Reasons I would be fired from teaching at a Christian school

I mean, not that I would make it all that far in regular, certified teaching, either, but the reasons for my dismissal from a Christian school would undoubtedly be funnier. Ya gurl went to a university that was historically a normal school: i.e., they taught the teachers how to teach. If I had wanted an English education degree, I would have gotten one, so it should mean something that I didn’t.

But long before the historic normal school, I was educated at a tiny-ass rural Christian elementary school where about the only advantage was a low, low student-to-teacher ratio. It was basically the passion project of some teachers who already racked up a bunch of time in public schools but wanted to do their own thing. I’m sympathetic to that, but my idea of improvement to schooling involves socialist shit like grade abolition or Montessori, not trying to smash some puritan idea of godliness into every topic. But my fundagelical-flavored alma mater is poor and desperate, even more than the Oklahoma education system in general, which is fucked in its own right.

If I would take the peanuts they offered in salary and go through the motions of their fundagelical accreditation diploma mill, they would take me. And having had some burnt-out football coaches as teachers, I would not even feel a twinge of guilt. The bar has fallen on the ground in the state of Oklahoma, and it might start digging any second now.

And this assumes I would be teaching high schoolers. I’m sorry, but fuck them grade schoolers, fuck them middle schoolers. All you’re teaching them poor lil bastards at those points are the arcane and nonsensical rules of spelling and grammar. There’s no good reason for any of it, kids, it’s just conventions based on smashing a Germanic language against French, with some snobby Latin rules thrown on top that only fucken loser nerds care about, like not ending your sentence with a preposition.

So I will lightly go over the most obvious reason I’d get fired at a Christian school: I’m an irreverent harridan who has gotten into the habit of using the profanity on a casual basis. And it would probably be the irreverence that got me done in, because I could wean myself off the harder fucks, shits, and hells and move into the dangs, shoots, and hecks. I would still be making fun of Baptists and literalists (that’s how I got banned from Speculative Faith). I would be calling Puritans holier-than-thou, fun-hating losers, and I would characterize Martin Luther as a shitposter scheissposter and a store-brand version of Jan Huss (shoutout to my parasocial bestie Dr Eleanor Janega). And as mentioned in a previous post, I would call John Bunyan a partisan hack.

But going into less-obvious avenues, here are ones that might get me fired possibly even before I set foot in a classroom, just from my syllabi or lesson plans.

Non-standard Shakespeare plays. I mean I guess I would be obligated to teach Romeo and Juliet as an inescapable reference point within the last 200 years of culture, but I kinda hate it for the oversaturation. There are better Shakespeare plays, and why in the goddamn fuck are we limited to tragedies?

My theory is that we are limited to tragedies because all the comedies have sex jokes in them, and God forbid the youngs (even in heathen public schools) find out that people in Ye Olde Timey days talked about sex irreverently. ShaKesPeaRE is sUpPoSed to be SerIoUs, you guys.

Fuck Julius Caesar, tho. Maybe I’ll leave in Yon Scottish Play for the baby goths and also the baby weebs, so I have an excuse to talk about Akira Kurosawa movies (Throne of Blood, for the curious). But fuck ol’ Caesar. If we need a “historic” play (we don’t, the value in Shakespeare is not in historical accuracy), Henry V is probably the more engaging because I can punt to Kenneth Branagh. Shakespeare is better when performed, if only because 80% of communication is nonverbal (and the jokes are easier to recognize). And since we don’t need a historic play, we can go with the much more fun Much Ado About Nothing, in which I can also punt to a Kenneth Branagh movie.

I may or may not have to cover the sonnets, and the more obvious Shakespearean gay shit is in the sonnets. Like, some of the famous ones, even.

But for those in the know, the other point of contention would be Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. It’s not in the public consciousness because nobody reads that shit anymore, but Steinbeck basically wrote this as the communist Jesus story. Absolutely fucking appropriate in a myriad of ways for a literature class: an heir to the previous American Realism novels, all that mythic symbolism shit, and especially appropriate for Oklahoma. Apparently it was my great-grandparents’ favorite book (and then the Cold War and the Dixiecrat realignment happened, so my dad doesn’t appreciate it).

