#absolutely horrifying the kind of things people on the internet can think of. you are wicked and a hell a waits for you.

[xluxsolarisx]

BOO!

nothings actually happened on feb 1st so far i don't think but i refuse to let my prophecy go unfulfilled ^^👍

heh....you fool......the gif isn't loading for me so therefore nothing bad or scary has happened on february first. your curses are ineffective and i am so so so powerful and i will never experience any harm or feaWAAAAH THE GIF LOADED AAAAH!!!!!!!!!

[tossawary]

It's very ironic to get comments on "Scum Villain" fics that are essentially revenge fantasies against certain characters, given... uh... everything about "Proud Immortal Demon Way" and how the story of SVSSS interacts with that in-universe story.

Sometimes, it's mildly amusing. Sometimes, it's a little disturbing, depending on how violent and disproportionate the fantasy is, because even if I've written some villain as a real asshole, I don't want to open my inbox to people wishing death and gory violence on anyone. A couple times, it took me a hot second to figure out that the violent fantasy wasn't directed at ME specifically.

Thankfully, that extremism is quite rare, so it's more often people wishing milder physical pains or, uh, complete social humiliation on certain characters, sometimes just for the "crime" of being mild inconveniences or slightly unfriendly to the fic's protagonist. Most of the time, I assume this is some form of playful exaggeration on the commenter's part, a reader exorcising mild annoyance at a fictional antagonist and expressing some sympathy or compassion for the hurt protagonist. A reader mentioning they kind of want to see a character grovel pathetically for forgiveness only to get kicked in the face is not necessarily a reader who wants that revenge fantasy to actually happen in the story.

Sometimes, though, it is hard to tell if someone genuinely thinks that all of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect should be destroyed because Luo Binghe was abused or Shang Qinghua was overworked. Like, I sure hope this is just hyperbole! I sure hope that you don't honestly think that "an eye for an eye" or "I take two of your eyes and also your tongue because you took one of my eyes" are, like, reasonable justice policies! I sure hope that you don't sincerely think that collective punishment is in any way a good thing and that a random junior disciple on the tenth peak (who probably doesn't even know who Luo Binghe is) deserves to suffer because the original Shen Qingqiu was a really shitty person.

But revenge fantasies like "Proud Immortal Demon Way" are popular for a reason, so I can never quite be sure! In every fandom, you have Peerless Cucumbers demanding that villain characters be castrated or killed for being abusive pricks, who cheer on the fictional revenge fantasy of hurting someone ten times as much as they hurt you, and some fans would be absolutely horrified by that kind of "retribution" in real life and others would... cheer that real life "punishment" on as well.

I don't really have a strong point to make with this post! This post is too long to be a casual reminder: "Hey, I hope you're always keeping in mind that messages you send on the internet are being directly received by real people who 1) can't read your tone and 2) don't know your 'real life' opinions to immediately know if you're joking." And I'm focused more here on how amusingly ironic this type of commenting is in regards to SVSSS and PIDW specifically.

Like, it's fun sometimes to get a little "Peerless Cucumber" about our favorite protagonists! (Shen Yuan said a lot of shit on the internet about PIDW but apparently generally doesn't really want people in SVSSS to suffer.) But once your revenge fantasy starts getting a little too detailed in regards to public humiliation and social ruin, torture and dismemberment, arson and leaving someone to get eaten alive by fire ants, making everyone who ever mildly slighted you beg for their life at your feet... It's like, "Bro, I don't think this comment is even Peerless Cucumber levels anymore. You are straight-up getting into original Luo Binghe territory here."

[chaifootsteps]

(long ask, sorry - there was a lot of unpack)

I read the fix-it fic (it's very cute and wholesome!) and looked at the comments expecting to see a few flames or people disagreeing with the premise, but it's an out and out dogpile in there.

it's so ugly to treat someone just writing a vent fic like that, & they must have been actively looking for people daring to criticize Viv given that there's nothing in the tags to suggest it

also like, one of the flamers being like 'how can you say Viv and Raph didn't handle the topic of SA well but still say people are entitled to like the episode or find it cathartic? if people like it and you recognize that, that proves Viv and Raph handled the topic well!'

which is like, no. that's not remotely what they were saying or how it works. they're just giving grace to people who got something out of it, but they still think the depiction and handling of the topic as a whole was bad themselves. being compassionate for someone else's take on media & their feelings doesn't objectively prove that take is correct, they're just making space for other opinions in a way a lot of these 'it was handled well, end of discussion' type people aren't

it's such an all or nothing, combative way of thinking about art, that if you dislike it you must also call everyone who likes it stupid or something otherwise it means you secretly recognize it's good or some nonsense like that. that and it's just populism - if some people like it that means it's objectively good. which is funny because usually we treat something everyone likes as just 'having mass appeal' not 'high art'.

but I guess when people get terminally online they assume the vote of the majority is correct - it reminds me of this one debate about something pewdiepie did (I think it was an edgy joke or something, I'm not interested in relitigating it, it's just an example) where one of his supporters claimed 'we've [already framing a constructed audience] already decided he's innocent because the amount of support/likes he got on a response to [insert controversy here]'. it's literally the logic/rhetoric of 'if the mob decides something is good, it's good' which is horrifying logic and has been used to justify any number of irl awful things. but I digress

you could just as easily argue it the other way - if someone likes the scene but makes space for criticism of it, does that automatically make the criticism right?

also like - there's so much evidence in those comments that people do not understand what SA is. like so many people have this conception that SA is the same as rape - like, unless there was penetration of some kind no assault happened. but like if you actually look at the legal definition of SA, multiple places define it as

1 did person A touch person B? 2 did person B not want to be touch and person A should have reasonably understood that? 3 then it was sexual assault

dragging someone into a room while they yell and plead and say no is sexual assault, even if they got away before they were penetrated. being set upon and kissed and groped by a crowd of people is sexual assault, even if they also were not penetrated (and given Blitzo's dialogue there it's doubtful)

Sir Pent was SA'd, Moxxie was SA'd

anyone who has been held down or groped against their will but was rescued or escaped was sexually assaulted. sexually assault can include rape, but it doesn't always

we desperately need better literacy around this, it's legit disturbing to see how many people will pull the 'well technically the show doesn't mock SA because [insert logic solely reliant on the idea that Sir Pent and Moxxie were not SA'd]'. & it's such a revealing line of debate because they know they can't argue whether or not the show is making light of sensitive topics (it absolutely is) so instead they do the internet thing of making the next argument - they claim no, this wasn't SA and demand people debate them on those terms instead. it's falling into their trap because the issue behind that is the one they don't want to talk about - that Viv does not know how to handle this topic with the slightest bit of sensitivity

(tangent but back when HB aired I didn't judge Stolas as harshly for the full moon deal mostly for the tone the show had set up, if that makes sense? I thought the show wanted us to understand that Stolas and most of the cast were all terrible people and that was the entire 'joke' of the show. that Stolas definitely did a bad thing but the show was more interested in dark humor and the audience just kind of had to meet it where it was at. when they started moving towards there being dramatic consequences in Ozzie's I still though the show understood Stolas was a bad person, only now they were actually paying off a dramatic plot point they'd set up so he would actually have to grow and change. Then season 2 happened and the show is insisting he never did anything wrong, he's perfect, etc. and everything that happened in season 1 looks way worse by comparison. it was already bad, but I thought the writers understood that. they don't. instead they've engaged in the most laughable, embarassingly written domestic violence storyline I think I've ever seen in any media, ever, just to get him off the hook for anything he's done. do I respect the opinions of people who find him standing up to Stella cathartic? yes. does that automatically mean those people are right and it's good writing, actually? no. hard no. a million times no. survivors of dv, especially male ones, are often starved of media representation. I want them to feel seen. it doesn't stop me thinking they deserve far better than being represented by a terribly written character like Stolas, who himself is accidentally the show's best representation of a convincing abuser, but that's a rant for another time)

also also, it's kind of annoying that A03 allows guests to post under any handle instead of assigning a random one, because now if anyone points to AyyLmao that it's unhinged behavior to try to police fics people post on the Organization for Transformative Works (the clue's in the name what fanfiction is for!) he can just claim someone tried to frame him, even if there's plenty of reason to suspect he would totally do that (some of the more hateful bigoted flames strike me as exactly that - going as far as possible with it to be able to turn around and say 'look how hard the Viv haters want to frame me! look how cartoonishly bigoted they make me out to be!'

