#and I don’t fit the demographic of those who are a fan of that content so that’s probably why I didn’t enjoy it

[smallishbabes]

Finished it. So bad. 2/10. +2 points for the fits of laughter I had while reading the atrocious dirty talk and cheesy flirting lol

I've only heard bad things about the spanish love deception,, good luck soldier 🫡

Ty anon ty I’m glad the not the only one who thinks it’s terrible :’)

[anemoiashifts]

how tiktok failed the shifting community

& how shiftok keeps you stuck idk what to call this. 🫶🏻

to make this clear, i do not hate tiktok. i dont hate people on tiktok who want to shift. i dont have a problem with people on tiktok talking about shifting.

this post is not about anyone specific. ive sold a shifting journal on amazon. which may seem hypocritical though ive never made a promise that it will make you shift & its not supposed to.

!! this post isn’t an excuse to push all the communities problems on shiftok. much like the animal crossing community pre-new horizons, as communities grow bigger, its expected to bring some toxicity with it. problems exist in all corners of the internet & in certain groups.

however, there is a specific issue within the shifting community that involves tiktok & that is the integration of money & profit being made off of people’s desperation.

shifting was / can be presented as this alternative “safe place” & escape for people with serious mental illness that consist of not wanting to be living this life anymore. & that’s fine on its own. everything we do is a form of escapism like readings or watching tv. as long as it’s healthy, it’s harmless. ive touched on permashifting & sv!c!d4l ideation before but id like to piggyback off of that point.

to clarify for everyone new: i am not against perma-shifting. i am against some of the langue that is used around it. you don’t need to k!ll yourself to shift. this is what im speaking about.

when you have an audience that is deteriorating & only going through the motions of life, when your only desire is to get out of the situation you are in, is it extremely easy to profit off of vulnerable people. this fact paired with tiktok — where you get paid & your income is dependent on engagement — it becomes overwhelmingly clear why pushing out content that keeps their audience within arms reach of actually shifting. it’s more profitable if you have an audience of people who can’t shift & want to as opposed to an audience of people who can shift & don’t need validation from exterior sources. it becomes easy to ignore people’s struggles if that’s what you’re making money off of. there is a lack of a healthy viewpoint & balance within some parts of the community.

calling back to 2020 when shiftok was in its infancy, there was a lot of “pov” & storytime style content. there is nothing wrong with wanting to share your experiences but making “entertainment” is arguably much, much easier & profitable. keeping that in mind, why i believe the practice of shifting is so seemingly popular amongst a younger demographic is because it brings fandom spaces together. it’s one thing to watch a show & obsess over fictional characters & read fan fiction but to live alongside your favorite character & be equal with those you idolize, it can sound very appealing. keeping shifting as entertainment style content, it makes it no different then fanfiction & oc’s. again !! i have no problem with people speaking about their experiences / wants for when they shift but the issue is when people only focus on that & it becomes a numbers game.

i hold no issue with people selling their labor in any community but when you sell something with the promise to “make you shift” is when it becomes problematic. when you sell false promises & empty hope, you are also banking that your audience is desperate enough to cling to anything that reminds them of what they want. it speaks to how the creator views their audience to an extent & id argue is aware of the dozens of (mostly) children expressing their negative worldview that displays an unhealthy mentality.

this is why i don’t do general readings as frequently & personal readings at all anymore. quite honestly, it’s easy engagement. while not my intention, people often change their perspective & “make” things fit their situation. i hate hate hate to say this but in desperation, you can make a sign out of anything. this is not me trying to take away the feeling of internal knowing. to give this thought weight, i remember a while ago i posted a reading that was & has been channeled from a person in my desired reality. the comments were flooded by “i know who this is from” & “this is from this person in my dr”. i clarified in the video — the very first slide — that this was from a specific person & everyone completely ignored that fact to fit their beliefs. if you find meaning in something that’s great but when something is explicitly stated as one thing don’t manipulate it to fit yourself if it’s not truly meant for you. not every reading is supposed to resonate. by forcing it to it removes the intimate aspects of what is truly just for you. if everything has meaning, nothing has meaning.

circling back to my idea before, readings & “this message was meant for you content” does open the floodgates to tell their audience what they want to hear for the sake of growth, profit, engagement. yes, there are some readings that don’t pander to a specific group of views but those “stop scrolling this was meant for you, he’s thinking about you, if you see this letter or number it’s a sign & you should be expecting a phone call or someone to reach out to you soon” readings that come up on your fyp are eight times out of ten for engagement purposes & to tell you what you want to hear by using generic langue to make profit. no, not all readings are set up this way and not everyone thinks like this. there are plenty of people who don’t do it for money or attention. even if people did it for money, some people hold issue with that while others don’t. the like it or not, just make sure you’re doing it in a way that’s not making peoples mental situation worse & giving others false hope.

while not reading based, this sounds familiar when we acknowledge “shifting symptoms”. early on, people seemed to take them as being close to shifting & literally feeling the process of you becoming apart of your desired reality. now we know, all those tingles & twitched are only your body checking to see if you’re asleep. the name becomes very mis-leading when you take into that content.

the tldr of this post was when you intertwine spirituality & profit in spaces where people are desperate for something that feels larger then them, people’s actions can put bad tastes in people’s mouths. looking at tiktok, views = money. when numbers are given to people who have shifted & deemed influencers (because that’s how tiktok was pretty much designed) it becomes easy to see why some idolize to be like these people’s — “they shifted & i didn’t, they seem to have everything figured out, they must be better at it then i am, they must be special & not like the rest of us.” it creates a cycle of self doubt, unfortunately, while keeping you in the same “i can’t shift” mindset while these same people are selling a piece of them that you seemingly “lack”.

[my-mt-heart]

Hey MT, Marketing Anon again.

Seeing all the Melissa and Caryl pics made my day! I’m so glad we’re FINALLY getting some confirmation.

But I’ve noticed a TON of confusion surrounding the spinoff since the snippet of the teaser a few nights ago. Then the subsequent internet explosion that occurred when my wish was granted, and we finally got some McReedus content (I may or may not have squealed with joy—you can’t prove this without witnesses).

I saw your post about the spinoff and the confusion around it. I figured I’ll add some info that may clarify why it all seems weird—MT, you hit the nail on the head with some points I’ll cover here. As always, this is my speculation, take what resonates <3

Why Does the Eventual Caryl Spinoff News Feel Confusing?

This may be a bit boring, but it clarifies a lot, so stick with me.

Season 1

Based on what we know about Season 1 of the spinoff—it's catered toward a younger male audience. It’s a fresh new audience that may stick around and won’t be resistant to new storylines, characters, villains, etc. So they can break the mould of the old show and veer into newer territory under the same branding umbrella, which over the years has garnered intrigue to pull a cold audience, aka those who don’t know what the content is but have heard of it. (How many times have you tried something because your friends raved about it? Heck, how many of you started TWD that way?) It’s FOMO—a tried and true method to pull cold audiences.

In marketing, you do market research to learn more about your target audience so you can create content geared toward them. IF used correctly, Reddit is an “untapped gold mine” of market research to help attract your target audience (source: pipeline.zoominfo.com/marketing/reddit-market-research).

Like you said, MT, 74% of Reddit users are people in their 20s who identify as male. Half of that audience is based in the US (source: blog.gitnux.com/reddit-user-statistics). This fits in with the criteria of attracting a younger male audience. And many Redditors from this demographic are resistant to Daryl being paired with a woman his own age that he has clearly been in love with for a decade (marketing anon, your Caryler is showing). You’re welcome to look it up on Reddit and see for yourself. So they’re not married to Caryl and are open to having new female leads on the spinoff.

So if I were marketing that show, that’s where I would go for research.

I suspect nightclubs and nuns were part of that strategy, but they added the young male kid in to show Daryl’s fatherly side. Absent father figures may be a major pain point for the audience they want to reach in S1—because, sadly, approximately 12 million boys in the US grow up without a father (source: rb.gy/o72re). It fits the demographic they're trying to attract. And it’s also a good way to preserve the ‘Daryl we know’ to hook the old audience while attracting the new.

Unfortunately, the reactions by that audience to S1 have been mixed—which, as I mentioned in a previous anon, is a marketer's worst nightmare. So you either change your content/strategy or find an audience that engages with and wants your content/strategy. It’s obviously too late to redo S1 since it has wrapped filming. The only option is to modify it as much as you can to appeal to an audience that is engaging to them—Carylers.

Which brings me to…

Season 2

Season 2 is a whole other strategy—it's completely catered toward Carylers and Melissa fans. They’ve used Caryl content to attract the attention of Carylers for the last decade, they’re going with what they know. Think about the news in the last few weeks. How many of us wanted all of that? They KNOW how to attract us. So Season 2 is a no-brainer IF done correctly.

So How Does This Explain the Spinoff Confusion?

The information we have is extremely ambiguous—When does it air? Who is the main villain? Why are they shooting 2 seasons back to back? What does it mean by a complete ‘reset’? What’s the damn name—Daryl Dixon or Raise the Dead or Pilgrim or something else to fit Caryl?

To further complicate things, they have two sets of audiences that they’re trying to cater to, but only one is responding to them on social media. Just look at the trajectory of the news:

Bathtub leak (nothing)

Rumours of Carol returning (Melissa trends on Twitter)

Daryl “in production” teaser (nothing)

Melissa spotted in the wilderness (Melissa/Caryl trend on Twitter)

Daryl snippet and the promise of a teaser (nothing)

The next day we see Mcreedus and Melissa McBride (Melissa/Caryl trend on Twitter—I think Melissa is still trending 2 days later)

Yes, there were times Daryl was also trending, but if you looked at the top posts, they all had to do with his relationship with Carol or TF in some way. The news that is promoting S2 is getting more attention. Hence creating a cluster of fans (from both groups, S1 group and S2 group) who are confused about when Melissa is joining.

So without clarifying, they’re thriving on the confusion. And instead of doing separate promo for S1, they’re cruising on the buzz generated by all the Melissa and McReedus sightings and keeping people wondering.

That way, Carylers join in and watch S1 with the promise of more Caryl (more info in my previous speculation post to MT).

So What Is REALLY Happening With the Eventual Caryl Spinoff?

It's exactly that—an eventual Caryl spinoff.

S1 is still a solo Daryl show where he is a fish out of water—exploring France, meeting the nun and her nephew, fighting villains, and trying to find a way home.

Melissa McBride joins in S2 of the spinoff.

In S2, Caryl clearly join forces in a location that parallels Consumed.

S1 airs sometime in the fall (I’ve heard September thrown around a lot, but we may get confirmation of that and of Melissa’s return at SDCC).

S2 air date is still TBA.

That’s all the reliable source-backed information we have so far. Melissa may have a cameo in the S1 finale but it hasn't been confirmed. We don’t know if the romantic canon is in the cards yet, although they tried to tease it with that ring on Melissa’s finger. Again, a promise of what you get if you tune in.

Where Does That Leave You, Dear Caryler?

If you signed up for to watch Caryl together—there’s still time for that. S1 still seems to be mostly Daryl with the French entourage. But Melissa is back, and she looks extremely happy. For me, personally, that counts as a sunny day after a cold, hard winter of her absence, her brief SDCC sighting, and nothing but tearful pictures of her during the final days of TWD shoots.

Remember that the timing of every piece of news you got isn’t a coincidence. They’re doubling down on getting Carylers’ attention because they need you to tune in.

Your view has value, your perspective is important—and you deserve to withhold investment until YOU feel they’ve earned it.

You hold the power—No matter what they want you to think. Use it wisely. Caryl on. <3

That was a thorough breakdown, thank you!!

Catering to two (opposing) groups is making me want to rip my hair out. How do you maintain longterm viewership that way?? No one’s going to be satisfied, and I’m concerned I’m going to resent what they do with Daryl in S1 so much, I won’t have the heart for S2 anymore. So I’d really like that addressed somehow.

Panels may not happen this year, but still holding out hope for an official announcement on Melissa, Caryl, and that damn title. And I want language that emphasizes it’s Norman’s AND Melissa’s show. Not Melissa joining Norman’s show because that’s not true.

[robingurl]

Small rant below on cozy gamers from someone that grew up on island builders, city builders and farming games.

I’ve finally started playing Disney Dreamlight and my god, some of the players are absolutely insufferable. Ive not met one normal player.

I’ve never wanted to strangle so many people at once (and I’m a moonie and kuroshitsuji fan new fans for both fandoms smh 😅) .

It literally non stop complaints about how repetitive it is and how there isn’t room to place their characters and how Disney has failed them and aren’t listening and now they are boycotting and not playing - ITS. SO. DAMN. STUPID.

1. First and foremost Disney owes you jack shit. You bought the game and gave them $60 plus the price of the DLC if you paid for it. They held up their end of the bargain and gave you a game. It’s a complete transaction and they don’t give two shits about your whining.

2. The game is going to be repetitive. You’re playing a harvest moon/stardew valley/animal crossing game. THATS THE ENTIRE POINT OF THESE GAMES. You repeatedly talk to villagers, upgrade your house, grow crops, do quests that will sometimes require 20 fish and 200 carrots. The game isn’t broken or a bad game. It’s doing its JOB and what it was created to do.

These games aren’t meant for everyone and yes once you play this game into the ground and cover every space (then complain your game crashes because you’re overloading your graphics cards 🤦🏻‍♀️) with decorations, complete your quests , buy all the furniture and clothes, and max out your level it’s DONE.

No game has unlimited gameplay especially when you go as hard as a lot of you do. You’re going to run out of things to do until the next update. So sit and be patient or follow below:

Restart your game from scratch and move on.

No game company owes you squat. They don’t owe you updates, they don’t owe you free stuff or even DLCs.

The fact that Disney is doing this, is great and I’m excited.

3. New characters. This is for my overly dramatic players who have to over achieve and cover every single pixelated space on their valley, you will need to REMOVE SOMETHING to make room for the new characters coming in.

Disney doesn’t owe you a new biome and if you’d shrink the 2 acre palace you made for Ariel and Belle, it would fit quite nicely.

First you complain about not enough to do, then Disney GIVES YOU MORE CONTENT (for FREE I might add) and you bitch about where to put it.

