#I've seen the exact arguments over and over again it's literally the exact same every time

[some-cold-and-some-violence]

Maybe THIS time the tumblr queers have finally found the REAL Privileged Invaders who Don't Belong. Maybe this time they're REALLY actually harming the Actually Oppressed members of the community by trying to discuss the issues they face. Maybe this time the horrific troll blogs and disgusting anons harassing others while claiming to be from this group really ARE from individuals in this group, and maybe this time the indefensible and atrocious actions of an alleged member of this group justify making this entire segment of the community an acceptable target, and justify nearly identical harassment that has also been thrown at them, but ignored because, "well actually these other people have it WORSE".

Maybe. Possibly.

But this website also thought the same when non-binary people were the Privileged Transphobic Interlopers harming the Actually Oppresed Trans People. When bi and pan people were the Privileged Homophobic Interlopers harming the Actually Oppresed Gay People. When aspec people were the Privileged Cishet Interlopers harming Actually Oppresed same-gender attracted people. But people on this website have no pattern recognition, the memory of goldfish, and a love of "justified" lateral aggression so this has to happen every few years.

[blitzwhore]

I just saw Blitzø get called Stolas stockholm victim I can't with this fandom anymore😭

😂 As outrageously incorrect and stupid as that take is, I'm going to go on a tangent here. I hope you don't mind.

I think every fandom has annoying people with awfully terrible takes in it. People with zero media literacy. People who hatewatch. People who think they're entitled to the exact show they would've wanted, which has nothing to do with the actual, existing show.

This is especially true for queer media, and especially true for queer cartoons. (Hi, yes. I was active in the Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Voltron, and She-Ra fandoms when those shows were airing, respectively. I've seen some stuff). Some people just can't handle queer cartoons, period. If the queer characters/ships are soft and wholesome, they're infantilising and boring, and if they're complex and nuanced and actually have conflict, they're abusive and problematic. You'll hear the same recycled arguments over and over again. Like, the shit some people are saying about Blitz and Stolas after The Full Moon? Is literally almost word-for-word what they said about Catra and Adora post-season 3 of She-Ra (and even at the end of the show).

Here's the thing, though! Those people and their bad takes are not what I want to think about what I think about a fandom. Those aren't the people I want to call the fans. They don't deserve that title. Not when so many other people are out there dedicating their time to making gifs and art and meta posts, and writing fic, and commenting/reblogging to show support, and sliding into people's DMs to scream and squee together about a thing they love.

At the end of the day, "fandom" is just a lot of people each doing their own thing. Which people you engage with and allow to stay within your line of sight will determine your fandom experience. Fandom can be a huge, convoluted, online space full of people who are constantly arguing with one another and whose takes make you unfathomably angry... Or it can be you and your 5 friends and mutuals who scream gleefully at one another in 2-note posts. You can't control what others post online, but you can control your engagement with it.

How? Well, here's what I personally do to avoid getting upset by people's stupid opinions online:

Filter 'critical' and 'anti' tags (eg. #anti stolitz #anti vivziepop #Helluva Boss critical #HB critical #vivziepop critical). Many people actually do tag their critical posts because they know it's the respectful thing to do!

If I come across a post that has one or more of those tags, obviously, I don't click through to see it under any circumstances.

If I stumble across a stranger's untagged post with hate/criticism that upsets me: I stop reading and BLOCK. Immediately. I don't look back. I don't finish reading. I don't engage. I just block block block. I <3 the block button, seriously.

If I feel my mind reeling from a bad take I just came across: I take a step back, close my phone, breathe, remember life is beautiful sometimes. Go back and watch an episode I really like. Clean my living space a little. Vent about it to a friend (but only if I really need to, because if not, I'd rather not dwell on it).

If I'm starting to feel the need to reply to someone's bad take (directly or via my own post), I instead make the decision to channel that energy into making fandom posts out of love. (I don't do this just with fandom. If I see something transphobic online, I usually react by reblogging a bunch of trans art or trans positivity posts on my main, for example). I like to think of it as putting some positivity out into the world to compensate for the negativity I just saw. So, for example, if I see someone shitting on my blorbo, I may make a silly post just saying how much I love blorbo. Or I'll make (or draft) a post about how interesting I find some of blorbo's actions. Or reblog another person's positive/interesting post about blorbo.

And finally, I stay the hell away from Twitter. Or at least, if I go on Twitter, I try my best to avoid any tweet that has text in it instead of just art. Even the people who have good opinions spend too much time arguing with the people who have bad opinions on there. I don't want to see people's bad takes! No, not even while reading founded and perfectly articulated criticism of those bad takes! So I just limit my time on Twitter. And again, if someone is putting bad takes on my TL (even if it is to counter them), I unfollow and block as needed.