But imagine all the gaskets that would blow, should I introduce the idea of divinely inspired communism in an American Christian institution. Y’all, it wouldn’t just be the gaskets blown, the radiator would be shrapnel for a 3-mile radius _{(I’m not sure how realistic this metaphor is)}.

I suppose I could get away with it if I were to carefully hedge around it with caveats. That only dirty liberal hippies think about things like this, of course Real Jesus(TM) is in favor of property rights. Look at how many Old Testament laws are about property, of course Judeo-Christian Values are based on prioritizing property owners. Those dirty hippies would steal your toothbrush because they don’t care about property rights. There is no distinction between private and personal property, it’s all the same thing. And it’s perfectly okay that sometimes human beings are considered property, because nothing bad ever happens when the owners are Jesus-y enough. Don’t look behind that curtain.

Yeah, my ass would get chucked right out the door if they scratched below the surface. But I would be curious if the school was willing to let it slide as long as none of the parents noticed, just to keep one more adult around to watch the kids as needed. Them pink-collar jobs need a ready supply of warm bodies to keep the economy from collapsing, and Republicans seem to basically think of teachers as glorified babysitters. Never mind ongoing brain drain in Oklahoma.

But luckily for everyone, this is only a conjecture born of my irreverent sense of humor.

Back on my bullshit: how criticism works

Hello, y’all, I’m back on my bullshit. Dis bitch done return to her vomit. Feel free to feign surprise.

So get a load of These Guys, one of my recurring punchbags, https://lorehaven.com/podcast/190-why-should-we-enjoy-spicy-and-sugary-stories-in-moderation/

TL;DR Lorehaven redefines what the slang “spicy” means so they get to use nifty clickbait word, and thrown in some subconscious shade about “what if criticizing things makes you as bad as pr0n, which is the go-to Worst Possible Thing in our context.” Also too the fallacy of the middle, they can throw in some shade about people who watch Hallmark Channel dreck while also pretending they are the REasonAble OnEs in the CeNTer.

The fallacy of the middle ground has been Burnett’s favorite schtick for awhile, because it’s an idea you can get a lot of mileage out of. You can 1) say nothing new nor real and 2) position yourself as a rational, reasonable authority with zero effort involved. I have been accused of using it myself.

Just keep in mind, children, that a false dichotomy is also a fallacy and no one can win, we can just argue. Good thing I like arguing.

Moderation is a well-established and respectable Stoic philosophy that was grafted onto Christian theology by early Church Fathers so that Calvinist dudebros can look extra academic and authoritative. There is nothing wrong with the idea, despite its frequent deployment in middle-ground fallacies.

Another thing Burnett does a lot is complain about is all these sarcastic young people who can’t say nuthin’ nice about anythin’. He actually does have a point here, though he doesn’t know the words that (semi-)serious people use to discuss it: irony poisoning. When he uses the idea, it just seems part and parcel with the general background radiation of juvenoia inherent to conservatism.

Having come of age in the Edgelord Era (roughly 2005-2015), I feel like I can parse the line between juvenoia and irony poisoning. I bingewatched all those Nostalgia Critic videos. Hell, that’s why this blarg exists in the first place, that I was inspired to make an imitation of the same funny shit in my own fashion. And when YouTube graduated to Lindsay Ellis’s more educated style of video essay, I tried to graduate in the same fashion. (Obligatory nothing new under the sun)

And I think that evolution between AVGN-style videos and Lindsay-style video illustrates the irony poisoning that generally defines edgelord “rape my childhood” bullshit. This isn’t necessarily a slam on AVGN or early Nostalgia Critic, because some of their shit is still funny. But it can easily get lazy, just trying to find a more hyperbolic, rage-gastic metaphor for “this seemingly benign thing begets an irrational emotional response from me.” The joke about “Beauty and the Best is Stockholm syndrome goes brrrrrrt” is only funny the first dozen times. This meta-joke about memes is already dead while I’m making it.

