There was a recent wrecker post that did this a lot. It comes across as reactionary to me but sometimes I see leftists doing it too. Nerd culture being associated with being childish/nostalgic and easily exploited by sanitised consumption, etc.
As an autistic person who sometimes gets hyperfixations that could be seen as childish, it feels gross to have people paint these hobbies as some kind of uniquely hyperconsumerist thing, because 90% of the time it’s just because the hobby is seen as childish and/or neurodivergent coded.
For example: I was hyperfixated on gardening for a while. It was expensive, really hard to do ethically and the industry itself is massively corporate and responsible for some of the biggest environmental problems today. It’s a nice little escapist hobby where you can turn your mind off while you pretend you aren’t fucking up your local biome because Monsanto decided it would sell more soil wetter, plant disease cures and fertilizer ifs product kills the soils ability to self regulate. I tried to do it the organic permaculture way, ended up being too expensive and half of the products were not in fact as ethical as they pretended to be. Also I have a degree in Ecology, most gardners don’t have that luxury and are not trained how to garden ethically. Never once have I ever seen anyone call gardening a vapid corporate hobby or expressed concern that I was using my fake little biome to escape from the real world. Never once have I been lumped in with the same people who invented DDT. Because it’s a socially acceptable hobby for a well adjusted adult to have.
I can’t say the same for when I had a Pokemon hyperfixation. It was a relatively cheap hobby, I mostly just played the games and the rom hacks were fun. But I stopped because who wants to be associated with grown ass adults waiting in line for cards and playing a childrens game! They must be mentally ill in some way, right? Now adults who still like a hobby they grew up with get put into the same camp as Harry Potter fans, who we have apparently now have decided are bad because Harry Potter is childish and whimsical, not because the writer is a racist transphobe.
Just something that mulls over in my head sometimes, because social dynamics that make no sense to me are another thing I like to fixate on and dissect for fun. I tend to see how the flow of popular narratives can manipulate people into adopting reactionary talking points. All you have to do is trojan something onto a socially acceptable target without outright saying the target and you have even leftists redirected to attack a target that the right want dead. People are funny.
Thanks for reading my weird rant. I could just be coming across as insecure and making myself an easy target for wreckers to get a rant from, but eh who cares.
Ageism is right up there with ableism as one of the most invisible forms of prejudice in capitalist society. At least with ableism, there is some very basic understanding that you can’t use certain slurs and whatnot. But ageism seems almost universal.
The world seems nowhere close to understanding ageism. I don’t mean merely being rude to children or the elderly, but the way those groups are regarded as socially inferior on a biological basis reminiscent of race science.
From a Marxist perspective, if we take history and contingency seriously, then we must value every age group, and see every member of society as a source of insight regardless of their age. Superstructure (ideology, culture, commonsense etc) always lags in time behind the base. Children are the most prepared and acclimated to the new world, before their elders are aware that a new world has even emerged.
100% and I think you hit the nail on the head with gardening vs. Pokemon. Adult hobbies are supposed to be productive, because adults are supposed to be productive every waking hour. So adults get to have hobbies like gardening, woodworking, or fixing cars, which produce something. Children get hobbies like games, toys, or collections, which consume things, because children are unproductive leeches on society.
Except anyone who’s done adult hobbies (esp. anyone who’s tried to monetize such a hobby while keeping it casual) knows that most of those are a way bigger money hole than any kids’ hobby. Gardening is a blast, but my payoff is 2 lumpy zucchini and a comically small bell pepper. Yay, now my family won’t starve.
On a more individual level, I think people who yuck your yum for enjoying Pokemon are jealous that you didn’t buy into the mindset, and you’re enjoying things that they were pressured to leave behind.
The leftist thing is definitely true too. They see consumerism as a red flag and immediately jump on it. And there’s a Nirvana fallacy common with leftists that if you’re not doing everything perfectly, then you’re the problem. And they fall into the same productivity trap that enjoying something unproductive is time that could have been spent building your community or taking direct action or whatever. But all that said, I see this way less frequently from the left, and generally leftists are happy to find a new unproductive person to join their DnD group.
