Systemic Critique Addendum · 3:15am Feb 21st, 2019
This is an unplanned but very necessary follow-up to my last blog, which you can read here. Special thanks to commenters NikitaKitten and Axis of Rotation for helping me realize that there was more to be said on this subject.
Last time I wrote about systemic critique, I talked about how arguments against it that focus on whether individual people are good or bad are inappropriate. Today I'd like to make an addendum to that and discuss some case studies that both Axis and Nikita touched on in different ways: how is it possible to criticize a system without judging individuals? Moreover, how do you then justify systemic critiques that do seem to make moral judgments - for example critiquing racism, sexism, or homophobia?
i think the biggest failing of my original post is that I did not clarify that not all systemic critiques are created equal, nor do they all have the same grounds. In my defense, the "hellmouth" was very much on my mind at the time and I mostly wanted to talk about how people's behavior in that specific context seemed inappropriate. Because of that, though, i left out a massive amount of nuance in what systemic critiques can do and say.
Specifically, I only talked about one particular kind of criticism of a system - the kind Monarch Dodora explained so well in the comments that I'm just lifting their description:
It depends on what you mean by 'bad'. It's one of the stupid things about the English language (and possibly others, I am a tool at languages) that words like 'bad' and 'wrong' mean 'incorrect', but they also mean 'evil'. It's wrong to say 10 + 10 = 35, but it's not wrong in the way it's wrong to stab someone. So people often get the two confused, and think they're being accused of evil when someone says their actions were simply incorrect.
You can be incorrect - you can cause harm, even - without being evil; what's really twisted about societal-level problems is that large groups of people can cause huge harm without anyone in the group actually being a horrible person, or even doing anything wrong at an individual level.
Say you have a valley of flowers. Some guy picks a single flower to take home to his girlfriend, and it's not a problem at all. Anyone could come and pick a flower and it wouldn't make a difference, but the valley gets stripped clean if everyone picks a flower. The accumulated damage is huge, yet each individual acted in perfect innocence without ever realizing where it was leading.
You can point out that a systemic behaviour is harmful while acknowledging that the individuals in question aren't also evil. Something like "Hey, guys, I know you like picking flowers, but there's so many people doing it that the valley's starting to suffer, so I need to ask you to stop till they've regrown." And it works a lot better than accusing people of either knowingly and gleefully ripping the valley to shreds, or being utter fscking morons for not instantly divining that plucking a single bloom on an idle country stroll would lead to utter desecration. That angers people, and once they're angry they'll think you're wrong about the valley because the Horn Effect is totally a thing, and then they'll keep picking flowers and do it with extra vigour just to spite you.
I've bolded what I think are the most relevant sentences here. Most of the systemic critiques I was thinking of exist in this space: they criticize what are mostly benign behaviors that have a harmful (or at least, unpleasant) effect when magnified and repeated. Writing porn with an undertone of misogyny isn't "evil", persay, especially if everyone involved understands it's a fantasy. That behavior being copied multiple times over can make an environment feel increasingly hostile or alien for the women who are still part of the larger community. A critique of that system is less like telling people that they're doing something evil, and more like they're doing something that's absent of good.
But what about a systemic critique of, say, open white supremacist ideology? In that case, you're making a claim that the behavior you're criticizing is ultimately evil. If that's the case, then aren't you passing judgment on the people practicing that ideology?
The simple answer is "yes, and..." The longer answer is "no, but:"
I'd like to first point out that the example of "a systemic critique of white supremacy" is a little misleading. Often, critiques of open white supremacy aren't looking to establish whether white supremacy is wrong or right, they take it for granted that most people agree that racism is bad. Even white supremacists tend to, at least publicly, argue that they aren't really white supremacists, or that white supremacy and racism are somehow different things.1 Systemic critiques that target racism are less likely to talk about whether racist behavior is good or not and more about to what degree specific behaviors, beliefs, and policies advance racism as a cause.
This distinction is important. It's what helps bridge the gap between judgment being passed on individuals, and critiques that are being more broadly applied to a society.
As I outlined in my previous post, systemic critique is being made at the cultural level and not at the individual one. To qualify as systemic in the first place, you have to be making a criticism that on some level transcends applying to just one person. As such when you're talking about making a systemic criticism of racism, you have to break that down into one of two categories: it's either a critique of the impact of racism on larger society, or of how specific behaviors advance racism's cause. in both cases, you're taking a fairly wide view of the problem.