No one cares Ashleigh, just change up your valley and move on.

4. Playing on the switch. Yes the gameplay isn’t perfect but I’ve been grinding and I really haven’t run into problems like all of you complain about. I’m not saying you’re lying but my guess is, like I said above, you’re decorating your island too much.

This is like ACNH, you over do it and your game will lag and crash and yes you could corrupt your game file 🤷🏻‍♀️ it’s how this stuff works.

“bUt ThAtS nOt fAiR” then get a different console. Can’t afford it, make do with what you have. That’s reality.

5 “omg where is Cinderella and Snow White? 😭😞” first, Disney is putting in their popular characters first and foremost. A lot of the demographic they are pointing to (not a 32 Disney adult) don’t know the older princesses. Second, Cinderella can’t move in when her castle is covered in thorns… just saying. My guess is she’ll be the last we unlock.

As much as I love older Disney, I know they won’t appear until later. I was happily surprised Merlin was one of the first people we met in the game and same with the Fairy God Mother later on. But I know realistically unless these princesses are needed for the main story line, they aren’t a priority.

Yes, I get that older people play this game, I’m one of them, but I’m not disillusioned into thinking Disney will bend to my will just because I cry and beg.

6. “Pay to play” this game isn’t pay to play. Sure you can CHOOSE to buy those blue tokens but THE GAME DOESN’T REQUIRE THE PURCHASE. You can earn these coins through game play and dream snaps. Disney is not locking the game so you have to buy them, I’ve not been locked out once.

So stop lying to people.

If you really want that ride or that dress and you’re an adult with adult money- YOU CAN CHOOSE to spend real money but it’s not a required part of the game.

bUt KiDs pLaY tHiS gAmE 😖 ok and? Put your foot down, remove your payment information from the game shop and step up and be a fucking parent and supervise your child on what she/he’s doing on the console you bought them. Your lack of parenting isn’t Disney’s fault.

That’s on you 😌✨

7. Dreamsnaps. No one is required to vote for your perfectly curated photo with your 1000 hour park in the BG.

There are actual kids playing this game and new or casual players. They deserve a vote as well.

Sure they look great but don’t expect an automatic win. It’s more fun, imo, to find the clever ones of the first time/casual players who don’t have Disney land behind them.

Same with the kids that have Mike from Monsters Inc belching 😂 it’s a game for kids, so there will be lots of those photos.

I vote for everything but the perfect dreamsnaps, but that’s just me.

I’m not saying not to put your all into it because you will still get a hefty amount of star coins (blue things) from following the prompt, but please stop complaining about how people could possibly vote for a “boring” “obviously not following the prompt” submissions.

Your popular mean girl techniques don’t work in the digital world. You can’t bully people into voting for you 🥰

If you’ve gotten this far into this rant and you’re unsure if you want to buy the game: yes do it. It’s such a charming well made game that lets you hang out with a lot of characters from your childhood.

Just don’t go to Reddit, TikTok or YouTube and read the comments. You’ll lose your mind. 🥴

Reach out to me if you want any help for new players. I’m still kinda new but we’ll figure it out together! 🥰

[unhingedhearties]

Aftermath Re-cap

Let’s travel back in time to October 8, 2023, moments after When Calls The Heart’s Season 10, Episode 11 finished airing. In the last few minutes of the episode, the two lead characters broke off their engagement amicably and went their separate ways, content with still being friends. Some fans were happy and some fans…

…well if you’re here, you’ve seen some of the reactions.

GOODBYE!

Two fictitious adult characters realized they weren’t right for each other = morals are gone.

“Look like a slut”

And there it is. You see the crazier fans allude to it a lot, but few of them are brave enough to say it outright. They think this woman, who hasn’t had sex with the man she was engaged to, is a “slut” for breaking off her engagement and maybe realizing another man is who she’d rather be with.

This person is yet another fan who seems to think Chris is leaving the show, despite there being no proof. Mind you, this seems to be a demographic of people who clearly think that if they believe something hard enough, it has to be true.

“Anti-marriage agenda”. Because once fictitious characters are paired up, they must stay together no matter what. Things like actor availability, chemistry, fan interests aren’t factors. It’s all a plot by the evil secularists to destroy God from within. 

Also, “Allie & Robert”... those two are kids. Please don’t be weird about the child actors.

Character limit isn’t enough. Twitter needs to limit how many times you can respond to yourself.

The lore of Lindays Sturman according to the Lucabeth fans is fascinating. Lindsay is apparently unqualified to be the showrunner because she had never watched the show before accepting the job. Only hard-core, super fans of any kind of media should ever be showrunners apparently. She binge watched all the episodes, which is somehow no good because something about not being able to understand When Calls The Heart the way people who obsessively watch all 100+ episodes constantly understand it. 

But now, this woman who’s never watched the show, watched it once and decided to join one side of this fandom that likes one of the male characters. And from there worked with the channel WCTH airs on to DESTROY the show.

Do you people who say this stuff understand how stupid you sound?

“They likely want WCTH off the air so they can replace it with some other ridiculous and corny series that fits their new agenda.”

Why would they do this? When Calls The Heart has amazing ratings compared to other scripted TV series on cable. What would be the benefit in getting rid of something popular that brings them money? WCTH isn’t on every hour of the day. If they want to bring in new shows and content, they can. 

And be brave. Tell me what their “new agenda” is? Because I’ve seen people lose their shit at Hallmark for having more movies with non-white leads, gay couples and non-Christian holiday movies. If that’s not what you mean by “new agenda” say what you mean then. Because that sure is what it sounds like.

People constantly bring up producer Brian Bird and the former showrunner John Tinker saying they weren’t going to change who the love interest is. I understand being disappointed, but it’s come to a point where people are starting to sound like children. “YOU BROKE YOUR PROMISE D:” Yes. That’s life. Things don’t always go the way you want them to go. If a TV show changing its main couple is what gets you to realize strangers sometimes tell lies, consider yourself very fortunate. 

Those stupid drumroll emojis… you can tell this is a person who’s only frame of reference for anything in life is from TV and movies. People like this can’t talk like a normal person. It really is “main character syndrome” and they see themselves as the underdog giving the dramatic, rousing speech.

“...which on 1920 was deemed as adulterous and immoral, and it is.”

Hearties in general really love to pick and choose when to either praise or complain about the show’s historical accuracy. World War 1, the Spanish Flu, Residential Schools, the realities of racism and sexism… pay no mind. Isn’t it great that these things never happened and we don’t need to address them in our happy make-believe world of Hope Valley :) 

A woman broke off her engagement and might have feelings for another man, well clearly that’s adulterous and immoral in the 1920’s AND IT IS!

[lazylogic]

TL;DR: I’ve let my online art presence and the internet as a whole become so weighty to me that I’m constantly having a meltdown over how the internet has changed and how I present myself online, so I’m cutting myself off from being an artist on the internet, because it seems like the only healthy option for me right now.

I think I need to stop posting online entirely. As drastic and melodramatic as that sounds, I’m spending time on an internet that I hate, wishing for an internet that no longer exists. I’ve repeatedly ~taken breaks from social media to try and detox~, and it does help in the short term, but eventually I just fall back into my “existential art crisis” and become anxious, stressed, and frustrated again, hating myself and hating every choice I’ve made up to this point. I’m happy when I draw at my own pace, but I’m quickly overwhelmed by the “I’m not posting enough so people won’t like me anymore” anxiety I get.

I know I’m like, the only one who feels this way, the only one who cares this much and takes art this seriously that I’ve let it crush me so much. For some reason my art and my ability to draw is so deeply ingrained in my identity and sense of self, and it’s become so monumentally important to me that it’s worn me down this much. But I know I’m not the only artist online who feels pressure to perform every day, who compares themself to others, who feels burnt out every month, and who is constantly fighting with the evolving technology and society that seems to be consistently designed to screw us. I know many have been able to adapt, and have done it smoothly, and I commend them and am incredibly happy for them. I’m proud to have happy and well-adjusted art peers! I can’t do that. I want to put in the effort to adapt, I have to many ideas to share and stories to tell, but I’m just…spent. Every time I try, it takes up all of my very limited energy, and I’m back to hibernation mode again. I am tired. I’m too small, sensitive and self-conscious to simply keep trucking along. My fragility makes every effort so painful. I really cannot do this anymore.

Posting my art online used to be fun. I loved connecting with people over fan art, OCs, gushing with other artists about each other’s creations, and getting love and support from people who found enjoyment in it. I used to get kind asks on Tumblr just complimenting my art or encouraging me when I posted a vent piece. Tumblr especially used to be my chill place. Most of those people, along with that happy and peaceful environment, are gone now. Old Tumblr is dead, old DeviantArt is gone, I feel detached from FA more than I ever have. Everything feels scattered and divided, and people are so jaded, which I really can’t blame anyone for. No matter where I go, I don’t feel like I belong anywhere anymore, and I don’t really want to be anywhere, either. I feel like I don’t even fit in with my own demographic, no matter what I try. I can’t emphasize enough that I’m trying to post for and enjoy an internet and online community that no longer exists. It’s my own fault for living in the past. Everything is far too fleeting now, engagement is king and constant streams of new content, as well as outrage, equals that. Everyone else seems to be able to change so readily with it, and I’m still stuck figuring things out from five years ago. I can’t seem to recognize or understand anyone anymore, either. I can’t keep up, and I don’t want to try to anymore.

I think what I wanted the most for my art was for it to resonate with people. It’s always been my favorite thing to do for fun, and it always made me so happy knowing my art made someone’s day better, even if it was just Hattie being silly or cute fan art. The idea that I could make someone breathe easier because I drew something soft and comforting is incredibly meaningful to me. But my art was always a powerful emotional outlet for me, too. I know my vent art would often dip into edgy territory, especially in my teenage years, and I withdrew from drawing vent art as a whole because I became too self-aware of it and I felt too exposed. But it was real, and it came from a real place and real emotions, and that’s still important to me. I feel emotions very strongly. I wanted to say something and be understood. And I guess that’s what I still want? To be understood, like anyone else would want, I guess.

I don’t even know what I want out of posting online anymore, or why I bother to check it. Every bit of engagement I get feels more empty than rewarding, and that discrepancy keeps growing. I hate it, because I know it’s because my brain has been trained to want more. I hate that I need more and more validation that people care about me via my art, because it used to be purely mine. And I want so much for it to just be mine again. It’s really felt like I’ve been drawing for everyone else for such a long time, and I guess that’s also my own fault. I feel trapped here. I really don’t enjoy drawing anymore, and I never get the urge to like I used to, and I cannot express how much that absolutely guts me. I always say social media is what ruined it for me, but I know that my participation in social media was my own choice, so I know I actually ruined it for myself.

I have a lot of work to do. I need to just get better as a person, fix my mental health, gain any semblance of self-worth so that I’m not breaking down every week over my value as an artist being synonymous with my value as a person (before you wonder, I am working with mental health professionals regularly now). I know I complain a LOT about the internet and how it’s changed, but I need to make it very clear that I don’t meant to put the blame solely on all of that for my mental state. I recognize that I just have a lot of issues and I make things harder for myself all the time. I’m chronically living in the past and unhappy with the present, and that’s 100% a me problem. This is the only move I can think of that will allow me to actually focus on getting my shit together; removing the option of being an online artist altogether. I can’t cheat and peek at Twitter and slowly make my way back after three weeks. While I’m at it, I will probably stop posting everywhere else too (not that I was really posting much anyway). I don’t want to say I’m leaving forever but I will say that I want no more expectations, I’m not gonna be posting anymore, basically until further notice. I have to figure my shit out for real. I’m not sure if this will even work, it might just make things worse for me. But I’m just at a loss and I feel like I need to do something. I don’t know if my absence from online art posting will cause me to miraculously enjoy drawing again and a year from now I’ll have a massive backlog to show everyone, I’ll be fixed and happy…I don’t know. I just know this isn’t for me, not right now.

I feel guilty doing this, because I have people who have been following me and supporting me for well over a decade, and I think you guys deserve better than this. It’s a big part of my motivation for doing this to begin with - I’m kind of ashamed to show myself to these awesome people every day, I feel like I owe everyone more than just my gratitude, but I haven’t been able to deliver consistent art or content in years. I feel like I'm letting so many people down every day, and ultimately I feel the same about leaving. But I need to get better first. I think about everyone all the time and feel so lucky and so stupid. I know it’s dramatic, but to everyone, thank you, and I’m sorry.

For anybody going, “it’s not that deep,” I’ve heard that plenty. This post isn’t for you.

I’m not completely disappearing from the internet. If you want to get into contact with me, you can add me on Discord at RealaChao#7312. I will still accept commissions privately for now, so just reach out to me (I’ll update my commissions Carrd site if I decide to close them). I won’t necessarily be deleting my accounts, but I will be logging out of everything at least and disabling notifications, so please don’t message me on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, or anywhere else expecting a reply. You can also email me at plutoeffoart@gmail.com. Lastly, my main focus these days has been my Neocities, so you’re welcome to check that out (though it's largely a draft right now). It’s not going to be an art site, though, at least not only art. It’s gonna be my quiet home.

I also posted this here. Genuinely, thanks for everything.

[samaspic31]

It would have been nice if hbomberguy had named confirmation bias and the halo effect as factors that contributed to somerton’s success : he exploited « looking the part », sanatized analysis and queer history, and overall copied off (in the tiny original parts) mainstream takes that were popular in tumblr discourse (« we have more queer women than gay men in childrens animation » « oriental countries censor gay relationships so much more ») because his audience was primed to those ideas.

He exploited making content with similar stances to other queer youtubers but looking much more snobbish and performing the idea we have of a queer intellectual, farming youtube for people looking for familiarity that would also make them feel clever (all the while never questioning the need for gay people to justify their reading of media, we shouldn’t have to and it feels grovelling-adjacent to me but i digress). Real academic work is much more complex and requires intellectual friction and confronting theories to data, creating new ideas, testing frameworks and discarding them if they don't fit, (try to) see all angles of an issue. Which is why his videos often lacked nuance and were dumbing down the sources.

