#and I’m saying this as someone who is terrified of doing rl drawings

[sailorsally]

we as the spn artist community need to chip in and book Misha for a live painting session

[curriebelle]

furtively tries to express my appreciation for BTS’s insane showmanship without gaining the reputation of Being a Kpop Blog

Actually leTS TALK ABOUT THE REPUTATION OF THE KPOP BLOG 👩‍🏫

So to a certain extent I understand why “friend’s blog became a Kpop blog” is a meme. From the outside, a lot of the Kpop fan activity seems quite vapid. The impression I got in previous years was that it’s mostly about gushing over handsome boys and a/b/o rpf. And that’s not........entirely wrong, but we’ll get into that more in a sec.

Another factor is that Kpop fandom is hard to follow. The barrier to entry is higher than with other fandoms. In posts, individual Kpop stars are referred to by name, stage name, or nickname, and the band they belong to isn’t always obvious, so it’s quite easy to lump it all into “Kpop”; it takes work for a new fan to differentiate the groups if you don’t know them ahead of time. Kpop fandom has its own lingo that differs from other fan language (other media fans don’t use “bias” or “delulu” — and there’s a linguistics dissertation for you). And let’s not discount the other language barrier — Korean isn’t exactly a common first language, so it does take a bit of extra work to find subtitles and translations.

This might be why the Suddenly A Kpop Blog Event supposedly triggers a different reaction in followers. I’m still following most of my friends from crit role season 1, even though a good chunk of them blog about other stuff now (what is this Chinese show? Boy with magic flute? Gay? Help). Fittingly, I’ve seen memes about how people are ride or die for their mutuals even when they move to different fandoms, but the jokes about Kpop blogs are always a bit different — about how turning into a Kpop blog is a bit cursed of u. It’s to the point where this is only “secretly a Kpop blog” because I don’t want the “Kpop blog” reputation.

And from my fandom lurking I can say that part of that reputation is not unearned. A lot of Kpop fans on tumblr engage in it in ways I’m either disinterested in or actively opposed to (the shipping wars are as terrifying as their reputation suggests. Some were arguing one ship was an rl canon true secret relationship because someone in BTS wrote the letter K on his drawing. Even though the letter K is in his name.) The reason I’ve been “secretly a Kpop blog” is that a lot of Kpop posts don’t inspire me into reblog frenzies the way crit role memes used to, and that’s not because Kpop Stans Suck — it’s more just a matter of taste. Then again, I do like gifs, but if I start reblogging BTS gifs, then I’m a Kpop Blog......and you don’t want to be a Kpop blog.

But isn’t there a whiff of “I’m not like other girls” about all that? Like, yeah, of course Kpop fans hoard gifs of the same people and overanalyze them. That’s what fans do! Pretending I didn’t overanalyze the shit out of Taliesin and Laura’s micro-expressions before Perc’ahlia was a thing would just be disingenuous. We’re all looking too closely — one of the best things about being a fan is diving into the excess of art and making things out of it. We all make mountains out of molehills because mountains are more scenic. And, on a baser level, we are all thirsty bastards. I have SEEN you all reblogging the gifs of Chris Evans ripping the log in half, okay, and you were not doing it bc of the camera angle, just own the thirst. Even the problems the Kpop fandoms have aren’t problems unique to Kpop — aggressive shippers and “””””problematic””” fans are everywhere.

I also wonder if the reason why we don’t see as much Kpop analysis on tumblr is because we’ve created kind of a hostile environment for it. Whether you are a Kpop fan or not, we’ve all decided to treat Kpop as kind of silly — the fans give it their all in the departments of cutesy photo sets and ridiculous fic prompts, and we laugh at memes of Gimli saying “never thought I’d die side by side with a Kpop fan” anyway Stan Jungkook. Just like thirst and over analyzing, that’s not necessarily a bad thing — I love that meme, and you should Stan Jungkook — but it does mean that if you want to start taking it a bit more seriously, or even a bit more casually, the assumption is that all your old tumblr friends will ditch you because “you’ve gone to the dark side”

And that’s a shame because uhhhhhh there is some baller stuff to analyze in BTS’s discography. The album before last was based on Jungian psychology (???). Their leader and primary writer is a huge fan of multilingual puns so in the latest album he makes a three-way pun on the phrase “I’m ill” — he’s sick, he’s cool, and he’s overworked (because “il” in Korean means “work”). So is he sick or is he simply made sick by like, society’s expectations of labour under capital???? Like, you know me. Societal critique by way of pun. That’s my shit. There’s also an essay or two in me about the way BTS are marketed for fan consumption and the way we handle multilingual lyrics and the way they’re handling the temporary departure of one of their members (he is an absolute cat of a man and I hope he gets well soon).