Calling people immature really isn’t my bag since my ass is casting stones in a glass house. I will say though my world of insults for chuds has gotten smaller since I started policing my language to be less ableist. So I do be wondering what insults I can use against the shitty people?
If I have to go for a single-word insult I usually call them “satans” or “shayateen”, I think — evil spirits who whisper temptations into people’s hearts, you know. “Dickhead” is a more conventional insult that’s very versatile. But for the most part it’s probably best to be specific, be accurate, and be a bit flowery, i.e. just call them what they are: racists, misogynists, transphobes, nihilists, trolls, class traitors, small business tyrants, etc.
Which is to say that it’s simply not accurate to portray fascism as coming out of a place of being ignorant and unable to learn better: it really takes a lot of creative and intellectual energy to come up with conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and ever-changing sophistry to justify your own supremacy over your fellow human beings. Mental gymnastics is a real sport, and people don’t do it because they haven’t considered Occam’s razor, they do it because they want to uphold their privileges despite the inevitable march of the human race towards equality — or from another perspective, because we’re all playing the prisoner’s dilemma, and the fascists have chosen to defect.
We could always vomit pellets at them
Good post, no notes.
Except that I actually think pokemon fandom is having a moment in the sun, there have never been more cool fangames and romhacks. Seems weird to me that anyone would perceive Pokemon fandom the same way as HP, when there are endless multi-hour essays praising the pokeymans games and stuff.
But yes, cringe culture never died and it is horrible.
death to cringe culture
As an autist who’s “not very childish” and enjoys being an adult I’ve caught myself wanting to call some of my peers immature.
Fucking evil capitalist brainwashing got to me.
I want to read books targeted to adult audiences. I enjoy more complex stories.
But almost all of them are bland cishet romance slop with the same plots and characters, just different names and locations!
I didn’t enjoy Warrior Cats and Redwall, I found them quite shallow, but there’s still stuff in them to “dig my teeth into”, even if most of it is analyzing and criticism.
Oh, and the fans of these works make neat stuff!
Most romance novels are written so their authors can eat. There is no true passion in that, no writing for “the love of the game”. Fucking sad really.
A good place to start reading adult books with an assurance of quality is old genre piece classics, most don’t use super flowery language because they were written for an older teenager and young adult audience and the only ones still being recommended today are the ones good enough to be remembered (also they don’t usually focus on romance as much).
John Wyndhams books aren’t too long and pretty gripping, mostly grounded scifi stories, I’d recommend starting with Day of the Triffids or The Midwich Cuckoos, if you’d like something along the same lines but a bit older try HG Wells. Ursula Leguin’s really good too for more fantastical sci-fi, i remember getting shaken out of a long bout of not reading by The Left Hand of Darkness (Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World were also good for this).
There’s a lot of good old spy and crime books you might also like, i remember being very fond of The 39 Steps and The Man Who Was Thursday, and all the old Sherlock Holmes books ofc.
All of these are fairly short (irc left hand of darkness is the longest at around 250 pages), not too hard to get into and widely available second hand at low prices.
Also they don’t usually focus on romance as much.
Heh… My ol’ aromantic ass strikes again!
I consider myself to be not so much “romance-repulsed” but instead “romance-annoyed”.
If I find a romance interesting and compelling I sink my teeth in.
But many romances feel so tacky! Especially when they pop in out of nowhere and trash the entire tone of the media.
But if it’s subservient to the core plot/actually compliments the story I’m largely fine with it.
I’m not quite sure what a want to read beyond my soft bias towards contemporary fiction and the mesmerism I have towards anthropomorphic animal stuff lol. (Not that I hate humans. I just enjoy when the characters are animals.)
