#(not saying there is anything aggressive on my posts. just a random example !)

[solargeist]

btw I don’t care abt the whole reblog/likes ratio thing so dont worry yourself pressuring people on my behalf 👍

[tarotofhope]

You can apply the below observations to both, your vedic and western charts. I'm not generalizing anything or anyone, these are just my random personal observations, don't let it ruin your day or week(for some people).

Note: I've noticed that some people were arguing in the comment section, when I posted part 1 of these astro observations. Please don't do that. If you do not agree, just ignore the post and move on, don't come fighting and arguing in the comment section saying, "We are not like this, we are not like that." I don't understand, those are not fixed opinions, definitions or judgements neither am I pointing out fingers at someone specific, so please do not take it personally. If it is something positive, people always come and accept easily then why not the negative stuff? Astrology is vast and people are complex. So many combinations or placements explain so many things, but it may not apply to everyone. Even I do not resonate with some observations(positive and negative, both) but I do not go bursting out in the comment section. If people won't observe and find common points between placements/signs, then tell me how else would people study astrology? Those observations are not written after just observing 1 or 2 people. If any of your placements are mentioned and you do not resonate with it, then you might have some other placements which make you an exception, don't take it to heart. If you have so much problem then don't read observations, only read tarot.

☾✴ The more Aries/Scorpio/1st House placements you have in the big 6, the more aggressive, assertive, impulsive and impatient you are.

☾✴ Sun conjunct Mars in the 4th House placement will give the native a profession/passion their father won't like and support of, there will be strong resentment and disapproval from his side.

☾✴ Aquarius sun people are misunderstood personalities and they either have a huge friend circle or they like to be alone, nothing in between.

☾✴ Capricorn Sun people are so attracted to the mystical and magnetic scorpios, they love their aura and energy. Same goes with Aries and Scorpios too. Capricorn Sun people also adore kind and generous people.

☾✴ People with dominant earth placements have a stable long term profession and/or more than one property in their name. They mostly leave some legacy behind if they're popular and famous, people respect them a lot and they have many loyal fans and admirers. To mention a few: Elvis Presley, Beyoncé, Michael Jackson, Adele, Ratan Tata, Gurdas Maan, A.R. Rahman.

☾✴ Now, this is very specific, I can't sit still if I don't mention this. When Sagittarius Sun singers and composers break up with someone, they create the biggest hit number after that. That song gets to the top in the charts. For example: Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus. I love how these natives quickly reach a glow up after a huge blow up, maybe this happens because it hits them hard when they soon realize that their life and peace of mind is much more precious and they shouldn't waste it on someone who's not worth it.

☾✴ Ketu/South Node in the 5th house/7th house, Ketu conjunct Venus/Saturn/Moon will make the native less or not at all interested in having children and/or romantic relationships. These people have their focus on other things in life such as self growth, career, ambition, passion and so on.(If these people have strong martian placements then they would want intimate relationships or marriage but no children.)

☾✴ Leo, Taurus, Capricorn and Aries Sun men have veiny hands and arms.

Love, light, peace & hope to you🌸🍁🌻🌼

Thank you so much for being here. I post PAC & Astrology Observations. Do love and support by reblogging, liking or following.

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[physalian]

Writing Exposition (Or Turning a Textbook into a Story)

Exposition concerns every facet of your work from character descriptions, backstories, and relationships, to world history, geography, religions/faiths/superstitions, politics, and current events. Whenever the author takes an aside to say “Joe, Bob’s second cousin, said ‘hello’,” the exposition is establishing that Joe is Bob’s cousin.

So shaming a story for its poor handling of exposition is like shaming a movie for bad visual effects. Yes, some of it is probably bad, but I guarantee that you did not notice every single VFX shot in the movie, and you weren’t supposed to.

Most examples of bad exposition occur when the following happens:

Informed Character A exposits to Informed Character B and tacks on “as you know” with full sincerity

Random Important Detail gets dropped in conversation that does not fit the tone or direction of conversation

Character suddenly monologues about The Thing unprompted

Convenient Breaking News Alerts

Character, out-of-character, begins monologuing about The Thing even when prompted

The pacing screeches to a halt so the Exposition Train can thunder past

Exposition exists to give information, and in order for a reader to understand a story, not all of it can or should be agonized over making perfect. Settings have to be established. Character names and relationships have to be understood. “Telling” over “showing” is, in my opinion, perfectly fine when the “showing” would take more lines, effort, and priority over a single inconsequential sentence. Heck, sometimes the “telling” is better than the “showing”. The trick to understanding when, how, and to what degree to give exposition is making it motivated.

What is motivated exposition?

See this post about character descriptions and the plight of the cliche “mirror” trope for unmotivated exposition.

Motivating your exposition means giving it a reason to exist where it does, prompted by the story you’re telling. Citing the “mirror” trope: I can have my character wake up and describe themselves to you, but in doing so, that rarely tells the audience anything more than just what to picture as they read. Or, I can have my character description spread out as those details become relevant. They’re describing their hair color and texture as it begins to irritate or distract them, telling us both what it looks like, and what our character thinks of it, and a little bit about their personality in how they treat it.

I can open the first chapter with a long-winded editorial about the long lost king destined to unite the shattered kingdoms, or I can wait until the tale becomes important to my characters to tell.

I can spin tapestries about politics before you’ve even met your hero, or I can wait until those politics begin to cause the hero problems and then invite the hero to talk about why those politics cause problems.

See this post about pacing and ensuring your scenes always do at least two things at once. Motivated exposition takes bland information’s singular purpose (to inform) and gives it flavor in coloring the personalities of the characters who give and receive it.

When to give exposition

Caveat: Not all front-loaded exposition is poorly-handled. Everyone loves the Star Wars title crawls because they’re a part of the episodic movie experience. Whether it’s a cheap way to deliver information is irrelevant.

Most prologues exist to front-load exposition and, because I love using Lord of the Rings as my shining example in every post, the trilogy opens with a lengthy speedrun of the main villain, some of the important pieces on the chessboard, the importance of the ring, the smeared reputation Aragorn must live up to and repair, and an idea of the stakes should the heroes lose. Not only is it a prologue, it’s a narrated prologue. There’s an impressive amount of information given in not a lot of time.

Last Airbender begins every single episode with a reminder about the 100 year war and the aggression of the Fire Nation and the purpose of the avatar.

With that said, prologues and title crawls are their own tangle of weeds.

As I said above, exposition should be given when the story gives it reason to exist. Don’t talk about the politics until you have a scene where discussing politics is relevant.

If you need to establish your cool, unique magic system, wait until you have a character using that magic and give it in little chewable bites. That character likely isn’t using every trick in the book right then and there. If they wrote Last Airbender as a novel and started explaining the other three bending styles the second Katara levitated some water, it would read sloppy and slog.

