#but the majority reading it censored are NOT those people

[homestuckconfession]

some of yall act like the slur replacement project is to make homestuck less problematic or some shit and like.... im not gonna deny if thats the intention or not but there still Should Be One That Exists. that just censors the slurs. are we forgetting that slurs are slurs and some people cant read them without having a full blown panic attack

.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Canonical enshittification

This is the Facebook playbook: you lure in publishers by promising them a traffic funnel ("post excerpts and links and we'll show them to people, including people who never asked to see them"), and then the rug-pull: "Post everything here, don't link to your own site. Become a commodity supplier to our platform. Abandon all your own ways of making money. Become entirely subject to the whims of our recommendation system."

Next will be: "We block links to other sites because they might be malicious."

Then some kind of "pivot to video."

Probably not video (though who knows?) but some other feature that a major rival has, which Twitter will attempt to defraud its captive, commodified suppliers into financing an entry into.

In case you were wondering, yes, this is canonical enshittification. Lure in business customers (publishers) by offering surpluses (algorithmic recommendation and an ensuing traffic funnel). Lock them in (by capturing their audience and blocking interop and logged-out reading).

Then rug the publishers, clawing back all the surpluses you gave them and more, draining them of all available capital and any margins they have, until they die or bite the bullet and leave.

I would also give good odds on this leading to a revivification of the "Pay us tens of thousands of dollars a month for a platinum checkmark and we'll actually show what you post to the people who asked to see it."

That will be pitched as the answer to publishers' complaints about not wanting to turn themselves into commodity Twitter inputs. It will be priced at the same (or more) as the revenues publishers expect to lose from being commodified, making it a wash.

All of this seems to me to be an "unfair and deceptive business practice" under Sec 5 of the FTC Act.

If I sign up to follow you because I want to see what you post, and Twitter shadowbans your posts unless they are formatted to maximize your dependence on Twitter, they have deceived me, and are being unfair to you.

This is *very* analogous to the Net Neutrality debate, where a platform blocks or deprioritizes the things its users ask to see, based on whether the suppliers of those things are its competitors.

I've written about how an end-to-end principle for social media could be enforced under Sec 5 of the FTCA, how it would address this kind of sleazy practice, how it would be easy to administer, and wouldn't form a barrier to entry for new market entrants:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

[soulren]

Go spend some time on male pattern baldness or male(AMAB) balding forums/subreddits and such. I did after realizing it is happening to me and the ammount of people who truly don't realize how BRUTALLY it tanks people's confidence and mental health is insane.

There's no cure to baldness by the way, and it can start at any time and there's no way to predict how fast or slow it will go. The only real working option is a daily pill that usually just halts it, but it can stop working or just slow it down or cause major side effects. To regrow you have to use a daily topical solution, or use a roller to wound your scalp. None of these are surefire by the way, and if you stop them you'll just lose your hair and whatever you regained. It's a daily involved thing that might not work and often at best just retains. The best drug, the one that occasionaly gives regrowth, also causes shedding at the start, and can have side effects from growing breasts to brain fog to EDsyfunction(sorry, censoring cause tumblr). Now, those are INCREDIBLY rare and almost never happen but it weighs heavily on the mind of those already spiraling.

But that's just background. What I'm here to talk about is the pure woe you'll see on those forums. People speak as though their lives are over, as though they've lost every chance of finding a woman(predominantly, there's a running idea in such places that women don't like bald men or like them less) or doing anything. You can read countless stories of people who describe that they no longer go outside, are now filled with anxiety and self-hate, have gone from extroverted to never showing their face. And some of these people are kids who lost their hair in high school or even before, or are holding as best they can to a very receded hairline and feel like there is nothing they can do.

And then there's something touched upon far less in those communities, but is important to bring up here; baldness and masculinity. There's the horror of knowing so much of society sees a bald guy as a very masculine guy, at seeing that the best advice for being hot and bald is "grow and beard and big muscles bro". Imagine now you're AMAB balding and nonbinary, or a trans woman who doesn't want to be on hormones.

Just genuinely take the time to look at those forums no matter who you are. Understand what these people go through, what I am currently going through. It is soul-crushing, spiraling, brutal. I have the dream of one day being like Brennan Lee Mulligan or Matt Mercer and starting to lose my hair made me feel like I could never. I felt like and still feel like I would have to be masculine, have to be a bro-y dude, have to look older than I was(I'm fuckin 22). It was the feeling that I could never dress feminine again, never present as a woman when I wanted to again, that I'd always be viewed as a bald guy before anything else.

This is an incredibly vulnerable post for me, and I hope it reaches you all as well in a kind and understanding mood. There's a tendency online for people to joke about baldness, to make fun of it, to treat it as a playfull silly thing but it fucking ruins lives, and it shouldn't. It happens to half the population's sort of bodies and very often. It should just be a neutral thing. You don't need long hair to be feminine, you don't need hair to be feminine. You don't need hair for anything. I guess I'm just saying in general that everyone should be kinder about balding, more understanding, and view it with as much import as they'd view the pixels between this sentence and the next. None at all, I mean.

And for those like me, very feminine guys who wanna keep that and don't want a beard and are terrified of balding, here's some names and I do hope others that see this will add more; Mr. Bruce (also in The Correspondents(band) Alex Ward in LA By Night Jason Carl in LA By Night Cecil Baldwin of Welcome To Night Vale Bob The Drag Queen RuPaul(in looks alone, I know about the whole fracking stuff but this post is about looks) tananasho on instagram Also your mannerisms and style of dress will convey femininity far more than your hair. Yea sure a front-on neutral shot of you may not and maybe you need makeup and stuff, and hell maybe a lot of people might reject you more but it'll just filter down to the people for you.

And to all you artists and writers and creatives; make more bald characters. Try it out. Feminine ones, masculine ones, all sorts. None of the copout nonhuman sort, just dudes and girls and mates and individuals who are all sorts of things and also bald. It might make a few of the people going through the various vortexes of pain that balding causes feel a bit better.

And to those noticing I did not adress female hair loss much here, that was intentional. I am AMAB and currently a nonbinary guy who goes by any pronouns but often likes to present as fem. I learned I was possibly losing my hair and lost two months of my life, no work or going or anything, to male hair loss forums and research and spiraling. Checking my hair twenty times a day, unable to sleep, unable to eat, unable to think. And my situation was NOT unique, but it also did not give me any experience or understanding of female hair loss and what AFAB people may go through with that, so I don't feel knowledgeable enough to speak on it. Also living with baldness WILL get easier and you will find something that works for it, by virtue of simply living with it. Things get easier with time.

[sunny-day-jack-official]

URGENT! Stop KOSA!

Hey all, this is BáiYù and Sauce here with something that isn't necessarily SnaccPop related, but it's important nonetheless. For those of you who follow US politics, The Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate yesterday and is moving forward.

This is bad news for everyone on the internet, even outside of the USA.

What is KOSA?

While it's officially known as "The Kids Online Safety Act," KOSA is an internet censorship masquerading as another "protect the children" bill, much in the same way SESTA/FOSTA claimed that it would stop illegal sex trafficking but instead hurt sex workers and their safety. KOSA was originally introduced by Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass. and Bill Cassidy, R-La. as a way to update the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Act, raising the age of consent for data collection to 16 among other things. You can read the original press release of KOSA here, while you can read the full updated text of the bill on the official USA Congress website.

You can read the following articles about KOSA here:

EFF: The Kids Online Safety Act is Still A Huge Danger to Our Rights Online

CyberScoop: Children’s online safety bills clear Senate hurdle despite strong civil liberties pushback

TeenVogue: The Kids Online Safety Act Would Harm LGBTQ+ Youth, Restrict Access to Information and Community

The quick TL;DR:

KOSA authorizes an individual state attorneys general to decide what might harm minors

Websites will likely preemptively remove and ban content to avoid upsetting state attorneys generals (this will likely be topics such as abortion, queerness, feminism, sexual content, and others)

In order for a platform to know which users are minors, they'll require a more invasive age and personal data verification method

Parents will be granted more surveillance tools to see what their children are doing on the web

KOSA is supported by Christofascists and those seeking to harm the LGBTQ+ community

If a website holding personally identifying information and government documents is hacked, that's a major cybersecurity breach waiting to happen

What Does This Mean?

