#but those are just my thoughts everyone approaches media and fandom differently

[horse-girl-anthy]

beneath the cut is an essay I've titled "Ikuhara Fandom, Shoujo Manga, and Eroticism." it discusses potentially upsetting subject matter.

when I first encountered RGU in 2014, I was largely baffled, though I thought the ending was very good. after that, I didn't rewatch more than an episode or two of the show again until 2020. Ikuhara was inaccessible to me as a teenager, but I spent years studying media, so when I returned to RGU, it was like discovering a goldmine. by the end of 2020, I'd watched all of Ikuhara's original shows.

the thing is, I still found Ikuhara challenging. there were things about his works which were seemingly contrary to my value system. I would read interviews of his and he would say things which sounded alarming--to use cliche terminology, he wasn't very politically correct.

if we're being honest, there is a party line in a lot of left-leaning fandom spaces. I used to be a part of that more than I am now; I had rigid ideas of right and wrong. today in the Ikuhara fandom, I often feel like the elephant in the room is that his works aren't the kind of "queer feminist masterpieces" that people portray them as. now, by that, I don't mean that those words don't apply to his works: what I mean is that the way people frame them, the way they discuss their meaning, doesn't bear that much relation to Ikuhara and his oevre.

RGU gets this treatment more than his other works. in fact, certain fans want to claim it as the work which truly aligns with their values, while Penguindrum, YKA, and Sarazanmai actively subvert RGU's message. a lot of other fans just stick with RGU, claiming it as a work without critiquing it. by critique, I don't mean negative criticism: I mean critique as in actual engagement with the text.

I remember that there was a point when I was afraid to engage with more Ikuhara interviews/works, since I thought I would find something out about him that made it so that I couldn't enjoy RGU. after all, when I would hang around in RGU spaces, every so often I'd see someone say that Ikuhara was super problematic. then I realized I was ignoring one of RGU's main themes, facing the truth rather than trying to stay in an idyllic past, so I took the dive. I had my ideas challenged, my values changed, and my entire approach to media shifted by doing so.

it's been strange to be in the English-speaking fandom, where everything is taken very seriously and there's certain universal assumptions about RGU's meaning, when many of the things held as absolutes are simply not so in the Japanese fandom. equally, the creative minds behind RGU are often in conflict with the Western fandom as well. once or twice, I've seen someone point this out and say that RGU is actually problematic/patriarchal, but mostly, it is ignored.

for instance, the character Ruka is massively hated in the western fandom, while as far as I understand, Juri/Ruka is one of the most common Japanese doujin pairings. Mamoru Hosoda, who storyboarded many Juri episodes, claimed that Ruka was in love with Juri. turning to Ikuhara, he often phrases things in a way that could leave you wondering if he's as much of a "feminist ally" as people want to paint him as. of the women's liberation movement, Ikuhara said, "On the one hand you had this social movement, but then in their heads I think almost everyone was thinking: this is lame (laugh), I don't wanna do this (laugh)."

consider this exchange from the same interview for a demonstration of just how differently people in the western fandom approach media compared to Ikuhara and a contemporary of his, art critic Mari Kotani:

Ikuhara: Speaking of sexuality, after Utena I wrote a novel which features lots of hermaphroditic characters. It's a collaborative work, a book called Schell Bullet. Kotani: It is a fantasy world? Ikuhara: It's a future world. Humanity has divided into roughly two groups, Majors and Minors. Because of gene manipulation the Majors are hermaphrodites without male/female sexes, and they have a monopoly on good genetic material. The Minors are humans who have fallen away from the monopolized gene material, they look basically the same are present-day humans, and have two sexes. Kotani: Sounds interesting! Are the Minors kind of like slaves, like in The Human Livestock Yapū?

later:

Ikuhara: The boss is visually female, a Major with a very bold beauty. From the start I wanted the main character's boss to be a hermaphroditic woman. That's because, the way I see it, even the Major women in the real world, that is to say women who are competent workers, seem to have an intense male side. 

what I find most interesting in this exchange is how Kotani casually brings up the idea of sexual slavery as a fun angle for Ikuhara's hermaphrodite novel. it's not to say that this kind of attitude is universal in Japan, just as leftist fandom spaces aren't universal here in America. however, there is obviously a huge difference in values between these two worlds.

so, what world is Ikuhara occupying? where did he come from and what are his influences? exploring these questions is what helped me to come to peace with his works, and in the process, I changed my own thinking.

I'm not really qualified to speak in depth on Japan, its history, culture, or values. however, I have looked into specific trends which I know were influences on Ikuhara specifically, so that's what I'll focus on here.

Ikuhara was born in 1964 and became a teenager in the 1970s. it was a period marked by a lot of social movements. he describes in many interviews feeling completely disillusioned when, rather than change society, the movements were crushed or simply collapsed in on themselves. "oh, maybe there's no way to change the world after all." however, one way or another, he seems to have pulled himself out of that despair. his works are all designed to give modern people a way out of the end of history brought on by the failure of radical change and the onset of the neoliberal global order.

as a young creative, he was into the dramatist/director Shuji Terayama and other artists who were pushing boundaries. in the Kotani interview, he stated:

Ikuhara: Terayama's words are interesting too, but what I find the most kitschy and cool is his theatre. Suddenly a completely naked actress would appear, without even a genital cover, and this was in Kinokuniya Hall! The police might barge in saying "Hey, wait a second". I guess this is why they say it's a fine line between a hero and a criminal (laugh), but until then I had never thought that showing your panties or showing your willy could be anything but shamelessness, and now the Asahi Shimbun was treating it as superb culture. I found that gap extremely mysterious and fascinating, and personally I felt a cultural nuance there.

clearly, the libertine values of 20th century countercultures left their mark on him. more than that, he is interested in the conflict between sexual repression and sexual expression, which has only escalated in Japan and in the West up until today.

turning to the anime/manga sphere, I know that RGU has a reputation as being very triggering, but to be honest, compared to its predecessors, RGU is mild and restrained. J.A. Seazer, a musician who Tereyama collaborated with, wrote songs for both RGU and the the 1992 anime film Midori. the story is old, dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, and it's been adapted as recently as 2016. Midori is an exploitation film: full of child rape, set in a freak show, featuring countless horrors in its 40-minute run. I've watched it and would not recommend it unless you're interested in the ero guro genre.

I bring up Midori as an example of the media landscape Ikuhara began his career in. he was working on Sailor Moon, so obviously, there was less heavy content in the world of anime and manga, but Sailor Moon is represents only one side of shoujo. Ikuhara is more aligned with the Year 24 Group, who revolutionized shoujo in the 1970s. the group produced a wide range of works, many of which had obvious influences on Ikuhara.

I know that Ikuhara is often associated with lesbians, but in fact, I would say that shoujo BL is one of his largest anime/manga influences. the early work Kaze to Ki no Uta is an acknowledged influence on RGU, and Ikuhara did an interview with its mangaka, Takemiya Keiko.

many of the early BL mangaka were inspired by western literature. Demian is not only referenced in RGU but also in Kaze to Ki no Uta. most important for BL is the 1912 German novel Death in Venice, as well as its 1971 film adaptation. for those unfamiliar, the novel is about a man in his 50s stalking a young teenage boy, becoming completely obsessed with him and other underage kids. it is a sexual obsession, but there are other angles to it, and the story has been analyzed in various ways. the fascination seen in shoujo and BL with beautiful young boys, as well as pedophilia, can be in part traced back to this story.

taking inspiration from Death in Venice, shoujo's fundamental character dynamic was established, one that can also be seen in a film such as Midori: innocence versus experience. the ever-present theme is corruption, how abuse and exploitation corrode personalities and create societal damage.

how this is handled can vary from work to work. I understand that grotesque depictions of child abuse or failure to condemn pedophilia hard enough make some people not want to engage with these works at all. I will say, whatever one thinks of Death in Venice, Kaze to Ki no Uta, along with the BL manga of Takemiya's contemporary Moto Hagio, are certainly not child porn. I think there is no excuse for CP, and even if there are things in Kaze to Ki no Uta that I question, it is overall a work of artistic merit, beyond holding interest to me as an early work in the genre.

as I've said, RGU is mild compared to much of what came before it, as well as a contemporary manga like A Cruel God Reigns. however, the core of its character dynamics are in line with shoujo/BL. the twist is that the work focuses on relationships between women.

Kotani: ...Watching it, the relationships between women, including the dialogue, were very sexual, very vivid, right? Ikuhara: But I think what it is expressing is simply yaoi. To do that using shōjo "royal road"-like characters, and with two women, is somewhat rare I think.

Utena and Anthy are easy to compare to BL couples who came before them, like Serge and Gilbert or Ash and Eiji. rather than approach gender issues through projection on to pretty boys, Be-Papas chose to use women, creating their own version of a gendered social system. of course, other Year 24 Group members used lesbians or GNC women to explore similar themes, with Rose of Versailles being another major influence on RGU. however, Ikuhara claiming that RGU is essentially yaoi has fascinated me for years.

Anthy and Akio are experience, knowledge, and corruption, while Utena is innocence, youth, and purity. like many predatory shoujo characters, Akio is obsessed with innocence and purity while also seeking to destroy them. the drama centers on Utena's struggle with corruption, as well as Anthy's conflicted feelings towards her friend's naivety, as she both identifies her past self with Utena and resents her for her ignorance. the story also features intense power dynamics, which, over the course of the narrative, are upset. all of these elements are standard for BL and shoujo.

to dig deeper into the value sense behind these works, here is a passage from the Takemiya/Ikuhara interview:

Takemiya: What I wanted to ask is about “crossing the line” for a girl [implicitly losing one's virginity/sexual purity]. I thought Utena crossed it unexpectedly easily. Ikuhara: Ah, I’m not thinking very deeply, right? Actually, I just wanted to suggest that it doesn’t matter. Because a lot of people seem to get caught up in issues of purity, I wanted to show that it didn’t matter. Takemiya: But doesn’t it seem like more kids these days don’t care about those things? Ikuhara: Yes, and that’s another reason I did it. But I think there are still many people who would try to put it in a box and say purity is important because it is an animation. Takemiya: Actually I think it’s more likely a lot of people will try to use the purity as an index of understanding. I guess you are an adult if you can overcome that. Ikuhara: That’s true, there are a lot of people that want to put a line between justice and absolute evil based on purity. I didn’t want them to do that. Whether manga or anime, I think it can become a motivation for the viewers and the readers in real life. I don’t like when people draw lines, out in society, equating absolute evil with impurity - in an animation which is nothing more than fiction, drawing a line between those that are carnally pure and those that are not.

I think we can all agree that Akio was in the wrong for trying to make Utena feel guilty for sleeping with him in episode 38 of RGU. but going further, Ikuhara and Takemiya say that they want to reject purity as an index of understanding altogether. to me, what this means is not jumping to immediate judgments, not treating issues of sexuality as if they are so deep as to sully the soul.

this is NOT to make some kind of excuse for pedophilia or child porn. I know from my own life how harmful those things are. to close out this discussion, I am going to try to explain what I mean by touching on the use of eroticism in art.

years ago, I was watching Naoki Urasawa's Manben, a show which gives space to mangaka to show off their process. Junji Ito went on it, and I was troubled by the following moment from the episode:

before I got into Ikuhara, I didn't have a grasp on the erotic. when I watched this, my thought was, why are they talking about a toddler being erotic?

after having gained an appreciation for eros's place in art, I understand what they were saying here. eros is hard to define, but it relates to sensuality: a way of interacting with the world which is beyond the intellect. the erotic is not pornographic: it is evocative, a way to make any work of art touch its audience on a deeper level. it is related to sexuality but is not the same thing as it. for Ito, exaggerating the erotic aspect of this character helps him to create even greater horror. the point is not to make a toddler sexy.

