#Fandom Musings

[inanna-blabbers]

It's probably called that not because it is actually pretentious, but because it's what Apollo would call that move from Klavier. Polly is naturally a hater; it would make sense. lol.

I completely get you, op. I would fight the person who called it that too. But that would probably mean you and I would have to fist fight Polly personally, and I don't like my chances against the twink with the notable right hook who lived with freedom fighters...

idk if i’ve ever said it but klavier’s sweet little awkward fiddling with his bangs sprite being called “pretentious” in the animation gallery is SO offensive to me personally

[neokamui414]

Venn diagrams are fun.

[transgwender616]

"Isn't it weird that these 2 completely different characters canonically exist in the same universe?"

No not really.

You, me, Kendrick Lamar, Jaiden Animations, Weird Al, Lynda Carter, Scott The Woz and Sigourney Weaver all exist in the same universe and it's no big deal.

[graendoll]

Its really really sad when I see a beautiful piece of fan art and then the author is like "I used AI isn't it gorgeous?" and then I have to block them.

[imascar]

So I kinda get not having enough time to notify Eddie of Bobby's passing. Timing wise, it moved very quickly. From Hen and Chim's reactions in their secluded areas to Buck being in the corridor and Ravi finding Karen and letting her know about the team. I get all of that because in real life, things move very quickly.

What I'm not getting is why we needed Tommy's reaction to seeing Buck break down in the corridor. It's as if Tim and Co are trying to forcefully integrate Tommy into being a member of the 118 Family. Being a pilot, yes, I get that Buck was able to call on him to help. Chim reached out to Tommy in an earlier season because of just that.

That said, I'm still not getting why Tommy is being depicted as being so involved with the 118. Will every single person who knew Bobby be at his funeral? Will Taylor be there? She dated Buck. She lived with him, too. Will Lucy? Lucy worked under Bobby for a short time. What about Lena? She was with the 118 for a stint. Why is Tommy walking with the team? Are we meant to view him as a replacement for Eddie? Is that what Tim is trying to do here? Have the gp view Buck through Tommy's eyes as opposed to Eddie's since he isn't present? Are we supposed to buy their relationship over that of Buck and Eddie?

I've got questions upon questions, and I guess this is what Tim and Co want. Tim straddles this fandom like the Continental Divide. The next few episodes will be the team grieving. If they have Buck turning to Tommy, especially with Eddie back, I'm gonna start questioning what they drink in those meetings. Maybe they shouldn't be drinking the water, lol.

(((And a side note.... how much character growth does Athena Grant-Nash need?! Already down one fiance, thinking she lost Bobby to a heart attack after their house burnt down only to start to rebuild and lose Bobby to a viral contagion. This lady gonna make Atlas cry.)))

[ladyfauxhawk]

Listening to The Car on a rainy morning

It's been a while since I've done a full re-listen of The Car. I'm noticing things that I'd overlooked.

The wall of sound strings jump out to me more this go-round. These are Puppets-level string arrangements. For an album about longing and masks and missed opportunities, it's hard for me not to think about this in comparison to Everything You’ve Come to Expect. We hear the strings but the whole song cycle is about absence. In lieu of a Puppets album, did we get Alex arranging strings and singing without (but about) Miles? Without Miles, we get something beautiful and heartfelt, but with no electricity.

Like the moment in Big Ideas where Alex chokes back a laugh after singing "we had em out of their seats" at 1:51. In good headphones I felt it resonate.

He knows he's not going to get people out of their seats. His new sound is for sit down concerts. I love this sound, but I also miss the fire.

I may be reading too much into this, but I'm curious if others feel it too.

[theweeklydiscourse]

Why is nuance dieing?

The younger generation seems to be so much more obsessed with moral puritanism in fiction and irdk why. Could it be because kids these days don't interact with real people and are just chronically online so they repeat what they see on the internet?

Actually saw someone saying people who like fictional bad boys are the reason why men get away with sa & rape irl and countries are criminalizing abortion...