We need to be so much more careful about people mining fandoms for money. I cannot stress how much people intentionally exploit the starvation created by our culture being alternative for decades and still somewhat niche now. We will soon see the rise of fandom as a money machine (worse than now obviously it'salreadystarted and has seeped in the mainstream to a degree). People see it as a market to exploit in many areas, merch, engagement and promotion, basically using fans' voluntary labor to cut down costs, catering to us can make someone lots of money, and we should be somewhat careful who we uplift. I don’t remember what tipped me off, and it clearly wasn’t big if i don’t, but i had unfollowed james like a whole year before all this, and his shallowness in supporting demographics in the queer community he wasn’t a part of himself, nor his lack of range covering racial issues, were not hidden. Hbomberguy was not wrong pointing out he exploited a gap of knowledge in younger queer folks of both queer history, academic texts, and in proficiency to recognize misogynistic rhetoric.

Im not blaming anyone for missing those signs, but lets stay vigilant. Lots of bad shit goes on fandom, especially we turn off our brains cause we feel safe about someone who could have mastered how to signal support to queer people without actually internalized any of it.

[linklethehistorian]

No, but seriously, I think one of the things that would be the hardest to convey to anyone outside of Cherish’s specific shipping field is just how unalike my experience is to basically anyone else in the BSD fandom.

While the rest of y’all can be out there freely sharing your favorite pairings and art and original characters and fankids and whatnot with your fellow BSD fans in servers and various other BSD communities and at least be getting a little bit of love and interest and visible positive vibes and support in return, I…don’t really get the luxury of doing that.

Like, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that life in the fandom is by any means easy for all of y’all out there; I know firsthand from being a ChuuArt stan even before this whole charade that depending on your ship, the metaphorical seas can very rough to sail and judgy people are always gonna be at least in some places you go to, to try to bring you down and make you feel bad about fictional interests. Sometimes, it can be super hard to find those niche but absurdly valuable sane circles where people will be down to listen to you without immediate judgement, and when walking into a new group you often have to sus out whether the environment is welcoming or not before you try to hang out there and mingle with others in talking about your ships and faves and whatnot, but — and here’s the key difference — those places do exist, if you go looking for them. There are people, an entire, fairly large demographic of people, that you can feel safe with, who will, in fact, listen and care, or at least respect your ships even if they personally don’t care for them. They are out there. And once you’ve found them, you know automatically that you’re in safe hands to talk about your all your ships and faves and OCs and fankids to your heart’s content!

…Unless it’s Cherish’s main pairing — its specific brand of RimLaine — then, and only then, nothing is guaranteed.

And I know someone will probably try to say, “okay, but that’s just like having any other OC you ship with someone, isn’t it? There are probably plenty of people who have experienced that!”

But no, it isn’t, and there aren’t.

I’ve been in large and small BSD communities all over, and I have seen enough to know that actually, OCs — yes, even fankids and self-inserts — are pretty damn well received in this fandom comparably to most other fandoms I’ve been in; because of its inherent nature of taking authors and transforming them into fictional characters with unique superpowers based on their works, it is a fandom that absolutely thrives on fan creations and fan content. Even if someone doesn’t know your OC personally, 9 times out of 10, if you’re bold enough, you can still waltz straight into a server or whatever-else-have-you type of community and just start talking about them freely, and you’re nearly guaranteed to be accepted into the fold. People will call your creations cute, they’ll ask friendly and excited questions about your ideas, and they’ll just in general compliment you and hang out with you like you’re one of the group; it may be significantly harder to find people to talk with than they more popular pairings, yes, but it’s pretty much on par or often actually even better than your average rarepair experience.

…So, what makes Cherish different, then? Shouldn’t its unique version of Arthur fit in just fine with the crowd? Isn’t it the very essence of BSD to bring authors into the BSD world, isn’t it celebrated for fans to do their own spins on going about that all of the time, to widely varying degrees of how much history and life of the author they transfer over into their BSD incarnation?

In technicality, the answer to both of the latter questions is an unequivocal ‘yes’, but to all too many of those in the fandom — they see it nevertheless as a resounding ‘no’. Even if you find the most universally accepting group of people in the world in regards to fictional creations and ships and whatnot, even in this fandom which itself is built upon a slightly fantastical, slightly science-fiction-y historical rpf AU, the moment you utter or even so much as imply or are read as implying the term “historical rpf AU”, at least half or more of those once-rational people will immediately turn to hungry rabid animals, ready to bite your head off and say that actually, while even the most ‘problematic’ of ships imaginable with canon characters is perfectly fine in their eyes and no type of fanfic should be banned or stopped from existing because it’s fiction, you and your historical rpf-adjacent creation deserve to be harassed and wiped off the face of the Earth, no matter how many centuries long passed the individual(s) involved are and how respectful you are in their portrayal(s) (let’s never mind the absolute hypocrisy given the fandom and the fact that the “f” in rpf stands for ‘fiction’, and is, therefore, a form of fiction).

For the purpose of this post, I’ll acknowledge once and only once that somehow — and much to my complete bafflement — I have gotten far more hate and hate watchers over Cherish’s main pairing than I have ever gotten over ChuuArt.

Now, that’s not going to stop me in any way from doing what I do — not even remotely, because quite honestly, I don’t care, I love this fic and this pairing, and I’m having the time of my life regardless — but, it should go to show, at the very least, what I mean when I say that being Cherish’s author is a uniquely lonely experience.

I watch people gushing every day in the broader fandom about their fave pairings and their OCs and crossovers and fankids and whatever else they desire in servers and getting people to engage with them and hype with them for their ideas, sharing their fanarts and such and having fun, but unlike all of them, that really is the most I can do, even if the sanest and safest of fandom spaces, unless I happen to have spent years getting to know an individual and be absolutely certain that I won’t be crucified right out the gate (or they are clearly a fan of or supportive of my fic). If I do post anything art related, it’s usually completely without context and a one and done thing.

And really, that’s fine. I’m happy that I just have this blog to gush and post on, all of y’all following (y’all sweethearts 💖), and the ability to share it all with you — my perfectly curated, respectful, and lovely few, in my perfectly curated corner of this fandom here on Tumblr. In a way, it’s special and flattering — to know how unique Cherish is in its concept that it is so uniquely lonely because it isn’t considered to fully fit within any existing branch of this fandom’s fan creations, and to know that there are people out there who are so obsessed with it that they choose to let its existence live rent-free in their heads, whether positively, or negatively (because they haven’t learned how to curate their fandom experiences); I have a lot of love in my heart for all of that and for all of you who make it possible, and if anything, it inspires me to go even further on the extra mile in continuing with this endeavor in this most unhinged (positive, afffectionate) way possible. 💖

So many times I have wanted to explain that there is a very unique loneliness to being Cherish’s author (outside of our little community) that I don’t think could ever really be felt anywhere else in the fandom, but it’s so hard to put into words and I fear that in many ways this will be interpreted entirely negatively — when, in fact, it is that same unique loneliness to its existence that also is part of what makes it so uniquely beautiful and special.

Idk, maybe I’ll elaborate in the future when I’m better rested and equipped for that commentary, but for now just have this random thought, I guess.

[fairyphiliac]

This ao3 thing devolving into a yes/no on censorship debate feels entirely like we’re dodging the real center of the problem. The need for censorship is just a symptom. If people aren’t able to post cp/blatant racism/etc. on ao3 anymore you can be damn sure they’ll post it elsewhere (not saying it’s not worth censoring, just that I want to address how these things got so deeply rooted into fandom in the first place.)

So let’s talk about it. (I’m mostly going to be talking about the production of cp/violent pornography/rape glorification, because that is what I know the most about, there are other facets of problematic media and in many instances racism and classism are mixed in with these things too).

I’ve worked in the adult retail industry for the last four years. I get a very unique and in depth perspective on the sexual habits of the general public. In a society where sex education usually stops at the bare minimum, and sex - especially kink - is not commonly talked about, you can be absolutely sure that kinks/fetishes will both develop and be expressed in extremely unhealthy or problematic ways. Especially with the internet, people - KIDS ESPECIALLY- are being exposed to sexual content that they are not mentally and emotionally mature enough for, and don’t fully know how to process. They develop sexual tastes without having a baseline understanding of healthy sex practices, consent, communication, and boundaries.

I did a report once on how media is effecting the sexual practices of the general public, especially the youth. (If anyone wants I can dig up my sources, they are in fact academic/ scientific journal articles, I’m sure I still have this report somewhere). Essentially the research shows this- the earlier/more frequently young people are exposed to extreme sexual media, especially violent pornography (which is INCREDIBLY easy for anyone to access), the more extreme their own sexual tastes become, frequently to the point that as a young adult they are unable to become sexually aroused unless violence/extreme and often risky behavior is occurring. For a lot of people who do not have proper kink education, or who lack maturity, or a whole slew of other reasons, this means that a perfect circumstance for real life sexual violence has just been created- and guess who usually suffers? The demographics most often portrayed as submissive or as objects of domination and violence in media (women, POC, LGBTQ+, even minors or minor-appearing…). So there you have it- unbridled access to problematic media contributes to real life sexual violence.

Kink is not inherently bad. For some it is an extremely healthy outlet, or even a way to process and cope with sexual trauma- if it is done by the book. By that, I mean following ALL of the rules that the true kink community is built on- safe, sane and sober, clear and informed consent, mature ADULTS only, established and clearly communicated boundaries, practical safety precautions, aftercare and emotional support. You can’t just skip all of that. Even if your involvement in kink is purely fictional/fantasized, you NEED to understand all of that because I am telling you, the media you expose yourself to can and will inform your own psychology.

So how does this all fit into fandom? Unfortunately fanfiction is a part of this cycle that flies way under the radar compared to traditional pornography. We cannot continue to have irresponsible fans writing irresponsible content. I am begging you to understand the full impact when I tell you that your fic sexualizing a minor, which is online for ANYONE to see, can be a building block for establishing pedophilic tendencies in readers. I need you to understand that your poorly informed and immature representation of BDSM is contributing to a growing taste for sexual violence among young people.

I am not “kink shaming” when I am telling you not to post harmful garbage. I am pleading for the sake of those who are already more susceptible to experiencing sexual violence. And if you feel like you have been a part of this cycle- exposed to sexual content too early, exposed to things too extreme, wondering if your own sexual tastes and habits are becoming unhealthy or if your “fantasies” are problematic or becoming too much for you to process comfortably- please PLEASE consider seeking professional psychiatric help instead of continuing the cycle by producing harmful media. Pedophilia is not acceptable. Degrading fetishization of POC or LGBTQ+ is not acceptable. I have a lot more to say about this but this post is already so long. Basically it comes down to this:

Take. Responsibility. For. The. Shit. You. Post.

[shihalyfie]

About the Adventure: reboot, the likely reason why it exists, the question of target demographic, and whether I would recommend it or not

I think this reboot has been kind of a strange outlier in terms of Digimon anime in general, in terms of...well, just about everything. I also feel like everything surrounding it has kind of been giving us mixed signals as to what the intent and purpose behind the anime is -- well, besides “cashing in on the Adventure brand”, but looking at it more closely, that might be a bit of an oversimplification.

I’m writing this post because, having seen the entire series to the end for myself and thinking very hard about it and what it was trying to do, I decided to put down my thoughts. This is not meant to be a review of what I think was good and bad, but rather, something that I hope will be helpful to those who might be on the fence about whether they want to watch it or not, or those who don’t want to watch/finish it but are curious about what happened, or those who are curious as to why this reboot even exists in the first place, or even maybe just those who did watch it but are interested in others’ thoughts about it. I'm personally convinced that -- especially in an ever-changing franchise like Digimon -- how much you like a given work is dependent on what your personal tastes are to the very end, and thus it’s helpful to understand what kind of expectations you should go in with if you want to watch something.

With all of this said and done, if you want to go in and best enjoy this series, I think it is best to consider this anime as a distinct Digimon series of its own. The relationship to Adventure is only surface-level, and by that I mean it’s very obvious it’s doing things its own thing deliberately without worrying too much about what prior series did. Of course, I think everyone will have varying feelings about using the Adventure branding for something that really isn't Adventure at all, but we are really talking about an in-name-only affair, and something that’s unabashedly doing whatever it wants. So in other words, if you’re going in expecting Adventure, or anything that really resembles Adventure, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. But if you’re able to approach it like yet another distinct Digimon series, and the other aspects of it fit your fancy, you’ll probably be able to enjoy it much better. And, conversely, I think it’s also important to remember that this series seems to have a writing philosophy with a fundamentally different goal from most Digimon series, and since it’s understandable for most long-time Digimon fans to have their tastes built on those prior series, it’s fine and completely understandable that this reboot may not be your cup of tea, for reasons that probably don’t actually have much to do with whether it’s an Adventure reboot or not.

There are no spoilers in the following post. (Although I use some emphatic language for the duration for it, these are mostly just my personal thoughts and how I see the series and the overall situation.)

On what exact relationship to Adventure this series has, and why it’s an “Adventure reboot”

If you ask why they did an Adventure reboot, the easiest answer to come up with is “Adventure milking, because it’s profitable”, but that’s kind of an oversimplification of what the issue is. This is especially when you take into account a key fact that official has been very well aware of since as early as 2006: most kids are too young to have seen Adventure, and therefore have no reason to care about it.

That’s the thing: Adventure milking only works so well on today’s children, and Toei and Bandai know this. This is also the reason that the franchise started going through a bit of a “split” starting in around 2012 (after Xros Wars finished airing), when the video game branch started making more active attempts to appeal to the adults’ fanbase with Re:Digitize and Adventure PSP. (Although they were technically still “kids’ games”, they were very obviously aimed at the adults’ audience as a primary “target”.) The generation that grew up with Adventure and other classic Digimon anime was getting older and older, and targeting that audience would require tailoring products more specifically to them -- ultimately culminating in 2015 and the solidification of “very obviously primarily for adults” media in the form of both games (Cyber Sleuth and Next Order) and anime (tri.). Note that Appmon ended up getting its own 3DS game, but since it was targeted at kids, it seems to have been developed by a completely different pipeline/branch from the aforementioned adults’ games, so even that had a split.

