Politics As Fandom - Tumblr Posts

Whither the pro-Pals a year from now?

I feel that "fandom as politics" most adequately covers the behavior of pro-Palestinians on Tumblr, and being an Old Hand At Fandom, this gives me some impressions on what the future holds. I know this is a matter of great concern for those of us on Tumblr who are their favorite targets.

My estimates are not scientific, and are based on experience in seeing the rise and fall of many fandoms. I am not psychic and make no guarantees.

The Old Guard: The smallest contingent of pro-Palestinian activists will be permanently, irrevocably radicalized by propaganda, and they will not go back. Truthfully, there is nowhere for them to go. They have burned all of their online goodwill invested in this fandom, and as the rest fall away, they will rage at their own allies, burning those bridges as well. These people are just as hateful and insufferable IRL as they are online, so they will know nobody who isn't also pro-Pal. They will remain behind in the fandom. When it later repopularizes as Tumblr rediscovers the fandom due to future content being released in the form of another war, the Old Guard will snark and brag about how they carried the torch while everybody else abandoned the fandom of The Great Cause. The Old Guard will constitute the BNFs of the pro-Pal fandom and their closest friends, at most 10% of the current fandom.

The Fond Recollectors: A lack of new, shiny, emotionally-evocative content for the pro-Pal fandom will drop it, the same as how many fandom members abandon a fandom once it is cancelled or after endless delays for new material. These folks will not think of their time in the pro-Pal fandom as wasted. They will look back on this time of trauma, war, and upheaval as one of the most exhilarating and joyful times of their lives. They will generally act as though they weren't part of the fandom, but when they find people who used to be in the fandom, it will be like finding somebody who shares a fandom you used to adore. They will whisper, with smirking conspiratorialism, of how one time they got a Jewish--uh, Zionist--person to deactivate their Tumblr account. They will confess among one another how many times they sent "kys" messages to Zionists, and giggle. It will be like ex-Johnlockers lol'ing among themselves about having stalked the actors IRL. If the fandom gets new content in the form of a war, then the Fond Recollectors will rejoin with glee. They will accept the Old Guard's hostility ("Where were you all this time?") as their just punishment. Otherwise, Fond Recollectors will be mid-grade antisemitic in whatever new political or media fandoms they join. They will constitute roughly 30% of the current pro-Pal fandom, and will mostly be composed of folks who post extremely prolifically but are not currently BNFs.

The Shamefaced Ex-Fans: Whether we like it or not, most folks get caught up in a fandom cycle due to hype from friends and socmed pressure. This creates a peak of interest which is followed by burnout. A person in this category engaged constantly and thoughtlessly with pro-Palestinian fandom content for hours every day, yet never engaged with purpose or by creating transformative works. Once the fandom fails to produce enough new content, they will look around, dazed, and wonder what the hell they even liked about it in the first place. Now out of the hype cycle, Ex-Fans will be able to look more critically at their behavior. They will not recognize their Jew-hate, but they will recognize the silliness of a lot of their behavior. "Gosh, I can't believe I thought reblogging on Tumblr would end a war" will take the place of phrases like "... would make that ship become canon" in their lexicon. They will look back at this time with embarrassment; again, not because they understand the harm they have done, but because they understand it's "cringe" to care about stuff that's not pluperfect and doesn't achieve the stated goal. They will be the least apparently-antisemitic and the most likely to make friends with Jewish people online, because they will change their names and will not admit what they were doing during the Hamas/Israel war. If the pro-Pal fandom gets new content in the future--again, in the form of a new war--the Ex-Fans will primarily fall silent. They will be overwhelmed by shame (not guilt, and not responsibility). They will not rejoin unless dragged into it, but they will not speak out to support Jewish people. They will constitute roughly 60% of the current fandom.

These are bleak estimates, because a newly revitalized pro-Pal fandom will not need the Shamefaced Ex-Fans. The core of the fandom, the Old Guard and the Fond Recollectors, will do what all passionate cores of fandoms do in these situations: recruit. And while most of these recruits are destined to become Ex-Fans in the far future, many will join the other two categories, being partially or permanently radicalized into a movement of antisemitism.

In a sense, what we are seeing is what Tumblr would have been like if Moffat had said "Johnlock will never be canon, and it's all because of the Jews".

