#but none of us have that screenshot and it's not in anyones tumblr archives

[warlordfelwinter]

enjoy the potentially previously unposted and absolutely funniest fiver and the cat girls image

[fangshing]

Hello!

This a member of the TV Station trying to apologize to you. Originally, I was going to send you a direct message but you have all of my blogs blocked and I don't want to pull what Arty used to and make a blog just to message you. That's creepy.

I want to start off by saying I am genuinely very sorry for her harassing you in the past and while the entire situation seems like a joke, a horrible grab for attention or fake I promise you this is very much real it has been very much affecting my personal life and the investigation with Ezra.

Full disclosure; I don't know you. I never wanted your contact information or your Discord, people would usually just kind of relay others to me expect me to know what's going on but I really am trying my best to distance myself from the situation which is impossible when I'm the only person who's out in the open if that makes any sense.

Understandably I get why you wouldn't want to see what I post unless someone else's screenshotting it without my permission and posting it, both sides have done this and I don't appreciate it and I typically don't see it because I'm very rarely on Tumblr and if I do see someone reposting my stuff without asking (which I'm only paranoid about because one of Sunny's friends has edited my face white more than once) I can't do much to undo the action.

I can say I know that the blogs typically will reblog a post without any commentary because it was meant to go into drafts or something to be commented on later or archived on the internet archive or some other thing I really don't know and really don't care because this is dragging my entire reputation through the mud it's been making everything harder for every person in my life right now.

You have no reason to believe this is me and I don't really have any way to show except if I take a screenshot of this and post it which I probably will at some point, but I am deeply sorry for the harassment you've faced. You're welcome to DM me with any questions you have or for any explanations.

Two things we can say is that we don't have a fictive of Taylor's OC and Arty is a real person, her deadname is in Sunny's callout.

Ben

Since you're being polite and trying to clear the air, I'll refrain from being a sarcastic bitch in this post. I do not forgive you, but its nice that you felt the need to apologize.

That being said, I don't appreciate that you block-evaded, even if your intentions were good. I do not want to speak with you, Hau, or anyone else in the TV Station system. I have made that abundantly clear on several different occasions.

The thing with the archiving still puzzles me. Posts from people who are twice removed from the drama (that is, only involved because they are interacting with me) are being cataloged even if the post has absolutely nothing to do with you. Like, a post that was just lyrics from a nonsensical YouTube video was saved by one. Why?

This entire situation doesn't have to continue. You and your friends don't have to do this. There is nothing to gain from trying to defend your character online. Ultimately this hurts nobody but yourself. People have already made up their minds about you and no amount of convincing will get them to change their minds. They are inconsequential anyway; the likelihood of you ever meeting them in person is slim to none. Internet slap fights where someone is trying to protect their honor has never ended well and has always resulted in more trouble for them than if they let it go.

The nature of human beings is that people will always take offense to what you do, no matter what that may be. You don't have to acknowledge them or try to prove them wrong. Like I said above, its doubtful you will meet any of your online detractors, and even less likely that they'll know who you are if they do. The opinions of someone who is this unimportant doesn't have to matter. If you don't look at their accounts, you will never know what they said, and it can never hurt you.

You don't have to take my advice, but I thought I would at least offer my two cents instead of saying "lol fuck off" because that helps no one.

[gender-trash]

actually i wanna jump off this post and talk abt filtering for a hot second because tag and post text filtering is THE killer feature tumblr has over All Other Social Media for me and i want it to be maximally good. (like, on twitter the post filtering literally doesn't work on the chronological feed, and if people want to include CWs they have to be in the POST BODY so 1) you can't add additional warnings to stuff you retweet (unless you QRT, but i feel like it would be considered weird/argumentative to qrt a post just to add warnings) and 2) it counts AGAINST THE CHARACTER LIMIT. and also due to the structure of twitter as a website, the Issue Du Jour is MUCH more inescapable in fandom spaces. also, a pettier concern, but it's impossible to blacklist fandoms you don't care about or want to see; i will probably never watch new trigun at this point because after danmei twitter's relentless obsession with it i've quite simply seen Too Much. not to even MENTION my beloathed gensh*n *mpact.)

ANYWAY, the bird hellsite aside...

i think "semi-standardized" tumblr content warning tags tend to emerge spontaneously sometimes, out of the primordial froth -- like, if you warn for Presence Of Food your tag is probably "food cw" or "tw: food" or the like, and if i have an eating disorder triggered by images of food, i can just stick "food" in the tumblr tag blacklist and i'll be fine. or, actually, if anyone ELSE reblogging the post before you has tagged it "food cw" the filter will also catch it and i'll be fine.

however, the set of Emergent Standardish Tumblr Tags is kind of idiosyncratic; it includes "scopophobia" and "flashing lights" and the very vaguely defined "unreality" but not "ai generated images" or "fake post" or "reblog coercion" (you know, the "reblog or something bad will happen" ones). the latter three are all things i personally tag for (for the record i probably have about 95% reliability with CW tags; i will try to hit 99% if someone who follows me specifically requests a tag but i also can't guarantee tags will be fully propagated into my archives).

in this particular case, if people tag posts about The Submarine with *any* content warning they usually tag them "death" or "violence" from what i've seen (or "current events", which is good actually and i wish more people did that). and enough people tag instances of *fictional* death or violence with those content warnings that those tags are functionally useless for me to blacklist (i'm, uh, in the naruto fandom). the problem is that there's *no* canonical tag for Real Life Mass Death, which means that i have about ten terms related to mass shootings blacklisted and despite my best efforts i STILL find out about every mass shooting from poasts on tumblr dot com, and the mood whiplash from posts about cat pictures or isopods to "FIFTY PEOPLE ARE DEAD" fucks me up really bad.

the other problem is untagged goddamn screenshots from goddamn twitter.

@23rdhunter's tags:

#y'all reblogging untagged screenshots. please.

i know i have no real room to judge here because i screenshot things instead of copy/pasting them all the time (tumblr tags are not selectable in the ios mobile app which is where i mainly post from), but these are terrible for several reasons: first, the words-in-post-body filter won't catch them; second, screen reader users can't read them; third, they take WAY longer to load for people on slow internet. but also, everyone seems to use twitter dark mode and light-text-on-dark-background is eye-straining for me (and makes my eyesight actively worse if i read light-on-dark text for too long, for some fucking reason; i have theories, but this post isn't about my bizarre eye issues). OCR is pretty good now! i don't understand why we don't have a tumblr feature -- or, hell, some third-party tool -- where you can paste in a screenshot and get a copyable text version. or, like, a tumblr feature that OCRs screenshots and automatically adds alt text if none was provided.

(wait, i'm a programmer. i could BUILD the third-party tool. remind me to come back to that one)

but ALSO also i think we need a norm of being a little more careful or thorough with content tags on screenshots. even if people don't content warn their tumblr text posts at *all* i can usually knock out 95% of content i'd like blacklisted with text filters, but the untagged goddamn twitter screenshots make it through every time. and the twitter screenshots are always the WORST takes, because twitter is a cesspit. maybe we should start content warning for twitter.

anyway my final thought -- god DAMN it i think i saw someone post about this last night, maybe @kodicraft?, and now i can't find the post -- is that it is unreasonably difficult to blacklist names of Famous People You Are Tired Of Hearing About. the example in the post i saw was "elon" because elon is also in "melon" and "elongate" and a lot of other common english words; i've been having a similar struggle with "trump" since about 2017. and then there's the thing where everyone gives them a billion nicknames like "elongated muskrat" or "orange man". i don't know what the solution to this is. i hesitate to request everyone tag their elonpoasting "elon musk". thoughts??

(if you reblog this post with comment and i don't seem to ack your reply, DM me or send me an ask? by necessity it includes about fifteen different things i have blacklisted so i will probably miss a lot of reblogs)

can you fuckers please consistently content warn for maritime disasters or something? i've resigned myself to never again seeing a post about any submarine good or bad but my filters are only catching like a third of the posts and it's giving me really incredibly bad brainworms . thanks

[vurbubera]

What happened with i-am-a-fish? A compilation:

A lot of people are confused about what happened with Tumblr user i-am-a-fish (who I'll refer to as Fish from here on out for the sake of readability), and a lot of rumor, misinformation and hyperbole is circulating. With this post I hope to compile the claims and evidence against him, examine their validity, and hopefully bring everyone up to speed.

Let's get the main thing out of the way first:

Veggiefact is a Twitter account with over 270k followers. 

The callout post it references is this one: https://ratsofftoya.tumblr.com/post/189087352976/this-is-a-repost-since-just-making-an-addition-to. A second call-out is making the rounds too, from bubblegumlopunny, and it’s a Google doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gv0ixX_jw9geWxFc07b9En--AGHcTqVBO1E6TLGLhHI/edit

Both callouts share about 90% of the same information. Bubblegum’s callout includes accusations of racism and lesbophobia as well, and more incendiary language and questionable charges than the Tumblr post, but in this post I’ll only focus on the accusations that Fish is a pedophile. 

The child porn accounts on Twitter

The “child porn accounts” it refers to are @krskiii, @Karbuitt and @kamawanu__. The last one is actually safe for work, provided you work at a place that’s cool with you being on Twitter, and the second-to-last one sort-of is, depending how your boss feels about suggestive pin-ups and sex jokes. 

Kamawanu posts fanart of various fandoms, but mostly fanart of Rick & Morty and Into the Spider-Verse. Kamawanu is an incest shipper, although they keep that content to a separate, adult-only and locked account. Karbuitt posts artwork of various Nintendo characters, but in particular Viridi from Kid Icarus. Neither of these accounts can be argued to be "dedicated to child porn" in any capacity.  

Although some Tumblr users would argue in earnest this is child porn as well.

Krskiii is the only account to have posted questionable content. While the vast majority of their feed is cute, safe for work anime art, they posted lolicon back in januari this year. Both callouts include a second screenshot from a tweet made in 2016 as well. 

Was this something Fish reasonably could’ve known about? According to the callout in the Google doc:

This is straight-up untrue.

Not only is it perfectly possible to follow Twitters without checking them first (and many follow-for-follow Twitters operate this way) but even if you do vet accounts, there is no archive or tags like Tumblr has to conveniently show you what kind of content you can expect. You have to manually scroll through a person’s timeline or media tab to see what they post.

You’d only see their most recent tweets, not ones they made almost a damn year ago.

Fish followed this account in a follow-spree that had him hit the follow limit for the day on November 12th, almost a whole year after it was made. Fish's claim that he didn't know about these pictures is not only perfectly believable; it’s unlikely that he would’ve even known about it unles he'd dug through this person's media tab quite far.

This is not the behaviour of someone who curated their following list and carefully vetted everyone on it. 

Was this irresponsible behaviour of him, towards both himself and his followers? Sure, you can make that argument. But it’s not evidence for anything more sinister than that.

The Pornhub joke

If you’re still on Tumblr in 2019, you were probably around for the porn purge of 2018, the one that had everyone scrambling for a new online home. With how few alternatives there are of social media sites that allow NSFW content, people started discussing, mostly as a joke, the possibility of moving to Pornhub. It was enough of a Thing that Pornhub's social media department caught wind of it.

I-am-a-fish decided to get in on the joke and created a Pornhub account and posted about “relocating” on Twitter and Tumblr:

How zany! A goldfish on a porn site!

People voiced discomfort over it, so Fish deleted the links from Tumblr and the Twitter bio, but didn't delete the tweet. The Pornhub account itself seems to have never been used.

The sex joke

Part of the callout post is the claim Fish “deliberately exposes minors to porn”, this + the Pornhub thing is what they're referring to.

At some point in late 2018 or early 2019 Fish decided this wasn't the direction he wanted to take his blog into, changed the original post, deleted the reblogs, and hasn't posted nsfw content since.

Also this happened a year ago.

The Discord server

Fish briefly ran a Discord server with a strict no-bullying policy that applied to everyone. This is not a political stance, but it was turned into one. This counts as “believing in reverse oppression”:

Most of the mods were adults, which is supposedly creepy:

One of them thought shipping characters who have been aged-up into adulthood isn't paedophilia:

Someone on the server thought “pedophilia” is a sexuality:

One thing to note here is that none of these actually involve Fish's own thoughts or actions, just those of people he's vaguely associated with (is Mother Allspite a close friend? An acquintance? Someone who volunteered to help moderate the chat?), as well as complete strangers. He's being associated with statements people have made who have no connection to him whatsoever.

Here are the claims I’ve seen making the rounds about the Discord server of which I’ve seen no evidence:

That the mods supported pedophilia

That the mods themselves were pedophiles

That pedophilia was treated as a sexuality you could tag yourself with

That the server was full of pedophiles

The claim that the server mixed minors with adults and didn’t section off nsfw content/discussion is at least a believable one, so I’m not including it here. It’s not proof of anyone being a pedophile, however. It just means the Discord server was poorly managed.

What to make of this?

There is no proof that Fish is anything worse than a young adult (despite the callout posts all making a huge deal out of him being an adult, he's still only 19 years old) who got too popular too fast and didn’t understand the responsibility that came with that. Even for his “worst” offenses there is no proof of ill intent behind them. At worst there is poor judgment, irresponsibility, and impulsiveness. There is certainly no proof that he is attracted to children, much less that he ever acted on it. 

