#also this fandom is so naive

[gracefullou]

Idk how I feel about this because I have massive hate towards the covers and 1dead anything.

https://x.com/LouisWT91World/status/1828489506460147938

I despise those covers. Even from this video, the man admitted he didn't know one direction that well. Yes, he was screaming with night changes but i've always said that it is a very popular and nostalgic song. I feel like him and his friend were the only ones singing along 7 💀. People behind seem to not know the song at all. But it's Louis' choice, i'm tired of this discussion. If he wants the 4 covers, if he wants to be known as the 1D guy forever it's on him. He had a whole ass 16 songs album (not counting the bonus songs) that he made specifically for the live shows and yet he chooses those decade old songs that'll never be half as good as his own 🤦‍♀️.

[supremeladyoftherandom]

Imagine being me

Imagine you live in a country where popular american cartoon show gravity falls was not even heard of

Imagine growing up a little and going on the internet, and finding out about this show

Imagine seeing fanart on pinterest, of a boy in a pine hat and a girl in a shooting star sweater and two similar looking old men and a one eyed triangle

imagine seeing fanart of the fucking triangle being kissy kissy and tender with one of the old men/the boy with the pine hat/the girl with the shooting star

Imagine seeing the triangle looking over the boy reading a book/the girl knitting/anyone doing literally anything in the fanart

Imagine thinking the triangle must be a tinkerbell-type side character

Now imagine seeing the show for the first time

[volitioncheck]

nvm this is still on my brain. kim does not like to watch harry suffer… to say that kim takes satisfaction in harry’s pain is a huge misconstruing of his character.

the “getting thrashed like a schoolboy” line comes from a board game, lol. it’s a tease, not a cruelty. there’s never any line that implies that Kim enjoys seeing Harry taking actual morale damage.

he can be amused if you fail a check, but the check is always relatively inconsequential, and again, Harry isn’t taking damage in these.

Failing to pry the trash bin open:

Failing to shatter Ruby’s lorry window:

(also in both of these examples he only responds smugly if you choose for Harry to stubbornly dig in his heels. if Harry gets huffy, Kim teases. If Harry backs down right away Kim won’t rub it in, which feels significant to me! it reminds me of that recent post goin around about Kim meeting your energy!)

and here’s some reactions to failed checks where he does take damage.

Failing the jump to get your cloak:

Failing to break down Plaisance’s door:

he’s not laughing if Harry’s taking damage because he’s not a dick lol.

aaaaand here’s some other instances of morale/health damage and kim’s reactions.

alternate dialogue for failing the harbor jump:

after the call with precinct 41:

seeing bullet holes in the wall:

most significant examples to argue this point for me come when harry has done something to jeopardize the RCM’s image. which kim goes on and on about the importance of maintaining— and yet even here, he still extends worry and assurance.

telling Billie about her husband and handling it badly:

hardie authority check failure cock carousel:

aaaaand the car. this line is one of the most mask-off kim moments we get in the game in my opinion, honestly.

tying this back to the schoolboy line— that line doesn’t show up if you have a negative reputation with Kim. if you have <1 rep, it gets replaced with him calling it “about four hours of our lives that we'll never get back,” lol.

it’s affectionate ribbing!! twisting it into anything else is bizarre 2 me lmao!

anyways. kim is a foil to every other cop we meet in the game specifically because he doesn’t view harry as a punching bag or a lost cause. gottlieb does nothing but sling jabs and glib jokes about harry’s health. torson+mclaine and the others laugh at harry’s panic attack over the radio. in response to harry’s suicide-by-car attempt(!!!!) jean yells about RCM budget. all kim’s lines in response to harry’s check failures and health-damage are consistent, explicit textual contrast against the callousness of the rest of the RCM. twisting kim’s character here requires a bad faith interpretation of the whole game.