Another bit on the pro-Pal fandom, this one axiomatic

Being a good person is not the same thing as pretending as though you believe you are a good person.

Being a good person takes work. You have to do stuff. Doing stuff is hard. Doing good stuff is harder, because you have to put thought into determining what you think is good beforehand. That requires self-reflection, honesty, a willingness to challenge oneself, and taking in information from other people to verify that your concept of "good" is, well, good.

The nice part is that once you evaluate what is good and start doing good things, it becomes easier. You gain inner calm, peace, and even joy.

("Good" is not always the same as "necessary". Necessary work can be a slog, or it can be horrific. But there can still be a calming satisfaction at the core, the security that this is necessary and therefore worthwhile.)

Pretending to believe you are a good person takes less immediate work. You don't have to do anything that positively impacts the real world, and you don't have to do any of that annoying, time-consuming self examination. But in the long run, it's more exhausting. By far.

You are insecure about whether or not you are a good person. You're pretending to believe you are good. You can't feel secure in something you pretend to believe. That insecurity gnaws at you, especially when you engage in bad behavior--harassment, doxxing, posting gore, swarming tags, encouraging and promoting suicide among your fellow "activists", telling your opponents to kill themselves, stalking, spamming unrelated content with literal Nazi propaganda.

None of those are good things good people do. And you understand that. You would think someone was bad if they did those things to you. The cognitive dissonance between who you want to be and who you really are, as determined by your actions, is scary. It's painful. It rears up every time someone you have labeled a Zio colonizer scumbag asks you to please just stop and you remember a time when you begged someone--an abuser, a troll online, a 4channer, your parents--to just stop please just leave me alone.

That must feel terrifying, and again, it makes you insecure. It makes you question if you're doing the right thing.

So you do the work to pretend to believe you are good. And that's far more work than goes into being good.

You recruit others, and all of you agree that you will pretend together. Tabletop gaming has taught us how powerful this imaginative play can be. You all reassure each other that you are good and you are right. But since you're all lying to each other, that means you must spend more, and more, and more time every day telling each other that you are good, chasing that high, that feeling that you are a good person and your actions are justified.

You tell each other that your "opponents" in this "battle" are not people, so anything you say or do to and about them is okay. You look at lists of "dehumanizing tactics" and instead of internalizing what those lists are teaching you, you go: "Ah, so if I don't use the word 'vermin', anything I say should be fine!" And then you say it.

You do not smile over good news. You only smile when one of your opponents logs off Tumblr because you made the site unusable and unsafe for them. (The expression you make there isn't really a smile, but we'll call it that, since the corners of your mouth do turn upward.) You tell yourself you're just attacking Zionists and pretend you do not see how you're really going after Jews.

No self-examination; that would mean admitting that you're lying to yourself and others. Instead, you traumatize and exhaust yourself until you're psychologically incapable of self-examination. You watch snuff films. You stare at mangled bodies until you're weeping and physically ill (certainly, you're too ill to check whether the video is real, or if it was taken from this conflict).

You force your beliefs into your fandom spaces so that others, the bad people, cannot escape their complicity in genocide.

But more importantly, you do that so you can't escape.

You cannot engage in any fandom but the pro-Pal fandom because that takes imaginative energy away from your biggest pretense--that you're a good person.

You are NOT hurting people because you are striking a blow for Palestinians. You are hurting people, including yourself, because you do not want to do the work of becoming a good person. You are afraid that self examination, at this point, will reveal to you that you are exactly the sort of person you believe you are fighting.

That fear, that insecurity, that dread, that restless sense that if you ever rest or stop or think for just a moment, you'll discover something awful? That's your conscience.

I do not ask you to change your mind about your political opponents. Your defenses are already on your lips and in your mind; a thousand How Dare Yous for me hinting that you look at other people as people. What I will ask you is to consider this.

I came to young adulthood just as Bush was elected, and the Iraq War post-9/11 was the first war I really followed as an adult. I did what you're doing now. I forced myself to look at photographs of destroyed bodies. I looked at photographs of torture perpetrated by US soldiers. I blogged about it obsessively.

I told myself that I was Doing My Part to end the war. But really, it's that the anxiety of being an American during the war made me insecure over whether or not I was responsible for all of this, and therefore, a bad person. If I pretended my looking at snuff photos was activism, and that it was good, then I could pretend to believe I was good and shout "Not in my name" at protests. I could deny my responsibility.