RGU relies heavily on this kind of eroticism for different purposes, both within the series and in the promotional art. whenever I see someone trying to ban a specific kind of fan art, I roll my eyes for this very reason. it's not as if there's any significant numbers of people making RGU exploitation porn or anything; most of it is in line with the show itself. for instance:

official art of characters all 13 and younger

Anthy having sex with her brother in the series proper (episode 31)

I have seen RGU called exploitative and fetishized, though not as often as I've seen the same criticism leveled at later Ikuhara works. however, more often than not, the disturbing eroticism of RGU is left uncommented on.

to come full circle, the reason that I now have a lot of admiration for Ikuhara is that I've come to see that the "problematic" aspects of his work help him to tell meaningful stories. all of his anime are designed to spark self-revelation/self-transformation in their audiences. additionally, I now appreciate erotics for what they are, feeling them on the sensual level rather than intellectualizing about them. viewing the above images, various readings can be drawn, arguments made about the impact of their eroticism on the themes they express. however, there is a more primal appeal to them, something which draws the eye. that aesthetic quality, by itself, deserves to be defended. those who dislike it should probably not engage with Ikuhara works. from RGU commentary, episode 38:

Hideki Mori: Are you always trying to work in this type of erotic undertone? Ikuhara: Yes, well... if it doesn't have that kind of stuff... it's not very interesting! Either I'm doing it to make it interesting or maybe I just wanted to see that.

I will finish with two final points. firstly, I think that letting go of one's automatic response of moral judgment is essential when approaching Ikuhara anime. this is not the same thing as advocating for a laissez-faire, anything-goes approach; it is simply saying, before applying preconcieved notions, let the work's textual, aesthetic, erotic, and sensual levels wash over you. if you give the work time and find some aspect of it offensive, that's one thing, but I am glad that I didn't let my kneejerk reactions turn me off of Ikuhara. along with that, don't immediately apply some kind of feminist, queer, or leftist lens to explain everything either. just let the work breathe.

lastly, I want to share Ikuhara's words on what affect he thought RGU had on its audience:

Ikuhara: I didn’t want 'Utena' to become a nice story. A story can be pretty, but it feels like a lie. From the beginning, the story was going to be about saving a friend, so in that sense that was the goal, but it can easily become a nice story, so to break away from that I made sure that it was a foolish story. I think it’s this foolishness that makes ‘Utena’ so popular with adults. Not in a sexual way, but more that watching it at that point makes it more relatable. 

to re-emphasize, my point with this discussion was that much of Ikuhara's artistry is ignored because his approach and influences are considered problematic. that being said, it was never his intention to make a work about "sexy teenagers" who adult viewers can masturbate over. none of his works are that: they feature students because anime often features students, and because he has an interest in the threshold between childhood and adulthood. although I am now 26, I can see myself in all of his casts, and the eroticization of the art makes me more invested in the story and themes, not titillated.

[cfs-melkire]

FFXIV: WoL, OC, and Roleplay

Since there were some questions and confusion in tags, I figured that an educational/informative post like this might be helpful for some folks, so I'm going to break a few things down for those who might be unfamiliar.

Namely, we're going to get into what "Warrior of Light" means to different people, what "OC" means in the FFXIV context, and what "roleplay" means to different people (and why those distinctions exist).

Since this is going to be a long post, click the "Read Below" for more under the cut!

Warriors of Light

"Warrior of Light," in general, refers to the main protagonist of the critically acclaimed hit MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV. Lore fanatics will know that this title once saw more widespread use in-setting (to refer to the Twelvesblades but also to historical heroes in general), but put that aside for now. WoL - Warrior of Light for short, in handy acronym format - is the main character, the hero, the person you play as. You even see the XIV devs (Yoshi P & everyone at CBU3) refer to the players themselves this way, as Warriors of Light.

FFXIV takes a different approach from other MMORPGs by making the story centered around a specific individual: you, as the WoL. This shift really kicks into gear towards the end of A Realm Reborn (2.0), as prior to that, you were just one of many adventurers in the realm of Eorzea (unless you were a 1.0/1.x player; again, set that aside for now). But starting with Operation Archon, your character starts taking center stage in terms of global affairs. By the time you're into Heavensward content, the story of the Scions is, fundamentally, your story: the Warrior of Light's story.

This creates an interesting situation in which players have a shared experience with different takes on how the main character did, should have, and or would have act, acted, react, or reacted. Part of that has to do with our differing selections on race and gender for our characters. Part of that has to do with us projecting our own thoughts and feelings onto the WoL, in effect playing the game as our own self-insert of sorts! Observant newcomers may have noticed that the game progressively gives you more and more dialogue options the further along you get; we had very few of them in ARR and HW compared to later expansions! That has been a good change, and it's really helped players to see how a story could take different twists and turns depending on what kind of person would be at the helm of making those decisions as the main character.

As a result, we've seen a lot of prompts crop up on social media - on Twitter, here on tumblr, even on Reddit - about how people's characters differ from one another. How would YOUR Warrior of Light react, what would THEY have done, but also: what was their childhood like? What do they do for fun? Who do they get along with best? So on and so forth, all sorts of questions. Anyone who's ever been in fandom for any length of time knows that these kinds of questions, these sorts of hypotheticals, are very fun to explore. We've been doing this since we were kids! "Oh but what if this happened instead in my favorite film/show/story?" It's our imagination at work, and it feels great to turn something over in our heads like that.

On Twitter, mainly, these prompts came to be referred to as "WoL prompts" and were often tagged something like "wolqotd" (Question of the Day). But as folks have been fleeing Twitter in droves lately thanks to a certain billionaire manchild being grossly incompetent and generally unsafe, there's been a lot of cross-pollination between social media platforms. Since tumblr has had a historically different approach to FFXIV prompts and our FFXIV friends from Twitter seem to have developed a blindspot, I posted a well-intentioned blurb about how, and I paraphrase, "not all OCs are WoLs."

There was some mild confusion on that point, which brings us to this post. I'm gonna help clear that up right now.

Original Characters

Most of us have probably seen, at least once on the internet, some form of the phrase "OC do not steal" (often humorously misspelled as the meme "OC donut steel"). An OC - short for "original character" - is a common concept in fandom. In fandom specifically, it generally refers to any character that a fan has created for their own use, whether that use be for artistic expression, drawing doodles, writing short stories (read: fanfiction), etc. The character is original, meaning they're not part of the established setting or lore as produced and put out into the world by the makers of the show/series/novel/game/what-have-you, and the character is unique, meaning the character itself (their personality, their history, etc.) is specific to that fan and they're not just Pidgey #2761 caught on Route 1 in the years since 1998 by one out of millions of kids with no other discernible traits, features, or background details.

In the FFXIV context, OC refers to any original character made or created by a fan or player. Often (but not always) this takes the form of their playable avatar, the character they sign into the game with and play as. But there's a context, a MMORPG-specific context, in which "OC" means something more specific to folks in the FFXIV community. The best way I can explain that other meaning is to walk you through the thought process, but in short, a FFXIV OC is a character who is NOT the main character you play through the events of the game as, but rather a character who inhabits the setting and has their own life full of adventures & misadventures, with their own story to tell.

The thought process goes a little something like this: I'm really having fun with FFXIV, but I'm getting real bored of my character. Maybe I'll fantasia them. You know what, I'm tired of seeing what my Warrior of Light gets up to. I'm more curious about what the average person deals with. There's all these monsters out there beyond the city limits! How does anyone get anything done? Maybe they need, like, caravan guards. Yeah, that's cool... but what about Lalafell? They're so small compared to other people, but they get by fine. Hmmm, let me go back to the character selection screen and fantasia into a Lalafell. I'll make something really cool and cute looking. Now, where would they be from? I see a lot of them in Ul'dah, a few in Limsa... you know what, I don't see a lot of them in Gridania or the Shroud. It'd be really interesting to learn how a Lalafell ended up living there. Yeah, let's do that! Fantasia's done, now to find them some day-to-day clothes to wear. I wonder, if they're a caravan guard, where'd they pick up their fighting skills? Are they an archer or a mage? Did their family help them get into a guild? Hmmm.

On and on it goes, in this very manner, with all sorts of characters and stories. This is a FFXIV OC, and even though the player will be progressing through this game with their new Lalafell, they're not really viewing this character (or whatever race they might choose, e.g. Roegadyn or Elezen) as the Warrior of Light. Sure, they'll play to see what the Warrior of Light experiences, but there's a distinction in the player's mind: this is Toro Tororo, of Gridania, they sometimes sign up as a guard to make money but on most days they help out their family at the botanists' guild. They've never once seen or fought a primal.

This is, fundamentally, an MMORPG OC, just specific to FFXIV. This is very much the exact line of thinking that gave us Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop RPGs! Someone was playing war games, said to themselves, "I really don't care about Napoleon or whichever general I am as I move these armies around, I really want to more about THIS soldier here, this guy, what's THEIR story?" and pointed at a single figurine of an infantryman standing alongside identically uniformed troops (thank you to Dave Arneson and his players). The full story is a bit more complicated than that, but the process itself is central to a lot of our own musings about tales and stories that we then spin out into our own creations.

But who plays FFXIV like this? Who goes through all of that effort to NOT be in the shoes of the WoL, and why?

In short: roleplayers.

Roleplay

Let's get the giggling out of the way. You've probably seen ERP referenced - short for "erotic roleplay" - and that has a long history that spiraled out of playing pretend in the bedroom & early internet chatrooms. But no matter what big streamers or people on Aether datacenter might tell you (I'm looking at you, Gilgamesh), that's not what most people mean when they talk about roleplay. ERP is only a very small facet of roleplay in general, the same way the horror-thriller genre is only one genre among many genres of film.

Roleplay is, fundamentally, writing in a collaborative setting where one or more writers act out the parts of one or more characters and make decisions for them.

You've seen this a lot, and have probably roleplayed without realizing it. Constructing a castle made out of Legos and having the knights fight each other, or setting up Barbie and Ken at the pool for a relaxing day and some barbeque, is roleplaying. You and a friend grabbing notebooks and writing out stories or drawing comics about your favorite characters from a popular series is roleplaying. Sitting around a table and playing Dungeons & Dragons is roleplaying, even if you're not doing character voices like the folks on Critical Role. Exchanging prompts about your WoL on social media is roleplaying.

Roleplaying within the actual game of Final Fantasy XIV is an extension of the above! Some folks really like to use the tools that MMORPGs gives them - character models, emotes, a chat box - to visually play out stories about all sorts of characters. FFXIV is particularly well-suited to this due to some crazy quality-of-life features, like target tracking (not only your character's head but their eyes move to follow whoever you target), multiple idle poses, an enormous range of emotes, being able to sit or lay down on furniture, etc. So when Felicia signs in on Toro Tororo, exits Gridania, and mounts up on their chocobo to head down to Bentbranch Meadows to meet her fellow player, Diego, who's on Heuloix Durendaire in order for Toro to sign up for the latest caravan down to Highbridge in Thanalan... that's roleplay!

There's such a breadth of stories to explore in any fictional setting, and FFXIV is no exception in that regard. It's often easier to make an OC who isn't saddled with the WoL's baggage in order to explore stories like this. Maybe someone wants to roleplay an Allagan who just woke up after being on stasis for 3,000 years. Or maybe someone else wants to play a Roegadyn pirate out on the open seas, and they put into port in places like Limsa and Kugane. Maybe Rockfist and Deathstaff want to host a fighting tournament to figure out who's the baddest of the bunch, or maybe the hardworkin' Miqo'te fellow wants to head into the Goblet for the evening to find a nice restaurant for a good meal and a nice drink, and maybe avoid being pressed for conversation by anyone other than the wait staff and that bartender who used to be their childhood friend.

Roleplayers make OCs to explore settings via collaborative writing, and often times those OCs aren't WoLs.

And sometimes they are!

And sometimes people roleplay via prompts or over Discord/messaging rather than in-game!

All valid. All good.

I could go on ad nauseum, but that just about covers it. If there are questions, please ask. In comments, in tags, via Asks, etc. I'll try to answer... or point folks to people who can provide better answers than I can.

Thanks for reading!