You don't have to look far to see or hear about the violence being done to the neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ communities worldwide, who are oftentimes one and the same. Social media sites censoring discussion of these topics would stand to do even further harm to folks who lack access to local resources to understand themselves and the hardships they face; in addition, the fact that websites would likely store personally identifying information and government documents means the death of any notion of privacy.

Sex workers and those living in certain countries already are at risk of losing their ways of life, living in a reality where their online activities are closely surveilled; if KOSA officially becomes law, this will become a reality for many more people and endanger those at the fringes of society even worse than it already is.

Why This Matters Outside of The USA

I previously mentioned SESTA/FOSTA, which passed and became US law in 2018. This bill enabled many of the anti-adult content attitudes that many popular websites are taking these days as well as the tightening of restrictions laid down by payment processors. Companies and sites hosted in the USA have to follow US laws even if they're accessible worldwide, meaning that folks overseas suffer as well.

What Can You Do?

If you're a US citizen, contact your Senators and tell them that you oppose KOSA. This can be as an email, letter, or phone call that you make to your state Senator.

For resources on how to do so, view the following links:

https://www.badinternetbills.com/#kosa

https://www.stopkosa.com/

https://linktr.ee/stopkosa

If you live outside of the US or cannot vote, the best thing you can do is sign the petition at the Stop KOSA website, alert your US friends about what's happening, and raise some noise.

Above all else, don’t panic. By staying informed by what’s going on, you can prepare for the legal battles ahead.

[mothhball]

If There's No End

Pairing | Jonathan Crane x Reader

Warnings | DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT!!! MAJOR CHARACTER DE*TH – Reader d*es! ANGST, HURT, NO COMFORT, CANN*BALISM, do NOT read if any of this feels too uncomfortable!! Jon is very, very delusional in this, drugging, lobotomy, established relationship, again - CANN*BALISM. (tumblr wants me to censor this :'] )

Summary | Jonathan reminisces about your shared life and the day you found out his secret.

Words | 2.7k

Notes | Don’t yell at me for this, you’ve been warned! Not proofread, please don’t beat me up.

@kiss-me-cill-me welp, this is the cannibalism fic lmao bon appetit

Jonathan never thought he’d know guilt. But now that he’s hunched over on his knees, digging through the mud with trembling hands, he suspects that this might be it. His vision is still blurry. Has been for the past few hours. The tears have turned his world into a faded, abstract mess, like a child’s chalk drawings that are in the middle of being washed away by the rain. If it had been anyone else, he would have settled for the large dump of hazardous waste behind ACE Chemicals. But not in this case. Never in this case.

Jonathan never thought he’d grow to respect another person, but you crashed into his life with an earth-shattering intensity that nearly made his knees give out as soon as you turned to greet him. Hi. Two letters, one syllable. And it affected him in such a profound way that his ears still burn at the memory. Even during that first fleeting conversation, he felt as if the edges of his person began to become cloudy. Desperate to merge with yours until there was no end and no beginning to the two of you as separate people. Until flesh and bone and viscera were a shared commodity between him and you. A fever dream with the appropriate symptoms. Some nights he woke from a beautiful dream, a fantasy in which the two of you were irrevocably merged into one being. And on those nights, hot tears of disappointment and anger burned so harshly on his cheeks that he expected his sheets to sizzle where the drops fell.

It was love. It had to be. And when the universe finally relented to the prayers and wishes he whispered until his throat became hoarse, his life exploded with color. Fleeting glances and coy small talk managed to bloom into something more, something deeper and more intimate than Jonathan’s analytical vocabulary could ever fully explain. You loved him in a way that was entirely foreign to him. Unconditional and patient. You just… got him. Without even trying to. Your gaze traveled past skin and ribs down to his very heart and soul, and you didn’t turn away. But you didn’t know everything back then. How could you? He was so secretive about everything involving his studies. Sometimes, he couldn’t resist the temptation of monologuing about fear and its shackles on humanity. But that was all he was willing to share with you. He granted you a microscopic detail of the true extend of his passion. A laughably small excerpt of his obsession.

Jonathan never thought he’d know love. But you proved him wrong with every smile, every whisper of praise, every tender touch upon his skin.

He knows how cliché it is to claim that settling down with someone never occurred to him before he met you, but it's the truth. In a life that was filled with hurt and contempt, you were the first to take a chance on him. Undeterred by his sometimes standoffish nature and cold attitude, you pressed onwards until he cracked, revealing the mush that you've managed to melt him into.

A future with you was worth everything he had endured up to that point. The plan was to graduate, find jobs and get hitched immediately. He wanted to put his last name on you, give you a part of himself that you would take wherever you went.

The first two steps were already completed with him getting a PhD and a professorship, that he quickly lost again, somewhere in the middle. Aside from a few mishaps and arguments about his attitude towards his patients at Arkham, all seemed right in paradise.

Often, the two of you would lie awake at night, talking about your future while you played with his fingers. "I'd like to get married in Spring," you said. And he just nodded, already imagining your bright smile when he'd put the ring on your finger. On those nights, the urge to become one often overtook him, and he rolled on top of you to devour you in a different way. In hindsight, he should've told you. Given you a chance to see the true extend of his rotten soul. You already knew so much about him, yet you still wanted a life with him. You often said how much you craved the mundane with him. Lazy Sunday mornings, standing in line to get groceries, gossiping about your neighbors in the quiet part in the outskirts Gotham City that you wanted to move to. He should've told you about the toxin he keeps stashed away in his office, no more than 15 feet behind the pillow you rested your pretty head on.

He didn't dare to think about what could've been. No, he made the right decision. Surely.

He still remembers your wide eyes. The way the color vanished from your complexion as you turned towards him with his mask in your hands. He remembers how wrong the burlap looked, crushed between your beautiful fingers. You asked him to explain, even though you were already tearing up just by looking at him. Jonathan was always convinced that he could read you like a book, but in that moment, he doubted himself. And he panicked. From one second to the next, he lunged at you, putting you into a headlock that constricted the blood flow to your brain, and you wheezed and wailed for him to stop, but he couldn’t. If he let go, you’d let yourself be ruled by secondary emotions. Emotions like betrayal and heartbreak that threatened to overshadow the deep, deep love you felt for him. It was an act of mercy for both of you. So, he held you until your struggling stopped, and your consciousness slipped away. It always takes longer in real life than in the movies. And he cried with you. God, did he cry, soaking your hair with his tears as he choked you into a blackout.  

You were out for ten minutes. Ten agonizing minutes which he used to prepare for what needed to be done. Your happiness was his happiness, so he had to do something to take your mind off of the situation. Or any situation for that matter. He has never done this before, but the thought of desperate measures during desperate times, didn’t give him the opportunity to hesitate. A local anesthetic and a muscle relaxant would suffice, he decided as he rushed to gather the equipment. By the time you came to, he was already straddling your torso, leaning over you with fresh tears in his eyes. As you began to silently panic, Jonathan was quick to try and shush you. Oh, how it hurt him more than it hurt you. The lobotomy set was a Christmas gift from you. A tongue-in-cheek nod to the history of the profession he chose. It was fate. It had to be.

The tip of the ice pick-like instrument felt cold against your eye socket, and he clenched his teeth at the shiver that ran down your spine. His hands were violently shaking already, and your involuntary movements didn’t make it any better.

“Shh… shh… don’t move, angel… It’ll… it’ll be so quick, I promise.”

Another sob wrecked through his body as he lifted the delicate metal hammer.

