cousinshelley

[cousinshelley]

Hemlock Grove 3x09 Damascus

[cousinshelley]

"It's just a memory of something beautiful."

[cousinshelley]

The Exorcist | 2x10 Unworthy

[cousinshelley]

[cousinshelley]

Thandiwe Newton and Rodrigo Santoro in Westworld season 2 episode 1 (2018) dir. Richard J. Lewis

[cousinshelley]

Lie To Me (2009-2011) 2x20 | “Exposed” 

[cousinshelley]

Source

[cousinshelley]

What We Do In The Shadows (2014) // What We Do In The Shadows (6x11)

[cousinshelley]

[cousinshelley]

FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS 1.6 | Bowie (2007)

[cousinshelley]

warm girl give me strength

[cousinshelley]

The fun part is that you could shuffle the pictures and captions and it would work every time.

[cousinshelley]

[cousinshelley]

"Not Crying" Flight of the Conchords | 1.01 Sally

[cousinshelley]

[cousinshelley]

Never forget it, fellow fans.

dont make me tap the sign

i know it ultimately trails back to the corporations but i just wanna say i think it’s heinous that old heterosexual men are STILL seemingly always in showrunner positions for major television shows, or at least they are always the ones getting their ideas greenlit. and so the most accessible popular media (the narratives we collectively see) are determined by these dudes who do not relate to You. they don’t care about what or who You’d like to see represented onscreen. sometimes this is affected by diversity in the writer’s room, etc., but for the most part everything must be dumbed down to what THEY THINK an average middle-american audience member can tolerate—and it’s insulting to everyone’s intelligence! It’s nearly 2025 and we’re all supposed to accept that certain kinds of stories are not worth telling (on that scale) because why? because it’s potentially alienating to a demographic that already has decades of screen representation to enjoy?

SO let’s talk about how showrunners/networks are well aware of viewership demographics and the profitability of fandom. Take a show like wwdits, where a lot of its notoriety had to do with its general edginess and, importantly, its appeal to LGBTQ audiences: the creators intentionally featured a mlm will-they/won’t-they at the center of their show, to the point that it was arguably the driving force behind continued viewership. It’s the carrot on a stick. “How will we keep profiting off of these queer viewers? Make them hope. Textually suggest the prospect of a fully realized gay romance and then tease these viewers for making ~homoerotic fanart and fanfiction~ like that wasn’t the plan all along!”

Your fanwork, whether it’s drawn or written, is free publicity for the source material. You Need To Know that. Because the corporate bastards Have Known That. that’s why supernatural was on for 15 seasons. Not because the plot itself was worth that much, but because the supporters of the central gay ship MADE it profitable. And baiting them only fans the flames (basically, it drives people crazy. spn still trends on here like once a week, 4 years later). & they want you crazy. they want online engagement. they want it trending on tumblr and twitter. They believe that if they give you what you want (canon gay rep) then the show will instantly lose profitability.

So. That’s what it comes down to. Your dedication means nothing to them but job security... and if you dare to take the bait and hope for the writers to fulfill what they VERY deliberately set up, they’re gonna straight up mock you. In the end, they’re just gonna fumble all of it, because they never cared about You or even the characters and their stories. Why bother if it doesn’t seem profitable anymore, right?

God it’s all so cynical. Keep writing fanfiction. Keep making fanart. Keep engaging in fandom spaces. Do it because YOU have passion. Do it because YOU care about a story or characters that mean something to you. Do it because we, as the folk, as the common people, need to have some way to control these narratives. We need to create our own hope, even if we get belittled for it. It’s all we have to combat the cynicism.

[cousinshelley]

Has anyone else recovered from that embarrassing thing they said when they were twelve? No me either