missfortune1977:

 So after the many many posts mourning the passing of Stan Lee earlier today I’ve started seeing an inevitable wave of backlash about how he actually wasn’t a good person and we shouldn’t be mourning them. And these posts are par for the course when a celebrity dies because no one is all good or all bad, and that’s fine. And Stan Lee was human, he was a person with a complicated life and a complicated legacy, and I’m not here to whitewash any of that. However, I’d like to refute a couple of the points I’ve seen people making. 

The first is that Stan Lee sexually harassed nurses who were taking care of him. This story came from the Daily Mail, which is not a credible news source. The original story does not name any of the nurses who supposedly came forward with the story, or their employer, and the legitimacy of this story is pretty shaky. I’m not saying it categorically isn’t true, but I am saying that we should take stories from the newspaper that ran a headline about the discovery of the “gay gene” with a grain of salt.

The second is that Stan Lee was told that Andrew Garfield wanted to play Peter Parker as bisexual, and as retaliation forced Sony to only depict Peter Parker as straight and white. This isn’t quite true. There is a contract from 2011 that lists mandatory character traits for Spider-Man, and in that list is included that Spider-Man is “not a homosexual (unless Marvel has portrayed that alter ego as a homosexual).” Whether Stan Lee himself personally was involved in writing up this contract is pretty doubtful seeing as his role in the company was fairly limited by that point (and that’s not to mention the fact that in his later years he was being abused and manipulated by the people closest to him), but he did mention it in an interview with Newsarama. What he specifically said was, “I wouldn’t mind, if Peter Parker had originally been black, a Latino, an Indian or anything else, that he stay that way, but we originally made him white. I don’t see any reason to change that (…) I think the world has a place for gay superheroes, certainly, But again, I don’t see any reason to change the sexual proclivities of a character once they’ve already been established. I have no problem with creating new, homosexual superheroes (…) It has nothing to do with being anti-gay, or anti-black, or anti-Latino, or anything like that,” he said. “Latino characters should stay Latino. The Black Panther should certainly not be Swiss. I just see no reason to change that which has already been established when it’s so easy to add new characters. I say create new characters the way you want to. Hell, I’ll do it myself.” 

And while your mileage may vary on how much you agree with him there, it’s a far cry from him cruelly declaring Peter Parker having a boyfriend would be an affront before God and man and an insult to his authorial intent or whatever. Also, I think the original post that started this story was about Andrew Garfield saying something while doing press for Amazing Spiderman 2 and Stan Lee writing the contract as a result, but the contract is from 2011 and the first Amazing Spiderman came out in 2012, so the timeline doesn’t work. I could be misremembering the post though. There’s also this implied narrative that Andrew Garfield got axed for saying his Peter Parker was bi, but uh, no. No, they cancelled the franchise because Amazing Spiderman 2 bombed at the box office. 

Now, to wrap it up, was Stan Lee a good and perfect man? No. His legacy is very much a mixed bag, especially when it comes to his relationship with his long-time co-creator Jack Kirby (although that’s a whole other suitcase to unpack some other time). I would like to point out, however, that the posts praising him aren’t all just blindly hero-worshipping him and being willfully ignorant. When someone you admire dies it’s natural to forget about the bad parts of them for a bit and get a little misty eyed, and not everyone’s gonna be totally objective about this man that they never met but who represents something important to them. I think that speaks more to the way we interact with celebrity as a culture than it does about the way Marvel fans see Stan Lee frankly.  And hey, we gain nothing by pretending that Stan Lee wasn’t an important figure in comic book history, one who co-created the first black character in mainstream comics just two years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, who fought the Comic Code Authority censors to use comics to tackle heavy subject matter, who helped bring legitimacy to the art form and humanity to its characters. So as long as I’ve got you here I’m gonna leave you with his thoughts on racism in 1968, words that feel just as relevant today:

“Racism and bigotry are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today. But, unlike a team of costumed supervillains, they can’t be halted with a punch in the snoot or a zap from a ray gun. The only way to destroy them, is to expose them — to reveal from the insidious evil they really are.”

