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latulasbian-1 · 4 years ago

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what are your thoughts on kankri? personally i never understood the appeal and im interested to hear your take since he Was on the b tier of your list

OK! Sorry for lateness but I only noticed your question at like 2:00 AM and needed a full tank of brain-gas to be able to convey my thoughts even semi-coherently.

So Kankri’s a weird one, probably one of the most convoluted and self-contradictory characters in Homestuck. Its fitting given he’s pretty much a one note joke and hussie’s one-note joke characters actually wind up being either his most oddly complex (see: equius and feferi for instance) or most sympathetic (see: Nepeta). Kankri’s a bit of both imo, though I wouldn’t call him a favorite for me.

Kankri’s characterization is built almost entirely on one fuckin’ note: “LOL AIN’T TUMBLR SJWs FUNNY AND ANNOYING!?!?!?”. If you disagree with this then I don’t even know what to tell you, bc everything from his style of long-winded monologues (that wind up running up on Hussie Ableism Moments bc in-narrative his infodumping is supposed to be annoying???) to his inability to take social cues to his supposed-to-be-interpreted-as-excessive use of trigger warnings to his unapologetic killjoy attitude to his supposed hypocrisy/”privilege” are literally all just a fucking layer cake of anti-SJW stereotypes. This is where the issue of how the fandom interprets Kankri kicks in, as people’s opinions on him (aside from a few diehards) tend to scale from “DAWWW CUTE WIDDLE UPPITY BEANBOY” to “fucking annoying neoliberal”. For the matter, neither of these are intended by Hussie, while he did design him to be cute he wasn’t meant to be hateable for leftist homestuck fans as a (neo-)liberal or faux leftist. Hussie just designed him after everyone hussie found annoying in the social justice community primarily on tumblr. Even his political monologues, though not WITHOUT hypocrisy and bullshit, tend to actually skew towards “pretty fucking reasonable hussie just thinks people being upset by bad stuff is stupid”.

Now, people cite Kankri being ableist in his criticism of certain other dancestors for ~conforming to stereotypes~, which yes from an in context scenario is pretty fucking bad. If someone IRL is dealing with their disability in a way you think seems pretty stereotypical keep that thought to yourself. HOWEVER, AS ONE OF THE MOST CRUCIAL POINTS TOWARDS KANKRI BEING GENERALLY SYMPATHETIC, WE GET THE META ELEMENT. Hussie, in writing a hypocritical mansplainer who goes on and on and on about everything thats politically incorrect about the people around him, practically beat-for-beat replicates talking points PEOPLE HAVE USED TO CRITICIZE HOMESTUCK ITSELF. YES! MITUNA’S PRESENTATION AS A CHARACTER IS 100% UNAMBIGUOUSLY AWFUL IN ITS PORTRAYAL OF PEOPLE WITH BRAIN INJURIES AND MENTAL DISORDERS. DAMARA IS A RACIST STEREOTYPE SO BAD HUSSIE SHOULD GET THROWN IN JAIL. INCEST IS BAD. If ANYONE in homestuck should’ve pulled the meta knowledge shit in post-canon, kankri would’ve been a WAYYYYYY better candidate than dirk for it, especially since kankri seems halfway to realizing he’s fictional just by political analysis of the story he’s in! Kankri seems to exist at the apex of Hussie’s confusion about fandom, given he’s baffled enough by people being obsessed with his work yet so intensely negative that he can only seem to think of them as obsessive manchild wierdos with no sense of rational thought. As someone who myself unironically loves Homestuck and yet have an entire third of my brain dedicated to ripping it apart on an ethical level, I can see some of myself in that turtleneck’d contrarian. Just because someone is a fan of something doesn’t mean they will or should unthinkingly defend it from all recourse. This is something homestuck as a whole struggles with, I think back to the aspect or extended zodiac quiz where one of the questions amounted to “someone is talking shit about a show you like, how do you respond” and there wasn’t even an answer for “actually listen to what they’re trying to say and consider if they could be right”. Kankri is a symbol of sorts for those critical enjoy-ers, in a way. A stupid silly not-that-meaningful way, but a way. I think people should reclaim him.

