#fandom reliant media is so confusing

[chardamnation]

dr. amaryllis... (pinned post on my profile)

Dr. Amaryllis from the SCP Foundation has been sent to... Purgatory!

Everyone from this damned foundation seems too good for hell but too bad for heaven

[gen4grl]

Yeah like the fact that SwSh is admittedly pretty reliant on filling in the gaps in also why you can see some pretty radically divergent interpretations of characters (see Piers) and none are technically wrong

yep!! and i think in a way that’s my biggest annoyance with swsh. all the characters have really shining personalities and KNOW eachother. they talk about eachother and league cards provide slightly more insight - milo and nessa being friendly rivals, opals notes on leon and sonia, kabu loosing faith in himself before a battle with leon etc. it’s all so good it’s just you hardly see anyone interacting. games like BW and especially SV really show gamefreaks ability to give each character really cool individual personalities but also how they interact with the wide range of people in their world (zero crew for example). i mean maybe it’s my fault LOL i’ve always appreciated the characters + dynamics over the actual pokemon (which probably explains my issue with the anime so much) 😭😭

i think if you’re terminally online and take part in fandom culture, it’s not the worst in the world cause we love to headcanon and create shit but for the average pokemon player who only consumes the games and possibly the anime, i understand why swsh comes across really weak in terms of story + character writing.

and exactly with the personal headcanons. i love headcanons (evident by this page i actually don’t shut tf up lol) and love how one character can effect so many different people in different ways. i think that’s the beauty of media and especially online culture. admittedly, on that piers point, i do get confused when people hc him and leon as “mean” or “arrogant” (moreso for leon) bc they are both the human embodiment of puppies in my eyes lol

[thyandrawrites]

so i too recently started jjk bc of your influence, and i'm a little confused, when you say that jjk is a well-crafted story, in what way do you mean? so far i found it terrible at handling the themes presented in the story, maybe it's not for me, or i might be missing the point of it, but aside from the cast being interesting, the story itself falls flat, and it's bothering me bc i *do* want to enjoy it like everyone else, but i just don't really know how. lol sorry if this is random, feel free to ignore it.

If it's any consolation, I'm not as into it as everyone else, either. I wanted to get invested in it, especially since a good portion of my bnha friends now migrated there, but jjk... Simply never sparked the same interest in me as my current fandoms. I just enjoy the story on a surface level with no real deep thoughts about it.

anyway, to answer your question. Idk about themes because I never read that deeply into them to form an opinion on whether or not the set up matches the delivery... But when I praised the series I was doing so mostly bc I think the story has actual stakes. Unlike bnha where the characters just get handed things because they're the protagonists, I'd say that jjk denies them things because they're the protagonists, and have to work for them. I guess that was refreshing for me, especially after the disappointment that was bnha during the war arc.

Of course, you can criticize the delivery. For example, I feel like jjk is sometimes way too gritty just for grittiness' sake (like killing off characters for no other reasons than Sad Things Happening During a War). Or you can criticize that the characters rarely ever get what they want even when they do struggle. But one thing I appreciated tho was that character flaws are never sugarcoated or framed as something positive (unlike bnha). For example, Gojou is presented as this extremely individualistic prick who thinks he has the biggest dick in the history of dick measuring contests, and acts like he can do what the fuck he wants without suffering consequences simply bc he's brilliant and he knows it. But the narrative doesn't frame this as a positive thing, and in fact, that cocksure, extremely self-reliant attitude is exactly what triggers the doomsday. I gotta say that after reading that garbage that was Endvr's atonement, this was pretty refreshing. Flaws treated as flaws. Consequences. Stakes. Characters being challenged in their worldviews. Shit going sideways because bad decisions aren't reframed as good decisions all along.