I will toy with ideas all the live-long day, most often while being sarcastic about them, but that doesn’t mean the criticisms are invalid. This is where the concept irony poisoning slams up against the tone-police barrier, which is the age-old method to demand that people just shut up. Is it REALLY about the tone, or is it a defense mechanism from having to engage with the criticism?

And that brings us back to Calvinist dudebros. They absolutely love to frame their critics and their criticisms as being immature. Burnett has a particular beef with things that are sarcastic, flippant, or “spicy,” but it’s not his only punching bag.

I bring this up specifically because bruh, buddy, my dude, you need to deconstruct this. Burnett seems to fall in the same school of thought as Ben Shapiro and Abby Shapiro-Roth: that having children is an adult rite of passage and those who do not have children are shirking their adult duties and are therefore immature.

Now do I really have explain how this is patently false, as well as literally infantilizing and arguably dehumanizing?

Does Burnett explicitly state this? No. It’s just background radiation in articles like this where he promotes his parenting book: https://estephenburnett.lorehaven.com/yes-marriage-and-family-are-still-normative-and-good-gifts-for-todays-church/. Why do we need to have children? Burnett doesn’t really engage with the idea, he just presents the clobber verses and implies it’s a dumb question made by misled haters of obviously good things. There’s another article of his linked in this article that retreads the same point and would provide more fodder in my support, if the link wasn’t broken.

If he was a more intellectual type, he’d pull in ye Ancient Church Fathers(TM) and their natalist bullshit, while still also never examining the natalist bullshit. (Which is a whole-nother essay I am kicking around. Look for that in three years.) For some reason Burnett has avoided the Calvinist-to-Papist pipeline, and I am nail-bitingly curious as to why. Maybe I should also do an info-dump on the Calvinist-to-Papist pipeline (look for that in six years).

So how much am I responsible for that association in Burnett’s subconscious, being that I am a vocal childless harridan as well as a shitty sarcastic keyboard warrior he has engaged with in person? Shruggy emoticon. He still needs to learn how to engage with criticism besides his reflex for well-poisoning and ad hominem. And to signal my virtues of self-awareness and reasonableness, so do we all, I’m just a more evolved and better creature on this higher plane of existence.

Bitch, I am so postmodern I use self-awareness as a crutch to make myself look likeable with self-deprecating jokes! Can’t hurt my feelings by pointing out my absurdities when I do it myself, motherfucker!

So to get back on track, is the problem really about people who watch too much Hallmark bullshit or read sarcastic subreddits? No, because this isn’t really about quantity.

It’s why libs and leftists keep circling back to power dynamics (and the lurking shade of fucking Foucault). Conservatives hate postmodernism because it’s largely about questioning authority. Conservatives do not want their authority, their status quo, their Noble [Judeo-Christian Western] Values(TM) questioned. They want to frame any questioning of this as immature and unserious to discredit it and also position themselves as the Real Adults in the Room.

That’s it, that’s the post. I’m still shitty at outros.

I emerge

Hello, assorted spelunkers of the Internet, I have come back to my little brain-dump to contemplate whether I should entertain myself once more with hate-reading Christian fiction. I think it was important for my journey of deconstruction, but am I done with that portion of my life? For a long while I seem to have been done with blarging, but I am definitely overthinking this.

Even if the only reason is to not info-dump this onto my dude (who has little to no baggage of this particular variety and no dog in this fight), that’s good enough reason.

I managed to get banned from Lorehaven, nee Speculative Faith, after, like, ten years. That’s got to be some kind of accomplishment for the record books. What changed? Pure biased speculation, but I think the main editor/showrunner changed. He’s now fostering teenager kids and I think it’s made him more sensitive to having his illusion of Authoritah challenged. To my way of thinking, I was treating him more as an equal because of all the fun I poked at him, but that was probably a sin in of itself. I doubt he wants to be my equal: he wants to be an Authoritah over me. (He’s a Zack Snyder fan, which should tell you plenty about his take on storytelling analysis and why I poke fun at him.)