I’ve touched on it a bit before, but the last main sympathizing aspect of kankri for me (aside from personality things like his frankly unearned patience with a friend group that entirely fucking hates his guts) is a trait share by almost all the dancestors: Hussie’s fucking disturbing use of mental illness & psychiatric disorders with them. Between Kankri’s unwillingness to observe common social cues, his overtly poised and practiced manner of speaking, his obsession with using trigger warnings to warn off confrontation in leu of not just speaking his mind with everything, his tendency to cling to certain articles of clothing for long periods of time, his implied difficulty taking care of himself physically, and the fucking insulting “mom-friend useless-manchild-who-needs-nannying” dynamic he has with Porrim, he comes off (intentionally or no) as a beat-for-beat embodiment of an autistic person as seen through Hussie’s tropey and horribly ableist worldview. This is a common trait he shares with both Aranea and Mituna, as well as many of the other dancestors to lesser degrees (many of them, like Mituna, also have OTHER mental disorders flat-out-stated in such a way that makes their depiction just fucking confused and bad). For me, and for at least SOME other people, it makes unbiased critical reactions to them damn near impossible. They deserve better than how hussie can write them. In a lot of ways I have friends like Kankri, and Hussie’d almost fucking certainly find them just as embarrassing and annoying as he meant for Kankri to be.

So yeah, Kankri isn’t my favorite by any means but i don’t feel like i can or should condemn him. He’s fun. I’d watch his video essays.

And this isn’t even BEGINNING to touch on how much I loathe Porrim as an example of “good cool fun feminists that hussie can sexualize!” And her more open bisexuality than other trolls being both a tool for fetishization by Hussie and a fucking skin-crawling thing to use as a contrast for Kanaya’s status as either “the only confirmed lesbian in homestuck (until postcanon showed rose was a lesbian too)” or “the only lesbian troll in existence ever bc thats totally how sexuality would work with aliens” (sorry if you ascribe to the “all trolls are bisexual bc they’re supposedly binormative as a get-out-of-jail-free card for hussie’s hetero-ass ship tease shit” then. well get better soon)

(seriously though everyone who pulls the “kanaya is the only lesbian alternian” shit owes every lesbian 100 dollars)

#homestuck #kankri #longpost #discourse #Anonymous

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echodrops · 6 years ago

Text

Why Do Certain Ships Become So Popular? (And Why Should Writers Rethink When They Do?) - Part 3

<- Start at Part 1 for best understanding

<- And here’s Part 2 if you need it!

I’m going to end this discussion with a case-in-point comparing the mega-popularity of non-canon ships against semi-canon ships, and then discuss what this all means for writers, and how examining the popularity of ships in media can actually improve the way you write romance plot lines in your own works.

Pictures taken seconds before disaster

Although I’ve been reading My Hero Academia for a while, I haven’t been an active part of the fandom until recently and so there might be meta and other surrounding the series most popular ships that I’m not familiar with. But I want to talk about this series because it’s the absolute perfect model for the points I’ve been making in this whole discussion: shippers target pairs of characters with high emotional energy/tension, and the “canon” ship will always lag behind non-canon ships in popularity when the emotional energy between the romantic leads is not as strong as the tension between the male lead and another character.

My Hero Academia has the somewhat rare situation of having two almost equally popular non-canon ships for its main character: TodoDeku and BakuDeku. Technically, given what I can find using filters on AO3 and Google Trends, TodoDeku is the more popular of the two (at least in the U.S. except in Indiana; I have no idea what’s going on over there, but man they love BakuDeku) by a fair margin...

Which would actually make this a series that disproves the trend--because you can say what you want about Bakugou and his notorious assholeishness, but at the end of the day, I don’t think there are any readers who would really argue that the pair of students with the strongest emotional energy--the greatest degree of push and pull and the most effort, meaning, and time invested in their interactions--is Bakugou and Midoriya.

As I mentioned earlier, it doesn’t matter that much of the emotional energy/tension between these two characters is negative in nature (in fact, for a lot of fans that probably just sweetens the deal because it increases the potential for progress and growth so much)--rather, what matters is the depth and intensity of the emotional interactions between the two characters. There’s certainly no short supply of--at times--almost nonsensically powerful emotions between Bakugou and Midoriya. They’re Extra™ in every meaning of the word, and the manga drums that message in fairly consistently, especially in arcs in which heavily feature the class.