[hauntingofhouses]

guys cmon. be ffr please. akemi did Not love taigen. the only reason why she was desperate to search for him to the point of putting herself in danger is because she didn't want to get married to an abusive man (which she believed at the time that takayoshi was). when seki tried to dissuade her from running off, her reason was not "but i love taigen and wanna be with him 🥺" it was because she refused to be controlled and have her autonomy taken from her; she literally says "i won't be locked away in edo married to a stranger." and when seki still tries to argue that getting married to the heir of the shogun would be better than getting caught by brigands, she then says "that kind of man"—referring to takayoshi—"treats women like animals. they say he's a tyrant." and when seki chuckles and says "what man isn't?" her response is "you." she doesn't even talk about taigen. she is using him as much as he was using her. they both see—or, well, saw—each other as means to an end. for taigen he saw that marrying into the tokunobu clan would elevate his status and wealth. for akemi she wanted the right to choose who she married, and she wanted that person to be someone kind. that's it! neither of them loved each other. but since they were courting of course they acted sweet to each other, and they do still care for one another, especially due to their romantic history. but let's be real! akemi is a boss bitch who dropped taigen and forgot all about his ass as soon as she saw takayoshi was a nice guy. because duh? not only is takayoshi a better lover (it's implied their lovemaking lasted a long time) but he's also kinder towards her and presents her with an opportunity to claim power and freedom, which she would not have if she had married taigen, as she would have still been stuck under her father's thumb. so literally why should she settle for taigen's stupid ass! she may be a little naive at times but she's still incredibly intelligent. she would not do something stupid for the sake of "love." you know who would though? taigen.

[finalacts]

hello i am thinking about the scene with the twins after their parents' funeral again because it makes me so damn sad, and because that moment really just set them up to develop into the horribly maladjusted adults they are today

like we definitely see how that affected ai throughout her childhood and well into adulthood--it's the first time she ever experiences her grandma favoring oom over her, and that's reinforced by the very real differences in how grandma raised her vs how she raised oom. it's no wonder she ends up developing an inferiority complex about her sister and a strong negative self-concept

but for oom, i think she saw that moment as ai letting go of her hand, rather than her (oom) pulling away/grandma pulling her away. it makes me think of ai's voiceover we hear in episode 2 ("i always made it my goal to take the best care of my little sister, until the day we let go of our hands") and how it fits into oom's perspective too. not only is her older sister, who she loved and looked up to so much, now letting go of her, she's also pulling away right after she hears other people insinuate that oom was the reason their parents died. it's why she's still bringing that up as an adult (episode 11) and why she needs ai to choose her so desperately--her guilt over their parents' death and her feeling like a burden because of her illness is completely wrapped up in her belief that ai doesn't love her anymore/hasn't loved her for awhile. for ai to choose her would be like absolution

and the most tragic thing of all is that oom did reach back out for her when they were kids--ai just wasn't looking. and doesn't that just sum up their entire relationship

[gammija]

sherlock & co is a lot of fun but it is also, and i dont know another way to say this, the most normie fiction podcast ive listened to

[cementcornfield]

good lord my inbox is a mess lmao

[normalbrothers]

[a-murmur-of-a-prayer]

For a long time, I've been really depressed that I can't get back into the same fandoms I used to be into, and I think I've finally figured out why. Mostly it has to do with the ways I changed as a person after 2020, and one of the things that's been affected is the way I engage with media. I think the way I changed was for the best, but there were some sacrifices. The two fandoms I used to write for constantly were Harry Potter and Star Wars, to the point that I started long-form projects involving them with my friends. I've started just vaguely getting back into both of those, but it's been slow, slow going so far...and I think it's because they remind me of the person I was in high school. I don't really know what to do with that; maybe I'll make a longer post about it at some point, because the way I engage with media now vs then really is interesting to me. But it does make me feel pretty depressed, because they used to mean so much to me. Maybe one day they will again, but it's been rough so far.