[ashadowofburnedoutstardust]

Hello again anon 🐯

I have what some would consider a "Narrative brain", at least that's what my smart friend the microbial ecologist lecturer/researcher calls it

It is a mild explanation for how I'm able to perceive the marketing narrative hints on things

Yes, that also means I have both a flair for the melo/dramatic but also a penchant for writing inverted metaphor for those clever enough to have picked up on the tricks they use

That's the thing about books/writing, they may be used by some as an escape using the readers desire to escape into something else; but its just as cathartic for the writer and as with most art tou can always find their real voice within it if you know them well enough

I'm doing it even now 😉 although with slightly less drama, this voice is probably the closest to my actual personality

I chose to explain that now as an example of curated social media personalities, you can be whoever you want to be online but it doesn't necessarily represent your true self to the outside world

I know of many Tumblrs accounts who are also fonts and IG pages, not everyone feels comfortable being themselves openly on all platforms but I have no problem just being myself no matter where I am, although my personalities are slightly different on each platform altered to suit the "Theme du jour" on each of them: IG - photoshop, LSA - much sass to be had, Twitter - troll, Tumblr - lots of fucking words, gifs, and the occasional reblog

The psychic thing is a bit less explainable even to me 🤷‍♀️ but I cope with it the best I can, my life has always been.....well, Weird

You're absolutely right, I take absolutely no crap from anyone, ever. Exceptions are only made for a drunk Taurus even I'm not stupid enough to fuck with that

Governments? yeah fuck them. Police? Yeah most of them too Basically anyone in a position of power that chooses to abuse it can simply fuck right off and you can be damn sure I'll call them out on it

But a drunk Taurus? Yeah, I'm noping out on that shit

I don't think I have ever in any lifetime taken crap from anyone

As for your other questions:

I've always maintained that I thought he was probably dating around and that the PR situation we've been submitted to was purely a contract connected to the SMA with the original intention of setting up a fauxmance with any one of the original IG contenders and everything we've seen is completely fake, as are all of the people involved

I have loved many different kinds of people in my life anon, I don't think anyone truly cares what a person does or where they're from only that they love them. So does this rumoured other person have pure intentions? I think that they too are nothing but a rumour or wishful thinking

Christopher has never hidden his relationships, if he had someone he truly cared about he wouldn't care how it looked standing next to them.......because he'd love them. Despite his claim to acting talents there are some feelings no-one can hide

This fandom is for the majority women, and given that thanks to a shitty patriarchy running the world into the ground one of our most important survival tactics is reading body language

Good luck convincing thousands of females that they are seeing something that simply doesn't exist

Did Chris find the one before this shitshow started? If you want my tarot based opinion, if I recall my readings well enough his unwillingness to do the work kept pushing back them meeting. It was something that came up in many many readings over time and the more this mess continued the more it would delay them meeting and the worse it would make it for the "work wife"

At least that was the jist of it......but look where we are now. Some people just don't know when to cut their losses. This is what happens when you don't put the work into something that needs it and consider your approach on how to correct a situation effectively.........thanks Megs, you suck

It is likely there is some form of Karma involved, I've seen a fair few astrologers read through his chart and predict some sort of Karmic debt? I think it was having to happen

Here's the thing about cosmic knowledge

When you take that information and abuse it for the purposes of what has been done it will come back on you. Magic in almost all of its forms is about intentions, and you can't force the divine it will take its own sweet time to teach you not to do that again so these people that have abused that have attracted the worst imaginable kind of energy that could take a lifetime to even attempt to shed

It's why I keep warning Christopher about the lesson he needed to learn........sometimes the universe will send a messenger....hence I'm here by diversion through my dreams

I do not believe in coincidences, if I was sent here to help thwart this abuse against the divine using both my spiritual gifts as well as some of my other talents then I have to have faith that it was for a reason; I don't have to fully understand that reason but I have to have faith that its in the plan somewhere

🤍🪽✨

[st-eve-barnes]

Coming to you with this cause you're always so kind to everyone in the fandom and I feel so alone with this take, everyone is freaking out over all the new stuff from Brazil. He seemed so confident and extroverted and like he loved being in the spotlight and it made me very confused cause he wasn't like that before.

I want good things for him in the future don't get me wrong but I don't want him to become famous famous, you know. Or for fame to change who he is.

I don't know, I guess I just miss the shy quiet guy, is that wrong?

What do you make of Brazil Ewan and why he was so different?

Thank you for the compliment first of all, I'm always open to discuss anything Ewan related (respectfully as adults of course)

It's perfectly valid for you to miss shy quiet Ewan but I think it's important to remember that just because he seemed different at this event doesn't mean that he's suddenly a different person.

I think we all have a work persona that's not 100% how we are in private, especially for us introverts. Sometimes you have to be social and out there for your job even if that's not really in your nature, it's like playing a role and we all do that sometimes.

I think Ewan definitely approached this whole thing like playing a role. That boy came prepared, he had clearly studied and thought about those answers in advance and he was ready to deliver them on the day (as if delivering lines from a script almost). Also his outfit, I'm not sure if this is a thing for CCXP but actors don't usually dress up like that for a con, they wear their own clothing and what's comfortable. The fact that Ewan chose to wear something so bold I think was also done to make him feel more at ease and less like day to day Ewan, if that makes sense. You could still tell he was really nervous and out of his element but I think the positive environment and all the reactions and love he felt from the fans pulled him further out of his shell and made him feel more at ease.

I can see where you're coming from though, the guy we saw was a world away from the guy we saw at the Hotd premiere last year, who looked like he was literally dragged there against his will. My guess is he's had some media training for this event as well and the rest is just him enjoying this whole experience and being open to it I think. But I'm sure he is still the same introverted guy we saw in older behind the scenes videos, but he's gaining experience now and that may give him more confidence than he had before. Personally I found it incredibly endearing and wonderful to see him enjoy it all so much and give such thoughtful answers with such a proud face. It's clear he takes this job very seriously and he went all out for this event imo, it only makes me like and respect him more.

One thing I 100% have to agree with you here though, I also kinda don't want him to become famous famous or become a "celebrity". But I don't think that's something we need to worry about at this time, all we can do is trust that Ewan keeps being Ewan and keeps both feet on the ground.

I'd love to see him do more events though (but not too many, we can't handle that lol)

[buginateacup]

🍄 ⇢ share a head canon for one of your favourite ships or pairings

🪐 ⇢ name three good things going on in your life right now

🍬 ⇢ post an unpopular opinion about a popular fandom character

🌿 ⇢ give some advice on writer's block and low creativity

🦋 ⇢ share something that has been on your heart and mind lately 

:green beetle: ⇢ add 50 words to your current wip and share the paragraph here (emoji is not working for me smh)

🍄 ⇢ share a head canon for one of your favourite ships or pairings

I was gonna say Drifter/Eris and that they both smell really weird in very different ways...

But let's be honest I gotta go Megarox. Megamind is a flower eater, he enjoys nectar, and Roxanne can and will encourage this, usually by bringing him flowers or when they go on walks in parks together (night walks, naturally. Those are the best kind), she plucks flowers and feeds them to him, usually by shoving them in his face because she is a terrible gremlin and it's why we love her.

🪐 ⇢ name three good things going on in your life right now

My wife came out to a bunch of our friends and they are all so loving and supportive! She smiles so much now!

We are getting a patio installed out the back! It only took 7 years but finally we can eat out there without having to balance on gravel

There is a very cute cat loafing beside me

🍬 ⇢ post an unpopular opinion about a popular fandom character

This is not me trying to yuck anyone's yum but I really, really cannot stand casting Megamind and Roxanne in parental roles for Keiko or her calling them her parents. It squicks me out to the point of repulsion. I am all for feral aunt and uncle to a wild niece, but fun characters who are NOT reduced to parenting (reluctant or otherwise) in sequels are so few and far between that I just don't want to see it. They can be supportive and caring without having to force everyone into Nuclear Family Unit.

And sure, a lot of this stems from growing up with the expectation in both media and irl that of COURSE becoming a parent is the only outcome for you. But that doesn't make it any less of an ick! We SHOULD be getting more non nuclear family options, we SHOULD be getting more it takes a village. But if your only approach to setting characters up as a family is to make them "Here is the mummy and here is the daddy and here is the baby" just no. Please. There are a thousand more possibilities there, open your mind.

🌿 ⇢ give some advice on writer's block and low creativity

Go for a walk, take some music with you, or do dishes or sweep (also with music).

Additionally, if you're wanting to write something but are holding off to find out if future canon will change things, stop waiting. Just go. Do you think we'd have anywhere near the creativity and wildness of fanfic if we had to stop and wait for canon's blessing every time. it's FANFIC! Who fucking cares if canon contradicts you down the track, it's not gonna be any less fanfic for waiting!

(I do think we actually saw a drop in the level of creativity and engagement with fandom ideas when the show was announced, which is a bummer. Kill the cop in your brain. Write shit that will be immediately contradicted, have someone come to your completely disproven fic years down the line and go "I thought this was going to not work because we know X but holy shit this is a whole new way of looking at things!")

🦋 ⇢ share something that has been on your heart and mind lately

I uh....no thoughts, head empty. How do I stop my cat attacking me for wearing jeans in the house? I got my other rants out up above so... *le shrug*

:green beetle: ⇢ add 50 words to your current wip and share the paragraph here (emoji is not working for me smh)

Oh you sneaky little shit, you got me writing!

(context: Look we aint supposed to let the prisoners get gifts. There's a whole chapter in the handbook about what happened last time we let the kid get so much as a bobby pin.

But you tell me how I'm meant to turn down such a sweet little old lady when she comes in with two pristine old shoe boxes, all carefully packed with tissue and hands one to the kid and the other to the repoter and with a quavery little voice about how she and her husband, god rest his soul, used to go dancing every saturday night for almost forty years and how they entered the ameature ballroom competitions together. Told us they were the last pairs they brought together, before the cancer took him and oh she'd never get these on over her bunions now but it would do her old heart good to see some use coming to these shoes which hadn't seen the light of day in nigh on twenty years.)

There's only so much a man can take right before retirement.

I might have been able to hold her off if she hadn't handed one of the boxes to Miss Primetime, who looked really touched and immediately buckled herself into a pair of sparkly red shoes to the encouragement of all the old biddies.

So now the kid's the proud owner of a pair of actual ballroom dance shoes, all polished black to go with the bright orange jumpsuit.

[lurkingshan]

Shan! One of the things that I’ve loved learning during my Old GMMTV Challenge project is discovering filmmakers and watching through their project lists. Do you follow specific directors or screenwriters for Asian dramas? If so, who are they, and why? And which dramas of their do you recommend?

A fun one, and an area where I know we actually differ in our approach. In short, my answer to your first question is yes, but also no. :)

By which I mean, I generally do pay attention to who creates the shows I watch, because when I am impressed or infuriated by a drama I like to know who is behind it so I can look into their other work, either to pursue or avoid it. Sometimes I have to go looking for that information, but there are some creators who have such an obvious style that it sets them apart and makes it near impossible to miss the connections between their shows (Kim Eun Sook in kdrama, Aof Noppharnach and Jojo Tichakorn in tbl, Hwang Da Seul in kbl, Lin Pei Yu in twbl, etc). With those I might start something unknowingly and then be like wait a minute is this X’s work? I do maintain awareness and keep creators’ other works in mind when I watch something new because it's fun to look for themes across a body of work, and frankly, to know where the pitfalls are likely to come in.

That said, I do not feel any need to be a completist about any one auteur's resume, I don’t intentionally sit down to watch a creator's work in an organized way, and I actually prefer not to know that much about their personal lives, because I like to focus on the fictional stories without too much real world gunk getting in the way and clouding my reads. I am a "let the art speak for itself" girlie; I'm less interested in authorial intent than in allowing stories breathing room to be interpreted by the audience. I do believe in the Death of the Author school of thought and I don't think it's great when creators try to do too much to control how their work is perceived. One of my current beefs with the Only Friends watch experience is that there is so much real world gunk (branded pairs, shipping and actor stanning, creators posting on social media with context that is not included in the actual canon) getting in the way and messing with interpretations of the show.