Get out of my school

Bakugou’s inferiority-superiority complex is fixated on Midoriya (whom, deep-down, he recognizes as a “better” hero than himself, despite the fact that everyone is constantly praising him and his powerful quirk), which means that even the most inadvertent of Midoriya’s actions triggers a reaction in Bakugou and Bakugou’s character.

Likewise, many of Midoriya’s significant plots and plot lines are driven by Bakugou--sometimes as a motivating factor (Deku is just as concerned about beating Bakugou as Bakugou is about beating him) and sometimes because the plot, rather hilariously, positions Bakugou in the role of Midoriya’s “damsel” in almost equal (actually it may even be more) proportion to the number of times Uraraka plays that role.

Bakugou and Midoriya’s combined progress is the emotional core of the student/class storyline, and they operate, in some ways, as joint protagonists whose play off each other drives the plot of the early sections of the manga, and whose rivalry fans can readily anticipate continuing to advance the main story in significant and meaningful ways. Bakugou, for example, still has plenty of growth to go through before he can really call himself a hero, and it’s only natural to assume that Midoriya, our premiere hero archetype, is going to be part of that growth--however grudgingly on Bakugou’s part.

Someone who actually ships this pairing (please don’t follow me for BakuDeku content, I got nothing guys!!) could probably go into much more detail on this and find much more support for it as a whole, but I brought it up to demonstrate that, once again, the pattern holds true: the greatest degree of emotional intensity, the core of these characters’ tensions and motivations, is another male character--and, equally on par with the pattern, they become an extremely popular ship.

But if Bakugou and Midoriya are the undisputed kings of emotional interaction energy among the students in My Hero Academia, why is TodoDeku the most popular Midoriya ship?

Well, besides the fact that Bakugou’s a grade-A asshole whose bullying crossed the lines for many fans, you can probably pretty safely blame Kirishima Eijirou.

My sunshine boy, where are the rest of your eyebrows???

In Kirishima’s emotional arc throughout the story, again, few people would argue that there’s any character more central than Bakugou.

This creates a viable ship that--importantly--plays well with others. Pairing Bakugou off with Kirishima leaves the series’ main hero free for shipping with anyone else, whether you prefer the semi-canon Deku/Uraraka or Deku/Literally-anyone-else-I’ve-even-seen-people-who-unironically-ship-him-with-Toga. In fact, this might be a little too much speculation on my part, but I almost feel like the degree of deliberate baiting this ship gets from actual staff (namely the anime and movie teams) is not only a ploy to appeal to female fans, but also an intentional way of deflecting some of the over-investment that’s gone into Bakugou and Midoriya’s storyline. Giving Bakugou someone else to focus on adds more variety to his scenes and provides Uraraka (or anyone else) a little more breathing room to interact with Midoriya.

The official media has to go this hard just so that Uraraka has any reasonable chance with Deku... Also god Bakugou, why are you so ugly in the anime...

Really, what I mean by all this is that part of TodoDeku’s popularity stems from it playing well with KiriBaku. Fans who want Midoriya with Todoroki are happy to ship KiriBaku on the side to get Bakugou out of the way, while even fans who don’t care much about Midoriya or Todoroki are happy to pair them together to free up Bakugou for their preferred Bakugou ship. It’s a symbiotic relationship, so to say, that helps elevate TodoDeku above BakuDeku in terms of popularity, even though without the presence of Kirishima, the stats would probably be skewed the other way.

That’s not to say that TodoDeku isn’t a perfectly valid ship or that it lacks the support or basis that BakuDeku has, because of course it doesn’t. It fits the pattern the same as all the other mega-popular ships do: if I were to ask “Who is the most important fellow student in Todoroki’s story?”, the answer would inevitably be Midoriya.

Todoroki is an ice prince prior to being beaten with the Friendship stick, and his choice to open up to Midoriya in a way that he hadn’t with any of his other classmates becomes the catalyst that allows him to--quite literally--thaw out and begin to have positive experiences with his fellow students.

His fight with Midoriya allows him to remember his resolve and his mother’s words that he has the power to be an individual separate from the looming shadow of his abusive father, which becomes a profound turning point in his character. In his clash with Midoriya, he opens up access to his fire side which he had previously repressed, a move which is tantamount to embracing who he is as a person, bolstering his sense of self-worth and autonomy and helping him to begin moving out from under his father’s thumb. His experience with Midoriya is, in short, utterly life-changing, and Todoroki’s character has never been the same since (for the better)--to the point that characters nowadays are teasing Todoroki about how uptight and icy he used to be.