Also fuck can J-Hope ever dance.

EDIT: I should probably acknowledge that I can only make this justification for BTS, which is the only Kpop group I really like; I got no idea about the rest of them. I do know that Shinee can Also dance.

I might get the essays out but this probably won’t become “a Kpop blog” if you’re not into that. I think I’ve internalized too much of the stigma (omg V has a song called stigma it’s so good check it out find a good translation), but also, like I said, I don’t vibe with much of the other content and I kind of only follow one extremely successful group. The gifs, though. The gifs might be coming. They are pretty, those boys.

Anyway! People don’t like Kpop for nothing so like Maybe you would also like Kpop? Who knows. At the very least, think before u meme.

[bendixreblogs]

A little trip down memory lane about my comic and what I’ve been through in the process of making it. 

Mentions of suicide, death-threats, grooming, PTSD. 

I'm so glad that I'm finally having so much fun making my comic. Every time I open my comic files, I'm just so full of joy and energy and I enjoy writing and exploring the world and my characters.

For so many years the experience of looking at my characters and trying to delve into the story, was poisoned by past experiences by people I shared it with. At the time, it seemed like the only way I *could* share it, and I’m glad I’m almost able to separate those experiences now.

SO, I have PTSD and sometimes I’m pushed back into old memories and my characters have been such a huge part of those exact memories, that they sort of go hand in hand, and sometimes it’s nice to just get those thoughts out of my head because they take up a lot of space. 

These characters have been through so much with me and I’m just glad I didn’t abandon them despite of it. I created them when I was 12 and I had a couple of friends and classmates who was into manga like me, who was into my story and encouraged me to keep working on it! 

I then got a friend who was two grades above me, I was 14/15 and they were so into the story that I was just overjoyed to share it with them, especially because they could draw and she started drawing my characters. At the time I had just moved school because I was severely bullied at my old one, and making friends was still very new to me so I latched unto her. In the end she wasn’t a very good friend and would threaten to kill herself and me if I didn’t hang out with her, she faked to faint whenever I was talking to someone else but her, so I had to take care of her, and on my 16th birthday, she faked to faint again and woke up as my character, Kain. She pretended for the entire day that she was Kain, I was so worried and horrified and fearful that it was real and that she would faint again, that I didn’t dare to leave her side and talk to my other friends (just as she wanted) and I couldn’t eat for the next two days, because she kept the act going for two days straight. She pretended to also wake up as the villain of the story which was Satan (I was 12 when I came up with this story, sssh) and threatened to kill me again if I tried to stop her or tell anyone that this was happening. 

She did a bunch of other stuff besides this and I ended up breaking contact with her completely a year or so after because my parents had continuously urged me to stop talking to her. In the end one of my very good friends told me that they couldn’t handle looking at me anymore because I was a wreck because of her. I had to tell her that I would call the police if she got near me, for her to stop talking to me. 

I very rarely drew my characters after that and ended up joining an rp group on deviantart for the first time when I was 17/18, and was instantly pulled into it - the cool people in the group were about 20+ and I wanted so bad to impress them and fit in, but I wasn’t nearly as out there as everyone else was when it came to rp’ing smut. I was honestly repulsed by it, and I tried to laugh it off when people tried to force my character together with someone else in the group, and I ended up going along with it because I didn’t dare to say no. At one point in a Skype group chat, two of the people in the chat had rp’d very hardcore porn that I woke up to reading mid-way and they told me that they did it on purpose, to shock me, and I knew then that if I wanted to fit in, this is what I had to do. I had to write about the same things as them, or not be a part of the group. I tried initiating it when I could because I genuinely thought I had to and I kept pushing my own boundaries. During this time, I was also rp’ing with my rl friends from cosplay groups, with my OC’s from my story. At the time I had given up on ever turning it into a comic, but I still wanted to do something with the characters, so I tried rp’ing with them and ofc, with loads of shipping, because that had become the norm. Especially in the cosplay community were everyone was yelling “YAOI” “RAPE” and “GLOMP” at everyone and *everything*. I was once tackled at a convention where someone yelled ‘rape’ at me and tried to pull my clothes off because I was one of their favourite characters and I had no idea how to get them off until they eventually ran off on their own, and no one did anything because everyone thought it was the norm and so I didn’t say anything and slotted that into the “I guess this is normal” box, along with everything else. 

