#for the reasons expressed above

[gokulma]

I don't understand when I see posts/tweets saying they don't understand the Goku/Bulma ship, aside that the point of shipping things that aren't canon is exactly to use your imagination and creativity to explore the possibilities of how things would have turned out if they had gotten together

They mention the age difference which...isn't that much ? It's basically nothing if they're adults. And all the gobul shippers I have seen don't like them as kids, only them having a relationship years after they meet.

They say the childhood friends to lovers trope it's bad and of course people have different tastes but what i find interesting about the ship, and still makes me like it to this day, it's how different their personalities are and how they can work in a relationship

I like the idea of selfish, greedy and proud Bulma falling in love with the most innocent man she has ever meet. Someone with no Malice and not a bad thought about anyone. Suddenly she is meet with feelings of inferiority, of not being good enough for him. Having a m/f ship where a woman feels like that compared to the man it's so rare and that's what i like about them.

Suddenly, after a lot of pinning and hurt she can finally accept him as partner and being with him she can learn to be a better person. Goku in the other hand i can see him having no problem accepting his feelings. I know Goku it's not the romantic type, he won't write you love letters or confess his undying love for you under the moonlight but i also love the idea of seeing him in love with someone, suffering because of that love.

if we love each other why won't you accept me?

After they're settled i see Bulma having no problem with Goku's way of being: not being a house husband and coming and going. But always coming back home to her.

[keferon]

May I ask what were the best transformers media you ever saw/read?

Well Transformers Prime, Transformers 1986 and IDW comics are having the first place that’s for sure

And then the second place is kind of shared by Fall of Cybertron, Exodus, Prime wars trilogy, Robots in disguise(2001) and Transformers One.

The third place goes to G1, Animated, Earthspark, Armada, War for Cybertron Netflix series, Aligned Robots in disguise, Bumblebee, Rise of the Beasts and Cyberverse because I only liked some little parts of them.

And then I also saw some of the Bay movies, Victory and Headmasters and didn’t like them at all.

Separate first place for J-Decker. It is not exactly Transformers but it is a show about giant robots and I loved it

[artgletic]

case study of the self-identified god

[lornaka]

My five cents on Tech’s fate in TBB

It’s been over three weeks since the show ended and I’ve been writing this in my head ever since, mostly to have it summed up in one post for posterity lol. I considered letting it go at this point but I know it’ll drive me crazy if I don’t get it out of my system so might as well.

So here we go, some of my rambly post-finale thoughts on Tech’s death (and a few other issues) under the cut!

Disclaimer: while this post is in critical spirit (because that’s how my brain works), I want to make clear that I have nothing but respect and gratitude towards everyone who’s worked on the show. My criticisms are of the final story as a whole as I interpret it (art is art, everything is subjective, you know the drill), but one never knows what goes into the process of making it behind the scenes, so I’m not holding anything against the creative team. I love this show dearly and am in awe of how good it is at its best, despite certain things I wish they did differently.

To begin, if I had to sum up the biggest problem that TBB writing suffers from, it would be lack of closure, and too many red herrings. Not just for Tech, but many things. Major plot threads as well as little character moments are cultivated or thrown in just to never culminate in anything or to be immediately discarded after serving the plot, some of them incredibly misleading. Some of the top examples:

- Crosshair’s chip. We never get an exploration of how the trauma of his chip activating and being left behind not only affected his motivation and choice to stay with the Empire, but his relationship with his brothers. While it was made fairly obvious, if subtly, that Crosshair became free of the chip’s influence after getting hit by the ion engine on Bracca, the narrative treated this change as if it didn’t matter at that point, while it obviously mattered a lot within the context of Crosshair’s character. Add to that all these little details with him clutching his head in s1 finale, Omega expressing her disappointment in him, and Tech’s comment on how “it is just his nature” (as if it matters!!! See what I mean about the narrative treating Cross’s chip as if it didn’t play the key part in his trajectory? They throw in this line, like we are supposed to take away that it’s simply Crosshair being Crosshair and not like, the results of brainwashing and abandonment), Wrecker blaming Crosshair for not going back to them, all while we as the audience have been shown and told repeatedly how these chips work (and so were the Batch), we ended up with an incredibly confusing situation with lots of mixed signals from the writers. And once Crosshair makes his choice to stay with the Empire in s1 finale, his chip and the confusion it brought to his relationship with his brothers is never brought up again, because the plot simply moves on.

