Villa Astor

How are you? :D

I'm doing alright! Sorry for the late response, I've been struggling trying to get myself use to working graveyard shift. 🥲

I know that people have already been saying that Viktor’s coming out felt rushed and I know they might’ve done more with that if they hadn’t already had much of the scripts written by the time Elliot came out, but!

As a trans guy myself there’s something really nice about seeing a character tell family he’s trans and having them just be like okay cool and move on. The way that I have constantly had to explain myself to people in my life and constantly have seen trans people in media have to explain themselves is so exhausting.

So, sure, I can absolutely understand people feeling like it was kind of flat. But it’s also nice to have a trans character just get to *be*.

Why is this so true tho 😩😂

Actually screaming on the inside at how they basically told queerphobes and exclus to please fuck off and explicitly included us aspecs even beyond aesthetics like the pride flags and nail polishes

okay maybe I’m biased, but did it bother anyone else how literally none of the characters acknowledge that Harlan /is/ like family to Viktor? When they’re deciding whether or not to give him to the Sparrows it’s always “Harlan saved our lives” or “Viktor owes Harlan for giving him powers”. Not “Viktor partly raised him” or “Harlan is like a son to Viktor”. Family is soooo important but Harlan doesn’t get to count?

Just a PSA, desecrating a Torah is not the same as burning a Bible.

Torahs are not mass produced, and cannot be mass produced due to how specific and strict the rules are for construction. They have to be handmade in a very specific process with specific materials (the scroll must be made of calf skin instead of paper, for example) A rabbi can reasonably spend about a year making a single torah. It must be written by hand in ink, and if a mistake is made on a page, the page must be thrown out and started from scratch. Because of this, torahs are often extremely expensive and delicate, and we have rules for how they are to be held and interacted with so as not to damage them. One of the most important rules is that you cannot touch the parchment of the scroll with your fingers, you have to use a pointer called a yad. This rule is for religious reasons, but also practical ones because the oils on your hands can damage the parchment very easily if touched regularly. That is how fragile these objects are.

In addition, if one is damaged, it is no longer considered kosher and must be replaced. There is obviously a spiritual reason for not wanting a torah to be harmed, but it’s also because they are extremely expensive, often very old heirlooms or artifacts, and handmade art pieces. Desecrating a torah is not just a symbolic gesture of disrespect to Judaism, it is destroying an expensive, old, and culturally significant art piece.

The Christian equivalent would be more along the lines of smashing stained glass windows in a historic church. Bible burnings as a form of protest are almost always done with copies you can buy for $15 at Barnes and noble. It is certainly meant to be disrespectful to the Christian faith, but it is not the same in terms of level of harm caused.

Bible burning vs torah desecration is a comparison made in bad faith I see occasionally to be like “why is antisemitism bad but being mean to Christians is fine?” But I’ve met a lot of well meaning gentiles who don’t fully know the cultural context or significance of the Torah and genuinely don’t understand the gravity of desecrating one.

Petition for Emmy to finally be able to keep her own hair as Allison in S4.

Tone tags are not your punchline.

Tone tags like “/j” “/srs” etc are accessibility tools. They help neurodivergent people understand the explicit tone of written text that would otherwise be only implicit and therefore difficult for us to understand. If you use tone tags in a joking or disingenuous manner, you’re not only going to end up confusing a lot of people, but it’s also just plain ableist to make a joke out of an accessibility tool, something that a lot of us rely on to understand and communicate with people online.

Especially considering the whole point of tone tags is for them to be used in the most genuine, accurate manner possible, someone knowingly misusing them just means they’re doubling down on their ableist disregard for neurodivergent people who might read it.

If you post something somewhere as a joke but end it with a “/srs,” fix it. Delete it. Don’t do it again. Tone tags are not your punchline.

This disability pride month message brought to you by an autistic ADHDer

sup punk