#discourse of the fandom variety

[queerbauten]

the “missing the point” meme except it’s for the Interstella 5555 rerelease, and the point being missed is “of course the notoriously shambolic anime industry is using AI to upscale a film; Daft Punk were almost certainly unaware (or, at the very least, unable to do anything about it); none of this would be surprising if you were paying attention to the actual issues with AI and labour” in favour of “I can’t believe Daft Punk would use AI :(“

[queerbauten]

With Joost specifically, I really think it’s a case of the project taking a vastly different direction in light of [gestures at the second half of last year]. I get that some people don’t like the amount of singles that have come out, but I’d rather have that than nothing to hype up what is almost certainly a delayed (and drastically different than planned) album.

So I know I'm showing my very advanced age here but do artists just not put out albums anymore? Is that just not a Thing The Kids Do?? It's just a drip feed of songs two or three times a year?

[musicalmoritz]

I am an aroace Tsukasa truther but I feel like at some point this fandom is gonna have to chill out abt Tsukasa ships, ppl have been acting extremely childish for years and now that fandom spaces outside of Tumblr are starting to understand how shipping works again, I hope we can all calm down a bit

[taehyungfirst]

what’s upsetting to me is that both jm and jk are so willing to toe the company line and make Tae look and feel like an intruder, cause it wasn’t just the subtitles that were weird, both of them kept telling him he was a guest even when it was clear it started to bother Tae and you can see his mood go down…

like have some balls and stand up for yourselves, and we know jk is chronically online so he knows how insane jkkrs are and yet he was a willing participant too…

we always say Tae can speak up for himself, and he did, but they still didn’t stop that weird shit…

just left a bad taste in my mouth about both of them…

and i know some dumbass tkkrs are gonna be like “Tae still hangs out with him”, and I’m like yeah, cause Tae is a good friend and wouldn’t ever make someone feel uninvited even as part of a script. like if this was a tkk show and the directors told tae to make jm feel like an intruder, he would have laughed in their faces.

More than making his mood go down, I think that throughout the episodes where the company ship repeated that joke thinking it would become remotely funny at some point after the first 77th times, he just got bored with it. Imagine you’re doing everyone’s a favor saving the show and you get this joke repeated over and over again.

Considering how they invited EVERYONE and then made it sound like he was insane when he expected Joon presence, how one of them loooves repeating the word guest but then reveals how they were begging the whole group to join, I just think everything about that show is eye opening and interesting about their dynamics.

[queerbauten]

[ID: a .gif of a woman laughing and popping a piece of popcorn in her mouth. End ID.]

me reading joostwt right now:

so who's got the moral high ground now?

tumblr bad, yes?

[bookwyrminspiration]

politely, can we please express our differing opinions without being rude/using ad hominem attacks? "you just can't handle [thing]" is so condescending for no reason, and unhelpful/inaccurate to boot. "just say [different point]" is, once again, condescending and dismissive. "how did you even come to [certain conclusion]?" logically, same as you. disagreeing doesn't mean it's senseless or baseless. these are just some common examples; there are others

no, you don't have to agree with everyone else's opinions/theories/characterization/analysis. I certainly don't. but the way a lot of the fandom's been expressing it lately feels so antagonistic and unpleasant.

[seaglassmelody]

People really are out here acting like Veilguard is the first roleplaying game to ever limit your ability to pick morally grey/evil options

Like are y'all new here????

[shivunin]

There is no objectively "correct" background to romance a companion with. Likewise, nobody is obligated to romance a particular companion based on which background/race they chose. Someone is not objectively incorrect for romancing a companion differently than you because there is no incorrect way to play a game intended to produce a variety of experiences and endings.

[maddie-grove]

There have been a couple of posts going around lately complaining that “every” m/f ship is a pathetic man and an indomitable woman, which is bad because the shippers are still focused on the man/it’s implicitly still gender essentialist/people act like it’s queerer than it is. And. Like. I’m also not really a fan of shipping dynamics where one character is depicted as a helpless baby when canonically they’re just nice sometimes or have some personal problems, but (a) that is nowhere close to being every m/f ship, what are you even talking about and (b) I’ve read enough m/m and even f/f to know that making one character an abjectly wet noodle and the other a sturdy caretaker is very, very popular across categories. I’m not saying that nobody’s writing the complained-about dynamic in a problematic way, but to act like it’s broadly a social issue is a stretch.

