#even tagging for engagement... who am i

[playablekairi]

only this, only this is gonna be the death of me

[maythedreadwolftakeyou]

over the last 3 months i have seen myself called (and sometimes blocked for being assumed to be):

a racist/a bigot

homophobic/queerphobic/transphobic

ace/demi-phobic

a fascist

for expressing opinions such as "I found the characters and background stories in Veilguard weaker and less interesting than previous Dragon Age games" and "i miss the amount of tension and conflict that we used to get to explore with the player character depending on their in-game background and life history" and "i did not feel Lucanis' character and romance arc was fully satisfying while I was playing through it".

and since this all started we now have:

seen the entire DA staff laid off from Bioware

heard many now-former bioware devs talking about how toxic the workplace was during the development of DA4

seen allusions to Bioware/EA executives overriding plot/plans that the Dragon Age writers/devs would have preferred

extracted large amounts of cut content from the games that show things like increased emotional response range for Rook, or alternate endings for companion arcs (NOT concept art content, but actual written and even voice-recorded dialogue in the game files), or increased impact from decisions you could make in the game

IN ADDITION to what we ALREADY knew about how many times the game changed direction/leadership changed/the mid-process layoffs, etc.

so can we maybe not keep putting "people who come into the Dragon Age universe from a place of love and were ultimately disappointed with the latest installment" in the same trash bucket as "dudes on twitter who were mad there were trans/nonbinary characters in their AAA game". can we FUCKING as a community acknowledge that there are many reasons someone might not jive with a change in direction other than jumping to "they disagree with me so they must obviously be horrible people, whose opinions shouldn't be counted anyway" (<-if this is your first impulse maybe examine that also).

i am so tired and i am never gonna get an apology for any of it but NOW that a lot of the people who were posting/reblogging these sentiments are hearing/seeing all these other things add up. it's like suddenly now it's "acceptable" to have problems with aspect of Veilguard or want more from it, because the writers/devs have shown they probably did too during it's creation. whereas when I said these things right off the bat (because the only thing we had was the game we got. not the game we can pretend they wanted to make instead) it WASN'T because apparently expressing opinions on my personal tumblr counts as "being mean to/harassing devs who worked hard on the game" or, again, assumed I am a racist/bigot/facist/queerphobic.

you're allowed to still like Veilguard. it's fine i promise. you can love the game if you love it and my not loving it has nothing to do with your own relationship to this piece of media. i am happy there are people who truly can enjoy it without massive Caveats. but i am still seeing like 3-5 posts Per Week express those opinions and it is really destroying my love for the community i once enjoyed.

[deviousdiesel]

Not to whack a hornet's nest here but I seriously think some people should reconsider putting their NSFW posts in the main series tag. Multiple main tags, mind you. Those posts will still end up being visible in the main tag search.

You're still engaging in media that is directed to a younger demographic. If you're an older member of the community please think about who is going to see these posts. Not everyone in the community is going to be interested in seeing that kind of stuff. And considering the fact that there are still plenty of younger community members here, I think you should be more mindful about what you post about these characters out in the open.

[philsmeatylegss]

Have said it a million times and will never stop saying it.

Phannies whose first language is not English, please write as many posts and fanfics you want.

This includes phannies who aren’t completely fluent and or have poor grammar/spelling.

Please rant and engage and be as chaotic as the rest of us. Even if you cannot express it in English.

I personally have always found it so impressive and admirable when I learn a phannie mutual of mine has a first language other than English. Your ability to participate as much as you do while having to translate every video, every post, is something I am always so impressed by.

Please participate as much as you want in the phandom. Even if you only feel like posting in your first language, even if you know your grammar/spelling isn’t perfect, please share your thoughts and feelings!!!

[apassingbird]

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[redr0sewrites]

dude one of my fav fandoms i dont talk ab v much is ihnmaims (both the game and the short story) but the fandom itself is so toxic that i just avoid it </3 like its very evenly split into two groups of people who r both equally different in their own ways but some people r just so mean bro like that fandom is So. full of these like anti selfshippers and/or people who will send u literal death threats over mischaracterization and i wish i could be more active in the fandom but alas. its so scary

[ryez-loveyz]

his ass did not need to look like that

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

wanna ask how you feel about the eridan bpd headcanon/theory(?? not sure what to call it!) you're so good at your character analysis and i'd love to see your outlook on it

Since I don't have a degree or any formal training in psychology, I feel deeply uncomfortable diagnosing characters. I've made an autism joke before but only because I'm on the spectrum. He's definitely traumatized and anxious, but I mean those as descriptors of his behavior rather than capital-D Diagnoses. I try to focus on those when I can - the cause and effect of cognition, self-image, and behavior - and those factors may very well match up with DSM criteria, but I try not to touch an actual diagnosis with a ten foot pole unless the author has explicitly stated that X character has Y condition.

[sojourner-between-worlds]

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[sherlock-is-ace]

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[qcomicsy]

Lately I've only been wishing to grab a comic about my favorite character and just have a genuinely good time reading it.

[kyliafanfiction]

I sometimes feel like characters who do truly monstrous things while also having been victims of some pretty insane shit themselves are sort of an exercise in empathy. Or at least, should be seen as such.

Like, in real life, if a person who has been horribly broken by their experiences and failed by society than proceeds to rape someone - it's hard to feel the justifiable sympathy/empathy for that person (without excusing their rape, never do that) because well, you can look at this actual human person they hurt, or worse, and it feels gross and disrespectful to the rape victim.