this is so deeply bizarre to me. I've been in fandoms where the media in question is less than perfect and fix-its exist for entire arcs of shows and everyone else is happy to be like 'I see why you had a problem with this even if I think it was OK or not a big deal', or 'I don't see the problem at all but I'm just going to let you vibe like an adult would do'. and the same with character shilling fics, I'm old enough to know that the best solution for fanfic or transformative works you don't agree with is to just click off. but some HH/HB fans are actively out to create a high control group where any criticism must be policed. if I ever get annoyed enough by HH/HB to make my own vent fic, I'm posting it under anon and with comments moderated. I'm not interested in providing an open forum for people to send me hate for a show that is far from worth defending (and even if it was, who cares? they ought to be able to get on with their day if their fave show is so obviously above criticism)

last point, sorry for the rant - it's kind of laughable to me that the author in the comments provided a long, objective list of what Viv and Raph have been doing that anyone can check and all of which happened publically, because they did it publically, and I don't recall seeing many comments in that thread attempting to respond to any of it; it just got ignored. it's pretty funny they simultaneously want to act like Viv is the victim of unfair hate campaigns when she's actively cultivated a fandom that attracts people like them, who bully people to the point they fear making even the mildest critiques. like you want to act like Viv is some bullied saintlike professional, but can you imagine the showrunner of any much bigger TV show encouraging the worst elements of their fandom to the point that said worst elements think harassing an SA survivor in the comments section of a fanfiction where they process their feelings about how lousy the show is in handling SA, and trying to claim said showrunner is still a professional?

to repurpose a point Viv herself made, a professional would know that any show with more than a cult following will attract criticism. a professional would not encourage people like AyyLmao and Norry, they would shut that shit down and know to leave the writers of a fanfic a couple hundred people at most will see that's dealing with a topic sensitive to them, in peace

No apologies needed, it was an excellent ask!

It's absolutely insane that any of this happened. In all my years of moving through some pretty aggressive fandoms and seeing (and writing) some pretty contentious fics for them, never have I seen anyone dogpiled like this just for writing a small, intensely personal fix-it fic. It's just beyond disgusting.

[weaselbeaselpants]

Lorch opened her big stupid mouth again and decided to lean into "addicts are all awful and deserve to die" territory. How adorable.

My father functionally drank himself to death after he finally drove us away for good with his constant rage sessions, bouts of anger, stalking, suicide baiting and threatening us with guns, and all of this after a period of hightened emotional and verbal abuse we were subjected to after the death of my grandmother which lead him to self-medicate even harder than he already did throughout my whole life. I get really pissed at the idea that drugs, ANY drug or substance, can "save" you. It can't. You have to save you and self-medication can kill and does kill. It ruined my life because it ruined my dad's life and it ruined his immune system to where he died of bronchitis. I know from watching my dad's brother, my uncle, who did do HARD drugs and had the same issues as my dad, that hard drugs are easy to get into after you keep clearing hurtles to escape pain/feel higher, and then DANGEROUSLY hard to escape from. No Lily I didn't need Requiem for a Dream and Trainspotting to tell me that though I've heard from people that both those movies are disturbingly accurate about heroine, which is horrifying. No one should go through what happens in those stories and they sure as hell shouldn't be blamed/shamed/treated like 'filth' for being in that position at all.

The thing is, people are responsible for themselves. Not taking prescriptions right is bad. ALWAYS talk with a psychiatrist they are literally there to hear how you're doing on your drugs; never drink/smoke/toke and drive or handle machinery. It is absolutely not worth it get your friend or family to do it PLEASE even if they're annoying (at best) and chast you for that. If there's any way in which weed can directly kill you -Lily- it's through this. Wait till you're home; I'm not telling you this crap because I'm your mom, stranger on the internet reading this. I'm telling you this as a person with my own vices who lives around other people with their own vices; take care of yourself as best you can. You can do better, but you can never be perfect and that's okay. Don't abstain from stuff you can't quit but please be responsible. And godspeed to people dealing with addictions to hard drugs. I wish you the best - you can do it and as impossible as it may seem you will find the things you need in life to escape your pain without your addiction. I wish...so much that vibes and prayers and good thoughts could do more for you; especially the people dealing with drugs and homelessness right now which is SO MANY in my county alone. My government is screwing you over. You deserve to live and you ought to have your story told no matter what.

Anyway fuck you six ways to sunday Lily Orchard in the name of HUMANITY. You miserable, awful woman- wishing death and eugenic talk onto addicts for the crime of being an addict. You're the kind of person who doesn't just get uncomfortable+scoot away at a clearly tripping person on the bus, you actively say vile things abt them under your breath and scream at them if they even come near you. You have no empathy. I pray to god you never come across a homeless person. You must think the same backward garbage about them too.

Also speaking of vices and lecturing people on them, I find all this rich coming from the woman who wrote incest-laden cp left and right in her heyday, blames other people for it and very likely has accounts full of visual cp under your sockpuppets. I don't drink, smoke or take heavy drugs myself, Lily. But, just looking at what your good old friend Tara (who is not Sai. We both know this I don't even like Sai and I know it's not Sai) has hidden on the web I kind of want to now just to get those images outta my mind. "Quit at anytime/just NOT do the dangerous this" clearly doesn't apply to you. Predator.

[maryellencarter]

Every so often, rotating posts in your mind on tumblr dot hell as you do, you find yourself face to squamous tendril with a previously undescribed Lovecraftian discourse monster, and you have to figure out how the hell to provide a scientific description of the beast.

Which is to say: I have identified a gap in how people talk about queer representation. A gap both so wide and so unnoticed that it contributes largely to misunderstandings, accusations, flamewars, and callouts.

You, and each of us, likely agree with one and only one of these two statements:

* "Queer representation includes any explicit depiction of queer activity, negative or positive. An evil lesbian dominatrix who uses hitting on the heroine to demonstrate her evil, a same-sex teacher/underage student relationship, or an unpleasant and unattractive authority figure shown with a harem of multiple sexes, are all technically queer representation. Additionally, having queer representation does not by itself make a work more valuable or less valuable."

* "Queer representation is a positive factor that always makes a work more valuable. Therefore, it is extremely important to select carefully among depictions of queer activity, and apply the positive label of Representation only to the ones that we personally identify with and/or wish people to emulate. Additionally, if a person describes a specific depiction as Representation, it is certain that the person identifies with it personally and/or wishes people to emulate it."

As you can see, a person who agrees with the second statement is likely to be absolutely horrified by some of the things that get called "queer representation" by a person who agrees with the first statement -- because they believe that calling something queer representation is an endorsement of the *kind* of queer behavior it depicts, that only socially desirable queer behavior can be called Representation.

At the same time, a person who agrees with the first statement is likely to be baffled and frustrated by some of the things that get called "not queer representation" by a person who agrees with the second statement -- because they believe that denying something the title of Representation requires either a denial that it was queer (or "queer enough"), or a denial that it was depicted.

(I, being a person on the internet, also agree with one and only one of these two statements, but I am trying very hard to represent both of them accurately. And I think it would probably be very helpful to clarity if we could all consider that both viewpoints exist, when having conversations about depictions of queerness in media.)

[something-pithy]

Notes and an Update: Astarion, Tav, and Trauma in Stories

Pictured above: actual footage of trauma response from Astarion (j/k! kinda!) to catch your eye :D

Hey glittercats and cosmic kittens!

So I've definitely been neglecting the updates here, which I'm going to try to do better with.