It's just so depressing to see that. This line of thinking is scary actually.

I don't remember people going this mad over morals when shows and movies like Vampire Diaries and Twilight saga were huge. It's like people have regressed.

The media we consume is becoming more and more didactic as we enter an age where it seems like every piece of popular media is obsessed with delivering their messages and themes like an after school PSAs. Media is becoming increasingly more sanitized and “family friendly” to appeal to the broadest possible audience to create more and more profits for corporations. This obsession with sanitized fiction has become commonplace with many younger people who parrot what they see online and on the media they consume and proceed to deliver underdeveloped takes on subjects they don’t fully understand yet.

It becomes even more interesting when people point to fictional narratives as the cause for societal problems when there are already larger institutions that have historically been responsible for what they claim fiction causes. They displace the blame for societal ills like SA, abuse, patriarchal violence and misogynistic legislation onto fiction, fan fiction and media that explores taboo subject matter. While I don’t deny that fiction has power, 90% of the time these people have no idea of the ways literary works influence our culture and default to a 1:1 “monkey see, monkey do” explanation for why people must consume the “correct media”.

Another factor is the way that people have become accustomed to moralizing their content consumption. They have convinced themselves that they need a concrete and righteous justification for their likes and dislikes and this has ruined the way fandom interacts with literature, film and other art forms. With this in mind, they can no longer dislike or even hate something without creating some moral justifications for why “hating this thing is actually progressive and righteous!” and in the process, conflate consumerism with activism.

The comparison to Puritanism is quite fitting in this case. After all, the principles of that religion were based in purity, obedience and censorious beliefs for self-indulgences and we can draw comparisons with the way people online discuss certain subjects. There’s a phenomenon where people will say something along the lines of: “It’s alright to like (insert problematic character here)! But you need to acknowledge that they are a bad person.” To them, it seems like a gesture at fairness and magnanimity when in reality, it is an attempt at exerting unearned moral authority over the tastes of others. It is a demand that a person proves their moral innocence to them in a performative manner that validates their need to feel superior. But it’s all performative purity because even if a person did explain/justify their fictional tastes, these people wouldn’t care and would continue to demand purity from others.

People can’t even discuss certain characters anymore without running into people accusing them of being terrible people who would approve of real-life violence and abuse. And I can’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t always like this, when did it change?

[ariel-seagull-wings]

Hey Ariel.

As an X-Men fan, I wanted to know.

Why do so many X-Men fans and even writers have, let's be a real, a massive superiority complex?

As I'm sure you know by now, for about a decade, the X-Men comics have had a bad track record when it came to writing characters outside of their bubble of the Marvel Universe.

Being that they were painfully written out of character and in rather non-flattering lights.

ESPECIALLY Captain America.

Usually portraying them as being against mutants (when they've been shown before not to be).

And the worst part about all this is that they try to say that the X-Men are the only REAL heroes in the Marvel Universe and that the other heroes ain't shit!

The ONLY one who doesn't get this is Spider-Man.

But as we all know by now, Spidey gets written with more respect in literally every other title than his own.

It's pretty clearly done to make the X-Men look good, but ironically enough, it doesn't.

If anything, it makes them look like a bunch of narcissistic, self-serving assholes who love to make their problems everyone else's and shame people for their issues even when they have nothing to do with it.

And I find that incredibly disingenuous.

Like, these motherfuckers have saved the entire world multiple times and tend suddenly, they're being shamed and told that they're not real heroes?!

Blow me.

I think the most egregious is in the case of the Fantastic Four.

Like, among all the heroes of Marvel, they're arguably the most respected.

Like, these guys literally save all reality on a weekly basis.

But then you'll have Cyclops causally shaming them and even threatening to take their son against their (and maybe even his) will.

But I guess that's to be expect since most other comic fandoms don't respect the Fantastic Four (largely thanks to their horrible track record with movies).