Or, leave the exposition as a mystery to be told later. Make your audience crave the hero’s backstory, piecing together little hints throughout the narrative until just the right moment comes along where your hero would realistically start spilling the beans about themselves. Have other characters frustrated at the lack of information. Have other characters missassume and be wrong about the information they think they know.

Have your characters crave knowledge about their world as much as your audience does.

How to give exposition

Exposition can be given three ways: Via the narrator, via dialogue, or via images or texts observed by the narrator (think news broadcasts or the front page of the paper, books, letters, videos, diary pages).

No matter which avenue you give exposition through, the less random it is, the less “hand of the author” the audience sees. Characters given a lucky break by a convenient breaking news alert is a mini deus ex machina —- the heroes do not earn their victory, it’s just given to them. They are not active in the plot making decisions, they are being railroaded by information as it falls into place before them.

Narrated exposition

The narrator’s internal monologue will interrupt the story to explain whatever needs explaining in that moment. The difference between it reading like a textbook and reading like a story is whether or not this information is important to the narrator.

Meaning, what does my hero feel about this new information? Katniss Everdeen in Hunger Games exposits the entire book because she’s alone for a fair chunk of it with no one to talk to, and she’s no stranger to the politics and history of her world. And yet, she has such strong feelings about everything she says that it doesn’t feel like she’s just giving information for the sake of informing. Everything she says and how she says it reflects on her personality and how she views her world.

Dialogue exposition

When Katniss is clueless about the tribute parade process and all the nuances of Capital life, how she asks about this information and how Effie, Cinna, and Haymich tell her also speaks to their personalities and biases about what they’re saying. In essence: Their exposition is in-character, and, thus, services their characters.

This is the complete opposite of when two informed characters exposit to each other information both already know for the sake of the audience because the author has no other way to give said information. A prime example is the hero happening to overhear two minions discussing The Plan dropping lines like “as you know” (which makes it worse every time).

The only time “as you know” works is when it’s in character. As in, the villain expositing to their minion they think is stupid and the minion reacting to that assumption appropriately. Or, the heroes are gathered to discuss The Plan and the leader of the meeting goes “as you know” because that happens in the real world. Bonus points if some characters are irritated by the redundant recap.

Exposition via dialogue also opens the door for lies, half-truths, and characters simply being wrong or blinded by their biases. Or, characters simply being ignorant of the world they live in. In Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is like 3,000 years old and has been all over Middle Earth. It doesn’t break the plot to have Gandalf exposit because he would realistically have witnessed or have deep knowledge about historical events and politics. Aragorn, too, is 87, and has ranged all over the place. He’s the future king and thus had better know his history and politics. Aragorn expositing makes sense.

Say what you will about Last Jedi but it has a prime example of nuanced exposition: Kylo Ren and Luke Skywalker have incredibly different perspectives on if/how Luke attempted murder on his nephew. There’s 3 sides to every story and the audience is never shown the truth. Had this been given in the title crawl, it would have lost much of its potency.

Dialogue also nurtures the relationships between the characters talking. Telling stories brings people together. If a character is sharing their backstory, why are they telling the narrator, and what does this mean to them as they tell it? If a soldier is sharing his grizzled leader’s backstory around a campfire, how does his relationship with his leader impact how he tells that story, what language he uses, how he sounds, the expressions on his face?

Third party exposition

Information given from an object can be incredibly hit or miss, depending on how hard the heroes worked to obtain it, and whether or not the object in question is meaningful to the heroes.

In the Assassin's Creed games, you abandon the gameplay in whatever historical era you're playing in to watch cutscene after cutscene of exposition (specifically referencing the Ezio Trilogy) by characters no one cares about, giving information that no one cares about, when we'd all rather just keep playing the game.

You can literally have a character read from a textbook, logbook, or daily minutes. What matters is how that info reads, and how the character responds to it. Is the information prejudiced or saturated with bigoted language? Is the mere existence of it where it is horrifying?

In the Mines of Moria (Lord of the Rings) Gimli learns that all his kin have been murdered by goblins once he sees their corpses all impaled with goblin arrows. Later, he finds his dead cousin’s crypt containing a dead dwarf cradling a book that tells of the downfall of Moria. The log entry isn’t finished, and the penmanship rapidly degrades as the dwarf writing it likely dies from his wounds, ending with the ominous, “We cannot get out, we cannot get out, they are coming.”

Had Gandalf warned Gimli ahead of time that all the dwarves were dead, or had they never found the crypt or figured out the owners of the arrows and simply were told “oh yeah we’re about to be attacked by goblins, I suspect they’re the reason Moria is a ghost town” that would have lost all emotional impact, and character development for Gimli.

This doesn’t have to be just objects, get creative! Have the hero watch a parody retelling of the Big Event. Have someone tell it like a ghost story around a campfire. Have it be a crazed rant all across live TV that no one takes seriously. Have six different characters remember it differently and all argue over who’s right. Have someone tell it poorly, thinking it “just a stupid rumor”.

When to withhold exposition

Satisfaction is the death of desire and sometimes uncovering the details of an enticing tidbit of information ruins whatever the audience had imagined to fill in the blanks. In terms of “showing” vs “telling” concerning worldbuilding, deciding whether to have a character speak about the information, or actually writing the scene they’re referring to, is entirely dependant on the story you’re telling.

If you are going to write a flashback, or describe a video of the event, that flashback and video has to be *packed* with as much information as you can cram in there as artfully as you can. Flashbacks and dream sequences take up space and entire scenes and settings need establishing so the audience isn’t floating in the ether trying to follow along. Which tends to mean that the meat of the flashback is barely half of the words you’re now forced to read.

Decide how important it is that the audience sees the incident as it happened, versus told in the aftermath through the biases and flawed memory of another character.

Sometimes the fewest amount of words pack the biggest punch. You can have a shattered soldier describe the battle of which they’re the last survivor in gory detail, or you can have them simply say “it was hell” and let the oomph hit in their expression, how their voice cracks, how vacant their eyes look. The injuries they sustained, the traumas visible in how they hold themselves. At that point, the audience can imagine whatever hell they want. At that point, what you are "showing" (the emotional and physical toll taken on the speaker) is likely way more important than the battle itself.

Concerning pacing — no matter how hard you worked on designing your politics and royal lineages and fantasy geography, odds are if that information isn’t important to your characters, it isn’t important to your readers. It’s not motivated.

I love trivia and fantasy maps as much as everyone else, but I like them on the wikis and next to the table of contents, not interrupting an engaging story.

And, give your audience credit where credit is due. How many fan theories stand on the basis of a few scant lines of narration or zoomed-in snippets of background characters (R+L=J anyone?) and pieces of costume? The mystery is what makes it fun, and I just watched the criminally disappointing second adaptation of the Lightning Thief completely robbed of that mystery every chance they had.

