#but thats not (completely) the point of this post

[vypridae]

"he's going to watch something dumb, xanzen do you want some content??" "SOMEBODY SEDATE ME!!!!!"

[fadelbison]

Thoughts on Joongdunk divorce and PR for branded pairs

so I read about the Joongdunk divorce era related ongoing drama and I have to say the thoughts I have are...perhaps very crazy but - sorry I have permanent brain damage from House MD - it fits. So take my opinion with grains of salt or better yet dont take it at all and just enjoy the conspiracy theory of it all. I'm fairly sure Joong is faking it and im pretty sure khaotung is...not faking whatever this 'I am going to fuck first against the nearest surface' vibe he has going on but he's certainly playing it up/into every moment like he's in a olympics style marathon thats just rail and be railed by your best friend.

Out of all the GMM men I follow, I follow Khaotung and Joong the closest and I would also say of the people I follow these two are the most likely to lie through their teeth about every single thing. And we already know that Joong has been helping FK but kind of particularly khaotung get more socmed savvy. So there is definitely some thread here to believe that PR discussions have occurred at least between Joong and FK but more likely between all four.

And the reason why I believe the Joongdunk divorce era is fake? It's becuase the thing between Joong and Est *was* real and Joong handled it completely differently. I had no idea it had happened even though I've been following Joong on IG through that entire time not until I went to twitter. I realized that whole thing was falling apart ONLY because people were talking about it. Joong's own posting was very staunchly business as usual.

And suddenly for his own branded pair right before a critical show who's success doesn't only affect him? What is he doing? Hanging neon signs that he's getting divorced. You're telling me to believe that Joong is middle school shading Dunk where even *I* could notice. Yes, I thought it was mega weird when he promo'd the THK release with pictures of him and FK but not Dunk. By this point, they *must* be aware of how people are talking about the Joongdunk divorce and what does Dunk do? Post a picture with FK but not Joong in the middle of it.

Really? Hours before the premiere?

See, the options here to me are:

1) Joong (and Dunk) has undergone a sudden and TOTAL personality change where he's suddenly inept at doing PR

or the crazier and yet to me the more likely scenario:

2) It's staged

And why would one do that? Why take the risk right before THK? To drum up engagement obviously. See we know that companies only care for numbers, these tweets and IG comments and likes are all going into some graphical format presentation in front of a guy who doesn't know or give two shits about what a divorce era is. So people talking about JD because their hobby is sniffing each other’s crotches or because they can’t stand each other is the exact same thing.

But how does Khaotung and his diabolical mind play into it, why did I bring him up in the beginning? We know that Fadel and Style start out as enemies…so like who's fucking playbook is that? Matching your promo to the dynamic of your characters? Who is the olympics gold winner in cosplaying your characters cosplaying as yourself?

I know people forget things week to week on socmed. But First and Khaotung were barely present during THK filming, soms were more or less only getting FK content from THK official twitter than First or Khaotung.

Khaotung was doing more fanservice with Joong than First at one point and he had a flurry of solo events during which soms were once more fractured between special treatment for Khaotung versus First [FK themselves were honeymooning in Busan and we got nothing other than the most brain damaging story about First scouring Busan for a hat Khaotung wanted and two posts of Khaotung ass up in their room that First must have taken].

Suddenly almost on the dot a month before THK release? They dialed the heat up without a reciprocal heat dialing up of Joongdunk. Summer Night definitely got in the way of that where Joong was giving Dunk a polite wide berth on IG liking and commenting on Summer Night stuff but not doing any CP related things.

So First and Khaotung suddenly act like they can't function without sampling each other's dicks thrice a day while Joong and Dunk stay business as usual. One pair taking the lion's share of THK hype is not a good thing for the other pair and genuinely I was like is JD really okay taking up second fiddle spot to FK for WEEKS. Lo and behold, days before THK all people can talk about is JD.

Anyway the following is an honest to god real photo of me writing this insane post. I just think things are going really well for Joong despite it all and I don't think it's on accident.