That is not to say I think jjk is above any criticism! There are a bunch of things I deeply dislike as well. The aformentioned hard-on for grittiness, for example. Or the way action scenes or worldbuilding elements are just told to us through dialogue instead of shown because the author is terrible at making the storyboard clear enough to understand what's happening without a narrator explaining it to us. 🤷

I didn't mean to lead you to believe jjk was a spotless masterpiece. I'm sorry. It does have flaws like any piece of media imho

[welcome-to-the-gay-bar]

So I we started to watch Attack on Titan again after many years and I’ve just finished season two and before starting season three I wanted to take a trip down memory lane and look at all my old favourite AOT fan fictions from 2014 (and see what’s popular nowadays that I may have missed, since wow, a lot has changed since I was last present in this fandom and compared to what’s happening in the current episodes season one was tame).

I’ve noticed a huge divide between fanon and canon and I kinda wanted to ruminate on this a bit.

Eren’s character in the show isn’t my favourite. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still fond of this brash idiot, but he’ll never be my favourite. He falls into this shonen protagonist trope of being hot headed and ill tempered. He doesn’t take advice, he’s not going to listen to plans or authority, he always thinks he’s right and only follows his moral compass, and to tie it all up he’s not even that strong. He can’t back up the threats that he’s laying down and yet he always rushes into situations with fists flying and never thanks or appreciates the characters (Mikasa) that get him out of those tricky situations. The only way to get through to him is to physically beat him down and even then it may not work if he hadn’t already somewhat respected you (Mikasa again). This character type is seen so often in shonen and I’m really not a fan, I like the cool and calculating protagonist better. Someone who has the power behind their threats and doesn’t rush into situations. Again, I like Eren, but I think it’s the other characters in the show that balance him out and the plot itself that makes me like Attack on Titan.

Compare this to fanon where his default character is happy ray of sunshine who’s a little bit naive. It’s a rather jarring comparison but I also don’t necessarily dislike it either. To me canon and fanon characteristics are almost completely seperate. If I had to always think a d compare fan fiction to canon I probably couldn’t read it. I read about happy fanon Eren and see canon angry Eren and to me they are two completely different characters - two completely different people even. If I had to read fan fiction about canon Eren I can 1000000% say that I just wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I’d be totally bored. As I said before, I like Eren but it’s the people around him and the plot itself that makes him bearable. I can watch a show about him because it takes less time and emotional energy, but I couldn’t invest in reading a book about him (which is why I haven’t read the manga either).

This isn’t even exclusively towards Attack on Titan. Back in my Teen Wolf phase I noticed how different canon and fanon characters were. Small secret - I was knee deep in the Teen Wolf fandom before I realised that I hadn’t actually watched an episode of Teen Wolf. One of my mutual’s reblogged TW artwork that was linked to a story and from that I never looked back. When I actually did get around to watching TW I can honestly say I was more than a wee bit disillusioned. Derek and Stiles are obviously not the main characters and I was prepared for that, but then they barely interacted, and when they did interact it was nothing like what I had read about - nothing like what their fanon characters or interactions were like. I can honestly say that I never made it past the first season - the show just wasn’t for me - but I was still thoroughly invested in the fandom for another year or two.

Something about fanon Sterek dynamics just did it for me, their characters and relationship was just so on point for what I wanted, and this is kind of when I came to accept that canon and fanon can be so different that it almost feels as if it’s two pieces of completely different media. I mean, fanon has its own set of rules, it’s own character tropes and story arcs that even completely different authors with completely different stories somewhat instinctively know to follow. I think that’s amazing, but it’s also a double edged sword. See these first two examples were of shows that I A) never watched/finished before reading fan fiction, B) don’t necessarily love love the characters in canon. That means that fanon is more appealing because it takes something I don’t care too strongly for and changes it to something more appealing. But what about when fanon takes something I love and cherish and remoulds it?

I want to briefly take this time to talk about something I’ve dubbed “the twink affect”. When you take a character that’s originally strong willed, self sufficient, and somewhat masculine and you pair the, up with someone EVEN MORE strong willed, self sufficient, and masculine - the “Alpha male” of characters if you will. I find that fanon is incapable of seeing two strong men together in a relationship and will eventually slowly twinkify one of them. Make them smaller, softer, lonelier, less self sufficient and more reliant on others, they need to be taken care of, they’re now a ball of sunshine that’s radiant and joyful, they’re cotton candy that melts on your tongue. You put them next to the pairing you ship them with and instead of seeing two strong men you see a bear and a twink. That’s definitely what’s happened to the two characters/pairings mentioned before and I honestly didn’t mind because I wasn’t protective of the source material, but when it does happen to a character I love it’s the most frustrating thing in the world, and I can’t even complain because I’ve already reaped the benefits from other fandoms. (I am going to complain though, this is my blog and I can do what I want mum.)