—

In short, the amount of exposition isn’t what makes it well or poorly handled, it’s how and when it’s delivered. Inception is my favorite sci-fi movie and the entire script is exposition, but the way it’s given is entertaining. Motivating your details to exist for a reason, to be given exactly when the time is right and not a moment before, is the spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down.

Make it timely

Make it relevant

Make it important to the cast

Make it earned by the cast

Make it entertaining

[delululand]

hihi could you do what makes enha jealous & how will they act on it?

hiii, I got about 5 messages asking about enhypen jealousy so I think this is a really long awaited post hahaha

I’m incredibly grateful to the engine who asked those questions at the fansign because now we have not just guesses, but literally their answers about the limits

heeseung

actually I was a little surprised that it would be okay for him if his girlfriend went out to dinner with a male friend and talked on the phone, he seemed a little more jealous to me. but okay, we know that texting every day, going to the cinema with male friend and going to an idol fansign would not be okay for him. and if you look at his answers, he is literally the only one who allowed this. and to me he seems like a guy with a calm type of jealousy. like if this was not some kind of open provocation or something rude, he would simply take you away from that guy and would of course be outraged, but rather just grumble like “oh did you see how he flirted with you? fucking asshole…”

jay

first of all, I want to note how thoughtfully I approached questions about this and how carefully tried to answer. I always thought he’s a super protective guy and my suspicions were confirmed. he answered no to literally everything, he is against his girlfriend and male friends talking on the phone, texting every day, going to dinner together, going to the theater, any physical contact (he said that giving a high five is okay and maxim pat on the shoulder) and even when answering about patting on the shoulder, he said something like “probably if she has a lot of male friends, she’s used to it, so ok” and actually I think he's not really ok with it. he's struggling with a kind of protective boyfriend inside and respecting/understanding the other person's personal boundaries like on the one hand he'd like to keep his girlfriend out of it completely, but on the other hand he realizes he can't push and forbid anything. and in a situation that could make him jealous, he would initially try to behave persistently but tactfully, not because it is normal for him that that guy is flirting with you, but because he does not want to make you feel uncomfortable or awkward, however, if the situation were not changed even with his appearance, he absolutely would not have remained silent and showed that guy his place

jake

ohhhh jake my sweet jake…. his playful puppy vibes and even the way he answered these questions... we won't even talk about his tendency to induce jealousy, but okay, the concept of jealous sex in real life always seemed a little strange to me, but JAKE... based on his answers to the questions, he also answered no to everything and if it was something serious, he certainly would not be happy, (but in fact I don’t think that he would really swear or get angry, he would rather be annoyed and discussed this situation asking you don’t communicate with that guy more). however, if it was something like a light momentary flirtation with a random guy, and especially if he knows that you are doing it on purpose to annoy him, I don’t know if you will understand what I mean, but with what intonation he says 이게 뭐야 (what's this) even out of context from his lips it sounds so flirtatiously seductive hahaha. and thinking about this situation, he would absolutely come up to you as soon as you finish the dialogue with that guy and, taking you to a secluded place, pressed you against the wall with the words «oh baby what was that?” and we all know what will happen as soon as you return home

sunghoon

as expected of him he answered no to everything and he answered with such confidence and enthusiasm hahaha. definitely the type who gets jealous easily and kind of shows it right away but not in an aggressive manner. for example, seeing you with another guy, he immediately comes up with a murderous look at him, but smiles sweetly at you and, as if by chance, puts his arm around your shoulders, but if that guy turns out to be dull and continues to flirt with you, then sunghoon would not remain silent and explain to him in a calm commanding tone that you are his girlfriend and what will happen to him if he doesn’t leave now

[nekropsii]

your staunch defense of transfeminine people in a community where we're so routinely mocked and sidelined does not go unnoticed or unappreciated.

you're doing a fantastic thing

Hey, I'm glad it's doing something!! It was... Kind of radicalizing realizing that no one's fucking normal, actually, they just say they are. But the really, really radicalizing thing - the thing that got me to start being very loud and aggressive about it all - was getting hit with wave after wave of misdirected Transmisogyny for two reasons...

I acknowledged Transfem reads of characters exist, and stated that I actually - gasp! - enjoy some of them, even over the popular Transmasc readings of the same characters. Getting hit with backlash for this was expected, but I didn't foresee how that would manifest. Several people - all self-reporting as trans men, weirdly - flooded my notes and inbox talking down to me, treating me like I'm stupid, and that I don't understand Transmasc struggles (I do, I just distinctly was not talking about them), and... Most vexingly, treating me like I'm a woman, and acknowledging me as such. By saying I, for example, preferred a Transfeminine reading of Dave over the popular Transmasculine one - by simply bringing up trans women in a conversation that didn't include putting them down - I had apparently branded myself as a stupid bimbo woman in their eyes that desperately needed mansplaining to. By discussing trans women positively, I had branded myself as an "other", and needed to be treated as such. I don't understand why it was all trans men doing this - you'd think they'd know better than to start misgendering and condescending people just because they started talking about feminism or trans rights. You'd think they'd understand meeting feminism with traumadumping is inappropriate.

I put a Cis Woman in my Webcomic, and she apparently wasn't feminine enough for some fucking people. Mind you, none of us on the Dev Team ever really thought that she was any degree of Masculine. She was never designed to be masculine, and she wasn't designed with transness in mind. We'd always referred to her internally as a cis woman. She just happens to have broad shoulders, narrow-ish hips, an Adam's apple, a bigger nose, and some serpentine heat pits on her face that happen to look like facial hair.

This is her. The uncanny, ugly, mannish freak who should've just been a boy. She looks normal! She's just a regular woman! Apparently, when you tell people that what human beings would identify as sex characteristics are totally randomized on an alien bug species because that alien bug species literally only has one sex, that's cool and based until it's applied to women? Even then, these are all traits that some normal human cis women have in real life. What's even more jarring is that almost all of the Transmisogyny thrown at me over Tejuri's appearance was done over fucking Cohost - the website people fled to specifically to escape Tumblr's Transmisogyny. The site that touts its pride in getting rid of all Transphobes. God.

I've noticed that people often preach their alliance not as a genuine statement but as a way to keep with the trends. A lot of reblogs on posts about loving trans women are viewing them as either a body ("loving trans women" taken as synonymous with wanting to have sex with them), an object ("loving trans women" taken as their value being synonymous with their romancability), or a token (saying that you "love trans women" is the latest political trend in progressive spheres, and professing this makes you look like a better person, even if you don't mean it). I've learned recently that a lot of people don't know anything about Queer Theory or Transfeminism. A lot of people apparently don't even realize Transfeminism exists. It's been a fucking wild past few months. Things I thought were just basic human decency and common sense apparently need to be stated, because it turns out my standards for what counts as "basic human decency" is a lot higher than most. Wild. @_@

Every time someone pulls this stupid horseshit on me, I get more annoying and more powerful. Nothing's gonna make me back down. At the end of the day, I have the privilege of being able to shut up and stop facing harassment. That's not a privilege trans women have. It's why true allies cannot stop fighting even when it does get a little hard. We can put the weapons down. They cannot.