“You need to try and sing for me, okay? Or hum. Or anything. I need… I need to know when it’s deep enough. Just try, angel. Just try, okay?”

Jonathan’s voice was as shaky as the grip on the instruments. But by God, he had to do this. He had to keep you by his side. His other half, his future, his everything. The vessel of every passion and love he poured into you. You just stared up at him through watery eyes, unable to open your mouth anymore, so you settled for humming. It was a nonsensical melody, a mish-mash of several nursery rhymes without a title. The first strike of the hammer against the orbitoclast caused an incredible pressure to spread in your skull, and black spots settled in your vision as the tip of the instrument breached bone. The crack was nauseating, but you couldn’t even struggle. Jonathan’s breathing became heavy, and he wheezed out a sob that sounded like it came from a dying animal when he saw the blood that began to fill your eye. But he had to continue.

“Just like that. Just like that, angel.”

With trembling hands, he prepared himself for the second strike, but he underestimated the adrenaline that his blackened heart was pumping through his veins. Something went wrong, his sweaty hands slipped off the equipment, skewing the angle of the pick when he hit it. And he hit it hard. Immediately, your humming stopped and turned into stuttered noises. A bead of clear fluid dripped from your nose, rolling down over your lips. This wasn’t blood.

The crushing realization that he messed up caused Jonathan to freeze entirely. Cerebrospinal fluid was leaking out of your nose at a quick rate, sending him into a blind panic. He tried to pull the pick from your eye, causing even more damage to your precious brain. A brain that was meant to love, not hurt. But here you are, wasting away before his very eyes. You’re suffering beneath him like a bird that hit a window in a curious attempt to explore. And you did explore.

Back in his childhood, he once found an injured crow in the shade of the family house. The poor thing was twitching and bleeding, much like you are now. Jonathan remembered the crushing emotions that he felt when he looked at the animal. And he also remembered the feeling when his grandmother put it out of its misery by crushing the crow’s head under her shoe like it was nothing. Like it was nothing. You weren’t nothing, but you still deserved that brand of mercy.

He doesn’t remember how he did it. Whether he wrapped his hands around your throat or injected you with enough muscle relaxant to put you down. In fact, he doesn’t remember much of the first night of complete silence. When he emerged from the blur, his throat felt raw from sobbing, and his eyes were swollen and red. He had left the room that contained your body immediately, fearing that he’d catch fire from stepping into a place that had been consecrated by the death of an angel. Eventually, after he had bitten his lips bloody and used up every tear in his eyes, he dared to face you again. And God, were you still so beautiful. And as ashamed as he was for thinking this way, there was also a positive to this. A big one at that. You would always be his. No one else would ever get the privilege of seeing your eyes or hearing your voice again. You truly belonged to him in every way. And as he stepped over to kneel besides your body and take your hand in his, he actually smiled. It was just the two of you. Like you always planned.

It was a grueling process. To strip skin from flesh, and flesh from bone. But he was patient. Patient in the same way that you were with him. Patient in a tender, saccharine way that made his insides squirm as if he was infested by maggots. But the only parasite inside of him was love. That's how it works, right? You can never truly get rid of it.

Once the bones were clean, he had to step back for a while. The impending loneliness made him stumble into the bathroom to vomit into the toiled bowl. For a good 30 minutes, he sat there. Doubled over and white-knuckling the porcelain. There was no disgust involved. Just fear. God, he was terrified of being alone again. Terrified of truly losing the one thing he couldn't breathe without. And as he sat there, heaving like a dog, he found a solution.

He ate your heart first.

Every bite, every mashing of teeth against teeth was an act of love. He had to pause a few times, chuckling at himself for his choice. How cheesy it was to go for the heart first. But how could he not? Even Jonathan wasn't immune to symbolism. It wasn't about taste or texture. It was about the growing sensation of having his stomach filled. Of having his hunger satiated by forming an everlasting connection with you. You would never be wearing his wedding ring, but you'd be with him forever in a different way. You'd be his until the day that he died. And even then, he hoped, your spirits would be so entangled that there was no way of separating the two of you. Maybe you'll get reincarnated as one soul together.

Over the course of three weeks, he forced himself to consume as much of you as he possibly could, setting the table for two since you were there as well. It always started off tame. He tried to savor the feeling of becoming one, but at some point, his composure always cracked, and he ate your body like he was a starving animal trying to fill the never-ending pit inside of him. The part that hurt him more than anything, though, was crafting a story. In the process of keeping you to himself, he had to ruin your reputation.

It was easy for others to believe. Of course, you would leave Jonathan for someone else. Most people in your small circle secretly never believed that this relationship would last. It was easy to make them believe something they had already expected to happen at some point. In this crafted lie, you went off to live with someone else, far away from Gotham. But in reality, you were always here with him. Beneath his skin that now became your own.

Jonathan never thought he’d feel peace. But now, that he has finished digging this hole in Gotham Central Park, he thinks he’s gotten pretty close. It has started to rain a few minutes ago, but he’s not bothered. In his mind, it’s your doing. Your loving attempt to wash the sin and guilt from his body. Because you know the depths of his devotion, know the intend behind his actions. This isn’t the first hole he has dug since the two of you became one. But it’s the final one. Back when he was confronted with the reality of what to do with your bones, he decided to do what you would want. You always were the romantic in the relationship, so he decided to leave your remains in places that were significant to the both of you.

His hands aren’t shaking anymore, as he pulls the plastic bag that he brought closer to himself. The material shreds quickly as his fingers tear through it, and he pulls it open to reveal the last pieces of your previous body. A tender smile spreads over his face as he reaches into the bag to pull out the bones of your fingers and wrists, remembering how he tore off the flesh and skin with his teeth. Your loving touch would always be with him. Carefully, he lowers everything into the hole he dug before he turns to the final piece. Tears of relief well up in his eyes as he gazes upon the empty sockets of your lovely skull. With the caution and gentleness of a mother setting down her newborn, he places your skull into the earth, whispering promises of everlasting love under his breath. This isn’t the end. Far from it. Once he wipes his eyes with his sleeve, he notices something else. It takes a moment to dislodge one of your molars from your jawbone, but Jonathan eventually manages. The piece of ivory bone almost seems to glow in the dim light that’s being casted by a distant street lamp. It’s your tooth. You share his now, so there’s no need for it anymore. But it’s one last piece of your smile.

And in a final act of completion, he swallows it.

[welcometothejianghu]

Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 鬓边不是海棠红/Winter Begonia

Winter Begonia is the tale of the intertwined lives of a wealthy, westernized businessman and a bratty, dramatic Peking Opera performer as they navigate the historical landscape of 1930s China.

It is a slow historical ramble of a show, to the point where I couldn't really say it has a single plot. Events just happen in their lives, and the show follows them with a pleasant steadiness. Characters go away, and sometimes they come back. Interpersonal conflicts rise and then get resolved. Sometimes you just get to sit and watch part of an opera happen. The last third of the show develops a slightly more cohesive narrative, but even then, it's still mostly a loose constellation of events related to larger goings-on in the culture.

So if you're looking for tight plots and fast-paced action, you'll want to look somewhere else. But if you're the kind of person who likes to wrap up sometimes in a gentle warm blanket of a beautiful show, I have five reasons you should give this one a try.

1. Oh, they're in love

Perhaps the most notable thing about Cheng Fengtai and Shang Xirui is that they spend the entire show smiling at one another, staring longingly at one another, and/or making each other laugh.

A lot of danmei couples depend on having at least one partner who, if not outright tsundere, is at least stoically long-suffering -- which is romantic, sure, but also exhausting in real life. These two read about as married as any danmei pair I've ever seen because they make one another smile all the time. They're incredibly touchy and affectionate from basically the moment they meet. They're not just in love, they actually like one another.