We're up to Chapter 11 on this bad boy, and I've adjusted the anticipated chapter count to 30 (but honestly it's probably still all lies because I have absolutely no sense of how much writing each point on my outline ends up being loool).

I have a DOPE beta who's fucking amazing both in terms of conventions and idea partnership and I'm telling you right now, this story is so much better for having their hands and eyes on it.

SOME CONTENT WARNING STUFF RE: THIS CHAPTER:

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) and symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

.

.

.

MORE DETAILS ON THIS -- SPOILERS AHEAD, READ AT YOUR OWN RISK

So hopefully that's enough room for people who don't want to be spoiled to escape!

So I'm going to copy/paste the end note on the story, and expand on it a little bit.

So, although Tav is a "good drunk," as Frank Gallagher might put it, she is 1000% engaging in pretty serious substance abuse, or to be more specific in this chapter, alcohol use disorder. I'm not going to go into the way this story is going to approach mental and behavioral health disorders and trauma; hopefully it will speak for itself. Suffice it to say substance abuse and trauma are not the central subject of this story, but also, Astarion and Tav as they exist in this little pocket dimension of the BG3 universe have been impacted by the trauma they've each experienced both together and as individuals. In general, the impact of trauma can look and feel a lot of ways. Sometimes it's horrifying, sometimes it's heartbreaking, sometimes it's rage-inducing - but let's be honest, sometimes that shit is funny, too, because humor is such an incredible survival tactic / coping mechanism. Even if sometimes we're laughing at shit that shouldn't be funny. (Maybe especially then.) This story isn't going to be an after-school special or a PSA. It's a story about people, and sometimes people are fucked up (literally and figuratively). Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox now. If this has activated you, or you have earnest questions or concerns about what's going on in this story / with these characters, or you just want to shoot the shit, hit me up on my tumblr. There might be more notes there on this eventually, but for now, this chapter actually took a lot out of me and I'm still out here with these perpetual COVID symptoms, so... lol NOT TONIGHT. As always, thank y'all for reading, kudosing, and commenting.

OK, so I may have lied about the no notes part... but honestly, in re-reading that note, I think it kind of gets to the point.

But ALSO...

I've been a geek on the internet for a long, long time. I've engaged with different fan-based writing and roleplaying communities (tabletop, chat-based, forum-based, butt-based -- EVERYTHING) for pretty much the entire time.

"The Tragic Backstory" seems like it's been A Whole Thing since people started creating characters whether for roleplay or stories.

I think times have changed somewhat, but back in the day I ran in circles where a lot of thoughts about writing, creating characters, roleplay, etc. coexisted somewhat peacefully, but an old chestnut that consistently (maybe without fail) turned up in any conversation that involved Writers of Quality was a contingent of folks who had deep disdain for The Tragic Backstory.

I'm talkin' some deep, scathing, elitist shit, my beautiful people.

And I'm not gonna lie to you! This is approximately ten thousand years ago (no but seriously, decades), and honestly, I was up in those conversations, too, throwing around my disdain, assured by my fellow elitists that even though I frequently employed some form of Tragic Backstory, it was OK when I did it because it was good.

I mean in retrospect, it's kinda bullshit. There's always gonna somebody who's gonna think your shit's good, and there's also always gonna be somebody who thinks they're a Better Writer Than You who's gonna think your shit is... well, shit.

Not gonna lie, I still have very strong and particular preferences when it comes to the fic I read in general, and that includes backstory.

But over time, I got progressively less insecure (not just about my writing, but in general) and consequently less concerned with judging writing that's not my flavor as "bad" or "shitty" or "juvenile" (looool seriously, I was a dick) and more concerned with finding and creating writing that is my flavor.

However, and I don't think I'm going to apologize for it, some dickish tendencies linger in my soul. I'm going to try and frame these thoughts in terms of what compels me in a story I'm reading and what I do (or try to do) in my own writing.

This is a very long way of saying if something I say (or have already said) makes you feel like I'm coming for your neck, please know that I'm not.

My thoughts and/or opinions may cause you or someone you love to feel Some Type of Way. That is not my intention. I have no desire to:

Yuck anyone's yum

Contribute to or activate the crippling self-doubt that plagues almost every creative I've ever met

Be a dick.

Having said all that, I do have Thoughts on This Matter.

People write for a lot of reasons, but I'm fairly convinced that nobody's doing it with any level of purity. There are tons of incredible, beautiful, moving stories that feature a whole-ass Self-Insert, maybe even the dreaded Mary Sue.

(lol lookin' at you Dante's Inferno, Tyrion Lannister from A Song of Ice and Fire, and countless others lol)

People write to explore topics and themes that interest them, that compel them, that they see recurring in the world around them and/or their own lives.

One of those things is trauma.

In my writing, I approach trauma, disordered behaviors, dysfunction, dysregulated emotions, etc. (topics both of great interest to me and, not coincidentally, ones with which I have a great deal of personal experience) from a place of wanting fervently to tell the truth.

And I'm pretty good writing some things that feel true.

But I know that in some ways, I've shied away from harder truths; from using my writing and the characters I create not only as reflections of what I see in the world, but as accurate (rather than idealized) reflections of myself.

Because of this, while I've explored redemption arcs in roleplaying games (where being cheesy or facile or juvenile or fulfilling personal fantasies felt much safer than on a page), I've skirted neatly around it, I think, in my writing (for the most part). Because I absolutely was the girl who wanted to "save" or "fix" the wounded (and emotionally unavailable, and/or abusive, and/or toxic) lover. I wanted stories about it. I wanted to roll around in that narrative, bathe in it, eat it up for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

All while occupying the role/perspective of The Good One / The Good Girl whether in a game or in a story I was consuming.

But it's not the truth. Not the whole truth, at least. Not for me, anyway.

My admiration, respect, regard, and all the other good words for the writing and acting in Baldur's Gate 3 cannot be overstated. Each of the "origin" characters (and honestly, any character "Tav" has the opportunity to even have a conversation with, much less spend a significant amount of time with) is thoughtfully and truthfully written. I see this more in some than others, but that depth and breadth of understanding about human beings -- sorry, sentient beings -- shows up all over the place and honestly I almost can't stand how much I love it.

I'm not going to say that there's no character I feel this as deeply with as Astarion, but... idk, sometimes.

But there's no need to quantify this. Astarion is one of a number of characters from the game that I'm low-key obsessed with.

As such, when I decided to take on the story outcome in which, in my opinion, he throws all the growth, all the processing, all the truth and reconciliation I saw him moving toward in the game into a fucking woodchipper, I did not want it to be easy.

I get wanting it to be easy, and there are delicious, delicious fics out there that go this route. I think anybody who writes Ascendant Astarion at least flirts with it.

And it's not a binary; it's not either, "OMG this is completely uncomplicated, I love you I'm your spawn and it's just like if you hadn't ascended except your SUPER EXTRA POWERFUL AND SEXY AND HOT AND WHOOPS THERE GO MY PANTIES" (which, tbh... lool I'm not mad at) or "ASTARION IS IRREDEEMABLE LET ME WRITE OF HIS TRAGIC DEMISE AND TAV'S TRAGIC WITNESS TO IT / ENGINEERING OF IT." Which I'm ALSO not mad at, because THOSE THINGS CAN BE TRUE.

But while I'm subscribed to some stories that follow those paths or ones like them, and when I get that notification it's time to STOP THE PRESSES bc mama needs to READ, for me the challenge of this is if I'm going to continue Astarion and Tav's love story (or rekindle it lol), I want to honor the four years of intense character work Neil Newbon and Stephen Rooney and honestly the whole goddamn BG3 team from soup to nuts have done by considering "What would really happen here" as brutally as possible.

Komo, my incredible thought partner-cum-beta, can tell you about the pages of back and forth between us about "fml, how can we make this story work and maintain fidelity to the integrity* of these characters???? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY"

*not personal integrity -- meta shit. The integrity of their arcs, development, personalities, histories, traumas, etc.