Eventually, in the rp group, everyone began to call me a whore behind my back, which I found out because one of my friends in the group actually came to tell me about it and I felt disgusting, dirty and shameful, like I had misunderstood something or I was genuinely just a gross person through and through. I still have a lot of fond memories from those groups, and I don’t think anyone pushed me into smut-writing deliberately or with ill intent, it felt like everyone were sort of playing along with the same “this is the norm” idea. Especially the events that were hosted were super fun, so it thankfully it wasn’t all bad and I still chat to some of the people from those groups. 

I quit the rp groups all at once and instead just rp’d with a single friend at the time, both our own characters and established franchises. At the time, there was an incredibly popular artist on dA, who happened to be danish and who was attending a danish convention for the first time. Another friend of mine, who was a huge fan of her, invited her to her sweet 16 and she said yes to come along. This artist was around 27 at the time. I was at the party too, turning 18 that year, and she commented on how special and pretty my face was and that she found it so unique she had to walk around me to see it from all angles. We became friends and I suggested we do an art-collab. I drew my character Kain hugging someone because I thought hey, that’s kinda cute and I had hoped she would draw someone else hugging him back. She drew her paedophilic priest hugging him back, licking his lips and ready to rape him. 

I didn’t dare to say anything despite how uncomfortable it made me, and it was another instance of - well shit, this is just how it is apparently - and I went along with it. She told me stuff like we were fated to meet and that we both had to meet five people in every lifetime we ever live, and once we’ve met those five people, we would both die. I had apparently met about three of them, so guess how terrified I was to meet the remaining two. I felt like I depended on her and that we were connected because of the things she said, and my mental health derailed completely. We also mashed our characters together, and I offered to bend and twist my characters until they fit the likes and dislikes of hers because at this point, it meant so much to me what she thought of me and my art that I didn’t care about anything else. 

She encouraged her followers to write smutty fanfics about *us* together, which I for once told her I didn’t like, but she laughed it off and kept encouraging them. 

I lost my irl friend during this as well because I was convinced to stop writing to her, because this artist always showed interest in me and always wrote to me every single day, but my other friend didn’t, and so this friend had to “prove” herself to care - “if I stopped writing to her, would she write back?” she asked. She never did and we lost contact completely, and looking back I don’t blame her for that with everything that was going on and how affected I was by this person. 

I ended up cutting contact with this artist from one day to the next because I ended up feeling sick near her. I felt nauseous, scared, sick, clammy and uncomfortable and I blocked her from everything. We met briefly at a convention some time after and we exchanged a couple of dm’s on deviantart to try and reconcile where I was honest and told her I couldn’t stand being near her, I wasn’t sure why (at the time), but I just had to get away. 

She told me the same, that I disgusted her and she couldn’t handle being near me either and she thought I should know that everyone in the cosplay community were spreading rumours like;  “she’s the type of person who makes people fall in love with her, and then break their hearts”. 

These experiences in particular completely soiled my relationsship to my characters. It took me a while to break away from them and sometimes, because the memories are still right there in my mind and jump out at me from time to time, I feel like they’re going to physically come back to haunt me and ruin it for everyone else as well. Because of all of this, I wasn’t able to trust that I could ever make it into a story or deserved to, like I wasn’t worthy to tell it because I felt just as used and broken and bended and twisted away from my original person as my characters. I had forced myself into fitting in with people and scenarios I wasn’t supposed to fit in with, I forced my characters into that as well, and it still takes so much mental power to tell myself that I’m not a broken person and my characters are not apart of those people anymore and neither am I. 

I’m so glad I have my friends like Anja, who was there when I first created the story and she was the first to encourage me to keep working on it and she always knew the heart of it and was ready to remind me, because sometimes I’m still pushed back into old memories, I forget the heart of my story and myself and I just feel shame. 

[storytime2]

RL

*trigger warning*

[kidnapping, trauma, death, harassment, blood,killing]

This is a personal story and although it still haunts me to this day I have had help and i just want to be able to help others.