There’s plenty of, to use the phrase again, emotional energy between Midoriya and Todoroki attracting fan attention and serving as the spark for the mega-popularity of the ship.

Bakugou is the most important fellow student in Midoriya’s storyline. Midoriya is the most important fellow student in Todoroki’s storyline. The interactions of these characters, however you choose to ship, is rich, meaningful, full of intense emotions (positive and negative), and--most importantly--strongly relevant to these characters’ individual arcs and even to the main plot overall.

But where does that leave Deku/Uraraka, the story’s semi-canon pairing and the (highly likely) endgame ship? Why is a pairing in which one of the characters has confirmed feelings for the other so far below non-canon ships in popularity?

Well, the premise holds true here--in reverse.

Say it with me, guys: the “real emotional energy” of Midoriya’s storyline has frustratingly little to do with Uraraka Ochako. She’s just not that important in his story.

The tension of Midoriya’s plot lines consistently has no personal connection to Uraraka, and all his most intense emotions and emotional scenes occur between him and other male characters. The problem I outlined in part two of this essay is in full effect here: female characters, especially in hero stories, are typically positioned in roles outside those which have major plot relevance. Uraraka might be “a hero,” but she’s not “The Hero.” She’s not the deuteragonist. She’s not the villain. She might qualify as a sidekick, except for the fact that the manga consistently prefers to pair Deku up with other male characters--such as Todoroki and Mirio--in the supporting roles. Uraraka, as a girl, simply wasn’t designed to serve in the same plot-mover-and-shaker capacity as the male characters. It’s the classic failure to write romantic female leads whose actions are central to the story, at it again.

I don’t mean that Uraraka has no impact on the plot--she did great against Kurogiri in the USJ arc, for example--nor to suggest that Uraraka isn’t a strong fighter (although of course, as a girl, she’ll never really measure up to the plot’s central males--sorry, can you feel my eyes rolling yet?). Her martial arts skills, clever use of her quirk, and, far more than that, her acumen for understanding people’s feelings mark her as a character with great potential... that’s just never really allowed to shine as much as it could be.

In her under-utilized position, Uraraka has less power and freedom to effect major changes to the main story compared to characters such as Bakugou. So far in the plot, she simply hasn’t occupied a position of importance or even enough individual screen time to put her personal arc in the spotlight heavily, at least in comparison to other characters like Todoroki, who, between himself and his family, now star in two whole arcs of their own. To quote Uraraka’s own bio, she has no “hidden side” or “ulterior motives”--two terms which might as well be synonymous with “fertile ground for creative fans to play with.” Being a simple and straightforward character is not the stuff of fan writer favorites, unfortunately.

More than that, Uraraka’s primary goal is no different than her classmates’--although she started with a somewhat interesting and unique reason for pursuing heroism (to help her parents financially), throughout the course of the series she evolves more into a character who embraces heroism for heroism’s sake. This is billed as progress, because the series comes down hard on those who seek to become heroes for their own gain. The only problem is... half the class at this point wants to become a hero because they believe in the merit of heroism itself. By growing into someone who wants to become a hero to genuinely help people and make a difference in the world, Uraraka actually becomes less unique and therefore more similar to just about everyone else in the class.

As time wears on, this problem of under-investment in Uraraka’s personal emotional journey becomes even more telling, as numerous battles for Uraraka devolve into little more than moments to reflect on her crush on Deku.

These are two separate occasions. Like are you kidding me--

If we were to remove Uraraka’s crush on Midoriya, she’d have absolutely zero tension between herself and other major characters. Literally no deeper emotional investment than “supporting friend.” It’s isn’t bad for a background character--but for what should be the main female character and romantic lead, it’s god awful. If we discount her newfound desire to punch herself in the face for jealous thoughts over Deku, Uraraka’s character hasn’t seen a lick of unique emotional growth since the Sports Festival. Worse, with her repeated entanglements with Toga, who also supposedly has a crush on Deku, I feel as if we’re almost inevitably going to get a chick fight scene in which they squabble over him. PLEASE MISS ME WITH THAT NONSENSE.

