https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215983733Stories like this are hard to read due to personal pronouns. DUmmies are all trying to outdo each other and show how woke they are by accepting the ludicrous 'they' to refer to a singular person, then they go to great lengths to show just how simple it all really is! I'm just going to post a couple of things then ask a question at the end. Maybe a DUmmie will come enlighten us all.
Nevilledog (29,987 posts)
They Were Best Friends and Cosplay Stars. Then Snow Killed Helen
Tweet text:
Benjamin Goggin
@BenjaminGoggin
Jaw-dropping and gripping reporting about how a cosplay tiktok star killed an Oberlin freshman from @ejdickson https://rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/cosplay-tiktok-manslaughter-yandere-snow-helen-hastings-1234452/… via @RollingStone
helen rose cosplay death
They Were Best Friends and Cosplay Stars. Then Snow Killed Helen
Helen Hastings, 19, was shot in the head by her best friend, Yandere Snow. But after Snow was charged with manslaughter and kept posting, the cosplay community was left to wonder what really happened
rollingstone.com
7:22 PM · Oct 25, 2021
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/cosplay-tiktok-manslaughter-yandere-snow-helen-hastings-1234452/
This is how Helen Hastings, 18, would have spent the past year: they would have been a sophomore at Oberlin College, a small liberal-arts school about an hour outside Cleveland, playing Dungeons and Dragons every Saturday in the dank basement of Burton Hall on North Quad, trying to sidetrack the game by reciting the entirety of the “Shrimp Heaven Now” dialogue from the podcast My Brother, My Brother, and Me. Helen, who used both the “she” and “them” pronouns, would have chased her Siberian therapy cat Willa down the halls of their dorm, picking up the tufts of fur she shed between her paws. They would have flounced around the snow-blanketed campus in shorts or a floral skirt, refusing to put on a coat even when their friends begged them to; and when the frigid Ohio winters started to thaw, they would have spent lazy Sunday afternoons in the swing chair on the lawn outside their dorm.
She would have completed the first year of what she hoped would be a triple-degree in art, psychology, and neurobiology; maybe she would have decided to focus on only one of those things, or two, or none at all. They would have gone to Anime Matsuri, the giant cosplay convention held in Houston every year, where maybe they would have dressed as Negasonic Teenage Warhead, the surly mutant telepath from the Deadpool franchise; Helen bore such a strong resemblance to the character that kids at cons would routinely stop in their tracks. She could have done an internship, in art or calligraphy or biochemistry. She had done bacterial microbiology work at the lab of her mother, who works in molecular biology, the prior spring, and was excited about the opportunity to possibly have her name put on a paper. They could have traveled around the country. They could have done anything.
Instead, Helen was killed; shot in the head in an apparent accident by her friend, a TikTok-famous cosplayer. Mary-Anne Oliver-Snow, a.k.a. Yandere Freak, a.k.a. Yandere Snow, a.k.a. Snow the Salt Queen, was a minor celebrity in the cosplay community, racking up 1.6 million TikTok followers for their performances of various Japanese anime characters. Snow, who goes by “they/them” pronouns, was particularly well-known for cosplaying characters from a series called Danganronpa, a Japanese video game in which teens are locked inside a school with a murderous bear and forced to fight to the death.
Snow, 23, was the leader of a tight-knit social circle including Hastings that was extremely popular on the Houston cosplay circuit. “They were like celebrities,” says Gem Piinker, a friend of Helen’s in the local community. “I hate to admit it, but the drama that follows Snow is what brought [that group] together. There was always something to talk about.” Snow was also notorious for stoking controversy among cosplayers in Houston, where they lived. “They were the Regina George of the community,” says Dolly Lace, a Houston cosplayer who knew Snow.
*snip*
Scrivener7 (38,810 posts)
1. Not related to this mishigas, but we need a better non-gendered singular pronoun.
"They" is plural and this usage makes communication less clear.
WhiskeyGrinder (14,154 posts)
2. "They" has been used as singular pronoun for centuries.
Silent3 (11,440 posts)
10. True, but when used as a singular, they/them has implied an unknown or generic person...
...and not a specific known individual. I'll use whatever pronouns someone wants me to use, that doesn't stop "they/them" from sounding awkward, or even misleading, in many cases.
WhiskeyGrinder (14,154 posts)
12. Actually, it now does refer to a known person. Language is always changing.
On and on the bickering goes until you come to the end and see this;
BlackSkimmer (42,280 posts)
16. I hit a paywall. Why did Snow shoot Hastings?
Can anyone summarize?
WhiskeyGrinder (14,154 posts)
17. They were drunk and playing with a gun. The story got attention because Snow's content
seemed to be referencing the shooting (more blood, etc.).
WhiskeyGrinder, you were the one arguing THEY can be used singularly without confusion. Please come tell me who was playing with the gun? Which one of them, or both??
Sorry, I'm never going to play the pronoun game, and this is one very obvious reason why. I read an article about Demi Lovato (I think? I have no idea who it is, but she wants to be called 'they'), and the article was about how she was traveling somewhere and they were approached by aliens from another world. By the end of the article I was really confused because I couldn't remember who her traveling companion was, so I re-read it. What a waste of my time. By the time I read that article the second time I realized I'd been had, because she was alone.
KC