SO. Back to trauma.

I said in my end note for chapter 11 that this story is not an after-school special (which looool probably at least some of you are like wtf are you talking about my dude and I'm like looooool omg life before kids were a whole target demographic unto themselves - kind of lol) or a PSA.

Which alludes to the fact that YES, I want to tell the truth about the ugliness of this relationship and the individuals in it with nuance and empathy and sensitivity; that I want to write about the pain and harm and longing and ache and all of it in ways that are neither hyperbolic nor diminishing.

But also, look, my darling motherfuckers, my comrades in fuckery, whoever's made it this far into this rambling monster of a -- whatever the fuck this is lool -- PEOPLE WHO HAVE TRAUMA ALSO HAVE FUN.

SOMETIMES EVEN WHEN THEY ARE ENGAGING IN BEHAVIORS THAT ARE DESTRUCTIVE TO THEMSELVES AND/OR OTHERS.

I don't think I've sufficiently unpacked this part to dig down much deeper into it, but what I will say is that this is not going to be a passion play about Poor Tav or Drugs Are Bad, Mmkay? or anything else.

What this is going to be (or at least, what I passionately want it to be) is -- framed with a delicious little fake-dating muffin of an emotional MacGuffin -- a portrait of some people in all (or lordt jebus please let me achieve at least MOST) of their complexity.

ALL OF IT.

Lordt Baby Jebus, Allah, Milal, Great Spaghetti Monster, ANYBODY

(not Lolth lol)

hear my prayer!

Aight, that's all I've got for today. <3

If you made it this far, PM me and tell me something you want to see in the story! I'll make you a treat.

And if it don't fit in the story, I might be able to make a li'l drabble happen.

COMING SOON to Writing Notes Storytime:

Identity in this story and in stories in general

The Good, the Bad, and the Neutral: Alignment and Astarion (and some other ppl, too!) in BG3, DnD, and This Story lol

Stuff I'm forgetting bc I'm STILL not over this never-ending COVID fuckery

[10-days-of-freakin-olives]

Dear internet,

I have some opinions and I'm about to make it everyone's problem.

I watched a video yesterday that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since - a Gen Z music producer who reacted to The Beatles for the first time.

I have nothing to say about the music Gen Z producers are making, honestly. There are things I enjoy about it and things I don't, and as with every other genre and evolution of music I can find songs I like among the lot. That isn't what this post is about.

Likewise, I'm not here to judge anyone's taste in music. I'm really not. As much as the tendency to conflate "I don't like this thing" with "this thing is bad" people have always seemed to have irritates me, that's just because it's, you know. Not true. But preferences are preferences, and "I don't like this thing" is a valid response to any music you hear, given that your dislike isn't based on misconceptions.

But this music producer said he spent a decade in this industry, and before listening to them, he'd had the idea that the music The Beatles had produced was boring.

I know. I said I'm not one to judge taste (although this was more of a preconception than an opinion formed by experience), but it really speaks to something that I find lacking in a lot of people discovering new things for the first time, from films to literature to random Youtubers reacting to The Beatles to The Beatles, and it also happens to be something integral to the very core of the field I'm currently studying.

Context.

Context is one of the most vital elements of learning about something new, and it is absolutely necessary for archaeological studies - my current major - and it's something I'm hugely passionate about pushing people to integrate into their daily experiences.

I feel like, in an age where "such-and-such out of context" videos are everywhere, everyone should know what the term 'context' means, but I'm also not here to make sweeping assumptions, so very briefly, context is the idea that nothing exists in a vacuum, and that everything is influenced by its environment. A human femur is just a human femur without context, but a 2,000-year-old human femur in a box in the Native American section of the basement of the Smithsonian and a 20-year-old human femur covered in saw marks dug up out of your quiet and unassuming but somehow off-putting neighbor's backyard have two very different contexts (both frankly horrifying, why did I pick this example???) that change how we think about those specific human femurs.

See, most people don't hear a song on the radio and go "let me do a deep dive into everything from the cultural history of this genre to the musical evolution of this style to the biography of the artist(s)", and that's fair. But if you're a producer, I feel like a passing interest in the history of your own industry and what has made music the thing it is today should be at least somewhere on your priorities list.

I'm not saying every music producer has to like The Beatles, not by a long shot, because preferences are still a thing, no matter how mad it makes people. But their mark on the history of modern music isn't just in their music on a surface level, or even their individual talent and how they meshed that together. It's in the way they changed the approach to music production. It's in their creativity around problem-solving during a time when recording technology was still in the awkward adolescent stage of growth. It's in their relationship with their own lead producer, with their label, with their fans, and their involvement in their own music. The context behind The Beatles makes their music anything but boring, kind of by default, and the assumption that their music is boring tells me this reactor lacked that context.

I saw a lot of comments on that video from people who were appalled this guy had never listened to The Beatles, but like...why? There's plenty of music I'm sure he feels is integral to his industry now that they haven't heard. There's a lot of music out there, and if you aren't exposed to it, you really do have to go looking for it yourself. Yes, even The Beatles. Who watches car commercials these days anyway?

People were talking about how music today lacks heart and soul because of producers like him, but like...how? If you really believe The Beatles left such a distinctive mark on music, then all the music he listens to now bears that mark and has influenced him. If you feel like music today lacks something, maybe it's because you're lacking something.

And there was at least one truly, phenomenally stunning remark about how The Beatles practically invented modern music and weren't 'copying anyone', which is just so incredibly offensive and ignorant of the artists who influenced them and the genre they were rooted in that it's a little hard to fathom. Yes, a lot of their endurance lies in the way their music evolved from Liverpool to Hamburg to recording contracts to the international stage to their break-up - a period of time shorter than I think most people realize, which is impressive in and of itself. But to talk like they weren't building on a foundation other people built before them is such a disservice to the history of the relationship between humanity and art and the specific contributions previous and often marginalized artists made that it's almost more amusing than it is annoying.

I'm not interested in judging any layperson for a lack of interest in music history, and I'm not going to judge this producer either, because clearly some interest is there if he's looking at their music now. I'm incredibly supportive of people who step out of their own comfort zones, and I'm even more impressed when they have the courage to record that step and post it on the internet for the world to judge. But what both that producer and those commenters need to keep in mind is context. And to do that, they need to look beyond the surface level of what they're experiencing and see what made that thing what it is.

You cannot form an informed opinion about a reactor without understanding their own history and experiences, the context around the gap in their knowledge that, to their credit, they're obviously currently trying to fill.

You cannot form an informed opinion about The Beatles without understanding the history of the music and the music industry that came before them and how they changed it, the context around that shift in how artists and producers and labels and fans connected with each other and the drastic change in the sound of music before and after them.

People need to really slow down a little and take a breath before they judge things, and to think about them as a single link in a much longer and more wildly branching and twisting chain than just right now, rather than trying to judge things in isolation, regardless of what you're trying to judge. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Everything has a history, has roots and branches and an ecosystem it grew and evolved in, and if you aren't looking at that, aren't taking its context into account, you aren't really seeing it for what it is, and by default probably aren't fully appreciating what it is you're experiencing.

Everyone has heard The Beatles for the first time at some point. At no point do the circumstances that happened in make the experience somehow 'better' or offer you some kind of superiority to others who are experiencing that first time differently. I heard them for the first time through my mother, and her love for them and knowledge of the music history behind them was the initial context I experienced them in. Not everyone has that, and people really need to stop acting like that makes their first experience somehow lesser.

This is an open letter to literally everyone who reads it, because we all live in a world where nothing exists in a vacuum, but it's especially to people who are judgemental or elitist about their own music tastes and those of others, to people who are making a living through music, and to those who are making a living experiencing new things on video for the rest of the world to see. And maybe you're all three, who knows?

Context is key.

In the interest of providing a little more context to this post, that reactor said that some of the music he heard did change that initial preconception of their music, even without the full context, so he learned something new that he wasn't expecting from this experience, and I wish I could say the same for so many of his commentors.