Truthfully speaking I’m more of a writer then a reader, but I do wonder how much of that is down to the book capitalists pushing quickly created stuff and largely focusing on the main best selling genres.
wells is so goddamn boring though. i couldn’t make myself finish war of the worlds. you have to be careful with old stuff because a lot of it gets elevated for being culturally important, not because it’s “good” or “enjoyable” or “interesting” for the reader.
i found Doyle and Verne readable and enjoyable, but not much else of the 19th century writing i (was made to) have sampled.
This is definitely NOT what the analysis the Pennsylvanian education department intended me to form, but I found Holden in “Catcher in the Rye” sitting there in that once scene awkwardly holding a clump of snow in his hand as it slowly melts and he doesn’t know where to throw it to be… Heh, well, moderately amusing!
Didn’t see myself in Holden. Still don’t. I run my mouth and am somewhat confrontational, but I don’t usually go around being obnoxious for the sake of being obnoxious.
Did link him to some of my “peers” though! Namely the obnoxious “dudebros” who’s hobbies involve “being loud and annoying and general assholes”, “toxic masculinity”, and “arrogance”.
And thinking about it now, there’s plenty of adults around me who mirror Holden. Arrogant and emotionally stunted adults who care only of themselves, being as obnoxious as socially possible as they can’t stand not being the center of attention for more then five minutes. Clowns who think they’re entitled towards everything and have systemd redirects of everything empathy related towards /dev/null.
Eg: Fascists flying MAGA flags, and jackasses who install loud mufflers and audio systems in their vehicles and zooms them up and down the neighborhood at three in the morning.
Spoilers for The Catcher In The Rye; CWs child sexual abuse, suicide
I got a very different reading from The Catcher in the Rye. I read it as a communist in my 20s (it’s not exactly on school curricula where I live), and I absolutely did see myself in Holden, but it’s more nuanced than that. I understood Holden as a traumatized kid — a repeat CSA victim, he saw an extremely violent suicide firsthand, his brother died of leukemia — who is now sabotaging his own happiness through toxic masculinity. He’s a bit like the worst parts of Shinji and Asuka put together in that regard, if you’re familiar with Evangelion. The “toxic masculinity” part wasn’t what I related to, but more the disillusionment with society, and his tendency to get fixated on, depressed at, or make fun of things that he sees as representing what’s wrong with the world, that sort of thing. But just because I can see that part of myself in his character doesn’t mean that it’s a good part: this is something people need to understand about relatability, that it doesn’t have to be all positive traits.
“Growing up” is like an invasion of the mind: Holden’s behavior is like the part of him that’s been so thoroughly done unto, clamoring to get out; but that insurrection of his progressive side keeps getting put down by his reactionary side, i.e. the internalized ideas being pushed onto him as a part of the traumatic process that is “growing up” and being molded into an ideal subject under capitalism. And so, Holden’s legitimate grievances about the world get twisted, and he puts on this masculine front instead of actually addressing the problems he faces head-on. And that’s what TCITR is: Holden’s mask, and throughout the work it slips a few places here and there to give you an idea of what’s under the mask, and what’s under the mask is really just a kid who needs a good friend’s lap to cry into.
It’s kind of ironic, actually, that you’re saying these things about the adults and peers in your life while also saying that you don’t relate to Holden. To me, what you’re saying is more evocative of how Holden talks about his roommates and teachers at Pencey Prep than anything else. Kind of the point with Holden is that he is himself no less of a phony than the people he talks about, but calling a bunch of people in your life “Holdens” instead of “phonies” doesn’t mean that you aren’t doing that same “everyone’s a phony but me” error.
I dunno, I hope you don’t mind me saying that. I don’t know you, and a handful of social media comments isn’t really enough to accurately assess a person’s character.
Honestly you have a way better understanding of the book then me.
I have to wonder if TCITR might be the sort of work that resonates best with people in their early to mid 20s, the age when I read it. The context in which a lot of people first read TCITR is as early-teenagers being forced to read it for school, and at that age you’re maybe not reading it super critically[1], and since you’re being forced to read TCITR by an authority to get a good test score, you’re maybe from the outset sort of incentivized to have a negative outlook on it, the same as most anything becomes a chore if you’re being forced to do it (see also: wage labor). So the result is that teenagers read TCITR and they see Holden acting out and being a dick for no apparent reason, but then the parts where the mask slips and we see how unreliable he is as a narrator, those parts kinda go over younger readers’ heads.