So if we want to talk about full-on nostalgia pandering, that’s already being done in the adults’ branch. In fact, Appmon development specifically said that they felt free to not really care about the adults’ audience because that was tri.’s job. Of course, the hardcore Digimon adults’ fanbase is still keeping an eye on the kids’ shows, and it’s good to not upset them -- and, besides, even if we’re all suffering under the hell of capitalism, people who work in kids’ shows still tend to be very passionate about the content and messages they’re showing the kids, so they still put an effort into making good content that adults can enjoy too. But, nevertheless, adults are still the “periphery demographic”, and a kids’ show is not a success if the kids (who have not seen and do not care about Adventure) are not watching it or buying the toys. Appmon ended up being extremely well-received by the adults’ fanbase, but that all meant nothing since the kids didn’t get into it.

Most kids are not super incredibly discerning about so-called writing quality (it’s not like they don’t at least unconsciously know when something is good, but they’re much less likely to be bothered by little things adults are often bothered by), so there’s a certain degree you have to get their attention if you want things to catch on with them. Critical reception does matter a lot more when we talk about the adults’ audience, but for the kids, the more important part is how much you’ve managed to engage them and how much fun they’re having (especially in regards to the toyline). Moreover, there’s the problem of “momentum”; Digimon’s sister shows of PreCure, Kamen Rider, and Super Sentai have sometimes had really poorly performing shows (critically or financially), but have managed to recover it in successive years to avoid getting cancelled. Digimon never managed to get to that point, with sales nearly dropping to half with Tamers and again with Frontier. So in essence, Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon were all attempts at figuring out what was needed to just get that “kickstart” again -- but things just never lined up for it to work.

So if kids don’t really care about Adventure, why would they do Adventure nostalgia pandering? The answer is one that official has actually openly stated multiple times: they want to have parents watch it together with their children. Both Seki and Kinoshita said this in regards to watching the reaction to Kizuna, and it was also stated outright as a goal for the reboot, but, believe it or not, there’s reports of this having been stated back as early as Savers (followed by an admission that maybe 2006 was a little too early for people who grew up with Adventure to be old enough to have their own kids). So the little nostalgia references in Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon aren't really meant to magically turn the series into Adventure as much as they’re supposed to be flags waved at the parents to get them to pay attention, so that they can introduce their kids to Digimon and watch it together with them, until the kids eventually take an interest on their own and they don’t need to rely on that kind of standby as much. (I say “as much” because of course PreCure, Rider, and Sentai all are still very indulgent in their anniversary references, but they’re not nearly as reliant on it to the point of life-and-death.)

This is also why Kizuna’s existence and release date two months prior to the reboot is a huge factor in this. The reason tri. wouldn’t have done it is that it never actually reached a properly “mainstream” audience. It’s a huge reason I keep emphasizing the fact that tri. and Kizuna are two separate things with completely different production and release formats, because tri. being a limited OVA screening released in six parts over three years means that, although it was a moderate financial success that did better than the franchise’s other niche products, in the end, it didn’t actually reach the “extremely casual” audience very well. We, as the “hardcore Internet fanbase”, all know people who watched all six parts, and the difference between tri. and Kizuna’s release formats doesn’t hit us as hard because of international distribution circumstances, but even on our end, if you talk to your casual friends who barely remember anything about Digimon except what they saw on TV twenty years ago, you will almost never find anyone who got past Part 1, maybe 2 at most. (That’s before we even get into the part where a good chunk of them got turned off at the character design stage for being too different.) Sticking with a full six-part series over three years is a commitment, and if you’re not someone with a certain level of loyalty to the franchise, you aren’t as likely to put aside the time for it!

Kizuna, on the other hand, was a full-on theatrical movie with full marketing campaign that was aimed at that extremely casual mainstream audience, including a lot of people who hadn’t even heard of tri. (due to it being too niche) or hadn’t bothered to commit to watching something so long, and thus managed to “hype up” a lot of adults and get them in a Digimon mood. (Critical reception issues aside, this is also presumably a huge reason Kizuna isn’t all that reliant on tri.’s plot; Adventure and 02 both averaged at around 11% of the country watching it when it first aired, but the number of people who even saw tri. much less know what happened in it is significantly lower, so while you can appeal to a lot of people if you’re just targeting the 11%, you'll lock them out if you’re overly reliant on stuff a lot of them will have never seen in the first place.) We’re talking the kind of super-casual who sees a poster for Kizuna, goes “oh I remember Digimon!”, casually buys a ticket for the movie, likes it because it has characters they remember and the story is feelsy, and then two months later an anime that looks like the Digimon they recognize is on Fuji TV, resulting in them convincing their kid to watch it together with them because they’re in a Digimon mood now, even though the actual contents of the anime are substantially different from the original.

So, looking back at the reboot:

There’s a huge, huge, huge implication that the choice to use Adventure branding was at least partially to get Fuji TV to let them have their old timeslot back. Neither Xros Wars nor Appmon were able to be on that old timeslot, presumably because Fuji TV had serious doubts about their profitability (perhaps after seeing Savers not do very well). This isn’t something that hits as hard for us outside Japan who don’t have to feel the impact of this anyway, but it’s kind of a problem if kids don’t even get the opportunity to watch the show in the first place. While there’s been a general trend of moving to video-on-demand to the point TV ratings don’t really have as much impact as they used to, I mean...it sure beats 6:30 in the morning, goodness. (Note that a big reason PreCure, Rider, and Sentai are able to enjoy the comfortable positions they’re in is that they have a very luxurious 8:30-10 AM Sunday block on TV Asahi dedicated to them.)

Since we’re talking about “the casual mainstream”, this means that this kind of ploy only works with something where a casual person passing by can see names and faces and take an interest. This is why it has to be Adventure, not 02 or Tamers or whatnot; 02 may have had roughly similar TV ratings to Adventure and fairly close sales figures back in 2000, but the actual pop culture notability disparity in this day and age is humongous (think about the difference in pop culture awareness between Butter-Fly and Target). 02, Tamers, and all can do enough to carry “adults’ fandom” products and merch sales at DigiFes, and the adults’ branch of the franchise in general, but appealing to the average adult buying toys for the kids is a huge difference, and a big reason that, even if they’re clearly starting to acknowledge more of the non-Adventure series these days, it’s still hard to believe they’re going to go as far as rebooting anything past Adventure -- or, more accurately, hard to believe they’ll be able to get the same impact using names and faces alone.

This advertising with the Adventure brand goes beyond just the anime -- we’re talking about the toyline that has the involved character faces plastered on them, plus all of the ventures surrounding them that Bandai pretty obviously carefully timed to coincide with this. One particularly big factor is the card game, which is doing really, really well right now, to the point it’s even started gaining an audience among people who weren’t originally Digimon fans. Part of it is because the game’s design is actually very good and newcomer-friendly, but also...nearly every set since the beginning came with reboot-themed Tamer Cards, which means that, yes, those cards with the Adventure names and faces were helping lure people into taking an interest in the game. Right now, the game is doing so well and has gained such a good reputation that it probably doesn’t need that crutch anymore to keep going as long as the game remains well-maintained, but I have no doubt the initial “Adventure” branding was what helped it take off, and its success is most likely a huge pillar sustaining the franchise at the current moment.

Speaking of merch and toys, if you look closely, you might notice that Bandai decided to go much, much more aggressively into the toy market with this venture than they ever did with Savers, Xros Wars, or Appmon (Appmon was probably the most aggressive attempt out of said three). They put out a lot more merch and did a lot more collaborative events to engage the parents and children, and, presumably, the reason they were able to do this was because they were able to push into those outlets with the confidence the Adventure brand would let them be accepted (much like with Fuji TV). Like with the card game, the important part was getting their “foot in the door” so that even if it stopped being Adventure after a fashion, they’d still have all of those merchandising outlets -- after all, one of the first hints we ever got of Ghost Game’s existence was a July product listing for its products replacing the reboot’s in a gachapon set, so we actually have evidence of certain product pipelines being opened by the reboot’s precedent. (The word 後番組 literally means “the TV program that comes after”, so it’s pretty obvious this was intended for Ghost Game; in other words, the reboot’s existence helped ensure there be a “reservation” for this kind of product to be made.)

I think one important thing to keep in mind is that Toei and Bandai have as much of a stake in avoiding rehashing for their kids’ franchises as we do. Even if you look at this from a purely capitalistic perspective, because of how fast the “turnover” is for the kids’ audience, sustaining a franchise for a long time off rehashing the same thing over and over is hard, and even moreso when it involves a twenty-year-old anime that said kids don’t even know or remember. Ask around about popular long-running Japanese kids’ franchises and you’ll notice they practically rely on being able to comfortably change things up every so often, like PreCure/Rider/Sentai shuffling every year, or Yu-Gi-Oh! having a rotation of different series and concepts, or the struggles that franchises that don’t do this have to deal with. And, after all, for all people are cynical about Toei continuing to milk Adventure or any of the other older series at every opportunity, as far as the kids’ branch of the franchise goes, this is only capable of lasting to a certain extent; if they tried keeping this up too long, even the adults and kids would get bored, and there is some point it’ll be easier to try and make products directly targeted at the kids’ audience instead of having to rely on the parents to ease them into it.

So it’s completely understandable that the moment they secured a proper audience with the reboot and finished up their first series with this, they decided to take the risk with Ghost Game right after. And considering all that’s happened, this is still a risk -- they’re changing up a lot (even if not as much as Appmon), and there’s a chance that the audience they’ve gathered is going to shoot down again because they’ve changed so much and they no longer have the Adventure branding as a “crutch” to use -- but they’re taking it anyway instead of going for something at least slightly more conventional.

Which means that, yes, there’s a possibility this will all explode in their face, because the Adventure branding is that huge of a card they’re about to lose. But at the very, very least, Ghost Game is coming in with the “momentum” and advantage that Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon all didn’t have: a brand currently in the stage of recovery, all of the merchandising and collaborative pipelines the reboot and Kizuna opened up, a fairly good timeslot, and a premise somewhat more conventional than Xros Wars and Appmon (I’m saying this as someone who likes both: their marketing definitely did not do them many favors). There are still a lot of risks it’s playing here, and it’s possible it won’t be the end of more Adventure or reboot brand usage to try to keep that momentum up even as we go into Ghost Game, but it’s the first time in a long while we’ve had something to stand on.

Okay, so that’s out of the way. But the end result is that we now have 67 episodes of an Adventure “reboot” that actually doesn’t even resemble Adventure that much at all, which seems to have achieved its goal of flagging down attention so it can finally going back to trying new things. This series exists, we can’t do anything about the fact it exists, the period where its own financial performance actually mattered is coming to an end anyway, and we, as a fanbase of adults hanging out on the Internet keeping up with the franchise as a whole, have to figure out how each of us feels about this. So what of it?

About the contents of the reboot itself

One thing I feel hasn’t been brought up as a potential topic very much (or, at least, not as much as I feel like it probably should be) is that the reboot seems to be actively aimed at a younger target audience than the original Adventure. It hasn’t been stated outright, but we actually have quite a bit of evidence pointing towards this.

Let’s take a moment and discuss what it even means to have a different target audience. When you’re a kid, even one or two years’ difference is a big deal, and while things vary from kid to kid, generally speaking, it helps to have an idea of what your “overall goal” is when targeting a certain age group, since at some point you have to approximate the interests of some thousands of children. Traditionally, Digimon has been aimed at preteens (10-11 year olds); of course, many will testify to having seen the series at a younger age than that, but the "main” intended target demographic was in this arena. (Also, keep in mind that this is an average; a show aimed at 10-11 year olds could be said to be more broadly aimed at 7-13 year olds, whereas one aimed at 7-8 year olds would be more broadly aimed at something like 5-10 year olds.) Let’s talk a bit about what distinguishes children’s shows (especially Japanese kids’ shows) between this “preteen demographic” and things aimed at a much younger audience (which I’ll call “young child demographic”, something like the 7-8 year old arena):

With children who are sufficiently young, it’s much, much more difficult to ensure that a child of that age will be able to consistently watch TV at the same hour every week instead of being subject to more variable schedules, often set by their parents, meaning that it becomes much more difficult to have a series that relies on you having seen almost every episode to know what’s going on. For somewhat older kids, they’re more likely to be able to pick and pursue their own preferences (the usual “got up early every week for this show”). This means that shows targeted at a young child demographic will be more likely to be episodic, or at least not have a complex dramatic narrative that requires following the full story, whereas shows targeted at a preteen audience are more willing to have a dramatic narrative with higher complexity. This does not mean by any shake of the imagination that a narrative is incapable of having any kind of depth or nuance -- the reboot’s timeslot predecessor GeGeGe no Kitaro got glowing reviews all over the board for being an episodic story with tons of depth -- nor that characters can’t slowly develop over the course of the show. But it does raise the bar significantly, especially because it prevents you from making episodes that require you to know what happened in previous ones.

The thing is, the original Adventure and the older Digimon series in general didn’t have to worry about this, and, beyond the fact that their narratives very obviously were not episodic, we actually have concrete evidence of the disparity: Digimon has often been said to be a franchise for “the kids who graduated from (outgrew) a certain other monster series”. Obviously, they’re referring to Pokémon -- which does have the much younger target demographic. That’s why its anime is significantly more episodic and less overall plot-oriented, and Digimon wasn’t entirely meant to be a direct competitor to it; rather, it was hoping to pick up the preteens who’d enjoyed Pokémon at a younger age but were now looking for something more catered to them. This is also why, when Yo-kai Watch came into the game in 2014, that was considered such a huge direct competitor to Pokémon, because it was aiming for that exact same demographic, complete with episodic anime. When Yo-kai Watch moved to its Shadowside branch in 2017, it was specifically because they had concerns about losing audience and wanted to appeal to the kids who had been watching the original series, but since they were preteens now, they adopted a more dramatic and emotionally complex narrative that would appeal to that audience instead. So you can actually see the shift in attempted target demographic in real time.