I just had to get this out. I hope everyone is having a fantastic and musical day.

Most sincerely,

Me, a single idiot who is, to the rest of the world, almost entirely out of context.

[39oa]

Talk Hockey To Me

tagged by beloved @txstars T__T <3 thank uuu as always

1. The thing that got you hooked on hockey

it's hard to pinpoint one moment because i honestly genuinely believe that it's the best sport in the world just in terms of pure mechanics and objective viewing enjoyment and live crowd atmosphere so it's easy to get hooked once you actually watch it... i've been on and off with hockey fandom itself and took a few years away from tumblr until recently but i'd say it was a mix of just watching games + discovering fandom spaces on tumblr/reading fic on ao3 + having a decent home team at the time + canadian tax etc.

2. Your first ever fandom friend

ngl i think most of the people i first met in hockey fandom eventually moved onto bts (or k-pop in general) lmfaooo but i met @regularseason when i was in 11th grade making connor mcdavid gifsets and now i am somehow 25 years old. we have seen so much on this vast internet together ❤️ 

3. The jersey you would most like to own

MOOTERUS BROS RISE UP ☝️🐮  absolutely my favorite jersey of all time i genuinely don't think any other design comes close. i also really love the stars rr 2.0 but i finally bit the bullet and bought it so that's out... another top contender would be sabres goathead 🐐 and maybe mighty ducks era pkariya, also i think the sharks rr 2.0 with the spin on the seals logo is sooo cute and i love the og sharks logo designed by terry smith as well... specifically the classic late 90s teal jersey. and my fav regular home jersey of current teams is the kraken :')

i have way too many opinions on jerseys honestly. if i could pick some from my warmup jersey database then i lovelovelove the habs 2023 bhm and pride designs (i have apparel for both of these...), the leafs indigenous celebration design, and the kraken women in hockey design. gorgeous girls!!!!!

4. YOUR player (you only get ONE so choose wisely)

:saluting_face: there is only one guy for me... jr21! (real talk like a big part of why i got into the stars and came back to sports tumblr was because of him despite having 0 geographical ties to texas LOL. admittedly there was some superficiality involved at first in seeing an asian guy achieve top-line star status against the restrictive pains of bones hockey but then i was like oh your game is actually efficient and understated as hell? and it kind of spiraled out from there. my favorite deceptively abnormal "boring" guy!!!)

5. A pairing that deserves more fic

i will echo 2124 💚 but i am part of the problem for having 4 partial aus in one doc and not actually writing anything of substance for them... otherwise there are a ton of rarepairs i could argue in favor of but i feel like i'd sound insane. where is the otter/woll boston goaliefic... where is mitch/nrob with robo being vaguely horrified but trying to be supportive of his brother's poor decision making skills. where is my sabresfic and kidsline shenanigans in general......... also if we're going back to the stars then 2141 honestly have so much untapped potential wrt Why Are You Both So Weird Can You Please [Redacted] About It. but you get the gist i'm sure!!!

6. Your favourite on-ice moment

my memory does NOT go that far back. whatever is the most embarrassing thing to have ever happened to some guy i hate is good enough for me

THEN

link someone else's art/fic/etc that you love & think everyone should check out

immediately the first thing that came to mind is that i still think zoe's 2129 primer is one of the most fantastic and comprehensive labors of love this fandom has ever seen... truly one of the major backbones of starsblr. honestly despite hockey fandom not being quite what it used to be on here i think there are sooo so many great creators making stars content and i am immensely grateful to all the gifmakers + artists + writers who constantly feed me no matter what time of year it is!!! i'm kind of shy but you know who you are... TT__TT

AND

link something you made & are proud of & want people to see

\o/ i desperately do not like any of the things i make and i am already grateful to the people who have looked at my measly creations before so thank you!

tagging @regularseason @iamidentical @pupuhintz @slagkovsky @supersoftsports... apologies if you've already been tagged and no pressure as always but pls feel free to if you'd like ❤️

[frozen-fountain]

Whenever you have time, I’d love some dvd style commentary on Spiced Black Tea.

What struck me about it when I read it way back, was the atmosphere. Having done a lot of hiking to small shelters and bothies myself, it was instantly familiar. Thought you captured the cosiness of such places really well, and how they invite confessions/intimacy. Maybe because they’re temporary, liminal spaces, with a certain kind of magic— the things that happen there have a different weight. (Or so I think anyway lol).

Maybe not a snippet exactly, but it was hard to choose a specific section!

Thank you for sending this, my dear! That is absolutely the atmosphere I was trying to go for, and since I don't actually have experience of a hike that takes more than one day yet, I'm really glad I was able to recreate that for Elena and Yuffie on vibe alone.

I ended up just sort of running with this where it took me, and I'm cutting it because it features discussion of attempted sexual assault, the sexualisation of underage girls, and the experience of being on the receiving end of a predatory gaze in general. Nothing graphic but be careful of your limits.

You've very much right that what transpired in that cabin was facilitated by the liminality of the space – temporary passing-through places, the small hours of the morning, the internet, all these ways you can end up feeling a little removed from reality and the allowance this grants for vulnerability that might never express itself in daylight. I think Yuffie and Elena would've gotten there eventually, but the snow definitely helped expedite the process a bit.

What I hadn't quite realised until I received this ask was that the fic was kind of a liminal space for me as well. Sexual violence isn't a topic I handle unless canon necessitates it, simply because I feel like I have very little of import or distinction to say on the matter. But if I was going to write these characters, I needed to address the whole of their stories, and I'm pretty proud of the fact that I managed to turn one of my least favourite scenes in the game into an opportunity to deepen both characters and talk about some real stuff.

Partway through the quest, the FFVII adventuring party is sidelined when Yuffie (who's sixteen) and Elena (who doesn't have a canon age but reads to me as around the same) are kidnapped and threatened with sexual slavery. It's played for laughs and never brought up again afterwards. On the one hand, it's clear in context that neither of them are at any point in any real danger, but on the other... there's more than could have been done here if it had to be included at all. The scene as a whole redeems itself somewhat and works as a fantastic “Hands across the aisle” moments for the protagonists and a squad of secondary antagonists, hinting at a lot of interesting characterisation for the latter – but almost none of that is extended to the girls who are suffering here, and I wasn't about to let that slide. They're both young people with a staunch, black and white view of the world and the conflict they find themselves on opposite sides of – I would've loved to see both of them reconsidering a few things in light of having a terrible experience in common with one of the enemy. In addition, they both hold themselves to very high standards, and very masculine standards at that; it's all about winning, dominating, besting, might making right. There's no way both of them aren't acutely aware that this never would've happened to them if they were boys, and no way it wouldn't haunt them in deep, self-image-shattering ways afterwards.

There's a lot of my experience in there, too, as a queer woman terrified of externalising and perpetuating a gaze that's predatory and invasive, no matter how unfounded that fear might be. I was twelve the first time I noticed an adult man taking notice of me; horrifying enough on its own, but as I grew older and heard more and more harrowing experiences from other women, I learned just how lucky I was to receive nothing more than a look, and to reach such a relatively high age when I did. The idea of having to consider myself fortunate for this is a black mark of shame across the whole world, and on a personal level, it made admitting and embracing my own attraction to women carry a lot of shame and guilt. Again, not as bad as many people from more actively homophobic backgrounds would have it, but enough to weigh on me. Of all the responses I've gotten to my writing over the years, I'm really proud of and touched by the comments from people with some similar personal histories to me and to the girls that said they felt comfortable reading, in the presence of and in a story concerning other women who understand. That's a badge of honour I'll take to the grave.

Somewhat relatedly, but another layer of the fic is its exploration of the hole Yuffie's barely remembered late mother left in her life, and the difficulty she has interfacing with other women because of it. If I recall correctly it's not something any comment I've received has really remarked on but I think I did a good job of weaving that aspect into the subtext, informing the main plot quietly. She's a character who isn't taken seriously or delved into by the fandom at large, at least in my experience, so I like to think I did my small part to contribute to that.