What I really did was traumatize myself. It's been almost twenty years. I can still see some of those torture pictures in my head. In the end, that is the extent of the impact of my online activism. The blogs are all long deleted, and nobody remembers them.

Only my trauma remains.

I do not want this for you. I want you to be wiser. There is still time. You can stop.

Stop hurting yourself and other people. Do the hard work. Examine yourself and your actions. Consider what your own heart is trying to tell you whenever you start to get the shakes and your throat gets tight. Do not take that feeling out on random people online because they have a Magen David in their pfp.

Once you have done the hard work, it gets easier. You will be able to advocate and work for whatever causes you believe in because you know they are good, not because you're joining your friends in cosplaying goodness. You will still be traumatized, and you will still be sad, and you'll definitely still get angry. You will have to face how you've acted exactly like your own past abusers, and that's a real tough row to hoe.

But at the end, you will be able to advocate and work because you want to, instead of feeling as though you must in order to keep up the masquerade.

Someone needs to let all the Tumblr antisemites antizionists know that Ismail Haniyeh is never going to take them to prom or reblog their fanart

I think you're right, and want to draw specific attention to the "I"m a good person" part of your analysis.

I have written about this before (very long post here--not necessary to read and contains trigger tags, but I'm adding it for completionism), but a really important part of leftist antisemitism is the calming of a baseline insecurity about their own moral value.

For some stuff I didn't discuss in that linked essay: a lot of USian cultural Christianity is defined not by Puritanism, but by a misinterpretation of Calvinism.

Calvinism has an entire theological framework, but the most important part is that no one on Earth can ever know if they are part of the elect who go to heaven or one of the many people who go to hell. While many flavors of Christianity provide reassurance that the individual won't go to hell thanks to baptism, ritual, conversion, prayers, etc., Calvinism denies all of these reassurances. This was supposed to redirect people from obsessively worrying about hell. Culturally it had the opposite effect.

The brainworms in the center of the skull of every USian are, basically, the question: "Am I a good (enough) person?"

Being a Good Person is conditional--after all, you might pretend to be a Good Person all your life only to not be part of The Elect, and hence you were faking the whole time. Being a Bad Person is permanent and earns you eternal condemnation. Being around Bad People greatly increases the chance of you being a Bad Person, because you cannot save Bad People. They were bound to hell before they were ever born. You must therefore root out all the Bad People to prove that you are Good.

While many leftists pay lip service to ideas of restorative justice, forgiveness, and psychological healing from religious trauma, they don't mean a word of it. They just say that because that's what Good People would say, and more than any political goal, they want everyone to think they are Good People. This allays the baseline anxiety of whether or not they are going to go to hell--whether that is a literal hell, or for the skeptics, the dread that after they die, everyone will find out all those little shitty things they've done throughout their lives which will retroactively make them Bad People and cancel out their Good People status forevermore.

Antisemitism is portrayed as a right-wing problem by leftists because Bad People are antisemites, and to be associated with Bad People means they're not The Elite Good People, and the very thought of that is more frightening than the thought of death.

If admitting you made a mistake is worse than dying, then of course, you'll do and say anything at all to avoid admission, including, as we've seen in several violent cases, dying.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice this but it IS super weird to see so many leftists

get told they're being rampantly antisemitic

fact check (which is a good instict!)

realize they've been hitting Antisemite Bingo with every post they make

...and instead of going "oh shit, I didn't realize it was that baked into all of society, I really need to listen to more Jews about this and do better not to perpetuate hatred towards them"

they go "well, I do all of this, and I'm a good person, so those filthy Jews Zionists must secretly control the media!"

It's especially weird when they know better than to do this to any other minority, but somehow when it's Jews it's acceptible as long as you call them Zionists before hate-criming them.

This is probably why the denial is so high, though. They HAVE to believe leftist antisemitism isn't a problem, because if they believe it's a problem then THEY are the problem, and that interferes with their mental image of themselves as Righteous Revolutionaries.

I am on bended knee begging the rest of my fellow USians to stop being so self-absorbed.

Like really. I live in Spain. I've lived here for years now. A funny thing happens when you don't live in the USA: you have to go out of your way to engage with certain aspects of US culture, and it's very easy to let most of that shit slide. Even if you're from there and are used to this cultural liturgical calendar.

