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denise posting in

Привет and welcome to our new Russian friends from LiveJournal! We are happy to offer you a new home. We will not require identification for you to post or comment. We also do not cooperate with Russian government requests for any information about your account unless they go through a United States court first. (And it hasn't happened in 16 years!)

Importing your journal from ЖЖ may be slow. There are a lot of you, with many posts and comments, and we have to limit how fast we download your information from ЖЖ so they don't block us. Please be patient! We have been watching and fixing errors, and we will go back to doing that after the holiday is over.

I am very sorry that we can't translate the site into Russian or offer support in Russian. We are a much, much smaller company than LiveJournal is, and my high school Russian classes were a very long time ago :) But at least we aren't owned by Sberbank!

С Новым Годом, and welcome home!

lesbocannibal

I talked to my father today, and it wasn’t bad or evil. He drove me to Michaels (craft store) while my mom was out cold (jet lag from Australia). I bought embroidery floss to make bracelets for my online friends :) Ugh I need a hexcuse for that still. At least the place we’re going is like, right by one of my meatspace friends’ house. I wonder if I should tell my parents that I have online friends someday. I constructed a plan for becoming more independent: one step at a time, building up to turning off my location and being free from their scrutiny. If they make a fuss about it, I’ll say… listen, I’m closer to graduation than I am high school. I’m twenty years old. I should be allowed to not look over my shoulder and constantly hexplain myself to my parents.

Despite my fraught relationship with my mother, I really am close to my dad. I didn’t eat dinner because I kinda fell asleep instead, so after Michaels he took me to noodles & company at like 8:30 pm lol. And we talked about some serious topics and I ended up crying in the fucking noodles & company. Embarrassing!

I talked about how horrid my semester had been, and I told him that I’m diagnosed with ADHD now. The more we talked, the more we realized we have the hexact same problems with time management and focus, and he could probably also be diagnosed with ADHD. It’s very possible to be a genetic thing: we’ve both been like this since we were very young. We listened to Radiohead on the drive back. I really do love my dad, I think. He’s even accepted my chosen name: he came to see me in the Nutcracker, where I was listed as my chosen name instead of my deadname in the program. He never said it out loud, but he said, “oh I saw your name in the program…” and pointed to my chosen name. It made me happy. He’s just like me in a lot of ways: we both really love talking about music, and we’re creatives that like physically making things. Plus I even think he has emotional regulation/impulse control issues (?) just like me. Fuck I’m crying lol. I cry really easily.

I like my dad, and that’s scary. I hate my mom, but I like my dad, and he likes my mom. And I still like my mom, deep down. Once, we were discussing The Incident months after the fact, and she told me something like - “You’re really strong. I don’t think I could’ve been that strong if I’d gone through this at your age. And healing from it is making you even stronger.” It meant a lot to me, and I started crying and I hugged her. Oh my god, I’m crying again.

current music: Demunya - VIIZERO7

lesbocannibal

I've come to realize that there are two opposite extremes that I equally despise when people write about their OCs/blorbos' political opinions.

Side 1: "They're evil, so they must be conservative and bigoted!" I often see this applied to characters like Mrs. Blight and Emperor Belos (since the fanbase of The Owl House isn't really mature enough to understand nuance anyway), Shadow Weaver from She-Ra (potentially similar), and I saw it applied to Renee from Pantheon once. (No hexcuse there, to be honest, Pantheon is an adult enough show.) It just straight up doesn't make any sense for the characters from a kid's show that won't even so much as say the word "gay" to be homophobic. She-Ra and The Owl House largely take place in alternate worlds that are pretty much queer creators' dreams of worlds where sexual orientations and gender identities aren't discriminated against. It flattens a character to make them so cartoonishly evil that they hate EVERYTHING good in the world and only believe in HATERED and THE EVULZ. Bad is Good and Good is Bad, so since this character is evil, they must be against all views of the liberal/leftist creator. Needless to say, people are more complex than that.

Side 2: "I love writing about evil characters! What do you mean you write about a conservative/bigoted character? Are you homophobic IRL?" This one just infuriates me. Writing about a murderer doesn't make you a murderer in real life, but this crime is so much more okay to the wider internet than sex crimes ("WTF YOU LIKE A RAPIST? YOURE A RAPIST IN REAL LIFE!") or. strangely, being homophobic. Look, I get it, I hate queerphobes too, we all do, but don't fucking jump down someone's throat for this in all cases, ESPECIALLY if they're queer themself.

To be honest, this is more prickly territory than the last example: there's definitely ways that fans can take this to the extreme. I think this is worse with racial issues since so many fans are white. I wasn't in the thick of it, but this is reminding me of stuff I heard about Sinners. Apparently, a lot of people were huge huge fans of the one white antagonist in the movie and wrote x readers about him. What the fuck???? That's bad. You understand how that's bad, right? Oh, and a lot of fans residing in the imperial core make light of "war crimes" as an abstract thing for their sopping wet cat evil blorbo has done wrong. Stop it. Do you even know what real-world war crimes actually are?

But nonetheless, writing a character with views that you don't agree with can make them more complex and more dimensional. Using my own characters as examples: Cainabeth (horrible horrible woman) is an anarcho-capitalist (horrible horrible political stance) because she's distrustful of the government and believes in the free market. Plus she profits off healthcare, that is a notable thing she does. Roan is a misogynist (miso-femme-ist?) because of his various complexes about appearing strong/Dominant that stem from being bullied for being too effeminate in childhood. Whitney is anti-woke (would bully nonbinary people) but also anti-fascist (would definitely punch a Nazi). Crush AU!Roan is super supportive of the military/veterans because his dad was in the military and Roan really idolizes him. Probably more, these are just off the top of my head.

For chrissakes, stop being so scared of nuance!