I’m going to talk about Mo Dao Zu Shi. Beautiful story that I love in (almost) all its various adaptations, but I’ve noticed the ever slow changing of fanon’s Wei Wuxian. For anyone reading this that hasn’t read MDZS (or if anyone’s reading this at all, I am expecting to just be shouting into the void at this point) Wei Wuxian dies - not a spoiler, it happens at the very beginning of the story - and comes back to life in the body of Mo Xuanyu. Mo Xuanyu is small malnourished and twinky - he even canonically wears makeup (or at least has it in his possession, I’m getting the various adaptations confused and I can’t remember if in canon Wei Wuxian woke up in Mo Xuanyu’s body already wearing the makeup or if he just finds the tin of makeup in Mo Xuanyu’s possessions). Wei Wuxian’s character is also a bit of a tease, and now he’s alive and unburdened by the past he’s much freer now than he was in the past, couple that with the fact that he’s pretending to be Mo Xuanyu (a character who is rumoured to be gay and also a bit insane) he goes all out in pretending to be a shameless flirt, and it’s honestly hilarious, I love his character. So in a sense he has all the makings of a canon twink and I’m really not here to shame on those who portray him that way while he’s in Mo Xuanyu’s body.

My personal issue is with the same extreme twink portrayal while he’s in his original body. In his original body Wei Wuxian is BUFF. He’s hunky, he’s in the top five most eligible bachelors, he’s *car honks* woof woof bark bark *whistles* puurrrr, he’s one of the most powerful cultivators of his generation, he’s a genius too. He’s hunky. He still has the cheeky shameless character, but when you compare him to the male lead Lan Wangji, they’re about the same size and strength. My favourite type of fan fiction in MDZS is fix it/everybody lives nobody dies/no war/etc etc. Basically stories where Wei Wuxian keeps his original body. The fanon twink portrayal of him being so small and soft and weak while in canon he’s one of the strongest and smartest urks me in ways I can’t explain. It’s not what I want, not what I’m looking for. I love him for who he is in canon and to see his character so distorted by fans of the original work is frustrating. I just want to read about Wei Wuxian as a jock with his equally buff and tall nerd boyfriend.

I want to pause here and say that I have nothing against authors that write him in a twinky way, I respect your work and your characters (and as I said before I’ve reaped the benefits of other fandoms twinky character portrayals numerous times), if I read a fic that I’m not happy with the characterisation I just close the tab and move on so absolutely no hate to anyone who enjoys this character type. I’m just ruminating on the fact that I’ve been seeing it happen more and more often lately to the point where I’ve kind of bounced the fandom and am sticking to other works like Scum Villain that haven’t yet twinkified too much (there will always be one or two stories in every fandom that twinkify and honestly? I respect that. Authors said twink rights ONLY, good for them).

Mo Dao Zu Shi isn’t the only fandom I’ve been in that I’ve negatively reacted to fanon. Another one would be Batman (I love Tim with all my heart and I love him getting treated nicely but damn I sometimes wish people would remember how freaking strong and amazing he is too), 2Ha is another I’ve started to see “twinkified” (although I don’t mind seeing Chu Wanning being soft and taken care of, he is canonically called handsome and masculine and he’s quite tall too), I’ve even seen the canonically “top” character (and that seems so weird to write oml) be twinkified by fandom because they want to see him get bottomed for ~equal rights~ because apparently bottoming is seen as a “woman’s position” to them and they’re trying to be woke by switching the sexual positions up but failing to see how misogynistic and homophobic that take is (imma stop myself here because that a WHOLE ‘nother can or worms to be opened right there).