- Cid’s betrayal. After her being a major character for two seasons with a continuous relationship build-up with Omega in particular, she is discarded as soon as her betrayal serves the plot, with all that character development getting thrown out of the window. You can be mad at Cid all you want, but to me it’s incredibly weird and wasteful to end two seasons worth of build up on that note without it having any closure for the characters, especially Omega whose whole theme is trusting people and bringing out the best in them. It’s fine if they decided to make Cid exactly what she appeared on the surface (untrustworthy and self-serving) after playing around with her potentially growing through her fondness of Omega, but then at the very least the betrayal should’ve had an impact on the characters, Omega most of all. Even just one casual line from Omega in s3 about how Cid’s betrayal impacted her emotionally, however minimally, would have solved that problem. And no, CX-2 mentioning how he extracted info on Phee from her off screen absolutely doesn’t count as closure, because I’m talking about emotional closure for the main pov characters as well as the audience. Cid had a presence for two seasons, then as soon as she executed her role as a traitor to further the plot, she was discarded like she was a random extra.

- Emerie’s relationship with Hemlock. We are led to believe that he basically raised her, instilling in her the idea that she had no chance without him and owed her purpose and “safety” to him. You can’t tell me that this didn’t deeply affect her struggle and eventual decision to break away from all that and choose to help the kids, basically betraying Hemlock. I get that the show only had so much screen time and Emerie is a supporting character in season 3 at best, but common, she has more tension with Dr. Scalder than Hemlock while the potential for this rich deep conflict between them is right there.

I can probably list more smaller examples but this is getting long and I don’t want to go on any more tangents, so, finally, the biggest example of lack of closure and tendency of TBB writing to display foreshadowing that leads nowhere:

Tech’s death.

First of all, I’ll die on the hill that it wasn’t denial or delusion that led to such a big portion of the audience to believe that Tech didn’t really die in s2. If we look at the facts:

- there was no body

- it’s the finale of season 2 out of 3, pretty early for one of the main titular characters to get killed off

- the only/last character to allegedly see Tech after his fall is a villainous scientist who is known to experiment on clones specifically

- not a fact but: the whole scene with Hemlock presenting Tech’s goggles to Hunter was incredibly suspicious. In hindsight, I think the whole purpose of it was so that the Batch got Tech’s goggles back in their possession as a memento (and to show how evil Hemlock is to rub it into Hunter’s face like that) but it was executed in a way that read as something much more. It read as if Hemlock was going out of his way to convince us/Hunter of Tech’s death, but with us knowing who Hemlock is, his background in experimenting on clones, everything screams at us to not trust a word he says. Is it really so surprising that so many of the viewers immediately jumped at the conclusion that something more was going on there?

- Hunter’s (lack of) reaction/immediate narrative fall-out. More on that later as I address lack of emotional impact of Tech’s death in s3.

- it’s Star Wars. And there was no body.

So yeah, to me, it is completely justified that so many people read that whole thing as open to speculation at the very least, foreshadowing Tech’s survival at most.

Personally, I was 70% sure Tech was truly dead prior to s3, but not because the text told me so, but because at that point I was used to the show’s writing regularly sending out mixed signals, and a part of me was resigned to Tech’s death becoming another example of the writer’s intent clashing with their accidental empty foreshadowing.

As season 3 aired and the whole CX-2 plot was unfolding alongside continued lack of closure for Tech’s fate, my hope for Tech Lives reveal grew and grew, but in the end my initial doubt was proven right, unfortunately.

Oh, CX-2.. what a mess. You can’t tell me the creators went over all of these scenes, all of these lines, looked at the whole picture and *didn’t* see how it was incredibly easy to interpret CX-2 as potentially being Tech with all these little potential parallels. “Domicile” alone.

If they didn’t want us to entertain the idea that it could be Tech, they could’ve done it differently, but for some reason, they chose to leave that space for speculation. My question is, why?

If they truly wanted us to believe Plan 99 was it, Tech’s Noble End that we were supposed to take as this dramatic super emotional ultimate sacrifice and all that, then why would they not make it clear that CX-2 couldn’t be Tech? Why breed confusion? And breed confusion they did. It’s hard for me to believe they didn’t foresee the “ohh is it Tech?” speculation.

When so many members of the audience immediately and individually jump at a theory or have the same take away from the story they are being told, yet the authors say it wasn’t meant to be taken that way, something went seriously wrong with the writing.

I don’t like to speculate on such things because we will probably never know for certain, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they had at some point considered CX-2 being Tech or at least something more for the whole CX plot thread, but changed and reshuffled things at the last minute for whatever reasons.