Once you get into a fandom at all you will inevitably be exposed to a ton of this kind of thing whether you like it or not. And it comes up a lot in bl because so many shows are adapted from pre-existing source material and rely on known actor pairs, which inevitably affects discourse because people come to these shows with a lot of baggage even before they begin. But I am always interested in story first. I dove into I Feel You Linger in the Air and Absolute Zero with zero hesitation because timey wimey soulmate shit is my jam, not because these shows were made by Tee Bundit and New Siwaj (in fact that would be more of a deterrent than anything if I let it dictate my viewing choices).

So while I am interested in the undercurrent of melancholy across Aof's works, and Jojo's devotion to messy ensemble pieces where everyone is a little bit of an asshole, and Kim Eun Sook's uncanny ability to tap into the zeitgeist and create banger after banger across a range of genres, I don't need to know too much about why their areas of focus are important to them or how it relates to their personal experiences. I prefer not to use fiction as a means to psychoanalyze the real people who create it; instead I just try to engage with and appreciate their art as art and afford them respect as creative geniuses without making assumptions about how each work is meant to reflect their real experiences. Understanding some basic demographics about creators (as in, do they have the appropriate lived experiences to be telling the stories they choose) is about as far as my curiosity goes.

Question 1 TL;DR: I do like to pay attention to who creates the shows I watch so that I can follow the themes in their work, but I am not interested in following the creators themselves closely.

Question 2: who are the creators I recommend following? I have mentioned a lot of them above, and my overall recommendation is that if you are invested in a show, you should look to see who writes and directs it, not just who stars in it. Actors are of course important but usually it's the creative team behind them that really makes or breaks a drama, because they are the ones ultimately in control of the story. Having that grounding can be really helpful for setting expectations and in interpreting and processing what you watch, and also just for helping you find more of the kind of thing you will probably like. I’m extremely glad, for instance, that I watched Gay OK Bangkok before Only Friends, because it gave me a framework for understanding the themes they were likely to dig into. I also just finished watching Rainless Love in a Godless Land, which I was interested in due in large part to it sharing the same screenwriter as my all time favorite Taiwanese drama, Someday or One Day, and being able to pull out the similar themes and ideas across the two projects made it all the more interesting for me.

[vmures]

Been thinking about meta and analysis of media and fandom, how we (meaning the fandom community) approach it, how we as a community deal with differences of opinion, and how all of this has shifted and changed over the years I've been involved in fandom.

I joined online fandom in the late 90s when I was in my final years of high school. The fandoms I was involved in varied in make-up. Some skewed younger and some older. Flame wars and obnoxious behavior existed and sometimes the dust-ups had long-reaching effects. I certainly had people tell me my takes or characterization were wrong, but not many. Fandom misbehavior is nothing new, but at times it definitely feels like it has gotten worse over the decades.

It's hard to tell sometimes if it's nostalgia goggles at work, or if things have actually gotten worse. But it definitely feels like people are less likely to go "huh, I don't agree with your interpretation, but I can see how you got there" and far more likely to jump straight to name-calling and nasty responses about how wrong you are.

But here's the thing. Canon is not the end-all-be-all people think it is. Because while we can point to the things that happen on screen, there are always a great many things that must happen off-screen. And when it comes to characters' internal motivations and drives, we usually are left for the viewer to infer those unless it comes up in dialogue or it's a book with a close point of view where we actually see what's going on in the character's head.

Add in plot holes and inconsistencies in narrative (some media is rife with these issues, others less so) and you have a lot more room for different interpretations because everyone consuming the media will come up with their own way to make the thing make sense. These interpretations and understandings of canon material frequently become what we refer to as headcanons. But, unfortunately, a lot of people have a hard time separating out canon and headcanon. Cognitive bias can make it very hard to understand that your interpretation of something is not actually a universal interpretation.

There is a reason that most Literature classes aren't graded on whether your essay was "right" but rather how well you supported your take and backed it up with evidence. And it's because there isn't really a right or wrong when it comes to art as long as you can support your argument, you've got a case to make.

I used to enjoy discussing fandoms with other fans, but more and more I try to stay out of those discussions because they stopped being discussions and started being arguments. And that isn't fun for me at all. It stresses me out, so I just keep quiet on these things these days.

But to all those who do share their thoughts on their fandoms and their wonderful essays about canon, go you (at least if you are doing it without being mean to those who disagree with you). I enjoy reading a lot of the takes even if I don't always agree with them.

[vintage-bentley]

apologies if you've talked about this before somewhere, but I'm curious- what's your take on watching or not watching s3 of GO when it arrives at some point, knowing what we now know about Gaiman (and have had some time to absorb that)? I think there's wisdom in avoiding media by predatory males that are tainted by their misogynistic worldviews and trying to uplift female creators instead, and I generally pursue that when trying to find new stuff to read or watch (and Gaiman has been on my shit list for things in his work for a while, but I did still find GO diverting and harmless enough to watch in spite of that). but after the fact... it wouldn't bother me to watch it like it bothers me a bit to see known abuser actors in lead roles, because Gaiman's not on screen and he's also (probably) not on set abusing the cast, a la Whedon, so it's not tainted that way. Financially... well to be honest with you I'm not paying for prime anyway, so it's not like I'm monetarily supporting Gaiman anyway. And yet...a lot of people had to look the other way for a long time, and continued to give him flowers he didn't deserve. I feel like that should change something tangibly about the way we approach his work now. All those posts from other fandom women on here about denialists are 'making excuses for an abuser just because we like a tv show' don't sit right with me. Not because I'm a Gaiman defender; I believe his victims completely due to the overwhelming evidence & I think he's a vile little man who deserves to get hit by a bus. But I wonder if that's enough.

I’m sorry that this took so long for me to respond to! I wanted to make sure I got my thoughts in order before I talked about this, so thank you for your patience!

(Note I’m making after writing the below: I noticed I made this more about being a fan of GO in general, not just season 3. Because at the time I’m answering this ask, season 3 isn’t guaranteed so my mind’s more on the fandom in general)

Personally, I think there’s no “right” answer and that it’s going to be different for everyone.

Somebody who came to the show as a big fan of Neil might feel differently from somebody who became a fan of him through the show, who might feel differently from somebody who never cared for him.

For me, I never cared about him, and I don’t even mean that in a “I always hated him, look how smart I am” way. I just mean that I didn’t pay attention to him, because I very rarely pay attention to the writers of shows I like. And as far as the book goes, I paid more attention to Pratchett since it seems he was responsible for most of it. Then of course later on I had my own annoyances with Neil so I actively ignored him. So when the accusations came out, my relationship with GO didn’t really feel much different, since Neil had never been a central part of that relationship. However, I can see how somebody might feel differently if their relationship with GO involved eagerly waiting for a new post from Neil and seeking out all the work of his that they could.

I agree that we should change the way we approach his work. Focus more on how women in his works are treated, for example. I know that I’m even more uneasy about that “stable of ladies” comment from Ms Sandwich than I was before…as well as the fact that there are TWO women in Good Omens involved in the sex industry. Why? Probably because the writer is a creep who feels entitled to women’s bodies.

I don’t think that remaining a fan of GO is “making excuses” for Neil. Making excuses would be trying to find some reason to discredit the women he abused, which unfortunately has happened. I’ve seen people claiming that the whole thing was a “terf conspiracy”, to claiming that it was a tactic to interfere with the UK election, to focusing on what the victims’ personal politics might be and why that makes them bad people. I could go on and on, because people had so many wild excuses for why their favourite male had to be innocent. That’s much different than just remaining a fan while acknowledging that the writer is not a good person, and that it’s possible that his own beliefs have seeped into his writing (again, I point to the existence of Ms Sandwich and her “girls”).

I don’t think it’s right that people on here are demanding that fans of GO cut all ties with it…because the fact is, that if you love something and have been involved with it for years, you likely can’t just drop that immediately. If there are people who can do that, good for them, but I don’t think it should be expected of everyone.

Since this ask was sent, season 3 filming has been paused, presumably for “production changes”. My hope is that Neil is removed from the project, because I still really love the story of Good Omens and I would love to see it completed on screen without him around.

In short, personally I still love Good Omens and I doubt I’ll stop loving it any time soon. I feel like personally, my relationship with the story doesn’t change much, but I understand the people who feel otherwise. And now that there’s hope of season 3 continuing without him, I think it’s fine to be looking forward to it.

Most importantly, I don’t want anyone to think that my continuing to interact with the fandom is me supporting Neil. That was never the case, and it is especially not the case now.

[thetriggeredhappy]

Was wondering, over here -- what's your favorite type of Scout characterization(s)? I've been in this fandom for almost a decade, and (imo) everyone's got a slightly different spin on him, ranging from "category 5 annoyance, cartoonishly egocentric" to "earnest but afflicted with Early 20s Brain" to anything anywhere in between or beyond that. Got any specific hallmarks you're fond of? Stuff you tend to disregard?

hrmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

alright so naturally i’m always the type to drift towards characters who, even as you’re reading them, you can kinda see the lenticular way they can be interpreted. you can tell by the author’s tone how the character interprets themselves, and how they’re interpreted by the viewer, and how they’re interpreted by whoever they’re talking to—three-dimensional, in shortform. with grey areas. sort of taking them outside of their trope and giving them the leeway of, at times, even assuming that the media itself is biased regarding them.

which is how i approach tf2, as well—the medium they exist in is, by virtue of being an absurdist comedy, an unreliable narrator.

so when you posit the stances “scout is like if gaston was wicked annoying and 150 pounds max but didn’t notice” vs “earnest, flawed early 20s dude without a ton of perspective on his life”, as if they’re two ends of the spectrum, my answer is, they don’t have to be.

i’m not a huge stickler on interpretations of characters, to be honest, but i do have a few icks with some interpretations of scout. any interpretation that implies he’s one of those dudes who says things for shock value or for a reaction really irritate me, mostly because there’s nothing in the text of canon that would even remotely imply that. scout wouldn’t say some weird shit about a girl going to make him a sandwich or whatever, he’d draw a picture of spy getting hit by a car and then hand it to spy because they don’t get along. giving scout these weird greasy traits just because at a glance you might characterize him that way in the netflix live-action remake, it just comes across as like. like maybe you don’t know what you’re talking about actually. like, the cheapest easiest possible characterization. the wish dot com characterization.

and i know it might seem a little bit like the pot and kettle on this one since i do take such heavy liberties with the characters, but here’s the thing—my argument isn’t that changing the characters in your fanwork is Bad. that’s all fanwork. that’s all interpretation. my argument is that making tf2 characters weirdly bigoted and filling in weird shock value stuff for no reason is fuckin’ lazy.

it’s much harder, and much more vulnerable, and takes way more time and effort, to try to write these characters with good jokes, or with human personalities, or with actual motivations and thought into their behavior, etc etc. and going “scout says [insert alphabetical list of homophobic slurs], because it’s the 70s lol they hate gay ppl” just tells me you’re not capable of writing well.

that’s not to say i even want scout to necessarily be a good person. i think it’s actually kind of funny that he decided to like, learn manners and etiquette and put on a prom for miss pauling, because having a dude who kills people for money do some cute shit like that is weirdly sweet, in a roundabout way. i think the canon of the text would imply that scout tf2 is kind of a sweet dude. but like, y’know. obviously nobody on the team is mentally or emotionally well. mentally and emotionally sound people don’t die and murder for money. writing scout as particularly egocentric, overly concerned with his own life (either in an anxious way or a narcissistic way), loud mouthed, temperamental, a sore loser, unsportsmanlike, those are all takes i’ve seen that have been really interesting spins of his character.

my favorite traits in him are probably things like him being a hugely impulsive talker, way exaggerative of positive emotions (like whenever he or someone else does some cool shit), maybe a little overdramatic and whiny about the small things, him being dude who will see his friend punch someone across the bar and will sprint over to punch them too, a real ride-or-die guy, kinda stubborn. maybe a little catty sometimes, earnest in a weirdly brave sort of way, clumsy or bad luck or both. dude with a weirdly nonexistent sense of shame or embarrassment except about, like, if he finds out he was wearing his shirt backwards when talking to Miss Pauling or something silly like that. and not even necessarily all of these at once! i just like these characterizations in general, and scout tends to get these ones.

this went on longer than i meant it to, sorry. anyways. scout teamfortress my beloathed

[sea-salted-wolverine]

P, Q, T 👀

*insert grumble mumble while I hunt down which questions those are*

P- invent random AU for a fandom.