What I’m trying to say is fanon is a double edged sword and I’ve definitely enjoyed some and hated some. I think it’s important to seperate the two. I do think it’s annoying for fandoms to be flooded with mischaracterisation when you actually do like the original characters and I wish there was some way to seperate fandom into “actual canon fans” and “fans of fanon”, but I don’t have a solution and I’ve definitely contributed to the problem in the past so for that I’m sorry.

I don’t know how to end this long ass rant, I don’t know what the goal was in writing this, but taadaa ~ here’s my exceptionally long take on fanon.

[incarnateirony]

Something has been eating at me for a while.

“Meta and speculation are different” yes, they are. But speculation without any meta foundation is like throwing a dart at a board with a blindfold on after being spun in circles. Meta that fails to supply valid speculatory direction and ends up being dashed by upcoming events means the wrong things are being focused on at the wrong angles and, if you continue to build on the premises of that old meta, you will continue to veer left.

Also if you write a 10 page thing and the vaguiest vague blogging general parts of it are right, or indirectly right, that doesn’t indirectly validate the rest of the meta; EG if someone writes between the lines that X symbol and Y color means Z thing is going to happen, like, a specific color coding meaning a character is going to be possessed by specific character, but then it turns out some random ghost did it -- or the other way around -- don’t wave that around. Like congrats you got a fragment of it right but if the rest was framed as connecting these two things and these things weren’t connected the way you thought don’t use one of the things to keep framing other things when that has been proven wrong?? but you wanted to say it was almost-right-ish if you turn it sideways?

When people talk about the meta community bragging about irrelevant shit, that’s it. When anyone assumes the most basic, adjacent, indirect thing being almost-right validates everything else, it’s like procedurally setting up broken foundations that, whether anyone actively speculates from, people build their lenses from, and then by the end you’re confused and don’t understand why it’s gone where it’s gone.

Similarly, assuming a given ring of your few chosen friends that agree with everything you say makes a bad echo chamber. Especially when meta continues to crumble into the aether but is just sort of brushed under the rug, but after 15 years of rug brushing, that rug’s pretty lumpy right now and people just sit on the pile like, nothing to see here, folks.

I say this because in the final season, there’s so much built up fanon -- formerly pleasing meta ideas, fanfictions, and other concepts -- that people have started taking to heart, and never really addressed that it was brushed under the rug and pretend the rug is fine, and then when the rug gets pulled out from under them, they land in a big pile of meta rubble and because they hoarded it and never released it, are prone to feeling like the show has betrayed them.

For reasons I will pretend are magical and mystic(TM) that hasn’t happened to me but happens to a great deal of people that have become reliant on fandom Thinkers, and we have one year left. Make sure everything adds up. Look back at the history of their work and see how well it’s played out if you rely on anyone’s framing to understand things. Did they truly understand and predict things as they were coming forward, or did they pull a random ticket with some extreme Reach afterward to save digital clout or their own pride -- are you allowing yourself to get knotted up by someone inconsistent?

Hell, there’s people I’ve seen around here that are like “Speculation is dumb I never” and then write entire pages long speculation posts literally pulled out of the air from the most random directions or like “other social media platforms are for plebs so if you go anywhere but this platform you are implicitly intellectually inferior to me” like tumblr is some hotbed of academia foremost rather than a collapsed porn vat. And then like, turn around and say all the bad hot takes that happen on twitter are dumb but then whip up bad hot takes here.

Read between the lines, make sure you aren’t letting anyone fabricate and malign the angle you’re taking in the final season to enjoy it with. If you have someone you reliably follow that genuinely seems to predict and forecast in complete framing ways to enjoy, that’s fine. But if they talk both ways, pull penny receipts of indirect vagueries, and are rarely if ever right, *please* make sure for your own enjoyment folks that you don’t let this last season hang on expectations someone else pulled literally out of thin air. 

[fionatartcenter]

Instagram - Final

In modern culture, people can connect to one another through many different devices such as phones and laptops.  Although we forget, social media is everywhere and for the majority of people, it is what they spend the most of their time on.  These social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter are commonplace and essential to the definition of the 21st century when they were created.   Instagram in particular is an excellent example of social media that falls under the context of Postmodernism, Remix Culture, and the Use-and-Create mindset.  