I still lurk there, tho I do debate the wisdom in that. Plus, the site’s kinda wound down, fewer articles, not much of anything except the podcasts and book reviews. Granted, it’s hard to keep a website’s momentum going, Lord knows I’ve failed. But it’s kind of inevitable that their community won’t grow because they don’t give themselves any room to grow as a community. They generally cover the same ground over and over, and that gets old. Most notable commenters seem to cycle out after a year or two of the same ground covered over and over.

Lorehaven still has a couple-few articles about not being fixated on squeaky-clean fiction as the end-all-be-all, but it makes you wonder if they really mean it when the majority of the reviews and recommendations are stories that do exactly that.

Which brings me to their recommended Towers of Light series that starts with Light of Mine. I had to see what sort of milquetoast crap they propose to inflict on middle-grade/bedtime story readers, so I got a sample on the Kindle app.

I was kinda relieved it wasn’t just another Narnia ripoff, but another Narnia ripoff would require at least a skosh of creativity. This was labelled as a cross between Little House on the Prairie and the lesser-known Christian series the Wingfeather Saga. I mean, I can see that was the vibe the author was going for, but in substance…not so much. I sampled the Wingfeather Saga, and it’s actually pretty creative and interesting.

Light of Mine does not have nearly that amount of creative juice in it. This author seems singularly uninterested in worldbuilding. Within the first chapter we know pretty much zilch about the world the characters inhabit beyond the aesthetic little farm and the Heathenlands far off where the Darkness grows.

Admittedly, worldbuilding is not what this story is for. This story is not about strange new worlds with new civilizations. This story is for holding the kiddos’ attention long enough to hammer in its message of obedience uber alles, because unfortunately, appealing to the lowest common denominator in the Christian submarket means pandering to some of the most paranoid, controlling, authoritarian parents in American demographics.

I’m sorry, but instead of a Narnia ripoff, we seem to have a Pilgrim’s Progress ripoff on our hands. The trigger word in the blurb was “allegorical,” and tragically, the people who most admire allegories are the least capable of writing them because allegories are trash.

[My TL;DR opinion on Pilgrim’s Progress can be summed up as: It’s one of those works of literature that is Important mostly for being widely referenced for two hundred years, not really for being admirable as a piece of literature. It was written by a barely literate hack, y’all.]

The other half of the blurb equation, Little House on the Prairie, mostly promises the subtle flavoring of libertarian horseshit. I mean, it seems on-brand for someone with libertarian rugged-outpost-hobby-farm fantasies to be so blatantly uninterested in even the fictional world outside his immediate orbit.

Now me, I’m two steps removed from a cottagecore bitch. I like quite a bit of the aesthetic, the cabins, gardens, tea time, the handicrafts, etc. Just take a look at my Stardew Valley save files. On the other hand, Little House on the Prairie, and other pioneer romanticism, is weaponized propagandic bullshit. The real pioneers were poor white trash who eked out a miserable, isolated existence rife with abuse and dysfunction, fuck outta here with that pious American mythos shit.

But there are barely any mentions of neighbors or a community outside this farm. Father builds a heavy-handed allegorical lighthouse on the farm from local cedar planks within the first chapter, but where the fuck do the planks come from? Did he buy them in town along with the square-headed nails mentioned? Does Father have a sawmill on his property, along with a smithy to make the square-headed nails? How the fuck did one man and a few children build a three-story lighthouse — by hand — within the timeframe of maybe a month — amongst all the other chores that would need doing on a farm with no modern machinery? Do the kids have friends their age? Do the kids even SEE other kids their age???

The pastor drops by for half a page to deliver the ham-handed allegory brass lantern for the lighthouse Father build several hundred miles from the ocean. Is this an alternate fantasy American Wild West (that fights with medieval weapons instead of guns)? Is it a completely separate world that only bears a passing resemblance? I’ve already given the question about 500 times more thought than author apparently has, but I have to remind myself, that’s not what this story is for.

At least the author has gone to the trouble of giving his child characters distinctive quirks? Further down on the Amazon page, there’s a cute little graphic introducing the main characters and their familiars cute mascot pets.