There was more reporting around here on Antonio Banderas's projects last year than there was on Barbie and Oppenheimer combined. They report on the Goyas for two weeks before the ceremony and the night of. They have a blip the day after the Oscars and the main focus is "Did any Spaniards win? Did any Spaniards show up? Also here's who got the big four awards".

It is honestly embarrassing to see Americans unironically arguing that the entire world schedules its wartime actions around, checking my notes, an award ceremony by and for Americans that nobody outside the US cares about unless they personally had a piece submitted.

Nobody cares about this but people who make this argument in seriousness. And the reason you care is because your "activism" is a performance piece you do on Tumblr so you can pretend you're a good person.

israeli/jewish & palestinian/muslim media: tonight marks the first night of ramadan

americans: I BET ISRAEL WILL USE THE OSCARS TO ACT

israel/gaza: that’s to…night?

I think you're right about this creating empathy burnout, and that's the goal.

Part of radicalization is no longer being able to perceive other people as people. It is objectification, but of a kind we don't like recognizing. It's weirdly hard to acknowledge it when there isn't (say) a feminist framework describing how the objectification works.

So let's use board games. In Ameritrash board games, the lowest unit of play is a chit. Chits are small bits of colored pressed cardboard with symbols printed on them, often used to track status changes in-game. Most Ameritrash games come with far more chits than you will ever need. The chit can be replaced by a slip of paper stating its value (the original meaning of "chit" is "voucher") and nothing in gameplay is meaningfully changed. You move your chits from one pile to another and that changes their value, but only inside the bounds of a specific game.

Outside of that, they are meaningless and worthless. Nobody's selling chits online. Nobody trades them. If you spill your soda onto a pile of them, you can throw them away or dry them out and it's whatever, nobody cares.

When I saw the brief burst of fame awarded to Bushnell, I was initially horrified. But once I thought about it, it made sense. He was a chit to the pro-Pals. He had moved from the Enemy Colonizer pile to the Brave Martyr pile. That changed his value, but only so long as the game lasted. And the game isn't "the war" or "defeating and destroying Israel" or even "driving all the Jews off Tumblr". The game is "hurting as many Jews as I can".

The game only lasted about two weeks. That's because most Jews online, quite sensibly, blocked everything having to do with Bushnell and everyone talking about him. At that point, the chit of his life moved from Brave Martyr to the discard pile, and they all stopped talking about him. He had no more value. He was discarded.

The purpose of traumatizing themselves, other than (linking to my own work on this subject here) pretending to believe they are Good People doing Good Work, is to make it easier for them to pretend to believe that their enemies and allies are all objects being shoved around the gameboard of Earth in the great sociopolitical struggle of Revolution! The Board Game!.

Posting untagged gore does not make sense as an activist move. It does make sense if you realize they perceive posting untagged gore as a magical spell in their Ameritrash game that will draw X number of chits from the Evil Colonizing Jew pile and put them in the discard pile, even if they themselves take Y Sanity damage to pull the spell off.

Last serious post from me for now, but every time I see people insist they have to talk about the conflict, that they HAVE to witness the horrors, retweeting untagged and uncensored real life gore and all it's just disheartening.

All I can think about is the therapists I know being told not to consume true crime content, to monitor their news intake to prevent empathetic burnout. Same thing I was taught. Because consuming the horrors you can't do anything about dulls you to it.

You aren't helping anyone, hell it's only hurting to spam post ACTUAL REAL GORE. And excuse my language, but I can't trust any "activist" who does this. It's why I've blocked so many people really, because it's not about protesting war, or advocating for a peaceful solution, or actually caring about the real people affected, it's about internet clout. Because now, you can get brownie points for driving yourself to a near second hand trauma.

I do think a lot of watermelon activists need to step back and reexamine what they're doing. Especially when it comes to their xenophobia, thing for suffering, and antisemitism. All it's doing is ruining their sense of empathy.

It makes more sense if you interpret "pro-Palestinian political action on Tumblr" as just another fandom these people have joined.

It makes even more sense if you realize that they understand very well that they cannot free anybody with their fandom activities... so they must be trying to accomplish something else. Otherwise, what's the point? Drawing your favorite character in the pan-Arabic flag colors and spamming pro-Hamas and anti-Jewish slogans in fandom spaces frees no one.