Nevertheless,

(I have no idea where the “20+ Twitters dedicated to child porn” claim comes from and found no evidence whatsoever to support it)

[stayarmytinyzenmoa-l]

Glitched [Change Your Passwords]

Hacker AU

TW: Implied Stalking, Language

Pairing: (NCT) Unknown x Reader

Genre: Choose Your Story, Thriller, Suspense, Mystery

(3/?) [Previous] | [Next]

[Main Masterlist] | [Glitched Masterlist]

Word Count: 3.9K

Notes: Sorry for the wait on this one! I’ve been studying for my classes, but don’t worry I won’t leave you all hanging haha. Also I’ve updated the video links to go to a video archive blog of mine because the private posts were just not working out for me so I hope this will be easier! I ask that you don’t follow that blog only for spoilers as I’ll upload videos/other medias there first prior to posting the actual fics so you might either get spoiled or just really confused lol. But yeah, I hope you enjoy!!

Disclaimer: Please remember that this is an AU and a work of fiction, obviously the idol(s) mentioned/written/implied would never partake in or condone these actions. I would never wish any of these actions to occur to anyone mentioned in the writings of this story, nor do I wish any harm on them. The idols mentions in this work are meant to be acknowledged as no more than face claims and are not meant to represent the idols in any way.

You sat down first with Jaemin and Yangyang still in line for whatever it was they had decided to eat for lunch, you, meanwhile, decided on changing your passwords. Figure, you have since decided on calling him that since that’s what he told you to tell Instagram, seemed very adamant on it, and thus here you were, changing literally all of your passcodes and writing them down on the side of the paper bag you requested.

But as you did this the creeping feeling of being watched never left you. The security cameras were pointed the other way and no one, to your knowledge, was making an active effort to stare at you. It had to be related to that scare from earlier, you had nearly forgotten about it while in your lab. You finished changing the last passcode and looked down at your phone, the last passcode being the one to your Tumblr account, and you opened your messages, secretly hoping that maybe you’d receive another message from Figure, but none were presented to you. No doubt changing your passcodes might have disconnected you from the person as a whole. But, of course, right when you least expect it, things always turn around. Then in came a message from user011719.

https://videoarchivesatzml.tumblr.com/post/644877251145515008/glitched-change-your-passwords-video

You played the video again. Why did it just stop mid-sentence? You tried to play it again but the message, much like the one you received earlier, disappeared. Like it was never there in the first place. You wondered what could have happened, if you didn’t know what you did already you would’ve assumed that he cut the recording too soon or that he ran out of WiFi, but this couldn’t have been the case, it was too easy, too simple.

But you were more concerned about another thing Figure had mentioned. To your knowledge, no one had used your phone. The only person that it could’ve been was… Jaehyun. But why would he have done that? There was no purpose as to why he would do that.

“(Y/N)!” Seonghwa called out to you and you waved.

“Oh, hello!”

“Oh, thank god, you have your phone,” he sighs. “Did Jaehyun give it to you?”

“Yeah, he did,” you were surprised by how convenient Seonghwa’s timing was, but you had to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Why?”

“Bambam was looking through it.”

“He was what?!”

“Yeah, that’s why Somi isn’t around right now, she’s probably beating his ass. He’s been here the longest but Somi doesn’t really give a fuck,” Seonghwa shakes his head. “Don’t worry, he didn’t open anything, he was just being a bitch.”

“How did he know my password?”

“You really should change your password from 0000, (Y/N), it’s too simple,” Seonghwa laughs.

“Oh god, don’t worry I already changed it. What did he want anyway?”

“I’m pretty sure he was just being stupid, Bambam acts like that but he’s not a dick, he looked surprised himself when he got your password, I figured I’d tell you because that was just out of line.”

“It was, yeah, thanks for telling me,” you nodded your head.

“It was the right thing to do, I’m gonna go head out now, I have to make sure Somi didn’t go too far, I’ll see you back in lab.”

“See you,” he waved at you again and walked out of the food court. You pulled out your phone and stared at it, people seriously have no boundaries. Bambam had already rubbed you the wrong way but this was honestly such a dick move, you shook your head.

You hoped that he didn’t see your Instagram, Seonghwa said that he didn’t see or open anything but still. You’d have to thank Somi later, but you still couldn’t believe that he was so shameless with it. The nerve of some people, if this were a cartoon you’d be certain that steam would be blowing out of your ears, you would definitely give him a piece of your mind back in lab later. You looked at the DMs, if anyone else saw this they would be more than just suspicious, no doubt, or they would think that you were crazy and laugh at you.

But looking at these DMs, you thought back to the video. Figure mentioned that there was someone keeping him captive, and with this knowledge, you felt your heart rate rise slightly, and you could only think of the worse. But, despite this, you were at least able to screenshot that one part that he asked you to send to not.here127, something that you were glad that you did because you hardly remembered what else he sent.

You left the app and opened your notes app, then you tried to type out the screenshot. You got pretty far until about the second sentence, at that point the keyboard started lagging until it stopped working altogether.

“What the fuck?” You whispered to yourself and restarted the app, trying to type out the message again, but still came the same result. You even tried restarting your phone altogether, but still, the same result. Until your keypad started moving itself, and you gasped loudly enough for some people to turn their heads. You dropped your phone on the table. “Uh, sorry, just family news,” you said aloud. Many of the people seemingly understood this and turned back around. But when you looked down at your phone, the lone sentence on your notes app read:

“Don’t. - Figure”

It was like you could feel your blood circulating through you. You had no idea how to feel right now, nor did you want to take the time to figure it out. Then it started typing again.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have hacked into your phone but… something came up, and it would just be safer for you if I did this. I’d tell you what it was but it would be better if I didn’t. Just… tell him in person, okay?”

You nodded your head slowly and picked your phone back up, reopening Instagram. Part of you felt more awkward now knowing that this Figure was in your phone, probably watching you as you typed, but you wanted to give what limited trust you could. Then another foreign feeling came over you, one you’ve felt since entering this facility, actually, and when you looked to the corner of the room, you saw the camera focused right on you, then you continued the conversation.

You stared at the camera that was still trained on you, then at your phone’s camera. You wanted to cover the camera, to be honest, but two things stopped you. One being how you would make fun of your friends when they did so, and two being how Figure had mentioned that the whole reason why he hacked into your phone was because “something came up.” Now, you aren't stupid. You could put two and two together and no doubt this “something” was related to this new person that not.here127 mentioned, Connect.

“So how’s your first day so far?” Jaemin asks once he sits down. You locked your phone and placed it back into your pocket.

“It’s great, it’s everything I could’ve hoped for, I just can’t believe that I’m finally here, you know?” You answered. Jaemin had his usual lopsided smile on while Yangyang sat down, he looked between both of you and a sly smirk crawled on his face. You knew that look, you knew what he was planning and you stomped on his foot before he could think about it.

“You okay, Yangyang?” Jaemin asks.

“Just fine,” he winces. “But how’s the hell lab, (Y/N)?”

“Actually not that bad… so far. But I shouldn’t jinx it,” you shook your head. “How about you, Lab V, right?”

“I think my mentor has it out for me. He’s always pointing out the little mistakes I make, it’s so nerve-racking…”

“Who’s your mentor?” Jaemin asks.

“Sicheng…” Yangyang frowns.

“Oh, you’re fine. He’s like that with everyone.”

“What does your lab work on?”

“Uh, it’s kind of weird,” Yangyang hums. “Some biomatter stuff.”

“You don’t know what you’re studying?!”

“I mean I do! But like, it’s weird,” Yangyang shook his head. “Technically, it’s called Biomatter Space Compression. But like, it’s weird because like… I think there’s more to it,” Yangyang frowns.

“So like what space does to the body?”

“Yeah, but like… you know what, forget it, I have no idea how to explain it,” Yangyang shakes his head. “Give me like a week to make sense of it,” he laughs.

“I used to be in that lab, and that’s probably the best way to explain it,” Jaemin sighs. A loud beeping noise goes off and Yangyang groans.

“Shut up,” your jaw drops while you fought back a smile. Yangyang reluctantly pulls out a device probably twice his age. “Is that a pager?!” You started to laugh.

“Yeah,” he holds it in his hand and shows you. “As soon as my supervisor busted this out I almost laughed out loud,” Yangyang chuckles.

“Oh god, that’s old…”

“I know, looks like he’s calling us all back in early, so I’ll see you after then,” Yangyang waves goodbye and leaves the cafeteria, leaving you and Jaemin behind.

“Ah, I guess lunch is almost over,” Jaemin stretches his arms back and yawns. “I’ll walk you back to the labs,” Jaemin tosses the paper bag into the trash bin and stands up, waiting for you to catch up to him. You quickly followed suit and walked next to him. You both exited the bustling lunch hall and walked back into the outdoor walkway, the grand structure never failing to amaze you but to be fair it is still your first day. You were both making a beeline for the labs, and you, of course, noticed the cameras discreetly following you the entire time. You soon approached your lab building and you both stopped in front of it.

“Thanks…” you didn’t really have much to say, what do you say in this situation? You both had only known each other briefly and never on the level to easily make small talk. You were about to go back inside when he said something rather peculiar.

“No problem… You must be pretty smart if you got this internship, you know. If you feel like something’s off, then it probably is,” he says. Then he walks off without giving you a chance to answer. You walked into the locker room with a heavy mind, putting your equipment back on and begrudgingly placing your phone back into the UV chamber, feeling at least a little more secure with your now changed passwords, then you walked back into the lab.

“(Y/N)!”

“Bambam,” the name came out harshly from your mouth and he shoots an awkward smile.

“You guys told (Y/N)?”

“Of course we did!” Seonghwa glares at him.

“I’m so sorry, (Y/N), he grabbed it because it’s the same model as his phone and he ended up opening it since you both coincidentally had the same password,” Somi sighs. “0000, really?! You have important lab information on your phone and your password is 0000?!”

“I know okay? I changed it,” Bambam rolls his eyes.

“To what? 1234?” Jaehyun laughs.

“Well, when we’re done here, I’m gonna change it again,” Bambam crosses his arms. “Sorry about that, (Y/N), it was a genuine mistake, I didn’t open anything, promise,” he says. Your shoulders relaxed, you couldn’t help mistakes, and though this was an eerie coincidence there wasn’t much you could say anyway.

“It’s fine,” you shook your head. Somi’s explanation made enough sense, you think. “Just be more careful next time, I’d rather not have a complete stranger going through my phone, mistakenly or not,” you said sternly. The other members of the lab group looked at you with a strange expression, maybe you said it a bit too harshly, and truthfully normally you’d shrug it off but with the whole thing going on with Figure, or Connect, or whoever the hell you were DMing on Instagram is just getting to you. Then there were those damn cameras, both around the facility and on your own phone.

“Sorry about that, I’m just a little stressed,” you shook your head and tried to play it off. Bambam starts laughing out loud and you flinched at the sudden outburst.

“Oh, don’t worry, we get it! Seonghwa was worse when he first started,” Bambam’s worried look is immediately replaced with a happier one while he clapped the other one’s shoulder. “You should’ve seen him, he snapped at all of us.”

“I didn’t.”

“Oh, you did,” Jaehyun chuckles and moves to the lab table. “But now, with all of that out of the way, we have to work,” Jaehyun says. Everyone moved to their stations quickly, picking up where you each left off prior to lunch. You were put on data recording, something not precisely fun but also the only thing you could currently be trusted with. You were amazed by how easily they all worked together, you couldn’t help but feel like you were just stepping on their toes really, but every time they’d call you over they’d be nice about it at the very least. You each moved around the clock nonstop, you walking around the rather large lab table with the rather large laptop to each station as the main researchers called you over to record something, and them occasionally overlapping in their stations as each of the trials were carried out and analyzed.

“Alright then,” Bambam stands up and stretches his back. “I’m going home.”

“Already?” You asked while you looked at the wall clock, it read 7:48 pm, about an hour away from clock out time. You then looked at the laptop in your hands and saw about 3/4s of the spreadsheet filled. “Don’t we need to finish the rest of this today?”

“Nah, the rest of the trials take about a day to develop, so we’re good on waiting, or at least I am,” Bambam says. “You did good, rookie, don’t worry about it,” he says.

“Oh, thanks,” you cleared your throat.

“Be safe on your way home then, Bambam,” Jaehyun says without looking up from his microscope. “Don’t worry, (Y/N), we don’t have strict clock-out times,” he says while turning the bulb off on the microscope.

“Heading out too?” Somi asks.

“Yup, you all stay safe,” Jaehyun waves at them and walks out of the lab, following close behind Bambam.

“I’m almost done here,” Somi twists open the pipette drip and watches the chemical drop into the solution. “Just have to finish developing these samples and recording color changes, if you want I can take it from here, (Y/N),” she offers.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, (Y/N), you’ve been walking around all day, I’m surprised you’re not lightheaded from all the times you walked around here,” she says. “I’m serious! Jaehyun left so he won’t know,” she says.

“I won’t tell anyone,” Seonghwa shrugs while he closes the mice cage.

“You’re cleared!” Somi smiles.