[aknolan]

Okay so, here's how I read into the Nuts and Dolts dynamic:

Ruby: "I love Penny but I don't know if she feels the same way and everything is so chaotic and I don't want to make her uncomfortable so I'll just keep this to myself and focus on other things!"

Penny: "Ruby is such a good friend! I want to make out with her! That is TOTALLY a thing good friends do, right? I'm pretty sure Blake and Yang make out, and they ALSO seem like very good friends! Weiss, are you okay? You look like you are trying to ease a headache."

I feel like that really doesn't give enough credit to Penny tbh. I get that it's funny to treat her as super naive on how everything works, but especially in v7 and v8 she's just... not.

Penny not realizing her feelings for Ruby are romantic? Sure. Penny not realizing that making out is a romantic thing? That just seems a bit infantilizing to me. And I'm not really blaming you because it's a common thing in the fandom, but I'm also not gonna gloss over it. That reduces Penny to a joke about how she has 0 social understanding, when v7 very clearly moves waaaaaaay beyond that.

Anyways, the way I read them is that up to v3, Ruby may have had a bit of a crush on Penny, but never really thought about her feelings long enough to notice. Then after v3, she thought Penny was dead and it didn't matter what exactly those feelings were, it just hurt. Then v7 happens, and she's between "too much work to think about feelings" and "no clear time limit to figure this out so whatever" again with regard to her feelings. In v8 she of course has even less time to think about it, but a lot of opportunity to notice how important Penny is. How much the thought of losing her again hurts. That leaves her in v9 with a very clear understanding of how deeply important Penny is, with it only being a matter of time before the quarter drops and she has her realization that the feeling is love.

Penny I think has the very specific problem of not having a reference point. This especially goes for v3. The people she's close to are her dad and Ruby, and so the difference between the feelings is easy to think of as family vs friend. And that's how things stay. Sure, Winter becomes a friend of sorts, but that's still... different. It's only really in v8 that she ends up briefly surrounded by friends, as everyone tries to save her. Everyone is willing to take risks for her. This is when she gains a reference point for how the feelings she has for Ruby are different from friend-feelings.

I also think either of them may have noticed much sooner if the concept of kissing was on their minds, but it's not, and that's fine.

[motleyfam]

Mx motleyfam, why do you have 5 ao3 accounts? What do you do with all of those?? I am desperately curious.

(And i'm guessing they aren't open pseuds, but if i'm wrong, do you feel like sharing what they are?)

I like to keep an ✨ air of mystery ✨

[cats-thoughts]

@arcticsilver

really fun duo you have there. mind if i add arbitrary roles to their relationship dynamic so i can write one of them as an overprotective caretaker and the other as a naive helpless baby?

[romance-of-three-memes]

A lot of people in mainland China are perfectly capable of getting around the so called 'Great Firewall of China' and interacting with the internet beyond it but the thing is a lot of them just flat out don't want to or don't really care all that much. Yeah sure the internet is heavily censored, but outside of that non-English spaces have gotten smaller and smaller while English takes over as the lingua franca of the internet, and they may or may not be able to read and understand English very well.

Also a lot of people on the internet beyond the 'firewall' are very hostile to them, they get treated like naive idiots or brainwashed infiltrators for the ccp. I remember a few years back when a lot of Chinese fanfic writers started uploading their stories on ao3 en masse because there had been a big uptick in websites that host fanfiction getting taken down and some people were so utterly vile about it, making jokes about how they could get the fics taken down by mentioning the Tiananmen Square massacre in the comments and things like that.

All because they were apparently offended by their favorite tags having more non-English works that can very easily filter out so they don't have to look at them at all. Because God forbid a fanfiction website that already greatly skews towards English fics have more works in other languages, right? That's like the only thing I miss about fanfiction.net, it had way more non-English fics, well that and more stories for certain fandoms than ao3 does.

And it's not like a lot of tech companies and other governments don't censor the internet to some extent or another, China isn't unique in that regard, it's just particularly infamous for being so heavy-handed and easy to use as a red herring.