[flamingtoads]

There is such a ridiculous divide between canon!Bobby and fanon!Bobby. I think your precious anon has forgotten that just bc fanon might interpret a character a certain way doesn’t make it true. Like we’re all here to have fun, what a weird take to attack how someone does that in a way that isn’t harmful. PLUS Kinky bathena is not only canon, I could write an essay on canon behavior that isn’t explicitly kinky (like past is prologue is) that could support kinky bathena. You keep doing you with the cute art and ignore these haters.

Canon or fanon I wish we could all just co-exist together at opposite corners of the fandom playroom! We don't have to agree on everything and that's fine! (Normal even!)

Not only that but this kind of behavior just makes more of a divide and might cause people to be afraid of joining the fandom because it's not a safe space to create or enjoy characters the way they may like to!! Someone very well could share your views or love your ideas but if you turn it into a toxic environment it could dissuade them from even participating in the fandom at all!!

And it just bums me out that someone could really enjoy something but someone makes them feel unwelcome! Especially for enjoying something like two consenting adults?! LIKE ARE YOU KIDDING MEE?! Like out of all the things to be mad at in the world and you choose to be upset about something that's fictional... that you can avoid if you wanted to...? Okay I guess!!

[queerbauten]

the best part is that Joost is going to continue seeing the content he wants to see—which, as we’ve seen, is high-quality Jeest content

[gascon-en-exil]

Its kind of funny when the topic of sexualization of characters comes up, especially in gacha, because you have several minor and obscure fetishes that most people dont know about like the previously mentioned zettai ryoiki. No joke I recently saw a guy lose his shit and go on several rants because the character he pulled for in a gacha had bare feet in the character art but the character model was wearing shoes but somehow nobody connected the dots on the guy having an obvious foot fetish.

It must be doubly difficult with gacha games. I imagine almost all of them avoid explicit sexual content for the same reason that most social media platforms are squeamish about it, and so you get references to a lot of fetishes that don't necessarily look like fetishes if you aren't aware of them, like feet or the stockings thing. That reminds me of when I was watching a YouTuber (Sarah Z, I think?) discuss one of those AI girlfriend programs, and she noted that the avatars come with socks by default and that you have to pay extra to see them barefoot. The creators clearly knew their audience.

Generally speaking, I've always had an open-minded philosophy about kinks. It's a practical necessity in my offline work, and even if it weren't for that I just don't see the point in judging people over what they get off to - even if it's something I'm not into myself. Feet for example do nothing for me, either playing with someone else's or having someone play with mine, but it's something I can indulge if the situation calls for it. What I can't understand and certainly can't work with however is the refusal to acknowledge that something is a sex thing. I don't expect anyone to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of kink, but I would hope that people were at least sufficiently aware of their own interests.

[renthony]

A significant amount of my opinions about modern queer television are influenced by researching older queer media.

I see a lot of the same vitriol in modern queer fandom discourse that has been playing out in queer spaces since film and television were invented. Shows in the 70s started making steps toward sensitivity consulting in queer media, even as the networks fought them on it. Imperfect but earnest queer representation was met with aggressive protests by homophobes and queer people who thought it wasn't good enough. The argument over good representation vs no representation has been happening for decades and decades.

You spend enough time immersed in old queer media and you really start to vibe with Harvey Fierstein's words in The Celluloid Closet documentary. Or at least, I do.

Harvey Fierstein: "I liked the sissy. Is it used in negative ways? Yeah, but, my view has always been visibility at any cost."

The way I see it, the way to genuine, loving queer representation that showcases a vast array of experiences is to stop demanding perfection. The fewer queer stories that are allowed to exist, the more of the heavy lifting those stories have to do in the representation department.

When we have numerous queer stories, it's suddenly much less important to argue over whether the queer characters in question are "good" or "positive." They can just be queer characters who exist in the same infinite variety as straight characters. They can be messy, they can be flawed, they can be honest portrayals of the complexity of human existence.

Queer representation will never be perfect, and striving for perfection is how we shoot ourselves in the foot.

Some starter reading for those interested:

Alternate Channels: Queer Images on 20th-Century TV (revised edition) - Steven Capsuto

Hi Honey, I'm Homo!: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture - Matt Baume

The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies - Vito Russo

[destinationtoast]

Hello! I keep hearing that fandom culture has changed, and there are less comments now than there were years ago. Have you noticed this in your analysis? Is the percentage of comments being left today lower than before?

Hey! Thanks for the question -- it prompted me to start collecting data about comments (after procrastinating on it for a while, because I had to write new code to gather comment data). I've also seen other discussions from folks also thinking about how to do this kind of analysis (like in the fandom data projects community) -- hopefully we'll end up with multiple people attacking this from different angles and getting a variety of data about comments!