Now, don't get me wrong: These two are both absolute exhausting gremlins who deserve one another so they don't have to be anyone else's problems. But they're good-natured enough about their respective gremlin natures that when one of them lets loose with his rascality, the other tends to think it's hilarious.

They don't even have the mandated danmei breakup! They're never mad at one another for more than the length of an episode. Most of the time they're just refreshingly normal about one another (or, you know, about as normal as two drama queens can be). And when they're being not normal about one another, it's because the circumstances they are currently enduring are not normal either.

They're so in love that by the time you get to the last episode, everyone in their lives is like, gee, those two sure are in love. For the main couple in a Chinese-censored BL adaptation? That's pretty darn in love.

2. The costumes!!!

Of course I have to gush over the costumes. Several major characters are professional opera performers, and their wardrobes are just stunning in complexity and detail -- and accuracy, apparently.

But they're not even where all of the wardrobe budget went! Everyone looks great, from the dapper upper class to the household servants to the street performers.

I also can't get over how everyone looks so cozy in their winter outfits. The show really wants to hammer home how cold Beijing is, and so most non-opera clothes are either heavily quilted or furry. Not a single outfit in this show is slimming (except maybe for some of the gorgeous gowns Cheng Meixin wears). It's all about conserving body heat, which means a lot of people walk around basically wearing mildly tailored quilts all the time. I love it. I envy it.

3. Oops! All bottoms!

This is a show of very soft men. It helps that very many of them have spent their whole lives playing female roles, but even those that haven't tend to be pretty darn soft.

(And I'm not even talking about the way people keep handing Cheng Fengtai babies and he loves it.)

Du Luocheng and Shang Xirui are absolutely what happens when you get two soft gay guys who are kinda into one another, but they're both too lazy to top, so they just become best friends instead.

Fan Lian stands as a testament to how you can be the only heterosexual in the show and still be soft as hell.

The old married gays. Softness level: off the charts.

Chen Renxiang's role is that of the opera frenemy, and he's incredibly soft about it. (This actor is also apparently in the Sha Po Lang live-action adaptation! Maybe someday it will be released...)

Opera underling La Yuehong hardens up later in the show, but even when he does, there's still a tragic softness to it.

Even the baddies are soft! Pretty much all the rival opera bitches fall into the "love to hate" category -- and nearly all of them win at least some sympathy from you before they leave the story for good.

There's one more soft boy whose presence surprised me, and that is Xue Zhicheng/Kujo Kazuma, a sympathetic Japanese character. Every other Japanese character in the show is sinister somehow -- not surprising, considering the drama is set during the brutal Japanese occupation of Beiping/Beijing.

But this little guy is a gentle, well-meaning opera fan who just wants to watch his favorite performers! When his actions cause trouble, it's only because he's so well-meaning that he couldn't see how anyone could disapprove of his attempts at cross-cultural undertanding. He even comes to the rescue a few times, at significant personal cost!

Moreover, the show uses him to make it clear that there's a difference between the Japanese occupying force and Japanese people and culture. In fact, the show is pretty critical of people who conflate the two and use interest in the latter as evidence of support of the former. That is not a level of nuance I've seen from other dramas set in this time period, and I was pleased to see it.

In conclusion, the critial war shortage in 1930s Beijing was not food or medicine or ammunition, but tops.

4. A whole lotta ladies

Again, not even counting the fact that one of the two main guys, many of his buddies, all of his heroes, and several of the antagonists professionally dress as women.

The most notable of them is Cheng Fengtai’s wife, Fan Xiang'er. They've been married for years by the time the show starts, and they have a son together. Theirs is an arranged marriage that they've managed to make work so well that they've actually wound up liking one another ... most of the time. Remember what I said earlier about his being exhausting? She knows that better than anyone.

(Sidebar: If you are uncomfortable with a love story where one of the participants is canonically married to someone else, this may be one you want to skip. That said, there are several male characters in this show who have multiple wives and/or mistresses, so the metric of what counts as infidelity in this setting is ... loose.)

Beyond her, though, there are many more female supporting characters in this show, from all different socioeconomic levels, in all different kinds of situations.

A caveat: Some of the women (one in particular) are at times frustrating as hell because they're too often written as jealous shrews who believe all the terrible gossip they hear and act on it without having actual adult conversations with anyone first. I dislike this trope, mostly because it relies on making some smart women artificially very stupid for the sake of forwarding the plot. I have little patience for situations that could have been solved five episodes ago if somebody had just been willing to ask clarifying questions.

That said, I can't be too mad about that, because there are many, many more women who are not written like that. Some of them are good and loyal! Some are sneaky and self-interested! Some are callous and manipulative! Some are meek and traumatized! Some make terrible decisions! Some make terrible decisions but, like, you get it! You know, just like in real life?

The answer to better representation is almost always more representation. When a character is the only one of whatever they are, everything they do is kind of an indictment of that category, especially when that category has a history of stereotypical negative representation. When there are several others, the characters stop being representatives of that category and start being just plain characters.

5. It just feels good to watch

Don't misunderstand: This is not a happy fun time show where everything in sunshine and roses all the way down. There are plenty of tense and emotional parts. Not everyone we like makes it out of the drama alive. Not all love stories get a happily ever after. People disappoint one another all the time. Awful things happen when soldiers occupy civilian populations. Poverty is a bitch.

But the show itself remains a nice viewing experience. It's absolutely a feast for the senses, what with all the music and costumes and sets and props and old-fashioned cars and everything.

The story is very straightforward. It's never trying to do any complex schemes or mislead you before some big reveal. I imagine this could be a good show to put on in the background while you're doing something else. You're never going to be too desperately confused about what's going on if you zone out for a minute -- and if you are, just hang on for a bit, because by next episode, it'll probably be onto whatever storyline comes next.

I have not read the novel, and I cannot judge anything against its standards. However, my friend who has read parts of the novel tells me that the adaptation is much preferable, because in the novel, you get to hear everyone's internal narration -- and everyone's internal narration makes it clear they're all bratty, insufferable assholes. That is not the case here! Or, rather, they are often bratty and/or insufferable, but from outside their heads, it's a lot more charming.

Finally, it's legitimately a very good love story. Shang Xirui is the only person in Cheng Fengtai's life who loves him for who he is, not what someone else needs him to be. Cheng Fengtai goes from being enraptured by this beautiful little weirdo to basically wanting to wife him. They spend a lot of time taking care of one another, sometimes in the only ways they know how. They're capable of operating independently -- there are several episodes where their storylines diverge completely -- but they'd prefer not to. They've just each found their soulmate, and that's all there is to it. (The red thumbprint in the palm is about the most romantic thing I've ever seen.)

I'm a little surprised by how little I hear English-speaking fandom talk about this one, especially since (see below) it's a widely available, high-budget show that even has a Shang Xirui figurine, and there's no question about how in gay love these two are. But if you hop over to AO3, there's only 257 works total in the Winter Begonia tag, a scant 57 of which are in English, and if you've tried looking into the Winter Begonia tag on Tumblr, you know it's pretty quiet 'round here.

I can't be sure, but I'd assume that's partly because this is both a) a relatively low-stakes drama, and b) so enmeshed with actual historical events and concepts that you'd have to do at least a baseline amount of research before making any fan media. I would imagine that for some folk, this is a barrier to entry.

And it is 49 slow, gentle episodes long. I saw Tumblr posts asking which episodes are important, because the posters don't want to or can't commit to watching the whole thing. But the answer is ... all of them? none of them? There's no plot you'd be getting or missing with specific episodes. There are very few things I can think of that would even qualify as spoilers. It's just a walk through a couple very eventful years in the main pair's lives. I understand if folk aren't up for that, but if you are, this is really a gem.

Have I convinced you to give it a try?