“Thanks, Somi,” you had on a tired smile, it was true, your feet were killing you with all the walking you’ve been doing and you haven’t had a chance to sit down.

“Get home safe,” she says.

“Do you need a ride home?” Seonghwa asks.

“No thank you, I’ll just take the bus,” you said, hoping that Yangyang was still here.

“Okay, see you tomorrow then,” Somi waved at you while you left. You entered the empty locker room and shrugged your lab coat off and hung it in your locker, placing your goggles on the top shelf and grabbing your bag. Then you turned around and, with your breath held, opened the UV chest. You saw your phone resting undisturbed in the same spot you left it and you felt a wave of relief while you picked it up. Everything was still in order and you spotted the text from Yangyang simply stating that his team messed up an experiment and they had to redo the whole thing and told you to just head home without him.

“Well, great,” you shook your head and walked out into the darkened facility. “West wing…” you mumbled to yourself, following the signs quickly. You pushed open the double doors and walked out into the nighttime, the moon already in the sky. You opened Instagram and quickly read through the conversation again while you descended the steps, and you soon noticed the car parked in front of you, and as you walked over to it, someone stopped you.

“Oh, (Y/N)!” Jaehyun called out to you, he looked like he was just about to re-enter the building. “Perfect timing,” he says while holding up his phone.

“Oh, hello,” you said. He was the first person who came up to you out here.

“I forgot that you weren’t in our work group chat, we were planning on getting dinner together,” he shows you the conversation. You spotted Somi’s text saying that she forgot to tell you about it and asked if anyone had your number. “Want to come?” He asks. You quickly glanced at the car behind him, it hadn’t moved since you walked out and the windows were tinted.

[[Follow Jaehyun or Go to the Car]]

General Tag List: @vickylamore @hangsxng @mizzdivagirl7-blog @sehunnies-hunnie96 @roses09020617 @bat-shark-repellant @cloudreads @awesomei @raeincitizen @here-aeth

Glitched: @red-moon-dream​ @vinmylife @tyuningkai @fortrest @leesalts @tvehyungs-gf @gaiyofanfiction @lvvcky 

[transcendentcacophony]

Thinking about Posts and Tumblr

So I responded to an earlier post from @kalesims in the comments. I probably should have reblogged it so I didn't have to break up my response which may have made it less than useful (and potentially read to mean the opposite of what I meant), but I also wanted to move a bit beyond the initial prompt with this longer one. I have not posted much Sims stuff in awhile. Part of this is because school and work demands are eating so much of my time right now1, part of this that ongoing pursuit of perfection we all seem to have to some extent on social media, and part of it is because I may have dumped my entire CC folder into my game without sorting it properly and now it runs like rubbish and I have to fix it. Regardless, I'm going to focus on issue #2 the ongoing pursuit of perfection, because I think this is the most relevant bit and the one I've been thinking a lot about lately. Tumblr is a social media platform. (This bit is a little academic, sorry.) I think we all know that, but do we ever really think about what that means? It's ultimately a company that provides a public-facing platform with the explicit intent of marketing ourselves to each other. More likes and followers for you=more ads and money for Tumblr, but they have to incentivize that for any of us to care. How do they do that? Make it a popularity contest. How often do you look at your likes or followers count? What emotional response do you have when they're low? How many creators incentivize new followers or more likes by releasing content to correlate with milestones in those areas? This is all part of feeding that beast2. It also draws on something referred to academically as the "hedonic treadmill," which is basically the keeping up with the Joneses mentality where we constantly compare our success to our peers and find ourselves wanting, even if we aren't. This is going somewhere, I promise.

When I first started Tumblr, I had one blog: transcendentcacophony. I started it explicitly to follow sims blogs I liked and keep track of the cc I downloaded or things that caught my attention, and my initial posts all reflected that. After I was on for a while, I realized most blogs compartmentalized to a certain degree: you have a blog for gameplay, a blog for cc finds, a blog for interest x, etc., so, not being particularly versed in these things, I thought "This is how you tumble!" and immediately set about creating sideblogs like transcendentcacophonyinspire, transcendentcacophonys3cc, or transcendentcacophonystudyblr. I went through my entire archive, moved everything over to its new home, and deleted the original posts and reblogs from this page. Does that mean I think having all the sideblogs is wrong? Nope. The organization of having sideblogs is sometimes helpful, but they they make me feel kind of fractured on some level. None of these provide an image of a whole person, just brief glimpses of an aspect. Sometimes I regret having split the off, other times I find it more convenient. Mileage may vary, but the obvious winner for the sideblog model is arguably Tumblr. None of my blogs have many followers, but there isn't as much overlap in audience as you might think and if they were all still one blog, I doubt there'd be as many as there are.

This raises the question of who you intend your blog to be for. Is it for Tumblr, so they can keep making that sweet sweet ad revenue? Is it for the online audience? Or is it for you? Who do you see as your primary audience? The structure of social media clearly wants us to say everyone else. "You're here for the likes! The followers! The popularity!" Other companies lean in to this as well. How many followers do you have to have to qualify as an EA Game Changer?

I would argue that it's this pressure to have all likes, followers, etc., that prohibit us from posting what we really want to post. Are you posting the things that actually make you happy? Or are you posting the things that you think an audience wants to see?

Learning anything takes a lot of practice. How many times did you fall off before you learned to ride a bike? How many broken and malformed pots do you make before you get a perfect one? We learn by doing. Waiting for that perfect screenshot or getting reshade just right or having the perfect city in CAW keeps us from posting our broken pots. Maybe we need to post more broken pots.

If something makes us happy, does it need to be perfect, or do we love it anyway? "This is my first pot! It sucks, but I made it! Finishing it alone is an accomplishment! It's mine and I'm learning and I want to show that process so we can all get better together!" Shouldn't our screenshots or gameplay or worldbuilding be the same?

I am building a world in CAW. I've been doing it for quite awhile, and I have an entire folder full of broken pots as a result, but I learned something every time I broke one. When I read CAW forums, I learn more from the ones where things don't work than from ones where they do. I post some of my broken pots, and simmers like @nilxis or @murfeelee are so supportive and helpful and give me tips on how to better and fix issues I'm having. I value that part of this community. I don't learn to do better by not showing off my broken pots.

I know some of my interests are pretty niche. I'm building an alien scifi world, I have conversion projects from games that support that but probably won't be useful to mainstream simmers. I made a series of alien moons in conjunction with simblu, who is now deactivated. These are arguably not things that will get a lot of likes, reblogs, or followers, but they are things that make me happy. Kurt Vonnegut once said when he wrote books, he always wrote with only 2 people in mind: himself and his sister. His goal was that at the very least he would like what he wrote, and a few of the books were written with her in mind, and if anyone else liked it, it was just gravy. I can’t say I’m a fan of the man’s writing, but I kind of like the idea of this mentality.

To that end, I think I'm going to change up how I use this blog moving forward, with the express goal of posting more often and with more emphasis on things that make me happy or show off more of my broken pots. Maybe it will cost me followers, maybe it won't, but it will help me carve this little niche out of the internet that is mine, that makes me happy, and that seeks to support the simmers and other community members3 that have been so supportive of me in the past. If just one or two people get something from it, or are entertained, isn’t that still just as valid?

I don't mean to imply in any way that posting what makes you happy can't make you popular, or gain likes and followers. It's very much possible. Vonnegut wrote his books for himself and he published 14 novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works, complete with film adaptations of several, literary prizes, etc. You can be successful doing what you love.

But I don't know that I need to be successful at it. I want to be happy doing it first, and anything outside of that is gravy. I'm going to post more broken pots and worry less about perfection or "doing it right." I'm going to fall off the bike and get back up and keep going. And maybe, by falling and failing, I'll get better or at least good enough or comfortable enough I'm not worried so much about that quest for perfection that is currently prohibiting me from trying.

Anyways, @kalesims, I don't know if that answers the original question you had. But I'd love to see what you post, be it gameplay, screenshots, cc, etc., really whatever floats your boat, moving forward. And, if you're willing, I'd love to learn by doing together. Let's go break some pots.

1 Whoever decided the best way to avoid outbreaks on campus was to just cancel all breaks and holidays over the last year clearly doesn't understand college students (who very much are still having parties and making up their own breaks) or that the reason we have those breaks is for mental health. Fall break was specifically added to reduce suicide rates among graduate students. And admin wonders why everyone hates them... 2 There's a researcher who looks at social media as a neoliberal marketplace that forces us to monetize ourselves without necessarily allowing us to realize that's what we're doing. She's got a book coming out about it next month if anyone is interested: Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Self(ie)

3I have in no way forgotten you, @piyotan, and you are definitely part of my online community, this was just targeted largely at simming.

[genderfluidlucifer]

Response to being asked to give  an opinion on Connie’s calout by residentevil-4

(Tw: CSAM, rape fic, incest fic, predatory behavior, racism, ableism, kink mention, nsfw mentions. Minors should probably dni.)

“Connie and I know each other irl and went to school together for 3 years, although they now live in a different state and have cut contact with me. We went to a private therapy school in Manhattan as we're both disabled and were deemed unable to attend public school. Even though we were pretty close, Connie didn't like having photos taken of them, so I don't have any selfies of the two of us; however, these are from our sophomore and senior yearbooks which at least confirms that we were in the same year at school. People who have seen Connie's selfies should be able to confirm that that is what they look like. First and foremost, Connie is not TMA. They are intersex and the two of us have discussed intersex issues both in person and online, but they are still decidedly CAFAB.” Ok so first off, I want to address this part of the callout. To be honest...was it really necessary to literally doxx Connie ehre? Because this textbook definition of doxxing. Yes Connie’s done some shitty things but I freally don’t think that what they’ve done warrants this level of doxxing. Or...even better, any doxxing. This feels like a really unnecessary breach of privacy, revealing sensitive information on Connie’s childhood that they choose to confide in you with. I really don’t agree with this aspect of the callout as it feels very invasive and bordering on stalkerish.  Btw when I say bordering on stalkerish I’m not directly calling you a stalker Bonnie. Just so we’re clear. I am not defending Connie supposedly faking being TMA. Because faking being TMA is a very serious issue. HOWEVER since I don’t know Connie irl and to be quite frank it’s none of my business what the nature of their agab is. Were not close and I’m certainly not going to like lead Connie onto thinking we’re friends just to confirm this with them because that would be creepy. So to be honest I’m going to take this part of the callout with again of salt for now.

[ID: A cropped screenshot of a numbered list Connie posted to their blog hadrosaurs in response to an ask. 

“3. I’m TMA And that’s completely irrelevant. I’m not accusing them because of their gender I didn’t even know their gender when they said that to me saying that they said that because they fucking said that and the reaction to it was incredibly alarming. Don’t fucking say that stuff to people.]

I mean I”m not a trans woman so take this with a grain of salt if you want but...I don’t see how this is really proof of Connie being deliberately transmisogynistic? Yes Connie gives iffy retellings of mistakes they’ve made in the past. I’ve seen that on their blog before and I won’t pretend it doesn’t happen. BUT here they sound genuine enough and to be honest a growing issue I’ve seen with callouts as of late is. A person confirms they in fact did not do the thing they were called out for. And then the people who make the callout choose to see it as proof of incriminating behavior anyways. To be honest it’s a big problem and it’s also incredibly unfair to the person being called out. If you’re so determined at that point to see the person as bigoted no matter what they say then of course anything they say can be seen as proof. So I’m going to have to pass on this bit of evidence. “Connie responded: “Final note: I have spoken extensively with several trans women about using TMA to describe myself. I will not be getting into discourse about that on this blog again. All that leads to is people demanding my medical records and calling me slurs. If you wanna have a thoughtful conversation about it direct message me cause it’s not happening again here.” Again this really doesn’t seem all that self incriminating. Connie mentions here that they’ve talked to rl trans woman about whether or not they can be considered TMA. Connie really doesn’t have to disclose that personal information to people for any reason. Yes even when people are e including this ask response in a callout. And considering lots of people DO get invasive about Connie’s medical history ans general personal life over matters like this? I feel their reaction is pretty understandable here. “Connie has constantly compared “exclusionists” (or anyone, really) to TERFs, even when the people in question are not transmisogynistic, trans exclusionary radfems, or are even transmisogyny affected themselves.