May his memory be a blessing.

kaikaykoa:

oof here’s @torabdos froyo boy havin froyo when it’s not rainign

I made this i don’t know when actually I just found it in my gallery but here’s a boy with a few missing details bc I don’t really know what I did at the time but the date of download is actually p recent so wrow

ginnyvos:

sky-blue-phoenix:

taptaptapping-on-the-glass:

deluxetrashqueen:

Daily reminder that “Missing Person” posts are a common and often effective method that abusers use to find their victims that have run away from them. Also used to find people in the witness protection program.  

If you see a “missing person” post with a number that is not just 911 on it, be very wary. And if you do see someone who is supposedly missing, call the police, NOT the number provided on the post. I trust the police as little as anyone but they’ll at least be able to tell you if that person is actually missing and it has less of a chance of giving information to a possible abuser. 

A couple of red flags I’ve noticed:

  • Abusers claiming their victims are mentally ill or schizophrenic, to explain why they might not want to come back
  • Abusers giving any excuse to explain why their victims may not come back really
  • Abusers telling you not to approach their victims if you see them, or limit your communication with them
  • Abusers telling you not to mention them to their victims at all
  • Abusers claiming that their victims aren’t safe with their family or friends
  • Abusers claiming their victims are being threatened away from them

(Feel free to add on)

Add-ons to the list of red flags from my mother, a psychologist who has worked with victims of domestic abuse:

  • Abusers claiming their victim has a history of self-harm that leaves bruises is always a red flag (except in the case of autistic children, but even then, call 911, not the abuser)
  • Abusers claiming their (POC) victim doesn’t understand English and so you shouldn’t try to communicate with them/trust anything they say is not uncommon for human traffickers
  • Abusers claiming their victim has a history of making things up for attention or to get their way, tacitly implying you shouldn’t listen to them when they express fear or disclose their abusive situation to you
  • Posters lacking a last name are inherently not to be trusted. The lack of a surname is there to keep you from looking the person up in other databases and finding out they’ve been listed as missing by their family/the police.
  • Posters that put any character smears – mental illness, drug use, etc. – out about the victim are trying to make you predisposed to not communicating with or trusting the victim so you won’t believe anything they say. Treat this as a flashing neon red flag and call the police.

My mother would also like to note that taking a picture of the poster or tearing it down and turning it in to police can be very useful to them when they’re trying to build cases against abusers so if that’s at all possible for you, by all means do it.

As someone who’s always had foster brothers and sisters, this is not only true for adults, but absolutely true for children as well. Sometimes kids are put into ‘secret placement’ in foster care to protect the child and the foster family they’re placed with. We’ve legit had parents find out where we live and turn up on our doorstep with guns. We’ve also had parents simply turn up at school, pick up their kids and flee the country.

If you work in the education system, or some other system that deals with information, be very aware of who you give information to. Are you on the phone? Don’t give out any information unless you can prove with 100% certainty that this person is who they say they are. Even if they are the parent, make sure they’re also the legal guardian. Even if they have a sad story about how they’re never allowed to see the kids through no fault of their own, even if it’s true, don’t give out information. Those rules are there for a reason and that reason is to protect kids from their abusers. This seems ridiculous and tedious and bureaucratic and in most cases it is, but for the sake of that 1 in 10.000th case that it’s true, please be careful.

Red flags:

– Parents who don’t know their child’s address or phone number

– Parents who make degrading remarks about their child’s primary care giver

– Parents who make degrading remarks about their child

– Parents who are looking for more than one of their kids

– Parents who are demanding access to their kid’s email account

– The child is in foster care or lives in a halfway house or similar institution

– The parent paints themselves as a victim.

Yes, not all foster care placement is handled correctly and sometimes mistakes are made, but that decision is not up to you. You don’t know all the facts. Many abusers, parents or otherwise, are clever, charismatic, manipulative assholes that get off on power trips but can come off as completely normal and trustworthy. Far more so than their victims.

Please help protect those victims.