I'll give a sneak preview that partially addresses your question and contains some good news. If we look at the fraction of AO3 works that get at least one comment (focusing just on one-shots for now), I think things have gotten better over the past decade on AO3*:

In other words, it tentatively looks like more works were getting at least one comment in 2024 than in 2014 (for a variety of time periods). One caveat, though -- if a bunch of works with no comments got deleted in the interim, there will be survivor bias here. I'll try to look into that possibility later. Another caveat: this is based on only like ~100 randomly selected works from each year -- this may all change with more data!

Another interesting tidbit: I still see some of the 2014 works getting comments. In fact, ~30% of works have gotten new comments over 5 years after they were posted, and it looks like ~10% of one-shots posted back in Mar 2014 got a new comment in 10 years later, in 2024.

I'm still doing other analyses; there may be other factors that better match with the discourse around how comment culture has changed. It could be that comment activity peters out faster now than it did back then, for instance. Or the total number of comments left on the popular works is less now than it was back then (though my current methods may not be able to capture that). Edit thanks to quick eagle-eyed readers: it's likely that some of what people are thinking about is ratio of comments to hits -- that is hard to compare in 2014 to 2024, because we don't know which hits came from which years. But I am working on some analyses along those lines. :)

If you have other hypotheses about what's changed in commenting culture, feel free to share! I'll look into what I can.

Some methodology notes:

*I've been tackling this by comparing AO3 one-shots posted in early 2014 to one-shots posted in 2024, and comparing activity in the days/weeks/months immediately after the works were posted. (To start with, I'm only scraping the first page of comments for each work -- meaning the first 20 comment threads -- so there are lots of comments I'm potentially missing for the really popular works. But for many works, this captures all the comments, and I think it may be sufficient for a lot of the analyses I am interested in.)

I'm choosing to focus on 2014 vs. 2024 because 2024 is close to now (but it's been long enough for comments to have settled down a bit), and 2014 was well after AO3 was established (thus it was already a pretty lively time on AO3). I don't want to collect data about every single year because it's too time intensive/too hard on AO3's servers. But if people think that I should be looking at different years, I'm interested in feedback.

Because it's only been ~10 months since March 2024, I am limiting a lot of my analyses to only look at commenting activity the first ~10 months after works were posted in both cases.

[frownyalfred]

FYI, it majorly ticks people off if you use the Hal Jordan/ Green Lantern tags when the post is actually about Batman/ Superbat/ the Batfam and Hal/ another Lantern is simply a side character/ plot device.

It's a numbers thing: the Batman tag has 1.8 Million followers vs Green Lantern with less than 6500. By tagging Hal literally every time he's mentioned, people are making it hard to actually find content about Hal in his own tag.

And no, you can't just block people either, because it's always a different person! It's not an issue with any single person. No one would bat an eye about 1 in 100 or even 1 in 50 batposts. But they make up a very significant chunk of the tagged content.

It's forcing people to play the world's most annoying game of whack-a-mole. (And I don't even want to play it, because I actually like Batman, especially your stuff. Just.. not when I'm searching for Hal content lmao.)

I obviously can't force you and other people to change the way you tag. But I can beg you to consider it. So here I am.

Thank you for listening.

Okay, I'm going to say this as gently as possible because I keep getting asks like these and I don't really think we're on the same page. There are a few points I want to get out of the way before I talk about tagging itself.

You are frustrated because there is a lack of Hal Jordan content

You are frustrated because there is a lack of high quality Hal Jordan content

You are frustrated because Hal Jordan content is not as popular as Batman content

Tag "etiquette" is a rapidly evolving and nebulous thing, and I don't think it's as straightforward as you and other tag purists make it out to be. There are some core components more people agree on - tagging hate in a different tag, for example - but beyond that?

You cannot control what other people tag, like you suggest. And I want to suggest to you, that asking people to not tag a character when they are making a post about them/involving them is a well-intentioned but impossible request.

Here's why: You mention that you don't enjoy finding posts where Hal Jordan is a "side character" or "plot device." The problem is, if Hal Jordan is mentioned by name in the post, that's a pretty straightforward tag for the average Tumblr user. "Oh, Hal has a line in this mini chat fic? I'll tag him." They're not thinking about catering to your experience, or your desire to see exclusive, high-quality Hal Jordan content. They're tagging the guy because he shows up in the post, full stop.