On the other hand, I know people who read TCITR for the first time in their 30s or older, and the fact that they were that much older than the protagonist really colored their perception of the work as well. Because by that point you can’t really relate to Holden as a disenchanted young person, you’re more looking at him as if you were his parent or older sibling, the sort of age where you can understand the stage he’s at in life, but you’re just so personally far past that stage of life that you really just want to “shake some sense into him”.
Edit: Sorry for all the hedge words lol
Obviously that’s what the schools are trying to get you to do, I just mean that it’s usually not a skill that people have really mastered by that age. Much of the blame for that is in how critical reading is taught in schools to begin with. ↩︎
it’s been about a decade since i read his stuff but i remember really loving war of the worlds, the time machine and the island of dr moreau as a teenager, maybe I’ve got rose tinted glasses for it smh but im sure it can’t be that bad
Well, that’s not true. But as an author of some dense cyberpunk, I’ve got some bad news. People aren’t really reading stuff like that at all. They do want their popcorn books. It’s so bad that it seems like most published authors sound the same due to editing for that audience.
I agree it’s reactionary and it also turns children into a thing that is lesser than an adult and re-enforces the lack of full humanity of children. Sort of similarly as the comparison between rational (manly) and emotional that works to undermine women.
Being “childish” as an insult is so much more to me than just belittling someone for behaving a certain way. It’s tied to all the nornative assumptions and is extremely privileged white western dude coded to me. As a neurospicy person I’ve always been deeply annoyed by it, as the norms are all so superficial and say nothing about things like the morality or character of the person. Not being childish is civility bs in disguise and using it as an insult kind of plays into these power differentials. A similar thing is “proper language use” and the way people with dialects get othered.
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Pokemon
I enjoy the online competitive side of pokemon, (never been into the TCG) and playing romhacks etc. idgaf what people think and never have.
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I’m going to wear cat ears even when I’m in my 50s
I think the infantilization of women by way of schooldressed anime girls with cat ears is super weird and everywhere.
The fuck does this have to do with this thread?
I don’t believe children should hold an exalted status in society.
I guess you must be pretty happy that they’re entirely un-peopled and have zero capability to say “no” to anything by law, then.
On average they don’t have the capacity to understand the world the way adults do,
If you think kids are just stupid, I guess there’s nothing for that.
to say that ‘poor development’ has been used to denigrate disabled people and ipso facto ‘infantilizing’ children is ableist is a weak argument.
What did the r-slur originally mean? Seems like this works both ways to me.
EDIT: well I guess I’d edit my comment to remove all of that garbage too.
The fuck does this have to do with this thread?
It’s one of the methods patriarchy discredits and delegitimizes stuff women enjoy.
If you think kids are just stupid, I guess there’s nothing for that.
I have mixed feeling on this. I was young and foolish. Now I’m slightly older and foolish!
Children can be quite smart, but they also lack life experiences. Teaching them about the world is extremely valuable, but growing up supplies a sort of “learning by the ropes” experience that teaches more contextual lessons.
This is one of the many reasons shoving neurodivergent children “under the carpet” is so incredibly catastrophic and helps perpetuate their general suffering and isolation.
When I was ~8 I knew some programming but didn’t understand what capitalist IP law was and why the status quo says piracy is bad.
Kids aren’t stupid, they’re just still in the process of learning!
It’s one of the methods patriarchy discredits and delegitimizes stuff women enjoy.
Many such cases
With regard to the rest of your comment I don’t disagree, I was pretty unwise in my teen years as well. It’s the idea that kids inherently can’t understand anything that bugs me, because it leads directly into parents owning their kids as property type situations as we see in the imperial core.
