>WSB is notorious for also posting a lot of anti-LGBT slurs (for example, one of WSBs favorite insults is calling someone a "gay bear", or more commonly a rainbow emoji followed by a bear emoji, or even calling people f*gs).
For what is worth, they pretty much never use it actually insultingly, and do not seem to harbor any ill-will against LGBT people (and some of them are lgbt). They also mostly use those words to describe themselves, and do it more as a nod to boiler room talk/4chan.
>Sometimes on the Discord server there are just people spamming the N word for no reason.
As far as I know, a lot of that is done by bots, though possibly set by other users to prank the discord.
Agree. I'm fairly certain a lot of the posts are self-deprecating - eg. "my wife's boyfriend", "i'm a r**d", "someone smarter than me", "i'm a gay bear". My wife doesn't have a boyfriend (hopefully), but I'd say that in a post there.
This isn't necessarily inflammatory. It is - like it or not - WSB's culture. It is not meant to be taken literally.
It is a frothy place, full of herd mentality. That is part of the clique. Going against that does incur the same tone of language against you. But it's not for who you are personally. It's the same language they use to describe the "in group", but it _seems_ worse to the out group.
Is the intent to mock people? No. Does it mean anything negative? No, 99% of it is literally re. the financials. Are there bad people in every group? Yes.
It's not, and for the record I said "gay bear", not just "gay". For that matter, if pressed I would identify as pansexual. The intent is that it's not meant to be degrading.
Please don't go looking for people to be bad guys - maybe instead assume good intent. You don't have to nit everything people say to find something to prove them wrong. You didn't focus on anything I was communicating - you tried to pick an argument with the smallest aspect of the thread.
I’m not nitpicking anything. Your argument was that it’s all just a joke, that calling yourself gay was self-deprecating. “I’m gay, I’m a retard, laugh at me.”
And now you contradict yourself saying it’s not meant to be degrading because it’s all just a joke.
You’re proving the toxic culture that those kinds of communities ferment.
"gay bears" is a play on words. Bear is a term in the gay community, just like bull is a term in the hotwife community (my wife's bf jokes apply here). Jokes happen both ways in WSB, straight or gay!
It's self deprecating to go against the market and be a bear in the biggest bull run of the decade. It's foolish to do so. I and many others being bearish have lost money. This is the entire point behind GME.
Like I said, it's all about the financials - not about you as a person.
On 4chan, “-fag” is essentially a nominalizing suffix at this point that is semantically interchangeable with “-man”; it lacks any connotation of positivity or negativity.
Not only do I second this, I would like to expand on it. This has been usage for at least a decade. Are you a musician? You are a "musicfag." And it is to such extremes that heterosexuals are "straightfags" and homosexuals are "gayfags."
It is indeed this way on many parts of the internet, including many parts of Discord and I.R.C..
I can remember this usage on NewGrounds in the early 2000s already. — I feel it's kind of sad that it's a part of internet culture that is becoming more and more obscure as the internet is experiencing an endless november of “normalfags”.
My prior for the majority of a reddit-based Discord server community being pro-LGBT is so astronomically low that the usage of that kind of language is unsettling to say the least. I'm sure there are plenty of well-meaning people just participating in the banter and picking up the 4chan lexicon, but I'm also sure there are a lot of people that use these words with no irony or awareness. It's like being scared to make an ironic offensive joke with your family because you feel like your cousin might laugh just a little too much. I'd be very cautious about assuming lack of explicitly-lgbt sentiment is the same as pro-lgbt-sentiment, especially given the culture wsb has branched from.
Given that's the same culture obsessed with traps, it's pretty clear that it hates fags, not gays.
They're not 'pro-LGBT' because that language is stultified, boring, soul-rending mainstream corporate-speak. Speaking that way is beneath human dignity.
"Are you pro-LGBT?" "Do I have a problem with gays, you mean?"
Better to be a human wallowing in the filth than a socially correct bugman standing clean, sterile, toothless to attention when the commisars come by.
It seems to hate “gays”; what it doesn't hate is homoerotica. It seems to take it's cues more from the Græco-Roman or Japanese interpretations that reject “intransient sexual orientations” as a concept altogether.
They simply want to look at pretty males without being bothered by now having to define themselves with some label that behaves more like a tribe than it does a truly descriptive term.
Most of the Japanese fiction that deals with same-sex love isn't phrased in terms of “It's okay to be gay.” but rather “Love has nothing to do with gender.”.
'Pro-LGBT' wasn't meant as corporate-speak, I genuinely just meant it as indicating a positive or even neutral sentiment towards those under the LGBT umbrella. I do agree that "Are you pro-LGBT?" as a question is not useful, as it almost feels like "Please signal your political affiliation" at this point.
I will say that the obsession with traps does for some reason feel to me as unrelated to views on homosexuality, which is weird, and possibly a misunderstanding of mine.
I meant that thinking in terms of 'LGBT' being a distinct category in your conception of the world is a worldview foreign to a lot of *chan people.
They don't slice up the world the same way you do; whoever made up that word put gays, lesbians, and transsexuals together for political reasons, and left-wing political activists your median chan-users are not- why use the language of someone else, someone who despises you and wants to crush you?
From their point of view, the mental theatre that contains actors named 'LGBT' and 'Diversity, Inclusion and Equity' as front-and-centre characters is a cold, dead place-
whereas their native memescape, filled with Colourful Words, traps, arguments, the cacophany of 'hateful memes', is alive and vibrant by comparison, if tinged by a deep despair at the leaching of vitality from the world.
It's why the NPC meme caught on.
Traps are anime, and so are idealised abstractions as much as anime girls are. They're also tinged by imported japanese culture, I'd assume.
For what is worth, they pretty much never use it actually insultingly, and do not seem to harbor any ill-will against LGBT people (and some of them are lgbt). They also mostly use those words to describe themselves, and do it more as a nod to boiler room talk/4chan.
>Sometimes on the Discord server there are just people spamming the N word for no reason.
As far as I know, a lot of that is done by bots, though possibly set by other users to prank the discord.