Uhhh... Klondike gold rush era Alaska. 1890s and there's money coming out of the ground at the ends of the earth. The corners of the map have all been filled in but there is one last frontier to explore. The mounties are making your characters carry 3 years worth of supplies up the chilkoot pass. They have more money than God in a place where there is nothing to buy. Wump opportunities galore. The only people actually turning a profit are the outfitters and the whores. The closest version of western civilization is a tent city in a swamp run by gangs stealing luggage. (Anchorage mention) Robert Service is writing poetry about a frozen zombie mailman. Jack London is writing about murder dogs.

Yeah.

I am not optimistic about the quality of a gold rush AU written for fan fic purposes because its a super niche thing that would require assloads of research, but its an incredibly rich setting and frankly a fucking insane period of history. Go read the Cremation of Sam Mcgee and slot in whoever you feel would fit. Tag it as #wouldn't it be fucked up if

Q- i don't so much abandon ships as I put them in drydock and forget about them. I have a habit of latching onto underdeveloped characters in mediocre media that are never going to get any more fleshed out than "cute naive love interest" or "comic relief character #2" and then I'm vaguely dissapointed when the mediocre media wraps up and is content to leave them as accessories of the plot. I have a handful of fics that started as ships, and I did so much work extrapolating personalities and fleshing out the characters that it just became original fiction. The worst offenders are usually Shonen Manga and action movies because while there is a solid chunk of my media taste that is a 9 year old boy who wants to see explosions and superpowers and giant rock-em sock-em robots, those are generally not the kinds of stories that have much in the way of character depth.

Though, sometimes I am surprised and a ship I had thought was moldering away in the back, ready to be scuttled for artificial reef building, comes charging up to the forefront guns blazing and colors flying. Usually when someone has an opinion about Christopher Eccleston. NineRose doesn't so much live in my head rent free as it chewed a hole in the wall and pops out at random moments.

T- do I have any headcannons i will die defending?

I have a bit of a unique approach to head cannons. If it makes the story work better If it makes the story work better then everything is fair even if its contradictory. Senshi is the equivalent of a 20-year-old with a full beard and a 1000 yd stare is supported by canon and contradicted by the supplemental material, but thats not the thing that makes or breaks the headcannon. Its hilarious and fits the themes, despite the fact its not the authors intent.

I do get protective over intentional allegory especially unstated intentional allegory. Just because there isn't a great big banner stating that Pacific Rim, the movie about giant monsters from the ocean, rated on a 1 to 5 category system, showing up specifically because of rising CO2 levels and a warming atmosphere, that the goverment decides to fight for a little bit and then ignore and slap an in effective seawall on it and just let everyone on the coast get fucked, is about hurricanes, doesn't mean that I'm making things up when I say it's about hurricanes. The same with reading the Matrix as a trans allegory. The Wachowski Brothers were the Wachowski Sisters by the time they finished making a trilogy about taking a pill to remain comfortable in the status quo or taking a different pill to make some difficult changes and see the world as it is. So denying any queer interpretation of those movies is somewhere between willful ignorance and illiteracy, especially when the pills are color coded to zanax and oral estrogen.

[trans-elrond]

7, 8, 14, 24 for the choose violence asks 😈

thanks for your contribution to the unending torments <3

7. what character did you begin to hate not because of canon but because how how the fandom acts about them?

funny that this is the same answer as the last question........ but H*lbrand in ROP. I mean, it's not hate hate, I think he's an interesting character and i have read fic with him that i liked, but the next person to go omg daddy sexy slut s*uron i want him to spank me or whatever? u get the KNIFE. develop some shame!

8. common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

I think there are ... lots but it is sometimes annoying when people didn't want characters to die and it's like, okay, but that's the point of the story?

(saying this as i'm guilty of not wanting abner krill or bialar crais to die, but like, i can recognize i wouldn't have loved the stories as much if they had avoided their fates.)

14. that one thing you see in fics all the time

this is petty English major of me, but people use the wrong fucking words all the time, especially in the sort of... flowery sensual archaism tone that is so popular among younger fanfic writers. just so many misused words. i will close a fic and also if the mistake is funny enough make fun of it to my friends. (I like words a lot! but not blatant misuse. idk, use a dictionary.)

(this is not to shame second language English learners, who are often way more careful with words anyway? i'm talking about regular old first-language English speakers who are trying to make their prose better and accidentally make it worse.)

24. topic that brings up the most rancid discourse

where do i begin. so much rancid discourse on this website! any kind of petty ship wars or fandom wars and... uh-oh girls i feel a thought coming on

okay i'm going to attempt to say this next bit in a way that doesn't set the snipers on me, or alienate the people i know and love who enjoy them critically, because i have obviously watched m*rvel and t*p gun myself and read & enjoyed fic for them. but like: while there are obvious exceptions and there are plenty of fans reclaiming & reworking these fandoms, i think it can be a sign of immaturity to latch onto those giant blockbusters with obvious pro-imperialism pro-cop themes and not be able to take constructive criticism about your media diet. (see: "it's just escapism", "it's my comfort show", "it's just fiction it doesn't mean anything" etc.)

if pro-cop pro-imperialism media is a significant part of your media diet, you maybe need to consider branching out and watching stuff that isn't spoon-fed propaganda. and you need to be able to say, these are things within these films/shows that do not align with my own worldview; i enjoy it for these other reasons. ALL THAT TO SAY watch what you want whatever i ain't a cop but please do so with brain cells and also there is a wonderful world of non-cop/CIA propaganda out there that you might find you enjoy if you watch something other than Generic Blockbuster #72 because it stars one of the Chrises you like.

basically i think people on tumblr need to touch grass. my absolute favorite film of 2022 was Athena, a French film about brothers and their different approaches to police brutality, that had about 0 marketing. i wouldn't have discovered it if i only watched giant studio films.

[mallowstep]

Not sure if I’m sending this in the right place but, as someone who identifies as “centrist” in this whole anti pro thing (I don’t like either side, harassment and overzealous hatred over fictional characters bordering on obsession is unhealthy and definitely really harmful to minors in those spaces but a majority of proship shit I’ve come in contact with during my attempts to kinda figure myself out were also very black and white when it came to arguments over fictional depictions of certain topics, consumption of media and honestly at times reminded me of the fandom culture I was groomed in) I agree with you the most and genuinely enjoy a lot of what you write, and it’s refreshing to see someone else who has similar opinions and ways of handling these topics in their works with a nuance that people lack when looking at any of this stuff which infuriates me. I’d send this off anon but I do kind of fear backlash from outing my stance on this stuff — this whole controversy is dumb, I do wish people who could handle your approach on dark subjects gave your writing more of a chance, your mosspelt story was a very well put together piece on grooming and it’s effects while not being too graphic and focusing on an emotional journey and i really loved it, I wish people in general could use more nuance when looking at fiction and interactions with said fiction because these black and white arguments get us nowhere

[this ask was initially sent jan 31]

thank you so much for this ask.

(cw: i do not discuss any details of what certain fics contain, but i do discuss that i have written fics dealing with various kinds of abuse with some being graphic.)

the mosspelt piece is one of my proudest works, and i think it definitely...goes down the easiest? (in contrast with, say, no one held me to the flame, a concept i didn't expect any amount of support for or engagement with.)

i would like to take this moment to remind everyone that you don't have to engage with everything i write, just in case anyone needs to hear that today. if something is upsetting to you, don't read it. love to everyone.

anyway. as someone whose stance is tax paying adult/whatever is funniest/whatever people have decided today, i don't really like to acknowledge shipcourse. i've got friends who bear both labels, and they both agree with me. so. i think that pretty accurately describes how nonsensical this whole thing is, that two people on supposedly opposite sides can have the same opinions.

i was talking with one of my friends who has the same stance as me (altho, if forced to label ourselves, we would pick differently), and we were talking about how it ultimately comes down to how do we actually stop harm.

banning topics from ao3 doesn't stop harm. things will happen no matter what. you don't have to like it, but that's the reality. (for a tangible example of this happening, look into how FOSTA/SESTA made it harder for law enforcement to do their jobs.)

as some of y'all know, i was most engaged in this discourse when i was at a deep low point. (or high point, as it were, seeing as i was trending towards mania.) it's been a while since i've spoken on it because i needed a good long time out.

ultimately, characters on a screen or in a book do not matter and cannot be harmed. real people can. what matters to me is therefore the normalization of abuse.

a talking point that continues to bother me is the idea that just acknowledging something exists and happens is normalizing abuse. i think anyone who's read some of my fics can agree with that. i think if you read no one held me to the flame and manage to get off to it, or otherwise think it's normalizing abuse, then i'm a much worse writer than i thought. (i name nohmttf specifically because it goes as far as deliberately depicting the acts.)

i don't know where i'm going with this, just...it's all pretty senseless. if the super dark stuff like nohmttf isn't your cup of tea, i don't want you to read it. i want you to enjoy your time reading my fics.

[letterstonamjoon]

Perspective

One day, I asked one of my old professor about a hot issue on media which was reported in one direction in almost articles. He seemed very upset hearing me approach the issue that way, and told me that what everyone had reported may not accurate. It reminds me of a basic rule in journalism, try to see the subject from different perspectives.

During my two years being Ami, I noticed some occasions when other Amies got extremely upset with the management company of BTS, for example Hobi's solo album, Proof collecting edition, and recently Suga's concert ticket price. They claimed that all the company cared about was money, careless about the emotion of BTS members and Ami. They said that BTS was the one who saved the company from negative starting point, but were treated far below what you deserved. New to k-pop and fandom, I wondered whether they're the problems of only Ami, or all other fandoms would have some issues with their idols' management company.

I once said you were the one that I wanted to get to know more. But besides you, there's another who intrigued my curiosity, the man behind you. I observed the transformation on the face and body size of Bang Sihyuk from the beginning of BTS till now, and thought about what was inside his mind. Every time reading negative analysis about the company activities like above, I switched position from Ami to Bang Sihyuk, thinking about why he made those moves.

When a company goes public and is listed on a stock exchange, its goal will be driven by a whole new set of numbers. So what kind of people is Bang Sihyuk? The one who lives for a kind of ideal, or an ambitious man who wants to build a robust entertainment corporation. If he is the former, he would ignored the financial indicators to do just what he wants to do with the bands and music like before. But if he is the latter, he would use the foundation made by your explosion to expand the corporation business lines. And in this case, financial indicators such as income and profit growth rate, market capitalisation and business diversification are what make sense to him.

[podcast-bookclub]

Specifically to join the conversation around audience distance, it also brings in to question the accessibility of creators and the perceived or literal "lack" of fandom-only spaces. In my experience, Tumblr in particular has historically been a bit off-color; most day-to-day people you encounter don't have a Tumblr blog (and probably have never had one), often viewing the site as something long-dead akin to MySpace despite the consistency of activity across the platform. Generally the content created and shared on here tends to stay on here, especially within fandom (possibly due to a perceived sense of privacy, though that would just be a wild guess.)

That said, Tumblr has always been a "safe" space for fandom to exist, and I believe there's potentially feelings of intrusion to have audio dramatists here right alongside everyone else. While not inherently negative, that type of coinhabitance is (as far as I'm aware) largely exclusive to fiction podcasts, thus just sort of calling for a separate set of rules and a differing approach to fandom than we've seen before. The so-called coinhabitance isn't inherently negative in any way, but by design it definitely lends to a sense of "observation" for lack of a better word.