And this is understandable. (And applies to more than just rapists/rape victims of course, that's just the most visceral one and thus picked for that reason)

But a fictional rape victim is... fictional. You can't 'disrespect' their trauma, and while obviously rape/whatever else is real, and people may related to the rape victim and thus see your comments about the rapist also being a victim as somehow being about their experience...

Well, it's not.

Because the rapist here, didn't actually hurt a real person. Fictional characters are objects. They're objects that often grab us by the throat and refuse to leave our fucking heads, yes, but they're objects. They are tools used by writers to tell a story, and readers to tell a story.

And one of the things fictional characters are good for is allowing us to consider experiences we never had, and imagine ourselves in other circumstances and lives. (Also just fun and fascinating and interesting to watch their stories).

It's very easy to feel for the rape victim in fiction, and rightly so. That's Level 1 Empathy there. Granted, some people IRL fail that, but that's not really what we're talking about here.

Advanced Empathy, hard Empathy is feeling for the rapist. Not for the rape, of course, even if they feel guilt about it, but if someone really was failed on multiple levels and was broken and damaged and went through the sort of psychological wringer that would leave most of us here on tumblr catatonic - they do deserve the same Empathy any human (any person) who went through all that.

Even after they also do the bad thing, critically they still deserve Empathy. And that is fucking hard. I very often have a hard time feeling bad for truly awful people who also deserve empathy and sympathy, real and even fictional (despite all this, yeah, I'm not perfect on this) for what they (separately) went through.

It also becomes even harder when what they went through is utterly bound up with what they did. How what they went through and experiences is in part responsible for what they did - because they still made a choice. The circumstances may have left them not in their right mind, may have left them feeling without choice, may have driven them to things they normally might not think of or do, but they still chose to do that bad thing. And that's not okay. They still hurt someone.

And yet - one cannot remove the action from the circumstances. So you can still feel empathy, and elucidate all the factors and circumstances as to what led up to their choices and why, and it doesn't change that they did the horrible thing. The rape, or the murders, or whatever.

But circling back - with a fictional character... they didn't hurt a real person. There's no one who is real that suffered. The things the character did IRL are bad because they hurt real people.

So you're not being disrespectful to the victim by feeling that empathy, or sympathy. By exploring the things that they were a victim for. Even by wanting to focus on those things - fictional characters should be compelling in all their aspects, if they're written well.

And yet, of course, if you do that empathy and do talk about what the bad person went through and all that context, people come at you. They call you evil, just as bad as the (again, fictional) character, or they say that you're treading dangerously close to the arguments people use to defend the real people who do these things in real life. Or you're disrespecting all the victims of these crimes IRL. Especially of course, if the person coming at you has a reason this comes close to home.

But again - fictional.

In an ideal world, we'd all feel sympathy and empathy when it's called for, regardless of what the person did. Even the worst most monstrous people deserve human treatment in prison. And if you don't have empathy, that's hard. Even if you do have empathy, that's hard.

So if you look at a fictional character (who doesn't hurt a real person by virtue of being fictional) that does horrible, vile things, but went through so much, and you still can't empathize or sympathize with them... I mean, it doesn't make you a bad person, not even close, this is still fiction, and there's people I should empathize with in fiction that I don't, but...

It's still a failure of your ability to be empathetic. And we're all humans. We're all failing at that, among other things, all the time. But... it's good to be aware of that. at least?

At the very least, bear that in mind when other people are talking about that context, and that victimization. And please, for the love of god, don't fucking pretend that the victimization didn't happen, that this person who did do terrible things (in fiction) suddenly didn't also (in fiction) experience awful shit, as if doing a bad thing erases all the bad things done to you.

Again - it doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, but like... the horrible state of prisons in our society is a real, actual problem. The way we as a society dehumanize people who do bad things is a real actual problem for a lot of reasons (not least because it creates an incentive for authority that wants to dehumanize a person or a group to expand the definition of 'did bad things' to make their dehumanization now acceptable, among other things).

So yeah. Fictional character who suffers but than also makes others suffer - that's a useful exercise in Empathy. And doing that doesn't make you or anyone else a bad person, or actually defending the sorts of crimes, IRL or Fictional, that this character did. Contextualizing is not whitewashing, empathy is not erasing, and humanizing is not disrespecting the victim(s).

So yeah, they fictional character did bad things. But there's more to them than that. And you can say but and talk about what comes after but without disrespecting the fictional victim. Because the fictional victim... is just as fictional. Just as not real.

Is it possible for this to end up being taken too far? Yes. But that's a reason to be mindful of yourself when it comes to real people, not to never do it. And when it comes to fictional people - again, fictional. Nobody was actually, really hurt.

(I really do want to make clear, before people read the tags, that this applies to all crimes these sorts of characters do, rape was just picked as the one to use as the example.)

[deepseawave]

obsessed w the tags on ur last reblog

Omgg, thank you haha, it was a quality post so I just had to appreciate it in full force 😂❤️

Can‘t believe someone would actually enjoy my yapping :,D

[8-rae-rae-8]

I wasn't prepared for how wanting a hug from a friend that's thousands of miles away would feel like a stab in the chest. They don't tell you that shit hurts and you can't do anything about it

[bigshunt]

Just seen the news. As a certified Checo disliker. Good.

I'm about to be busy for 3 hours making art with lovely people and having fun. I won't be engaging with this because I don't wanna get for real irritated. So all I'll say is. Good. I grudgingly respect the hustle and good for him for hanging on for so long but I never liked him and I'm glad he's gone. Stay gone.

[oynonrings]

anxiety is a hell of a drug. why do i keep apologizing for writing smutty responses to smutty asks on my smutty blog that people followed from my smutty fanfiction.