I like Uraraka. Or rather, I like what I think Uraraka could be. I want to root for her and I want to be impressed by her. But it’s hard when the writing of the story repeatedly tells me that she is less important than the male characters in her class, and that her own personal journey and motivations as a character could be reduced to “admiring the protagonist” and wanting to be like and be with him.

(“If I push down my feelings instead of accepting them, I can draw out our awkward romantic plotline for at least ten more volumes.”)

Who, at this point, isn’t motivated to greater heights of heroism by Midoriya? Even his role in her life isn’t unique to her... I almost feel bad for Horikoshi, in a way. Using other characters to inform the female lead of her romantic feelings for the hero is a classic trope that indicates a lack of experience writing and developing believable romantic plot lines. I guess when he said he wasn’t good at it, he really wasn’t lying.

The limited popularity of Deku/Uraraka plays word-for-word into the quote that sparked this entire discussion for me:

Many fans, particularly women, are disappointed by the contrived romantic story lines that are appended to ‘buddy’ series and movies in which the real emotional energy is between the heroic male leads (or between hero and villain) (McLelland 2006). [Source]

This is a classic scenario of a semi-canon het ship that, by virtue of its own under-developed female character, will never achieve the same level of support and interest among fanwork-producing members of the fandom as more emotionally invested and intense relationships such as those between the starring male characters. (Of note here: Kacchako’s number of vocal fans isn’t surprising, given that Bakugou’s refusal to treat Uraraka with kid gloves was the most respect the series itself has ever given her...)

All right, all right, I’ll stop. (By the way, if you’re a Deku/Uraraka shipper, more power to you, my friends. I really feel bad that your ship isn’t getting the meaningful development and depth it deserves. There’s nothing wrong with this ship in theory... just in practice. T_T)

SO! FINALLY! AT LAST! Speaking of practice!

What’s the lesson? What is the take-away?

I didn’t write this monster of a rant because I wanted to shit on canon ships, het ships, or (often male) writers failing to write believable women. I didn’t write it to justify my favorite slash ships.

I wrote because as I was mulling over my answers to recent conversations and after I stumbled on the quote I’ve shared repeatedly now, I had a bit of a heart attack.

I’m writer. Many of my friends are writers. I have a Masters degree in creative writing. I took seven years of creative writing in school. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words of both original work and fanfiction.

But never once have I sat down and consciously mapped out the “emotional energy” in my stories. Never once have I spent time actually examining the interactions of pairs of my characters and actively comparing them to really gauge where the core tensions and intensities in my stories really are.

I trusted in the notion that, as the author, I knew my own characters better than anyone else. If I wrote two characters in love, well then, surely it’s because they were meant to be in love.

In today’s discourse, the words “fan entitlement” are increasingly bandied around and often applied when fans get aggressive over their favorite ships not becoming canon. It’s easy to dismiss the frustrations of readers and viewers “as demanding something writers don’t owe them.” But this dismissal hinges on a central notion:

The original writer always knows best.

Whatever story the writers have written--whatever canon romances they have chosen--those are the “right ones,” and fans who piss and moan about that just “aren’t appreciating what they’ve been given.”

This is an easy mindset to understand in the face of fans who take their grievances to the extreme and harass creators. Harassment is obviously never acceptable.

But I don’t feel comfortable with the other side of the spectrum either. Blindly defending canon by completely ignoring cases where the fandom vastly prefers a non-canon ship to any canon alternatives... In the end, isn’t that the same as saying “It’s always the fans who are mistaken, never the authors”? Or, by extension: “As the author of this story, I can do no wrong.”

To me, authors who choose to simply dismiss their fans’ preferences--especially when the fans reject a canon relationship--are doing themselves a terrible disservice.

As a writer, I have never had nor wanted to have the thought that I’m perfect at what I’m doing. I am always keenly aware of the fact that my ability to write is limited. There are always things I felt I could have captured better. And more than that, I’m always trying to grow and improve my writing. I don’t want to be right all the time!

So why should I expect that my planned romances are always right?

Fans are not entitled to the ship they prefer. But if the fans prefer a ship you didn’t intend, that’s a good sign that something has gone wrong, and you might want to rethink the way you write romances, character interactions, character motivations, and potentially female characters in your next project.