From the perspective of a fan, knowing that everything you're saying could theoretically be seen by a creator is, in short, nerve-wracking. Particularly with smaller shows and smaller creators (as said, beyond the reaches of audio drama "titans") it's not just a possibility, it becomes just shy of a guarantee. Often posts will circulate around small fandoms; if a creator doesn't see it on the tag or from your blog, it's not unlikely to assume it will circle back across their dash at one point or another. While yes, there is a sense of responsibility as a fan interacting in a space the creator also frequents, it leaves a lot less room for people to share as freely as they might otherwise do. (As an aside, I think creators setting up a filtered/blocked tag to allow their fandom that privacy is wonderful and arguably something every creator on platforms such as this should be doing.)

Additionally, I believe the general (correct) attitude around audio dramas is that the "indie" aspects of the space, as spoken about many times over, allow for the prevalence of representation for often underrepresented identities in audio fiction. Both as creators and fans, such podcasts are a place to feel at home, and here on Tumblr it's further a place to find others you can relate to also within that representation. While there is a certain degree of satisfaction within what the source material's "canon" provides, it may lead to any further hesitance about exploration in fanwork; with the creators, in essence, looking over your shoulder, what if you do something "wrong"?

As an example, take the colloquial habit of rewriting storylines or show endings within more "mainstream" media. A fan feels something was handled poorly, and are well within their right to explore those thoughts and ideas on the betterment of a situation in fanwork. However, I think there's potential with the presence of creators to once again damage that freedom through no fault of their own; a fan may be unhappy with something in the show, but equally as much they're aware a given creator will come across their fanwork depicting however they chose to repair it. While that isn't inherently negative, there may be fear just in the idea of causing an audio dramatist to feel like they made a mistake/should've done things differently/etc. In my experience nothing is ever intended to be an "attack" on a creator's choices, but I do think it could be a very easy conclusion particularly for a creator who is maybe inexperienced in fandom spaces.

All this said, ultimately most things on this topic are, for the moment, speculation, though I'm incredibly curious about the theoretics of any particular solutions to the overall lack of committed fandoms in the space (and, otherwise, observations concerning creators sharing said space.) I think it's easy for a lot of the discussion to become cyclical because everyone seems aware of the issues yet unsure of the best way to handle them, or if they should really be "fixed" at all. Fandom in indie podcasting is, for the most part, an entirely new ballgame, but trial-and-error will only get you so far if there isn't steps taken to at the very least evaluate and potentially adjust the way situations are approached by both fans and creators.

Where are all the Audio Fiction Fandoms?

To be clear, this isn't me complaining, and I know, there are plenty of fandoms for audio fiction podcasts and the like.

But I have always found it weird how few shows get the big, self-sustaining kinds of fandoms, the ones where there's always at least a little trickle of fanfic and fanart. So weird, in fact, that I've been thinking about it on and off for the last 5-6 years, and I have a few theories I'd like to share with y'all as to why, and to see if I can't get some feedback from the audio fiction fans on Tumblr.

Theory 1: Audience Size

The first theory is mostly about demographics - fundamentally, a fandom has to be large enough to sustain itself, and only a certain number of audience members are going to become the kind of fans who make fan works, so ultimately, an audio fiction show needs to get popular enough before fan works start appearing.

There's plenty of support for this theory, of course - Welcome to Night Vale, Wolf 359, The Adventure Zone and The Magnus Archives are titans in the fiction podcast space, and indeed they have big fandoms. But, with that said, there's plenty of other podcasts that are just as big that don't have fandoms, so this can't explain it all.

Theory 2: Audience Distance

This one is similar to the first, but subtly different. A few creators in the space I've talked to have noted that they'd never make fan works of their friend's shows - that feels weird, like deliberately treading on their friend's work. They don't have this feeling when playing in big fandoms, or fandoms where they don't know the creator. This implies to me that fans need a certain level of distance from creators in order to feel comfortable playing with that fictional space. While this is less the case now with the fall of Twitter, a lot of shows, for better or worse, used social media as the primary pillar of their marketing, as well as using Patreons with special access as part of their monetization strategies.

In short, it's never been easier to get close to the creators of your favourite shows, and for smaller shows, the most exuberant fans - the kinds who might make fan works - are also the kinds of fans who will take those opportunities to get closer to the creators. In short, there just might not enough social distance for fans to be comfortable creating works, not at least until the audience grows sufficiently that a creator simply cannot be that close with their entire audience.

This theory I'm not so sure about these days - this one is probably a lot more dependent on the generation of fandom you belong to. Older generations of fandom are more likely to have this queasiness around creator closeness, because they were creating in a time where fandom was a shadow realm, desperately hidden from The Powers That Be, and "No Copyright Infringement Intended" was carved into fan works as an eldritch attempt at legal protection.

Theory 3: Audience Age

To be clear - there are fans of all ages out there. But it is clear to me that fandom trends young, and part of that is just the time needed to participate in fan culture - creating and consuming takes a lot of time, time that tends gets scarcer and scarcer as you get older (there are obvious exceptions of course - stay-at-home mothers have consistently been a major force in fandoms!). It's possible that audio fiction fans just tend to trend older, and thus don't have the time available to create and consume fan works.

Honestly, I'm not sure how relevant this one is - Audio fiction is becoming more popular with younger audiences and slowly shedding the "old fuddy-duddyness" that surrounded it when I was first getting into the space. And, ya know, there are audio fiction fandoms out there, so obviously either the youth aspect of fandom isn't a thing, or it is, but audio fiction audiences are still trending young anyway.

Theory 4: We're getting what we need!

A lot of academic discourse often focuses on the idea that fandoms create for a reason - and that reason is often to focus on parts of a fiction that the original text, for whatever reason, doesn't. The most obvious form of this is the many, many, many examples of ships and erotic fanfiction. You, as a fan, watch a show, see something between two characters, and get frustrated that the show isn't giving you more of that, won't make what is clearly obvious to you, explicit. So, you consume and/or create fan works that help relieve that tension instead.

Or, in shows where the focus is primarily on plot advancement or action, you feel a desire to get to know the characters better - you see the stirrings of these characters, you want to know them better, but the show just isn't the type of show to give you that slow, character-heavy scene/episode that you know would give you exactly what you need, so, again, you go consume and/or create fan works to fix that.

It's very possible that a lot of audio fiction is already built to give these sorts of fan audiences what they want. There's already romantic relationships, characters are openly queer, the nature of the audio medium means that character-heavy scenes are something that the medium directs creators towards, so there's already a lot of character engagement. So, for many fandoms, there just isn't much need to create fan works - there's no tension between what the show is and what it could be.

Theory 5: We can make our own at home!

One interesting theory is that one reason that people make fandom is because, fundamentally, the creators understand that they're not going to be making a film, or a TV show, or a book. They have creative urges, and they're not in a situation in life where they're likely to overcome the enormous barriers to entry in mainstream media, so, in combination with the stuff in theory 4, they play in other people's worlds instead. They know that there's already an audience who will consume their work (they're part of that fan community, after all!), so they can get that validation of creation without needing to create their own TV show or film or book, etc.

Podcasts, however, are different. Now, it's not true to say that podcasts have low barriers to entry - to create a podcast, there's a lot of skills you either need to learn yourself, or find collaborators with those skills. But, those barriers to entry are much lower than visual media. At the very least, audio production is significantly cheaper and less complicated for an equivalent runtime.

Better, podcasts have absurdly low barriers to publication - There are no gatekeepers to satisfy, no distributors you have to convince. Once your thing is made, pretty much no one can stop you from distributing that work. You don't even really need to pay for a podcast host - there's a few free podcast hosts now. So, once you've done the work, pretty much nothing stops you from publishing said work.

So... If you're a creative fan, who loved a show but thinks you can do better? Well, you can! You don't need to play in other people's spaces, you can be inspired by the podcasts you listen to to create your own original work, in the same medium and genre.

What do y'all think? Which of these feel right, which of these feel obviously wrong? Are you part of a audio fiction fandom? What does your fandom feel like to you on the inside? As a audio fiction creator, it's kinda hard for me to get into the inside of fandom culture, so insider perspectives would be super neat for me, so please reblog this to anyone you feel might have an interesting perspective on the whole thing!

[pumpkinpaix]

mdzs fandom, diaspora, and cultural exchange

Hey everyone. This post contains a statement that’s been posted to my twitter, but was a collaborative effort between several diaspora fans over the last few weeks. Some of the specifics are part of a twitter-localized discourse, but the general sentiments and issues raised are applicable across the board, including here on tumblr.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve probably seen a few of my posts about this fandom, cultural exchange, and diasporic identity. For example, here, here, and here. This statement more directly criticizes some of the general issues I and others have raised in the past, and also hopefully provides a little more insight into where those issues come from. I would be happy if people took the time to read and reblog this, as the thought that went into it is not trivial, and neither is the subject matter. Thank you.

Introduction

Hello. I'm a member of a Chinese diaspora discord server - I volunteered to try and compile a thread of some thoughts regarding our place and roles in the fandom expressed in some of our recent discussions. This was primarily drafted by me and reviewed/edited by others with the hopes that we can share a cohesive statement on our honest feelings instead of repeatedly sharing multiple, fragmented versions of similar threads in isolation.

This was compiled by one group of diaspora and cannot be taken to represent diaspora as a whole, but we hope that our input can be considered with compassion and understanding of such.

For context, we are referencing two connected instances: the conflict described in these two threads (here and here), and when @/jelenedra tweeted about giving Jewish practices to the Lans. Regarding the latter, we felt that it tread into the territory of cultural erasure, and that it came from a person who had already disrespected diaspora’s work and input.

Context

The Lans have their own religious and cultural practices, rooted both in the cultural history of China and the genre of xianxia. Superimposing a different religious practice onto the Lans amidst other researched, canonical or culturally accurate details felt as if something important of ours was being overwritten for another’s personal satisfaction. Because canon is so intrinsically tied to real cultural, historical, and religious practices, replacing those practices in a canon setting fic feels like erasure. While MDZS is a fantasy novel, the religious practices contained therein are not. This was uncomfortable for many of us, and we wanted to point it out and have it resolved amicably. We were hoping for a discussion or exchange as there are many parallels and points of relation between Chinese and Jewish cultures, but that did not turn out quite as expected.

What happened next felt like a long game of outrage telephone that resulted in a confusion of issues that deflected responsibility, distracted from the origin of the conflict, and swept our concern under the rug.

Specifically, we are concerned about how these two incidents are part of what we feel is a repeated, widespread pattern of the devaluing of Chinese fans’ work and concerns within this fandom. This recent round of discourse is just one of many instances where we have found ourselves in a position of feeling spoken over within a space that is nominally ours. Regardless of what the telephone game was actually about, the way it played out revealed something about how issues are prioritized.

Background

MDZS is one of the first and largest franchises of cmedia that has become popular and easily accessible outside of China. Moreover, it’s a piece of queer Chinese media that is easily accessible to those of us overseas. For many non-Chinese fans, this is the first piece of cmedia they have connected with, and it’s serving as their introduction to a culture previously opaque to them. What perhaps is less obvious is that for many Chinese diaspora fans, this is also the first piece of cmedia THEY have connected with, found community with, seen themselves in.

Many, many of us have a fraught relationship with our heritage, our language—we often suffer from a sense of alienation, both from our families and from our surrounding peers. For our families, our command of the language and culture is often considered superficial, clunky, childish. Often, connecting with our culture is framed as a mandatory academic duty, and such an approach often fosters resentment towards our own heritage. For our non-Chinese peers, our culture is seen as exotic and strange and other, something shiny and interesting to observe, while we, trapped in the middle, find ourselves uprooted and adrift.

MDZS holds an incredibly important place in many diaspora’s hearts. Speaking for myself, this is literally the first time in my life I have felt motivated and excited about my own native tongue. It's the first time I have felt genuine hope that I might one day be able to speak and read it without fear and self-doubt. It is also the first time that so many people have expressed interest in learning from me, in hearing my thoughts and opinions about my culture.