Adventure through Frontier were aimed at 10-11 year olds, and here’s the interesting part: those series had the protagonists hover around the age of said target audience. We actually have it on record that Frontier had a direct attempt to keep most of the kids as fifth-graders for the sake of appealing to the audience, and so that it would be relatable to them. You can also see this policy of “matching the target audience’s age” in other series at the time; Digimon’s sister series Ojamajo Doremi (also produced by Seki) centered around eight-year-olds. Nor was Seki the only one to do this; stepping outside Toei for a bit, Medabots/Medarot had its protagonist Ikki be ten years old, much like Digimon protagonists, and the narrative was similarly dramatic. The thing is, that’s not how it usually works, and that’s especially not really been how it’s worked for the majority of kids’ series since the mid-2000s. In general, and especially now, it’s usually common to have the protagonists of children’s media be slightly older than the target age group. This has a lot of reasons behind it -- partially because kids are looking to have slightly older characters as a model for what to follow in their immediate future, and partially because “the things you want to teach the kids” are often more realistically reflected if the kids on screen have the right level of independence and capacity for emotional contemplation. Case in point: while everyone agrees the Adventure through Frontier characters are quite relatable, it’s a common criticism that the level of emotional insight sometimes pushes the boundary of what’s actually believable for 10-11 year olds...

...which is presumably why, with the exception of this reboot, every Digimon TV series since, as of this writing, started shifting to middle school students. That doesn’t mean they’re aiming the series at middle school kids now, especially because real-life 13-15 year olds are usually at the stage where they pretend they’ve outgrown kids’ shows (after all, that’s why there’s a whole term for “middle school second year syndrome”), but more that the narrative that they want to tell is best reflected by kids of that age, especially when we’re talking characters meant to represent children from the real world and not near-immortal youkai like Kitaro. In fact, the Appmon staff outright said that Haru was placed in middle school because the story needed that level of independence and emotional sensitivity, which is interesting to consider in light of the fact that Appmon’s emotional drama is basically on par with that of Adventure through Frontier’s. So in other words, the kind of high-level drama endemic to Adventure through Frontier is would actually normally be more on par with what you’d expect for kids of Haru’s age.

But at this point, the franchise is at a point of desperation, and you can see that, as I said earlier, Appmon was blatantly trying to be one of those “have its cake and eat it too” series by having possibly one of the franchise’s most dramatic storylines while also having some of the most unsubtle catchphrases and bright colors it has to offer. Moreover, one thing you might notice if you look closely at Appmon: most of its episodes are self-contained. Only a very small handful of episodes are actively dependent on understanding what happened in prior episodes to understand the conflict going on in the current one -- it’s just very cleverly structured in a way you don’t really notice this as easily. So as you can see, the more desperate the franchise has gotten to get its kids’ audience back, the more it has to be able to grab the younger demographic and not lock them out as much as possible -- which means that it has to do things that the original series didn’t have to worry about at all.

Having seen the reboot myself, I can say that it checks off a lot of what you might expect if you tried to repurpose something based on Adventure (and only vaguely based on it, really) into a more episodic story that doesn’t require you to follow the whole thing, and that it has to break down its story into easy-to-follow bits. In fact, there were times where I actually felt like it gave me the vibes of an educational show that would usually be expected for this demographic, such as repeated use of slogans or fun catchphrases for young kids to join in on. That alone means that even if the “base premise” is similar to the original Adventure, this already necessitates a lot of things that have to be very different, because Adventure really cannot be called episodic no matter how you slice it.

Not only that, even though the target audience consideration has yet to be outright stated, we also have interviews on hand that made it very clear, from the very beginning, what their goals with the reboot were: they wanted the kids to be able to enjoy a story of otherworldly exploration during the pandemic, they wanted cool action sequences, and they wanted to get the adults curious about what might be different from the original. Note that last part: they actively wanted this series to be different from the original, because the differences would engage parents in spotting the differences, and the third episode practically even goes out of its way to lay that message down by taking the kids to a familiar summer camp, only to have it pass without incident and go “ha, you thought, but nope!” Moreover -- this is the key part -- “surprising” people who were coming from the original series was a deliberate goal they had from the very beginning. They’ve stated this outright -- they knew older fans were watching this! They were not remotely shy about stating that they wanted to surprise returning viewers with unexpected things! They even implied that they wanted it to be a fun experience for older watchers to see what was different and what wasn’t -- basically, it’s a new show for their kids who never saw the original Adventure, while the parents are entertained by a very different take on something that seems ostensibly familiar. 

On top of that, the head writer directly cited V-Tamer as an influence -- and if you know anything about V-Tamer, it’s really not that much of a character narrative compared to what we usually know of Digimon anime, and is mostly known for its battle tactics and action sequences (but in manga form). In other words, we have a Digimon anime series that, from day one, was deliberately made to have a writing philosophy and goal that was absolutely not intended to be like Adventure -- or any Digimon TV anime up to this point -- in any way. And that’s a huge shock for us as veterans, who have developed our tastes and expectations based on up to seven series of Digimon that were absolutely not like this at all. But for all it's worth, the circumstances surrounding its production and intent don't seem to quite line up with what the most common accusations against it are:

That it’s a rehash of Adventure: It really isn’t. It’s also blatantly apparent it has no intention of being so. The points that are in common: the character names and rough character designs, some very minimal profile details for said characters, Devimon having any particular foil position to Angemon, the use of Crests to represent personal growth, the premise of being in the Digital World and...that’s it! Once those points are aside, it’s really hard to say that the series resembles Adventure any more than Frontier or Xros Wars resembles Adventure (which are also “trapped in another world” narratives) -- actually, there are times the series resembles those two more than the original Adventure, which many have been quick to point out. The majority of things you can make any kind of comparison to basically drop off by the end of the first quarter or so, and trying to force a correlation is basically just that: you’d have to try forcing the comparison. The plot, writing style, and even the lineup of enemies shown just go in a completely different direction after that. So in the end, the base similarities can be said to be a marketing thing; if I want to criticize this series, I don’t think “lack of creativity” would actually be something I would criticize it for. (Of course, you’re still welcome to not be a huge fan of how they’re still guilty of using Adventure’s name value to market something that is not actually Adventure. We’re all gonna have mixed feelings on that one.)

That they don’t understand or remember Adventure’s appeal: Unlikely. All of the main staff has worked on character-based narratives before, which have been very well-praised while we’re at it. The producer, Sakurada Hiroyuki, was an assistant producer on the original series, and I would like to believe he probably remembers at least a thing or two about what they were doing with the original series...but, also, he’s the producer of Xros Wars, which definitely had its own individuality and style, and, moreover, was more of a character narrative that people generally tend to expect from Digimon anime. (Still a bit unconventional, and it has its own questions of personal taste, but a lot of people have also pointed out that this reboot has a lot in common with Xros Wars in terms of its writing tone and its emphasis on developing Digital World resident Digimon moreso than the human characters.) All signs point to the idea they could make a character narrative like Adventure if they really wanted to. It’s just, they don’t want to do that with this reboot, so they didn’t.

That they misinterpreted or misremembered the Adventure characters: There’s been accusations of said characters being written in a way that implies misinterpretation or lack of understanding of the original characters, but the thing is, while I definitely agree they have nowhere near the depth of the original ones, there are points that seem to be deliberate changes. (At some points, they’re actually opposites of the original, and certain things that operate as some very obscure references -- for instance, Sora complaining about having to sit in seiza -- seem to also be deliberate statements of going in a different direction.) The lack of human character depth or backstory doesn’t seem to be out of negligence, but rather that this story doesn’t want to be a character narrative to begin with -- after all, we’re used to seven series of Digimon that are, but there are many, many kids’ anime, or even stories in general, where the story is more about plot or action than it is completely unpacking all of its characters’ heads. In this case, this reboot does seem to have characters that are taking cues from or are “inspired by” the original, but, after all, it’s an alternate universe and has no obligation to adhere to the original characters’ backgrounds, so it stands to reason that it’d take liberties whenever it wanted. (Again, the head writer outright stated that he based the reboot’s Taichi more on V-Tamer Taichi than the original Adventure anime Taichi. He knows there’s a difference!) Even more intriguingly, the series actually avoids certain things that are common misconceptions or pigeonholes that would normally be done by the mainstream -- for instance, the Crest of Light (infamously one of the more abstract ones in the narrative) is fully consistent with Adventure’s definition of it as “the power of life”, and, if I dare say so myself, Koushirou’s characterization (emphasizing his relationship with “knowledge” and his natural shyness) arguably resembles the original far more than most common fan reductions of his character that overemphasize his computer skills over his personal aptitude. In other words, I think the staff does know what happened in the original Adventure -- they just actively don’t want to do what Adventure did, even if it’s ostensibly a reboot.

That it’s soulless or that there’s no passion in its creation: Well, this is subjective, and in the end I’m not a member of the staff to tell you anything for sure, but there are definitely a lot of things in this anime that don’t seem like they’d be the byproduct of uninspired creation or lack of passion. It’s just that those things are all not the kinds of things that we, as Digimon veterans, have come to develop a taste for and appreciate in Digimon anime. That is to say, there is an incredible amount of thought and detail put into representing Digimon null canon (i.e. representing special attacks and mechanics), the action sequences are shockingly well-animated in ways that put most prior Digimon anime to shame, and the series has practically been making an obvious attempt to show off as many Digimon (creatures) that haven’t traditionally gotten good franchise representation as they can. Or sometimes really obscure “meta fanservice” references that only make sense to the really, really, really, really hardcore longtime Digimon fan (for instance, having an episode centered around Takeru and Opossummon, because Takeru’s voice actress Han Megumi voiced Airu in Xros Wars). If you follow any of the animators on Twitter, they seem to be really actively proud of their work on it, and franchise creators Volcano Ota and Watanabe Kenji seem to be enjoying themselves every week...so basically, we definitely have creators passionate about having fun with this, it’s just that all of it is being channeled here, not the character writing.

So in the end, you can basically see that this series is basically the epitome of desperately pulling out all of the stops to make sure this series lands with the actual target demographic of children, dammit, and gets them into appreciating how cool these fighting monsters are and how cool it would be if they stuck with them even into a series that’s not Adventure. The Adventure branding and names to lure in the parents, the straightforward and easy-to-understand action-oriented narrative so that kids will think everything is awesome and that they’ll like it even when the story changes, and the merchandise and collab events booked everywhere so that they can all be reused for the next series too...because, remember, they failed with that during Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon (I mean, goodness, you kind of have to admire their persistence, because a ton of other kids’ franchises failing this many times would have given up by now), so it’s a bit unsurprising that they went all the way to get the kids’ attention at the expense of a lot of things that would attract veterans, especially since the veterans already have a well-developed adults’ pipeline to cater to them. This does also mean that this series is more likely to come off as a 67-episode toy commercial than any previous Digimon series, but it’s not even really the toys as much as they’re trying to sell the entire franchise and the actual monsters in the hopes that they’ll stick with it even when the narrative changes.

Nevertheless, here we are. The series is over. Ghost Game -- which, as of this writing, is looking to be much more of a conventional Digimon narrative, complete with older cast, obviously more dramatic atmosphere, and pretty much everything surrounding its PR -- is on its way, presumably thanks to the success of this endeavor. It’s hard to gauge it; we have it on record that they also intend it to be episodic, but remember that this doesn’t necessarily prevent it from having an overall dramatic plot or nuanced drama (especially since the abovementioned Appmon and Kitaro were perfectly capable of pulling off this balance). Nevertheless, it seems to be a lot more of the conventional kind of Digimon narrative we usually expect, so, as for us, adult long-time fans of the Digimon franchise (many of whom don’t have kids anyway), what exactly should we make of this? Well, as far as “supporting the franchise” goes, you’ll get much more progress supporting Ghost Game than the reboot; I highly doubt view counts and merch sales relative to an already-finished series will do nearly as much for the franchise’s health as much as the currently airing series, and, besides, it’d probably do us all a favor to support the endeavor that’s actually new and fresh. So when it comes to a “past” series like this, it’s all just going to come down to a question of personal preference and taste: is this a series you, personally, want to watch, and would you find it entertaining?

For some of you, it’s possible that it just won’t be your cup of tea at all -- and since, like I said, the majority of us here have based our expectations and preferences on up to seven series of Digimon that were not like this, that’s also perfectly fine, and in that case I don’t actually recommend you watch this. Of course, I’ve never thought that it was ever fair to expect a Digimon fan to have seen all of the series released to date; the more series we get, the more inhumane of a demand that’ll become, and I think this franchise becoming successful enough to have so many series that most people won’t have seen it all is a good thing. (It’s actually kind of alarming that the percentage of people who have seen it all is so high, because it means the franchise has failed to get much of an audience beyond comparatively hardcore people who committed to it all the way.) But I think, especially in this case, with a series for which adult fans like us were probably lowest on the priority list due to the sheer amount of desperation going on here, it’s fine to skip it, and if you’re someone who lives by a need for character depth or emotionally riveting narrative, the fact this series is (very unabashedly and unashamedly) mostly comprised of episodic stories and action sequences means you won’t have missed much and probably won’t feel too left out of any conversations going forward. That’s before we even get into the part where it’s still completely understandable to potentially have mixed feelings or resentment about the overuse of the Adventure brand for something like this, especially if Adventure is a particularly important series to you.

But for some of you out there, it might still be something you can enjoy on its own merits. I’ve seen people who were disappointed by the limited degree of Digimon action sequences in the past or the fact that the series has gotten overly fixated on humans, and had an absolute ball with the reboot because it finally got to represent parts of the franchise they felt hadn’t been shown off as well. “Fun” is a perfectly valid reason to enjoy something. It’s also perfectly possible to be someone who can enjoy character narratives like the prior Digimon series but also enjoy something that’s more for being outlandish and fun and has cool Digital World concepts and visuals -- and, like I said, it does not let up on that latter aspect at all, so there’s actually potential for a huge feast in that regard. I think as long as you don’t expect it to be a character narrative like Adventure -- which will only set you up for disappointment, because it’s not (and made very clear since even the earliest episodes and interviews that it had no intention of being one) -- it’s very possible to enjoy it for what it is, and for what it does uniquely.

