Men Are Stupid About Emotions, Women Are Stupid About Everything Else
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Men Are Sex Psychics, Women Are Unconscious Dick-Exploders
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Men Are Terrifying and Women Have No Idea What A Healthy Relationship Looks Like
By far the worst part about bad romance novels is what they think is romantic. In these stories the couple-to-be usually starts off with some sort of conflict between them so that there’s tension to overcome before they get together. The trouble with these conflicts is that they lead to the men doing terrifying things to the women. I’ve seen the women in these books get kidnapped, held hostage, be psychologically manipulated, forced away from friends and family and even their whole culture, forced out of career opportunities, forced into sudden engagements, manipulated into sex, accused of attempted murder, and set on fire, all by the men they are destined to fall in love with. Most of the time the men never even apologize for these actions and it’s passed off as more silly shenanigans. By the end of the book Male Hero and Female Hero are still happily in love, joking about the odd circumstances that brought them together. You know, all that quirky abuse.
And the worst of it is the rape. You wouldn’t think it. You’d really think that romance novels would be a place generally free of rape scenes, particularly between the romantic leads, but they aren’t. In fact, rape scenes in these books are depressingly common, so much so that it’s noteworthy when there aren’t any.
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This is where bad romance novels cross a line. They go from being misinformed and silly to being visibly dangerous. When I read a bad romance novel, I do so because I think a lot of them are funny. I like to laugh at the impossible sex positions, the contrived plots, and the ridiculous characterization. But the fact is I can’t open any romance novel without a hint of dread. I know with each book that there’s a high chance that I’m about to read something horrifying that will be passed off as romantic.
So normally I’m not an argumentative person. I dislike conflict and the internet is known for being irrational when you argue alternative viewpoints.
But I’m irritated. I’m not a fan of woobies. I’m not a fan of abuse being created for drama (especially at the expense of characterization). And I’m not a fan of the trend that when two people come into conflict there is one person who is “right” and the other is often made worse to justify why people should view the “right person” as perfectly in the right, did nothing wrong, and there is no defense for the “wrong person”.
So after these three posts (A, B, C), let’s talk about the Senju family.
Let’s start with the idea that Senju Butsuma abused his family. Specifically let’s reexamine the idea there is any abuse at all. Butsuma appears in one chapter of the manga (622) at the funeral of his youngest son who has been slain by the enemy. Because – and this is important – you need to remember CONTEXT.
Naruto is not a manga about modern day morals.
Naruto is not a manga about civilians.
Naruto is a manga about a warrior society where child soldiers are the norm. It is based off of and implied to adhere to a lot of older norms. It is a violent society where children are expected to grow up to become killers and that is a point of HONOR and PRIDE and TRADITION. Children are learning their heritage by becoming shinobi. It’s not safe, but it’s not the same view of child soldiers as first world countries have in modern day.
This is basically the perfect post and there’s not much I can add to it. It’s that good! But it does make me want to write a Butsuma POV story where he’s old and dying and worrying very deeply about his family under Hashirama’s leadership, and he’s right to be.
This is the year 2017 and I’m still having to yell about how ridiculous Maya extinction myths are and tell people we are ‘Maya’ not ‘Mayan’. I’m not saying shame shame if anyone reads this and didn’t know. I’m so angry concerning how slowly these issues are being picked up by educational institutions, at how often I have to bring these things up to higher education professors.
We are a massive massive group of peoples. One of the largest Indigenous groups in the Americas. Wikipedia cites 7 million or so of us total but honestly that’s way off because that’s about how many Maya folks there are in Guatemala alone.
We’re not dead. The Maya did not ‘mysteriously disappear’. We did not ‘fall’. We did not fade into obscurity. We’ve led revolts and rebellions against colonial powers for hundreds of years. We’ve had a big hand in shaping legislative definitions and protections for Indigenous Peoples in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
We haven’t lost our cultures. We’re constantly threatened and experience a lot of violence and have our resources stolen but we are still very much alive and our cultures have persisted.
And don’t even try me with the whole “Oh well we mean your CIVILIZATION disappeared, not you.” The structure of our societies and layout of our network changed and decentralized in many areas. That didn’t make us turn invisible. That didn’t make us not still be large in numbers with a relationship with our lands and lose influence in the areas we live. We still held power in large cities way after what people like to cite as “the fall of the Maya Civilization” (around 600-900 A.D. when we still had cities that we held power of until nearly 1700 when the last was “conquered” by Spain.)
Which brings me to the next issue. Being “conquered” or having a colonial government installed does not erase Indigenous societies or civilizations. That’s an extremely eurocentric way of thinking. We didn’t suddenly turn into Spaniards. We still had massive amounts of towns and villages with leaders. We still had our cultures, our trade, our networks, our influence, while Spain focused on putting up flags in our cities.