I would say that Winter Begonia is perhaps the most easily watchable of any c-drama I've come across. Here's where you can find it:

iQiyi

Viki

Amazon Prime

YouTube

We watched most of it on YouTube, where the subs were perfectly fine. However, there was one episode where we had to switch platforms because the English subs were all out of synch, so we went to Amazon and they were fine there too. Other than that, I don't really have a sense of which translation experience is the best. Try them all!

(PS: If you feel like putting on a tinfoil hat, I'm just going to say, they look at one another like that in real life, too.)

[cardentist]

"haha Wow can you Believe how crazy it is that jay outed tim's medical records?"

Hoody:

1: stole tim's records from when he was 8 years old, which meant that he had to Specifically and Intentionally track them down To steal them. from his house? Maybe, we certainly see him breaking into tim's house plenty. (though why would tim even still have those)

2: baited jay both in person and online implying that tim was lying to him (reminder, the last guy who lied to jay about his intentions tried to kill him with a gun and turned out to have tried to murder all of his friends. and tim himself had watched jay sleep, been in videos threatening him right before jay's apartment burned down, and tried to physically attack him.)

3: intentionally planted the records in a scary tunnel under the abandoned burned down mental hospital and lead jay there by the nose, going so far to write how much of liar tim is in big bold sharpie on the files themselves.

4: after all of this happened hoodie's immediate next step was to break into tim's house, steal his medication, and intentionally set off and film tim having a seizure and post it on the internet.

Hoodie leaked tim's medical records, he specifically and Intentionally baited jay into finding and documenting them because it proved that tim was lying about the slender haunting only starting recently for him.

and it's important to note that jay's response wasn't to get angry with tim, it was to Blame Himself and express empathy for tim.

it's Also worth noting that the majority of the records were redacted (including tim's Name), which is a point in favor of both jay And hoodie (hoodie still cares about tim, even if he's angry at him and willing to hurt him to push him towards what he thinks needs to be done).

moreover, jay's censored tim's last name before (several times, actually), just like he's censored amy and jessica's phone numbers. I think it's safe to assume that part of the reason why jay filmed it was because those details Were redacted (that and, of course, evidence keeps disappearing from his house and from his laptop. which means if he forgets about them and they're stolen then they're just gone- if there isn't some other record of them online, of course).

my point being, it burns my ass that people blame jay for this and hold it against him like it's the worst thing that he could've done, without ever holding it against hoodie.

I feel like this is a cross section of fans only holding characters accountable for what other characters get mad about (tim was Right to be angry at jay for it, but he didn't call out hoodie. probably because there'd be no point, he can't exactly hold him responsible. likewise jay Deliberately didn't get mad at tim about what he did as masky, at least not openly, so fans tend to not understand his perspective)

And fans holding jay to a different standard than they do other characters in general. whether it's because most of his personal information is on his twitter (secondary material people are less likely to go through, especially while watching), because his voice acting tends to be less emotionally charged (it was probably just that troy's acting was a little awkward, but I personally like to read him as autistic), Or because he's just generally not as cool.

either way, people tend to hold jay accountable for things they let tim and hoody off the hook for. and it's kind of Really insane in this case.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Dungeon: The Hole in the Hill

Of all places, a portal to the underdark has opened along a sleepy stretch of country road, drawing amature explorers and lookie-loos who all want to know the origin behind the mysterious purple glow. Those bravest to be first across the threshhold bring stories of glowing mushrooms and caverns full of odd animal life, a few even returning with souveniers in the form of carrot sized fingers of crystal. Naturally the party will be headed below next, going even deeper in search of greater treasures.

Adventure Hooks:

Diverted from his dayjob of selling snakeoil town to town when his cart and campsite fell into the original sinkhole, an enterprising merchant by the name of Canny Farwell has laid claim to the sinkhole and is charging admittance to its uppper levels at three silvers a head. He's got dreams of establishing a mine to exploit the riches of the seeminly bottomless cavern, and while he's more than happy to give the party a tour through the sinkhole's upper reaches ( full of facts he's made up), he's not going to let the party venture deeper and jump his claim without putting up a fuss.

However stubborn Canny might be, he's all to willing to drop his arguments and bolt for the surface when a pack of monsters from the world below show up hounding the party back to the surface. Forced to act quickly to protect the onlookers, the party will have to delve deep into the depths to force these creatures back into their original territory.

Somewhere in the depths the party can find the smashed remannts of the huckster's cart, being picked over by a gnomish waif with leaden skin. She speaks no common and is TERRIFIED of the party, but once they convince her they're no threat (food has a way of briding all cutural divides, especially when the hesitant party has been roughing it in a cavern for a fortnight) she'll use mud-doodles and pantomime to indicate that she was forced to flee her village when they were attacked by... somehing... that has enslaved her people and forced them to mine the great crystals in the cavern depths.. which might've been what set off the sinkhole in the first place.

The girl, Takta, is a svirfneblin, a deepgnome who lives along with her people in a hidden subterranian village, enjoying a humble existance while keeping themselves concieled from the underdark's major predators. That was until a few months ago, when a levitating duergar ironclad loomed its way into the network of caverns their community called home. The vessel known as The Esretnatzar and its crew of grey-dwarves are an exploratory expidition sent off to expand the borders of their autocratic homeland and to seek sites worthy of colonization. After nearly a year and a half evading perils of the world below they're delighted to have found a people to subjugate, useing psionics to expose and subdue Takta's people, forcing the Svirfneblin to act as laborers and servants as they dig themselves in.

Further Adventures

Its hard to oust an occupying army that can read your mind, and while the deepgnomes are no strangers to defending their home they have little defence against mind-censors, a fanatically dogmatic group of telepaths who kept order onboard the Esretnatzar during its long voyage and have now turned their attention to keeping the chattel in line. They've moved the troublemakers (including Takta's older brother) into a makeshift prison and while it doesn't compare to the reducation halls of their homeland it does keep the gnomes working for fear of their loved ones being hurt. Freeing these individuals from lockup is the first step to fighting back.

While the Esretnatzar's captian Fulgite Faultsaw is eager to return home bathed in the glory of expanding the hegemony, many in her crew do not feel the same. They're sick of the ship and sick of skimming dark caverns, and just want to keep their boots on the groud (even if it means pressing them into some deepgnome necks). Some others, careful to guard their thoughts from the ship mind-censors, imagine staying in the village, establishing a new clanhold and living like thanes. Perahaps this division can be exploited, convincing the recalictrant crew to surrender while pushing the hardliner faction back out into the dark.

After the party has done their thing and these cavernous conquistadors are defeated the village will be in rough shape, and while the deepgnomes will galdly put in the years of work to make it funcitonal again perhaps the party can suggest another option: moving the village to the far more defensible mouth of the sinkhole, allowing the svirfneblin to continue their subterranian agriculture in the upper reaches while having the whole of the upper world to fall back to if they need it. It'll be a hard sell, both to the traditionalist gnomes whos' lives have already been disrupted enough, and the authorities on the surface, but should the party succeed they'll get to see a new settlement blossom over the course of their adventures.

[4stormfly]

Why Chester and Norris are probably more than just Jon and Martin’s voices

The ramblings of a madman who really wants his silly little guys back

Spoilers for up to tmagp episode 4

First of all, just because tmagp can be enjoyed without listening to tma, that doesn’t mean none of the characters from tma will come back. All sequels are designed to be enjoyable on their own, it would be bad writing otherwise. You never know where a new listener/viewer/reader will start, so everything needs to be able to be enjoyed by itself so that they continue to consume your content, but that doesn’t stop writers from including characters from the original work. Just look at Marvel movies. You don’t need to have watched every single movie that came before to enjoy Infinity War (I hadn’t, and I still loved Infinity War), but it’s still able to reference things from those previous movies without explaining the entire MCU at the time. Characters can come back from tma and tmagp can still be enjoyable for new listeners. These two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

One of the major theories is that the fears are just using their voices from the tapes. This doesn’t explain Augustus’ voice, though. His voice isn’t anywhere on the tma tapes, unless you want to say he’s a recast for Leitner, which doesn’t really make sense for any other reason than they sound similar. It’s much more likely that Augustus is og Jonah, since he was the only one in the panopticon with Jon and Martin (plus there’s no implication that Elias’s body in the rubble in MAG200, so Jonah could have been sent wherever Jon and Martin went).