This is where the contradiction emerges. At some point, you can begin extrapolating that if we can prove racism is harmful to society, people who practice racism are harming society and therefore this is a critique of the behaviors and actions of those people. Thus, the systemic critique - apparently contrary to my prior post - is passing moral judgment on people for their racism. They are sinners, they must be punished.
Which. Well, yes. Racism is bad. You should not do racist things. There's a good number of racists out there who I wish, on an individual level, would either shut up or come to Jesus already or both. But was that ever really my point?
When i say that systemic critique isn't meant to criticize the individual, I don't mean that an individual reading a systemic critique shouldn't examine their own behavior and decide that they need to change as people. That's part of my goal, after all. But my goal isn't to convince people that they are evil or good, either. I'm here to convince people that certain ways of living have good or bad effects.
Let me put it this way: if God exists, he's not weighing in on the racism debate. That's a thing we humans have to decide is good or not for ourselves. Which means before I can even begin to judge people for committing racism or not, i have to convince you not only that racist causes are neither just nor good, but also of what behaviors and attitudes and policies can even be said to constitute racism. The goal of my systemic critique isn't therefore to judge individuals, but to judge things that are larger than individuals.
To that end, getting the discussion wrapped up in who is or isn't a racist is silly, and probably also antithetical to the point. In today's society, most people agree racism is bad. The debate we're now having is what behaviors, attitudes, and policies further the cause of racism; and also to what degree they do. You may be a racist debating my critique or you may not be, but ultimately the underlying points I make are going to be the same. This critique is agnostic as to the state of an individual being a racist or not-a-racist.
This applies to any individual, not just the specific person(s) objecting to the critique. I've heard people argue that, for instance, Thomas Jefferson isn't really all that racist because he called the slave trade a "hideous blot" and fought to end the new trade of slaves in Virginia2. The argument goes that criticizing Thomas Jefferson as a racist cannot be true, because he performed... "un-racism", we'll say. The actions he took were not racist, therefore the man wasn't racist.
Now the general response to that you'll hear from most progressives - bless 'em - is "of course he was racist! He did a bunch of racist things, like literally being a horrifying slaveowner and participating in and propping up the institution. Stop trying to argue that the dead white guy isn't racist!
The thing is that's an interesting conversation to have, but it kind of misses the point. The conversation has shifted subtly. We're no longer talking about whether the things Thomas Jefferson did were racist, we're talking about whether the man himself, at some essential level, is a "racist". While that word has some level of utility and I'm not calling for anyone to never use it again, it's important to understand that it just isn't useful in some discussions. Debating whether someone is or is not a racist is a lot less concrete than just discussing whether certain beliefs, attitudes, behaviors or policies advance the cause of racism, or have ultimately racist outcomes.
Going back to the Thomas Jefferson example, the correct answer to the debate of whether Thomas Jefferson is or is not a racist is to state "does it really matter? The institution of slavery doesn't care whether Thomas Jefferson was a racist or not, he participated in a larger system propped up by human trafficking and racial inequality, and ultimately failed to effectively advocate for the rights and autonomy of his fellow humans. Those things are racist and should be recognized as such, independent of what you want to call him."
A lot of the ambiguity here has to do with the English language. Calling someone a sexist, racist, or homophobe implies that those are classes of people, that on some level people can make sexism core to their identity as a person. If we spin that kind of thinking too far, it can become hard to separate judgments of people's behavior from judgments of their essential humanity. That isn't an excuse to ignore racist behavior, far from it. It's more a point that terms like this are slippery if you actually think about them. At what point have you done enough racist acts to be a "racist"? What if you only do one racist thing in your entire life, or do it without knowing?3
In other words, when you shift the focus of systemic critique toward individuals it tends to get wrapped up in conversations of essential identity, which is a tricky thing to pin down at the best of times. Most things we consider core identities to ourselves are constructed on some level anyway. I identify as a lesbian, but one of my primary partners for years has been a cis man. I'm not particularly attracted to men, I don't much enjoy having sex or even role-playing with men, and I have no real interest in additional male partners - but I also deeply love my boyfriend, even if I generally find him attractive in a more platonic than erotic way (sorry, Chuck). Am I a lesbian or not? To what degree do I have to perform essential lesbian-ness to qualify?
That's the problem I tend to have with saying that systemic critique involves some level of calling people out for their moral failing. To some extent it does, but it's not a targeted or specific call to action against people for "being racist", it's a call to action arguing that people should stop practicing racism. You could argue that's a distinction without a difference, and I'd argue that if we're going to be that at this point we're using the word differently. If practicing racism to any extent makes one "a racist", then sure, I'm calling people racist when I call out social behaviors that reinforce racism.