[verdemint]

some pecco thoughts, maybe really stupid

but ive seen some posts about how pecco really wants to be perceived as a fair rider, a gentleman even and i totally agree with that, completely! and also the whole writing his own narrative and how important that is but also how its easier to be more well-liked when ur the underdog and ur losing and the valentino legacy of it all

but also i think we're missing the point that pecco for all his pettiness (like every champion and rider) he really wants to BE a fair, a gentleman rider, someone who does have rivalries but not toxic rivalries, where he can say him and jorge were kinda friends. he really tries so hard to be that

like u could see he was (even with the pain of losing) kinda genuinely happy for martin, when he said those words he was trying so hard not only to be perceived in that way but to ultimately be like that, to be . he's seen the chaos that a rivalry like those vales's had could bring, more then chaos is the anger, the resentment, those violent feelings but also how those could evoke love and devotion but still he tries so hard to keep it away. and this constant imposition on himself to be like that, to be perceived like that, the over explanations to the media, in his lil diary entries, this obsession with being understood (very much a la casey but im digressing) is not only for others, its first of all for himself. he wants to be like that and he tries so hard to suppress his other very human insticts (like anger or envy or pettiness that he still feels and sometimes cant control) and to become like that. so yes, about how important the public perception of him is but also how ultimately this desire to be fair, "un signore" is about himself and how he wants to be! thats the end goal, just to be himself and be accepted and appreciated not to keep pretending

im rambling but mmmh some pecco thoughts

its less about others than we may think

[vigilskeep]

Well to be fair I think that just under Antiva Enjoyer you’re Dwarf Fan Forever. and then just under that is Dragon Age Awakening Lover. so all of your pfps and usernames fit well

im very critical of whether my urls & icons are Honest Advertising. this is something i care a lot about for absolutely no reason and a standard i hold literally no-one else to. i actually switched out of zevsurana because i was doing alisurana posting for a bit and i could not bear the evidence of my disloyalty. my original original url before even zevsurana was shaperate and i gave that up because i didnt dwarfpost at all early on. you can’t be shaperate and not dwarfpost!

i just don’t know if i’m enough of an awakening lover to keep going by vigilskeep. of course, i love awakening, i have taste. but i’ve literally only played it the whole way through once. and, oh my god, i just realised i’ve never actually completed a dragon age game playing a dwarf. what is wrong with me. talisa fix me. but my point is that my heart HAS proven its loyalty is ultimately with zevran/surana in a way it rarely is truly dedicated to something

vigilskeep is a better url in itself i think. on the other hand zevsurana is my True & Classic Self and i sense many of my beloved mutuals do want the zevsurana era back jgsjsjskks

arguably a veilguard url is the most honest advertising right now considering the state of this blog but thats FAR too much change AGAIN and also im not hunting one of those down when all the good ones will have been snapped up. no way i’m getting a good crow one in this economy

[cat-mermaid]

You know whats gonna be crazy about Wicked being two movies is that the second part is going to bomb

Its going to be like the It movies, everyone loves the first part where their kids but hates the second adult half

The book the play is based on is a depressing mess, I've read it twice and already made like 3 rant posts about it. If this first movie stops after the "Defying Gravity" bit then all the second half is gonna be is:

Elphaba failing to be a terrorist, getting that one guy she bones(Fiyero) killed, ending up in a nunnery and being semi-comatose when she gives birth to his child, going away to the middle of nowhere for the rest of her life and neglecting said child, obsessing over animals, developing a-

OH WAIT, HAHA, NO

the Broadway show was fucking smart and completely hucked that whole second act out the window and rewrote it wholesale. Because Fiyero fucking does not come back as the scarecrow, thats a random ass delusion that Elphaba comes up with towards the end of the book when shes fucking losing her grip on reality. Boq is just some guy, he doesn't become the Tin Man, its implied that some dude Nessarose fucks over with her magic becomes the Tin Man

Like you gotta understand how much the original second half is just Elphie sitting in that castle and just aging and being a deeply unlikable person, she gives up on her whole justice crusade pretty fucking fast. She doesn't overthrow the Wizard, he just fucking leaves. Madame Morrible literally dies of old age, warm in her bed and Elphie is so crazed that she cracks a dead women's head open with a marble bust and declares that shes killed her

the whole second half of the book is just everyone Elphaba went to school with trying to live their adult lives, being freaked out by her random crazy bullshit and trying to talk her down off the edge of a cliff while she yells crazy conspiracy BS while pointing at them

everyone who was ever important to her dies, usually as a direct result of her actions, and then Dorothy rolls up and goes oh god i'm so sorry I killed your sister i came all the way here just to tell you og can u ever forgive me? and Elph is so far gone that she mentally can't handle this and fucking sets her own ass on fire/Dorothy accidentally kills her by dumping water on her