Lauren, the girl and the oldest at 12, is called the leader, but I dunno if I should take this at face value, or if she’s just parentified after the Plot disappears their parents. She’s carrying a spear, but I’d have to pay five bucks to confirm if she gets to go action-girl with it, because unfortunately the lowest common denominator in the Christian submarket is also sexist dickheads, and Lauren doesn’t even get to wear pants. Not in the text of the book, not in the cute cartoon on the Amazon page. Bitches expect her to fight in an ankle-length skirt and apron?

Aiden, age 9, is blurbed as the builder/planner. He doesn’t do any of it within the first chapter sampled, but whatever I’m willing to take the blurb’s word for it. He has a sword on the cover, and his cute mascot pet is a special golden duck.

Ethan, age 5, gets the informed attributes of the element of Heart and is shown on the cover as being the shield hero, which damn, he got the short end of the adventuring stick, but I’m not convinced about the party balance on this adventuring team anyway. I’m not really disappointed because he seems very cute, and his mascot is some kind of magic rainbow sparkle frog that serves as the team healer. Probably the most noticeable trait he mentioned as having is his mass of cute, red curly hair, but it hits a harsh note when the narrative repeatedly mentions that their mom hasn’t cut his curls into a proper short boy haircut yet. Yeah, just more weird sexist undertones to ruin my mood.

Lauren serves as the viewpoint character for most of the first chapter, but this story isn’t above headhopping (which is whatevs), but the more grievous writing sin is that these don’t feel like actual characters. They do not think nor act like people. They are little plot-robots whose purpose is to hammer in the message of obedience. They admire their parents’ Authoritah, they do their chores diligently, they police their siblings when their parents aren’t watching, but like, out of love and not petty power flexes (LOL, yeah right).

So their dad went to join the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Mercenaries (readers, I cringed so hard) on their mission to the Heathenlands after building the tiresome lighthouse that is powered by their faith mojo, and some guy reported him missing and presumably dead, and their mother goes absolutely gottdamn ballistic on the poor guy, because wimmen be overemotional or some shit, before making the absolutely bees-headed but plot-necessary decision to ditch the kids in order to get disappeared while looking for her dude. The Idiot Ball strikes again, and the Inciting Incident spurs the kids to obey the Plot.

But controlling parents, what happens when your kids are put in the situation of obeying an adult that doesn’t agree with you on everything? That seems to be the question tackled in the next book, Still Small Voice, when the kids meet their uncle, whom the blurb says leads them astray omg, and I have this sneaking suspicion that all the kids have to do is believe their parents over anyone else and the Plot will reward them, problems solved. Cultlike behavior? What cultlike behavior?

Could I pay five bucks to confirm my suspicions about this book? Could I sample and/or pay for the next one to see if I’m right about it, too? Or would it be a better ROI to just pay Tapas that money to put isekai romance manhwa in front of my face? The answer is obvious but there’s still that contrary part of my brain that likes the rush from hate-reading.

This Week in Moe Shit: Helpful Fox Senko-san

Okay, I’m super behind the times on this one.

But I think it’s a truth that at the end of the day, working adults still want a housewife to come home to. Heck y’all, I want a housewife to come home to, and I barely qualify as a working adult.

It puts me in mind of something I read about the survival factor of the Donner party seems not to stem from the number of young male workers, but whether or not they had an older female social lynchpin. In other words, survival is society, and society is den mothers.

I mean, there are shitloads of problematic things in here under the surface of this anime, the least of which is the loli being 800 years old expressly so you don’t have to put your dick in jail. Granted, most of the otaku-bait loli shit is performed by Shiro, while Senko is mostly our repository for the Jungian mother archetype (with some veiled ecchi moments I find fairly easy to ignore and by God I am going to ignore them.)

Another reviewer already said something about how he appreciates that Senko is grounded in the reality of the shitty working adult experience, and I feel that. I do want to build a community with a den mom and maybe we can all live in a sharehouse and pay our den mom a salary so that she can continue to den-mom to us without burning out. Because late-stage capitalism is getting to me, y’all. And if she wants to cosplay as a Taisho-era housemaid, I am a-okay with that (deffo superior to the overused generic maid outfit.)