I'm glad we're FINALLY moving past this era since in the recent comics, we've seen Cyclops and Captain Marvel are committed to having their respective teams being allies who have each other's back.

But still, why did so many fans and writers just love to trash the other heroes?

Side Note: You remember those pieces of fan art that had the X-Men dogging on The Avengers? Like that one with Cyclops having a class that basically taught that The Avengers are losers and had pictures of several members up on a board with the word "Bitch" written over them. Yeah, I'm so glad that phase finally died out.

Eh ... it's a bit more complicated then "superiority complex", and I will need to give you a brief history and geography lesson along with writing office analysis for context...

So I'm brazilian, and my country has a very complicated love and hate relationship with US American Pop Culture since it started being exported to us during the Cold War (And by complicated I mean that intelectual circles even were split about the Electric Guitar being used in our music, with some youths embracing it in the 1960s while other youths went to the streets to protest against it as a Imperialist Symbol). This complicated relationship affects as well the perception of superheroes, arguably the quintessential American Genre of comic books: some people go to the Golden and Silver Ages and see the characters as simbols of progressive figures of cultural exchange instead of domination, while others who lived enough to see the conservartive forces of Capital dominate the industry of superhero comics and films, can't separate the influence that military powers exerced in the narrative, specially post 9/11.

Without mentioning that even color of clothes can be triggering: so you see the clothes of Captain America in the Red and White And Blue spangles, if you are in the US, you are more likely to see first the hero who punched Hitler in the face as stand against fascist opression, but if you are Latin American like us, you see the modern Uncle Sam, the figure that simbolizes American Invasion. With the MCU encarnations being now the primary way that people know the Avengers, with Military Influence over blockbusters being secret to nobody, is inevitable that they become defenders to the status quo and revolutionaries who question American Intervention become villanized, so while the figures might not be literal cops to an american audience, to us they are simbolically the World Cops.

The X Men adaptations become more engaging for us because they work outside the American Goverment: they live in their own house their leader purchased, most members are born in other countries, they have to constantly fight not to be exterminated by the authorities of the american goverment, ocasionally try to trust said authorities only to be betrayed again and again, deal with issues of assimilation vs embracing their difference and creating their own culture and society, changing within the system vs changing the whole system, pacificism vs guerrilla, which are themes very rooted in the history of Latin America, so is expected they will be embraced by us as symbols of rebellion

Fandom action and reaction also hasto be considered: in one country it may appear that a fan of Avengers might be the comics "underdog" in the sense of not selling much the way the X books sold, while in other country it was considered acceptable to be an Avengers fan because they were considered "the masculine team" while the X Men fans, identifying with the queer coding and social commentary of the mutant metaphor, would be target of homophobia from people in the Avengers fandom, and in the proccess while the homophobia was not the fault of their characters and writers per se, it still left a trauma that tarnished them in the eye of some bullied X-Men fans.

As from a writing office standpoint, there is also the aspect of the Shared Universe, that has been a Double-Edged Sword for Marvel when it comes to their worldbuing: the way the Shared Universe was conceived in the 60s was mainly a publicit stunt, a way to make readers buy other titles, not necessarily a slowly well planed project. There is no way every reader will have time or engagement to collect and read every other title besides the main series they follow of their favorite character or team, AND the writing offices were still as much separated from each other as DC Offices were.

When the company expects each series to be independent from one another, yet still hold to the concept of Shared Universe as a selling tool, there will be, and has been, problems: writers each are put in the bubble of their own series rather than be constantly updating on reading other titles and collaborating with one another to make the Universe feel coherent and cohese, so characters will also be put in their bubbles, and readers will ask "Why aren't the heroes and teams helping one another and discussing this issue that concerns everyone together when they all live in the same world and mostly in the same cities (New York and San Francisco)?"

So one may say that X-Men writers don't know how to write the Avengers... but people forget the reverse can also be true, with Avengers and solo hero writers having trouble writing X-Men books and characters.