This past year and a half in fandom has been an incredible experience. I know that I am not alone in this. So many diaspora I have spoken to just in the last week have expressed similar sentiments about the place MDZS holds in their lives. It is a precious thing to us, both because we love the story itself, and because it represents a lifeline to a heritage that’s never felt fully ours to grasp.

It’s wonderful to feel like we are able to welcome our friends into our home and show them all these things that have been so formative to our identities, and to be received with such enthusiasm and interest. Introducing this to non-Chinese friends and fans has also been an opportunity to bridge gaps and be humanized in a way that has been especially important in a year where yellow peril fear mongering has been at an all-time high.  

History

However, MDZS’ rise in popularity among non-Chinese audiences has also come with certain difficulties. It is natural to want to take a story you love and make it your own: that’s what transformative fandom is all about. It is also natural that misunderstandings and unintentional missteps might happen when you aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of the culture and political history of the story in question. This is understandable and forgivable—perfection is impossible, even for ourselves.

We hope for consideration and respect when we give our knowledge freely and when we raise the issue of our own discomfort with certain statements or actions regarding our culture. Please remember that what is an isolated incident to you might be a pattern of growing microaggressions to us. In non-Asian spaces, Asian diaspora are often lumped together under one umbrella. In the west, a lot of Chinese diaspora attach themselves to Korean and Japanese media in order to feel some semblance of connection to a media which approximates our cultures because there are cultural similarities. This is the first time we've collectively found community around something that is actually ours, so the specificities matter.

There is a bitterness about being Asian diaspora and a misery in having to put up a united front about racial issues. Enmity towards one group becomes a danger to all of us, all while our own conflicted histories with one another continue to pass trauma down through the generations. Many of us don’t even watch anime in front of our grandparents because of that lingering cultural antipathy. When the distinctions between our cultures are muddled, it feels once again like that very fraught history is flattened and forgotten.

Without the lived experience of it, it’s hard to understand how pervasive the contradictory web of anti-Asian and, more specifically, anti-Chinese racial aggressions are and how insidious its effects are. The conflation of China the political entity (as perceived and presented by the US and Europe) with its people, culture, and diaspora results in an exhausting litany of criticism levied like a bludgeon, often by people who don’t understand the complicated nature of a situation against those of us who do.

There is often a frankly stunning lack of self-awareness re: cultural biases and blind spots when it comes to discussions of MDZS, particularly moral ones. There are countless righteous claims and hot takes on certain aspects of the story, its author, and the characters that are so clearly rooted in a Euroamerican political and moral framework that does not reflect Chinese cultural realities and experiences. Some of these takes have become so widespread they are essentially accepted as fanon.

This is a pattern of behavior within the fandom. It is not limited to any specific group, nor does it even exclude ourselves—we are, after all, not a monolith, and we should not be placed on pedestals to have our differing opinions weaponized against one another in fandom squabbles. We are not flawless in our own understandings and approaches, and we would appreciate it if others would remember this before using any of us as ultimate authorities to settle a personal score.

It is difficult not to be disheartened when enthusiastic interest crosses the line into entitled demand and when transformative work crosses into erasure, especially when the reactions to our raised concerns have so frequently been dismissive and hostile. The overwhelming cultural and emotional labor we bring to the table is often taken advantage of and then criticized in bad faith. We are bombarded with racist aggressions, micro and macro, and then met with ridicule and annoyance when we push back. Worse, we sometimes face accusations of hostility that force us to apologize, back down, and let the matter go.

When we bring up our issues, it usually seems to come with the expectation that there are other issues that should be addressed before we can address ours. It feels like it’s never really the time to talk about Asian issues.

On the internet and in fandom spaces, Western-coded media, politics and perspectives are assumed to be general knowledge and experience that everyone knows and has. It feels like a double standard that we are expected to know the ins and outs of western politics and to engage on these terms, but most non-Chinese have not even the slightest grasp of the sort of politics that are at play within our communities. We end up feeling used for our specialized knowledge and cultural background and then dismissed when our opinions and problems are inconvenient.

As the culture represented in MDZS is not a culture that most non-Chinese fans are familiar with, we’d like to remind you that you do not get to decide which parts of it are or are not important. While sharing this space with Chinese diaspora who have a close connection to the work and the painful history that goes along with being diaspora, we ask that you be mindful of listening to our concerns.

Cultural erasure is tied to a lot of intense historical and generational trauma for us that maybe isn't immediately evident: the horrors of the Pacific theatre, the far-reaching consequences of colonization, racial tensions both among ourselves and with non-Chinese etc. These are not minor or simple things, and when we talk about our issues within fandom, this is often what underlies them. This is one of the first and only places many of us have been able to find community to discuss our unique issues without feeling as if we’re speaking out of turn.

With the HK protests, COVID, the anti-Chinese platforms of the US election etc., anti-Chinese sentiment has been at the forefront of the global news cycle for some time now, and it is with complete sincerity that we emphasize once again how important MDZS fandom has been as a haven for humanizing and valuing Chinese people through cultural exchange.

Experiencing racial aggression within that space stings, not just because it’s a space we love, but because it feels like we’ve been swimming in rapidly rising racial aggression for over a year at this point.

Feelings

This is a difficult topic to broach at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. Many of us have a wariness of rocking the boat instilled in us from our upbringings, and it is not uncommon for us to feel like we should be grateful that people want to engage with something of ours at all. When we do decide to speak up, we’ve learned that there is a not insignificant chance that we’ll be turned on and trampled over because what we’ve said is inconvenient or uncomfortable. When it is already so difficult to speak up, we end up second-guessing and gaslighting ourselves into wondering whether there really was a problem at all.

We’d like to be able to share what we know about our culture and have our knowledge and experience be taken seriously and treated with courtesy. This is a beautiful, rich world built with the history of our ancestors, one that we too are trying to connect with. When we find it in ourselves to speak up about it, we would appreciate being met with consideration instead of hostility.

We don't have the luxury of stepping away from our culture when we get tired of it. We don't get to put it down and walk away when it’s difficult. But if you're not Chinese or Chinese diaspora, you get to put this book down—we'd like to kindly request that you put it down gently because of how much it matters to all of us in this fandom, regardless of heritage.

What we are asking for is reflection and thoughtfulness as we continue to engage with this work and with one another, especially with regards to how Chinese issues are positioned. When we raise issues of our own discomfort, please take a moment to reflect before reacting defensively or trying to shut us down for spoiling the fun—don’t deprioritize our concerns, especially in a fandom for a piece of Chinese media. We promise most of us are not trying to start shit for the sake of a fight. Most of the time, all we want is acknowledgement and a genuine attempt at understanding.

Our hope with this statement is to encourage more openness and understanding between diaspora and non-Chinese fans while we navigate this place that we’re sharing. Please remember that for many of us, MDZS is far more intense than a typical fandom experience. Remember that the knowledge we have and research we do is freely and happily given, and that it costs us both materially and emotionally. Please don’t take that for granted. Remember too that sometimes the reason for our discomfort may not be immediately evident to you: what seems culturally neutral and harmless might touch upon specific loaded issues for us. We ask for patience, and we ask for sincerity as we try to communicate with one another.

We are writing this because there’s a collective sense of imposed silence—that every time the newest round of discourse crops up, we often feel as if we’re walking away having created no meaningful change, and nursing new wounds that we’ll never get to address. But without speaking up about it, this is a cycle that will keep repeating.

This is not meant to shame or guilt the fandom into throwing themselves at our feet, either to thank us or beg for forgiveness—far from that. We’re just your friends and your fellow fans. We are happy to have you here, and we’re happy to create and share and play together. We just ask to be respected and heard.

Thank you. Thank you for listening. Several of us will be stepping back from twitter for a while. We’ll see you when we get back. ❤️

* A final addendum: here are two articles with solid practical advice on writing stories regarding a culture other than your own.

Cultural Appropriation for the Worried Writer: Some Practical Advice

Cultural Appropriation: Some More Practical Advice

The thread on twitter is linked in the source of this post. Thanks everyone.

[binniedeactivated]

whorehouse. || 💦

➥ 𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆 | 𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐢 𝐲𝐞𝐨𝐧𝐣𝐮𝐧 𝐱 𝐥𝐞𝐞 𝐣𝐮𝐲𝐞𝐨𝐧 𝐱 𝐡𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐲𝐮𝐧𝐣𝐢𝐧 𝐱 𝐟𝐞𝐦!𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫

➥ 𝐆𝐄𝐍𝐑𝐄 | 𝐟𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐛𝐨𝐲𝐬! 𝐚𝐮, 𝐬𝐦𝐮𝐭

➥ 𝐖/𝐂 |  4k

➥ 𝐒𝐘𝐍𝐎𝐏𝐒𝐈𝐒 | 𝐧𝐨, 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐛𝐨𝐲𝐬. 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐬𝐮𝐛𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦. 𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐞.

➥ 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒 | 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐬𝐞𝐱! , 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞, 𝐝𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐲 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤, 𝐝𝐨𝐠𝐠𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐲𝐥𝐞, 𝐭𝐨𝐲𝐬, 𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐥!𝐠𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐥!𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐢𝐞, 𝐰𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐞 𝐥𝐨𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐧𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐲 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐭 𝟏𝟖+ 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲.

multi-fandom ask requested by @light164star​ hope you enjoy this my love!

in any normal university a fraternity represents ambition, passion, and integrity amongst brotherhood. but things were different in your university.

the Sigma Chi (ΣΧ)’s were different. they stayed in this big gorgeous frat house across campus, they threw the best parties and had the best of everything. they had the best selection of everything on campus, even down to the best dining hall. they were very selective to who they admitted. well, judging by the guys you saw leave that building it seemed as if they only accepted the best of the best. the best looking guys, best athletes, the academic powerhouses, the all rounders. every guy on campus wished they were one of them and every girl wished they could be with one of them. but the Sigma Chi’s never dated anyone. that was their number one rule.

and lastly, the sigma chi was rich. not because it was full of a bunch of guys who were spoiled rotten by their parents. not because the university provided them with full ride scholarships. but because the sigma chi house wasn’t what everyone thought it was. of  course it was a house of brotherhood, but they had subscribers all across campus. including you. and the university officials had yet to know that. not that anyone would snitch anyway, they practically had everyone wrapped around their fingers. they even managed to wane off some of the security guards and professors from scoping out their territory, giving them hush money for their loyalty.

i know what you’re thinking. no -- the sigma chi’s aren’t a mafia. despite their ways they’re actually far from a mafia. they were a fraternity. they were a business. and one thing for certain, two things for sure, don’t you ever meddle in the business of the sigma chi’s. no one has ever came back from that little mistake. as far as you were concerned the victims were basically wiped off the face of the earth, complete lost of contact, even their social media accounts deleted and deactivated. no one knew what the sigma chi’s did to them but no one wanted to find out either.

anyway, you held your head low while walking towards the steps of the house. not everyone on campus knew about their little secret but that still didn’t keep you from being embarrassed about yours. you were a happy subscriber and you weren’t going to deny that. sometimes you wondered how your application even got accepted. but it did. you went into the little convenience store they held in the building, waiting for kim seungmin/kang taehyun/ ju haknyeon, either one of them were required to check you in. they worked at the house convenience store but little did anyone know the trio were the brains behind the whorehouse. they didn’t handle much subscribers themselves, but faithfully took care of admissions and payments. oh, and also check in’s. no one could get service or even have access to the whorehouse without going through them first.

the motion detector chimed indicating that they had a customer. you bit your lips looking around a bit, hoping no one walked in right after you. hoping they would think you’re just there to purchase snacks or something. with his sleeves rolled up from handling the store’s stock--coming from the back was kim seungmin. he approaches the back of the counter and does a little head tilt, indicating that you needed to show your identification. you reached your fingers into your wallet and plucked up your student identification card, sliding it on the counter. he reaches for it and opens an app on his smartphone, making sure you were a paying subscriber. lord knows they had enough people behind on payments yet still trying to receive service. even though you knew you were up to date on your payments you still gulped. seungmin never really showed much of any facial expression which scared you. just a sullen, hard expression that made everyone around him think he hated them. 