It’s the idea that kids inherently can’t understand anything that bugs me, because it leads directly into parents owning their kids as property type situations as we see in the imperial core.
Oh yeah! Absolutely!
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I quoted you directly. Immediately jumping to insinuating that a trans person is a pedo is real smooth. Always gets the crowd going, bonus points for doing it when she’s talking ahout the rights of kids. [User said that I was being uncharitable, and in turn asked me if I don’t “believe in the age of consent law”]
You think a lack of an education and reliance on our basest instincts is not reactionary?
You said “they don’t have the capacity to understand the world the way adults do” which sounds a lot more like “innately less intelligent” than “not educated” and lines up nicely with the dehumanisation of kids.
Your take got construed extremely uncharitably because it is bad, sorry:
Fwiw, I do think I have a problem with misapplication of “force” in conversational terms. I went all soft trying to educate a wrecker that got banned, many such cases. I do stand behind what I said though.
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Truth nuke incoming:
Karl Marx was way too harsh on the Lumpenproletariat, he described them as: “passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society”. This mirrors the behavior you’re describing. A lot of leftists go to the left because they see an ideology that, on the surface promotes a manly badass worker, who saves the world, lead by a very intelligent serious adult man club. A little introspection would go a long way.
It’s probably not a good idea to make Marxism appear like the most boring man-cave in the world.
The original meaning of the R-slur was literally that the person supposedly had a “delayed” development, so there absolutely is a connection between how we treat disabled people and how we treat children. There’s a wider discussion to be had about how the autonomy of children is contantly denied in most societies, and the USA is a particulaly bad offender in this regard outside all imperial core nations. I’ve always found it shocking and revolting how normalized it is in Amerika to be openly abusive to your kid, how unremarkable it is there to treat your child as your property. But hexbear never had that conversation because too many users immediately fell for the thought-terminating, sectarian and reactionary “there’s anarchists that want to abolish bedtime” jokes, and it shows in how we talk about the treatment of kids here. I think it’s part of the “bullying works” mindset, too, that always came off as “well i was beaten as a kid and it didn’t harm me” bs. Newsflash, having been bullied as kids absolutely has harmed you, it has harmed me, we constantly keep circling back to that harm and we will not be able to break that cycle and heal as long as we do not recognize that you can’t treat people like objects just because they’re 12 or “act like they’re 12”.
We need to relearn respect for human dignity and we need to start with recognizing this right in the people we most routinely deny it to, in children.
Honestly we SHOULD abolish bedtime, like different people have different natural circadian rhythms that change with age, but we’re forced to live by more or less one standard time for sleeping, which is based on the standard working hours, which are themselves based on the most efficient way to extract value from the working class. The abolition of wage labor should mean the freedom to fall asleep and wake up when it is most convenient for you to do so.
But yes, up the dignity of children, down the bullying works mindset. Very good comment!
in particular the school start times are the wrong way around here. highschool starting at 7:30 am is abusive. there’s a lot of logistics and scheduling changes that should be made to western schooling for that matter, but we’re beholden to sports culture and early 20th century farming so it will never change.
It was pointed out to me recently that the “debate” over under-18s being allowed HRT is as much a subfunction of this as it is transphobia, which I was like “woah” to but also isn’t really surprising, sadly.
It’s common for transphobia to reflect the worst fears of reactionaries. Our transitions require that we assert our autonomy in ways that radically deny what they imagine the natural order of things to be. Our name changes do not only fly into the face of their insistence to call their daughter Bobson Klansman jr., the dozens of document changes that follow it highlight at every step the encroaching panoptic nightmare that is datamining technocapitalism. Our HRT regimens demonstrate to all senses that gender is not a bioessential and immutable thing, but something you can hack and play with and influence down to the epigenetic level, and the earlier we start that the more their flimsy “you can always tell” excuses break down. Our very bodies remind them that their performative immitation of phallocentric heterosexuality as a form of male domination is a fraudulent hoax, and the fact that all of them secretly crank it to t-slur porn completely breaks them when they are confronted with us outside of pornhub, obliterating their mental faculties in a way that is as terrifying to them as coming face to face with Nyarlathotep on the high plateau of Leng.