Every now and then I think about the phrase "Trans Women are the Women of Women". Every day, it becomes more true.

[starryjkoo]

some random chronically online fandom and shipping thoughts #1

I just feel like ARMYs who are very obviously Y/N’s have NO reason to be judging shippers. I think it’s funny how some of them are so genuinely defensive and put off by shipping in a way I can tell is personal lol (it’s giving jealousy!). I totally understand people not liking shipping/shippers but I’ll never accept judgement from a Y/N, sorry! If you’re posting about only ONE member in a really thirsty manner after every AYS trailer and then turning around and saying “ugh, jkkrs are so annoying and delusional, jikook are brothers!” I know what you are! 🫵

slurping up all these AYS teasers like a starving animal but I’m starting to feel like they’re showing us too much now 😩 don’t spoil all the cute parts please BH!

only extremely sad and chronically online losers think that mass liking hate tweets actually means anything in the real world. a lot of these people need to get a life and go touch grass because the obsession with jm is truly weird and sad.

not everyone who wants th to appear in AYS is a tkkr, because it’s normal for ARMYs to want to see as many members as possible, but it’s kind of obvious with the ones who bring it up every chance they get lol, or the first thing they look for in a new AYS teaser, or just the specific way they talk about it. and my god are there a lot of tkkr ARMYs

I’m self aware that I’m pretty heavily biased, but there’s nothing worse than the ARMYs who hide under the OT7 visage but are CLEARLY heavily biased themselves. I simply do not like hypocrites, maybe some of them are in denial about it, idk. ofc there’s nothing worse than the ones who cosplay and try to create havoc in ARMY spaces, but that’s an entirely different thing. with that said, i’m convinced that at least 90% of active ARMYs are heavily biased at this point and we’d all be better off if they could simply just admit it.

perhaps this is my own bias so feel free to disagree, but imo ARMYs very clearly have a different sort of energy for jm antis and I think its partially because his hate has been so damn normalized in this fandom after years of tkkrs, but also because clearly a vast majority of the ARMY sh*oter accounts are diet solos and tkkrs and they always put an extra amount of scrutiny on things related to jm. they're also the first to bring shipper/solo drama into ARMY spaces (but only when it impacts their ship/bias) and they’re very clearly obviously lurking in solo/shipper territory to find it the way they do. the silence right now from certain accounts really does speak volumes.

sort of related, but the best way to gain a big following on ARMY twt is to get involved in whatever current drama is going on, for example MHJ drama, boycott drama, general fanwars. ARMYs will flock and mass follow these accounts, and a lot of them are diets who gain a platform and then spread their diet narratives later. one really good example is that elo person if anyone remembers all that, they literally were moots w/ tkk akgaes & calling them bestie but rebranded after they started gaining a mass following for “doxxing” and they started gaining attention because they were “debunking” the OG taennie icloud leaks (lol ofc they were a tkkr doing that). anyways they were awful and did a lot of harm, but they got that platform bc a lot of ARMYs flock to toxic accounts like that, especially when somethings going on, and then they’re impossible to cancel.

last shipping thought but we all know why tkkrs and y/n’s are jealous and weird towards jkk but sometimes its actually the same case for a lot of the other bts shippers, especially jk x hl shippers (like what's w/ all the j*nkookers lol) & yoonm*n. and there’s a lot of ARMYs who fall into this category actually. even if they don’t believe their ship is real, sometimes they still feel a bit passive aggressive/jealous bc they would prefer whatever content was with their bias/self-insert instead. theres so many jkk moments that have been really badly OT7’d, like I’ve never seen anything like the way almost the entire fandom rewrote history to make that jk binging jm content jk binging bts content (its legit wild to me).

and ill never forget during the disney docu when someone pointed out how jk likely knew jms apartment password and it got ratio’d at over 4k by someone saying “he probably knows all his hyungs passwords!” and it wasn’t even funny or clever lmao, it was very much giving

anyways, i believe this is one of the reasons sometimes ARMYs at large are weird towards jkk bc even outside of just tkkrs there are a LOT of HL shippers who take it pretty personally, especially if they’re the sort that projects onto one of the members in their ship. tbh, even if it’s not shipping, it’s a bias line thing where they want to fight over jm/jk being closer to their bias than they are to each other.

its whatever and just a petty complaint lol, i dont care who ppl ship/bias but i do find it annoying sometimes bc there are always ppl constantly downplaying jkks friendship and picking it apart and trying to OT7-ify it more than any other duo. its like ppl are really obsessed & its tiring. just give jkk their flowers sometimes and move on, you know? you definitely do not need to ship them or see them as romantic, but just respect their bond and the things about it that are unique to them, god

alright was just getting this out of my system because I was focused on positive vibes only for MUSE, will be going back to (mostly) positive vibes for AYS!

[some-pers0n]

Really liked the previous abnormal psychology post, do you have anything to say about intrusive thoughts (and how people tend to misuse that term (and how they aren't only about violence because that's the only examples i have seen people talk about))

Ah but of course!

Intrusive thoughts are in this category where a lot of people use the term without really understanding the extent to which it means. People often conflate it with impulsive thoughts or fantasies, wherein a person will have an urge to do something reckless but enjoy it. This could be something like dying your hair, making a really mean comeback to that one annoying coworker, jumping in a lake, or even something more aggressive like pushing over a baby stroller. They're thoughts that people have at random but enjoy the thought of them, even if they're a little dark. Fantasies in particular can cross over into the whole desire aspect of what a person would want, which mehhh I don't really wanna get too into since this is about intrusive thoughts

Intrusive thoughts on the other hand are unwanted thoughts of any kind. They're thoughts that bring the person stress, anxiety, etc and etc. These can be anything really, but most of the time it can be anything like these

Suicidal ideation and or self harm

Being SA'd or SA'ing someone else

Homicidal or aggression towards innocents

Fear of social ostriziation

Random imagery that's just generally disturbing

Public humiliation

Philia-related (ex: SA'ing a child, animal, corpse, etc)

Mind readers or someone potentially observing your thoughts

Believing that something that happened to another was actually your fault and you're to blame for it all

Religious-related fears

Scrutinizing your identity (gender, sexuality, etc)

World-ending catastrophes

These thoughts aren't exactly a representation of who you are nor your "secret desires" like say fantasies. I want to make a distinction between that. Intrusive thoughts are disturbing and can oftentimes cause stress and anxiety

This can manifest in disorders like OCD, where to combat these intrusive thoughts (obsessions) they do these things that..don't really work (compulsions).