What it does do is:

Make Jews in their fandom feel unsafe enough to continue interacting with them, silencing their voices

Allow themselves to choose to continue pretending to believe that they are Good People Doing Good Work and that fanworks which only a few dozen people on a niche social media site view will Free Palestine

And.... ahhh. Now it all makes sense.

people will have "this is my art/fandom blog!!! nothing else!!!! just a sideblog for art or fandom!!!!" and then every other post going back the past six months is "i want all jews dead. coexisting on the same planet as a jew makes you complicit in their evil jew crimes and you must atone by giving yourself heart palpitations on twitter dot com" like what about that is fandom dipshit

What happens is the same thing that happens in most toxic fandoms. I know others have made the obvious "piss on the poor" jokes, but it's important to analyze how this isn't merely "kids these days don't read".

This is people choosing to act like they can't read.

People see that a post relates to their fandom (pro-Palestinian online slacktivism, in this case). They cannot read the post in its entirety. If they do, they might see an argument which pokes holes in their current publicly-stated belief system. It could mean that they are wrong, and they would (no hyperbole, this is the actual case) they would prefer to be dead than to be wrong.

The easiest thing to do is to pretend they have never encountered a persuasive argument from their ideological enemies. To pretend to believe that no such counterargument exists. To pretend that their enemies are simply Bad People who are morally bankrupt subhuman monsters.

They vaguely scan the post, their eyes semi-glazing over (or half-listening to their screen readers), until they encounter a word or phrase with which they strongly disagree. In an average fandom post, that might be evidence that the poster is pro- or anti- or comshipper, or that they ship something the toxic fan disagrees with, or that they like a part of the canon the toxic fan has rejected. For pro-Pal fans, it will be phrases and words indicating that the poster is Jewish, that the poster does not believe Israel should be glassed from orbit, and/or that the poster might disagree with one or two tactics engaged in by pro-Pals (even if they themselves are pro-Pal).

At this point, the toxic pro-Pal fan slams the reblog button and screeches COLONIZER ZIO SUBHUMAN SCUM, adds in photographs of dead bodies, hits post, and feels a warm, hateful glow in their heart. They pretend to believe that this glow is actually the feeling of success and accomplishment. They know, just as anyone who reads their "responses" (which aren't responses, as they, by design, do not address arguments they refuse to read) will know the truth: that is not accomplishment, but sadistic glee.

What I'm describing here is a pretty well-documented phenomenon. You see it a lot in high-control groups, aka cults. Members are trained carefully to ignore what non-members are saying, only latch onto specific key words and trigger phrases, and spit out the same response every time. This is part of what can be called a "cult personality", the reason why all members of a high-control group act the same and appear to think the same and say the same things to the same provocation.

You also can see it in, as I mentioned, really toxic fandoms where fighting's all that happens anymore, as well as in plenty of political groups, even ones that lack a Strong True Leader. "High-control", after all, just means that something is controlling group members and demanding their devotion. Often, that's a person, but just as often, it's an idea.

To read arguments from the Evil People, even for a second, is to show insufficient devotion to The Idea Of Palestine, which is all pro-Pals care about--because real Palestinians are too complicated and inconvenient to fit into The Idea.

How the fuck does someone get "what's happening to Palestinians is good actually" from "I think antisemitism is a bad thing and people need a more nuanced understanding of this conflict than they currently have and they *really* need to learn the actual history of the region rather than the bollocks they're swallowing."

The reading comprehension on this site is truly in the fucking toilet.

Woke up to this in my AO3 inbox (after getting a mere 5 hours of sleep). I’m gonna delete the comment and block the user, but just… do you honestly think changing your username and pfp on a fanfiction archive website is going to free Palestine? Or will you finally just admit it’s a fandom for you, with some suspiciously easy villains for you to hate?

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

The pro-Pal fandom on Tumblr is showing us what would have happened if Moffat had said "Johnlock will never be canon, and it's all because of the Jews".

something stinks and its the fact that “antizionists” on tumblr (and irl i assume) are the amalgamation of years of fandom and stan culture. its a superwholock for the masses

If they keep empowering anti-democratic authoritarians by not voting, there will, in fact, come a time when no one will be elected again.

