#I'm notoriously awful at engaging with fandom

[mercuriallily]

I know I'm hardly active in the STP fandom but I hope my posts were helpful for at least one person

[waleofgaterdeep]

Because I literally can't keep my mouth shut I gotta comment on the Gale Fatherhood Discourse TM lmao. /(it's not really discourse at all).

This gets long, sorry not sorry 💕💕💕

First I gotta say it loud and clear for all y'all (because I know how tumblr works: its all or nothing for canon discourse)- if you don't jive with parenthood headcanons that's totally valid. If you find it icky, I get you. If you enjoy the headcanons, more power to you to create them and enjoy them. I love to see different perspectives in fandom content. It means the original material is inspiring. What follows is my interpretation of the content that may or may not align with your interpretation. And that's not a reflection on you or I if our interpretations don't align.

Okay with that out of the way--

I have a p different interpretation of the "I'm not father material " line from Gale. In the context of the scene, as most know, Tav is asking Gale to open up their relationship (for Halsin).

(Thanks naughty gaming on YouTube)

Gale is notoriously awkward around the concept of sex (ala his reaction to the foursome in the brothel), fiercely monogamous to the point of obsessive devotion, and known to make jokes in dark situations. I interpret this reaction not as naivete or a moment of honesty, but an intentional attempt to gain some control over the conversation. Gale is trying to defuse the situation because he feels uncomfortable and bad about it!! We already know he has problems with feeling inferior in romantic relationships. Tav walking up and just asking to have sex with another guy, to Gale, would call into question his own position in the relationship. I mean, just look at the very next line:

"I thought what we had meant something to you."

He's angry and afraid that he's going to lose someone he loves. He's not genuinely commenting on his opinion of parenthood, he's just going through it.

This conversation also mirrors his reaction in the conversation in which Tav is romancing someone else and Gale asks them to choose.

So no, in my opinion, I don't think it's really the smoking gun of the canon that some people are making it out to be. It's a very Gale response tho, it all makes sense in the meta of his issues with romance and self-esteem.

I also have some thoughts on his opinion of students (which some ppl have cited towards the Gale is a Bad Father side).

At some point, I can't find a screenshot, Gale mentions he once had apprentices but they really annoyed him. (Which is very funny tbh.) Then, during the Trial of Love, choosing the correct answer of "apple" for the "What food is Gale?" question, gets you this line:

(thank you Ashe on YouTube)

So in his incredibly vulnerable Trial of Love, typified by his own honesty, he admits that he dreams of being a professor and having devoted students.

Does this reflect his opinions on parenthood? Not really imo.

I think this aligns way more with Gale's desire to have someone devote love and attention to him. To be respected and lauded. Gale desperately wants to be acknowledged for his genius, his arcane skills, and to be appreciated for sharing his knowledge (read: sharing his true self, the little nerdy wizard guy Gale Dekarios). It connects back to the concept of ✨Gale of Warerdeep ✨, the fabricated man he wanted to be to impress Mystra, and gain a high level of respect and awe. Not so much a commentary on how he feels about students as people or children. The students are just the vessel through which he can gain respect.

But the tl;dr of it all is that I don't think there is a canon moment that makes a statement clearly on Gale's interest in starting a family or his thoughts on children. I think it's a really interesting thought experiment to dissect and contemplate what kind of father Gale might be like based on the canon examples we have to work with. So whichever camp you fall into, so long as you're engaged and having fun with it, you're doing it right.

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

Maya was clear that she saw Liam's abuse as a result of distress that ran deep and his coping strategies with that distress. So if I talk about Liam it will be in those terms. ///

In her book she said some of the distress arouse from the contrast between his career and Harry's and the poor reception of LP1. I remember the same Guardian critic Laura Snape was very cruel about LP1 (awful 1* review) and very nice about Fine Line which was released a week later.

I just think the whole solo fandom thing is fucking toxic. The fans, the media, the industry ... all pitting them against each other and the same person coming out on top year after year.

Oh anon - I know fandom is notorious for blaming women for the actions of men - but responding 'Laura Snapes wrote a negative review of Liam's work' in response to a description of Liam's abuse - is taking fucked up fandom to another level.

But far more importantly - the way you present mental distress here You focus on the fact that Liam is being compared to other people and the fact that in this comparison external validation is not being distributed equally. Suggesting that if only external validation was distributed equally - if he got enough of it - Liam would not be experiencing this distress - is a model of mental distress that sets you up for failure.