Here's a list of some common compulsions as well lol

Interrogation of self, like asking yourself whether you actually want to do any of those things or whether you feel rightfully repulsed by them

Checking and recounting things in case if someone had stolen anything or something bad will happen if it isn't quite right

Asking for reassurance from peers

Routines and "rituals", like how a person may have to watch a certain video in order for them to sleep

Doing somethings over and over, like washing your hand 4 times because 4 just "feels right" enough to get whatever the hell is on your hands off

Compulsions don't have to be logical or rational. Sometimes they're just stuff like "I need to flick the lights of my room on and off seventeen times or else my parents will die and go to hell". It's just whether or not it makes sense and has the person feel as though it works

Either way, intrusive thoughts are an infinitely complex topic that most people don't really wanna talk about because they're exposing. I know damn well I don't really wanna share mine. It's not really until they're less demonized and misunderstood that people can really talk about them

Intrusive thoughts make sense for why people who don't get them are reaaallly off put by them, but it's still irritating. Like I get why a well-adjusted person would be spooked by hearing that someone they care about has these thoughts, but it's still...gewhhhghhhhh y'know?

Like c'mon. Thoughts are not really indicative of a person's core. Your brain is going a mile a minute. Sometimes the train of thought just spits out the worst thing known to man and you just kinda gotta live with it knowing that it's not really you, but some subconscious part of your brain that's like "god wouldn't it be so fucked up if that happened?" It feels even more isolating honestly since not only do you feel like a freak and horrible person, but you can't really vocalize it unless it's in broad strokes and hushed tones. Ah well

Either way, intrusive thoughts and disorders connected to them are pretty complex. Again, highly recommend checking them out and researching them more if you wanna

[antiv3nom]

asuka ask game? pick your favorite one

ok so i do enjoy asuka guiltygear but i have been thinking REALLY hard about asuka tekken as of late so we're talking about her today

also this took me WAY too long to post i apologize but it Is out here so yaaaay

favorite thing about them:

ok so legally i have to mention asuka's tekken 8 design because motherfucker WHAT were they thinking with that one. what the fuck was the inspiration. but i love it so much i cannot lie

other than that, i really enjoy her rivalry with lili and how moderately insane that bit has gotten, and i like how they've kept her a character who is a) defensively focused in her gameplay even among the generally aggressive play of t8, and b) has a generally down-to-earth feel to her despite. Everything. happening in tekken

least favorite thing about them:

so i was actually talking to a friend about this recently and she explained my feelings really well, its like. asuka feels like the protagonist of another story that isnt being told.

it feels like she has so much stuff that COULD be a really interesting plot focus for her but it just. hasnt been? like everything between her and feng COULD be so neat but its just been sort of...by the wayside for the past few games in favor of keeping up with the mishimas (new sitcom there btw)

favorite line:

asuka's quotes are fun but most arent super noteworthy unfortunately? its mostly pretty standard fare for fighting game open and win quotes unforch :( i will say though, i do really enjoy this win line in t8 from her:

It's not good to fight all the time. Well, see ya!

bc like. girl. what do you think youre out here doing rn. girl please

(note: i dont speak japanese so i couldnt say anything towards this, but i wonder if asuka speaks with a kansai accent/dialect in game? her being from osaka and all, itd be a cool little addition)

brOTP:

omg actually ive seen stuff between leo and asuka that's been fun before i really enjoy that, iirc theyre not super close in the main canon but i wanna say in the non-canon webcomic theyre friends? i think thats right? either way its a fun concept

OTP:

asulili...uwoagh........

fellas is it gay to buy your rival's dojo and fill it entirely with roses to get their attention? certainly not. certainly.

i do wish we saw some amount more narrative tension between them since most of it has sort of dissolved by t8 but i do think theyre really cute and as mentioned before i really do enjoy their whole bit its awesome

SHOUTOUT ASULILI WEEK BTW I DONT HAVE THE TIME TO PARTICIPATE BUT I AM HYPED ABOUT ITS EXISTENCE

nOTP:

i do not think i have been around long enough to see another pairing for asuka, let alone one i dislike, so i cannot answer this question LMAO

random headcanon:

spun my mental wheel of headcanon topics and it wouldnt stop spinning for like half an hour unfortunately so im just telling you that i think asuka would play baiken or may in strive

unpopular opinion:

i still havent been here long enough to know whats unpopular regarding her :,) although i think in terms of gameplay i think she's cooler than most people believe, though i do agree that her current iteraiton in t8 isnt very strong within the meta unforch :(

song i associate with them:

i can nigh on guarantee that it's because ive been listening to this song while thinking about her really hard recently but absolute zero by natori (banger btw go watch the music video it goes unbelievably hard), i think the lyrics arent entirely unfitting though!!!

favorite picture of them:

i really like this profile art option for her, the posing is fun and the textures on the clothing are really impressive

and then also i have to mention her preset 3 outfit which i LOVE SO SO MUCH

(apologies as i cant find a better example pic and do not feel like opening t8 at 2 in the morning on this day)

[koolkat9]

Hey! So this may seem random, but I remember you posting about how Prussia would react to England dating Germany and I was wondering, how do you think he would feel towards your other ships for Germany (gerfra, for example)?

I think in all cases, he's overprotective.

Even with Francis who he knows is a good lover and though he seems to go fast, Gil knows Francis will slow down if his partner. But he finds it so weird when one of his best friends ends up dating his baby bro. So even Francis isn't immune to scary intimidating Gil. If anything, it might be worse than even Arthur. Though if PruCan is together, Gil doesn't have a leg to stand on

GerCan Gil is not saying shit. Gil is too scared of Matt still after the world wars. Though at the same time, I think there is extra worry because Matt had a burning hatred for both him and Ludwig up until a few decades ago. But at the same time, that's just how nationhood is sometimes. And Matt is very attentive and dotting which puts some of the concerns at ease. Francis and Arthur also assure him that Matt is very forgiving, sometimes when he shouldn't be, so now in peace time there shouldn't be any ill will towards them.

GerAme. Not as much overprotectiveness as with Fran and Art. A healthy amount of course. But Gil was his mentor so he know Al is a good kid when it is all boiled down. Though he gets concerned sometimes that Al is a bit overwhelming for Lud with how loud and oblivious he can be. But he trusts Lud's judgement and he seems to be coming out of his shell beyond work so perhaps it is good.

Okay, this isn't my ship but I have some interesting thoughts on Gil and his reaction to GerIta. There is a lot of interesting emotions/thoughts at play. One is the jealousy. It's canon Gil has a crush on Feli. So when Feli goes for his brother instead it stings a bit. But Gil loves Ludwig more than anyone so that jealousy never becomes anger or aggressiveness towards Lud. Then there is the HRE thing. Whether you think Ludwig is HRE or not, there is no denying their similar appearance. Gilbert probably has worries that Feli is only using Ludwig as a rebound or perhaps thinks Ludwig is HRE, but Gil sees Ludwig is slightly different (even if Ludwig is HRE with amnesia or the two share a body, or however you see it) so he worries Feli won't be satisfied and Lud will either try to mold himself into HRE for Feli's sake or end up broken hearted. He's not aggressive in his overprotectiveness, he even outwardly blesses the relationship, but he's keeping an eye out. As much as he loves Feli, he knows Feli has been hurt and that hurt people hurt people. And like I said, Gil's love for Ludwig trumps everything.