“ Gonna have to disagree with this part of the callout too. Lots of ace inclus blogs, even some run by trans women , have proven that the ace exclus movement was started by swerfs/terfs. But the blog that has the most evidence for this is courteousmingler on tumblr. I suggest you check out that blog’s archiving of the history of ace exclus rhetoric before rushing to call me a transmisogynist for disagreeing with this part of the callout. I looked through all of the evidence for Connie being racist and tbh as a black ndn it all feels incredibly flimsy. It’d be one thing if Connie was using their experiences to derail and invalidate the discussions about how black people are oppressed But they weren’t doing that there at all. This part of the post feels incredibly biased. And like OP is looking for things to be mad about. Going to have to pass on this list of evidence. Also uh I seem to recall that residentevil04 got called out for some questionable behavior as well. “Both me (insepsy, hi) and ezrat have had really weird spikes in activity on our Statcounters, both on the same day. (Saturday, 4/17/21) For both of us, majority of the pages looked at by these visitors have been related to or about Connie, or have been posts that Connie would find "problematic" such as the f slur untagged or something related to "panphobia"/aphobia. I’m sorry but...none of the proof of cyberstalking holds any water. Visiting someone’s blogs and rbing posts to disagree with them is not cyberstalking. Keeping tabs on urls that an abusive person who has harassed are using so you can block them (in this case with kyoshi) and warn your mutuals is not stalking. As a victim of rl stalking it’s...really weird to call this legit stalking at all. Much less claim that you have damning proof of it being stalking when no such evidence exists in the callout. Besides after Connie and nonbinarydave called out one of kyoshi’s buddies for sending a death threat hate anon to nonbinarydave’s toddler st4lker partly admitted to doing it a few times. Then other mutuals in kyoshi’s toxic social circle clearly began joining in. Making side accounts where they tried to spin a false narrative of nonbinarydave’s daughter being one of their alters (ableist as hell.) And also trying to do it in such a way that they thought would trigger nonibnarydave’s psychosis (also ableist as hell.) If you’re going to drag Connie for their mistakes and never let them move on from those mistakes then it’s only fair to do that to people you agree with who also do toxic/bigoted things. ALso the fact that your wording here suggests that you think panphobia and aphobia aren’t real makes me doubt this claim even more. Exclus and their allies are notorious for mislabeling inclus disagreeing with them as stalking. “connie said that they would release that info at a later time and the minor began to argue with them that they had a responsibility regardless of their complicated relationship with age. in this argument connie for a time kept their age ambiguous and at one point told the minor (who confirmed in a later ask that they were severely traumatized by adults) that they obviously weren’t traumatized. connie quickly deleted this ask and any mentions of it and the next post they reblogged was about how wrong it was to try and quantify or discount others’ trauma. on my old blog i @ed them in the replies and asked if they had just done that. connie admitted to it and said it was fucked up but quickly blocked + deleted my comment. i can’t remember whether or not connie apologized to the minor, they may have? but yeah. i thought that was pretty weird.”] I do agree with some of the concern here that adults shouldn’t over expose minors in discourse. I’ve been contemplating this for awhile myself. And trying to figure out how to take better steps to avoid including minors who are triggered by discourse in discourse, especially. HOWEVER I have one little issue with this addition to the callout. If that is the case then exclus and their allies need to practice this as well. You cannot ignore the fact that the reason a lot of minors are getting involved in exclus discourse is due to adult exclus and their allies forcing minors to pick a side in the discourse. Y’all are not at all exempt from this problem. I still remember an ex mutual of mine trying to convince a minor to agree that aces can’t face corrective rape. And based on how aggressive it got with me when I tried to avoid giving an opinion on the matter, I can’t imagine that it would’ve reacted better to the minor refusing to give an opinion or to the minor outright disagreed. Refusing to put these standards on exclus and their allies is both hypocritical and quite frankly very transparent. The claims about them glorifying dark topics on AO3 through their fics also seems unfortunately legit. I mean those asks of shaming people who ask their viewers to not romanticize or glorify abusive relationships in their works is very damning. I’m very disappointed to see that Connie has taken being an inclus to the point of validating antis anti culture wholeheartedly. I can’t think of much more to add to my opinion on that part of the callout. As for the issue of Connie interacting with pro shippers in the past, I do know that this claim is legit. I’ve seen it before and so has Breeze. This was why for a brief time we decided to stop following their blogs. Because it was triggering to have pro shippers put on our dash. And sometimes we just don’t feel it’s worth it to always let people we’re platforming know they’re rbing triggering stuff. So sometimes we just quietly unfollow and choose to not interact until we’re sure they’re filtering what they do and don’t rb in some way. I definitely don’t agree with that behavior. And if they’re still doing that I”ll deplatform again. “The anon asks: “A weird question but do you know any other stimboard blogs with your follow criteria? (No radfems, racists, fandom antis, etc.) I was hoping to find more through your “similar blogs” but a lot have no anti-antis for their DNI or allow truscum/transmeds and exclus. :(“

The user responds: “I know of @turtle-pond-stims, @outofangband, and @kinaesthetics! 🍂🍄" “[ID: A cropped screenshot of an ask sent by Connie from their now-deactivated blog, butch-with-a-tortoise.

Connie says: “hey anon I have safe stim blogs. dm me if you want them. And radfems/bigots aren’t allowed to interact. For my own safety (because the community is honestly terrifying) I can’t publicly say on my blogs that I’m safe for proshippers/kinky people but I try to spread word how I can.”] [ID: Screenshot of a post by evilwriter37, which reads, “I’ve been seeing posts about fandom police leaving ao3, and it’s like: Good. We don’t want you here anyway. Go find your own fanfiction site.”

The post is tagged “#Fandom #AO3 #Antis #Purity Culture” and has 87 notes. It was posted on December 21st, 2020.

There is a reply from main-to-outofangband-andothers saying: “there are Silm antis on that site who are against Russigon (Maedhros and Fingon) not because they’re cousins but because they’re both male (coded)”] [ID: A screenshot of an anonymous (though signed off as being from outofangband) ask sent to evilwriter37, which says, “Melkor and Viggo solidarity is ‘Look there’s nothing wrong with keeping my enemy chained up in my personal chambers at all times so please just focus on the war efforts and I’ll focus on the boy* in my chambers’ -@outofbangand.

*boy used figuratively @ antis”

The user responds: “Pfft!!! Hahaha! You’re absolutely right! (And Viggo does refer to Hiccup in canon as ‘my boy’).”] I can’t really say anything to refute this. Because these are all posts of Connie outright stating that they disagree with antis. And not only sympathize with anti antis but are fully against antis. Looks like very damning evidence. Although ngl I’m not entirely against kinky blogs as a whole? Just so long as they truly stay in their lane with their kink content. And don’t force it on others in any way. Or shame people who are triggered by their kinks. It is true that being entirely against kinky blogs no matter what is dipping your toes into swerf rhetoric. Tbh I’m not going to look at the rest. This is pretty much all I need to make a decision on whether or not I”ll continue platforming Connie. Though I will try to get some more  perspective from people who I interact with as well. Because I feel better about making a more definitive decision after doing that. Also in general please don’t not try to get an opinion from me on how I feel about syscourse. A lot of the claims about Connie’s age weirdness and them using their alters as a shield feel like syscourse to me. Especially if this callout was written by one or several singlets. Singlets should never be trying to judge how legit someone’s system is ever. Even if their system friends encourage them to. You can call out a horrible person with a system without trying to insinuate that they’re lying about their alters in some way. Doing otherwise is ableist ESPECIALLY if you’re a singlet. Also in general the reason I stay out of discussions of judging how someone is handling their systems is because it’s syscourse and syscourse is triggering for my system and I. If this post was an attempt to get me to give an opinion  on the validity of Connie’s system I don’t appreciate it. And I would appreciate not being dragged into such matters again, thank you.

In general there’s like a few parts of this callout that feel legit. Which is unfortunately cluttered with obvious bias and obsessive hatred of Connie. I’m not here to stan or coddle Connie. I know they are not a perfect person. Especially since no human being in the world is perfect. But I feel the way this callout was created was very sloppy since a lot of the evidence was messy at best. And some points were very hypocritical as well as there being some no true scotsman moments from OP. In acting like exclus never do any of the thing that they tried to call out Connie for. Which is behavior that I am not a fan of. This is why people need to be more careful about callouts and like make roughdrafts and have a more unbiased person helping them if they don’t feel they can do it on their own. I’m even trying to make a resolve to do better at that myself. So it’s not like I’m unwilling to put my money where my mouth is. Anyways those are all my thoughts on this messy callout. And tbh I’m not going to get too much more heavily involved in this. Because I need to focus on more immediately serious rl stuff more often, like doing what I can to get out of the hellish landscape of a house I currently am stuck in.

[the-kiwi-is-not-a-pewee]

Emmy.

This is a callout post about discord user emmy, known for now as @eurydices-flower on tumblr, and her nasty behavior regarding her joining and then leaving a specific Riordanverse fan discord server. I don’t usually make callout posts but this needs to be addressed since she has vagueposted about my friends and been rude to them over DMs. I don’t believe she should be allowed to run around and make accusations, especially with people not able to find part of the story due to it being over private messages. So, with the permission of the friend whom she sent DMs to, I will outline her brief stay in the server and the aftermath.

It’s time you heard our side of the story.

Emmy (which is how I will be referring to her for the duration of this post), joined the Trials of Apollo (ToA) server on July 6th, 2020.

For the sake of chronicling how we know that she is also @eurydices-flower on tumblr, she says as much in her self-introduction in the #introduction channel of the server.

Emmy was in the server for less than 24 hours, before leaving voluntarily with seemingly no explanation. Naturally, we were confused and one of our own reached out to emmy on her tumblr blog to ask why she left. I blacked out the profile picture and url of my friend’s blog for the sake of their own privacy.

Let us go over this, piece by piece.

“yeah i’m alright i just realized constant negativity wasn’t rlly my game at the moment and i don’t necessarily have the headspace to ever deal with that.”

That is fair, she is encouraged to look after herself and her own mental state first. If she felt like leaving was the best course of action to take for the sake of herself, then she should not be judged for that. And it’d be perfectly fine if she left it at that! But, of course, I wouldn’t be making this post if she did.

“everyone’s entitled to be everyones own opinion but to bash other people you don’t even know for having opinions was too much for me to handle. a lot of those blogs are good friends of mine and it truly is disrespectful to harp on anyone for having different opinions but go around and spread negativity when others don’t agree with with that opinion.”

Regarding the first part, “everyone’s entitled to be everyones own opinion but to bash other people you don’t even know for having opinions was too much for me to handle”, there’s nothing wrong with this statement as it is on the surface-level. She is expressing that she personally does not want to partake in that particular kind of discourse. That is fine, she is not obligated to in any way, shape, or form. Though I do have a comment or three about the statement before we move on.

She could have muted the specific channel where that kind of discourse was taking place, which as far as I’m aware she never did. The ToA server has 2 specific channels for pjo discourse because members were uncomfortable with it being spread sporadically throughout the server, thus those two channels were made to contain discourse. If she was truly made uncomfortable by what she stated, she could have rectified that problem herself instead of leaving. But, after all, it was her choice to make in the end.

“but to bash other people you don’t even know for having opinions was too much for me to handle”Uh, welcome to tumblr Emmy? I don’t know if Emmy meticulously vets her tumblr experience so that she literally never encounters people bashing other people they don’t even know for their opinions, but it makes it a rather ironic statement considering tumblr’s reputation and that she has a tumblr blog. Heck, it’s not even unique to tumblr, it’s more of a social media thing. I can only postulate that maybe it made her more uncomfortable in a more confined and private space like a discord server, but I cannot be sure. Given she joined at the height of the Ace! Reyna discourse and the “opinions” she’s referring to are likely the aphobic rhetoric spouted by people who were astonishingly upset that Reyna was not a lesbian, I personally am rather uncomfortable that she dumbed it down as if it were merely “having an opinion” and not an attempt to invalidate ace representation in a mainstream media book series just because they were upset that they hadn’t gotten exactly what they wanted.

She retrospectively made herself a hypocrite. I’ll put a pin in this for now and we’ll come back to it.

“A lot of those blogs are good friends of mine and it truly is disrespectful to harp on anyone for having different opinions but go around and spread negativity when others don’t agree with that opinion.”

There’s quite a bit to unpack here just in this one sentence. First of all, no one in the server knew she was acquainted with any of the blogs we were discoursing about. She never stated such at any point prior to this point. We didn’t know, and thus we could not even consider accommodating her before she left in this regard.

I’ve already expressed my own views on her dumbing down people spouting aphobic rhetoric to them merely having “different opinions”, but the server was not “spreading negativity” unless you define “negativity” as calling out people for their aphobic rhetoric and frankly disrespectful treatment of Reyna as a character as a whole. It’s not as beautiful and simple as “others don’t agree with that opinion” when said opinion promotes aphobia and tries to claim that lesbian Reyna somehow cannot peacefully coexist with asexual Reyna.

“I mean no disrespect to anyone in that server when saying that or this but i just truly hope you all emotionally grow as people one day and learn to be more respectful <3 <3”

This… whole line has the basic energy of “No offense but *proceeds to say something offensive*”. Emmy basically went, “I mean no disrespect but *proceeds to say something disrespectful*”. It’s especially rude that she told us that she hopes we “all emotionally grow as people one day and learn to be more respectful <3 <3” when she was the one that came into the server in the first place. Furthermore none of us owe our respect to the people that got so mad over a fictional character not being exactly what they wanted that they have to belittle and attempt to downplay ace representation. It’s not Emmy’s place to tell us to “emotionally grow” and “learn to be more respectful”, especially when in the aftermath she doesn’t put her money where her mouth is.

“Blacked out user: Ah I see. If I may ask, what differing opinion were you being bashed for?

Emmy: not me personally but to see the rr crit circus chat (Note: one of the discourse channels) filled with other people doing it to people not even IN the chat was what bugged me”

Has emmy never been in a discord server with a discourse channel? This is a legitimate question, because this is not behavior unique to the ToA server. All of the servers I’ve seen with channels specifically for discourse have done this. This isn’t some kind of uniquely shitty thing that the ToA server does that we should be morally ashamed of, especially when something similar goes on with people on tumblr posting screenshots of tweets.