(And of all the forms of external validation to suggest should be distributed equally - using reviews as your main example is completely absurd. People respond to art in all sorts of ways - which will always be complicated. When you put something out into the world you are taking a huge risk - including that people won't like it. But I'm mostly leaving that alone and are going to pretend to focus on a form of external validation where some form of equity of distribution would be reasonable)

External validation can be nice (although it can also be complicated), but it will not and cannot address the fractures in our psyches. There is all the evidence in the world (including within 1D) that external validation is not a solution to mental distress.

We need some kind of recognition - we need to do things people value and we need to be seen. We don't need, and can't all have, the extraordinary recognition that you describe as Harry coming up on top. Stadium tours, awards, even someone with authority engaging with and appreciating something we've created - those only go to some people - and they never have been distributed fairly and never will be.

Our mental distress lies to us - it sends us in completely the wrong way to try and fix it. Chasing after external validation as a way of trying to eliminate mental distress is a fools errand. Short term distress around rejection, or not getting something we want, or failure - is really normal. Learning to sit with that distress and get through it rather than running in all sorts of directions is a skill that it's possible to strengthen (one of the most important changes of my adult life has been experiencing applying to jobs as something that felt unbearable distressing, to something that was possible, with a significant toll).

Of course Liam experiences some distress at career difficulties - we all would. That's not what his ex-girlfriend wrote a book about. Liam responded to his distress by being cruel and abusive to people around him (particularly his ex) and seeking relief in substances that had a history of making him more abusive - in this condition he chased his girlfriend with an axe.

Our brains are lying to us. It's really common to feel distress and think 'I must do X then I will be valid and not feel distress'. That's a trap that will only keep people on a hamster wheel of distress - chasing relief that will not come. Even if you do achieve X it will not be enough - your brain will give you another goal. I think it can be useful to think of eating disorders here - the idea that being thin enough will cure someone's eating disorder will strike a lot (not enough) people as obviously illogical. The same is true for Liam and success (or Harry and success for that matter) and for so many people in different ways - if we chase things because we feel like we're not good enough - then getting those things are unlikely to make us feel good enough.

There is an alternative (although it is not to listen to that voice, and build our ability to tolerate our distress, manage triggers, and eventually heal some of the wounds that made our distress so strong in the first place.

[4lph4kidz]

The way that all of the kids seem to progress backwards in the epilouges with the exception of a lone few, I get the impression that hussie wasn't satisfied with the ending either? I don't know why you would then take the most dire route in that logic instead of using the epilouge to wrap up the loose ends and finish the story, except that he also just hated writing homestuck. My biggest gripe with them, in all honesty, is how many interesting ideas and themes it presents that it immediately either falls flat on fulfilling or just straight up retcons. At least if it followed through it would be an interesting, if not good read, instead it's just frustrating and awful the entire time through.

this is pretty close to how i feel, i think.

i can only speculate as to the intention behind them, but it's hard to not read it as petty vitriol being aimed at the fanbase. a bit of a 'screw you for being invested in the wrong things about my work'. though if i wanted to be generous, maybe it's more about this author figure struggling to move on from such an all consuming and notorious work, but fearing irrelevancy/what might come next. shrug. either way i think it's supposed to be hard to interact with in the way fandoms typically do.

idk. i'm trying to be up front and say that on some level i just don't vibe with the overall unhappy tone. i'm trying to separate 'i dislike this' from 'i think this is objectively bad'. but also, i really have done my best to engage with post canon and see what it's trying to say, and though there are interesting ideas at play, this is not a text that is pleasant to engage with. and i'm just... i'm not impressed? it doesn't come together for me. the quality of the writing and meta aspects of the epilogues are interesting but not enough to carry it as a work. certainly not as a piece of entertainment. meanwhile hs2 is a mess. it has none of the originality or momentum of the original work, and it has very little offer in terms of original content or innovation. between that and the intentionally cynical and miserable tone of the whole thing, it's just. bleh. i'm not really feeling too generous.

[littleshebear]

As much as I don't ship Ikora/Zavala (I entertained the idea briefly back in D1 days), I've got no issue with the ship or anyone who ships it. Ship and let ship, let people enjoy things and all that. 

