#fandom discourse

[frontmansdefender]

shaming and making fun of people for still engaging in fandom activities once they reach a certain age is so embarrassing because why are you giving yourself an expiration date of time you have fun? why are you not-so-indirectly saying you will stop having fun once you reach a certain age? or do you really believe you have to stop engaging in fandom activities and having fun once you turn (x)? do you not think you will, what, live that long and turn that age too? do you think fun will suddenly stop for you and life will all of a sudden lose its meaning once you reach a certain age? how sad to be giving yourself an hourglass and just waiting for your time of having fun to run out.

adults can and should engage in fandom activities if it's what makes them happy.

adults can and should continue doing whatever they like doing as teenagers if it's what makes them happy.

age is just... part of life. it's a part of me and it's a part of you. shaming people for something you will have to go through (unless you don't think you will live that long) is such a loser behavior. indirectly saying you will stop having fun once you reach a certain age isn't the flex you think it is. it doesn't make you look "cool and edgy", it makes you look miserable.

[thenaiads]

☝️☝️☝️

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[theweeklydiscourse]

Shippers get a lot of lashings for being annoying and “forcing romance” but not enough is being said about people who force the nuclear family structure on everything. Nothing against found families, but the amount of people who seem to cram every dynamic into a cookie cutter nuclear family mold is driving me insane. It’s another lowkey reductive way of engaging with characters that pretends to less reductive than the shippers they constantly complain about. Not every relationship can be categorized as “sibling coded” or “father-daughter” because most relationships are more complicated than that. Don’t even get me started on the way these people use “coding” *cough* their headcanons *cough* to shut down ships they dislike.

[lyrisnightblood]

ATTENTION TO THE MDZS FANDOM

It has come to my notice that @pakhnokh is an Israeli and a Zionist, who had always been a pro- Zionist. This was something I didn't know at all, and I have been in the MDZS fandom since 2023. I didn't know until very recently when people on twitter had started to call out on the person.

Probably some of you guys here already know, maybe you don't. I tried to gather as much information as possible about it.

Apparently pakhnokh's anti-palestinian stance dates all the way back to 2014. The screenshot below is from DeviantArt, where she talks positively about Operation Protective Edge

I researched a bit on Operation Protective Edge, and what I found was not only ugly, but horrifying.

This was immediately what popped up when i hit search

"2014 Gaza war, also known as Operation Protective Edge".

I then dived into a few reports by Amnesty International, ICRC, and IMEU (Institute of Middle East Understanding). I will link the reports below, and will also summarise what I found.

Operation Protective Edge killed more than 2000 Palestinians, 500 of whom were children. It was also a seven-week operation (Source: Amnesty International). Seven. Weeks. Meaning this operation, launched on June 8, 2014, lasted for almost 2 months. That's 2 months of killing and displacing Palestinians in Gaza. About 28% of the population were displaced during the Operation.

The report by IMEU also states that Israel had initiated the "Hannibal Directive" twice. For those who aren't aware of what this means, it is an extremely dangerous procedure by which the Israeli Forces "must stop (kidnapping) by all means, even at the price of striking and harming our own forces". Even Israeli people have condemned the military for this directive. All I can say is that the level of bloodlust the IOF possesses that even the idea that their own people may die in the crossfire doesn't stop them...

Amnesty had also described Operation Protective Edge as a military offensive. And this is what a military offensive means:

And people still call them "Israeli Defensive Force".

All of this is to say that this was what pakhnokh spoke of so proudly in the first screenshot.

More screenshots of Pakhnokh being a Zionist:

Like? "If you tell a Palestinian - go back to Jordan or Egypt, he says - go back to Poland"??? The kind of sick joke is this?! I'm so disgusted.

And once again, praising the operation that killed 20000 Palestinians...

All of this summing up to - how have we, the fandom, allowed this monster of a person in, god forbid financially support her even, when all along she had wanted the death and destruction of an entire group of people, just like her country and her government and her rotten military???

How had we accepted a Zionist with open arms, made her popular, when we had also collectively come together to raise funds for Gaza in the year 2024 through various gachas, so that we could try to undo at least one small part of the damage this person had contributed to??

And how are we, despite everything, going to let her off the hook?!

I for one certainly won't!

I will call out pakhnokh, gods forbid it be toxic or whatever, because I am never going to let a Zionist exist in a fandom where the main character calls out against genocide.

And to the rest of the fandom...