So after i graduated highschool I would go help at community building. Which is basically making houses for homeless people. And there was this cocky guy who would hit on people but it had never happened to me and we would all ignore him. So one day he and I am on painting duty and i had brought knee length shorts and a long sleeve and I put my hair up in a messy bun which I never did because I hated showing my neck and my ears because people tend to sexualize them. So I'm painting and he comes over and he smells like strong cologne and says hey you are pretty and I said thanks and continued painting and he gets closer and is about to touch my neck and I slap his hand and I have tears in my eyes[I have trauma of people touching my neck because someone once tried to kill me that way] and a friend of mine comes over and he says what's going on what did you do to her and he says nothing I was just gonna touch her neck and he looks him dead in the eyes and says if you touch her I will kill you and this guy laughs and i am moved from painting and I go with my friend to putting up windows. And finally after that day I go home and I thought nothing about it.

Until i wake up from someone breaking into my room by my window and I smell the cologne and I know who it was and I make extra loud noises and my dog wakes up and he bites this guy but he kicks my dog and he leaves with me and I suddenly feel dizzy and all I can hear is my dog barking fading.

Day 2 (I was passed out for 2 days)

When I finally wake up im in a dress and I'm in a dark room and my hair has been cut I start to cry and panic and I have asthma so I start to get an attack and I'm too freaked out to control my breathing and my hearing starts go fade and I'm clenching the dress where my chest is and I fall over thats all I remember. Then it was like seconds after I felt i was in water sinking that I feel a pressure on my chest and I wake up and start coughing. My heart had stopped and I mean I was basically dying. And then I hear someone say holy shit I almost thought you were dead and I smell the cologne and tears start falling and he says hey no no no don't cry i don't want to hurt you or scare you i just wanted to see you again and im freaking out but I'm frozen and he reaches out him hand to touch my now short hair and says do you like it I made sure I did it as perfect as i could I have your hair in a bag if you want it i like your shampoo smell. And im terrified like how did he even know where I lived how did he get there why me. And he takes out this camera and takes a picture of me and says will you stay with me please and im not thinking straight so I don't answer. And he frowns and says I guess I cant feed you then and he leaves I stay where i am and start to think wait what am I doing why am I not thinking about how to escape and then it hits me figure out what he wants and I realized he was lonely amd he probably grew up in an abusive family and never loved anyone and didn't know anything about such things. So I make a plan to figure out how to escape and I stand up and because the door was open i could see things inside and I tried to run but then I fell and I looked down my legs had been cut I guess from the window glass from my room and i never realized my legs had been bandaged up and then i started to feel the pain and I started to drag myself to the door but cant go further because there is a metal railing door and i saw him drawing and i looked at his walls my face, my house, my friends, my hair, my personal things where up and I could see something that looked like a drawing of me asleep on the wall and I thought he is obsessed with me if he knew where i lived he must have known for awhile. And then I hear breathing and I turn around to see a shadow and I scream and he comes over and says whats wrong and i point into the dark and he can't see anything and he unlocks the door and I drag myself into the light and he is confused and he locks it but we both hear a growl and we both freak out but then we hear like an animal walking and its a coyote. And then it runs back into the darkness and says sorry this place has been abandoned for awhile I didn't know it lived here. And i didn't answer. He then says are you hungry and he takes out bread and ham and places it infront of me and I look at it then vomit and he carries me to a bed he had there and says I have been looking at you for awhile will you stay with me and me not knowing what to say close my eyes. When i wake up again he is on the floor sleeping but has my hand in his and I look at the surroundings and its a run down shack surrounded by trees and I'm like I know this place.

[I had passed these trees alot and this shack when my family would go hunting and fishing because there is a little lake up ahead]

Day 3

And then he wakes up and says Goodmorning and I smile and he says will you stay with me and finally I nod and he gets happy and he stands and picks me up because my legs are still in a bit of pain and then he says we have to get married right away and im like .....what.... And he puts me down and i can stand and he says oh wow you can stand now and I'm like yes? And he says the medicine must have worn off and I then realized I couldn't walk not because of the pain and cuts but because of medicine that made my legs and me weak. And I yell why do you do that and he yells back what if you run away and I hear something outside and I throw myself to the floor and then a shot is fired and he falls flat on the floor and there is blood and I hear men outside and they kick down the door and and there are 5 men this one man takes out a radio and says we have found her and im start crying because I was found and this guy had been killed in front of me. Then a guy takes off his mask and its my friend and he says I said I would kill him and I'm scared because what if he was the same. So he comes and hugs me and carries me and says you're safe now I can't believe he cut your hair (my hair was super long before and its still growing to this day) and i laugh and he says thank god you can still laugh lets take you home and we do and moral of the story idfk im sorry but check your surroundings and put bars on your window and have cameras pay attention to everything please.