A non-canon ship reaching mega-popularity in a fandom should provoke thought--not dismissal--from the series’ writers. And I don’t mean the kind of thought like “Would we have made more money if we’d caved to fan demands?” I mean things like “Where did I go wrong in writing my romance that led the fans to prefer something else? How can I fix that in the future?”

The take-away isn’t “I should give my fans what they want” but “How can I get my fans to want the same things I do?”

In order to align your fandom’s interest with the canon romance you’re writing, the canon main pair has to have meaningful, intense emotional interactions that are entwined with the central plot line or at least their own personal character development arcs--to greater or at least equal extent with any other potential pairing of characters in the story. Your romantic leads need to have interactions that are as compelling, as personal, as plot relevant as the hero and his (or her!) villain. As the hero and his or her sidekick/best friend/brother-or-sister-in-arms. It’s not enough for your main character’s romance to be “pretty interesting”--it’s got to be as interesting as his or her relationship with every other character in the story.

Now of course there are ways around this. A father-and-son story with a romance on the side doesn’t necessarily need to elevate the romance above the father-and-son dynamic. A hero and villain story where the villain is a complete monster that no one in their right mind would ship is probably safe, etc.

But I guess the basic baseline is this: If you’re bothering to write in a romance for your main character... don’t you--shouldn’t you--want it to be as compelling, intense, and believable as the relationships you write for any other characters?

If you want fans to love the love you’re written into your stories, you’ve got to give that love the same attention and effort as everything else in your plot.

How do you do this? What actual actions can you take in your writing to apply this idea? I don’t have a definitive answer that will magically make everyone’s romances perfect, and really, none of this is particularly revolutionary, but I think these are all good reminders that even when we’re writing our own original stories, there’s stuff we can do to check if we’re “doing it right”:

Make a single chart of all major character interactions in your story, especially those which provoke strong emotional responses in your characters and those which are relevant to the story’s main plot. You can mark positive emotional interactions in one color, negative emotional interactions in another. Do something to indicate the level of intensity for these interactions. Then, step back and look at the big picture. Which characters really have the most interactions? The most intense interactions? The most plot relevant interactions? If the canon romance you’re planning doesn’t have as many, as much intensity, or as much plot relevance as the relationship between your main lead and another character, think about how you can change that.

Ask yourself the important questions: Where is the real emotional energy in my story? Which characters have the most tension (positive or negative)? Which characters promote the most growth in each other through their interactions? Which characters are the real “movers and shakers” of the main plots? How do interactions with other characters help to advance Character B’s individual character growth? Spend time consciously thinking about the flow and cores of emotion in your story. Who really makes the biggest difference in your hero’s life?

Remove the romance and look at the story again. If romance is not the main point of your story, go back to your character interaction chart and remove all the romance and romantically-led plot points. What does the interaction chart look like now? Do your romantic leads still have compelling interactions even with the romance removed? Do they still motivate and help each other grow as characters even if they’re not romantic partners? Are their remaining actions relevant to the main plot? And, most importantly: with the romance removed, do they still have intensity? Are they still part of the story’s “emotional core”? Is there still as much or more energy between them than between the main character and others? If the answer is no, that’s a good sign that you can probably develop your romantic lead and his/her relationship to the hero more fully--or better integrate it into the main story and their personal stories--in order to improve the depth and quality of their relationship in the eyes of fans.

Take another look at your female characters. Even if you’re a female writer yourself, that doesn’t mean you automatically write great women. In fact, we’re often so conditioned to see males as the drivers of narratives that even series by female authors, with female protagonists sometimes fall into the trap of having a male character doing all the real heavy-lifting in the plot. Check your girls again. Do they have as much meaningful influence on the main plot as your male characters? Do they have as much meaningful influence on other characters’ personal arcs? If you remove all the romance, do they still have these influences? Are your female characters allowed to have as much diversity in their emotional interactions with others as your male characters are? Do the intensities of these women’s feelings match the intensities of the men’s feelings, even (especially) when romance is removed from the equation?

And I’m sure there are many more things you can try along the same lines.

Really, the idea I want other writers--professional, amateur original writers, or even just fan writers--to take away from this is the notion that we should never rest on our laurels and assume we know what’s what. We should never just expect our fans to agree with us as writers.