“but also when i entered and said i didn’t have opinions on litpollo or medea and i was immediately kinda made fun of for it didn’t make me feel good, as well as saying i was ace and ppl going “oMG the LESBOPhObIa. again i hope y’all just grow emotionally and mentally <3”

Here’s what happened (different colored bars mean different users):

Now, despite the fact that the “r u human” in response to Emmy saying she doesn’t ship litpollo and the “i bet u r not ace u r just LESBWEEN CODED” are jokes, I do understand why those statements made Emmy uncomfortable. Emmy was a newcomer and not acclimated to the sense of humor of the server and to basically shove her the butt end of it was not fair to her. The latter joke especially would be difficult to swallow if Emmy didn’t know that an inside joke of the server at the time was mocking the people who insisted that making Reyna ace was a lesophobic act on Rick’s part despite Trials of Apollo as a series having three lesbian major characters (Emmie, Jo, and Lavinia). 

In simple terms, I agree with my friend’s reply and the apology they gave on the server’s behalf. Emmy did deserve that apology. Doesn’t make the “i hope y’all just grow emotionally and mentally <3” any less rude or unwarranted though.

As far as any of us were aware, this was the end of it. Emmy was a bit rude but we had our closure and as far as any of us knew the ToA server and Emmy had parted ways. And then this happened.

This post has since been deleted by Emmy herself, but before it disappeared it was archived by myself and other friends reblogging to respond to it.

It doesn’t name myself or any of my friends directly, but since we were quite vocal about calling people out for their aphobia when Reyna was revealed to be ace, it is assumed we were the target of the post or are at least part of the group that is the target for the post. If it is indeed the former it seems Emmy is vagueposting about us. Even if it’s not specifically about us, it’s not a good look for Emmy. Let’s parse this apart.

“funny how the people yelling aphobia when it came to Reyna were dead silent today when Rick went on twitter and was blatantly racist and disrespectful”

There’s several reasons why people weren’t addressing Rick’s tweets that day. Some of us don’t use twitter/don’t follow Rick on twitter. Some of us don’t check the #rickriordan tag or other tags like it. Some of us have other main fandoms that are not pjo. Some of us don’t follow blogs that reblogged the tweets and the responses to the tweets, or hadn’t reblogged them yet. Some of us might want to first watch the responses to the tweets because we are not Cherokee, Muslim, or educated enough about those topics beforehand and not dig ourselves into a hole. Just saying, just because we didn’t give an immediate response doesn’t mean we didn’t care.

“funny how they only care about representation when it applies to them and them alone”

Does Emmy know that plenty of non-ace people were defending ace Reyna? If she wants an example, I’m a bisexual woman and I’ve been vocal in my defense of ace Reyna. So her logic that “they only cared when the rep applied to them and them alone” falls apart.

“funny how they only cared Reyna was ace because it gave them the opportunity to harrass the lesbians who were hurting”

I don’t condone harassment but calling them out for their aphobic behavior was not harassment. They couldn’t express their hurt without belittling asexual representation and lacking so much self-awareness that they couldn’t realize how aphobic they were being. I’m sorry that they don’t have my respect for that- actually, you know what, I’m not sorry for it. They literally chained themselves to the concept of Lesbian Reyna and would not accept anything else, that’s their own fault. Just because you’re hurt doesn’t give you the excuse to be an asshole to other LGBTQ+ people that did get representation.

"it’s almost,,, almost like you don’t actually care about these characters or color! that you just want the opportunity to clown and be bullies and abusive”

This is a very rich statement considering those “hurting lesbians” she referred to didn’t care about Reyna as a character. They only cared about Lesbian Reyna and nothing else. Some of them mixed up ace and aro showing stunning ignorance on the difference between asexuality and aromance. And now they’re playing victim because they got called out.

“if you want marginalized groups like asexuals to be represented, where’s your energy for pipers representation and characterization? samirah? where’d it go?”

Heroes of Olympus has been out for years. There have already been posts on tumblr before detailing the flaws in how Rick wrote Samirah and Piper, it’s not a new phenomenon. It just had a resurgence recently. Heroes of Olympus is old news so it’s not as fresh and hot as it was when it first came out so of course while discussions over the representation in it are still going on it has mostly calmed down until recently.

“i see you. i’m watching you. you said nothing. not a single word. not even a messy reblog of one (1) post about piper or sam. dead. Silence.”

Emmy gets a little creepy here and slightly stalkery. She doesn’t like us yet she’s watching our blogs? I guess the Blog Police is here. If you don’t reblog discourse posts about how Samirah and Piper were represented you’ll be arrested and pegged as a racist.

No one is obligated to reblog posts about Samirah and Piper. It’s not reflective of their feelings towards Piper and Sam. it’s THEIR blog and they are not obligated to reblog what others want them to. I hate to break it to Emmy but she can’t force people to reblog the stuff she wants to see.

“i don’t care if you think you ‘shouldn’t have a voice in this’ bc ur white or smth. there’s a difference between spreading posts about this terrible situation and trying to butt in with ‘i’m white but here’s my opinion’“

And here we finally circle back to the retroactive hypocrite point I put a pin in earlier. Here’s a refresher: “everyone’s entitled to be everyones own opinion but to bash other people you don’t even know for having opinions was too much for me to handle. a lot of those blogs are good friends of mine and it truly is disrespectful to harp on anyone for having different opinions but go around and spread negativity when others don’t agree with with that opinion.”

And yet she bashes people she doesn’t know and spreads negativity for… possibly having a different opinion than the ones going around right now or not interacting with it for their own personal reasons. Also not everyone who didn’t immediately jump on the Samirah/Piper rep analysis reblogs were white. Assuming people are white will eventually bite you on the ass.

After that post, she continued vagueposting on her own blog.

I seriously doubt she was sent an anonymous death threat because a friend of mine checked her account earlier that same morning she made that post and the Anon feature was turned off. Then, in the evening, she posted about having an Anonymous death threat sent to her without any proof. I’m not saying it’s not possible nor do I condone death threats, but I do have reason to disbelieve her.

IF she is still referring to her brief stay in the ToA server as that “scenario”, then she neglects to say that she did not tell anyone that she was uncomfortable until after she left. We are not mindreaders, we cannot tell when every single person we talk to is uncomfortable. So it can at least partially be held against you, Emmy, for a failure to communicate with us.

And finally, the straw that broke the camel’s back for me.

This DM was sent to a friend of mine, the same friend that reached out to Emmy following her departure from the ToA server. I can only assume that the post she is referring to is the one I covered earlier, prior to the “anon death threat” post. Let’s parse through this again.

“hi love! i noticed you unfollowed me around the time i made my post calling you and other’s silence on piper and samirahs blatant mistreatment today.”

Wow, you know what, scratch what I said earlier about assuming that the post was directed at me and my friends, Emmy basically confirmed it from her own mouth. Nice to get the ambiguity out of the way right off the bat. Also she’s seriously DMing my friend just because they unfollowed her? And assuming it was because of the post? She can’t definitively connect the two dots but if that was indeed the reason my friend unfollowed her I certainly can’t blame them. Especially given that this was Emmy’s response.

“i hope you realize you’re blatantly racist and just all around a terrible person for harping on the wlw community for being upset about their bad representationk because you had ace representation but don’t use the same energy for the people hurting that they don’t have native or muslim representation.”

It’s spelled “representation”, Emmy. Also the pjo wlw community was upset that REYNA was NOT a LESBIAN, not that they had bad representation. That was their whole salt. As a wlw myself, being upset about bad representation doesn’t give you an excuse to put down ace representation which a lot of them were doing. They have THREE lesbian characters in Rick’s books so far.

Also I thought the issue Emmy took with us was that we weren’t reblogging posts breaking down Rick’s tweets or pointing out the flaws in Samirah and Piper’s portrayal in the books. And now she’s talking about posting about people hurting because they don’t have Native American or Muslim representation? Which is it Emmy, you are sending mixed signals.

“i hope you educate yourself and realize you and the entire community that kept their silence are truly acting terrible right now. thank you.”

This is… extremely rich coming from the asexual who implied she has aphobic friends. I hope she educates her friends and realizes her and the entire community who bashed the choice to make Reyna asexual are truly acting terrible right now. Though given how she put the wlw on a pedestal and turned a blind eye to how aphobic they were acting I don’t have hope. The hypocrisy when she says that my friend is “truly acting terrible right now” when my friend dared to just unfollow her.

And that is how I will close this. She is still posting about the server on her own blog but that is everything major that has happened so far. On behalf of my friend, don’t harass emmy or send her death threats. I may not respect her, but I certainly don’t condone harassment or death threats. 

She is only 15, according to her own blog, but it does not excuse her behavior towards my friends. Being a minor doesn’t exclude you from being a shitty person.

[vurbuberan]

What happened with i-am-a-fish? A compilation:

A lot of people are confused about what happened with Tumblr user i-am-a-fish (who I'll refer to as Fish from here on out for the sake of readability), and a lot of rumor, misinformation and hyperbole is circulating. With this post I hope to compile the claims and evidence against him, examine their validity, and hopefully bring everyone up to speed.

Let's get the main thing out of the way first:

Veggiefact is a Twitter account with over 270k followers. 

The callout post it references is this one: https://ratsofftoya.tumblr.com/post/189087352976/this-is-a-repost-since-just-making-an-addition-to. A second call-out is making the rounds too, from bubblegumlopunny, and it’s a Google doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gv0ixX_jw9geWxFc07b9En--AGHcTqVBO1E6TLGLhHI/edit

Both callouts share about 90% of the same information. Bubblegum’s callout includes accusations of racism and lesbophobia as well, and more incendiary language and questionable charges than the Tumblr post, but in this post I’ll only focus on the accusations that Fish is a pedophile. 

The child porn accounts on Twitter

The “child porn accounts” it refers to are @krskiii, @Karbuitt and @kamawanu__. The last one is actually safe for work, provided you work at a place that’s cool with you being on Twitter, and the second-to-last one sort-of is, depending how your boss feels about suggestive pin-ups and sex jokes. 

Kamawanu posts fanart of various fandoms, but mostly fanart of Rick & Morty and Into the Spider-Verse. Kamawanu is an incest shipper, although they keep that content to a separate, adult-only and locked account. Karbuitt posts artwork of various Nintendo characters, but in particular Viridi from Kid Icarus. Neither of these accounts can be argued to be "dedicated to child porn" in any capacity.  

Although some Tumblr users would argue in earnest this is child porn as well.

Krskiii is the only account to have posted questionable content. While the vast majority of their feed is cute, safe for work anime art, they posted lolicon back in january this year. Both callouts include a second screenshot from a tweet made in 2016 as well. 

Was this something Fish reasonably could’ve known about? According to the callout in the Google doc:

This is straight-up untrue.

Not only is it perfectly possible to follow Twitters without checking them first (and many follow-for-follow Twitters operate this way) but even if you do vet accounts, there is no archive page or tags like Tumblr has to conveniently show you what kind of content you can expect. You have to manually scroll through a person’s timeline or media tab to see what they post.

You’d only see their most recent tweets, not ones they made almost a damn year ago.

Fish followed this account in a follow-spree that had him hit the follow limit for the day on November 12th, almost a whole year after it was made. Fish's claim that he didn't know about these pictures is not only perfectly believable; it’s unlikely that he would’ve even known about it unles he'd dug through this person's media tab quite far.

This is not the behaviour of someone who curated their following list and carefully vetted everyone on it. 

Was this irresponsible behaviour of him, towards both himself and his followers? Sure, you can make that argument. But it’s not evidence for anything more sinister than that.

The Pornhub joke

If you’re still on Tumblr in 2019, you were probably around for the porn purge of 2018, the one that had everyone scrambling for a new online home. With how few alternatives there are of social media sites that allow NSFW content, people started discussing, mostly as a joke, the possibility of moving to Pornhub. It was enough of a Thing that Pornhub's social media department caught wind of it.

I-am-a-fish decided to get in on the joke and created a Pornhub account and posted about “relocating” on Twitter and Tumblr:

How zany! A goldfish on a porn site!

People voiced discomfort over it, so Fish deleted the links from Tumblr and the Twitter bio, but didn't delete the tweet. The Pornhub account itself seems to have never been used.

The sex joke

Part of the callout post is the claim Fish “deliberately exposes minors to porn”, this + the Pornhub thing is what they're referring to.

At some point in late 2018 or early 2019 Fish decided this wasn't the direction he wanted to take his blog into, changed the original post, deleted the reblogs, and hasn't posted nsfw content since.

Also this happened a year ago.

The Discord server

Fish briefly ran a Discord server with a strict no-bullying policy that applied to everyone. This is not a political stance, but it was turned into one. This counts as “believing in reverse oppression”:

Most of the mods were adults, which is supposedly creepy:

One of them thought shipping characters who have been aged-up into adulthood isn't paedophilia:

Someone on the server thought “pedophilia” is a sexuality:

One thing to note here is that none of these actually involve Fish's own thoughts or actions, just those of people he's vaguely associated with (is Mother Allspite a close friend? An acquintance? Someone who volunteered to help moderate the chat?), as well as complete strangers. He's being associated with statements people have made who have no connection to him whatsoever.