Block. Report. Cancel your paetron subscriptions if you have one, and do not support pakhnokh on any platforms. Ignore her completely. Let all her engagements on all social media accounts drop to zero.

Compared to her sentiments on Zionism and ethnic cleansing, this is a very small punishment. But let pakhnokh never be welcomed into the MDZS fandom ever again.

(P.S. i will attach all links related to Operation Protective Edge and the threads from twitter which brought to light about who pakhnokh really is:

https://x.com/Ceru_Draws/status/1950007738789941448

https://x.com/GusuTortleFloof/status/1950212980672434311

https://x.com/hualianarchive/status/1949943539594314007

https://x.com/inspainwithoutp/status/1950150075331604521

https://x.com/inspainwithoutp/status/1950322404921917742

https://x.com/luckymarrowb/status/1950240263151944129

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/gaza-operation-protective-edge

https://tinyurl.com/5n99w4bx

https://imeu.org/article/50-days-of-death-destruction-israels-operation-protective-edge )

[whumpster-fire]

Broke: Chilchuck Tims is child coded.

Woke: Chilchuck Tims isn't child coded, he's a middle-aged, divorced man with grown up children.

Bespoke: Chilchuck Tims cannot be accurately described as either "child coded" or "not child coded" because he is a deliberate commentary on the idea of "child coding" itself.

Chilchuck, and half-foots in Dungeon Meshi in general, are given significantly more neotenous proportions and appearances (e.g. larger heads and eyes, rounder faces) than the other races. This is not universal for depictions of hobbits / halflings in Tolkien / D&D inspired fantasy fiction. Compare Chilchuck relative to the "tallmen" (humans) in Dunmeshi to how small races are drawn in something like Legend of Vox Machina (many of those characters are gnomes but whatever) or in basically any official D&D art. It was an intentional artistic decision to make him look like that. This is reinforced when he's temporarily transformed into a tallman (human) and in addition to becoming much taller he gains features that make him look more visibly middle-aged (stubble, eye bags / wrinkles, a more oval face) that he doesn't have as a half-foot. See also Marcille's transformed form and supplemental drawings of what all of the main party would look like as other races. However they do NOT look indistinguishable from actual children as portrayed by Dunmeshi's artstyle and have distinguishing features e.g. larger ears.

Chilchuck is frequently mistaken for a child in-universe, or treated / perceived as one even by members of other races who know he's a half-foot, and he hates this. His infantilization and that of half-foots in general isn't just a running gag, it's a significant plot point and source of discrimination. Like when the party gets impersonated by shapeshifters copying everyone based on the others' memories of them, and most of the Chilchuck clones look and behave more childish than the real one, and they almost get away with it, even though his party should know better than to think of him as a kid.

The narrative consistently takes the position that the people infantilizing Chilchuck are wrong, and are being ignorant/racist.

Conclusion: Chilchuck is definitely not "child-coded" in the way that a 700 year old shapeshifter that looks and behaves indistinguishably from a little kid for contrived reasons. However, he is intentionally designed to make it seem plausible for people who know he's an adult to still not fully believe it and this can make the viewers fall for it too. Which I guess is "child-coding" in a sense. But the message the work is trying to send is very clearly "Don't decide that grown-ass adults are equivalent to children and treat them like children because they have physical characteristics that remind you of a child you dipshit."

While hobbits aren't real and Chilchuck's traits that get him mistaken for a child are exaggerated compared to the vast, vast majority of real people, infantilization of grown-ass adults due to ableism, racism, or just people being dumbasses who forget short people exist is a real issue, and if you start shit with people for shipping Divorced Dad Chilchuck Tims with other characters or whatever you are displaying the exact attitude that's being criticized.

[hainethehero]

Bucky stans who hate Steve Rogers puzzle me...

Because on the one hand, any scene/movie/show that does Bucky supposedly wrong/dirty is seen as bad writing to them. But the minute Steve's character is a victim of bad writing, they ignore that & just chalk it up to Steve being a "bad person/hero/friend." Like, we get it, Bucky is your fave, but the double standards are gross. At least be fair in your criticism.

I also saw a Bucky stan say "Steve NEEDED to leave for Bucky to grow" because "Bucky was just known as Steve's friend or was always in Steve's shadow" and I'm like.....?????

Because if I'm not mistaken,

Bucky/the Winter Soldier has always been more popular than Steve/Cap- EVEN IN HIS OWN TRILOGY! [Which is fine, I mean, even in the comics, Winter Soldier is more popular than Steve].