All this to say, yes, it really fucking sucks to read the opinions of people who don't understand and who hate the characters and ships and worlds you love. Gosh it's the worst. But you can curate your fandom experience. You can focus on the things you can control. You have the power to decide if your fandom experience is draining or fun!

And because I don't know how to finish this, here, have a Stolitz kiss to heal you:

We will keep winning and there's nothing the haters can do about it. 😌

[strawberryamanita]

Alright, it was a bad idea to go into the neurosparkly tag. People are chill in the neurospicy tag, but it's just hatepost after hatepost after hatepost in the neurosparkly tag.

I was gonna keep my mouth shut, but now I'm pissed. Y'all really know how to make a person's skin crawl.

Rant below.

Listen, this reeks of one person pulling "neurosparkly" and "neurospicy" out of a very obscure conversation and going "hmm, this gives me the willies, so it looks like an acceptable target to me!", and I'm already sick of it. This gives me the exact same vibes as that one famous post about transmeds vs transtrenders -- this idea of pinning one form of self-expression against another, in the name of dunking on fellow marginalized people that are giving your demographic "a bad name". To that end, I'd like to remind y'all that the original artist of that post admitted they weren't acting right about trans people that aren't like them, and so I'm hoping we get over this and get over it soon.

Because we cannot keep doing this.

Every. Summer. Every fucking Summer, this website has to put a spotlight on a new group to punch down on. First it was just about every LGBTQIA+ group outside of cis gay men you could imagine -- lesbians, bis/pans, trans people, ace people, non-binary people, people who identify as queer (we're literally all queer, but that's another convo all together), you name it. It literally never stops, you people have to be taught over and over again that, no, this one group isn't okay to target either, that's your family too, you're not better than them for being a different flavor of weird.

Now we're doing this to neurodivergent people? Neurodivergent people. The overwhelming majority of this website. You're gonna try and clown on other neurodivergent people for, what is it, being cringe? After we just agreed that embracing cringe is a huge step towards self-acceptance and self-love? tumblr is THE cringe website. We don't do optics here, we don't clean our metaphorical rooms when guests are over.

Like what, we have to take every moment of our neurodivergent lives seriously? It's ridiculous enough that we have a "normal" model for how a brain should be, compared to all the different ways a person can develop. Are we such tragic figures that we can't take the smallest delight in calling ourself a fun little nickname? It's not self-censoring, it's not like "handicapable vs disabled", let's not treat this thing like a gust of wind on the house of cards that is our (quite necessary) camaraderie.

Are we gonna start zeroing in on specific neurodivergent conditions next? How long are we gonna play this stupid game of Who Is It Okay To Bully on this website? If you wanna look like a mature and poised and respectable lot, you can't be doing something so petty, whether it's for fun or "for the cause".

Y'know what? I support neurosparkly. I support neurospicy. My neurotype is glow-in-the-dark. It's glittery, it's color-changing, it's metallic and covered in rhinestones and smells like artificial fruits. My neurotype is crayon drawings and old kids' meal toys and bubble machines and getting bleary-eyed over Muppet songs. My brain is covered in holographic stickers and playing 8bit videogame music on loop. I am Cringemeister General. You could only wish to be as cringe as me.

Now cringe. Cringe and cope and seethe and mald. Dig up everything you can about me to attempt to punish me for disagreeing with you, and let your confirmation bias run wild. Post me on r/cringe, make a YouTube or TikTok video about me, pick me apart on a livestream, make me the poster-boy of your disgust, print out a screenshot of my blog and throw darts at it. Dance the dance of self-hatred, and then wait in the wings until you get to dance it again.

Eugh.

I'm gonna close this rant using every argument that I've seen effectively shut down these yearly attempts at putting eachother in the pillories, because I don't know if I can take another Summer of this:

If you start picking on people for using "neurosparkly" or "neurospicy", I'm assuming you're a fed. Infighting only helps the oppressors, and if we spend our energy trying to police eachother we're not going to get anything done. Kill the cringe cop in your head. There's as many ways for a person to live as are, have been, and will be people on this planet; there's a good chance you're gonna hear about some people who give you the ick, but you're gonna have to swallow that ick and respect them anyhow.

Every ounce of energy you spend rolling your eyes at people you consider beneath you can be spent chipping away at a person in power. Every minute you choose to spend tsking or turning up your nose at "weird" kids can be spent advocating for that weirdness and normalizing being fucking nice to people. You punch down or punch across because it gives you quicker, more visible results; if we're all punching up, they'll have no other option than to listen to us.

There is enough room for everybody. Even the neurospicies, even the neurosparklies.

PS: Any attempts to make fun of me or the people I talked about in this post are just straight-up gonna be ignored. I don't see why you'd want to convince me to think less of others, so trying to sway me is gonna be difficult on your part. I'm not debating anyone's rights, and I'm not gonna conserve spoons to argue with a stranger. I have Anons turned off already, so if you wanna get up in my virtual face you won't have a disguise to protect you.