I'll take this opportunity to recommend the fic Scratching the Itch, which is the only one I've found to cover some similar territory. It's not romantic (though it is briefly gay) and it doesn't end with any sort of release or resolution, but it does a remarkable amount with a little.

[bigsnzstanacct]

It is too bad I have to go back to work bc otherwise I would get into my T/ed L/asso scenario with Roy having Le Big Big Sneezes and the famously hot embarrassing video of him losing control in public early in his career where he like idk blows out the front wall of a shop, something along those lines, and of course he’s absolutely horrified and all “it’s not funny it’s not hot I could have really hurt somebody and none of you understand what it’s like to walk around knowing you’re a fucking danger to the people around you” and meanwhile the whole internet is like “fucking R/oy Ke/nt can big bad wolf the shit out of my shop any day, dear god please let Ro/y get a sniffle in my shop” and actually I think I can make it work in the show’s whole moral framework bc doesn’t that sound like the kind of thing we would have gotten way too carried away with in 2013 and then been really embarrassed about looking back like oh wait this was lowkey a lil problematic of us oops also am I thinking of the whole obsession with J/on H/amm’s dickprint in the early/mid-2010s bc I happened to be reminded of it and looked up some of the old articles maybe maybe not mind your business k gotta go back to work finally bye

[shadowmaat]

Enough already

I see we've reached the point in the Eye Ay Discourse where we're now vilifying Neil Gaiman and trying to drive him off the internet/make him commit suicide. What a great look that is, gang. /facepalm

Oh, but it isn't ACTUALLY about whether or not he supports the Eye Ay, of course. No, it's about that cultish obsession with sex and "wrong" depictions of it. That means that attacking him is the only MORALLY PURE answer.

Great gods above and below, some of you people are an honest menace to society. Head empty, only hate.

Neil isn't perfect and has expressed some troubling views in the past, but A) "Past" isn't necessarily "Present" and B) that still doesn't mean you should tell him to kill himself you absolute fucking monsters.

Some of you REALLY need to get it through your terroristic little minds that pedophilia (CSEM) does not include works of fiction. The dictionary definition doesn't include fiction. The legal definition (at least in the US where most of you fearmongers live) doesn't include fiction. Writing and drawing stuff that makes you personally uncomfortable is NOT ILLEGAL and sure as fuck shouldn't be used as some kind of moral judgement on the creator's personality. Some of y'all just need to spew hatred and lies to make yourselves feel better.

And SPEAKING of legal definitions, it might behoove a few people to actually READ and COMPREHEND the judge's ruling on the Eye Ay case. Because if you read through it you'll see that the Eye Ay was clearly and blatantly in the wrong. There's no question of it and some of the excuses/reasonings they tried to use in their defense were frankly ridiculous and hold no basis in the legal reality of the world. And given that one "reason" they gave is that copying books to digital is an example of Fair Use, we should be damn glad the judge shot that nonsense down. That's a whole damn can of graboids that shouldn't be loosed upon the world.

If you can't accept that an organization can perform a vital and necessary service and still be wrong about some things, that's on you and your rabid idolization of a black-and-white universe. The Eye Ay fucked up and fucked up big. And it's a genuine shame because they do indeed accomplish a lot of good and vital things, but this wasn't one of them.

TECHNICALLY even the one-to-one loaning ratio was illegal (and clearly so according to law) but I think everyone was willing to look the other way until they decided to strip that away and allow unlimited downloads regardless of number of copies "owned." That made it a serious enough issue that Big Pub, who are a festering nest of diseased vipers and pestilence, felt a need to step in. Which is how we wound up where we are, with a good nonprofit having to pay for their mistake and the internet rallying to crucify an author who was previously considered one of our own. The fact that John Green's name is being used as a rallying cry to incite the internet mob is nothing but horrifying. Some of you have no shame and no moral backbone.

You're allowed to think the Eye Ay should be able to continue loaning endless copies of books. Just stop pretending that it's legally permissible.

You're allowed to think that people who write sexually explicit stories involving children, unwilling participants, animals, etc. are wrong to do so. Just stop pretending that fiction is illegal.

I'd also advise you to reconsider the idea that people who write about "sick" things must enjoy/perform "sick" things themselves. Maybe even pay attention to how those kind of "arguments" are also being used to describe LGBT+ and CRT content by nationalist/religious extremists. Are those really the kind of people (and beliefs) you want others to associate you with? Are they the kind of people you want to be? Clearly, if you want to drive someone to their death, you are.

Shameful. Stay the hell away from me.

[chaifootsteps]

long ask, sorry - there was a lot of unpack)

I read the fix-it fic (it's very cute and wholesome!) and looked at the comments expecting to see a few flames or people disagreeing with the premise, but it's an out and out dogpile in there.

it's so ugly to treat someone just writing a vent fic like that, & they must have been actively looking for people daring to criticize Viv given that there's nothing in the tags to suggest it

also like, one of the flamers being like 'how can you say Viv and Raph didn't handle the topic of SA well but still say people are entitled to like the episode or find it cathartic? if people like it and you recognize that, that proves Viv and Raph handled the topic well!'

which is like, no. that's not remotely what they were saying or how it works. they're just giving grace to people who got something out of it, but they still think the depiction and handling of the topic as a whole was bad themselves. being compassionate for someone else's take on media & their feelings doesn't objectively prove that take is correct, they're just making space for other opinions in a way a lot of these 'it was handled well, end of discussion' type people aren't

it's such an all or nothing, combative way of thinking about art, that if you dislike it you must also call everyone who likes it stupid or something otherwise it means you secretly recognize it's good or some nonsense like that. that and it's just populism - if some people like it that means it's objectively good. which is funny because usually we treat something everyone likes as just 'having mass appeal' not 'high art'.

but I guess when people get terminally online they assume the vote of the majority is correct - it reminds me of this one debate about something pewdiepie did (I think it was an edgy joke or something, I'm not interested in relitigating it, it's just an example) where one of his supporters claimed 'we've [already framing a constructed audience] already decided he's innocent because the amount of support/likes he got on a response to [insert controversy here]'. it's literally the logic/rhetoric of 'if the mob decides something is good, it's good' which is horrifying logic and has been used to justify any number of irl awful things. but I digress

you could just as easily argue it the other way - if someone likes the scene but makes space for criticism of it, does that automatically make the criticism right?

also like - there's so much evidence in those comments that people do not understand what SA is. like so many people have this conception that SA is the same as rape - like, unless there was penetration of some kind no assault happened. but like if you actually look at the legal definition of SA, multiple places define it as

1 did person A touch person B? 2 did person B not want to be touch and person A should have reasonably understood that? 3 then it was sexual assault

dragging someone into a room while they yell and plead and say no is sexual assault, even if they got away before they were penetrated. being set upon and kissed and groped by a crowd of people is sexual assault, even if they also were not penetrated (and given Blitzo's dialogue there it's doubtful)

Sir Pent was SA'd, Moxxie was SA'd

anyone who has been held down or groped against their will but was rescued or escaped was sexually assaulted. sexually assault can include rape, but it doesn't always

we desperately need better literacy around this, it's legit disturbing to see how many people will pull the 'well technically the show doesn't mock SA because [insert logic solely reliant on the idea that Sir Pent and Moxxie were not SA'd]'. & it's such a revealing line of debate because they know they can't argue whether or not the show is making light of sensitive topics (it absolutely is) so instead they do the internet thing of making the next argument - they claim no, this wasn't SA and demand people debate them on those terms instead. it's falling into their trap because the issue behind that is the one they don't want to talk about - that Viv does not know how to handle this topic with the slightest bit of sensitivity