Bucky fans made sure to highlight Bucky & his character & storylines in whatever media available that shared MCU content like ao3, tiktok, ig etc. If anything, Steve's character was always/has always been overshadowed by Bucky.

And thirdly, "Steve was a good hero, not a good friend"?????? To Bucky?????? The man he sacrificed everything for after being rescued from the ice? The man for who Steve risked jail, his own freedom and his life?? The man he brought to T'Challa for immunity and help? The man he got therapy & psychological help for instead of getting therapy for himself after all the trauma he went through as well? James Buchanan Barnes? That James Barnes???

It's like y'all forgot the entire motivating point of all 3 Captain America movies was Bucky Barnes- which, I might add is the reason why Steve leaving in Endgame was CLEARLY bad writing. He would never leave Bucky. Not after everything he did to get his old pal back!

And, mind you, Steve's ending wasn't just the result of bad writing it was also the fact that people were shipping them & Disney + Marvel couldn't have that so they just decided to have Steve fuck off the timeline. So by Bucky stans (and any other stans) not seeing it as bad writing and using it to justify their hate for Steve, y'all are purposely ignoring and giving merit to the very anti-lgbtqia+ narrative which runs most MCU + Disney projects.

And y'all conveniently forget when Sam told him "Bucky's not the kind of man you save. He's the kind of man you stop," Steve refused to listen because he would rather die trying to save Bucky???

The MCU writers have never been fair to Steve or his character arc and it's weird to see that mcu stans, and sadly, Bucky stans are ignoring the inherent issues within the mcu & Disney, and the bad writing in favour of putting Steve down to uplift their fave.

[bebx]

“enemies to lovers as a fictional trope is harmful because it normalizes and romanticizes abuse and toxicity” my brother in Christ, touch. grass. they fuck while trying to murder each other and also they use each other’s blood as lube and yeah they look hot as fuck. what are you going to do about it?

[thebookishgaymer]

But somehow 19 year old Feyre was mature enough to marry Rhysand

Rhys was old enough to go to war at 28 against Hybern 500 years ago but Gwyn is somehow "not old enough"/"mature enough"/"too young" for Azriel also at 28. Interesting! Have you considered not making yourself sound insanely fucking irrational and illogical for the sake of two people pretend kissing?

[jaguarys]

I find it fascinating (derogatory) how the general fandom conversation has shifted from "this woman is getting in the way of our gay ship and she's USELESS and ANNOYING and WE DON'T LIKE HER!" to this weird "no actually she's just not involved in her own relationships because she's too cool and special and awesome and a girlboss". But the problem is that there's not actually a veritable difference there. People still aren't engaging with her as a fully-fledged character. Like sure man calling her a girlboss is fine it's whatever but let that lead somewhere else. Engage with her. Can you actually name any of her character traits or are you just blindly praising her so that you can focus on shipping the guys in the background without feeling bad about it

[antiship-ciel]

Me personally being anti proship means you're simply against the romantizazion, sexualization and glorification of sexual abuse( or really abuse in general.) that's it.

No I'm not against dark media.

No I'm not against these topics being in media.

No I'm not a nazi.

No I'm not pro censorship.

No I'm not a puritan who thinks sex is bad.

No I'm not a fascist.

No I'm not a conservative.

No I'm not some moron going around sending death threats to random people.

No I'm not in a clut.

And NO I'm not going to turn out to be some pedophile groomer.

I am simply a person with common sense.

[lavandaverde]

I feel like people sometimes oversimplify Leia as someone "driven by rage" or much more susceptible to falling to the dark side than Luke, when that's not the case. I have no problem comparing her to Anakin (both twins take after him in certain ways), and I recognize that she had many painful experiences, but Leia was also quite understanding and firm in her convictions.

Anakin had a traumatic childhood, and while he was good and had been taught right from wrong, he also had conflicts in his apprenticeship with Obi-Wan (who had just lost Qui-Gon and been knighted when he became his master), and had difficulty interacting with his fellow Jedi. Palpatine took advantage of this and all the fear and anger issues caused by these events, magnifying them and using them against Anakin. However, Leia was raised very differently. The Organas clearly instilled in her a good moral sense, and she spent her early childhood and grew up in a stable home (and there's a lot of Padmé in her, too). During the original trilogy, she was already an adult who lived in a different context than her father, and was less susceptible to being molded by Palpatine.