There is no understanding between writers of each others characters and no team work behind the scenes, then how can you expect that readers will get invested in aquiring different titles/team books instead of becoming tribalist for one particular hero or team? How can they really share the Same Universe?

Civil War might not have been the event it was if Avengers and X-Men characters were put in the same book to discuss the situation, because mutants have the experience with the violence of Registration Acts and would talk Tony Stark out of supporting, which would make impossible the Team Iron Man x Team Captain America fight that the company wanted to sell.

The Fantastic Four might save the planet Earth from Cosmic Beings like Galactus, but the Sentinels would still come for the son of Reed and Sue, Franklin, so is understandable that mutants will ask the question of "What use is saving the Planet if those who are born on Earth like us still will try to kill us for existing?". That Reed tried experiments to supress Franklin's X gene (before the retcon) while saying condescendingly "You are a child, you don't what you want" reminding people of cisstraight parents in denial of their children being queer didn't help.

One Incredible Hulk comic had Bruce Banner say to an alternate older Scott Summers that "Mutant Fear was never prejudice, just a correct fear that people born with superpowers would run out of control and harm humans, just like people feared the Hulk would do and did".

Which if you only read Hulk, might sound true ...

But if you follow the X-Men for decades, you will bring this argument into question because there were mutants that never didn't harm anyone and were experimented upon, enslaved and were targets of genocide, God Love Man Kills, the graphic novel that extablished the danger faced by mutants along with the Days of Future Past storyline, even showing us the Reverend Stryker killing his mutant newborn son just because "he looked different" and soon killing his wife as well for giving birth to a mutant child, which is a context a casual reader has no obligation to have, but a professional writer working at MARVEL should have, then obviously fans will get frustrated, specially when a lot of X-Men fans are from marginalized comunities and see in this speech by Bruce Banner the same speech some people give to them when they bring their own opression:

"You are exagerating, you see prejudice where there is none, this is just victimization!"

And of course, there is the Elephant in the Room called House of M: with Joe Quesada erroneously thinking that minority meant "small quantity of people" and not the actual meaning of "sociopolitically underrepresented and opressed population that often is the majority in quantity", the editorial mandate to reduce mutant characters trough a Decimation happened at Marvel, but instead of choosing an X-book adjacent character to be responsible for said Decimation, an Avengers character was choosen, and Wanda Maximoff suffered with a poorly written mental breakdown to be used as an easy Mcguffin to put mutantkind in the brink of extinction.

It probably also didn't help that since there was the whole "Movie rights battle where Fox held the movie rights to the X Men characters" Marvel itself was spitefully trying to reduce the proeminence of the X Men in comics to push other characters like the Inhumans... who are a royal family with a history of practicing slavery and eugenics.

This caused an important concern for fans: if a company already tries to erase and silence the METAPHORICAL marginalized characters even though they have been their best selling series since the 80s, what chance does NON METAPHORICAL marginalized characters have?

Basically: different writing teams not understanding each other's characters is a simpton of an editorial problem in the comics industry, and fans reacting with mistrust over other teams and fandoms like the Avengers and Fantastic Four is a coping and defense response.

@thealmightyemprex @professorlehnsherr-almashy @themousefromfantasyland @the-blue-fairie

[kareenvorbarra]

ppl are out here calling pairings “old man yaoi” when both of the men in question are 35-45 at most

[batbeato]

Phenomenon not unique to Umineko but starkly showcased because of it: the difficulty with separating discomfort of a character from analysis, and from judgement of others.

There are so many characters in Umineko that make people uncomfortable - Rosa is one of the first that comes to mind, but Kinzo does as well. They are such well-written, human characters - and also terrible abusers. They are uncomfortable to watch, they are uncomfortable to analyze, because it feels uncomfortable to remember and acknowledge that, yes, the abusers are human too even though they are terrible.

And there are people who will love characters like Rosa because of how well-written she is, just as there are people who will dislike or even hate her because she is uncomfortable, she is abusive. Some people will then go on, as they hate Rosa, to also hate people who enjoy her character, equating their enjoyment of her character to condoning or ignoring her actions.