So yeah. All your history books have you all convinced that an extremely large group of people, with a greater population than more than half of the countries in Europe, all died out 1100 years ago.
Now try to imagine what kind of shit Indigenous Peoples with much less numbers and much lower access to resources go through.
This has gotten A LOT of attention so I figured I’d add a few links to some more recent Maya history:
Oh my god “try harder” is what all my teachers and counselor told me for the four year duration of middle school whenever I said I didn’t understand the material in class or when I said I couldn’t focus and it was h e l l. Honestly I think teachers say that cause they think students are lying, so that they can go “Oh I did my job I didn’t ignore them” when in reality they’re still doing that. I get close to flipping my shit every time I hear someone say it now.
Try harder has been my mantra through all of my childhood right the way through to my adult years. Try harder.
Like honestly the whole time I was at university I was having a perpetual meltdown, there was no way I could have possibly tried harder. I graduated with a 2:1 with honors (I have no idea how to translate that for the Americans, sorry, it’s pretty good though, like not 4.0 good but Up There) and the first thing my professor said to me, with a big ole smile on his face was “now imagine what you could have done if you’d just tried harder” and all I could hear after that was the Kill Bill siren in my head. Like I’d just coasted my way there, and hand’t spent four years torturing myself, crying daily and completely destroying my personal life to try and keep it together long enough to reach graduation day.
And that’s a summary of my entire school life right there, with report cards that say “Joy is extremely clever but just doesn’t try hard enough”, “could be wonderful, if she only tried harder.” And it took until last year when I was joking with @jeneelestrange that it’s odd that I know all the things that I know because I’m not all that clever, and haha isn’t it funny that I’m able to remember these things despite this this and this, and there was this moment of pause which you could hear even over the internet before Jenee very gently nudged me with “hey…uh…that uh…that’s a learning disorder, you have a learning disorder” and I went haha no I just don’t try hard enough, I’m just not all that clever…right? I’m just stupid, right? Why else do I struggle so much with academic things…
Wait, what do you mean ADHD gets overlooked in girls because it presents differently than in boys? What?! What do they mean it’s hard?!?! WELL WHY DON’T THEY TRY HARDER?!!
Oh, as an autistic girl I got the same BS ALL THE TIME.
I saw an explanation a while back that I think is helpful. (Neurotypicals, please READ THIS AND TAKE IT INTO ACCOUNT.)
Take a thing most brains can do. Maybe it’s putting a series of steps in the right order, maybe it’s filtering out background noise from the sounds you’re actually supposed to be listening to, it could be one of a million things that most brains can do.
Put that ability on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is “absolutely positively cannot do the thing under any circumstances” and 10 is “absolutely perfect ability to do the thing flawlessly without expending any effort at all.” Neurotypical people will be somewhere in the 7-10 range. If you naturally hit 7 on this ability, with a little bit of work (not an insane amount of work and focus, just an ordinary bit of trying harder), you can get yourself to a 9.
Because neurotypical people fall in the 7-10 range, they think 7 is the bottom of the scale. If they’re REALLY sympathetic and openminded, maybe they’ll admit that 6 exists. Therefore, anybody who is at a 5 or below must be there because they are choosing to be there. Because they’re lazy, or they’re jerks trying to take advantage, or something.
If your brain naturally falls at a 1 or a 2, and with every shred of effort in you, you can only get to a 4 or 5, well, they’ll either assume you’re doing it on purpose or that you are absolutely incompetent at everything and need to hand over all autonomy to others to “take care of you.”
If your brain naturally falls at a 4 or 5, and with every shred of effort in you, you can only get up to a 6 or 7, then OBVIOUSLY YOU JUST NEED TO TRY HARDER. And the reason you’re only at a 6 or 7 is because you’re lazy or scamming or whatever.
As someone who is a constant 5 and struggles immensely to follow along with conversations if there is any kind of other noise going on, THIS ^^^
When the most infamous group of S-class missing-nin have the majority of their members from (or taught by someone from) the same village you *know* all the other Villages are giving Konoha some serious side-eye. What is their problem with the most infamous disloyal ninja coming from the ‘most loyal, friendship-based’ Village? Hypocrites much. (As an aside, it’s 50/50 whether Orochimaru left of his own accord or was booted out for being so extra/trollish/not-a-team-player. He’s proud of it.)
I…honestly had not thought about it before, but you’re completely correct. It probably says a lot about how poorly Hashirama’s morals and framework for the village mesh with actual shinobi work that so many people end up deserting.
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