Heck, you could sum up my feelings about Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid in much the same way.  Gimme a cute, quirky den mom.

Almost Reluctantly Team Benno, but like, not for Myne

Ascendance of a Bookworm is my shit, y’all. Put it in my veins. Savin’ that isekai with niceness and brains and DIY. And super grounded worldbuilding that makes me fall into the wiki-hole to learn shit about shit. I’ve bought all the light novels currently available on Kindle and the anime has made it onto my short list of things that I will probably end up owning at some point.

(I fell in the clickhole about medieval European bathing culture. They actually did have bathhouses and it’s more than likely even poor shits like Myne’s family would have visited a bathhouse, but they were still somewhat sketch because that was where the prostitutes plied their wares, which is why they were shut down in Europe circa a the Renaissance-ish to early Industrial era, when clean linen carried the social weight that actual bodily cleanliness should have. Or where consumption started carrying water for actual good habits on a larger scale.)

But as far as the waifu wars go, I’m shipping for myself, not for Myne. Out of anyone, the sheer organic development with Lutz puts him at Only True Waifu status, with Gil as a distant second. I can’t in good conscience ship Myne with anyone older, because Myne even as an early twenty-something otaku stuck in a child body is still pretty immature compared with any of the adults in this world who had to earn their livelihoods with bared teeth and claws and a touch of emotional constipation.

The deep-buried niceness of Benno, Ferdinand, or Fran is some fine-aged, full-bodied gap moe that hits me on a not-altogether-mature level that my adultier consciousness needs some time to catch up to.

Fran is a precious cinnamon roll who is super capable and responsible and only needs some dedicated loving to make blossom. He’s a bit young for me, tho.

Benno is kind of an asshole, but he’s mostly an asshole for reasons that relate to needing to grow up fast and earn a living for his family. He does not seem to be an asshole for shits and giggles. But he seems to like arguing, and at the end of the day, I do not actually like argument from my family circle. Discussion yes, but not argument. So whether Benno argues with his family circle for sport or turns on his deredere side for emotional support is the difference between happy waifu fantasy time and whether I would smother him in his sleep within five months.

Ferdinand is physically early twenties, mentally thirty-something, but (from mostly light novel evidence) seems emotionally stuck at an particularly stunted fourteen. I get that he grew up in a society where he has to hide his real feelings in order to protect himself, but he also represses them from himself. Understandable, but super annoying. Like, after I get over the charm of the gap moe, do I actually want to do the work to pry to real but undeveloped person out from underneath both his societally imposed and his self-imposed armor? Probably not.

TL;DR: I’d (tenderly) f*ck Fran (possibly marry), marry Benno (but possibly kill), and definitely kill Ferdinand.

Unsolicited opinions on Stardew Valley waifus

Abigail: Top-shelf. Cool, fun girl, and gives you useful gifts like bombs as a spouse. The only annoying thing is tracking her down to woo her with gifts and finding the right situations to trigger her cutscenes.

Alex: Boring.

Elliott: Okay, I definitely have a thing for luscious Fabio hair. Instinctive first choice for a male waifu, but I get a little annoyed with him for being unreachable before you level him up to enter his cabin.

Emily: Fukken loveable weirdo. Not as compelling as others, but an understandable choice. Would definitely share her edibles.

Haley: Mostly boring, but I find her somewhat redeemable with her artistic hobby. But I’m only dating her as part of my lesbian slut playthrough to trigger that special cutscene discussing Marnie and Lewis.

Harvey: Mostly boring, but I’ve slowly warmed up to him because he is pretty adorkable. I hope he gives useful gifts like energy tonic once I get around to marrying him, but I’m still hesitant because I’d have to look at that mustache everyday.

Leah: Free-spirited crunchy granola wholesomeness. Actually appreciates my foraging gifts.

Maru: Another A-list waifu. Smart, cool, capable, and also gives you bombs as a spouse.

Penny: My first waifu. She’s too precious and gives me an outlet for my misplaced savior complex, tho maybe what she really needs is a bus ticket and a loan for a deposit on an apartment in Zuzu City. But yeah, cutely sexy bathhouse cutscene.