In context to Postmodernism, Instagram is a platform used by people all around the world and so it is always active by its users.  This concept follows the idea that Instagram creates a confusion over time and space as people are able to forget the distance that separates people online and creates a connection through photos, videos, and live feeds.  For example, people who are in the Western hemisphere such as the United States or Canada at night are able to live view videos of people in the Eastern hemisphere such as Korea or Japan during the day.  Users of Instagram are also huge in range as many celebrities are active on this platform and so they use these platforms to connect with their fans, creating a sense of familiarity and to lessen the space between them. Instagram is also a platform that has a lot of different content that range from commonplace content such as music videos or magazines, the mass culture, to more high society content such as classical music or the fine arts, both who commonly use Instagram to promote their goods and to share it to a larger audience quickly.  

Instagram is also a very open space where people are allowed to post opinions and ideas that differed greatly from the ideals during the Modernism period where people greatly followed and relied on religious belief and reason as the only truth.  On Instagram, many people share their interests in the sciences, LGTBQ community, female empowerment and etc.  Many of these ideals are also greatly related to and accepted by the new generations as they grow older and expose themselves more to these ideals.

The app itself is also an example of postmodernism and makes use of artificial intelligence.  The platform is known to make use of the user information to adjust to different content.  The app is programmed to follow and build around information such as tags you use or posts you like and create a feed for you using that information in their explore page.   Even in the personalized section of followed users, Instagram makes use of the information of commonly liked posts to show posts you would be most likely to like.  Aside from adjusting followed content, Instagram also analyzes the user’s information to control ads and switch algorithms in order for sponsored ads to be seen more frequently by users who could have an interest in the item in the ad. However, Instagram is also using the more controversial method of getting user information from it’s partner site, Facebook.

In addition, Instagram is also a platform created by remix culture.  First is the app is partnered with apps such as Boomerang, an app that uses bursts of photos and stitches them together to create mini videos that go and back and forth.  But the app is also known to take inspirations from various other apps such as Snapchat when it added the feature to view and make stories.  This addition of Snapchat’s features was heavily done in opposition to Snapchat’s refusal to Facebook’s offer to buy the company for $3 billion.  From then the app has suffered greatly in its users as Facebook and it’s apps continue its domination amongst apps.

The content of Instagram also greatly makes use of the remix culture as it is a Use and Create platform. For most users, they are both users of the apps and creators of the app.  As Creators, many post images and videos of themselves, events, or just random content.  Some creators are fan accounts where they post content based off of cartoons, shows, or even people like fanart or praiseful/appreciation photos.  Other accounts make use of the app to post memes or other funny content such as short videos, also known as Vines before the Vine app shut down.  Businesses also commonly use Instagram to announce promotions or events to their followers in order to build up an audience and to connect with them.  Because of this, many accounts also have a huge following of users who follow them for these content they post.  With creators of fandom accounts, users can follow posts based on their interests of shows or characters they favorite.  With businesses, users follow them for their promotions or events in order to find deals for themselves.  Then there are personal accounts where people want to just photograph and mark down their life and trips and their friends who want to follow them to be caught up with the another.  It is difficult to categorize a person into a user or creator as almost all accounts of Instagram both create and use in the app.  But each follow remix culture as they make use of inspirations from others for what type of content is posted or how they are commented on.

As Instagram begins to grow more, the type of content that the users and creators encounter will continue to grow and expand.  Because this platform is so reliant on user created content, it will continue to develop with the tastes and content desired by the mass culture.  And as technology increases, Instagram’s type of content will continue to evolve just as technology like virtual reality or the technology that reacts to facial expressions just as Apple’s Iphone X allows for, which is brought onto Instagram.  Instagram is a platform that many people use to connect with one another through photos, videos, and live feeds, whether it is across towns or across the ocean as this app is available to just about anyone who has a phone.  Then remix culture will continue to help fuel Instagram where many people use the app to create content based on fandoms or be based off others.