As pointed out very often, even though we only have four cases read out by the text to speech voices, they all line up pretty well with the characters they would be. Chester reads the case about the dangers of the Magnus Institute, serving as a warning for what’s to come. Norris reads the cases about love and how easily it is to lose yourself to these fears. Finally, Augustus reads the case from the 18th century about a selfish man willing to use the fears to harm other people in order to get what he wants.

Another thing I don’t see mentioned a lot is the censorship around who Jonny, Alex, and Tim Fearon are playing. When the official cast was revealed, the characters they were playing were censored. On top of that, at the end of each episode, when listing the cast members and who they play, Jonny, Alex, and Tim Fearon are always listed as “additional voices” rather than as Chester/Norris/Augustus. It just seems like a weird thing to do if they end up being just text to speech programs.

Finally, the first case with “some of” Arthur coming back and Jonny’s statement on it about being careful for what you wish to come back because it’ll come back wrong just parallel the situation too well. It could be a coincidence, but it could also be some great foreshadowing.

[iwanthermidnightz]

“Anyone considering the whole of Ms. Swift’s artistry — the way that her brilliantly calculated celebrity mixes with her soul-baring art — can find discrepancies between the story that underpins her celebrity and the one captured by her songs. One such gap can be found in her “Lover” era. Others appear alongside “dropped hairpins,” or the covert ways someone can signal queer identity to those in the know while leaving others comfortable in their ignorance. Ms. Swift dropped hairpins before “Lover” and has continued to do so since.

Sometimes, Ms. Swift communicates through explicit sartorial choices — hair the colors of the bisexual pride flag or a recurring motif of rainbow dresses. She frequently depicts herself as trapped in glass closets or, well, in regular closets. She drops hairpins on tour as well, paying tribute to the Serpentine Dance of the lesbian artist Loie Fuller during the Reputation Tour or referencing “The Ladder,” one of the earliest lesbian publications in the United States, in her Eras Tour visuals.

Dropped hairpins also appear in Ms. Swift’s songwriting. Sometimes, the description of a muse — the subject of her song, or to whom she sings — seems to fit only a woman, as it does in “It’s Nice to Have a Friend,” “Maroon” or “Hits Different.” Sometimes she suggests a female muse through unfulfilled rhyme schemes, as she does in “The Very First Night,” when she sings “didn’t read the note on the Polaroid picture / they don’t know how much I miss you” (“her,” instead of that pesky little “you,” would rhyme). Her songwriting also noticeably alludes to poets whose muses the historical record incorrectly cast as men — Emily Dickinson chief among them — as if to suggest the same fate awaits her art. Stunningly, she even explicitly refers to dropping hairpins, not once, but twice, on two separate albums.

In isolation, a single dropped hairpin is perhaps meaningless or accidental, but considered together, they’re the unfurling of a ballerina bun after a long performance. Those dropped hairpins began to appear in Ms. Swift’s artistry long before queer identity was undeniably marketable to mainstream America. They suggest to queer people that she is one of us. They also suggest that her art may be far more complex than the eclipsing nature of her celebrity may allow, even now.

Since at least her “Lover” era, Ms. Swift has explicitly encouraged her fans to read into the coded messages (which she calls “Easter eggs”) she leaves in music videos, social media posts and interviews with traditional media outlets, but a majority of those fans largely ignore or discount the dropped hairpins that might hint at queer identity. For them, acknowledging even the possibility that Ms. Swift could be queer would irrevocably alter the way they connect with her celebrity, the true product they’re consuming.

There is such public devotion to the traditional narrative Ms. Swift embodies because American culture enshrines male power. In her sweeping essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” the lesbian feminist poet Adrienne Rich identified the way that male power cramps, hinders or devalues women’s creativity. All of the sexist undertones with which Ms. Swift’s work can be discussed (often, even, by fans) flow from compulsory heterosexuality, or the way patriarchy draws power from the presumption that women naturally desire men. She must write about men she surely loves or be unbankable; she must marry and bear children or remain a child herself; she must look like, in her words, a “sexy baby” or be undesirable, “a monster on the hill.”

A woman who loves women is most certainly a monster to a society that prizes male power. She can fulfill none of the functions that a traditional culture imagines — wife, mother, maid, mistress, whore — so she has few places in the historical record. The Sapphic possibility of her work is ignored, censored or lost to time. If there is queerness earnestly implied in Ms. Swift’s work, then it’s no wonder that it, like that of so many other artists before her, is so often rendered invisible in the public imagination.”

— NYT OPINION: Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do

[genericpuff]

I WANNA TALK ABOUT THE FUCKING EISNERS-

i've been finding lately that there are so many topics i still wanna talk about concerning LO and its development and they just don't happen because i get distracted or busy and my brain is like "ok we're just gonna pretend we've already talked about it even though we haven't" JFKDLSAJFDASKLFJSLKA

Let's talk about the Eisners and LO's recent 'win'.

I've already briefly mentioned in previous posts that LO has had a lot of its awards and accolades bought for it. This is especially true for both the NYT Bestseller label (seriously, none of those labels are ever earned, it's not some top 100 list that you compete on, it goes to whoever is willing to pay for it or whoever an editorial column wants to highlight) and, of course, the Eisner Award, which is not exactly an award judged by the industry's finest (the judges this year were made up of largely comic book shop owners and librarians).

But we're not here to talk about that. I wanna talk about what happened after LO won its second Eisner.

First off, the fact that it can be nominated at all when it doesn't even really fit the criteria for their submissions is sketchy at best:

see: "new, professionally produced long-form original comics work posted online in 2022." LO is not 'new'. Sure, it has new episodes, but I don't think that really follows the spirit of what they meant by 'new'. The Eisner doesn't seem like an award that should be granted to the same series twice, is my point, and that's one of the many complaints brought up in the absolute dressing down that LO got in its announcement post on the Webtoons Official IG page.

Of course, you can see for yourself right here.

But for the sake of fun, let's share some of the excerpts here.

(and yes I'm sharing a LOT of these because frankly I don't trust WT to not delete them in an attempt to hide all the shit that's being thrown at their precious "baby")

While names have been censored to protect the users involve, I will say one thing - this isn't some attempt from antiLO/ULO members to brigade the series' win, there are other comic creators in this discussion as well from the Canvas section who aren't pleased with seeing LO win another Eisner when there are multiple new series from this past year alone which deserve more attention than they're getting. Again, see for yourself if you click on the link above, the vast majority of comments on this post are expressing their disappointment and you can tell from how they've been sitting at the top while all the positive comments are being 'pushed' to the bottom - the like counts say it all.

All of this, paired with the fact that LO didn't win a SINGLE user-voted award during the Webtoonies, goes to show that the Webtoons audience is over LO. They're done with it. It's not relevant anymore, the only ones who still keep up with it are the stans and those holding on in the hopes that the story gets around to resolving the SA plotline and gets its TV show (which I've also mentioned has a real possibility of not happening, at least not now when it would count the most LMAO)

It still gets more likes than any other series on the platform (for now) but you can tell during its current hiatus that when LO is out of sight, it's out of people's minds - despite many of these episodes now being weeks old, their like counts aren't going up, no new readers are being pulled in. And the fact that a series with over 6 million subscribers can barely scratch 100k likes nowadays is... really something.

And that's on its free to read episodes, it's FP episodes - where views count the most because it's where LO makes its money and initial views - aren't even a fraction of what the free episodes often take well over a week to gain at this point.