[tonyzaret]

ANNOUNCEMENT: I NO LONGER SHIP FRARNEY (Fred / Barney)

So I'll be honest. When I first got into the Flintstones fandom, I was incredibly young and naive. (For starters, I thought the show featured documentary footage of real cavemen, dinosaurs and prehistoric technology.) But over the years, as I got deeper into not just the series lore but also the behind-the-scenes aspects of the production, I began to realize that it was a just a cheaply animated knock-off of The Honeymooners and all the storylines were nothing more than stock mid-century sitcom plots mixed in with puns on the word 'stone.' The writers, tasked with churning out 30-episode seasons of childish drivel, would not have had the bandwidth to craft hidden messages to the show's audience about a secret love between two crudely drawn Neanderthals. Furthermore, as I began to question the validity of my once-cherished ship, I found myself under attack by increasingly toxic 'Dark Frarnies' who review-bombed my earlier fanfics into oblivion. The fact is, while shipping Fred and Barney may have brought me joy during a dark time in my life (I had recently been exiled from the Jetsons fandom for what was, in retrospect, a misguided pairing of Rosie the Robot and Astro the Dog) I just don't feel at home in the Frarney community anymore. And while it may be bittersweet to say goodbye, at least I can still find consolation in my folder with over 10,000 hyper-realistic, anatomically correct Scrooggi (Scrooge McDuck x Yogi Bear) drawings.

[elany]

Let's do this then =D First a disclaimer and a bit about my methodology because while the math here is very barebones I want to at least explain what I was doing. Essentially I picked a few ships in different fandoms, calculated the percentage of E and M rated works in the tag, then compared that to the percentage if at least one person in the main pairing is trans, using the "Trans Character A" OR "Trans Character B" filter. I didn't look at non character specific tags such as Trans (Male) Character because I didn't want too many false positives. Since this was part of what I was initially interested in, I then also compared the percentage of mpreg works within those featuring a trans character to the percentage in the ship tag overall. Another note, I'm using the word 'mpreg' because that's inherently what we're talking about, but I found out that only around 20% of works tend to be tagged with 'Mpreg' as opposed to 'Pregnancy', and since that is also the parent tag it's what I had been filtering for. Then, because that's what the OG post was about, I also looked into how often Character A is headcanoned as trans vs Character B.

As for the disclaimer - I redid all of it yesterday, in part because the last time I did this the intention was only to drop the results in a gc and it shows lol, in part because I was curious if anything's changed, but mostly because I'm boo boo the fool who never wrote down which fandom some of this data is even for.

Now for the actual numbers!

I started with two Genshin Impact ships because I figured that's a good baseline for current fandom trends. One that's slightly more recent and another that includes a character I've seen thrown around in the tags a bunch. So;

Alhaitham/Kaveh (Genshin Impact)

All works: 14,589 | E/M: 38% Works where either is tagged as trans: 461 or 3% of all works | E/M: 70% Of those 40 or 9% are mpreg, compared to 2% in the ship tag overall. Meaning those make up for 13% of all mpreg works in the ship tag. Trans Kaveh was tagged 316 times, trans Alhaitham 188 times, 43 works were t4t So right off the bat we get some stats that, spoiler alert, will become a pattern. Works centring trans characters are nearly twice as likely to be rated E or M than the ship average (and most of those are Explicit, like, it's not even close for most ships). Second, works featuring trans characters comprise a disproportionally large amount of all mpreg fics, compared to the overall percentage they make up - in this case 13% vs 3% - altho this particular stat varies greatly from fandom to fandom. It's going to be lower with some. But it's also going to be much, much higher with some others.