And, more than that, when the fans prefer something other than what we intended, we should always, always use that gap as motivation to rethink our writing, to discover where we might have fumbled in our plotting and character creation.

Fans don’t (usually) ship randomly. Most of the time, there’s a logic and pattern to this “madness.” If a non-canon ship becomes mega-popular, it’s usually because the fans saw something the creators missed.

And that is always--always--an opportunity to reflect and grow for future projects.

PHEW. I’M DONE! I did it! Man, this was such a labor of love... I hope some people actually read it...

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naernon · 6 years ago

Note

for the ask meme (TES, obvs): 3,9, 13 (for naemon), 23!

thank you!! i wrote this all last night and i havent checked for coherency or errors so forgive me if it’s a bit scatterbrained at times (although yall should be used to incoherency coming from me ghhgfg.)

____

3.) Have you ever unfollowed someone over a fandom opinion?

someone said that they didn’t like serana and i was already sitting on the decision to unfollow them for other reasons and that. that was just the Final Straw.

but i think that’s it…? im so petty + impulsive (deadly combo) at times that maybe i did unfollow over a TES opinion another time but i can’t remember hgufuhfhxdfh

____

9.) Most disliked character(s)? Why?

OOF this is a hard one, ill list the ones that come to mind rn;

molag bal. needs no explanation

darren guitar or whatever his name is. im sorry to anyone who likes him but i just.. can’t. he’s so obnoxious. he was toned down in summerset, probably because different people were writing him if i had to guess but in the main and daggerfall covenant questline? awful. his goddamn womanizing jokes at every second of the day was “kim, there’s people that are dying” at its finest.literally one or two “haha ladies amirite fellow man ;)/haha ladies amirite……… lady ;)” jokes can be.. bearable albeit still annoying but there was so much more than that. or they were so obnoxiously written that it seemed to be more frequent than in actuality, either way, darren guitar? 0/10also my view of him hasnt gotten better since someone sent me a rude ask about how darren had more personality than prince naemon in-game due to me joking about how i don’t like him and then subsequently blocked me for being irritated about the rudeness of the ask + the fact that im 99% sure they were the anon that appeared in my fucking inbox defending darren guitar every single time i breathed a single word about him

i completely forgot he existed until you listed him as disliked and now i hate him even more. that fucking. bard from the bannered mare. the one that harassed carlotta until you told him to fuck off. i hate that dude. always have

abnur tharn. mildly obnoxious with some amusing lines until you find out what he did to queen ayrenn like. small dick mannimarco joke is now renounced, little man. Perish.my view on Estre is Complicated because she’s a really neat character and villain and ranks as a favorite in the latter department but from like, a moral standpoint i loathe her.also while it wasn’t like. pelidil levels of shittiness i’m not fond of how she hurt naemon– but then again……. now that i think of it, i really don’t know what’d she COULD do other than keep him in the absolute dark until he inevitably gets caught up in the Shitshow otherwise. i wouldn’t suppose naemon to be 100% willing to join in her efforts or even keep completely quiet about them if she did decide to talk to him about it or let him know; and for all we know, she could’ve planned to do so eventually in some way– but the suddenness of the AD hero’s infiltration of the veiled heritance probably ruined any semblance of a plan she could’ve had. so on second thought, even from a “naemon is a perfect being and i will protect him with my life and loathe all who hurt him” standpoint, i don’t dislike her too much. let’s just reduce estre to like.. honorable mentions on my “disliked characters” list then lmao(also “moral standpoint” as if queen ayrenn is anything close to the pinnacle of absolute morality. estre is objectively worse on that front, though, so i suppose i still stand by that)

speaking of which i really… don’t like pelidil. again, moral standpoint. and “naemon is a perfect being and i will protect him with my life and loathe all who hurt him” standpoint. otherwise, he’s a neat villain and the quest in which you cut him down was one of the more impressive quests in the game IMO, or even in the entire game series. good build-up.

this is getting too long so i’ll cut it there, that’s all the characters that come to mind rn anyways hfhgdhg

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10.) Unpopular opinion about XXX character?

hmmmmmm

i guess if you view it in such a way, liking him is kind of unpopular– while there’s still a lot of those who even if not actively talking about him as a character, have praised his character/took his side/whatever, there’s also a good amount who don’t. not really in considering him a poorly written character, but rather from a (sorry to bring this phrase up so much so far) moral standpoint.