But if all it takes is taking one racist action to "be racist", it follows that it's equally easy to no longer be "a racist". At that point, the word's no longer describing a core tenet of someone's identity or philosophy, it's describing a state that people can move into and out of.
And this is how I tend to relate to and explain systemic critique as well. Systemic critiques tend to see racism as an identity or stance that's just as constructed and thorny as every other identity and stance. Every critique, even critiques of overt white supremacist ideology, are ultimately going to be targeting the behaviors and beliefs that make the system up, not the underlying individuals. Should people holding those beliefs feel called out? Well, yes. But the point wasn't to call them out for some kind of special bad-ness, it was to help them understand that the system they are participating in isn't a just one and should be abandoned.
So there's my answer to "aren't you still criticizing individuals?" The answer of "yes, but only insofar as they consider themselves inseparable from their own mistakes."
1 "I'm pro-white, not anti-black/mexican/whatever" is a pretty common spin on the standard arguments today, now that David Duke and his boys have exhausted is phrenology as a defense.
2[/sup]See that defense mounted here by pop culture philosophers, the guys who make Epic Rap Battles of History.
3Tl;dr: "If a man builds ten bridges and then sucks a dick, is he a bridgebuilder or a cocksucker?"
This is a fantastic addition to an already fantastic blog.
It's just a damn shame that the people who need to read and understand this the most probably won't.
My question, the thing I'm really interested in and have needed to write about for like three years now, is what happens when everyone involved does not understand this...
5017337
Then you might want to consider what to say to the people who don't.
I'mma steal this
5017326
Sadly, that tends to be true of a lot of brilliant, insightful pieces.
5017395
Go for it!
It's interesting to see your perspective on what you think you're doing with systemic critiques... but I don't think it is what you, or other radical leftists, are doing.
When you say "only insofar as they consider themselves inseparable from their own mistakes", you're saying, "They're not bad people, they just don't understand that they're making mistakes (and they're not morally responsible because individuals are incapable of acting morally on their own, because Marx)." But if they do understand what they're doing, don't consider it a mistake, don't absolve themselves of moral culpability for their actions, and intend to keep on doing it--then, yes, you're calling them bad people.
The problem with leftist systemic critiques is that they're nonquantitative and non-comparative. A genuine critique of a system does 2 things that leftist critiques never do:
Instead, leftist critiques list some anecdotal incidents of bad results from a system and argue that that means the system as a whole is "bad". "Bad" thus mean "imperfect"--a system is "bad" if any examples of bad results can be found. The presumption--which came to Marx from Plato, through Christianity and Hegel--is that everything, including humans and their social systems, are by their original nature perfect, and so bad things can happen only if a human or a system has been corrupted (rendered impure) by some contaminating, malign influence [1]. This assumption was explicit in Christianity, but left implicit in Hegel (and thus Marx). It's still there, but it's difficult to notice when it's not stated explicitly, because Hegelian and Marxist (and Christian) reasoning is pre-Aristotelian, based instead on Plato's dialectic, which uses no logical quantifiers. It usually speak in terms of absolutes, without distinguishing "some X are Y" from "all X are Y". (Plato didn't think there was much difference between those statements, because he believed all philosophical discussion should be about Forms rather than earthly instantiations of Forms. He did use "some X" when discussing the fates different people would have in the afterlife.)
Here we get to the problem: Today's radical leftists don't realize that they're nearly always saying "all X are Y". Because they don't use logical quantifiers or numeric quantification, they're only capable of writing (or thinking) in terms of "all X are Y". "Here is an example of a corporation doing something evil" implies "All corporations are always evil". Similarly, as Scarlet wrote earlier, they "assume that living in a capitalist system to some extent negates the impact of individual moral choices." This is an obscure way of saying that they don't distinguish individual people and individual choices. They must treat them as a homogeneous mass, because their language of thought isn't capable of analyzing quantitatively.
What Scarlet has been arguing in these 2 posts is that, when leftists say, "You are an actor in this system, and it's a bad system", they're saying that (A) every person in the system is acting in a way that has bad, immoral results, and yet (B) somehow, that isn't claiming that every person in the system is immoral.
The "somehow" here consists of 2 assumptions:
The leftist is just trying to educate people, to show them that the system is bad, but it isn't their fault, although actually yes it is if they keep supporting it.
Someone who isn't a radical leftist, however, sees it differently.
