It's a self-inflicted wound, but not nearly as bad as being legally denied life-saving medicine.
The thing is that i don't really think that Rowling has ever been all that influential.
Sure, the Potter books have many fans. But how likely is that those fans take any political advice from a children book author ? And sure, she has money and money means political influence. But she is not really that rich. It is millions, not billions and most of that is not meant to be wasted on politics.
The boycott however has actually managed to attack this fanbase directly and for many of them that will be the most direct interaction with trans activists in their life. This is what they will remember in future elections, not Rowlings bigoted comments.
Rowling's comments are getting read of by proponents of anti-trans legislation on the regular, and has been used to launder dozens of anti-trans news articles a week for years now
I bet a lot of people playing the game know nothing about Rowling or her opinions on jackshit, but they damn sure know about streamers getting attacked for playing the game. Especially younger kids who would have just watched their favorite streamer playing the game only to see them freaking out about chat and crying.
I wonder how many people they won over with their campaign.
Never seen a single such article. I know of Rowlings views exclusively from sources complaining about her. The complaints are certainly not wrong but that really makes me doubt her reach.
It's probably only in some far right or yellow press offerings i would never touch anyway.
The New York Times and The Guardian, among many others. There's currently a blow up about their trans coverage being absolute garbage
Kathoey (the term "ladyboy" is generally considered offensive) are no more common in Thailand than trans people are in many other countries. The reason why you think this is a "thing" in Thailand is because Thailand has a particular history with sex tourism, and because for a long time white people have specifically traveled to Thailand in order to pay for sex, including sex with kathoey.
That's not the only reason, but you are not doing yourself any favours if your goal is to demonstrate that this is anything other than personal incredulity. The fact that something is "a thing" to you doesn't actually matter. Trans people in other countries have a history and identity just as long-lived and socially relevant as kathoey do in Thailand, it's just less relevant to you because it's not being marketed to you.
Note that this is not to downplay the presence of trans sex workers in other countries or to present sex work as shameful, only to point out that the reason white people are familiar with the presence of kathoey in Thai culture is primarily due to sex tourism.
I'm not sure where this is coming from, but you've misunderstood.
The reproductive behaviour of most animals is driven by simple sensory and chemical signals. Most insects barely have a central nervous system, and yet they manage to reproduce with each other by reacting to basic pheremone signals. Humans don't work that way. There's no hard evidence that human pheremones even do anything. From an evolutionary standpoint, getting humans to reproduce with each other is actually very difficult. We have to be persuaded into it, which is why our genitals have an enormous number of pleasure receptors. Unlike most animals our sexual behavior is mostly if not entirely learned, which can result in all kinds of outcomes like people being turned on by shoes (or tigers).
Animals didn't evolve sociality in order to reproduce, and reproduction is not the "purpose" of sociality.
I'm not American. I know what grammatical gender is, and I also know it's different from social gender (although they have interconnected histories).
I think what you are attempting to say, and I agree, is that there is more than one way of being masculine or feminine. What I kind of wish you would take from that is that me wanting to be masculine or feminine doesn't necessarily align with your own ideas about what I might mean by that.
However, if what you mean is that the meaning of masculinity and femininity is completely indeterminate and noone actually notices or cares about these things, you're simply wrong.
How would you make it feminine?
What is the difference between the way you would wear your hair long and the way a woman would that make one masculine and the other feminine?
For example, I imagine that you don't heavily condition or treat your hair to make it look soft, smooth or shampoo-ad glossy. I imagine you don't backcomb or curl it unless you're into a certain type of metal. I imagine you don't heavily style or shape it. Maybe you straighten it sometimes, but I imagine you probably try not to make that obvious. These things would be an acknowledgement that the aesthetic purpose of your hair is to look pretty rather than epic. Now, maybe I'm wrong, I've met metallers who took a great deal of care over their hair, but it's a statement to do that, because it is more transgressive (for men) than just wearing your hair long.
You've been telling me the opposite.
I'm not not a woman because I have a penis, but because I'm non-binary. I'm not a man either, although I also think that at some point in my life I was. What I want to be, and what I have worked hard to become, is neither of these things. I can resemble both of them, I've been mistaken for both of them and I can enjoy things which are associated with both of them, but resemblance is not reality. What I want is to be free to express myself in whatever way I want without having to buy into one of these two identities.
TERFs, the actual sincere feminist TERFs not JK Rowling and her child-murder-fetishist friends, would argue that the way to do that is to retreat completely into an identity based on your "real" sex. You can do whatever you want but you have to admit you're a man and that your primordial spiritual essence comes from your penis. Unfortunately, those are also people who think that said primordial spiritual essence makes all men into necrophiliac rapists (you know, symbolically, so we don't have to do any work to substantiate it). I reject this. I reject the notion that I have a fundamental spiritual essence, and I especially reject that it comes from something as stupid as my genitals. I'm not ashamed of my genitals, but they're a very small part of me (insert joke here). They symbolize nothing.
The thing is, I could so easily turn this back. I could argue that the reason you believe that your genitals contain the essence of "what you truly are" is because you're not introspective enough to have found a better answer.
Being trans, even binary trans, is fucking hard sometimes. Noone just wakes up one day looking like a perfect glamorous woman or hunky man and never gets clocked. Being non-binary is even harder in some ways because very few people are ever going to get it. At the end of the day, we all live at the mercy of a world dominated by cis people, and if cis people want to make your life miserable there's not much you can do about it. Noone becomes trans or non-binary because they haven't given it enough thought, kind of the opposite.
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