I've also seen the opposite, wherein people who love a character will be upset that there are people who heavily dislike or hate a character who, while well-written, is abusive and uncomfortable. They may even equate this dislike to a lack of understanding of Umineko (a common way people are attacked for their opinions, and one I'm trying to move away from using).

People should respect that people may enjoy a character they do not, and that does not always reflect on their views regarding real-life treatment of others. They should also respect that people may not enjoy a character they do, and that does not reflect on their understanding of the text. Again, not a problem unique to Umineko fans, but I've noticed it amongst us.

[sylphidine]

My inner cultural anthropologist is quite excited to actually have a chance to watch fandom theories / fanon evolution unfold in real time, with the release of DELTARUNE Chapters 3 & 4.

Usually I am either months or years removed from consuming popular media and falling in love with characters.

[neokamui414]

Although they all obviously contain similar elements as each other to some degree or another since each is functionally a remake / indirect sequel to Xenogears and a incarnation/ reinterpretation of the Perfect Works meta plot epic myth space opera cycle, many of the later Xeno games are often direct cognates to earlier entries in the "franchise" .

Xenoblade Chronicles X and 3 more so than any of the others directly reinterpret large portions of Xenogears.

Xenoblade Chronicles and Chronicles 2 take more after Xenosaga.

Also in terms of like what games I think would appeal to other fandoms / franchises and or make really good material for crossover fanfics:

Xenoblade Chronicles 1 - Bionicle

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 - Zoids

Xenoblade Chronicles X - Transformers

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - Fuga Melodies of Steel

Also also I always like to think about how Xenogears and by extension all of the Xeno games are to Final Fantasy, specifically Final Fantasy 7 what Devil May Cry is to Resident Evil 4

[transgwender616]

Making a post about a character and someone whose pfp is that character liking the post is better than having a 1000 notes. The #1 authority on blorbo agrees with my take on blorbo and I think that's neat.

[graendoll]

Saw a post about how Buddie is giving Bellarke vibes and honestly yes because I have trust issues, but also no it's not because Minear isn't a bitter piece of hot garbage like Jroth.

Unless the spin-off for 911 is 911 El Paso and Ryan is the lead for the tie-in, in which case may the curse of 1000 Billy Boils be cast upon thee, Tim.

[imascar]

Random thought here.

Even if we have to wait for BuckandEddie to happen in S9 or it continues to straddle the not-platonic-not-quite-Buddie-stupidlyinloveyet storyline, can we please, please, please not have Buck turn to Tommy again?

I'm not against Buck finding comfort and intimacy with another person before Eddie or even with (if Buddie doesn't happen for whatever cockamie reason), but let it be with someone who isn't Tommy. Being with Tommy doesn't equate a healthy relationship imo. He wanted to rekindle their relationship only after finding out that Eddie had moved. Seeing how involved Buck still is with Eddie and Chris, would he have finally given Buck an ultimatum? Would he have left again (even to protect himself)? Would Buck need to continually justify his relationship with Eddie?

Buck doesn't need someone to question his commitment or his intentions in a relationship, and having known him for so long, Eddie wouldn't. They've really built a solid foundation. It hasn't been perfect, but it's thrived. I'm really hoping we get there.

[inevitablemoment]

So, you know that necklace with the three stars that Callie wears?

Okay, I have a headcanon about that.

The necklace was a gift that Egon sent to Callie after Trevor was born. Her ex-husband was the one to find it in the mail and passed the gift off as his "push present" to her; it originally came with two stars, but she added a third after Phoebe was born.

In the Cathleen Lives AU, Cathleen is the one to give it to Callie, but Egon asks her not to tell Callie that it's from him. It's only after the end of Afterlife that Cathleen tells Callie the truth.

EDIT: When Callie divorces her ex-husband in the canon verse, he fesses up that the necklace wasn't from him, but doesn't tell her that it was from her father.