[teaveetamer]

Gotta say, I follow BWIIDT and I've read her critiques but I don't recall her ever having done what raxis had done. She never linked to the fic or even outright named it? And she certainly never linked directly to the author. So I still have never seen caps fic , have no idea what the fic is called , and I still don't know who "captain" is.

But if she did the same shit Raxis did and explicitly linked people to the fic and to their social media I would definitely know who they were .

Just want to point out the difference.

Like if I want to know who cap is and read the fic myself I can probably put in the effort and ask or go out of my way to look for it. But that requires actual effort. you need to make a choice and go out of your way to even DO that.

But raxis pasting links and listing names left and right ? that is literally just a mindless click away and the entire fandom knows how aggressive edelstans are , so it's a literal invitation to harassment.

Raxis is basically giving an angry mob the identity and address of a random author he dissgrees with and he's Pikachu face surprised that his MakeAdrestiaGreatAgain buddies stormed over there (literally 1 click away) to attack the author on his behalf? Nah, Raxis has done this for years. he knows.

Combining these two

Thanks, so from what I'm hearing I was right about BWIIDT never providing links or naming the fic?

I initially wasn't following the fic critique. I knew it was going on but I was kind of just not interested in it cuz I didn't really see the point of critiquing the fic at first. Then I started seeing it get recc'd everywhere and shortly after I saw what I believe was BWIIDT's breakdown of Dedue's treatment and I was like. Oh wait this is actually way worse than I thought it was. I thought it was just gonna be some guy's silly little wish fulfillment fic I didn't realize it was gonna be that bad.

But like yeah here's the thing. Sure, people could go figure out Cap's fic from BWIIDT's posts. However, if there's one universal truth about people it's that people are fucking lazy and 99.99% of people are not going to put in the effort to go find the thing.

And also, in forcing people to actually go looking for the thing you greatly increase the chances of someone stopping and saying "wait, what am I doing do I really need to be doing this? Because it just takes longer to find something, and that gives you time to cool down and think about what you're about to do.

I can't tell you how many times I've been pissed off about something and gone to do some research, and in the process of doing the research I've had a second to cool down and suddenly I'm not as riled up or inclined to do anything with the info I've found.

Not related to fanfic but in the same spirit, just as a real example of what I'm talking about. I've been running fandom tournaments and I have spreadsheets for those where I calculate out everyone's total number of votes and rankings. I debated organizing everyone by votes and then posting it midway through the qualifying rounds so people could know who was in the lead, who was behind, who they might wanna focus votes on if they wanted to boost someone into the bracket, etc.

Ultimately I decided against it because I didn't want any potential messiness of someone, say, looking at that frankly presented data and doing some kind of vote manipulation or something. A lot of the characters lower down on the bracket were within only a couple of votes of each other so it would have been really easy to boost someone up with just one or two alt accounts.

Sure technically all of that info is public right on the tournament blog. I've shared the methodology for how I pick the brackets in the past. You could very easily go through the polls and calculate it out yourself to know who is going to be cut. Thing is, most people aren't going to bother to do that, even if they would be willing to try vote manipulating if they just saw the data laid out for them. And it takes like an hour for me to go through and update the spreadsheets and reorganize everything, plenty of time for someone to start trying to calculate everything out and realize that vote manipulating a dumb tumblr poll is, well, dumb.

The point I'm trying to make is, it absolutely matters how easy you made it for people to go find something. Because that will actually make a huge difference in how many people go on to harass an author. And again, that is honestly self-evident at this point? Everyone knows if you link a fic and/or name the fic and the author people are going to be a LOT more likely to go harass them.

[scramble-crossing]

ok i love your entire recent sho post. i felt like the anime sho really played up his sadism though whereas the og sho didn't feel sadistic but more like he was just single-minded in pursuing his goals and didn't care if he hurt anyone else. so for example in the game, the reapers and players that he kills are mostly collateral. in the anime, it shows him actively revelling in having players kill each other and stuff. which i didn't like. i thought that it made him go from a more interesting character of "will get what he wants no matter who has to get hurt in the process" to a more outwardly sadistic character who genuinely enjoys seeing random bystanders suffer. the stuff about the taboo actively hurting and being uncomfortable is top tier food though, love that shit.

OUGH ANON THANK YOU you perfectly summed up my feelings about anime Sho. You're exactly right about the Support Reapers feeling more like collateral damage, deaths he passively allowed to happen rather than actively sought out. It seems like a slight distinction at first, but I definitely feel that it makes him a way more interesting character.

The anime made him appear so single-mindedly aggressive and that's just not him!! And I'm not saying that he's merciful, or anything like that. I'm saying he's strategic. He hangs back during his boss fight, using taboo noise as tools to wittle away at Neku and Joshua before coming into the fray himself. And when he does he dodges like mad. He only really goes in for the kill when he's in his Noise form, and even then he weaves in and out of it in order to focus on long-distance attacks that keep Neku and Josh at an arm's length. Hell, even when he's at his most powerful, in his taboo form, he pulls back when fighting Neku and Beat even though he very likely could have erased them both because he didn't want to expend his energy. He never purposefully attacks, or erases, without a reason. He never prioritizes hurting others over keeping his plan running smoothly, doing only as much as he feels is warranted while keeping himself intact (or uh...intact enough to immediately blow up I guess?)

A Sho who's measured in his violence, who's clever and efficient, not excessive, who doesn’t think very highly of others but in a way that has him largely ambivalent to whether they live or die rather than maliciously targetting them, is much more unique and interesting than a Sho who's just indiscriminately violent for violence's sake

And I'm not saying this because I want to soften him up or excuse his actions or anything like that. No he sucks! He's a bad guy! Maybe he's not shooting the gun, but he's loading the bullets (metaphorically speaking at least. He very much shoots an actual gun). There's almost no way he DIDN'T know what would happen when he started summoning taboo noise, or even if he didn't, he certainly could've stopped at any time. But he doesn't. Not because he takes some sadistic joy in seeing these people get erased, but because it gets him closer to his goal and he just doesn't care who might end up dying for his cause. And I think this makes him WAY more interesting than some guy who just loves mindless destruction. ESPECIALLY since this is a character who's motives we don't know. In the anime he very well could just be doing this because he has rabies. Fuck it. Joshua's spears are a metaphor for vaccination change my MIND

[arty-archives13]

The past is an explanation not an excuse

Billy apologists and stans please DNI

I will say this once and once only: this is simply my opinion and how I view things, feel free to discuss things but keep it civil.