Episode 252:

And the midseason finale, 253:

Compare it to Down to Earth which gets 70k likes on average on its free episodes (though its current new FP is sitting at the 1k mark), is LO still bringing in higher numbers than other series? Yes. But it's clearly falling to a point where it's going to be on par with every other comic on the platform in no time. I can't even imagine what it's going to be like after it comes back from this poorly-timed hiatus, when all of its official fan groups have also been shuttered preventing people from staying in touch within their own fandom.

Awards like the Webtoonies are, while largely just for street cred, still audience-based, and I really hope the fact that the people have spoken not once, but twice through their engagement with the platform - both through the comment section on LO's Eisner win and the votes in favor of other series in the Webtoonies - will be a major wake-up call to WT that they can't keep trying the same things over and over again expecting different results. They can't keep stuffing money into LO as if advertising or awards are the reason LO isn't pulling in the numbers it used to. They can't keep pretending that LO still has the merit and credibility that it once had 5 years ago.

It's like that comparison from Super Eyepatch Wolf talking about why you shouldn't take advice on how to be "successful" from Youtubers who got famous 5+ years ago:

"Say you decide you want to become a carpenter, and particularly, how to build a nice chair. Think about the kind of person you'd want to learn that skill from. Would it be from someone who has built nice chairs every day for 20 years? Or would it be the guy who built one nice chair five years ago out of a special kind of wood that doesn't exist anymore, who has no experience with the kind of wood available to you now?"

LO is a byproduct of a version of Webtoons that no longer exists. It was fortunate enough to join the Canvas section when the Canvas section was still only lightly populated, before WT started trying to sell the idea that anyone could become "rich" on their platform (an idea largely perpetuated by creators LIKE RACHEL who only became big because WT threw all of their money at them), before Greek myth comics became commonplace (again, something that's a consequence of Rachel/Lore Olympus) and before the romance genre became largely filled with problematic "dark" romances (again, see Lore Olympus).

Do you see the pattern of what I'm talking about here? A lot of what Webtoons became known for was a byproduct of Lore Olympus and series like it, because those series did phenomenally well, due to being in the right place at the right time, so WT went "hey, cool, this makes us lots of money! Let's do more of that!" Obviously this isn't to say that Lore Olympus is the root of all evil here OR that it didn't have its own merit back in the day, but if you make a series that blows every other series out of the water in stats, it's only natural for a company to want to pursue more series and story tropes like it in the hopes that it'll replicate exactly what comics like LO did, completely misunderstanding why LO did well in the first place. At the time, LO's art was unique for the platform, and it was tackling a story that was extremely popular on platforms like Tumblr so it naturally gained a crowd.

But that was five years ago. Since then, the WT audience climate has changed dramatically, as it always does every few years; and LO and WT haven't kept up. We went through a phase of BL, isekai, and now WT seems to be in an odd limbo because it's still clinging to a series from three whole lifetimes ago, especially now with so many of its other signature series either finally ending (True Beauty) or walking away from the platform entirely (Let's Play).

At this point, Lore Olympus is a chair that was nice five years ago, but has since started to fall apart - its paint is chipping, and its legs don't stand up so well anymore - and WT is still trying to sell it you as the exact same chair - with cheap new paint and a few bits and bobs attached to try and convince you that the chair is new - but it's long past its prime. This isn't to say that the chair itself doesn't deserve to exist, just that it shouldn't be given so much proprietary advertising and attention when there are so many other works on the platform that deserve to be uplifted and seen.

LO was good for its era, it was successful for a reason, but we're halfway through 2023 and it's painfully obvious that the comic and the platform's audience is ready to move on to new territories. Webtoons just needs to learn to let go.

[clearancecreedwatersurvival]

On a subject related to why it is important not to self censor in tags on ao3 so people can filter properly, one thing that drives me crazy that I have seen repeated by people who are deeply misinformed about ao3 when referring to the big four mandatory archive warnings is that ‘ao3 has entire categories of fic for these terrible things in fics and therefore its use and existence is morally wrong,’ which absolutely boggles my mind.

Those are not categories of fic. Those are content warnings. People are mad because the archive has content warnings. I’m sorry but I for one am extremely grateful for the ability to look at a fic, see a major character death warning, and be able to choose not to read the fic.

Like fandom has been having this same argument between these two points for decades: a. People deserve freedom of expression in fandom spaces and b. Other people deserve to be able to avoid triggering content. The archive warnings are the result of the synthesis of those two points, the already arrived at compromise for this conflict. If you don’t want to see something you should be able to filter it out. That’s what content warnings are for.

Also periodic reminder since I’m on the subject that chose not to use archive warnings is also a valid alternative to using warnings in the interest of preserving suspense. Which is why -chose not to use warnings is Very Different from -no warnings apply and people should take care to remember that when posting or reading on ao3. If you are sensitive to one of the four warnings, please remember that there is a difference in order to avoid content you do not wish to see, and approach fics labeled ‘chose not to use warnings’ with caution.

[love-byers]

Hi!! I binge-read some of your byler analysis, along with other users', and I can't help but STILL feel on the fence about hoping for byler endgame. I guess I just don't want to get my hopes super high only for them to be crushed by whatever CGI fest the düff3rs got in store to "go out with a bang" (while, obvs, sticking to the status quo and what they think the GA wants to see). I've seen so many intelligent people write media criticism pieces and analysis in support of the ship, but I still dread that the writers cry plausible deniability on all the clues they DID lay, that the people behind the N*f1ix social media accs confess that they've willingly posted queerbait to boost their engagement and thus get a bigger paycheck (I wouldn't blame them if they did, obvs; besides, it still means that some higher-up approved those misleading posts) and, worst of all, that this whole thing may end up blowing up negatively like the JohnLock conspiracy or the Voltron shenanigans or, y'know, the Supernatural fandom after Castiel's introduction and up until that lame ass final season. In your opinion, what makes byler different? Is there real hope for a satisfying mlm relationship from a show made by het men that capitalizes on 80s nerd culture nostalgia?

Sorry for coming off so jaded: I do wish for a byler ending, but it's been hard to keep my hopes aflame against these worries :c

i think everyone has some amount of doubt, which is totally understandable.

lgbt representation has come a long way, but a lot of us fans who are a bit older grew up consuming media that either had no representation or shitty representation. we sought ourselves in the media we loved and never found it, and corporations exploited that. nowadays there's way more representation that isn't left up to interpretation or censored, but a lot of the time that's in shows that are about romance and drama, high school a lot of the time. which is great, but stranger things is a sci fi show with romantic sub plots. it's easy for queer characters to end up being left out of a show like ST, but they haven't been at all.

one of the big messages of ST is embracing weirdness and being different. loving whatever it is you love, unashamed. when a character strays from being their true self or pushes away the things they love, there are consequences for the character. they become less likable to the audience. the entire theme of s4 is living in the truth, not hiding things, embracing love, being misunderstood simply because you're different. all of that is very queer coded. and it happens to be the season where will's love for mike fully comes into light.

there has been so much thought put into stranger things. the duffers have said there are no coincidences. they put thought into everything, thats why it takes so long to make a season, because they care so much. there are endless details i could point out not related to romance. they've also said they've been set on the ending for a while and will not be changing it to please people. i believe they said some people might not like the ending, but they don't care because they're making the story THEY want. which so far has uplifted queer people and promoted being different. so some antis may call be stupid for trusting them, but im choosing to. i believe they'll do these characters justice.

and my favorite quote from them is "The best plot twists don't make the audience say "wow I never saw that coming!", it makes you say "I should have seen that coming."

as a writer and a creative writing major, i definitely look up to the writers of ST. they are all incredibly talented and i hope one day i can put this much thought and love into a project. and, as a writer, i cannot see them throwing mike and will's relationship down the drain.