[mariaiscrafting]

can i ask why you dislike dream? im not being passive agressive or something lol i am genuinely curious

S’all good, kinda figured you weren’t being, and a lot of people have asked me this lol. There are so many reasons, and I’ve said this so many times already, but I’ll try to go over some of the main things I can remember:

1) Arrogance: kinda put me off how he’s always responded to criticism. Always kinda had an air of superiority about shit, and it never really bothered me on its own because I think lots of CCs are arrogant & I’m arrogant myself, but combined with all of the following, it became a reason for me to dislike him lol

2) Manipulation of his audience: look, I kinda always knew that CCs with huge fanbases, especially CCs who grow this quickly, have some kind of grasp of how to treat and foster their audience to their greatest advantage. I’ve always been wary of CCs that put on soft or nice personalities, especially since the whole Shane Dawson debacle. But with Dream, it’s been a whole other thing ever since his cheating response video, and I’ve never been able to see him in a good light in regard to how he responds to his fans, ever since. I went into it in a lot more detail back when I first watched the video, the day it dropped, but I’m too exhausted to scrounge that post up, so I’ll summarize: that video had a very specific strategy that he used to victimize himself and appeal to his fans’ compassion for him, and after rewatching the video for the third time that day, it felt gross and calculated to me. The way that he focuses very little on the actual mathematical part of his argument. The way he frames the issue of the mods having favoritism or bias. It was already proven on Reddit and throughout Twitter that the numbers the mods looked at were for good reason, and not because they just wanted to pick the numbers that made Dream look the worst, but that’s how he framed the argument. When I logged onto Twitter and Tumblr that day, there were thousands of fans who had latched onto what he said in the latter half of that video and coming to Dream’s defense, and that’s kinda when it hit me: this guy fucking knows what he’s doing, and he’s doing it well, and I really really dislike it. There’s about a hundred other ways he manipulates his audience, including not coming to people’s defenses when huge chunks of his audience attack them (even though the people had respectful and correct criticisms of him), defending stans so adamantly in the face of antis, and posting periodic alt tweets that help garner the illusion that he super cares about his fans; but, that cheating response video was the major red flag, for me.

3) Cheating & lying: as is likely no surprise to y’all, I think Dream cheated lmao. At first, I was ecstatic that he had actually made a detailed response video and put out a report with the help of an actual professional, but as I read up on his supposed statistical argument and dissected the parts of his argument that felt off to me, I realized maybe he had cheated. Talking to some STEM major friends of mine, who weren’t into MCYT but had obviously heard about the whole debacle because they like Twitter and Minecraft, kinda put the nail in the coffin for me. I’m not nearly smart enough or have a good enough memory to detail exactly why I think he cheated on this blog, right now, in April, but essentially: his main argument relied upon claiming mod bias, instead of a sound mathematical or statistical argument; there’s no way of proving that the world files he provided to the mods and in the open source weren’t altered; the statistical problems he points out (i.e., stopping effect) don’t actually skew the original mods’ model nearly as much as his supposed PhD guy would say; and the odds he comes up with might not be nearly as impossible as 1 in 7 trillion, but they still come up to around 1 in 100 million, which is still fucking ridiculous, considering that there are only, like, 120 million people in the world who play Minecraft.  Not impossible, but laughable that he expects people to believe that. But... I guess they did, lmao. The thing that peeved me the most about the whole thing was the adamant lying lmao. When you look at the situation from the perspective of “dream cheated,” you realize just how fucked up all his Twitter responses, his adamance in streams and that video, and the general mood among his friends is... idk man, it’s just highly fucked.

4) Relationship with stans: look, there are significant numbers of  his fans that take part in Twitter cancelling vendettas, who spread around information about other CCs and their fellow fans that is false and meant to villify them, etc., and he never fucking says anything. It really, really bothers me. There are too many instances to enumerate, but a few that have caught my eye were when Dream stans would attack Techno, prior to their battle and when a Native American woman politely explained why he shouldn’t use Native music, he responded and said he wouldn’t, but tons of stans continued to attack her in her replies for “being so harsh/mean.” Like, he knows that just one word from him will make his fandom follow his beck and call. All it would’ve taken was one fucking word. There are so many fucking people that have been harrassed off of social media platforms because of the hivemind that is dttwt, for christ’s sake.

5) Reddit posts: All of the above were reasons for me to mildly dislike the guy prior to the Reddit posts, but they weren’t really enough to make me stop posting about c!Dream or reblogging fanart or reading DNF fics or watching Manhunts. I kinda just clowned on the guy, answered the occasional ask about the cheating thing or something related, and left it at that. The Reddit posts not only pissed me off for their content, but for the lying, as well. Do you think I fucking cared about him cheating at speedrunning Minecraft, of all games? Fuck no. What I cared about was the adamant lying that went into the whole debacle. Kinda the same with the Reddit posts. I’m one to usually forgive creators who acknowledge past errors, obviously. It is creators who try to brush stuff off, or even worse, create an elaborate lie to cover up allegations, that put me off a fuck ton. This is the reason I could never be comfortable with watching Pewdipie after I realized all the shit he had brushed off, and it’s now the reason I can’t go back to watching Dream. There is so much evidence that points to guilt, including but not limited to: his first move when the slideshow dropped (before posting to Twitter) being deleting as many old Discord messages as he could, the contradiction between him at first denying the account was his at all then changing the story to say he shared it with a friend, the wording and phrasing in the political posts being almost identical to the non-political posts that were clearly him (i.e., the one that explains his demographics perfectly), and the timing of the political posts (some of them being posted mere minutes after posts that were verifiably him, like the picture of Patches to the cats subreddit). People can claim that he’s likely changed, and what this it matter, as long as politics don’t affect his work now, but I can’t believe this fundamental misunderstanding of why bigotry in entertainment matters. I’ve always had a problem with the adoration this fandom has for cishet white men, and the constant criticism of non-cishet, non-white, non-men, but this really feels like the final slap in the fucking face. It’s like everyone truly believes that it doesn’t matter, that his beliefs couldn’t have possibly affected the way he’s treated fellow CCs in his circles or any of the number of people that depend upon Dream, directly and indirectly, for employment/CC clout. It’s like everyone truly believes that political ideology has no effect on the way we perceive, treat, and behave around other people in literally any field, not just politics. I, just... Christ. I don’t really wanna unpack my emotions about this whole thing right now, so I won’t. I’ll just say: I dislike Trump supporters and ex-Trump supporters alike, I dislike conservatives who claim they’re centrists (every fucking guy my age does this, it’s infuriating and makes me want to bash my head into the nearest wall), I dislike people who levy their fans against criticism - even when it’s righteous - and I dislike people who lie about their past actions; Dream fits all those categories, so I dislike him.

[loreolympusanalysisforfunsies]

How to put this-

What are the ethics of using queer coded characters and themes in a narrative that has no explicitly queer characters?

Welp, that question can be asked of many stories in media. Like, a metric shit ton. A lot. But since Lore Olympus is the flavour of the week (month? year?) for my brain, that's what I'll be applying this question to. And right away, asap, I'm talking critically about Lore Olympus. Critically as in taking a subject and thinking about what themes are in it and what those themes mean to me as a reader, not critically as in badmouthing it. Also, I'm no expert and I've only read my favourite chapters fifty million times, the other chapters maybe three times. So there's stuff I could have missed, please feel free to correct me. Also also I will be using the word queer a lot because that's what I am and what I'm talking about.

Just wanted to make that crystal queer.

Alrighty, queer-coded characters in Lore Olympus. Hello Eros, nice to be talking about you again. He's a fan favourite for some pretty good reasons. Compelling romantic sideplot, clear adversary to the asshat, and he's just plain fun. There can be plenty of heavy content when he's around, but he's also the guy that lightens the mood. Some of the faces he makes-fucking priceless. And hoo boy does he come off as the gay best friend. Romantic advice, shopping trips, make overs, the squeeing, those are some very old tropes. But he's not the gay best friend. Or at least, so vaguely bi/pan/etc that it can be written off as none of the above. The only hint we get that he's not straight is that orgy mentioned waaay back in the beginning. After that we get his backstory with Psyche and no mention of other interests since. The gay best friend trope was made when hollywood and equivalents stopped being quite so nasty to the LGBTQ+ community, but not quite to the point of queer positivity. It took signifiers that were used maliciously in the past (feminine aspects and interests) and put a humerous spin on them. Ah look, it's a guy that can expertly apply make up, how funny and nonthreatening he is. Maybe it was that funny and nonthreatening bit that the author was going for. Both Persephone and the readers just endured some pretty awful shit, so here's a new person for her support system that isn't threatening at all and brings along some lighter atmosphere. Super flamboyant and never shown to be sexually attracted to her-that's perfect, in you go.

And honestly, seeing a man that's in a relationship with a woman whose also in touch with his emotions and feminine side, that's pretty great. But it comes in a narrative completely without queer characters. When I first saw him I was pretty sure he was a stereotype. Now that I know he isn't, I feel mixed. Straight dudes should be able to be soft. But a story with so many characters, that talks seriously about their complicated inner lives, with all these romantic relationships, all that with no queer representation? Ehhhhhhh-

Getting to the endpoint a little early there, so onto the other queer coded characters. Most notable are Athena and Artemis. Athena is very androgynous in her design. And Artemis has a very telling moment with Persephone in which she tries to push the conversation away from the danger zone of her personal feelings. A loud, embarrassed exclamation that she isn't attracted to anyone? Yeah I've seen that one before. And here's where I'd like to think somewhat positively, because this is going somewhere. It might just be a similar line as Persephone, being torn about her membership with the eternal maidens. Or Lore Olympus Artemis may very well be a lesbian or asexual as her mythic counterpart has been. There's a lot of potential in her storyline.

Heck, there's a lot of potential all over this story. Greek mythology is filled to the brim with LGBTQ+ people. Skip Zeus and Apollo, because fuck those guys. We've got Achilles and Patroclus as the most well-known, but to be fair the mortals don't heavily feature in this one. Athena was bi, Hermes was bi, Dionysus isn't born yet but again, super bi. Aphrodite and Poseidon are both in open relationships within the story, and oh hey bi the way in the myths. Just saying, the greeks were very very gay.

But even if they weren't. Guess what. When you write a story of your very own, you can make your characters be anything. Case and point with Hera. This is a very, very different version of Hera. Sure, she can be capricious and act on a whim. But this isn't the same goddess that committed cruelties against women that Zeus forced himself on. At least to our knowledge. Nerp, this author has reinterpreted her to be a very sympathetic woman, and that's without changing what she went through. Hera was always someone that endured a lot of crap from her husband, but I didn't feel bad for her when I read her stories in class because hey, she was a vindictive shrew. By changing the patriarchal perspective that has some pretty strong opinions on women scorned, to the perspective of a woman author sympathetic to the woman character who is constantly shit on by everyone around her, the author has improved on the original subject material. Change, it's a good thing.

Ok, queer themes. Again I'd like to make a point right away, and the point here is the themes I'm about to talk about don't just affect queer people. These are lived experiences for many. But being kept naive of an outside world, being unable to explore your sexuality, people trying to override you when you tell them what's best for you and your body, are all things that deeply affect the queer community. There's a very good reason this fandom has so many LGBTQ+ members. Many moments in this story are affirming to us, and that's a good thing. This story also has a lot to say about gender roles. Persephone is the most recent of women that people are looking to use for their own selfish advancement. Hera has a very powerful line about sacrificing her power and potential to make Zeus feel comfortable and happy. And boy is that a line that fits millions of women and afabs throughout history. Making people comfortable by keeping a part of yourself shoved down, whether it's your ability in a field of work or your identity. Or maybe your disability. Or your religion. Your background. Lore Olympus hits pretty hard with a very real feeling of sacrificing bits of yourself to make what people see more palatable, easier for them to deal with. Hera and Persephone have breakdowns over these forced versions of themselves, the facade that's too much to keep up.

These problems don't exist in a bubble. They are problems that weave through many different subcultures and peoples. And unfortunately, some affected people can be excluded when such problems are addressed. I don't think the author decided to be exclusive on purpose. The kindest interpretation is that this simply isn't something that affected her directly, so she either didn't think to include it or didn't feel comfortable writing from a pov she doesn't share. The less kind interpretation is that she wanted to appeal to as broad a demographic as possible, and decided this was the way to do it. I'm not inclined to think that way of her, because she's showed herself to be very empathetic and thoughtful with pretty much every other aspect. But when we become so close with a piece of media, a story that touches us so deeply, one that strives to be realistic in themes like abuse and trauma, the question comes up. What about us? Do we exist? Are our problems seen? The end result of a narrative using queer-coded characters and themes without explicitly being queer is a disconnect. A feeling of separation from a story and characters that I otherwise feel very close to. A worry that these problems are only seen by, only affecting, heterosexual and cisgendered peoples. And I realize this would be hard to cover for someone who hasn't written queer characters in this story yet, someone who may or may not be LGBTQ+ themselves. But even so, even though there would be mistakes and bad faith critics and all else, I would rather she try. I would rather be seen.

[littlyon]

I would love to hear your rant about your hatred for the concept of literature

Okay. So here’s the thing about literature and why I hate the concept of Literature with a capital L. Bear in mind this is an American perspective.

Generally speaking, when your average Joe talks about “literature”, they’re referring to the material that was taught in high school: old, dry, pretentious, written by middle-aged white men, etc. Now, that’s not always the case anymore (for instance, we read The Hunger Games and The Book Thief in a couple of my English classes, both modern), but even so, the general cultural understanding of literature derives from what people are taught, which tends towards that type of content.

When you get into higher academic circles, the concept is even more solidified. There is so much criticism and theory out there about what Literature is, and what qualifies as Literature, and there’s an incredible amount of shame leveraged towards people who argue against what’s been normative over the past century. Think about how much vitriol the Twilight fans got, or the embarrassment at admitting you read fanfiction in non-online circles. A lot of that is sexism and homophobia, since society in general really doesn’t like it when media is aimed at women or queer people, but those societal pressures are part and parcel with how we define Real Literature. 

Academia overall is a male-dominated and male-created field. What is canonized as Real Literature by the literary field is largely material that appeals to that demographic. Books written by straight white men about straight white men are the most prominent (i.e. Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby). Works predating 1900 come next (i.e. Jane Austen). Following that come works by marginalized groups about being marginalized (Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, etc). 

That’s not even getting into genre; it’s very rare to see anything other than realistic or historical fiction considered Literature, unless it’s suitably old. Aasimov and Heinlein count, Tolkein sometimes counts, Dracula and Frankenstein count, but modern scifi and fantasy rarely enter the conversation when you talk about Literature. “Genre fiction” is a derogatory term in academic circles, or at least a disrespectful one.