I may not be a psychologist or someone who has experience in this field nonetheless, I am here today to present my opinion; someone's past, trauma, situation, etc is an explanation for their behavior and actions but never an excuse.

As an example, I will be talking about Billy Hargrove.

Billy is a character from Stranger Things. He is introduced in season 2 as Max's brother and a new hot guy but we soon learn that he is an awful person as the episodes continue.

From his first episode, we learn that Billy is abusive towards his step sister, Max and is aggressive. At some point during season 2, Billy was threatening to run over 3 completely RANDOM KIDS (Mike, Lucas and Dustin) and if it weren't for Max, he might have killed them. Not to mention his aggression towards Lucas (who is a black character) which is completely unwarranted. LUCAS WAS ONLY 12? Billy was 18, the only reason he had to hate Lucas and nearly kill him is because of racism. Let's not forget that Billy BEATS up Lucas before Steve intervenes.

Billy is an extremely hostile character and as we continue to watch the show we find out that his father, Neil Hargrove is an abusive, horrible father and person. By the end of season 3, we find out about Billy's mother who abandoned him and left him with Neil.

Yes, his past was horrible and dramatic but what Billy does is inexcusable. Which leads me to my point, the past is nothing more than an explanation for one's behavior and actions.

Sorry for this entire post but I simply wanted to put this out and talk about it, if you have anything to add just comment or something, and if you are a Billy stan, please don't bother. And I apologize if I got anything wrong or forgot somethings.

Also I just want everyone to know, this is nothing against Drace Montgomery, if you think Billy is hot that's fine just don't ignore his horrible choices simply because he is hot.

BTW I understand that Billy is fictional, I just wanted to comment on his character and my personal distaste for the character.

[caparrucia]

Apropos of nothing at all, I will share with you the dumbest fucking example of self-inflicted "anon harassment" I've ever been subjected to.

It's also why I have a good chunk of the old Homestuck circle I was tangentially part of blocked: they're friends with this person, and they follow them and reblog their posts all the time. This is not me saying they shouldn't be friends with her, or that no one is allowed to reblog/like her stuff. This is just me quarantining the wank so I don't have to be exposed to it, even on second hand.

But this particular idiot that I shall not name, because I'm classier than that, sent us (me, my friend and the shared blog we kept) a long ass tirade of like, sixty anon messages in total. Basic anon hate 101 shit. Basic bullshit.

The thing is, the anon hate was not targeting us. It was in fact weirdly, passive-aggressively complementary about us. It was targeting the idiot in question, and giving us a laundry list of all the godawful, terrible things this idiot had done and why we shouldn't associate with her, etc. Etc.

Obviously it was meant to prompt us into defending the idiot in question, you know, disputing all the allegations and publicly reinforcing our friendship and care for this particular idiot.

Except for the bit where half the anon messages were not, in fact, anon, and came straight from the idiot's own blog.

This is in fact the reason why I refuse to call this person anything else but, the idiot, but without Significant Capitalization, because they've shown both such callousness and such stupidity, they don't even deserve that. They're just a run of the mill idiot, cruel and crude and common. Completely unremarkable when you get down to it.

My point is that, after a while, you realize that just like random strangers in the bus won't set you up flawlessly for a scathing witty comeback that will end up in a public standing ovation, pretty much all anon hate isn't set up in such a way you can take off it and have a witty, incisive conversation off it. Because anon hate is stupid by definition. It's mean-spirited and cruel and purposefully not acknowledging your humanity. Because it's not meant to acknowledge your humanity. You cannot win a screaming match against someone leaving anon hate in your inbox, because there really isn't another person behind it, in so much as they're not available for you to converse or connect with. That's why the general advice is to "turn it off" or "stop reading it". Because there's nothing to gain by engaging with it, and you're just subjecting yourself to abuse, and potentially subjecting your followers to abuse, if you post that sort of thing publicly.

Unfortunately, there's some very unscrupulous people that, much like the idiot I just told you about, have figured out they can use the boogie man of anon harassment to manipulate people around them. It's not hard to notice, either, but if you've ever been the recipient of hateful words, you'll probably have the impulse to dismiss the realization. No one, surely, can be that callous, that crass, that hateful.

They are, sadly. And the best thing you can do is turn around and put as much distance between you as possible, when you realize it. This particular brand of idiot is a specialist in splash damage.

[beevean]

m, o, y, z for the fandom meme?

M - Say something genuinely nice about a ship that you don’t ship (or its shippers, or anything related to you)

Oh, a ship I don't ship is very different from a ship I dislike/hate 😂

I'm neutral on Trevor/Alucard, only because I don't really see Alucard as romantically involved with anyone, but they are very nice to each other and I love to hear them being so kind and respectful to each other in GoS, so if someone ships them romantically I perfectly understands where they're coming from <3

O - Choose a song at random, which ship or character does it remind you of

I'm very bad at this game lol. I don't choose songs: songs choose me. My music culture is too limited.

For example, my brain has decided that this is Isaactor + Hectaly and it won't hear otherwise ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Y - What are your secondhand fandoms (fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)

I definitely learned quite a lot about Devil May Cry despite never touching a game myself :P

Z - Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go (prompts optional but encouraged)

I never considered myself a shipper until recently because even back in the day, shippers used to be extremely aggressive... just in a "MY SHIP IS BETTER THAN YOURS AND YOU'RE A POOPYHEAD" way, not in a "I am literally going to send you pictures of real children being abused to punish you for the horrible crime of thinking a fictional 17 yo and a fictional 19 yo could be cute together" way.

And I'm like. I still don't get it what's about ships that makes people this rabid? What is the point of ship wars? What is the point of yearning for your OTP to be canon? Guys, you're just smacking dolls together. This is literally the kind of game 7 years old play, except that you're drawing a masterpiece for 15 hours or writing a short novella over it.

My point is, I wish I could spread the message to everyone that this is supposed to be fun. Something about two characters (or more lol) sparks an idea in your head, and then you share that idea with others finding some common grounds. That's it. That's shipping. It's not that deep. It doesn't say anything about the person, something something Umbridge effect and the other way around. There are posts circulating about little girls putting Barbies in horrible situations with a "aw aren't they much more creative than the Patriarchy assumes they are" undertone, and then the same people act like a slightly less vanilla ship is a prelude to IRL crimes.

[charcubed]

Okay in the genuinely least shady way possible and not trying to start a debate here: I understand the wider point OP is making but I also, personally, feel insane when I see posts about this topic phrased in this way lmaaaoooo

“queerbait tv”

???????

What, supposedly, was “queerbait TV”?

[Rhetorical question. I can rattle off the list of shows people would probably reply with, and yet I'd also probably insist that each of them is vastly different and should be viewed through a unique lens rather than compared to the others because no 2 situations are alike]

Because what this post is describing (and what some people are even understanding in the notes of it) is subtext. These discussions are often really about subtext and queercoding and thematically compelling narratives!! That’s what’s described here and it’s what people – or at the very least me personally – desperately crave!!