To such a person, the claim that the system is "bad", combined with the claim that individual actions within the system are all morally equivalent, logically and literally implies that every actor in the system is a bad person.
[1] Plato believed the physical world was imperfect, but I think it was the Manichees or Gnostics who introduced the idea that a malevolent being made it so deliberately.
5017337
then FiMFic happens lol
5017566
Given you're talking about a critique I didn't explain in detail in the post in question, it would be nice if you had read the text of it or looked at it in full instead of assuming that it can be summed up as just "no ethical consumption under capitalism". I didn't feel the need to explain it since I was making a larger point about the critique's nature, not examining whether its claims were truthful. "No ethical consumption" argues not that people are incapable of making moral choices, but that the ability to make good choices is denied to people on some level under capitalism - since at some point, your money flows to someone exploiting someone. You can agree or disagree with that, but it'd be nice if you had approached the actual argument, not a constructed version you built out of two lines in a tangentially-related blog.
Nor does Marx, as you seem to argue, indicate people are incapable of not making individual moral choices. Rather, he argues that individual moral choices made in accordance with specific systems result in deleterious effects.
5017566
don't you have like anything better to do then misread/not read blogs and then pontificate about them like youre some kind of ponified thunderf00t lol
im not sure how credibly you thought you could talk in the presence of people who watched you in *my* comments thinking I was catholic or something as patently false and painfully/obviously stupid as that. this entire post is like reading something from a chinese room algorithim designed to regurgitate reconstructed Internet Rationalist Facebook Sermon sentences at me. It has like literally no connection to reality, like most of the long rambly comments you leave on blogs you don't read
5017732 You're trying to avoid engaging in discussion by making overly-fine, irrelevant distinctions on a supporting point. The only importance of this point in my comment is that you're using a Marxist assumption that people have limited power and limited culpability to excuse them from being part of a "bad" system. You use that to claim that you're not calling them bad people.
My overall point is that, given their assumptions rather than your assumptions, you are calling them bad people. The specifics of in what way and in what circumstances Marx thinks freedom and culpability are limited are irrelevant, as long as we agree that you're using that Marxist notion in the argument you already made. It was you, not me, who claimed it was applicable to your argument.
5017776
I acknowledge that they're assuming I'm calling them bad people. I'm explaining why, under this framework, that's not the framing of the discussion. If they refuse to read the discussion in the spirit it's being presented in, isn't that still a problem of their own overall reading?
Also, same as Cyne. Showing up in my comments after you decided to read my girlfriend a long anti-papist diatribe last time she wrote a post was a bold move.
5017734
I miss the nice Cynewulf.
5017820
I miss it when you had Better Things To Do then be a dick and stick your nose where others don’t want you, reeking of bad faith on fowls legs like a badly animated Baba Yaga.
What you really miss is when I and others were young and ignorant and couldn’t see that you were the jester among your betters, and you could bully and intimidate whenever you felt like it. The Good Cynewulf? Man. Don’t act like you have at any point been anything but disingenuous towards me.
5017820
Slick edit there, sport. For context, you said "The good Cynewulf" earlier and you should really have apologized before trying to say that never happened.
Incidentally, what prompted you to say that to a trans woman, I wonder? Did you miss the potential implications, or were you aware of them and did it anyway?
Don't answer, I'm just explaining why I'm blocking you now.
Answer to the TLDR: he's a bridge building cocksucker. The two things are not mutually exclusive and you need only perform an action once to be labeled as a person that has performed that action.
Was that the point of the example or was it actually supposed to show a dichotomy of some sort?
As for the main point of the article I think that, at a very base level, one cannot critique a system people participate in without also critiquing said people who participate in that system.
By critiquing the system one is by the very nature of the critique saying "something needs to change". Maybe it is because that something is "wrong", for any given value of that arbatary word, or maybe because there is simply a "better", again another arbitrary word, to do it that doesn't also make it "wrong" in some other way.
It doesn't really matter why one critiques a system, the point of a critique is to try and get something changed and at the end of the day that change has to be made by people. By groups of people yes, and "Mob Mentality" and similar are actual things, but all groups of people are made of individuals and those individuals have to each take action to cause that change. And individuals only take action when something or someone else directly impacts them. Call it what you will but the "Bystander Effect" is also a real thing and it has to first be overcome to see any results.
If one person in that system stops acting within the system it might not have much effect. But if that person takes the time to convince someone else to leave and so on and so on then you really start to get change. But that first person has to have a reason for wanting to leave first and they will only get that reason personally.