SHE FUCKING DIES

the wizard fucks off and leaves OZ to rip itself apart due to the power vacuum his absence leaves

god this book is depressing, and i haven't even brought up all the weird ass sex stuff

This book being made into a Broadway musical is like Jhonen Vasquez getting to make a kids show for Nickelodeon:

It happened, but a lot of miracles had to be happening in the background cos jeesus look at the source material

[aroaceleovaldez]

What is the PR disaster in question that made Rick announce TSATS? I wasn’t active in the online fandom at that point

Of course! This was awhile ago so it figures people don't remember it/aren't familiar:

Basically a couple years back (2020) the fandom had some posts circulate discussing the ways different characters in the Riordanverse were written poorly or offensively. There was a masterpost that went around tumblr but the two major points people were particularly focusing on were Piper and Samirah (particularly because Piper had featured prominently again in Trials of Apollo recently and the third MCGA book had further emphasized and discussed Samirah being Muslim, since it was supposed to take place during Ramadan). Basically each had multiple posts breaking down the ways they were depicted incorrectly or offensively. The entire fandom for a little bit was VERY intensely discussing this (and it's around this time the "RR crit" tag got very popularized on tumblr - it did exist before, but suddenly was being used VERY frequently - cause it was that wide-spread - though the discussion took over basically every side of Riordaverse social media on different platforms). People really wanted Rick to respond to these criticisms, so he did!

He made two blog posts, one about Piper and one about Samirah. He has since deleted both so the links are to archived versions. The short version: he essentially tried to justify his poor research and double-down that he hadn't written them offensively, actually, people were just being mean to him. The fandom, of course, reacted poorly to this.

[Further elaborated events under the cut since this got a bit lengthy]

(Fun fact, this all happened within a month or so of the time i posted an open letter on aphobic tropes in the Riordanverse that Rick replied to, and then he immediately followed with announcing that Reyna was intended to be ace-coded [which cause a LOT of fandom debate] before Rick dipped for a couple of weeks, and then came back to post the blog posts in response to Piper and Sam stuff. So I like to jokingly refer to this as "The time I imploded the fandom/drove Rick off of twitter." Twas I that set the house ablaze.)

Rick fully left social media after this and the LT Musical social media manager became Rick's social media manager for the time being.

So this all happened June/July of 2020. Tower of Nero would end up being published in October of 2020 and a few months after that Rick would state that he was done with the series and wouldn't be writing any more series installments involving Percy, and also that he wouldn't be writing a Nico quest following Tower of Nero as it "wasn't his place to" and encouraged the community to write their own versions of Nico's story.

The community continued to circulate the tumblr posts and discuss the topics of Rick's offensive character depictions, and this is also where we see the dramatic shift in how the fandom depicts Piper in fanwork (though in most cases it is admittedly not an improvement 😬) because of all this discussion. This is also around the time when the fandom brought Viria under scrutiny claiming that she was whitewashing Piper as part of the same discussions, through the justification that she was drawing Annabeth as having tan skin (which she does canonically), and if Annabeth has tanner skin then Piper then that's whitewashing Piper? Except they were using completely separate images of not fully rendered Piper art versus Annabeth in dramatic lighting, so it's all very awkward and poor logic, and did actually get kind of racist. A lot of people were calling it "Tannabeth Blackchase" (yeah, i know) or similar and a common sentiment you'd see repeated is "Don't draw Annabeth as having darker skin than Piper, because that's offensive/racist/whitewashing." (Note: it was not phrased "don't draw Piper as having lighter skin than Annabeth" - we also won't get into certain offensive depictions of Native Americans, but I digress). But yeah, the Annabeth stuff in all that did not age well at all.

Anyways, in October of 2021 however Rick would announce that he was co-writing The Sun And The Star - with a lot of heavy emphasis on how Mark Oshiro works as a sensitivity reader, and some false advertising from the official social media that Mark Oshiro was the first time a non-Riordan author would be collaborating on the series (disregarding the ghostwriters completely). One of the big criticisms in the breaking down of issues in Rick's writing was his lack of ever seeking a sensitivity reader, and fans claiming that a sensitivity reader could solve a lot of the problems. This was basically Rick's "look! I totally listened!!!!" (though it did little to actually improve things, based on the book) and in TSATS as well Piper gets a large cameo at the end where the text very directly addresses a lot of points made in criticism of Rick's writing of her.

We also then of course got the CoTG trilogy later, explicitly stated to be for advertising purposes for the show.