And look, I’m obviously not saying that advocating for gay people being openly explicitly represented on TV was or is a bad thing. Of course that’s important, whether the gay people are going on healthy dates or killing for each other lmao.

But for God's sake... this is why my repetitive rant and personal hot take is that we need to abolish the word "queerbaiting." It's done so much damage in this regard and it doesn't even fucking mean anything of consistent substance or value at this point, if it ever properly did. Once upon a time and only briefly, "queerbaiting" was intended as an accusation that corporate marketing and false advertising were deliberately being used with the intent to increase viewership of a show with no explicit follow-through or validation of queerness within the story itself. It was a type of pinkwashing for ads about TV shows – something that was actually pretty rare in the grand scheme, to be honest – not about the writing or execution of a story itself. But that potential meaning for a very specific thing quickly became entirely lost, and now the use of the word "queerbaiting" is literally just about vibes. You'd be hard-presssed to get even 10 random people to define it the same way. And more often than not, using "queerbaiting" is about derogatory vibes specifically thrown in the direction of devaluing subtext or deriding creators for whatever a fan personally considers to be a failure, disappointment, subtlety (or even too-slow burn) in a story's writing.

[Btw OP, if you're reading this, I'm really not trying to make an aggressive accusatory example out of your singular use of the word here lmao. I apologize if it feels that way. I'm working up to a point]

At the end of the day, so much of these recent takes about boring gay people on TV or ~queerbait hits harder~ route back to how, in the (still worthwhile!) pursuit of explicit representation and the implicit assumption that it's always the Best, somewhere along the way people got it in their brains that subtext and queercoding deserved vilification as the Worst. And that became the loud and prevailing opinion. Of course a lot of that also stems from personal hurt, anger, or disappointment by past TV shows which is all obviously understandable... but that's why people cling to the simplicity of the word “queerbaiting” as an umbrella anytime something's upsetting, and the accusation is often hurled with misplaced ire at creators.

Ultimately in some ways the concept of subtext became synonymous with "not good enough," and in other ways it came to be seen as something cowardly or malicious that creators put into stories to tease, bait, and disappoint fans. Nuance got lost, as well as the understanding that subtext/queercoding exist at all because they're tools used to tell (or enrich!) stories despite interference, constraints, and censorship – obstacles which have never fully gone away.

So we've ended up here: the need for whatever constitutes Good Representation – an endlessly shifting goalpost – and room for little else. The fear of all the ways stories can hurt and the advocacy for avoiding that hypothetical or potential hurt. The "all or nothing" mentally where if a ship isn't canon in the way someone personally deems acceptable – or in a way where every straight person on the planet will miraculously, mythically accept it's queer – then the story has Caused Harm and therefore doesn't have much value or can't be queer. And the overall cultural framing that subtext only exists when creators are too cowardly to do something more, rather than possibly as a creative choice to add complexities or a byproduct of censorship or both.

I find it all pretty fucked and exhausting to witness.

So, judging by [gestures broardly] the hamster wheel of bullshit out there and specifically the high note count on this post...

Here's where I land, as always:

I truly believe so many people and fandoms would free themselves if they realized that “queerbaiting” as a term is mostly bullshit, and as a concept the fear of Being Baited often robs people of finding joy and meaning in stories on their own merit. And I think they'd also free themselves a bit if they learned, understood, and acknowledged that subtext and queercoding are forms of canon. They're canon and they "count." Explicit queer storytelling is important for all the reasons we all implicitly know and understand, and of course we want to see sweeping epic character arcs reach the natural loudly queer conclusions we and the characters often deserve. But even if a story doesn't have that or get that, if you see and understand it's queer, that's still enough in its own way. It still has value, and you don't need permission or validation from anyone else to maintain that to yourself or to others.

Final apology to OP for hijacking their post. And maybe the TL;DR is I genuinely am "advocating for a return to queerbait TV" – or rather the sorts of storytelling and subtext people too often derogatorily slap with the "bait" label, past or present. Maybe people should think a little more about how stories like that were and still are good as well as often legitimately queer... and examine why there's often an implication that they're somehow not.

I am genuinely not advocating for a return to queerbait tv, I was vocally against it the whole time it was happening that was like my whole shtick for a while but it is kind of wild that when gay people weren’t allowed on tv, gay characters (who weren’t allowed to be gay) would be drinking poison for each other and killing bad guys for each other romantically and offering to go to prison in each other’s place and now that we are allowed to have gay people on tv…gay people will just be having a healthy conversation and going going on a date like normal people. Get OUT of my face with that

[lokilysolbitch]

the only thing that was holding my interest and that tiktok would Actually put on my fyp (since the very start i've wanted cottagecore, not the aesthetic shots, just 17-20 something year olds baking snail cookies and getting excited about finding mushrooms and making paper crafts. tiktok gives me Anything But That) is witchtok and it's even started showing me less of that. most of what i'm getting every now and then is someone being an ass or a literal serial abuser or those "when ppl culturally appropriate ew🙄" posts which are SO Fucking Annoying because it's about the equivalent of "racism? that's for dorks. bullying?? don't do that dweeb" like it's not gonna do anything. all that's happening is a bunch of (usually white ppl) going "i'm so cool bc i don't steal from cultures. i'm literally the best. unlike those guys" over and over again. and generally the ppl loud and proud about how they Don't do something are either doing that same thing or something worse behind the scenes. also it's boring and repetitive.

like pls pls pls. make some fun content. is there a funky way you like to read tarot. do you have a niche herb you really enjoy. any funny stories of times you fucked up. cool rocks you found. strange upgs that are just for fun but you kinda believe them. something. anything.

to be fair i know exactly why ppl don't wanna post that bc witchtok is an echo chamber and anything that isn't ew racism or burning incense will get you bullied to hell and back in there. i'm careful with my own posts too (kinda stopped filtering so much tho bc i was getting annoyed) bc i've seen ppl get harassed and cyber stalked or mass reported over tedious shit. either that or they get discussed by less aggressive accounts. which. is it's own situation

these discussions can be semi or fully respectful (always calm tho) but i just think it's really weird. to post. a short video and have a group of people you don't know publicly breaking down every detail of your video saying things like " i don't know this persons situation but it COULD be a sign of psychosis" in a calm polite voice. i think it's so so weird. especially if in said video you're in distress. its like having a panic attack and some random person turns to the rest of the people in the room like "let's discuss the ethics of this situation" and starts a socratic seminar. it's treating a human like a hypothetical example. either help them if you know them well enough or leave them alone.

anyways tiktok is just making me angry. i have a few creators i think are super cool and i appreciate the disabled ppl on there bc they usually make me realize "oh feeling like my arm slips a little out it's socket or go limp often probably isn't normal) but other than my following list it's just so unfun