Thank you for your time.

[pillatedcompills]

Narrator designs.

Okay I'm damn tired with the same kindergarten playground type arguments in this fandom. "All thin narrator designs are bad". Please for the love of GOD shut the hell up man. Who cares, its a ⭐GAME⭐. The Narrator has no canon design, he's a DISEMBODIED VOICE. If the argument that all thin narrator designs are bad simply because well- "They don't make him look old enough, They make him like a twink , He doesn't look right". Then every other argument can also apply. That he shouldn't be white because well "Not all British people are white". Or that he shouldn't be a man because "Not all people who sound like men are men". Every single argument can be throw out there, and people will tear it up. It shouldn't matter, why the fuck are grown ass adults getting mad at kids over a damn design.

There are so much other stuff we could be arguing about, not how much fat or wrinkles some random ass voice has on him. The older folks or the people who have been in this fandom longer will whine, complain, and act all bitter over the way a kid designs a damn character. "He wouldn't look like that" who the fuck actually cares. I've seen popular artists on tumblr whine and whine for god knows how long on that people don't like their narrator design because he's "FAT". Maybe let's stop and think why people don't like your design perhaps?

Maybe it's because you make your narrator being fat his whole personality. It's maybe because you're so entrenched in what other people do, people stopped liking your design because you actively hated on others. Call me a hypocrite or a grifter, I don't care and I will NEVER care. Sure most of my narrator designs are fat, but I don't let that define him, I just don't. Seeing grown ass adults make fun of younger people over a damn character is annoying as hell. It'll be the most irrelevant ass arguments, "Narrator is white" "Narrator wouldn't look like that" "Narrator doesn't have exactly 62 strands of hair on his nutsack". Literally it's the same with you people, it never changes.

It's a shame knowing nobody gets the inspo behind my narrator designs, because almost every design has the exact same elements. Funny enough people will go "Ew you made him dark" when he's at most fucking tan or lightskin.

I swear to you if I see one more person whine about this, I will personally shove my foot so far up your narrators ass he won't be able to walk EVER again.

[potatomountain]

PROCESSING IS NOT THE SAME FOR EVERYONE

This is just fcked up you can have the same mental disorder as someone else and guess what ITS NOT GOING TO EFFECT YOU BOTH THE EXACT SAME WAY that's not how that sht works hyper fixation isn't even the same for people I've got a few mental health issues, I'm on the spectrum AND have my own trauma and can guarantee what works for you won't work for me and vise versa.

Also is everyone literally just gonna forget the fact that a World Wide famous song was PLAGIARISED by writing HC?????

As someone whose read both HC and ID and has actually had ideas for ID run past them and helped a lil as someone that's seen the "similarities list" yes Hongjoong likes clothes Joong irl loves customising his and his members clothes, Jongho and libraries go hand in hand have you SEEN how peaceful that man is???, Yunho drawing has been used in soooo many different fcking fics it's ridiculous, Yeosang being mcs "first" would have been an argument point even if it wasn't Yeosang, MC is closest and the moment to Mingi and Yeosang NOT Jongho and ya know what annoyed me the most the comparison that the demons have Black eyes.... like my loves please search up what colour are demon eyes = black, the mind connection is literally more of a wolfpack thing than a demon thing so huh

Anyways I'm just done with the fcking fact that a FAMOUS song was plagiarised to write Hotel California and yet NO ONE gives a sht about that and are just layin in on the ID fic these are both fanfictions that a storyline that has been used time and time again with both being similar to ALOT of other fanfics of EVERY fandom people write for

So enough Doom has apologised (for something that honestly doesn't need one) they've explained how something might’ve made it easier to overlook similarities so how about people just grow up and look at both sides

I-

Thank you anon.

Im so distraught over this I bawled at work and they let me go home.

I can honestly say I feel so guilty and ashamed- mostly over the MoC/LT thing but I wanted to stand by ID.

I still plan to rework it cuz I don't want any trouble. They are both big in the ateez fanfic community here, they were both authors I respected and looked up to- but I'm like beyond hurt about this?

I did everything they asked, I claimed blame for MoC and spoke my side. HC and ID is another matter I'm just not even going to argue over.

I only asked for some understanding and forgiveness on my part as I am only human, and not one that functions by societies standards. I did my best to be an adult about it. I owned up to the mistakes pointed out and I apologized like you said.

But at this point it feels like they want me to be a bad guy about this?

Neither author has said anything past the initial call out to me. Neither have acknowledged my attempts to remedy the situation. The author of HC has me blocked so I can't see on their end and frankly I don't want to. I was an adult about the situation, their turn.

I'll admit my reaction at first to the ID-HC situation wasn't the best but I was extremely hurt by the claims. And I think I have a right to be.