They just think that their team will be the one who gets to wield absolute power afterwards.

why do you guys talk like you think not voting means no one gets elected

The guillotine is like the hammer and sickle, the red flag, the olive uniforms, and phonetically memorizing party slogans used in China or North Korea.

It's cosplay.

They would not use it "correctly" because they never intend to use it at all. They only want to send gifs of falling guillotine blades to one another in Discord in between rounds of gaming on Steam and livestreaming on Twitch and then getting onto X and complaining about corporatism and filming TikToks about how billionaires suck.

They're actually perfectly content with megacorporations ruling their lives. They encourage it and everything they do lines corporate pockets and gives billionaires more billions to work with. They only care about the aesthetic of their corporate cyberdystopia. Let them fantasize that they are really cyberpunk revolutionaries opposing The System despite being Plugged In and they'll stay Plugged In and obedient forever.

I wouldn't trust y'all with the guillotine like y'all would make reign of terror 2 with petty shit like well this dentist has a nice house and perhaps a few decorative pillows while some fucking billionaire sells you the parts to build the guillotine from his private beachfront property

to the pro-pals still mad rafah and gaza and palestine are no longer trending and tumblr that isn't tankies cares about fandom again and isn't even putting little palestine flags on their fanart

a very seethe and cope that your little trend is dying

I would like to suggest that the memetic spread of the phrase "media consumption" is a huge driver behind this behavior. (I will appear to veer off to talk about fandom for a moment, but it is illustrative and will come back to peoples' attitudes about politics, I promise.)

Perceiving yourself as an audience member who is interacting with media will provoke a particular set of attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors. Perceiving yourself as a consumer who uncritically swallows media with no input on your own provokes an entirely different set of attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors.

Ever wondered why fandom folks nowadays say things like "Why are you shipping that when it's not even canon?" It's because they see themselves as consumers who passively receive What To Ship from the Unalterable Canon. They swallow What To Ship and demand more and more and MORE of What To Ship and nothing else.

Ever wondered why modern fandom is focused on making certain ships or things be canon, instead of creating fanworks for those things? It's because only the stuff they swallow as Canon counts for them. Fandom is perceived as useless unless it produces the real-world result of Making The Thing I Like Be Canon Now.

Ever wondered why fandom produces pro/anti discourse so viciously these days? It's because antis are afraid that anyone in the fandom producing problematic works will reflect badly on the Canon and possibly make the problematic thing become Canon, because fandom is for uncritically receiving Canon and then voting with your money to potentially alter Canon, right?

And have you wondered why modern fandom treats itself as disposable? Why modern fans will purge all their likes/reblogs/self-produced fandom material once they've lost interest in the fandom? Well, they're acting like it's something to be consumed--and they've sucked all the marrow out of that fandom's bones. So now, nobody's fanworks have any value to them anymore. Why leave your fanworks up for others to enjoy in the future? This is all about you and your individual consumption experience!

This attitude being applied to what I've called "politics as fandom" for months now is depressing, dangerous, and alas, obvious. People don't manage their news access, they binge it like it's a Netflix series that just dropped a new season. They follow all the BNFs who provide them with the correct headcanons, and then they repeatedly reblog "news" that's really headcanons with the hope that this "news" will become canon if they all just repeat it enough. Their advocacy is precisely the same kind of sad stuff I saw from early 2010s-era fandom of "If we all harass the creators enough on Twitter, then our ship will become canon!!"--entirely self-contained on specific sites on the Internet, driven by anger and boredom and not by real belief, deliberately ignorant of how advocacy works because this isn't advocacy, it's abuse.

And whether it does or it doesn't work, they abandon the "cause" eventually, because it was never a cause. It was something to consume and they've consumed all of it and now it's just bones on the plate. And they'll purge whatever Big News Event they've consumed from their blogs and move on like nothing ever happened to the next Big News Media Event fandom.

Only... this isn't about fictional characters, this is real life. So this behavior isn't just embarrassing. It's also causing real-world harm, primarily to people who actually ARE affected by the Big News Event, but--unlike fictional characters being kinned and stanned--actually exist and are able to see what is being said about them.

Continuously just... Baffled by how people on this website and elsewhere talk about global politics and real life conflicts like they're fandoms. Profoundly embarrassing, for one, but also deeply frustrating.