also, considering him in a semi-unironic “he did nothing wrong” way, which i do, is kind of unpopular– and i can understand that, in some ways. i dont think him snapping at the scene of the orrery was under his 100% control nor was anything subsequent, but there’s still the fact that he still is in an “i deserve the throne, fuck off” mindset in coldharbour, which, unless he’s STILL affected by the mantle and/or the orrery, is obviously a negative change in viewpoint compared to the “i’ll swallow my bitterness and remain loyal to my sister and the dominion, she is the rightful queen and i am just her shadow” you saw prior.

granted, i’d argue that even then, you have to consider the influence that pelidil had over him prior (as some have accurately put it before– whispered poison into his ear). especially with the fact that naemon’s quite young for an elf at… 26? around that age-range. i dont think altmer’s minds work in the way that, say, hobbits do, in that they age slower and this includes their mental capability, decision-making, etc.. (they obviously don’t) BUT, compared to an elf with more experience, there’s a bit of an… imbalance there. pelidil WAS the one who served naemon instead of the other way around so you’d figure the opposite if anything, but again, naemon = impressionable and emotionally vulnerable at the time.

anyways, got off-topic; my point was that naemon, when you consider the influence that pelidil and any other secretly heritance people that interacted with him, even when you use the fact that he still seems “corrupted” in coldharbour to frame him as bad… that ain’t it. there’s also the fact that he is being tortured, at that moment. big part of it. he PROBABLY isn’t in the right state of mind, to put it simply. but then again, i mean, one could still argue a whole “cool motive, still murder” take on it, so whatever. i dont know man ghfghduhbdfg

YIKES i rambled, holy shit. sorry. but otherwise, i dont think i have too many? there’s not much in the prince naemon…. sub-fandom, at least not enough to be able to render one opinion as unpopular compared to the next

(and i. Guess that headcanoning him as trans definitely has the potential to be unpopular. but i dont really talk about it or “enforce” it much other than off-hand comments that might imply such, drawing him with top surgery scars, etc.. so it hasn’t exactly been given any room to be considered remotely unpopular. haven’t gotten anon hate, snide comments, etc.. about any of it at all so it’s cool. but i’ve brought it up because… you know how fandoms are; if there was more to the prince naemon “fandom”, theoretically, it would be and therefore kind of IS an unpopular opinion. “does your arm hurt from reaching cassius” ok look, i just felt like i needed to provide one more unpopular opinion about naemon and i couldn’t figure out any other than that. but yes. yes, hurts a little)

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23.) Unpopular character you love?

unpopular as in commonly disliked, or unpopular in… amount of people that like them? with the latter, it’s def naemon. i love him with all my heart gfigufhgdugdfh but then again who didn’t know that

with the former… hm. the thing is a lot of characters disliked in this fandom are disliked with good reason IMO– nevermind. almalexia. not to open any #diskhorse wounds but almalexia’s one of them ghdfhguhg jot that down

and i’ve heard some talk that veya is kind of unpopular, what with the recent summerset developments? yeah, fuck that, veya’s one of my favorites. this fandom (or. any fandom lets be real) has an awful tendency to praise any goddamn male character’s flaws or “negative” depth as redeemable character complexity and something that can be looked past, and yet, you see even REMOTELY the same amount if not more character depth in a female character and they’re hated. pointing this out is nothing new but it’s truly just…. something to behold.

and on that note im just going to renounce my prior statement of “a lot of characters disliked in this fandom are disliked with good reason” that’s the dumbest shit i’ve ever said. or perhaps an addendum stating that it’s only applicable to male characters is more in order? or that it’s the opposite for male characters: liked with bad reason. or… liked with over-exaggerated reason disproportionate to the actual amount of depth, complexity, and/or likeability said character actually has, paired with hatred for female characters with the same amount of complexity. “bruh don’t you obsess over prince naemon–” Yeah And What the Fuck Of It

anyways moving on sorry i got distracted hgdfgyfgh. that’s all the characters that come to mind? disregarding characters that are unpopular in an unappreciated sort of way rather than a disliked way, i really dont have a lot

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salty fandom (elder scrolls) opinions

#ask memes #time to do the other ones #asks #long post #ramblings #thanks again!!!!

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