To be trans is to be antifascist down to the molecular level. This is why as long as the fascists draw breath, they will do everything they can get away with to end our existence, as we are the living proof that all they believe in is a steaming garbage pile of lies.
“To be trans is to be antifascist down to the molecular level”, pretty good writeup ngl. Kinda makes me wish more trans people would take up a revolutionary stance. I wish I saw less nato queers…
I’ve seen a total of 2 trans people in the military over the course of the last 5 years, and that number goes up to 5 if we’re including “works for a non-military branch of an MIC corporation” or “owns stocks of such a corporation” or “has done contract work for the army once”. 5 out of a literal tripple digit number of trans people i’ve interacted with irl. And that’s not nothing, but it’s a tiny fraction of all trans women i’ve met and i barely interact with cis people nowadays and have met about as many of these who are in similar positions. And unlike with cis people who just dgaf about anybody owning Rheinmetall stock, i know trans comrades who have literally broken up with partners over that, so i’d say that’s really not enough to warrant making up the entire genre of trans drone pilot that so many leftists get super hung up about even on this site.
So many leftists still refuse to notice how overrepresented trans people in general and TMA people in particular are in their spaces, especially in outspokenly anti-imperialist ones, especially in ones that are solidaric with Palestine in this ultrazionist hellhole of a country i am living in. Do you think we would have 50% queer people on a sex-hating incel site like hexbear if it wasn’t for trans people being more into communism than anybody else out there? Yes, i get it, the majority of trans people are social democrats and progressive liberals well gues what the majority of cis people in my country are literally Super Hitler. The trans community skews left harder than any other demographic, it’s not our fault that in countries infested with anti-communist brainworms, that still means a majority of us are kinda lib. That’s just the norm for literally everybody, but we are expected to always have correct takes because otherwise we make trans people look bad, and as soon as somebody does that, everybody is like “well that’s just most trans people” even on here. That’s a textbook case of double standard. You can show MLs and MLMs literally one trans girl working for Thyssen-Krupp and they lose their shit and talk about how being trans is a bourgeois Western concept that you can’t expect working class people from the global South to be normal about when working class people from the global South are literally more than half of my neighbors and none of them have a problem with me.
Sorry, but i’m just fed up with hearing this shit. When a trans woman is not a comrade, it’s without fail made out to be something that directly links back to her transness. We never get the grace of that being seen as a personal failure that cis people get granted by default, it’s always because that woman is a “NATO queer”. When a cissie is not a comrade, nobody ever says “well, cis privilege literally makes it more likely that you are a lib or worse” even though that is demonstrably true. Cis people are, on average, less politically trustworthy than trans people. Why don’t we hold them accountable for being “NATO straights”? Because people would think that’s ridiculous. And they only think it’s ridiculous because being straight is the default that you do not have to justify to anybody, where being queer and especially being trans immediately means anything you do gets examined under a magnifying glass. I’m so fucking tired of people on here trotting this out.
Your whole comment reminded me of this XKCD:
Yeah, that’s basically it.
Yes, I don’t mean ‘literally in the military’. I do agree that the “trans drone pilot” thing is slightly wild as an idea. And we do have a ton of trans people here, it sure as fuck beats the shark instance. I didn’t refuse to notice, I’m one.
Yes, i get it, the majority of trans people are social democrats and progressive liberals well gues what the majority of cis people in my country are literally Super Hitler.
Germany
what a classic.More than the political leaning broadly, or working for shitass elevator companies or military support or anything though, I was thinking about how startlingly fuckin’ racist white trans people can be. Pretty harrowing thread if you ask me. And I know, twitter, bsky, but these are people that exist in real life.