Here are the claims I’ve seen making the rounds about the Discord server of which I’ve seen no evidence:

That the mods supported pedophilia

That the mods themselves were pedophiles

That pedophilia was treated as a sexuality you could tag yourself with

That the server was full of pedophiles

The claim that the server mixed minors with adults and didn’t section off nsfw content/discussion is at least a believable one, so I’m not including it here. It’s not proof of anyone being a pedophile, however. It just means the Discord server was poorly managed.

What to make of this?

There is no proof that Fish is anything more than a young adult (despite the callout posts all making a huge deal out of him being an adult, he's still only 19 years old) who got too popular too fast and didn’t understand the responsibility that came with that. Even for his “worst” offenses there is no proof of ill intent behind them. At worst there is poor judgment, irresponsibility, and impulsiveness. There is certainly no proof that he is attracted to children, much less that he ever acted on it. 

Nevertheless,

(I have no idea where the “20+ Twitters dedicated to child porn” claim comes from and found no evidence whatsoever to support it)

[jaredhollyheiditruth]

Major update: Charlie LIED!

Well, talk about a huge bombshell, dropped by none other than Jared Knabenbauer himself!

As you may recall from the initial posts about Charlie, they adamantly claimed that they never told Jared their age, but that they felt it was obvious how young they were. However, Jared himself has released a video that includes evidence that Charlie didn’t omit their age, they flat out lied about it! This blog entry will, for the most part, be reiterating the points made in Jared’s own recent video, though I will be approaching it from my own interpretation of the evidence presented.

As seen in the screenshot below, this claim came from their tumblr account, which is dogveins.tumblr.com. The fact that this is Charlie’s tumblr can be confirmed via web archives by following the link on Charlie’s own art commissions section of their Twitter profile.

Which leads to a weebly site. On that site, you can find a “Contact Me” section, which includes a link to their tumblr...

Said tumblr link leads to dogveins.tumblr.com, confirming that “dogveins” is, in fact, Charlie.

Archive Links Charlie’s Twitter: http://archive.is/zutdQ Charlie’s Weebly: http://archive.is/QvxWo Charlie’s Tumblr: http://archive.is/ailGt

Getting back to the encounter they had with Jared, we can see during the conversation with Charlie (who, by the way, bragged about having “a ton of nudes”) that Jared explicitly asked Charlie if they were over 18!

“I wouldn’t be sendin nudes if I weren’t.” Let me remind you that this is the person that claims Jared “manipulated” them and took advantage of their innocence.

This is important for two reasons. First, Charlie claims that they “never told Jared their age” and that it was implied that they were under 18, but in case you’ve forgotten, Charlie actually claimed initially that Jared never even asked their age!

We now know this to be nothing more than an outright and complete LIE.

Again, for those unfamiliar with the law regarding explicit photos of minors (”child porn”), the law explicitly requires that the person creating, distributing, possessing, soliciting, viewing, or otherwise receiving the materials do so knowingly. That means they have to know in advance that the materials they’re receiving contain images of minors. The reason for that stipulation is rational: The goal of the law is to stop people whose intent is to prey on children.

Child predators knowingly and intentionally seek out children as prey. Jared only accepted pictures from people he believed to be consenting adults. A child predator or pedophile would not go out of their way to avoid receiving pictures from minors, and that’s exactly what Jared tried to do. That is not the behavior of a pedophile. The entire reason the law requires intent is specifically to prevent a person from weaponizing underage pornography by sending it to recipients that are unaware of its nature, just like Charlie did when they knowingly distributed underage pornography to Jared knowing that what they were doing was wrong.

It actually gets worse. You see, not only did Charlie outright lie about their age. Not only did Jared age-check them and they told him that they were over 18 and that Charlie clearly understood at the time that a minor shouldn’t be sending nudes to people and still did it anyway, but Charlie was actually aggressively persistent in sending Jared nudes.

“You want some more stuff?”

Note the timestamps on those logs. Four months later, and Charlie’s randomly hitting up Jared again saying “remember me?” and asking if he wants more nudes...and again, this is someone Jared believed was an adult.

“Can i send some more stuff?”

Clearly, Jared wasn’t “manipulating” anyone into anything. Charlie was very aggressive in sending nudes to Jared. Alarmingly so. In fact, they were so adamant about shoving as many nudes at Jared as they could that it makes one wonder if they had ulterior motives.

It’s clear they got enjoyment out of it, and it was definitely them that took the initiative. Oh, and you might wonder if Jared somehow coerced or solicited them...well, here’s what Charlie said about that while talking to Jared:

“Like how you won’t post any, how you’re like ‘you don’t have to send any [if] you don’t want!”

The person that accused Jared of grooming them, the person that approached Jared, the person that not only lied about their age but acknowledged at the time that they knew a minor shouldn’t be doing that, also acknowledges in texts with Jared that Jared made it clear to people to only send nudes if they were comfortable doing so.

How many thousands of people bought into this and were convinced by these lies?

So Charlie is now confirmed to be a liar. Not just someone that lied by omission, but someone that told a straight up, clear-cut, intentional lie aimed at deceiving the public so they would turn against Jared.

You might be thinking “Maybe Charlie just forgot that Jared asked their age!” After all, that’s what they told The Daily Beast back in May.

That might be plausible if not for the fact that we know Charlie and Chai claim they spent a year gathering evidence and looking through chat logs and screen shots. Charlie had the chat logs of their entire conversation with Jared, so there’s no way they could have “forgotten” that Jared age-checked them. Charlie would have to have conveniently missed the one fact that their entire false accusation hinges on.

That brings only more questions, too.

What about Chai?

Did Chai know Charlie’s story hinged on a total lie?

Chai had zero evidence to support his claims, and Jared has no memory or logs to indicate they ever spoke, so was his whole story a lie, too?

Did Charlie use deception to somehow manipulate Chai the same way they did the rest of the public, or was Chai fully aware of Charlie’s deception from the beginning?

The two of them claim to have spent a year gathering all of this information. Surely, Chai had to know Charlie was lying about Jared checking their age. Right?

Or was Chai just a pawn?

That’s really the only question left hanging...was it Charlie, or Chai, that planned this whole thing? Or was it both of them in tandem? They worked together, and Charlie has now been thoroughly outed as a sham and a manipulator whose entire goal here was to use deception to destroy an innocent man’s reputation. If Chai knew Charlie was lying about their encounter with Jared, then he’s just as guilty of falsely accusing Jared as Charlie is.

Are you still fine with believing the claims of Charlie’s accomplice knowing that Charlie fabricated the lynch-pin of their entire accusation?

If you believed the accusations against Jared. If you thought those allegations leveled against him months ago showed him to be a pedophile...then you were lied to. You were manipulated. You...were victimized.

[lynsunrise]

The happiness is crying at the threshold

Unable to enter its own house...

I still cannot make my own screenshots of this scene. I had to download them.

"Do you think Charlotte should have done/said something else? Were there any chances for her to stop Sidney?"

This thought is absolutely haunting me although we all know the answer, probably.

Also this...

When Sidney is talking about Love.

"I don't love her, you know" it's like

"I don't love her. I love you. Please say... Say... Stop me. Save..."

There is something piercing with its force in his eyes when he says these words. For a second there flashes a relief of realizing that the love of his life is standing before him and she understands him. Then another second is the second of the overwhelming tenderness. And all the world is basking in it. Being on the verge of breaking to pieces. Then the third... Ardency, fervor. And the fourth is impenetrable despair, the fifth... He's ready to leave everything behind! And then the light fades away...but remains to burn inside. Forever inside.

Forgive me.

What has changed in your heart since you first saw this scene? 💔 What do you think?

Also a message that I read (not on Tumblr and I answered as politely as I could) hurt me so much, so much... it caused me enormous pain, it was saying that (it is a translation as it was written in another language) "there will be no old feelings anyway, resentment will remain deep down in the soul. If a loved one betrayed, due to any circumstances, this pain in the heart and soul can no longer be thrown out, the reality cannot be changed. Charlotte is very strong, and she will survive this grief. But love for Sydney will be broken, bitterness will be added to it."

I hate, I abhor to post such a thing here, but I feel like we must get over such a version of events and just throw it away as something absolutely meaningless. First of all, I think in their situation, we simply cannot talk about "past" feelings. For Charlotte and Sidney exists only one love, their love. It lasts as long as life. For Sidney she'll absolutely be the everlasting beautiful love, and for her he'll always be "the same man but much improved". He'll always be loved for who he is. Noble, kind, brave to the point that led to despair. Secondly, it is not betrayal. Charlotte is wise, and even after some time she can theoretically just sit down, analyze, count and see what a terrible deadlock he was in. And this is making the situation even more complicated. And hurtful. Insufferable for her being so far.

Thirdly, I was amazed today again when @catkerr posted a real Masterpiece✨

Just in the morning I was thinking that Charlotte will never marry anyone else. Just like Jane Austen herself. It's either the first and the only love of her life or nobody. And Charlotte might become a writer too (I wish she'd become a writer being together with the love of her life) but she will never forget Sidney and she will never fall in love with another man.

I pray Andrew Davies didn't intend this parallel. Because he really seemed to not. He was talking about season 2 at the very beginning of the series.

I can't stop to wonder how curiously our thoughts were in sync without us even knowing about it. @catkerr thank you for creating this heartbreaking and beautiful parallel.

Fifthly, when he asked "... you don't think too badly of me?" she answered "I don't think badly of you"... Again. Why do I always have a feeling that she could say "I don't think too bad of you" (if she had said so then we could have supposed she felt let down, she felt resentment towards him, she didn't even start to forgive him) but she just said" I don't think badly of you" which means "I don't think badly AT ALL". She understands... 💔And this... God... This hurts like hell!

So, fourthly, as @catkerr also quoted Jane Austen, about the fact that knowing they didn't save their families will destroyed them from within. It is relevant for Sidney's situation. And of course Charlotte❤️💔 besides the feelings raging inside and a bleeding heart knows all too well the realia of the times she's living in to feel "betrayed". It's absolutely impossible to talk about betrayal here. Because it can lead us to absurdity when even Charlotte's not stopping Sidney can be understood wrongly. No betrayal. Sacrifice and pain. And the story of Jane Austen in this beautiful video is an adamant proof. She was thinking only about HIM when she sacrificed their love... Unbelievable, painful, unbearable... But she was thinking only about him even when letting go. I am glad that our situation is a bit different but here we have again sacrifice in the name of family... I am very thankful that this video appeared, it gives substantial support to face these challenges.

So, no resentment, no betrayal, no broken feelings.

Jane Austen's beloved one never felt betrayed by her.

And Charlotte will never feel betrayed by Sidney. She will always feel his love. It's like the sun. You can close your eyes but you will still feel the warmth. It's everlasting.

Also... Charlotte Heywood is not Jane Austen. She has a different destiny. And Sidney is its loadstar. She must find her way to him again as must he.

And we have other people responsible for the unhappiness here. Who must take the responsibility!

I also cannot forget this:

"Lady Authoress trusted Mr. Davies completely with her books, each one like a child to her, each one precious. But none more so than Sanditon, it had been her very last book, her youngest child if you will. The child she had to leave in its infancy and despaired of ever seeing fully grown, completed."

And we witnessed its growth... God, and how gorgeous it became! And for this very reason this "child" JUST CANNOT have such an end.

This must be the universal justice to make it Happy.

Forgive me for hurting you. I hurt you and I hurt myself by writing this. But maybe we'll find a bit of relief... Because I feel like I am entering the anger/denial/sadness stage again which I never even had left as I can feel.

[kit-kat-1221]

So like what is the point?

(see above) Like for this the entire sections after the beginning section ended and where the ending started, like was there any point? O_o Because it didn’t seem like it to me. Could have easily just said. “No why should it? You have your own ideas and thoughts. Just have fun with the things you like. No one had any right to tell you that you liking fan ideas is wrong. A lot of people like seeing what their creations inspire others to do. So just have fun, find people who like the same things and try not to worry too much about it. Sound good?”

Umm Lily who cares if someone finds Josh more attractive than you? Why should you care? You have a girlfriend right? Why not respond. “Eh whatever. I already got someone so I’m not in the market anyhow. Also everyone has their own things they are attractive to. I don’t expect people to all find me attractive. *shrug*. He’s not my taste anyhow.” Like you know a civilize person..... -.-

All I can say is, Lily only you would suggest this -.- Like seriously? Next thing you’ll suggest is a massive comment deletion just being like “clearing out weeds” .... 

For the Anon saying to leave Ink Rose alone.... Lily how paranoid are you!? O_O You realize there are more people in the world that dislike you than InkRose, SegaSister, Eliora (?), ThoughtBubblePony (Brittany), Josh (?), and other people from the mlp fandom right? I mean I can name quite a few people who REALLY dislike you. How are you so sure it was Ink Rose? O_O Like what bubble do you live in?

For the politics one.... Lily please tell me you are joking -.- Totalitarian =  a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state

Socialism: depends the country if it can work honestly. It’s really hard to implement in larger countries....

Umm no Lily you are the one providing all of this salt...