I can imagine Ikora/Zavala shippers were jumping for joy over this latest lore (kind of how I was after the Guardian Games lore with Zavala and Hawthorne) so I honestly feel it's kind of a shame a dev felt the need to shoot down the ship like this:

I'd also hate for this screencap to be waved in the faces of shippers to show them how they're "doing fandom wrong" or to mock them. And I could totally see this happening because this fandom is notoriously awful towards fanfic writers (no, I haven't forgotten the Byf debacle and the abuse that was hurled our way even after he clarified and apologised). 

So have at it. Write fic, headcanon and make fanmixes to your shippy heart's content. 

To any Ikora/Zavala shippers out there who are feeling deflated, I'd say this: it doesn't matter. I honestly don't think *Word of God matters that much. Invoke death of the author and carry on. If a dev says they're just friends, fine, that's one opinion, a reader's different interpretation is just as valid. Once something is published, all bets are off, the writer doesn't get final say over how people interpret it. And who says fanfic or shipping even needs to be canon-compliant anyway? The fix-it fic, AU and crack fic are all perfectly valid ways to engage with fandom. 

*TV tropes warning, I take no responsibility if you end up down a rabbit hole. ;)

Edit: image isn't going where I want it to. I'm in no WiFi land, so I'm posting this on mobile. Oh tungle.

[gxldencity]

would you be willing to share more of your thoughts on fandom/AO3, specifically re racism and staffing issues? if you'd rather not do so publicly I can message you off anon. but I'm really interested in what you have to say on the subject

Hmmm...🤔 tbf, a lot of this ties into how fandom as a whole is notoriously racist, and severely caters to the needs of white people first, BIPOC second (so in some ways like society). ao3 isn't the first or the only one who has these issues—and really we shouldn't stop at ao3—but it'd be great if a site that's supposed to for fans could do so much more at protecting its most marginalized communities.

I think in general what people want is to be able to use the site without enabling their fight or flight instincts. Filtering helps but it doesn't stop racist trolls from spamming their fics with hate because they dare pair a white fave with a Black character/OC or for daring to interpret a white fave as anything but white. Besides, a lot of racist fic usually isn't tagged with racism because who would do that knowingly? Unless you are aware that the stuff you're writing contains it, and want to warn people of the subject.

Ideally, it would be great if we could report these fics but I understand that's not how ao3 works. If that's not how they work, then the least they could do is provide more tools for us when using the site. Blocking/muting is a feature they've been working on for years, which was suggested by plenty of BIPOC during meetings with the board of directors. I think they're slowly rolling out the feature in the next month/next few months, and they've already added tools to support that (ie: comment freezes), which is honestly welcomed and much needed.

Really, they could be doing so much more beyond what the tools the site uses. The leadership and staff are so painfully white that it's kinda hard to engage with them on problems. BlPOC who have donated, are members and have participated in elections often felt ignored and frustrated at the lack of acknowledgement to their needs so they end up just stopping their donations and leaving. Like...they thought they could change things by donating, becoming members and speaking out—I mean that's what everybody tells them to do right?—but no one's there to understand their problems.

There are lots of things the OTW could do, but I think they should just take that initiative to hire BIPOC, instead of waiting around for someone to step up. That's not going to work with how notoriously racist fandoms are, pushing away fans of colour from participating.

Anyway, here are some threads to discussions that happened last summer, which was the last time (and not the first nor would it be the last) these discussions happened en masse.

Samira Nadkarni's detailed look on fandom racism throughout the years which contains several threads from Dr. Rukmini Pande.

This post on what white fans can do to help BIPOC.

Another perspective on keeping racist fics on the archive.

There are a few more threads surely, and a few more are constantly popping up.

There's always this dissonance I find whenever discussion about ao3 come up, like this attitude that we should be grateful for a service for providing for us, that we should learn our roots and see why ao3 is so important. But okay, why should I be entirely grateful for a site that barely did anything when my friends were getting racist harrasment in the comments? Why should I be completely happy with the way ao3 is when I and so many people I know have left fandom and/or stopped reading fics bc perusing through their fave's tag has just been exhausting due to the racist content?

Why is it when we talk about fandom roots, no one ever mentions that RaceFail happened around ao3's early years? I mean unless a BIPOC talks about it first which really doesn't help since it's on us again.

If we truly want to claim that fandom and ao3 are safe spaces for everyone, or ao3 and the OTW uplifts fans, then we have to mean everyone. Like fans of colour are just here to hang out and have fun, and don't want to be reminded that the world is awful like everyone else.