“you’re all set. sign this slip”.

he grabbed the small notepad full of paper slips he’d printed and specially designed himself, writing the date and his signature signifying that he approved your service. it was your job to sign the bottom line though confirming your consent to anything included in your service. you swiftly grabbed a pen and scribbled your signature.

“room 502. make sure you give them that or else you’ll have to leave”.

you nod and place the slip in your pocket, taking the elevator to the floor. you admit you were nervous as hell, this is how you were each visit. when you’re a subscriber you don’t know what type of service you can get. you’re just assigned to a random room and you’re promised a good orgasm-- several even--- by the time you leave. the way university was stressing you out these days that’s all you needed. your feet finally approach the door and you knock hesitantly. the door opens a bit, just enough to show his face and they grey and black silk robe he was wearing. it was choi yeonjun. fuck. you were scheduled with choi yeonjun today. there was no doubt in your mind that you’ll be fucking ruined.

“slip?”.

you fished it out of your pocket and showed him. he took it and nodded before crumbling it and tossing it in the nearby trash can. he opened the door further, you could see the dark room only illuminated by the deep red lights that lined the perimeter of the room. your heart dropped to the pit of your stomach at the sight of handcuffs, a pack of gummy worms and a vibrator sitting on the edge of the bed.

“come in”.

you nervously slipped through the crack of the door while he shuts it behind you. the room smelled like cherries, it always did for some reason. you stood there and swallowed. you could hear yeonjun faintly chuckling behind you, his hand brushing along your waist.

“you scared baby?”.

“y-yes”. you stammer. he kisses your cheek.

“you should be. take those panties off and get on all fours for me”.

“okay”. you stuttered once more doing as you were told. you came here enough to know that clothes always went on the clothing rack beside the door. fully naked you hesitantly crawl on the bed and remain on all fours just as instructed. you could hear the clashing metal of the handcuffs behind you as yeonjun undoes them and hooks them around both of your wrists and around the headboard. the cold metal ring clung painfully tight around your wrists and you gasp a little at how rough he was.  your back was now arched in the perfect bow and anything he wanted to do he could do it, your body was at his full disposal. you could feel his hand slide down your midsection and your breathing hitched. he removes it and lowers himself to the level of your face just to glare into your eyes. you stared into the abyss of his eyes in fear. he takes two fingers and rub them together, smearing the wetness he collected from you before slipping them in his mouth. he then slides it out.

“you’re not wet enough”.

and on that note he shifts to another side of the room and you heard the familiar sound of goo melt into the palm of his hand. you wince at how cold it was when he coated you with it, getting a good rub on your clit before slipping his fingers inside of you just to coat you that way. a subtle moan left your lips when he did so, unbeknownst to you that yeonjun had other plans when it came to your needy noises.

“none of that today,”. he says in response before picking up a pack of long heavy gummy worms. “that’s what these are for”. he ripped the pack open and grabbed a handful just to go over and shove between your lips. “I don’t want to hear any sounds from you today, you understand?”. you nod with the gummy treats in between your teeth. they were so thick you didn’t know how anyone could ever chew through them.

the buzzing noise of the vibrator rang behind you and your feet immediately grew cold. you couldn’t back out now. you paid for this. this is what you subscribed for. you had to take it.

yeonjun clutches your thighs and slides himself beneath you, face to face with your pussy that was practically begging for him at this point. you felt the smooth, thick grey vibrator slip past your slippery folds pushed deep inside you. in an instant you no longer knew how you were going to keep your legs in place this whole time. you started breathing hard gnawing on the gummies as hard as you possibly could. “shaking already baby? you’re going to have a hard time today”.

he steadily holds the toy, sinking it between your folds and pulling it back out slowly relishing the way your wetness coated it. moans awaited in your throat yet you forced them back down. yeonjun loved the way your pussy looked from this angle but most importantly he loved the way your clit looked. plump and glistening with lube. he softly hums and slides his tongue against it. you gasp but this time refusing to exhale.

“mmm”. he hums again and gives it another cat lick before pushing his face closer and coddling it between his lips. you decided to breathe, as shaky as it sounded at least you weren’t making any noises. but fuck you wanted to. the way he was twisting and moving the toy inside you, the way his wet tongue felt curling against your clit, you wanted to collapse. and he knew it.

he groans after pulling away from your folds with a thin spit string to follow but he couldn’t keep himself from going in for more. he ate you like a hungry tiger, each taste of you is like heaven in the coil of his tongue.  that’s what killed you the most. that’s what made your legs tremor the most. yeonjun didn’t eat pussy as if he wanted to eat pussy. he ate pussy as if he needed to eat it. and that made all the difference.

every lick sent electricity straight to his groin. the fact that you were shaking above him unable to do anything but breathe heavy and take whatever he was giving you turned him on. he thought your little lips were so soft, pretty and scrumptious. he slid his tongue around every crease and fold refusing to neglect a sector. he always had an unquenchable desire to please. your insides burned with agony. he told you that you weren’t allowed to make noise yet he ate you like this? you couldn’t take it. your breathing was already heavy and your legs were already on the verge of collapsing so if he didn’t stop within the next 5 seconds you’d be a moaning mess through the gummies in your mouth.

he fucks you with the toy a bit faster,  twisting it inside you while he flat tongued your clit prior to sucking it gently; hallowing his cheeks in the process. your eyes close and the jolts of pleasure made your tummy cave in. your heart rate soars and now your wrists were writhing desperately inside the cuffs. it felt so fucking good. god, it felt so good. your torso was on fire. his fingers dug into your innermost thigh while his tongue further explored you. he licks a particular spot that you weren’t quite fond of anyone licking, sending a bone shuddering moan through the air.

“ ffuckk! please!”.

yeonjun halts his movements at the sound of it. you mentally cursed at yourself. how could you be so stupid?

“what was that?”.

you swallowed. you agreed to keep silent. that was a bad choice. he slipped himself from underneath you and approached your face, grabbing your jaw roughly forcing his attention on him.  “answer me when I’m speaking to you”.

lord knows you wanted to. but he looked so incredibly scary like this your jaw trembled at the thought of even replying. he lets go of you forcing your head to drop back down in between your shoulders. “you don’t want to fucking listen right?”. you heard a barely audible chuckle but you knew he wasn’t chuckling because anything was humorous. “I got something for you”.

the sound of that made your heart drop. you didn’t know what the hell that meant. your mind couldn’t even grasp what it could possibly mean. all you knew was that you were handcuffed to this bed in this dark red room, your body in the position of complete freewill. after a couple of minutes more of drowning in the fear of your own thoughts the door behind you open and close. you heard not one set-- but other sets footsteps creak the floor. your eyes grew as wide as moons. little did you know though, this was all apart of their plan. yeonjun knew you wouldn’t be able to take what he was doing to you.

“since you don’t know how to shut up, I brought some friends who won’t mind doing it for you”.

squatting to your eye level was lee juyeon, another one of sigma chi’s most honorable members. he does this sly smirk before rubbing your cheek with his hand. “how you doing precious?”. your heart began to pound dangerously fast. sliding his hand through your hair was hwang hyunjin, on the other side of your face wearing the same smirk as juyeon. “damn you’ve got a pretty one jun”. he comments. if you weren’t bound to the headboard you’d run out of sheer nervousness. but you couldn’t.

juyeon grabbed your jaw and glares into your eyes steadily, almost as if he were searching for something. with him doing this you hadn’t even noticed that yeonjun and hyunjin disappeared behind you. “you have some pretty lips. you know that? show me how well you can suck my dick“.

he fiddles with the waistband of his briefs, giving you a gorgeous view of his chiseled body and you wanted to melt right then and there. however someone was groping your thighs underneath you and you realized yeonjun was back in the same position as before. and hyunjin was above him, his hands groping your ass and kneading it. he spills some lube into the palm of his hand and shoves two slendery, slippery fingers inside your ass without warning. you choked on your own spit and wince at the pain. he rubbed his clothed dick against you, biting his lips.

“have you ever done anal before baby?”.

you shudder. “nno i haven’t”.

he hums before scissoring his fingers inside you a bit more, stretching you out so his dick could fit perfectly. you’ll admit, you weren’t too keen on anal before hyunjin stuffed his dick inside you and filled you to the brim. yeonjun attaches his lips to your clit again, and juyeon rubs his dick against your lips forcing you to take him in whole. more than anything you didn’t know you’d be experiencing this. being ruined by three men instead of one.

you hummed against the shaft of juyeon’s dick at the feeling of yeonjun’s tongue licking your soft folds through and through, all the while hyunjin’s giving you soft thrusts from behind. the delicious mix of pleasure made you delirious. your tummy caved in and your thighs were trembling once again. and oh yeah, yeonjun got his wishes of you staying quiet. juyeon was filling your mouth so much a sound could barely be audible. juyeon slips his hands in your hair, jerking your head back just so he could see your mouth filled his precum. he grins.

“a subscriber of the whorehouse gets used like a whore. you like this shit don’t you?”.

hyunjin grips your waist harder and chuckles. “she can’t talk with her mouth full. she’s being a lady”.

juyeon smirks and glances down at you trying to suck him as far as you could possibly reach. “is that true? you’re trying to be polite?”.

yeonjun smirks and licks another stripe up your wet swollen clit before chiming in. “if so, shes at the wrong place. polite prissy princesses don’t get fucked and sucked this good”.

hyunjin slams a hand down on your ass, making it jiggle underneath his palm. “they sure don’t”. you groan against juyeon’s length feeling like you could pass out any second. he thrusted himself between your lips steadily loving the sloppy, messy sounds your mouth was making in the process.

“look at you...you suck dick and take it good. who taught you this?”. juyeon growls.

you softly whine, crying in response. numerous moans left your throat but it was a mystery on whether or not they’d actually be heard. it didn’t even matter though because all three of them was groaning loud enough to drown out the sound of yours. you felt like you were going to lose your damn mind being used like this. the pleasure of it all made your toes curl and body shiver. yeonjun’s wet lips were coated in nothing but you precum at this point and hyunjin speeds up the movements of his waist, snapping into you like he’d never get a chance to do it again. well, considering the system of the whorehouse he just might not. and he was making it evident.

“fuck, your pretty ass”. hyunjin groans while throwing his head back and biting his lips, slamming you back against his waist every chance he got. your ass was pretty like this, stemming down from your cinched waist it was plump and perfect from this angle. hyunjin thought he could watch it bounce against him all day if he could. you unintentionally pushed back on him leaving a hum of approval sputtering from him lips. “oh shit”. he grumbled.

“she’s fucking you while riding yeonjun’s face. shit, I like her”. juyeon licks his lips while holding your hair in up a makeshift ponytail. tears jerk from your eyes as he shoves his dick down your throat again before pulling it back out. you gagged enough to spit his precum back over his tip.

“I like her too”. hyunjin mentions, completely stopping his hips just to watch you desperately fuck yourself to an orgasm. a throaty groan became a murmur as your legs trembled and the familiar wave of electricity washed over your whole entire body. you didn’t know how much more you could take.

“she’s pulsating so hard around my tongue I think she’s about to cum”.

“she’s so cute look at her fucking herself. you gonna cream all over us baby?”. hyunjin groans.

your high pitched whine rang through the steamy atmosphere and as if your body listened to hyunjin words you did just that, your juices spilling down his thighs and waterfalls down yeonjun’s chin. hyunjin slips his fingers into the curve of your waist and fucks a bit more until your ass was filled with his cum, and the sticky contents of juyeons fluids were already slithering down your throat. your body spasmed and jerk so hard and yeonjun licks the aftershocks out of you before getting up and fucking your throat until he got a fix of his own. he grunts and roughly pulls your hair while he does so, letting his hot cum spill down your throat after he was finished. your limbs felt so weak. you wanted to just stay there and sleep. but unfortunately you had to walk back to your residence hall in this condition. it was fucking worth it though.

after you were freed from the handcuffs you could see the bruised rings on your wrist from them both. “put your clothes back on, go back to your dorm and take care of yourself baby”. yeonjun speaks just before they all vacated the room.