Seriously what proof of homophobia? I don’t want people shipping me with a girl but that doesn’t make me homophobic! Hell any of my female OCs with girls. I honestly am not all that into girl x girl. Some of it is really cute Sailor Uranus x Sailor Neptune, Kureha x Ginko, Chiho x Uzume (it’s very pure even with age difference), not official but heavily implied Mimori Togo x Yuna Yuuki. 

Honestly he doesn’t necessarily have to fly out there. Also Lily wouldn’t he need your address for him to mail it to you? Or a business email? Oh wait you don’t have those -.-

Why do you guys post these comments on Lily’s tumblr instead of Josh’s you know so he can see them? Lily blocked him so he can’t go on her tumblr unless he makes another account....

One.... seriously like you have any room to talk with “Reals over Feels” you’re acting like a child Lily....

Really? Because from what I understood Lizzy found out about you because you put her on your “Good Stuff” thing and they you two eventually hooked up. Since when did Josh enter the equation -.-

Ummm anon seriously? And Lily WTF is wrong with you! He is NOT endorsing a freaking pedophile you asshat!

Hideki-Nishi seriously? I seriously can’t tell if you are a fan of both Lily and Josh or what. Also what was the point of your comment? No seriously what was it? Cuz it seems like something you should say to JOSH not LILY. Alaso Lily could we get screenshots? Because you know you have your subscriber count unlisted for crying out loud. You say you lost 2,000 subscribers, how would that be Josh’s fault? Wouldn’t that be your fault for not engaging your viewers or explaining your side of the story appropriately? You can’t blame Josh for you loosing subscribers unless you have proof that he like deleted subs from you o_O

Why should he be embarrassed for finally standing up to the woman who bullied and harassed him and possibly emotionally abused him? 

Also backfiring? Explain....

.... Okay yes he should have gotten someone who knows law to help him. But seriously Lily. We can find archives and archives of your harassment from over the years.  Also what do you have better to do? I know Josh has school but don’t you have a full time job? Oh wait YouTube is your full time job.... if it’s not then what IS your job exactly? -___-

Umm are you saying watching a brain dead puppy pee itself is funny? or sad? because honestly it’s hard to tell with you. Also if you felt any pity for Josh why not just leave him alone instead of continuing this stupid crusade at mudslinging Josh?

Anon did you ever think he just doesn’t know a lawyer? Or rather one that is good enough to help him with cyberstalking/bulllying/harassment who would be willing to do this as a international affair because it is USA vs Canada? Laws differ between countries you know. -.- 

Of recent videos... honestly who would look there? -.- No seriously who would look there if you never use to do it Miss Lily Orchard. I sure as heck wouldn’t think about looking there...

Found it after she wrote:

Wanna send me fanart, undying pledges of worship or ransom notes? Send it here - lilypeetsubmissions@gmail.com

Really I would like to give Lizzy the benefit of the doubt anyhow because she’s obviously being manipulated into believing her darling is innocent. (Wow it’s almost like how Toon manipulated his friends into thinking he was innocent. But Lily is obviously too kind and nice to do that *there is some sarcasm here somewhere*) But seriously Lizzy doesn’t sound kind. She is coming off as condescending . This is what an overly religious person does to make themselves seem faultless. No joke. 

Lily did you ever go to college -.- ? No? Then you’d know it’s a C- and also in order to practice law here in the states you have to pass a state certification exam. Oh wait you’re from Canada! I don’t know how law school works there please tell me the certification standards? -.-

*slow clap* Wow Lily look at you talking about yourself and trying to make it seem like Josh is the one who lives in an Echo Chamber. Where are your criticisms then hmm? You delete them that’s right! So you can never be wrong! Wow it’s almost like you’re the one runinng a smear campaign with the endless amounts of Community posts that are essentially telling your loyal cult followers to “Go spam his comments sections with dislikes and slander” 

Umm anon how is he dragging the victims in? This is his personal statement saying “Lily I’ve have enough of this. I’ve ignored this for too long. YOU NEED TO STOP!” It has nothing to do with the victims. =__=

Okay last one. Seriously Lily? A non-profit organization where people can learn about sexual predators that works with the Centers for Missing and Exploited Children is sketchy.... WTF Well do you know of a better one? No? Umm then can you talk? Also a quick google search like that’s legitimate! That wouldn’t even hold up in class in a college/university as sufficient evidence. Seriously girl who put bleach in your brain

And to this Anon... what message of them still needing Toon? Prerecorded videos, that would be very difficult to either voice over, text to chat, or cut out? Having him out of all their newer projects? having older videos still up because of story and possibly to review his behavior so they can spot manipulative people like Toon? Also besides pedophilia he had a lot of other issues which none of you guys and girls seem to remember right away: sexual harassment, black mailing, emotional manipulation, harassment, etc. don’t forget about all of these too!  

@lily-peet you think Josh’s fans are crazy? Look at your own. They say more bull than anyone I have ever seen. I question their moral intelligence, and I question your emotional intelligence too. 

[kurokoros]

hey so i’ve been following morgan for a while and thought she was awesome but that thing abt the bookclub/archive is really shady and i’m sorry that your idea was taken

I wasn’t sure if I should answer this or not, but I guess I will if only to say this:

The point of my post wasn’t to slander Morgan or change anyone’s opinions of her. And I definitely don’t condone people sending her hateful messages or otherwise harassing her. None of that is okay, regardless of what someone does or doesn’t do. (And I’m not trying to say you’re doing any of those things, anon, but I know there are some people who will use any excuse to justify making people’s lives miserable.)

At the end of the day, I reached out to the bookclub back in May, I let things go, and then I was sent more screenshots that changed my perspective. Morgan has me blocked on tumblr (but only on her anime side blog), and I assume on discord as well.

People are still going to be friends with Morgan regardless of anything I say. We’ll probably have mutuals. That’s just how fandom goes. Hopefully, this was a one-off situation and everyone will be able to move on from here and do better, because I know I’ve made plenty of mistakes too.

[onlyonecanbeking]

There is a lot to unpack in this message.  Firstly, I am grateful that you opened up about your age despite it being difficult to do so. I believe that is a very necessary step. However, there are many things within this post that I cannot allow to slide by without addressing.  Firstly, me and my “associates” entered in on an open link that you failed to remove. We did not “dig” into any archives of any of your server members, it was available to us by a link that had been saved upon its initial post. We came out of curiosity, as we had all seen your cosplays and your posts and wanted to engage in what we assumed would be a relaxed server. When we arrived, instantly we were interrogated not only from yourself, but from the server members. Many of your members were standoffish, and had statuses that were very paranoid, and distrustful. Me, along with four of the joiners were peaceful, quiet, and compliant. It was one of the individuals who caused a stir. I am and was apologetic of what they did, the actions of them do not reflect on the mindset and behavior of the entirety of the group, as you have claimed for your same group as well.  We were within your server for the totality of two days. When we looked deeper into the server itself, we realized how serious everything was being taken, and so we became incredibly uncomfortable, and left. Like any person who leaves, we didn’t want our information to remain in limbo on a server we are no longer in. So, before we left, we deleted our intros, because we didn’t want to be pursued.  If my entrance into your server had bothered and triggered you, you should have just told me. The cryptic messages were concerning and alarming, and being told I’m being “watched” was creepy. I would have immediately respected your wishes and left if you had asked me to do so. You did not. We left on our own accord after realizing we probably weren’t welcome.  The second thing I’d like to discuss is you and your followers. If you are as you claim, you are 20 years of age. And as you have said many times, you are aware that you have 13 and 15 year old followers. If that is the case, WHY are you providing your audience with suggestive, sexualized images? Both on your tumblr and your twitter, you have taken angled, suggestive images of your shirt unbuttoned, your tie undone, and one with your chest out in the open. That, in all capacities, is UNACCEPTABLE, and the main reason I reacted with such anger and passion is because that is providing minors with sexual content. Your claim that Mark has done this is a scapegoat that doesn’t work. None of Markiplier’s images contain his genitalia, and he carries a male-presenting body, meaning his chest in legal context is okay to be shown. Not to mention, just because one person has done it, does not ever mean it is okay for you to do it.  This is, in all definition, endangerment to minors. That is unacceptable, and regardless of the outcome, I will be bringing this to staff.  I was accused by an individual who was banned from the server one year ago, and ONLY after they were banned. The reason behind this can be seen here, but ultimately, they were removed immediately after I reclaimed the server because I didn’t enjoy their company and they constantly demanded to be a mod. We within our server engage as friends. Writers. And our ages and identities are clear to one another to ensure no falsehoods of what is or isn’t acceptable ever happen. If you yourself would like to visit and see how we work and behave here, I will be most pleased to give you a link. I will not allow or accept anyone from within your servers to come here, however. They distress others. 

We and everyone else have brought up legitimate concerns based off the facts and screenshots we have been provided. We took your posts from tumblr in the context they were given. We looked at the claims you made on discord as they were. We drew conclusions based on our observed evidence. If you don’t want to be seen as a cult, stop acting like one.  For you, personally, I hope you find some solace in this. I experienced the same thing. When my tumblr channel first started, I received a high velocity of support, and people started addressing me as if I were actually Dark. It would have been very easy to ride those highs, and while I wouldn’t have been necessarily “engaging” in their mentality, me not shutting it down would still be considered encouragement. Regardless of your identification, you have to understand you are not actually Dark. They are a fictional character, and thus these people taking it too seriously are grasping at a false god.  You will receive backlash, possibly, for removing that fantasy, and it will be painful. But it needs to happen, and you need to help yourself to heal. I hope you get all the help, support, and love that you can in your life. You deserve it, but your followers do not deserve any more wish-washing about what is or isn’t true. Stop with the soul-selling, stop with the “it’s not a game”. You are a content creator. You are the face of a huge community. It is a responsibility you need to take as yourself, not as Dark. 

Darkipli3r.

I will say this only once. And it is all that I will say.

If you want all of this to stop, if you want there to be a conclusion to this mess that doesn't paint you as what you are, then you need to be honest, now.

You need to be honest about your age, and your identity. You need to be honest about whether or not this entire community you've built is purely fictional, or all to be taken seriously. Because when I see this;

And when I see this;

And when I see this;

And when you personally message me with this;

And when I see public nude photos, along with underage individuals regarding you as Master and Sir...

These lead me to make some very CONCERNED CONCLUSIONS. You have 13 year olds in your following. You need to stop this illusion and OWN UP. Is this real. Or is this fake? Who are you and how old. OWN. UP.

[burnedhybrid]

please reblog | psa;

This is gonna be long so brace yourself, but if you’re in the RPing community especially the TVD, TO fandoms you’ll want to read on. Now, I'm not one to start or cause drama, but after some recent events I've felt the need to address a person who's not only continued to harass a friend and I but also try to emotionally manipulate us. 

This girl ran the dailydanielgillies blog and has many alias, her most recent name to go by is Amy but has been know as Piper, Yvonne & Holly according to @shitheardonline  (which is pretty much a blog dedicated to keeping the RPing community in the know about Amy and her whereabouts). I was following dailydanielgillies of course, to keep up with all things Daniel Gillies. After a few good weeks of following her I realized the blog contained more admin updates than anything Daniel Gillies related. The posts consisted of the admin getting upset every time Elijah (Daniels Character on The Originals) was hurt, or died or her favourite pairing wasn't together she would mouth off, get sad and threatened to delete the blog, threaten to harm herself or to hand the blog over to someone else.

I messaged her initially offering to take over the blog if she wanted to pass it along as she had previously stated. She asked me a few questions (if I had ran a fansite before,  how long I had been on Tumblr... etc) and I thought that was pretty standard and she gave off the impression that she was ready to hand it over to me but then she got quiet, didn’t correspond any further and the negative posts on her blog continued. That wasn’t fun for anyone, a lot of people have claimed it made them feel uncomfortable. After the three weeks had past and finally getting a hold of her, I could tell she didn’t want to part with the blog. That was fine, however her blog wasn’t giving me what I initially sought out for, so I told a friend, Ree, (@suitsofarmor) I was planning to make a Daniel Gillies fansite and she offered to help (Ree has huge admiration for Daniels work and knows a lot of info about him and his projects - so it was perfect)  So we started our own Daniel Gillies fansite under @thegilliesource.  10 hours into starting that blog (the template wasn’t complete or customised, we had about 3-6 followers by then) we both received messages from the Amy asking us why we didnt ask her permission to start that blog. My initial thoughts were ‘WTF?’ After doing some digging I realized she had posted on @dailydanielgillies  (gone now) our new link and then saying she was going to close the site because we made one. Bare in mind none of us made the blog to rival with hers, no one had bad intentions, we both just werent getting what we wanted from her blog and decided to create our own as a lot of her followers had voiced the same issues of not enjoying her admin posts. I woke up to messages from both her dailydanielgillies blog (which by then she had archived) and her inspirationromance RPing blog too. I have some screen shots of the messages she sent us as well as well as what she posted on dailydanielgillies (remember to read from the bottom of each screenshot upward):

She messaged me both on her RP blog and on  (inspirationromance) & dailydanielgillies to which the conversation went like this:

As I said the template wasn’t completed, no schedules were made and we had about 3-6 followers at the point so no one knew about us nor did they flock. 