so, what makes byler different? there's very few shows where this much thought is put into everything. its not debatable that they do that, they've said it and its evident if you watch the show. so i refuse to believe all of these things between mike and will are just coincidences or accidents. there's just no possible way. i definitely had a klance phase and i can confidently say voltron writing is nowhere near the level of ST, and neither is supernatural. supernatural is one of those shows that has a lot of seasons and has gone all over the place in terms of writing and plot. the duffers have known the ending to this story since season 1. and unlike those shows with lots of seasons, ST only has 5. it won't be dragged on and beaten like a dead horse like some shows.

you don't have to completely eliminate your doubt. even i have doubt even after all i've said and posted. there is simply no way to confirm what'll happen before s5 releases, and they want it that way. just hold on until s5 friend

[lady-raziel]

Sorry people are sending you awful things. I read your post and I thought you had a good analysis of the situation. The issue is the situation itself, not how you spoke about it. Anyway, I hope you have people around you to be a good support system. Stay safe.

thanks-- i think that's just the nature of sharing any sort of political opinion at a time like this and having it breach containment. you have to be prepared for everyone to tell you that you have no idea what you're talking about. but that's not exactly exclusive to politics-- the nature of the world is that if you aren't in the circle of power or in any position that is considered the "authority," you will be told you're wrong, stupid, and you don't know anything. For example-- being a woman in a STEM field, or a young person in any junior role, or a person trying to bring awareness of discrimination to the attention of a majority group. Everyone is always fighting to be heard, regardless of the merit of their experiences or ideas.

And when you then remember that the "authority" figures are ALSO being told, at least in places where people have the freedom to do so, that they are wrong, stupid, and don't know anything-- that's the most freeing thing of all, I think. It becomes clear that NOBODY actually knows the completely correct right answer and that your opinion isn't lesser than theirs. I think that's pretty obviously why censoring opinions and oppressing those likely to disagree (who are letting others realize they have choices too) is so attractive to authoritarians. They don't want anyone to realize that they're just as wrong, stupid, and clueless as the rest of us.

[theophagie-remade]

I've been kind of following the Gundam lesbians vs Bandai controversy from the sidelines (ie: the main characters got married (offscreen) at the end of the series and the production team is supportive; Bandai censored the explicit mentions of marriage in a recent magazine and then said that everything is up to interpretation) and. In general it's a really good example of how oftentimes it's not authors who should mainly be blamed for the lack of unapologetic queerness in anime and manga (or anywhere else, for that matter), but those companies that they work for

Which leads me to

And as a side note I want to reiterate this but anyone who calls them "queerbait", "yuribait", etc is a stupid dickhead because Toga is bisexual and in love with Uraraka. THE QUEER IS THERE

At this point it no longer makes much sense to wonder whether the romantic undertones to Uraraka and Toga's relationship are accidental or not. I won't claim that they will definitely end up together together (although I've seen enough Japanese fans go crazy for how proposal-esque Uraraka got to, like, at least entertain the thought lol), but what I want to say is. Everything that happened between them is deliberately meant to be read as queer, romantic, and mutual. Uraraka may have not said "I love you" back to Toga in these same terms, but through her actions and words she has reciprocated her feelings. Yes, even if Those Assholes say that she's just lying, that anything that isn't spoon-fed explicitly confirmed is just a "delusional interpretation"

Even then, the supposed line between text and subtext is... a bit eyebrow raising, innit. Toga being bisexual and having feelings for Uraraka is text. Exchanging blood being equal to kissing to her is text. Her insecurities are text......... Uraraka wanting to give Toga her blood, thinking that her smile is beautiful, and that she's the cutest in the whole world is text. I feel like that strongly suggests something at minimum, no. And. Can we really call it subtext, or even coding, when characters do everything short of dramatically shouting "I gay-love you!" to each other? These are more of my personal feelings, and I know that this happens because We Live In A Society, so we tend to feel like things like these must be outright defined so that our queer interpretations can gain validity and the right to exist in the eyes of the majority (= the cishet audience), but... I do find this way of engaging with media rather stifling, especially because... people who hate us to begin with won't care if two manga girls declare their love to each other. Chances are that they will get angrier, actually, or that they will look for excuses to deny their love ("the author was pressured by crazy shippers", "akchually the wording is ambiguous", "the degenerate West is corrupting the purity of the East", you name it)

Still, I know. I know that there's a lot of hunger for undeniably canonical queer relationships (for obvious reasons! understable reasons!), but to circle back to the beginning of this post, pushing back against the system is hard. Bnha's ending is still a ways off, and no one can predict the future. We don't know if Horikoshi plans to stress even further/more bluntly within the manga that Oh, They 👭🏳️‍🌈, we don't know if Jump would allow him to, we don't know if such a thing would be met with opposition elsewhere/afterwards (see: what Bandai is trying to do now, after everything has been said and done).

Regardless, sought after explicit confirmation or not, they do have something, something that is very much there to anyone who's willing to embrace it for what it is: mutual, queer love. And they're sooo real 🩷💛

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

AP’s ubiquitous photographers — the prolific bunch churns out 1.2 million images annually — also don’t manage to capture the shocking scene of Pasternak’s home defaced with what amounts to a murder threat. Instead, the cadre of photojournalists suffice with an image of the German consulate, which was vandalized with red paint, apparently applied in an abstract arrangement, sans red triangles. Like Marcelo’s article, the photograph’s caption also paints over the pro-Hamas imagery, referring to a random splashing of color:

Red paint covers portions of the entrance to the German consulate building, Wednesday, June 12, 2024, in New York. Pro-Palestinian protesters have vandalized locations associated with the Brooklyn Museum and United Nations in New York City, throwing red paint across their entrances in opposition to the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. (AP Photo/Sophie Rosenbaum)

Not only does the caption neglect to note the Hamas-linked graphic, it also ignores that the “locations associated with the Brooklyn Museum” were private homes.

It’s not just Hamas graphics which are subjected to AP’s scrubbing. A pro-Hamas organization also gets sanitized. Here’s how AP’s Marcelo whitewashes the pro-Hamas Within Our Lifetime group:

The protest group Within Our Lifetime and other organizers of that demonstration said the museum is “deeply invested in and complicit” in Israel’s military actions in Gaza through its leadership, trustees, corporate sponsors and donors — a claim museum officials have denied.

He says not a word about the organization’s support for Hamas. According to ADL, Within Our Lifetime

has hosted or co-sponsored at least 78 anti-Israel rallies many of which included explicit support for violence against Israeli civilians by U.S. designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations  Hamas, The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Hezbollah, the Houthis and affiliated individuals such as Leila Khaled and Hamas’ military wing spokesperson Abu Obaida. WOL also expressed enthusiastic support for Iran’s unprecedented April 13 drone-and-missile attack on Israel. 

Marcelo similarly sluices down Within Our Lifetime’s horrifying and deep embrace of terror at the demonstration outside the Nova Festival massacre last week. His censored account states:

The paint attacks came the same week that Within Our Lifetime organized a large demonstration outside a New York City exhibition memorializing victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on the Tribe of Nova music festival. The group called it “Zionist propaganda” and dismissed the music festival, where hundreds died, as “a rave next to a concentration camp.”

AP spares its readers from the most disturbing aspects from the event. As Times of Israel reported:

 On June 11, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer denounced the antisemitism of the pro-Hamas crowd outside the Nova Festival exhibit, twice citing those most heinous lines:

What was even worse, or at least adding salt into the wounds was that just a day or two after I visited the exhibit, protestors gathered outside the exhibit chanting repugnant antisemitic phrases, donning banners that read “Long Live October 7th” and “The Zionists are not Jews and not humans.” How low can you go ? Having visited the exhibit and seeing those young people and then knowing and seeing on film what happened to them at the vicious hands of Hamas, and then having people come outside and protest and say “Long Live October 7th” and “The Zionists are not Jews and not humans.” How repugnant. How despicable. How terribly unnerving that humanity could sink that low.

And yet, at this low point for humanity, AP has relegated these repugnant slogans glorifying mass murder to the dustbin of history.