Diluc/Kaeya (Genshin Impact)

All works: 8152 | E/M: 55% Works where either is tagged as trans: 186 or 2% of all works | E/M: 89% 22 or 12% of those mpreg, compared to 4% in the entire ship tag. They make up for 7% of all mpreg. 128 trans Kaeya fics, 74 trans Diluc fics, 16 t4t This is by far the horniest tag I looked at lol. 55% is a staggering number and while it's literally impossible for it to meet the 2:1 e/m ratio of most other fandoms, by gods, a solid attempt was made. 89% huh. Nobody here's interested in writing anything but smut. This one also continues the pattern of works centring trans characters being 3-4 times more likely to be mpreg than the average, and one person being portrayed as trans far more often.

Essek Thelyss/Caleb Widogast (Critical Role)

This is one of the ships I originally looked into. Nothing's really changed since. All works: 4076 | E/M: 33% Works where either is tagged as trans: 224 or 5% of all works | E/M: 74% 11 or 5% are mpreg, compared to 0,6% in the ship tag overall. Meaning that works centring trans characters make up for, deep breath, 42% of all mpreg fic in the tag. 5% of all fic is trans. 42% of all mpreg is trans. 63 trans Caleb works, 194 trans Essek works, 33 t4t Yeah idk what to say other than there's a reason I was already looking into this one 4 years ago.

Kabru/Laios (Dungeon Meshi)

All works: 628 | E/M: 48% Works where either is tagged as trans: 64 or 10% of all works | E/M: 89% 6 or 9% of those mpreg, compared to 5% in the entire ship tag. They make up for 20% of all mpreg. 62 trans Kabru works, 7 trans Laios, but 5 of those are transfem Laios. 5 t4t Smaller sample size means that the numbers are a bit more all over the place, but congrats to that one person in the tags that fully predicted the 9:1 split.

Now for a fandom that I thought might shake things up a little, because it's the first one on this list where the top/bottom dynamic is heavily implied by the source material and where the supposed bottom is canonically a bit baby crazy.

Lan Zhan | Lan Wangji/Wei Ying | Wei Wuxian (The Untamed/MDZS)

All works: 45,505 | E/M: 38% Works where either is tagged as trans: 444 or just under 1% of all works | E/M: 64% 70 or 16% of those mpreg, compared to 4% of all fics in the ship tag. They make up for 4% of all mpreg. 208 works tagged trans LWJ, 290 works tagged trans WWX, 54 t4t The fact that fics centring trans characters make up a relatively small percentage of all mpreg fic is not entirely surprising in a fandom this big on (magical) baby acquisition. So the most interesting part about this one ended up being the relatively equal number of trans fics for both characters, which I wasn't entirely expecting from a fandom where the source material already comes with certain BL tropes.

And now for the crown jewel of this entire thing. Going in I already knew approximately what results I'm likely to get, so I was a bit blase about everybody in the the tags saying jayvik. I figured, surely it's not any worse than the rest of them. I was wrong. I would like to formally apologise to jayvik shippers, y'all really are fighting for your lives in the trenches.

Jayce/Viktor (Arcane)

All works: 9616 | E/M: 47% Works where either is tagged as trans: 1262 or 13% of all works | E/M: 80% 53 or 4% of those mpreg, compared to 1% of all fics in the ship tag. They make up for 36% of all mpreg. 205 trans Jayce fic, 1199 trans Viktor fic, 142 t4t 1199 trans Viktor fics and basically all of them just porn. Whew. 36% of all mpreg. Whew. I mean it's not reaching the heights of labru and shadowgast in their respective departments, but it's the combination that's the real kicker.

And you might be looking at this thinking, well, it's not really that bad. These are all pretty small numbers, 9% is hardly an epidemic of people writing trans men as baby making machines. And yeah, when you're looking at all the thousands of works available it doesn't seem that bad.

But when you're browsing a 'Trans [Character]' tag and every 7th fic involves them getting pregnant? When half of the entire 'Pregnancy' tag is trans men? When the rest is just extremely heteronormative PIV smut? And the only characters portrayed as trans men are short and skinny and have long eyelashes and their more traditionally masculine counterparts are being headcanoned as transfem??