So basically, short version: Rick came under scrutiny for a lot of offensive writing within the span of two months, made some bad blog posts doubling down about it, left social media. TOA ends. Rick says he wasn't going to continue the series/write what would become TSATS. Community celebrates the end of of the franchise but also continues to discuss Rick's poor writing and the blog posts at length. Rick suddenly announces TSATS and Mark Oshiro's involvement. Everybody gets distracted from being mad. Show announcement stuff also happens and the discussions peter out.

[diddlesnap]

this line always shocked me like i always forget peeta's popular because the only friend of his who's ever so much as named is delly. and they were really just friends when they were little kids.

[zevranunderstander]

number #1 tactic that people use to not sound as racist as they are when they talk to black people: 'uhh so you AMERICANS need to stop pretending everything is about YOU. why should i know this im not from the us :/' (= is talking about like. a phenomenally internationally well-known black artist)

[girlmetalsonic]

something that is like the baseline of amys entire character to me is that shes lonely. shes clingy and physically affectionate in a way none of her friends really are, shes always getting pushed aside and left behind. yeah, she helps out people she doesnt know because shes a nice person, but also, she sees part of herself in them. she wont leave someone else behind because she knows the feeling —and more importantly, hates the feeling. if she doesnt have somebody to stand by her and be there for her, then shes going to be that person for everybody else. something something her obsession with sonic is really just like a manifestation of that desire for closeness with someone, and she thinks that romance is the only way to get that. idk... this hedgehog can have so many abandonment issues.

[maxthesillyy]

”chloe offering to sacrifice herself for arcadia bay is her redemption”

me: personally i wouldnt use the word “redemption”, but yeah, basically!—

“redemption, of course, from how much of a shitty, toxic, horrible person and friend to max she was throughout the game.”

me: oh that’s not-

[suntails]

the book is done :D setting up a shop for it next week but i’ll start posting/open preorders in september!!

[thedrotter]

this idea to me in a vision ... ive become a shrimp as a consequence from sitting at my chair but anythign for a yuu drawing🔥🔥

[sea-buns]

Holy fuck, man. What a trip Fearne has been on, huh?

You tell her how grateful you are to have her in your life, you flatter her, you tell her you need her, that you have to do this together. You have her make a promise that has this woman, born of chaos and fey, agreeing through shaking hands and a trembling voice.

You make her deceive your friends; you make her follow where they cannot know; you make her help you into this contraption; you make her feed this thing into you despite the fact that you both have been warned extensively of the risks. You make her watch you crumble and splinter and shatter and fracture and burst and implode. You make her watch you die, over and over and over and over, for a minute in agonizing bullet time.

You make her do all these things, because when she tries to back out, when she tries to not be the one who let you do this—how could you do this—

you tell her, "YOU PROMISED."

Because if there's one thing you know, it's that the fey do not break a promise.

[sasukeless]

back to complaining about translations but i just again came across an old post that basically was analyzing sasuke calling naruto his one and only and saying it was him being sarcastic/not truthful because he was throwing naruto’s previous words at him in this panel

and im just… this panel is wrong. the speech bubble and naruto’s thoughts are flipped. naruto did not call sasuke his one and only here, he was remembering sasuke calling Him his closest friend.

anyway it’s a tricky panel because it’s in many pages when you read the manga. like i’m not free of sin because i remember i have posted too when i couldn’t find one with the correct placement. (also i feel like naruto saying there’s no way he’d able to leave sasuke alone holds more meaning than i can’t let that happen but whatever Whatever details) but anyway this is also an scene you can watch the anime clip and see what is naruto saying. but my point is that One simple misplacement in the translation can literally lead to people misinterpreting something completely different and in this case denying sasuke’s feelings and characterization. and it’s just well. sad

[starlooove]

No one is asking you to like cops IRL, not even the show. If you look at Arcane and what you see is copaganda, if you look at Cait and only see PoLiCe OfFiCeR and not the character, the problem is YOU.

1. I never said anyone asked me to like cops irl

2. I know that’s what I said.

[dragon-age-sideblog]

regarding the whole choices thing. I've decided if bioware wants to pretend none of my other characters existed or their choices mattered in this new blank slate game. then I'm gonna just consider it two completely different canons. there's the one thats more important to me and I'll continue to build onto it on my own and incorporate my characters and decisions into it. and then there's veilguard. which I'm sure will still be fun but its gonna be set in its own canon world separate entirely from mine <3