Recognizing that Leia can be bitter at times is different from seeing her simply as a sort of time bomb ready to explode at any moment. Throughout the trilogy, she was always quite rational and took her values very seriously, so I believe it's precisely this moral foundation that keeps her strong enough to resist the temptation of the dark side. Leia is also quite gentle (as we see repeatedly in all three films); when Luke decides to "surrender" to Vader in ROTJ, she doesn't react explosively, even though she wishes he wouldn't.

Luke also has his moments of anger, like in the fight with Vader in ROTJ, and is often impulsive, but people like to portray him as just an innocent and cute little boy. Anyway, I just disagree with how some summarize their personalities as "saintly twin" and "angry twin." They both have a lot of Anakin and Padmé inside them, and they were influenced by their adoptive families' upbringings. Leia and Luke have moments where they struggle to let go of their anger, just as they have moments where they are kind and heroic, so it doesn't seem right to simplify the whole thing that way.

[theweeklydiscourse]

Modern fandom has this nasty trend of people forming their political identities around liking the correct media ™ and then using that moral justification to explain their trigger happy attitude towards policing people’s interests. It seems more common in fandoms that skew younger, partly because they’re in the beginning stages of developing their political views and partly because they’re want a straightforward way of signalling those views. But when fandom is your politics, you’re bound to run into a situation where you’re forced to justify your personal likes and dislikes through a moral framework. This creates a situation where people incite the most inane discourses ever because they can’t tolerate the discomfort of seeing content they dislike or interpretations they disagree with. And by framing it through a moral lens, they deny their personal responsibility to moderate their own internet experience because they are firmly convinced that their views are morally correct and thus, must be enforced.

[questions-about-blorbos]

Yo you just rb'd a post from a proshipper jsyk

respectfully, I don’t care what fictional things a person enjoys, it’s not my business, as long as they don’t hurt anyone in real life.

I’m not a fandom police and I hate fandom police. this is a fandom police free zone. ship the most fucked up fictional ship you can think of, because if you’re older than 3, I trust that you can separate fiction from reality.

[goblinsatchel]

The Owl House really is the show that encapsulates what it means to be Pro-Fiction and Anti-Censorship in a society largely influenced by puritanical Christian beliefs.

The show was made by weirdos, about weirdos, for weirdos.

The prison is literally called the Conformatorium where they lock up the wild witches, the artists, the writers, and the undesirables. If you’re not contributing to society in a way they deem meaningful they have no use for you.

Worse: If you’re actively pushing back against the status quo you’re a threat and you must be silenced. (Sounds similar to our current political climate if you ask me.)

As Luz put it -> “None of you actually did anything wrong. You’re all just a bunch of weirdos.. Like me.”

Yeah I don’t think Luz would be on the side of witch hunting people down and burning them at the stake over shipping Lunter. (Pun intended.) She probably loves enemies to lovers.

Amity is a selfshipper herself, who likes forbidden romance. She had a crush on a presumably male character despite being implied to be a lesbian. (Your fictional tastes ≠ your real life tastes.) His name is Malin Gael I believe.

Me personally? I’m a multishipper. I like exploring a lot of dynamics for the fun of it. I also just generally enjoy when someone is really enthusiastic about a niche ship. This doesn’t mean I like every ship out there though. I don’t care for Amillow, but I don’t go around saying it’s a horrible ship and no one is allowed to draw them smooching.

Alex Hirsch even said to get weirder with it and Dana Terrace is all for the literary theory “Death of the Author,” Which gives reader’s the freedom to interpret a story however they want despite the authors original intentions.

Censorship is a weapon used by those in power to target not just those in minority groups, but everyone. The less information you have on any given topic the easier it is to manipulate them.

Fiction can be commentary on real world issues but viewing something “problematic” won’t somehow make you less “pure.” Or ruin your brain. (From what I’ve seen a lot of these antis and terfs perpetuate this toxic shame cycle.)

That’s why it’s so sad seeing a large portion of the community still falling for conservative propaganda that got the show canceled in the first place.

I loved The Owl House and I miss it dearly. I made this post as a sort of love letter/rant for anyone feeling misunderstood, for anyone feeling angry or hopeless with all the chaos going on in the world right now. I see you.

Keep making art and writing the stories you want to see, go comment something nice on someone’s fanfic, reblog a nice piece of art. After all.. Us weirdos gotta stick together.