Sam: Initially boring skaterboi, but I like his jam and he has another cutely sexy cutscene in his bedroom. I went doki doki, wondering just how spicy it was gonna get.

Sebastian: Another instinctive pick for male waifu, once he fukken left his room long enough for me to level him up. Misunderstood precious emo boy with a motorcycle. Also a bit of a sarcastic fuck, and I love it. That is definitely not tobacco he’s smoking.

Shane: No. I guess I understand the appeal, but even if he is a heartstrings-tugging sadboy and another outlet for a savior complex, but he ruined it by being too much of an asshole for too long in the beginning. Not worth it.

Gender: WTF

Basically this is a reaction to Contrapoints’s video “Men,” and also some stuff she’s talked about in her previous posts.

Mostly my thoughts are about the idea of narrative: that now that society has changed where traditional stories about protectors and providers are either irrelevant or unremarkable (because women do it, too, I guess), these young dudes have no narrative on which to model their identity as men.

But my first problem is that I don’t even know what the fuck “identity as a man/woman” is supposed to mean. IME, what it boils down to is bullshit stereotypes. I am AFAB, but I guess I’m mostly okay with it now that I have feminist vocabulary to torch down the bullshit stereotypes.

My positive experience of my femininity is basically one of reclamation of things I was taught to despite because they were girlie: I learned to like pink, I learned to treat traditionally female artforms like sewing and knitting as artforms rather than inferior domestic fluffery. I’ve learned it’s okay to dabble with makeup and not a sign of horrible shallowness, vanity, and deception.

Going back to the protector role, I’m actually pretty glad that it’s largely irrelevant in daily life. I like not having my safety dependent on the whims of male randos. But nowadays we are inundated with stories of female warriors and fighters after many centuries of sausage parties in the genre. And young dudes are probably feeling at loose ends about that.

Will it just get better if they’re no longer raised with that expectation? Prolly not. I still think that the identities of provider and craftsman are still relevant. I don’t know why it would spoil it if women are doing the same thing. Y’know, besides latent sexism about girls getting their cooties on everything.

Contrapoints doesn’t offer a solution in her videos (which I appreciate), but I think what my solution looks like is just to abolish gender (besides as a medical condition). And I understand why people don’t like that solution, because Contrapoints has told me so. Maybe it would be better to have a few intermediary steps in there, but it seems to be the thing most likely to resemble a solution.

Knitting a kimono, Part 2

Because great weebs knit alike, of course there is someone who’s published books on the idea of knitting your own kimono. Twice.

Knit Kimono and Knit Kimono Too by Vicki Square, lays it all out with about ten times the historical research and technical vocabulary that I managed. I just want to knit a sweater out of rectangles, but Square has patterns for all kinds of shit based on historical wear, with some yofuku (western clothing) ideas thrown in for good measure.

Knit Kimono is mostly about shape, while Knit Kimono Too is mostly about color. Since I am fairly shit at color schemes on my own, I will totally steal ideas from a thousand-year-old tradition made by people way more sophisticated than I am.

“Stealing the best ideas wherever they come from” is the working definition of multiculturalism that I like best.

Knitting a kimono

“Kimono” in Western fashion basically means “relatively unstructured sweater without fasteners.” But being weeaboo hipster trash, I actually mean kimono when I look for kimono patterns (or at least a haori). I get disappointed a lot.

But at one anime con, I found a fellow fiber weeb who did a short demonstration on how REAL kimonos looked and were assembled, and I felt two steps closer to Enlightenment after it. (Her pro-tip was to buy one and disassemble it yourself.)

Traditional kimonos are pretty cleverly designed for maximum efficiency of fabric use, which is a long goddamn lost priority for Western fashion. I can’t be too angry about it, because I do like tailored clothes that are easy to move around in, but there is a sort of practical elegance to kimono and bog coats (no, Google, I don’t mean dog coats, jeebus).

Reviewing “Chirin’s Bell”

OMG this is one of the most existentially fucked-up things I have ever seen. Everybody look at it with me.