That says something.

I know this is only a handful of fandoms and you're welcome to add more! Please do! But personally I don't have the spoons to keep looking into this right now and getting hit over the head with the same pattern over and over again. 80% porn. 4 times more likely to involve pregnancy. That 9:1 split. jesus h christ

It's really fucking annoying shipping an mlm ship and everyone in the goddamn universe is like "the bigger stronger one is a dominant cis man who tops and the smaller weaker one is a submissive trans man who bottoms :)"

[doberbutts]

One of the really insidious ways black people in media get treated is that despite our stereotypes expanding outside of "thug" "slave" and "prostitute", we are still very limited on *what* we can be portrayed as.

It is no shock to me that the two black women in Veilguard, for instance, are either medium toned like myself or a nonhuman skin color (introduced as a woman). It doesn't escape my attention that the only black woman in Baldur's Gate list of companions is also a nonhuman skin color. Dark skinned black women are still considered too unattractive to include as potential romanceable candidates, as it *also* does not escape my attention that the darkest we've had was Vivienne who was simultaneously regarded as an incredibly unlikeable character by huge swaths of the fandom and also unavailable for romance.

But moreover- why can't the bubbley nerdy cute mage be a black woman? Why can't the shy but resourceful archer be a black woman? Why does the black woman have to be someone with their guard up, walls as high as a skyscraper, cynical and callous? Why can't the black woman be the warm and loving Wynne, or the somewhat naive yet devout Leliana? The stalwart and just Aveline? I know plenty of Isabelas, and Viviennes, and Neves, and Taashs, but I also know plenty who are Merrill, or Bellara*, or Harding, or Cassandra, and I even lived with a Sera for a while. Why can't she be Bethany or Morrigan?

The closest we had was Josephine, who again is still fairly light skinned, but at least she has a bit more flexibility. And she isn't a companion, so her screen time is fairly minimal if you're not taking the time to romance her.

*And I don't begrudge Bellara too much, as A: I adore her and B: I'm pretty sure she's our first visibly Asian companion which is a milestone in itself. My point is more that Bellara could be black with virtually no story change because I know plenty of bubbly chirpy friendly black women who have a deep love of their hobbies and interests, who are bisexual and even prefer women, with deep trauma in their pasts, and yet the choice to *not* do that speaks to a problem the media has in their depiction of black women that is far bigger than Bioware.

And it doesn't escape my attention that the men have this problem as well- Wyll and Davrin* are both regarded as boring by their respective fandoms due to the choice to play it safe and stick with the extremely good and upright and just knight character instead of giving them something more messy- Astarion and Lucanis could be black with, as said, little-to-no change in their storyline because I know-even have dated- pansexual former sex worker black men with intensely complicated feelings about sex and intimacy, and I've had plenty of ex-con soft yet dangerous men holding themselves at a distance to prevent themselves from hurting anyone as my friends and even extended family.

I know plenty of intensely nerdy and probably autistic black guys who will infodump gladly about their special interest to the point of it consuming them. I know plenty of black guys with martyr complexes who think they have to tear the world- and themselves- apart just to fix what is broken in this world. I know plenty of black guys who, despite their own inability to get their shit together, are like a port in a storm every time you talk to them. I know plenty of black guys who are extremely educated and well respected within their field, with gentle yet commanding demeanor. Any of these characters *could* be black, and yet they aren't, and the choice to do so is again far bigger than Bioware and Larian.

*Davrin, like Vivienne, being the darkest and first blatantly black male companion instead of potentially able to be ambiguously "of color" like Zevran, Fenris, and Dorian. Even more damning that they'd considered, like Sera, making Solas blatantly black in his concept art and instead chose to make him a pale egg.

As someone desperate for representation, it becomes quickly obvious as I take inventory of what roles black people are given that we still aren't considered as complex and nuanced and interesting. We're allowed to be more than we were before, but we still have a long way to go.