(tangent but back when HB aired I didn't judge Stolas as harshly for the full moon deal mostly for the tone the show had set up, if that makes sense? I thought the show wanted us to understand that Stolas and most of the cast were all terrible people and that was the entire 'joke' of the show. that Stolas definitely did a bad thing but the show was more interested in dark humor and the audience just kind of had to meet it where it was at. when they started moving towards there being dramatic consequences in Ozzie's I still though the show understood Stolas was a bad person, only now they were actually paying off a dramatic plot point they'd set up so he would actually have to grow and change. Then season 2 happened and the show is insisting he never did anything wrong, he's perfect, etc. and everything that happened in season 1 looks way worse by comparison. it was already bad, but I thought the writers understood that. they don't. instead they've engaged in the most laughable, embarassingly written domestic violence storyline I think I've ever seen in any media, ever, just to get him off the hook for anything he's done. do I respect the opinions of people who find him standing up to Stella cathartic? yes. does that automatically mean those people are right and it's good writing, actually? no. hard no. a million times no. survivors of dv, especially male ones, are often starved of media representation. I want them to feel seen. it doesn't stop me thinking they deserve far better than being represented by a terribly written character like Stolas, who himself is accidentally the show's best representation of a convincing abuser, but that's a rant for another time)

also also, it's kind of annoying that A03 allows guests to post under any handle instead of assigning a random one, because now if anyone points to AyyLmao that it's unhinged behavior to try to police fics people post on the Organization for Transformative Works (the clue's in the name what fanfiction is for!) he can just claim someone tried to frame him, even if there's plenty of reason to suspect he would totally do that (some of the more hateful bigoted flames strike me as exactly that - going as far as possible with it to be able to turn around and say 'look how hard the Viv haters want to frame me! look how cartoonishly bigoted they make me out to be!'

this is so deeply bizarre to me. I've been in fandoms where the media in question is less than perfect and fix-its exist for entire arcs of shows and everyone else is happy to be like 'I see why you had a problem with this even if I think it was OK or not a big deal', or 'I don't see the problem at all but I'm just going to let you vibe like an adult would do'. and the same with character shilling fics, I'm old enough to know that the best solution for fanfic or transformative works you don't agree with is to just click off. but some HH/HB fans are actively out to create a high control group where any criticism must be policed. if I ever get annoyed enough by HH/HB to make my own vent fic, I'm posting it under anon and with comments moderated. I'm not interested in providing an open forum for people to send me hate for a show that is far from worth defending (and even if it was, who cares? they ought to be able to get on with their day if their fave show is so obviously above criticism)

last point, sorry for the rant - it's kind of laughable to me that the author in the comments provided a long, objective list of what Viv and Raph have been doing that anyone can check and all of which happened publically, because they did it publically, and I don't recall seeing many comments in that thread attempting to respond to any of it; it just got ignored. it's pretty funny they simultaneously want to act like Viv is the victim of unfair hate campaigns when she's actively cultivated a fandom that attracts people like them, who bully people to the point they fear making even the mildest critiques. like you want to act like Viv is some bullied saintlike professional, but can you imagine the showrunner of any much bigger TV show encouraging the worst elements of their fandom to the point that said worst elements think harassing an SA survivor in the comments section of a fanfiction where they process their feelings about how lousy the show is in handling SA, and trying to claim said showrunner is still a professional?

to repurpose a point Viv herself made, a professional would know that any show with more than a cult following will attract criticism. a professional would not encourage people like AyyLmao and Norry, they would shut that shit down and know to leave the writers of a fanfic a couple hundred people at most will see that's dealing with a topic sensitive to them, in peace

Replied to this one here!

[clownhooves]

LONG RAMBLING KIND OF VENT POST (I GUESS????)

I've been seeing a weird discourse about the word """puriteen""" and idk I mostly don't care because they're teenagers and will probably grow out of that shit and look back on it and go "eugh i was a little shit back then" like most people do.

But

What I'm actually concerned about is the weird right wing shit teens are buying into (without knowing) and spreading that shit amongst each other like some sort of plague of hatred and ostracization, trying to fucking ruin each other's lives. The whole """puriteen""" mindset (and honestly call out culture and cringe culture) is rooted in a lot of satanic panic shit. Trying to sniff out the "bad" people so no one thinks you're a bad person.

They think, "maybe if you make call out posts against enough people and put enough things in your dni list you can be a good person and no one will make a call out posts against you, right?" "Maybe you won't lose all of your friends, because those eggshells you've been walking on for what feels like forever can definitely handle the weight of all of your fears and anxieties and all of the weird fucked up feelings that comes with puberty, right?"

Look I've been bullied by my peers (is that the right word?) pretty much my entire life up until my second or third year of highschool, by then barely anyone wanted to even have anything to do with me. I know what it's like to have nasty fucking rumors that you barely even know, that last for fucking years, spread about you because you're annoying and you act kinda weird and awkward, and you let it slip that your queer, constantly walking on eggshells and being called a million different slurs most of witch don't even apply to you.

shit was fucking terrible then and it still bothers me, and I'm fucking *21* now.

And now, this shit has gotten way fucking worse hasn't it? I fucking dread the shit queer kids must be going through right now. Especially since schools have been getting worse and worse and worse, it's like they're trying to fucking work teenagers to death or something. imagine dealing with the stuff that comes with a shitty school system while also dealing with puberty and also dealing with figuring out your identity and sexuality while everyone around you is judging every single fucking thing you do offline and online, every stupid opinion you have, every piece of media you like, every person you follow, all under a microscope being looked at by a giant faceless hoard of people, who are all simultaneously, strangers, friends, and people you love. ALL WHILE YOU ARE A TEENAGER, A LITERAL GIANT WALKING TODDLER WHOS PRIMARILY DRIVEN BY HORMONES AND BAD IDEAS.

Like COME ON how is that not absolutely fucked up?????

Is there even anything that can be done about this shit? Fucking dog piling on teenagers going through a horrifying moral and existential crisis everyday definitely doesn't fucking help.

The anti bullying campaigns in the 2010s didn't seem to fucking work at all, probably because those people had absolutely no idea what teenagers were like.

So like, what the fuck is anyone supposed to do? Trying to sanitize the Internet isn't a solution because that fucking ruins things for everyone.

It seems like teenagers are trying to coexist with adults on platforms made for neither of them. Teenagers don't have anywhere to express themselves or explore their own emotions or identities. I sure as hell fucking didn't and that resulted in some EXTREMELY BAD THINGS (I'm gonna keep what exactly happened vague for now because it's really personal)

I don't know how to really end this rambling mess of a post, it's just been some shit I've been really worried about, I just hope my brother doesn't get sucked into this shit. I hope this all makes sense because I'm really bad at typing and this post is REAALLY LONG and stream of consciousness like.

I hope this isn't too indescribable.

[askthebutch]

(A bit of a vent, but I think it’s necessary context) I know I’m definitely a lesbian, but the moment I learned the L word as a kid I lost the kind of unabashed attraction I used to feel for women when I was young. I could look at a pretty woman and I'd wonder why the hell my chest hurts so bad. Now that I know why, it’s like my brain thinks women are off limits outside of blushing at lesbian posts online, probably because of times I slipped and said something too gay as a kid and got the shock-horror "are you gay/lesbian?" question. That and it could be a reaction to the whole predatory lesbian thing. Straight girls act like it’s disgusting so if I repress my attraction I can’t be disgusting by being attracted to them logic.

I know that kind of thing is bad and I've come to accept my sexuality as much as I can having never met/talked to another lesbian (unfortunately I'm not very online so internet friends are a foreign concept), but the shame or anxiety, whatever it is, around it hasn’t completely gone away.

I hope to move to the city at some point, but I worry that it won’t make things better because of how drastic the difference is in visibility and acceptance. I assume the people who grew up with GSA's, pride and in areas with openly gay people are going to be much more confident in their sexuality. So is the lack of experience and the lack of confidence in being a lesbian going to be as big of an issue as it is in my head? Is it more common than I realize?

Thanks for any advice!

Hey Anon,

Thanks for the question. I grew up in the deep south, and being a lesbian was absolutely unacceptable. I had a lot of internalized homophobia, and it sounds to me like that's what you're struggling with.