Another issue is the ability to filter in the opposite direction -- without tagging Hal Jordan in posts, you also remove the ability for other users to filter him out of posts, regardless of his role "size" in that post. If he's not tagged, he's harder to filter around. That's why we have tags - to find and to avoid content.

I got feedback while writing love comes quickly that I shouldn't have tagged Batlantern in my posts about their jealousy/love triangle because the Batlantern wasn't "endgame." The problem was, Batlantern literally happened in that fic. It happened in the posts. And so I tagged those posts with the ship, because guess what? The posts were about Batlantern. They weren't "endgame", but that's not how tagging works. It's how you want it to work, but that's not how most people think or have used tags.

I think the overall problem here is that you, and other fans (I've seen this same discourse about Duke and other characters who don't get enough "fandom time") use the Tumblr tag as a way to find and enjoy content about your favorite character. There's nothing wrong with that, but it involves a ton of sifting. And yes - even those in the Batfamily/Batman tags have to do this, too.

Where we differ in opinion, I suspect, is that I don't think sifting through your character tag is a great way to find high quality, character-focused posts. And I don't think we should expect it to be. The tag is an unedited, unfiltered swill of a variety of posts -- some with Hal Jordan as the focus, some with him as a secondary JL character, and some where he's mentioned in passing.

I see people get very defensive and "protective" of these character tags, and you correctly identify that that kind of protectiveness is fruitless. I posit that it is because you, not the random accounts tagging Hal Jordan on a JL post, are using the tag filter/search incorrectly. You have expectations for Tumblr that are neither realistic for the platform, nor how it has been historically used.

But listen -- the tag search is the place you start. You sift, you filter out posts, and eventually you find blogs that post high-quality content that focuses on your character exclusively. You follow those blogs, and eventually your dashboard is the stream of Hal Jordan-focused posts, both new and reblogged, that you want the character tag to be.

The problem is, as I suspect you've seen, there just aren't as many Hal Jordan or Duke-focused blogs putting out content at the rate of the Batman/Batfamily tags. And that's really disappointing, and I don't want to skip over that. It really sucks, and unfortunately sometimes our only option is to either 1) accept that 2) create our own content or 3) convince others to create content. But shaming people for using the tag "wrong" -- not what you're doing here, to clarify, but just what I've seen -- isn't the way to achieve #3 there at all. You just turn people off ever mentioning that character again.

You might think this is a harsh take, and you might think that I contribute to the issue you are experiencing. There is a way for people to use Tumblr and for you to enjoy your content. But it involves work on your end, and managing expectations. And of course, a general level of respect from people creating posts and tagging them. I hope you're not upset with this response, but I think it's the last I'll say on the subject.

[thrumbolt]

So, I cancelled Nyxlin Week and deleted the event blog. Edit to clarify: I DELETED THE BLOG MYSELF! IT WAS NOT TAKEN DOWN BY TUMBLR BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY THERE WAS NOTHING ON THERE THAT WENT AGAINST TOS.

I originally wanted to do this event mainly because me and Copy have a bunch of Nyxlin art planned anyway and that way we could also encourage some more content out of a few other peers.

I expected SOME people to get miffed, maybe some angry anons, some hate posts, because we all know this fandom has lost all its hinges somewhere long ago (if it ever had them) and people are absolutely incapable to just ignore something they don't like. At first we thought a super silly banner might help against that, but clearly that was a big lapse of judgment on my part lol Either way, I wasn't too worried because there's nothing people can really do that bothers me and once the event would roll around everyone would realize there's nothing actually sinister about it, so I figured it would be fine.

What I did not expect, however, was the absolute insane behavior that ended up taking place, where people got targeted and their posts mass reported to take advantage of tumblrs shitty report system over absolutely fucking nothing. People who were not even involved in the event, just happened to write for the same pairing. So let me ask this very plainly: What the fuck is wrong with you? Because something definitely is and I hope you all are getting it checked out.

So I decided to call it quits because people getting hurt over it is obviously not worth it. And again, no wonder this fandom lacks a nice variety of artists who participate in events. What's the point? You canon obsessed pea-brained pearl-clutchers don't understand fan spaces or creativity. All you seem to be here for is virtual signalling, hate, bullying and demonstrating a severe lack of reading comprehension. I've had months of this high school bullshit now and I've really had enough.

I'm still gonna post my art (oh and all that Nyxlin stuff is not going anywhere, don't worry), but I am taking a step back from participating in fandom weeks and fandom discourse and whatnot. You guys can rip each other apart on your own.