Now this is not to say that books considered Real Literature are inherently bad, or that you shouldn’t read them. There are things to gain from Austen and Salinger. The issue is that in mainstream academic circles and cultural consciousness, we don’t look beyond these Officially Canonized works when discussing literature. (Incidentally, this is why I studied Comparative Literature instead of English Literature; the body of work that’s looked at is much broader, and allows for more nuance, plus the focus is on examining the interplay of culture and literature. A lot of what we read in CompLit classes would not have counted as Literature by mainstream academic standards.) 

So why is this a problem? Well to start with, it limits the lens through which people see literature, and thereby the lens through which people see the world. There’s a pretty common response teachers will give when asked why students have to read all this stuff, which is that literature helps us understand culture. This is true. However, if your window into culture is the pen of a straight white man from the 1960s, you’re not actually getting an accurate fix on the culture of wherever the book is from. If the point of literature is to learn about the rest of the world, you need to be able to access multiple perspectives, not just the perspectives deemed acceptable by high academia.

But accessing those perspectives is hard, because they’re not respected by high academia. Works that fall outside of the Literature definition are less likely to be considered important enough to distribute across language lines. Now, there’s a bit of an exception for English literature here, since that’s what dominates the market; there are plenty of translations of English YA and scifi/fantasy and romance novels etc. It’s the other way where it suffers. Non-English literature is just as important to the world as English literature, but because the market is dominated by English, they don’t get as much traction. I have no idea what, say, a teenager in France reads, let alone China or Saudi Arabia - countries the English-speaking world has less of a boner for. The to-English translation market is more geared towards the classics and Literature than it is towards popular fiction.

The other big issue with the perception of literature forwarded by academia is format. Throughout this I’ve been talking about books and the written word, which is an incredibly Western perspective. Literature encompasses so much more than that. Typically literature is defined as “written works”, but that eliminates a great body of work that by all rights should count. I would say that a better broad definition would be “composed works”. A folktale doesn’t become literature when it’s put to paper; it was already part of the literary canon of its culture before it was validated by ink. 

This focus on the written word stems largely from colonialism: the counterpoint of “civilized” vs. “uncivilized”, with written tradition being seen as one of the signs of civilization. There is a lot of classism and racism inherent in the academic definition of literature, since it tends to rely on the novel, the short story, the essay, and the poem as its main components. Any type of media or method of storytelling or conveying information that isn’t one of those four aforementioned formats has a hell of a time being seen as anything but “popular literature,” if the word “literature” is appended to it at all. This especially applies to methods of storytelling that do not jibe well with being written down; oral storytelling traditions are usually not considered Literature, or often considered sophisticated. Hell, songs are barely considered literature; there was a big controversy over Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize For Literature back in 2016 because people weren’t sure his works should count.

But under the paradigm of literature as “composed works”, a lot of media that isn’t typically considered literature becomes so. It gives us that broader perspective on the world. It’s incredibly damaging to discount pieces of a culture’s history or storytelling simply because they don’t fit into the narrow definition of Literature as put forth by Western academia. And that’s why I hate the idea of Literature as a concept: it asks us to set guidelines for what should be respected, and what should be discarded. Capital-L Literature inherently sets itself as superior to everything else, and defines itself as What Should Be Focused On. Anything not included in that is derided and disrespected, and because of what doesn’t fit, it contributes to the derision and disrespect of marginalized groups and the devaluing of their narratives and experiences.

[digimartusa]

7 Insider Trade-Secrets to Double Your Sales & Profits from Your FB Ads Campaigns!

Explore How to Advertise on Facebook and Learn the Hidden-Secrets Of Running Your Successful Facebook Ad Campaign With these 7 Steps...

If you’ve ever dreamed of running “a successful Facebook ad campaign,” now is your chance — as long as you’ve got a good marketing mind.

In this article, you’ll learn 7 secret strategies to increase your sales and profits from Facebook Ad Campaigns

Want to learn how to advertise on Facebook profitably?

If Yes, So Let's dive in right away...

✓ How to create a Facebook business page.

✓ How to Promote your business on Facebook

✓ How to create a Facebook Ad

✓ How much does it cost to advertise on Facebook?

✓ 7 Facebook Ad Strategy Secrets

✓ Conclusion

Facebook advertising is a vital feature that connects you with your audience on the world’s largest social network. It has 2.80 billion monthly active users

If you want to get the top results, it’s vital to learn the basics of Facebook Marketing and its algorithm before you learn the 7 Facebook Ad Strategy Secrets.

How to create a Facebook Business Page

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Your First priority to market your services or products on Facebook, you must have a Facebook page up and running. By doing that, you will become a part of the 2.80 billion monthly active users community from all over the world.

It sounds amazing, I know, but that’s why this step is so important. Crafting a killer page can really make a huge difference in the whole marketing process.

Before you start posting engaging content, you need to have a customized page, first. If you already own a personal account, then you might know how this works.

To connect with people, you’ll need to add them as friends, and follow businesses by liking their fan pages.

Remember: Don’t open a profile for your business instead of a page, Facebook may shut it down permanently since it’s against their rules.

To begin creating a Facebook page, go to https://www.facebook.com/pages/creation/. There, you will find two different categories to choose from:

✓ Business or Brand

✓ Community or Public Figure Assuming you are a business, Hit on ‘Get Started’ under ‘Business or Brand’ to start the process.

Everything starts with your page name; Think about the name carefully as it is the name that your audience will see. There is an option available for you to change the URL.

After you’ve chosen your page name, you should select the category that your business falls under. Include the details such as an address, phone number, etc., and click on ‘Continue’. You will then land on your own fan page.

Vital Features of the Page:

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   Profile Picture:    

The first step you need to take care of is to include a profile picture on your business page. Think of this picture as your business’ identity and make sure it is something that represents your company well, like a well-crafted logo.

Your Facebook Fan Page profile picture should be your number one weapon for your brand marketing, so make sure it is recognizable. You’ll be required to upload a photo with 180 x 180 pixels, but do not panic if you don’t have a square photo. Facebook will give you an option of cropping, but the important thing is that your entire logo (if uploading a logo) fits into the cropped picture.

Cover Photo:

Your cover photo is the widest image on your Facebook business page that is found on the top of your page, in addition to your profile picture, which is what gives personality to your page. You can add this photo to promote special offerings, discounts, etc.

To upload your cover photo just click the ‘Add a cover photo’ button from your Facebook welcome menu. The perfect dimension for cover photos are 851 x 315 pixels,

Description:

You will need a well-crafted and well-written couple of sentences to introduce your brand. You can only use a maximum of 155 characters so choose your words carefully. Keep in mind that this description will help you rank better in the search results so make sure it is creatively descriptive.

Username:  

The username appears in your Facebook URL so help customers find you more easily. Facebook only allows 50 characters for your username; make sure to use them for something unique that is not already being used by other companies.

Setting Up the Roles:    

Now that you have added the page information, it is time to set up the roles. The best part about the Facebook business page is that they are kept completely separate from your personal Facebook account.

That means you can give access to other people from your organization. They can also maintain the page without having to log in through your personal account. Nevertheless, it depends on your role assignment part.

Page Roles:    

The admin of the page manages everything From sending messages, responding to comments, publishing and deleting posts, to advertising and even assigning the roles. You should select the person carefully as it’ll receive an authority to manage your page

There are also other Page Members options such as Editor, Moderator, and Advertiser. Analyst, and Live Contributor.

Call-to-Action:

Call-to-action is a very convenient way for customers to take action with your business. You can set it up on Click on ‘Add a Button’ found above your cover and choose what the button should allow customers to do: get in touch, download, purchase a product, donate, book your services, etc. then include a link that sends them to your website, or another landing page.

Page Tabs:

To organize the content that customers will find on your Page, it is required that you add custom tabs. It’ll help your audience to see your photos, look for open jobs, go to your website, visit your other social media accounts, etc.

In your Page left navigation, there is a ‘Manage Tabs’ button. Hit on it to change your tabs.

Audience Trust those pages that have verified batch, it’s as simple as that.

It is not required, but if you want to add more value to your page and include a degree of authority, it is recommended.

You’ll need to head to ‘Settings’ ‘General’ ‘Page Verification’ to enter your phone number, country, etc. You will receive a Facebook verification code.

How to Promote your business on Facebook:

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You’ll need to head to ‘Settings’ ‘General’ ‘Page Verification’ to enter your phone number, country, etc. You will receive a Facebook verification code. Facebook is one of my best social platforms to produce targeted traffic to the squeeze pages, Lead Page, and website. Facebook is a goldmine if you follow the strategies I’m about to share.

Algorithm Slap:

Did you know only 7% to 10% of your fans can see your post in their timelines? To Become Prominent on Facebook, You’ll need to beat the Algorithm in their own game..

All of those fans who like or follow you want to see your content regularly, but people barely see your content due to algorithm changes.

Action:

To increase the reach of your content, you’ll need first to identify the right audience and their pain points, needs, and wants. You can view your Facebook page analytics to find the right audience, demographics, interests, and age.

How to Create A Facebook Ad:

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First, you’ve to choose the marketing goal that’s right for your business. Then, craft your first ad with the following options below.

Select Your Audience:

With this option, you can reach your ideal audiences, such as age and location. Select the Demographics, interests, and behaviors that perfectly match your audience

Placement:

You can place your ad on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network or across them all. you can also choose the placement manually.

Define Your budget:    

You can add your budget on campaign-level, ad set-level, or lifetime budget. You can use all of these budget strategies that perform well, and you’re comfortable with.

Choose Ad Creative:    

You can choose a single image, video, or multi-image format.

Submit:

Once you submit your ad, It’ll go for the review process and start working once it gets approval.

Measure & Optimize Your Ads:

You can track the performance of your ad through the Ad manager. And Measure your No#1 metric that generates ROAS.

How much does it cost to advertise on Facebook?

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There are many types of bidding models in Facebook, like Cost-per-click (CPC), cost-thousand-thousand-impressions (CPM), etc.

The CPC bidding model usually costs around $0.97 per click, while the CPM advertising cost is about $7.19 per 1000 impressions.    

AVERAGE FACEBOOK ADVERTISING COST

BIDDING MODEL

$0.97 Cost-per-click (CPC)

$7.19 Cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM)

$1.07 Cost-per-like (CPL)

$5.47 Cost-per-download (CPA)

But these bidding models advertising cost isn’t 100% accurate. Its large depends on ad copy, landing page, target audience, and creative ad strategies.    

7 Facebook Ad Strategy Secrets

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#1 - Use the Facebook Pixel To Create a Custom & Look-Alike Audience!    

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One of the most common problems businesses face is they don’t have their audience data and don’t know which funnel step is converting most… This problem could cause severe head-ache to the owners, and frequent money loss makes the business wheel crash.

One of the most common problems businesses face is they don’t have their audience data and don’t know which funnel step is converting most… This problem could cause severe head-ache to the owners, and frequent money loss makes the business wheel crash.

Want to Explore the Secrets How to Store your audience Data & Retarget them continuously so they can buy from you.

Here are steps you can follow to integrate your Facebook pixel on your website.

✓ Create a Facebook Pixel(Connect to Data Sources & Select Web)

✓ Select a Connection Method(Choose Facebook Pixel)

✓ Name the Pixel and Enter Your Website

✓ Integrate a Facebook Pixel Code to your website (You can either manually add pixel code to the website or Add through Partner Integration.

✓ Set up Pixel Event(Open Event Setup Tool & Enter Your Website)

✓ Make Sure Your Pixel is integrated successfully through Facebook Pixel Helper

#2 – Map Out Your Customer Journeys    

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Customer Journey is the process in which customers go through from the informational phase to a raving-fan stage.

Whether you are running an e-commerce store or a Services-based Business, ideally, your customer journey starts from informational searches, comparison-based searches to purchasing a product or service.

You’ll need to map this journey and target each step of the journey with offers, discounts, contests, free-trial, lead magnets, and referrals.

#3 – Funnel Creation    

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Now, as you map out your customer journey, you’ll find the steps customers use to grab your product or service.

So You can divide those steps into a 3-Step funnel Which is TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU.

You’ll need to map this journey and target each step of the journey with offers, discounts, contests, free-trial, lead magnets, and referrals.

✓ Awareness (top-of-funnel or ToFu)

✓ Engagement (middle-of-funnel or MoFu)

✓Conversion (bottom-of-funnel or BoFu)

#4 - Influencer-generated-content  

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You can start working on an influencer marketing & outreach program as soon as you have found out your ideal audience.

You can leverage the power of the influencers in your industry just by persuading them to present our offers, services, and product in front of their audience.

#5 - THE ILLUSION OF SCARCITY & Urgency

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We, humans, find something far more attractive and desirable if it’s only available in limited quantities and for a limited time. Ever wondered why e-commerce sites often put time-sensitive calls-to-action on their website, such as “Only 2 left in stock. Buy now to avoid missing out”?

People know that it is quite frustrating to miss an opportunity that is offering in discounted rates.

#6 – Research Your Competitors Ads

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Before you begin crafting ads for your business, you’ll need to dive into the ocean of your competitor’s ad strategies. .

You may judge your competitors based on their ad copy, ad creative, and their call-to-actions.

Here you’ll find all the competitor’s ads.

Ads Library

#7 – Three Types of Campaign    

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You can leverage the power of Three types of Ad Campaigns: Creative Sandbox Campaign, Initial Data Collection Campaign, & Finally Data-Driven Campaign. In the Creative Sandbox Campaign, You’ll have to craft 3 Ads with only one unique variable in each Ad. In this way, you’ll find the best creative you can launch in the Initial Data Collection Campaign.

You’ll begin launching Initial Data Collection Campaign, Once you found out the best ad creative in the Creative sandbox Campaign. To establish an Initial Data Collection, You’ll need a custom and lookalike audience.

Once you find the Data >500 Pixel Events, You should launch a Data-Driven Campaign with warm audiences.

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Facebook Advertising can make or break how much traffic & Conversions you get. An excellent Facebook Ad Strategy will allow your business to grow leaps and bound.