You can show MLs and MLMs literally one trans girl working for Thyssen-Krupp and they lose their shit and talk about how being trans is a bourgeois Western concept that you can’t expect working class people from the global South to be normal
Funny enough the MLs asserting that you can’t expect working class people from the global south to be normal is a pretty bad take in and of itself. I hate to see the “queerness is bourgeois” take but when I think about Brand Israel, that kind of makes me feel ill. Not that it makes the take correct obviously.
We never get the grace of that being seen as a personal failure that cis people get granted by default,
Can’t say I disagree that we never get any benefit of the doubt, yeah. All kinds of spaces are always chomping at the bit to have a turn bullying trans women.
“well, cis privilege literally makes it more likely that you are a lib or worse”
I like saying this because it’s true, as it’s true of all identities that the imperial core privileges. Cis people, cishet people specifically, neurotypicals, white people. I do think that more than being the “assumed default”, a “NATO straight” is just the default in NATO broadly. As in, yeah, it’s a cishetero patriarchal white supremacist project. So I guess it’s more notable when “minorities” support it. Not that I don’t think cis leftists over-expose trans people in empire, but y’know.
I think in short, I just don’t have the same inherent faith in the revolutionary character of trans people as you do. We’re just people, it’s a bit like any other identity in that you don’t get “more revolutionary” just for being trans.
I think in short, I just don’t have the same inherent faith in the revolutionary character of trans people as you do.
I do not. I think revolutionaries are the exception in every demographic, i just think that trans people are more likely than anybody else to be that exception. It’s the same as with being left handed, that correlates massively with queerness and particularly with transness. But that does not mean left handed people are a majority in trans spaces, or that trans people are a majority of left handed people.
Well alright, I wish I felt the same. Maybe trans people do lean left more often, but in my experience I’ve seen a lot of unexamined biases, is all.
I wish I saw less nato queers…
Lots online unfortunately, sad to see, queers of all kinds. Lack of intersectionality is a real problem.
i thought name change stuff mostly originated in debt enforcement
Some leftists are really keen on calling people childish and weird for liking cute and wholesome stuff but have no problem with straight up gore and porn, not that they’re morally bad but you can’t expect to moralize one type of thing and not expect moralization of another thing. I have really distanced myself from the wider world when I see people praise something like Attack on Titan and call One Piece stupid. It is a microcosm of everything going on with the world, everything that is about gore, violence, death, and inhumanity/misanthropy is elevated and everything about life is degraded.
but have no problem with straight up gore and porn
ironically the elevation of “gore, violence, death, and inhumanity/misanthropy” is just another form of childishness even though it sees itself in opposition to cute and wholesome stuff. So much of the discourse around dark, gritty, violent things like attack on titan or the boys doesn’t focus on the gore itself as an inherently good quality but that the gore is the polar opposite of cute stuff, that it’s what the “real world” is like, it’s just the stage of children’s development where they disavow their old fantasies and find new ones as different as possible to shown that they’ve grown and are no longer a ‘stupid kid’.
Adults still exclusively obsessed with this stuff in a way that focuses on its opposition to childishness rather than its inherent values are developmentally stunted in their own ways.
Using infantilization to falsify things, people and to twist narratives is always going to remain as factually and morally incorrect. This thing happens everywhere - a lot of the time within Lemmy itself; the factors can be age related or other but, the issues circles back to discrimination in general.
This is an issue that’s deeply rooted, as infantilization happens to a variety of minorities. Its hard to ignore once you perceive it. What you’re witnessing - the ableism, is the output of this machine.
I feel like once people hit middle age they primarily consume slop again so its w/e.
Pokemon is interesting because when we were kids it was a hyper exploitative system, trying to squeeze as much money out of kids as possible. But since gamefreak is so litigious playing romhacks as an adult is almost the opposite, no monetization whatsoever.
I am autistic and my special interest is Monster High. I have gotten to the stage in life where I realise that it is just way too short and I’ve basically stopped giving a fuck if it’s seen as weird for an adult to collect dolls. I don’t want to spend my entire life suppressing one of my greatest interests just because people I don’t care about think it’s odd.