Also may I add I found it amusing that she already knew the reasoning behind us not deciding to have her as a contributor.  She knew what she was doing already. PLUS she wasn’t entitled to the blog in any way shape or form.

I’m sorry. I found It funny because enemies sounded so dramatic. I felt like a kid in a playground and someone has just said they didnt want to be mates LOL I was confused like, what? I went along with it anyway.

Apparently not.

And I kept to my word. It was clear that as soon as I said something she’d take it way out of context or twist it and that upset me, so I cut ties.  I initially only responded to the messages from this account but I did get some from her RP one inspirationromance and after the Sunday and this previous conversation. I didnt respond. A couple of days after that she deleted that blog altogether - but didn’t forget to blame us first.

At first I didn’t know who inspirationromance was but after looking on her blog I came to find out it was her. Also she had left a really cute message for Ree and I, take a look and also yes, from then on out dailydanielgillies had been deleted which is why you wont find anything.

Yeah...

Than another few message to both me, Ree & @thegilliesource:

Funny that. She’s never mentioned RPing before.  We received an ask on thegilliesource, asking if we had stole dailydanielgillies to which Ree answered you can find here: https://thegilliesource.tumblr.com/post/160926607439/did-you-steal-dailydanielgillies-account

Some ex followers of Amy’s dailydanielgillies blog commented too:

The ‘lots of people’ she was pertaining to where in response to these comments. two.

Didn’t really matter though because she got a shiny new blog with a similar name shortly after called @gilliesgifsource (also deleted, she likes deleting things within a period of a few hours to a few days)

And she sent us this:

I wish I had more shots of her site because the similarity in text was ironic. Still, we never flagged it up with her.

She continued to message us every couple of days on our personal accounts or on thegilliesource. They were all ignored, and that seemed to annoy her more, but we didnt respond because we knew regardless, our voices wouldn’t be heard or respected. We had already tried to have a civil conversation and that wasn’t enough. She would also write about us on her RP blog and then tell us we were horrible people for not responding. This week I started RPing with someone new and realised their blog was made in the past 24 hours and they were a semi selective roleplayer, I realised she had made a starter with Amy and knowing emotional manipulation and abuse can be a trigger warning for people and knowing Amy had a preference for certain face claims... I didnt want this blog getting into something that could be emotionally harmful so early. So I explained that I didnt want to change their mind about RPing with Amy but I sent the RPer there to @shitheardonline, a blog that particularly talks about Amy and her antics online, and the RPer decided they didn’t want to go down that route.  After seeing that we were even mutuals Amy wrote this on her blog (but also blocked the new RPer due to us being mutuals BEFORE the new RPer even had the chance to block her, herself as the new RPer had already started to see the negative side of her)

What tipped me over the edge is when she sent thegilliesource this message:

I did nothing wrong. We did nothing wrong. @shitheardonline is a public site, everyone can grab that information themselves.  She also tweeted this:

Now I’m not one to play with a suicide threat. I have lost three real life friends this way, one being in the past couple of weeks. I treat the topic very sensitively. According to @shitheardonline there had been old accounts of her threatening suicide like this but just doing it to scare people.. And after reading her tweets that followed her tumblr posts and that message I made sure I reported her accounts to a Suicide watch. I wanted to make sure she was okay. Because all things aside it's clear she has a mental health issue (I have anxiety, depression and get severe panic attacks to the point where I pass out) So I know how scary and difficult it is. I get help for my mental health, but I feel as if she doesnt have that help or control over it, her emotions change erratically and I would hate for anyone to feel as if they have done something wrong especially when not even responding to someone.

She was offline for a day and came back with this post:

I’m not posting this long ass post to ‘out’ any one, or shame anyone. That’s never healthy. But I know that also the way she can treat people, take things out of context and react to things isnt healthy either, especially to those who are vulnerable and take things to heart. Messaging someone to say they are the cause of their suicide is intolerable. I was worried sick and for what? She was trying to scare me and it worked, which had bought back a flood of triggers from my childhood, but I choose not to be a victim to it at all and I would hate any of the community having to go through that too.   I’ve felt like I was doing something wrong or was in the wrong until my fiancé reminded me that hurt people, hurt people - But that doesn't make it justifiable. To get the message out and protect  others too. I’m writing this post as a psa if anyone is looking to steer clear of Tumblr drama or want to avoid triggers like like suicide, emotional abuse and manipulation. She has a tendency to post and then delete, so that’s why I’ve been taking screenshots, so going on those pages they may have posts missing - this isn't out of the ordinary.  All info I shared are online and public and can be publically shared. The reason I’m sharing  screenshots of PMs is because I want everyone to see that I’m not making this up and/or I’m not lying. Because Amy has called me that. On several accounts. BTW within the last 24 hours she’s also changed her URL from @inspirationromance to @theheartofromance, then to @characterarchiving. I woke up this morning to a notification of a follow/unfollow from phoebegillies. After inspecting the account  and realising the rest had been deleted (including gilliesgifsource) I’ve realised she signed up with a new email (because she was blocked on the other accounts too so she couldn’t have followed me.) So she’s deliberately come and found me again to follow me then unfollow me. It was like a little dig at me. So I blocked her. If you choose to do the same its: http://www.phoebegillies.tumblr.com URL changes and account changes arent uncommon either. Bare in mind. I still haven’t responded to her since. She’s now harassing me by constantly reaching out despite my efforts to stop her. If you’re interested in more info about her you can find it on @shitheardonline That blogs over a year old and Amys history has been tracked that far. There you can find a list of aliases she’s used over the years as well as URLs she been under, horrible tweets she’s sent out and tagged TO writers in etc...

As of today (the 31st of May) she’s also made her Twitter account private so I’m glad I screen shotted what I could when I had the chance. I wish this girl the best and hope she gets the helps she needs, but its not okay to point the finger, victimise, harass and manipulate people online. And I want all of us to stay safe. Please reblog this so others can know. Take Care, Jolie x

[deborahdeshoftim5779]

The Marvel of Trelsi (Intro)

I can’t stay away from these two; they will have me smiling in my grave. Having been heavily critical of the writing for the High School Musical series, I must temper my own acidic tongue (typing fingers) to celebrate what I call “The Marvel of Trelsi”. As I am currently writing Trelsi fic (which WILL be finished sometime this century), and trying to get at least 1500 words a day, I need to write as much meta as possible to flesh out my ideas and headcanons for this pairing. 

What to say? That I love Trelsi is an understatement. That I will keep repeating this is a given. And despite all of my sarcasm, opprobrium and inveterate anger towards the writers of the HSM franchise, who ruined my viewing experience by sinking the RMS Troy Bolton whilst claiming the ship could not sink, the creation of Trelsi is to their credit. It is gloriously ironic that the show set out to demonstrate that the main couple epitomised the ideal of love and a solid relationship, but ended up demonstrating this between the protagonist and an allegedly minor character instead. As I have said before, Troy and Kelsi grow from strength to strength throughout the movie series, whilst Troy and a certain other lady go careening down a mountainside in blizzard conditions. So, I must give full credit to the screenwriters for creating this ship and thus fostering an enduring love for two of the most likeable characters I have ever seen onscreen. 

In reality, no introduction to Trelsi is needed. Or at least none that supersedes the beautiful screenshot I have at the top, reposted for the pure joy of it. Interestingly, when I use the word “Trelsi”, I am actually referring to their canonical friendship FIRST, before referring to a potential romantic ship. Apart from being easier to write, I like to adhere very closely to canon and build my ideas from that basis before branching into my own headcanons. I have an intense dislike for OOC and all the horrors that spring from that Pandora’s Box. This friendship comes as a result of Troy taking an interest in Kelsi’s music and resurrecting her self-esteem after she has been bossed around by Sharpay Evans during the first movie. The two become friends very quickly and prove to work as a great team during the production and execution of two major musicals in Junior and Senior Year. 

You will notice, of course, that I exclude Gabriella from this description-- not because she wasn’t present for the beginning of the Trelsi timeline, but because she had no hand in its development. I am currently planning several Trelsi fics, one of which includes a significant rewrite of the canonical timeline without Gabriella, and most of the major events would have happened either in a different way or with no change whatsoever were she not there. I notice that many fandom writers will often describe Kelsi as being friends with Troy and Gabriella. This intrigues me, as it implies that she is friends with them on an equal basis. Call me picky, but appears to be untrue. I cannot think of any scene between Kelsi and Gabriella that comes anywhere near the Trelsi bond. What do I mean by the Trelsi bond? I mean primarily the unspoken understanding between them that makes the two so effortlessly comfortable around each other. Case in point: the lovely, LOVELY hug in HSM III seems obvious, but I draw the viewer’s attention back to HSM I, when Troy tries out “What I’ve Been Looking For”. Isn’t it interesting that Kelsi only has to nod at him to start singing the song, but guides Gabriella through the first line before letting her sing the rest? Troy, who is notably MORE nervous about performing, has never tried this song before and seemed a little surprised when Kelsi asked whether he wanted to hear “how the duet’s supposed to sound?”

Yes, I know, this is MINOR. But it intrigues me. We will discuss this in more detail during the next instalment. 

I have LOADS of notes in my Google Drive on Trelsi, because it was and still is incredibly important for me to understand WHY I shipped them, the potential and realistic avenues for this ship and how to portray their dynamic. I’m going to try and condense those notes in my next couple of posts when I explore their beautiful, but cruelly limited scenes together. Unlike the average shipper, I tend to think-- overly much, from the length of my Tumblr posts-- on ships and dynamics. In the beginning, I wanted to ship Troyella. It seemed natural to me, as they were stamped across the screen. Turns out I could only ship one half of Troyella; that is, Troy Bolton, who is so such a sympathetic hero. He has flaws. He struggles*. He has a journey. He grows (when the screenwriters allow him to!). We see this. Gabriella? I got nothing. Believe me, I tried. That’s why I was pinning my hopes on HSM III to deliver. This did not happen, and that prompted a 13 (see my archive for April/May!) post series on my fury with this movie and the dreadful implications for Troy Bolton, the art of writing and human decency. 

So, throughout this series, I will examine Trelsi with my usual fine-tooth comb, as viewed through the scenes in the movies as well as my headcanons and musings. Of course, I do not pretend to be impartial. I have a very unfavourable view of Troyella, as one may already have gathered; however, whilst being scathing towards this “relationship”, I have and will continue to provide evidence for my opinions here. I will frequently compare the Troyella dynamic with the Trelsi dynamic. Please do not be surprised to find that Trelsi wins 11 times out of 10. I am not bound by the Trade Descriptions Act or any other regulatory equivalent, so I can say whatever the hell I like. 

The particular themes and questions I want to explore alongisde my scene analysis are:

1- Who IS Troy Bolton?

2- Who IS Kelsi Nielsen?

3- What makes the Trelsi friendship and dynamic so friggin’s special? Why does it make me want to weep and write poetry?

4- Friendship, Romance or Both? What’s their dynamic? What would attract the both of them? What are their flaws? How would these flaws work together?

5- Why is Trelsi a superior potential romantic ship to Troyella? (Oh, I’m going to have a field day with THAT one!) Why is Trelsi so poorly appreciated as a potential romantic ship?

I may add some more questions later on. I am definitely open to prompts and questions from anyone reading this. My posts are long, partially because I think too deeply about things, partially because I have a daily word count to smash, partially because I am depressed by the lack of all things Trelsi and mostly because HSM, despite infuriating me, GAVE ME TRELSI SO I’M HERE FOREVER! :D Anyway, I hope this will be fun. One thing I’d like to see more of in the HSM fandom is a willingness to at least consider other ships that aren’t called TroyHELLa. I’m not asking for conversion to Trelsi. (Although that would be nice. One, I’m pretty lonely out here. Two, these two have a healthy dynamic!). But it would be good if more fans actually detached Troy from Gabriella’s umbilical cord and viewed him firstly as a man and a hero protagonist, and secondly with potential other characters either platonically or romantically. For a series that is supposed to represent being YOURself, you would think fans would take that on board, huh? 

Try it? You might like it. 

TO BE CONTINUED.

(*FOOTNOTE- I have no time for people who claim that Troy Bolton is a privileged brat. Unless you can give me the name of a privileged brat who treats everyone equally, is kind, generous, thoughtful, mature, hard-working, gets ALL his friends jobs for the summer and makes friends with kids who would be considered “uncool”, always has a kind word for everyone, always appreciates other people’s achievements and is always on hand to help his friends, then please do be quiet. With a father who is a public school teacher and who struggles to pay high tuition fees, I think any such argument is dead in the water. Claims that Troy was a “jerk” in HSM II are entirely unfounded-- please refer to my Questions for HSM II Part I and Part II for further information. Claims that Gabriella was right to pursue her own future are fine, without the odious implication that Troy stood in her way. This is completely false. Rather, it is Gabriella who stood in Troy’s way of achieving a much-needed scholarship back in HSM II. Claims that being a popular basketball player make you a jerk are rendered absurd by the very obvious social pressure that accompanies such a level of fame, and which deeply affect Troy in every movie. This is thoroughly nonsensical. Claims that Gabriella is a privileged brat are, of course, founded in fact).