Coming at it from another angle; by applying a critique to a system the people within that system are going to think it applies to them. And by them thinking that it applies to them on some level that makes it apply to them. The original critique may not have meant to apply to individuals but individuals are going to apply it to themselves.
I'm not sure if I'm making sense or not, or if I'm even addressing the right thing. It is late and words are failing me but this has been on my mind for about half the day and I couldn't sleep without saying something.
I'm going to bed now.
Did I use the word "critique" enough for it to loose all meaning or not?
5018020
It was to show how labels are kind of arbitrary and murky if you poke at them often enough. Kill one person and you're a murderer, but are you a bedwetter because you pissed your pants when you were six?
1) Yes. And what I'm talking about isn't mutually exclusive with that. It's not a matter of "you shouldn't feel anything when reading this" but a matter of "this isn't about you."
2) If you go back and read the original post I'm following up, what I'm talking about here is a specific reaction people tend to have to larger systemic critiques, which is dismissing them by claiming "this can't be an appropriate critique because I'm not a bad person". See also my example about Thomas Jefferson and people arguing whether he was really racist.
I'll get to this as soon as I can, Scarlet. Thought I'd missed it by a long shot.
5017886
Bad Horse is like the opposite of phobic, if that's what you were implying.
5018045
Oof, meant to respond sooner but things happened...
People get really hung up on labels, and I'm one of those people who doesn't really understand why.
I understand the importance of labels, it makes conversation and society and a bunch of other things easier, but labels are imperfect things and, to me, sometimes get more importance placed upon them than is warranted.
So, yes, I can see how that example could work in that regard.
What I was saying is that it really is about them. I feel that one can't really target a system without also targeting the people in that system.
To get any change in a system you have to have someone make that change, and the majority of the time that change is going to come from within, not without.
There is no point making a critique of something if you don't want the people with the best chance of making the change to see it, and people will only "see" things if they feel it applies to them in someway.
Yes, a critique can be made to not target anyone individually and just apply to a blanket group but in the very nature of calling out a group the people within it are also called out.
Maybe we're just talking about two different things here or I'm not communicating my point well enough.
The other blog post was actually the first thing of yours I read here, but I'm not going to lie, I dropped the follow because of your M:tG stuff...
And people dismiss stuff all the time, especially harsh truths they don't want to see or think about. And very few people want to think of themselves as being "bad people" so of course they are going to dismiss anything that says they are. But the majority of people are also rather stupid in my opinion.
It is hard to get people to change, and often times they never really do.
5018045
I think the best example of (2) I've seen is the comment section at a particular political blog whenever one of the front-pagers brings up the harmful, racially unequal effects of choosing where to live based on perceived school quality. I don't think I ever brought it up on the first post because of some of the other things connected with it (said front-pager likes to provoke the comment section, says contra (1) that it is about the individuals, and tends to downplay the point that absent systemic change individual choices won't meaningfully change much), but with the two points so condensed... well why not?
5018999
The opposite of phobic? Cool. You don't know my personal experience with him, or Cyne's, and frankly I'm not sure why I'm expected to extend him the benefit of the doubt given that. And frankly, this is a personal thing: you do not fuck with my girlfriend and expect me not to get a little pissed, at least.
And also, tbh, I don't give a damn if Bad Horse is fine with individual trans people. We had beef from a previous incident, he knew we had beef because he asked me if we had beef and I told him - in no uncertain terms - that beef was present. That is not the place to have discourse from.
Honestly, take your time. I am burned the fuck out on this subject and I really don't want to devote the mental energy to it that I feel like your counter-points would deserve right now.
5019123
We're talking about two slightly different things here, yes. You've apparently read past Monarch Dodora's flowerpatch example of systemic critique and my last post's emphasis on how systemic critique can't be deflected by arguing your own morality since it's kind of agnostic as to the question of whether someone is "good" or "bad" in the first place. It argues certain actions, beliefs, or policies create a cultural effect, but I wouldn't call someone writing that capitalism, say, accelerates global warming also a person who believes all capitalists are bad people who are deliberately destroying the environment.
This addendum post was meant to address previous criticism that there are situations in which a systemic critique is going to touch on a moral issue - if it's directed at, say, white supremacy or bigotry, which are generally less value-neutral.
5019152
I'm kind of embarrassed I didn't think of that example myself.