If you want to reach your ideal audience, be sure to experiment with different ad creative, ad copies, and targeting strategies to see what gets your business the most results!

Want a Free Step-By-Step Guidebook For Your Business Growth? Here is the link

[x0401x]

Why do you think the writers of the Tsurune anime decided to tone down masamina and outright cut out kaisei while pushing for sei/mina instead? It's just so baffling to me why they would alter the canon content from the novels so much. Like, what was even the point?

I’ve answered this question quite a few times before, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever made the point entirely clear, so here we go one last time. Sorry that it turned out so long.

So, in novels and manga or any written medium, creators normally have more freedom to do what they want, but when it comes to TV series, animators have been developing the habit of toning down whatever they can. Most of them have this conviction that the viewers only want to watch calm and relaxing stuff nowadays. Other than this, we get adaptations of popular works that basically exist to promote the source material, most of which rush up towards the end like crazy. It does seem like the Japanese audience has an obsession with comfort animes now, since life in Japan gets more and more stressful with each passing year, but it’s not like they’ve abandoned other genres. This general belief that creators should water down the contents however they can is pretty much destroying the industry, and it’s probably what the animators of Tsurune had in mind when changing the novel’s events into a much less dramatic versions or just cutting them off. That’s issue number 1 with the anime.

Issue number 2 is that animators of adaptations tend to ignore the reader demographic in favor of making the series neutral to please all audiences lately. But that’s only when the majority of the readers are women and girls. If it’s guys, you’d rarely see alterations. It feels like the general conception is that making the contents less “cringy” for men means more people will be watching it and having a positive opinion. It seems to completely slip the staff’s minds that the fans they disappoint mostly won’t feel willing to buy the DVDs or merchandise. This is where most of these adaptations fall flat, by the way. It’s kind of really obvious to me that these series are more prone to succeeding if the studios animate what the readers fell in love with, because the originals are popular for a reason, and it’s that people liked them the way they were. I think it’s only the expected when readers are disappointed not to see animes live up to the expectations, and that whoever picks the source material will feel the difference as well. Still, if the anime isn’t a BL, there’s this unsaid rule that you can’t show too much gay between male characters unless you have an excuse for it. Normally, nakama power and rivalry is what does the trick. I don’t think I need to mention that this is the standard in sports animes.

In the Tsurune novel, most of the gay doesn’t have an excuse. Of course, it’s not officially gay unless canon states it, but the books not only don’t give any justification for it, they get rid of possible justifications, so while you can’t say it’s not fanservice, you can’t label it as just fanservice, either. For a studio that banks off fanservice like KyoAni, that’s a problem, especially since the novel is packed with heavy scenes and even heavier quotes.

I mean, in Masaki and Minato’s case, they don’t have the nakama power or rivalry elements, so one possible excuse for them being so close would be that they’re master and disciple. But Minato makes it clear quite early in the story that Masaki doesn’t have to be his master because just having Masaki’s company is enough for him, and all in all, the two of them have a much more affectionate relationship than the other teacher-student ones from the books. Another excuse would be the found family dynamics, but Masaki already shares that with Kaito, who canonically sees Masaki as the older brother he never had, and their relationship is unlike Masaki and Minato’s as well. Kaito also has a monologue in volume 2 about Masaki treating Minato differently from everyone else in the club, and the way he describes it denotes that Minato is Masaki’s favorite, and that Masaki doesn’t bother hiding it. Just as a cherry on top, Minato often loses his rationality when it comes to Masaki despite being a serious kid, and he’s very verbal about wanting to monopolize Masaki. Add fate to the mix and you have the perfect recipe for anything except an ordinary mentor-pupil relationship.

As for Kaito and Seiya, there was a lot going on between them since the beginning, but the nakama power excuse only starts applying late in volume 1, because they didn’t get along very well at first. And even then the nakama stuff hardly applies to their interactions, where Seiya often acts like Kaito has a thing for him, for no reason other than Kaito’s reactions being amusing. Their relationship also does some big strides in the middle of volume 1, and Seiya literally migrates to Kaito’s side at some point. They don’t seem to have a friendship as strong as the one between Seiya, Minato and Ryouhei, but it’s Kaito who Seiya interacts with the most in volume 2 and he’s also the one that Seiya leans on whenever he needs any sort of assistance. There’s other unexplainable things here and there, such as Seiya taking a peek at Kaito’s sleeping face when it’s just the two of them in the room, or him implying that Kaito is jealous of the motherly attention he gives Minato. It goes on as far as the novel does. There’s literally no scene with the two of them that doesn’t make it look like Kaito is really into Seiya and that Seiya owns his ass but he’s the last one to know.

Back to the main point, it’s really hard to animate all of this without giving people “ideas”. For KyoAni, any gay exists ultimately for the sake of fetishization, and they often follow the “ship whatever you want, even yourself with the characters” model. If being gay is canonically a character trait in the original, it’s out (Violet Evergarden is probably the best example of that one), and if the gay can’t be interpreted as something else, it’s either out or downplayed. In Seiya and Minato’s case, that’s perfectly feasible. Not only are they best friends, they also have a familial relationship where Seiya treats Minato like a son. Minato has sworn eternal friendship to Seiya in the novel, and both he and Kaito describe Seiya as something like a helicopter parent. There’s more than enough counter-argument to remind the viewers that, whatever happens between Minato and Seiya, it’s all a product of their childhood friend bond. Anyone is free to interpret it differently in fanon, but the viewers (at least the Japanese ones) are ultimately aware that the anime is in its “safe zone”, portraying a friendship. Nobody on the Japanese side of the fandom actually believed that there was romance going on in it. On the other hand, if you search in Japanese for people’s impressions of MasaMina, you’ll notice people often saying that the novel makes you wonder if Minato and Masaki aren’t actually dating, or if Minato doesn’t have a puppy crush on Masaki, at the very least. Basically, everyone seems to agree that what goes on between those two is hard to define, but whatever it is, there’s this very particular, “special” air about them that differs from the rest of the characters, which normally manifests when they’re alone together.

As you can tell, this overall view is the opposite of the animators’ ideal. If the novel had been animated the way it is, it would’ve probably felt like a BL for the people watching. Not only does it come with practically set ships, it also doesn’t give much space for the proverbial “ship even yourself with the characters” option. To put it bluntly, the animation went through those changes so that it could fit the mold. It gave us SeiMina and even some NanaKai (the latter being honestly disturbing, since they’re cousins), while either toning down or erasing the rest of the duo and trio interactions. It made Minato’s accident with his mom actually seem like Seiya’s fault and didn’t really take the burden off his shoulders but instead swept it under the rug. It also made Masaki seem like a two-faced bastard who only became a coach for the sake of revenge, which means he was using his students (actual 15/16-year-olds) for his own personal gains. Shuu and Minato’s friendship went down the drain, Ryouhei was pushed aside as if Seiya was Minato’s only childhood friend, Nanao was never depicted as his own person, and the girls didn’t even exist 90% of the time. So yeah, none of the changes served any good purpose for the characters’ images. All it did was (try to) fill a quota.

Personally, this whole thing feels like we’re being told to the face, “we’ve given you what you want, now give us your money”. It brings me back to interviews I’ve read featuring Stars Align director Akane Kazuki and his statements about the anime industry being in a pinch, specifically because animators nowadays keep trying to make a fool out of the audience for monetary ends. Seems clear to me that the staff thought the female viewers would latch onto anything as long as it looked remotely gay, and that’s why I was so angry back then. Being looked down on like this by people who expect us to consume their media is pretty offensive, in my opinion. I’m glad there’s at least one creator speaking up about this matter and using the exact same arguments as I have been for more than two years now.

[cantskank]

i think i’m having to accept that tma is just not the fan space for me.  i enjoy it now, but the only reason i got into was for the ace rep.  i’m not a fan of horror OR scripted podcasts (like i am neutral to actively dislike them pretty much).  i was not expecting it to be a romance.  not to be the grouchy aro but i thought getting into a horror podcast would be like “safe” for not having romance.  and i really like the pairing actually!  and like literally everyone else i project so heavily onto martin.  my relationship with romance in fiction is usually like- i like the part where they’re falling in love/getting together.  then the actual relationship itself is...like dicey at best for me (in terms of enjoyment).  it depends how it is portrayed really- sometimes i get it, and a lot of times it just seems so unappealing.  and like now is not the best time for either of them so i don’t really...get it.  honestly it just feels like they’re getting on each other’s nerves but are still together?  idk why that aggravates me- i acknowledge this isn’t a rational way to feel about this fictional relationship.

ANYWAYS.  idk i guess i hoped getting into tma that i would really relate to jon’s experience.  but we don’t even get his experience!  we find out secondhand, and it’s not even clear what we find out- so much so that it took someone asking a question and the creator’s response to clear it up.  even then, it was some “HE might not think of it that way but that’s what it is i guess” which is some straight BULLSHIT (pardon the pun).  i just wanna state for the record that that is WEAKSAUCE FUCKING REPRESENTATION.  at least don’t be so much of a coward that we can barely tell you’re trying to out him as ace (without him knowing) and then skirt the issue

and i don’t think he really got how important ace rep is so i maybe can’t fault him for that but...it sucks.  at least like...educate yourself on ways it might be good to portray aces in media.  again, though, my expectations are a me problem.  i just think that like we don’t have enough extant ace rep to like...casually make a character that misses the mark in those ways.  like yeah there’s a vast wealth of ace experiences and there are tons of aces who would probably not be like super ready to accept that they are ace!  like i’m basically not out at ALL irl and so i get it!  but at least like you could maybe not make that one of the few ace characters we have to represent us?  ace rep is not at that point yet!  we need characters that are open and unashamed to be ace.  todd chavez was a really weird character for me to watch!  i was like way thrown off by how comfortable he was with talking about being asexual (even though it did take some time for him to accept it!  which is totally reasonable!).  but i think it was necessary because it weirdly went such a long way to normalizing it for me?  like i’m asexual!  i spent a large formative part of my late teens/early twenties interacting with almost all asexuals on the internet (aven).  if anyone is accustomed to asexuality it should be me, right??  but actually seeing a character be asexual and even discuss it proudly made me realize how much of a shameful secret i thought of my asexuality as.  i’ve definitely framed it as a forbidden or taboo topic and really separated my active, open asexual persona online from my irl persona.  anyway the fact that that one character had such an impact on me just goes to show how much we still need that kind of representation and not some bullshit rep.

okay onto fandom shit:

i just find there’s so much fan content (mostly fic!  because i don’t really engage in any other way and i don’t really have any desire to!  because it’s even worse for this than fic i have a sense!) that doesn’t want to think critically about what an asexual relationship means/looks like.  either they are not ace and have heard “oh okay aces ‘can’ have sex, well jon will just have sex!” or they are ace and idk have internalized that message as well?  either way i fucking hate people who don’t think about how that relationship might diverge from an allo one.  THEY ARE DIFFERENT.  ASEXUALITY IS ITS OWN THING.  IT IS NOT A THING WHERE YOU JUST DO WHAT YOUR PARTNER WANTS.  IT IS NOT A THING WHERE YOU SAY “OKAY SURE” AND NEVER DISCUSS BEYOND THAT OR BOTHER TO SET BOUNDARIES.  IT IS NOT JUST ONE CONVERSATION AND THEN DONE.  like an asexual relationship can be those things but i don’t think that’s an ideal relationship anyways?  (even for allos tbh..)  and idk why you’d want to idealize that in fandom anyways?  like you can make that relationship look like whatever you want!  why would you make it look like that?  (not to generalize or like invalidate anyone’s experience but i....feel like there is some internalized shit there.  especially when these things are presented without question?  like it’s one thing to present things one way and it’s another to do it without questioning.  one of my favorite ace fics (notably, not tma) is all about the ace character exploring his sexuality!  and having sex with his partner!  but it’s presented with such attention to all characters that i have no trouble at all.  having sex as an asexual is not inherently negative, but i cannot deal with media that doesn’t consider and address the implications of having sex as an asexual.

and honestly there’s so much discussion around the Issue (that i don’t even get involved in but it swirls around my peripheries of my fandom experience) that that aspect distresses me a lot!  because the people who disagree with me make me feel like shit.  i’m sure it is really confusing and difficult to be an asexual who is okay with sex, or interested in exploring sex, or whatever people would consider themselves.  it just feels antithetical to the asexual activism of ‘sex can be cool but it’s not necessarily for everyone.’  like, if you’re an ace who has sex or whatever, cool!  and i hope you can find your corner of the ace community that vibes with that.  i cannot, and like.  compulsory sexuality does not need propping up.  if sex is for you, then congrats!  you fit into the norm in that way!  you might not fit into the norm re: sexual attraction and i’m sure that’s not easy to reconcile.  however, i am not personally in a place where i can be the person who supports that uncritically when i’m still working within myself to understand where compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity have worked within me.  because i have been hurt by both of those things, MY primary goal is to work on dismantling those things (at least in myself, ideally in the world around me).  and people who do not have that as a goal and who instead want to mirror allo-ness in writing an ace character just don’t get the same consideration from me, unfortunately.  i guess this has helped me see that i should just fuck that noise.  if you want to make that the big thing you complain about on the internet i won’t stop you.  and...it occurs to me that’s what i’m doing!  so i’m going to refocus and stop just moping about my aro aceness and how i’m being ignored.  i’ve got better things to focus my time on than haters online.  i will not be dragged down to their mopey level!

also i feel weird and way too old for the fandom demographic (even though there are certainly fans waaaay older than me in the fandom!)  i think i’ve outgrown a lot of the fandom mentality.  wait is hockey fandom for old people?  (i’m fully not old but i’m probably old-ish for tumblr/fandom.  certainly old for tma fandom)  it occurs to me it’s sort of a graduation into a societally-acceptable form of fandom and it probably doesn’t appeal as much to younger audiences.  AND things can be as sexy/romantic or platonic as you like.

anyway all this is to say that i thought getting into media with aspec rep would be good for me but i think i must conclude that it has NOT.  it has actually just upset me way more than it has helped me feel good about being ace (which was the whole goal!).  i will be glad when it is over.  AND i’m glad i’ve really just been engaging with rqg fandom.  it is much more fun and a much better story!