Internalized homophobia is the conscious or unconscious application to the self of biases against LGBT persons or identities. The biases are learned from our community and are taught as values. Like values, they can feel innate and perpetual. And like values, biases can be difficult to articulate and even more difficult to disentangle from our thought processes.

Access to a supportive community is very helpful for this disentanglement. You can make progress without a community like that, but it can be super fucking lonely. You've probably already experienced that awful moment when you're speaking to someone you thought might share your values, only to be horrified and heartsick when they say something biased. It's ok. To use an agricultural analogy, it's like processing grain. You do what you can to process it, and then you toss it in the air and let the wind carry away the useless parts. You don't have to totally disengage from your current community. Just try to process what you're given, identify the values, and let the wind carry away the biases.

And don't worry, you have way more in common with other queer people than you even think is possible. You'll think "I never knew other people felt that way" more times than you can count.

[theimaginatrix27]

So I had one of my many whacky-ass crossover dreams last night and I wanted to write it down because it was fun okay.

So it started with me watching a TV show but shifted to me participating kind of? (My fic dreams are often in the form of me being part of the story and/or viewing it as if it were a fully licensed TV series which I then have to wake up and realise is not in fact real and searchable on the internet and which I cannot find out the rest of what happened in. It is a most disappointing experience.)

The first part's kind of confusing, but dreams rarely make sense for long enough to get a coherent story out of in its entirety. But something something Seto Kaiba has to go into hiding because a new villain who may or may not have been a new spirit that possessed Yugi and turned him evil is looking for him something something(I don't set store by that bit, it's too boring and I think was derived from one of the fics I've been reading recently in which Yami is more like his manga self, but I digress).

The bit that's the clearest is that he somehow ends up hiding in the dorms of Cackle's Academy. I watched the Worst Witch TV series from the late 90s/early 2000s religiously and it's the version I like best. The books were not long enough and are also sparce and diverge a few installments in because of how infrequently new ones were published, so the TV show had to make a lot of stuff up as they went along. And imho it was good stuff! The Netflix version was nowhere near as fun. But I must digress again.

An important aspect of this dream scenario was that Mildred and her friends, and Ethel Hallow, know who Seto Kaiba is. And of course they want to help him but at the same time they're a bit starstruck (except Ethel doesn't know yet, I'll get to that later). Of course, as usually happened in the show when the girls were trying to sneak things, Ms Hardbroom found out something was up, and is not amused by Seto's presence, because he is a young man in an all-girls school. She is not aware who Seto Kaiba is, but is impressed by how he carries himself and presents his case.

For those of you less familiar, Ms Hardbroom (her first name is Constance in the version I'm most familiar with and hekate in the books/netflix version) is the potions teacher in the TV show I spoke of, and is very strict and inflexible when it comes to the main characters and their tendency to break rules (and bring electronics into the school), and has a knack for teleporting and popping up right when the main girls least want her there. I like her, honestly. The girls don't but they're teenagers. Ms Hardbroom is not nearly as harsh as the likes of Professor Snape, and in the dream at least, Seto gains a certain amount of respect for her, even if he thinks the naming convension these witches have is kind of ridiculous.

To help Seto hide, he is given a cloak of disguise that makes him look like a girl (no physical change, just a really good glamour. This ignores the magic system of the world, but I absolutely do not care, this world totally can have a cloak of Trans-Your-Gender if my subconscious wants it to), and he spends the rest of the dream making snarky comments about Mildred's decisions and pissing off Ethel Hallow, who doesn't know who he is, until she turns the weird new girl Sofia into a toad briefly, which forces him to leave the cloak behind,and when Ethel's made to turn him back, she recognises him and is horrified, because she is actually secretly a Seto Kaiba fangirl and OH MY GOD I SPELLED SETO KAIBA MY LIFE IS RUINED!

Aaaaand that's basically the dream. And it was fun, and I want to expand on it but I'd have to make up a plot and I have too many stories already. I'll just have them run into one another during that one Magina incident where all the timelines and the people within them get jumbled up for a bit.

[lmsr-lilitu-sephiroth]

Dude, no one is born fucking evil. Thinking that way leads to eugenics. It's about choices and the decision to make the ‘easy’ choice that will absolutely hurt a lot of people, or the right one that means you actually reduce the harm you do.

And sometimes writing is a tool to understand motivation. To explore emotion. Jeez, it's almost like people have complex reasons to do anything. I just get so sick of these reductive, one-dimensional arguments. They never go anywhere good, because black-and-white thinking leads to nothing but witch hunts. How many times do we have to go through this?

And wasting energy on obsessing over the things in fiction, when fiction just doesn't follow all the same real-world rules, is just that. A fucking waste of your precious energy and time. Going after writers in such a witch hunt is merely taking the easy choice that will only hurt real people. A fictional character is just that. Fictional. Not a real person with agency. You know who is? The writers.

People like to write horrifying things for various reasons. Do I want to interact with anything that involves detailed abuse? Hell no, because I don't want to experience the flashbacks to kick up. But I can't magically wipe all the problematic media from existence. And there is media that I find Because that kind of witch doesn't exist, so I of course can't. Instead, I can only curate what I see and interact with to my own preferences.

If you really want to protest problematic media, go after people who write for big-name media producers. Writers on places like AO3 (which is nonprofit, by the way), or any other online space dominated by fanfiction, literally have no power over the world of media. If you're so terminally online that you think only fanfiction online has any sway over public consciousness, then you're a fool. And if you think you can get ahead or gain respect for punching down, you clearly don't understand how the system works. Respectability politics are a farce. The authorities you're trying to appeal to probably hate you as much as you hate these ‘problematic creators’. You're suffering a delusion that small-time creators actually affect places like Hollywood. They do not.

I swear so many people don't understand how the mind works. Fiction provides a safe outlet because most people can tell the difference between fiction and reality. Reading or writing fiction lets people explore uncomfortable topics without actually hurting real people. If they do then go out and hurt a real, living, breathing person, it probably wasn't because of writing or reading that little tiny piece of fiction.

Horror, as an example, exists as a genre for a fucking reason. It's a safe outlet to explore the deepest, darkest recesses of our minds. I once found a Cardcaptor Sakura fan comic I wish I hadn't. I found it gross as hell. I vamoosed as quickly as I could once I realized what it was (this was so long ago I barely remember, though). But I can't stop people from uploading that stuff online because no one has that kind of control over the internet. You don't have to like some of the content people create. You are absolutely free to find it gross.

And the thing is, you do have to actively seek this stuff out.

On that note, quit with the puritanism. It helps no one and gets marginalized people hurt the most, including and especially the innocent ones.

I feel I'm repeating myself, but seriously. All people are individual and should not be beholden to arbitrary standards in fiction alone. Unless you can physically prove they harmed other living people, you can't do anything because of fiction. If you want to think someone is a creep, ok. Stay away from them as best as you can. But thought crimes don't exist. Stop being a Puritan.

Stop trying to mind control other people's creativity because they don't write only according to your puritanical standards. Fictional characters are like puppets for you to play with. People struggling with emotions need an outlet so they don't actually hurt others.

Stop thinking of other people like they're beholden to your main character syndrome. This isn't a game where you can modify everything around you with impunity.

Stop infantilizing everyone. Stop acting as if others are unable to realize the line between fiction and reality. Stop acting like the people who write the stuff you find repulsive speak for an entire fandom.

Witch hunting groups inevitably tear themselves apart eventually once they've run out of outsiders to target.

I usually don't like to jump into discourse online, and I refuse to actively take part in shipcourse. But writing fiction is something I'm actually passionate about. And I just want to point some things out about trying to control what others write, even if you ‘mean well’. After all, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

If you really want to make sure the fiction isn't hurting real people, you'll get better results if you get off your high horse and engage content creators where they're at.

90% of arguments about media could just be solved by saying “different people like different things in their stories” and leaving it at that