5019285
Scarlet, you can block whoever you wish, and like or dislike whoever you wish, for whatever reasons you wish. It can be their name for all I care. :P
I'm saying that Bad Horse isn't a "transphobe", in counter to you implying the opposite. I'm defending his character, I'm not saying you have to like him, or even want to associate with him.
If you're allowed to defend someone you have close ties to, then surely so am I. So I did. :)
No worries, I feel you, believe me. Honestly this works out for me, because I was going to take half an eternity anyway. Life's too busyyyyy. And besides, maybe we could chat about something else, since I did have a topic in mind from an unrelated thing you mentioned last blog. But, uh, just not right now, because like I said, busybusy.
5019614
You can defend him all you like, but I didn't actually accuse him of being one. I just wanted to make it clear why the last thing he said pissed me off so much. And why I'm not interested in further conversation. I didn't even use the word transphobe, airquotes or otherwise. i will say that his phrasing definitely lent itself to one of two readings - either he didn't realize how that could be read, in which case I think apologizing instead of stealth-editing would have gone a long way, or he did and went ahead anyway. Neither requires him to be an explicit transphobe himself, but, well. I did just write a whole damn post on the topic of not finding discussing whether you are a racist in your heart of hearts useful.
5019640
Remember, I said you implied, (meaning, deliberately), not that you outright accused. Though of course only you can say what your intent was--whether it was deliberate or not, right--as only Bad Horse can say what the intent behind his comment was. It's an insult in response to an insult, obviously, but beyond that you'd have to ask him, because there are lots of ways to interpret it.
I'm not here to say what his intent was, or even to discuss the comment, only to state what I've witnessed his character to be (in person, mind you). I mean, I don't think your limiting of it to two options is fair, but if you want to discuss the comment itself, we'd have to discuss Cynewulf's comment that invited it. But neither of them are here (well, maybe Cynewulf still is), and Bad Horse can't speak for himself anymore, so what would be the point? *shrug* :P
(For the record, I like Cynewulf, I follow her and I've enjoyed her stories. Why must authors I like fight? sigh.)
5019711
Because our last joint interaction with Bad Horse involved him attempting to explain why a blog Cyne wrote about me being dogpiled by fans of an author after I called their fic uncomfortable/kinda creepy was actually problematic because she used imagery drawn from the Tower of Babel. He went hard, despite being pretty roundly informed he was full of it.
And again, he literally just said something shitty.
I think what I'm trying to say is please stop apologizing and trying to assure me of his character. I don't care, and it has already hit the point where I'm getting annoyed. This is not a conversation where it's a good idea to try and get the last word in.
5019801
Apologizing? For what? Bad Horse? Um, I'm not apologizing for him.
Scarlet, do you always get irritated when people try to make their original comments understood, and then accuse them of trying to get the last word in? You're free to do it, I guess. You haven't correctly reflected any of my comments. I guess I'm supposed to be silent about that around here? I'm not a regular follower, so I wouldn't know.
Come now. I'm not the only one hitting the reply button. :P
Addendum:
Look, misunderstandings happen, they're as easy as breathing. Lord knows I contribute to them. How about we just move past it, eh? I still look forward to chatting with you when I've got the time. :)
5020222
If I wanted people to be silent when they disagree with me, I would've blocked you and Vladspellbinder both by now. I think you begin to misunderstand what I'm doing. It's not so much that I don't understand your original comments, it's that I'm telling you that I don't want to have this conversation and that continuing to pursue it out here, in public, is not going to be a recipe for a non-grumpy Scarlet.
Pull the other one.
...Really, my dude?
I mean if you want to continue to have this conversation, sure. Just bear in mind that my response to people defending people I just blocked on grounds that weren't even the entire reason I blocked them as a conversation opener? Not the kind of thing that's likely to result in long, fruitful discourse.
5020406
i.gifer.com/GODy.gif
:>
5017844
- for some reason this line made me laugh so hard... I think "Бабя Яга" herself was usually prortratized as fairly normal old bitch, just her ...Mobile House was pictured as having fowl legs ... But may be someone in my country draw something else while I was not looking :}
This link should contain picture .... of both.
https://pikabu.ru/story/izbushka_babyi_yagi_otkuda_u_nee_kuri_nozhki_4774322
Now, after I named her .. Integrated Framhouse like this I can't unsee this picture of 'What if Russians draw 'Giant Fighting Tanks' ala Japanese's mecha (hello Scarlet, I guess I internalized your Gundam posts!) guided by THOSE images ... I think I saw trailer for something like this ...lately ... Russian alt sci-fi anime thing ....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_2KCEOF1bQ - I think ....