Which is fine and understandable. But it brings me to the heart of my biggest issue with how Tech’s fate was handled:

lack of impact and closure.

Let’s disregard all the Tech Lives theories for a moment and focus on what we did get: Tech, one of the main characters, getting killed off at the end of s2 out of 3, for stakes and consequences and NOTHING else. When I say nothing, I mean nothing.

Imagine, for a moment, he survived and stayed with the Batch. Nothing would have changed, in the grand scheme of things. Nothing. We wouldn’t have had a few obligatory “Tech mention, everyone feel sad now” throwaway lines/goggle shots and whatnot, sure, but that’s it.

Tech dying didn’t change the trajectory of the plot in any way, nor did it affect any of the other characters in a way that changed their trajectory. And anything less is simply not enough to justify killing one of your main characters. Stakes and consequences ain’t it.

Consider Mayday, for example: a supporting character, but his death in s2 affected Crosshair in such a way it completely redirected his journey, AND in s3 we got an episode that cemented the impact Mayday had on Crosshair and provided emotional closure for them. That’s a narratively meaningful death.

Tech’s death was not meaningful to the narrative beyond removing him from it. That’s why so many Tech fans insist he deserved better treatment: not only was he not present in one third of the show physically, but he lacked any sort of presence even in death. His absence was never processed or grieved by any of the main characters and so by extension by the audience.

And before anyone starts with the whole ‘they are soldiers/they had no time to grieve/etc’ arguments, it is the responsibility of the writers to provide the space for all of that emotional impact. It they don’t, there is no impact.

A few reactions here and there, moments of missing Tech as a person and a brother, not an asset, anything would have made this whole thing easier to accept.

The lines that we did get, from Omega mentioning the stuff Tech taught her to Echo commenting on how decryption would be easier if Tech was with them to “Clone Force 99 died with Tech” from Crosshair - each and every single one of those lines linked to Tech’s functions as part of the squad, his usefulness, but we didn’t get a single line in remembrance of him as a person of his own, no one missed or remembered him for himself or his personal impact on them.

Just one line from Omega about how he taught her about change being a constant part of life or whatever, or Wrecker making a comment on how Tech used to info dump about stuff, anything would have instantly provided that much needed sense of “he was here, he was a person and is still a part of us”. Instead, Tech was killed off to show that messing with the Empire is dangerous and risks are real, I guess, and immediately lost any and all presence within the story.

We never even got to see Crosshair’s or Phee’s reactions to losing him.

Speaking of Crosshair, that’s a whole other example of complete lack of closure: they never closed the loop on the family being reunited again after initially leaving Crosshair behind, and with Tech dead, it’ll forever stay broken.

They could’ve given this a bittersweet yet meaningful spin if they developed the angle of Tech dying on a mission to bring Crosshair home, making a sacrifice so Crosshair had a chance.

Instead, the moment Tech dies, we get Hunter (and through him, the narrative) immediately abandon the idea/plot thread of going to rescue Cross all while saying “let’s not waste Tech’s sacrifice”. Sacrifice for what? Clearly Hunter doesn’t see it as a sacrifice for Crosshair’s sake, so, what, to make sure the rest of them makes it from the mission? The mission to save Crosshair. That mission. Right.

I see people talking about Tech’s noble sacrifice that ensured his family got to live and eventually have their happy ending, but all I can think about is how the creators chose to have him die on a mission that was immediately abandoned and the only take away from that whole sub plot was Tech’s own demise.

And after Crosshair is back with the Batch, his reaction to Tech’s death is never explored at all.

So yes, to me Tech deserved so much better. If you are going to kill off a major character, it must be necessary to be compelling. The way I see it, Tech’s death was not necessary at all because it didn’t change anything. And if it was meant to, the creators failed to communicate that by choosing not to explore the emotional impact of it and not structuring certain story beats in a more precise manner.

To wrap this up, if the way Tech’s death was handled was satisfying for you, that’s valid and I’m glad for you. For me, unfortunately, it’s completely the opposite and will forever remain the biggest and most unfortunate low point in the story.

And while I welcome anyone to share their own perspective if they wish, please don’t take this post as an invitation for debate, since there is no one right or wrong way to interpret or be affected by art.

[cervinae-canine]

This will be a long response forgive me.

I ideologically disagree with them and their stance on fiction. I believe their insistence for nuance while not being nuanced themself is infuriating and troubling. I believe fiction can depict any heavy or sensitive subject but is deserving of criticism for however the subject is portrayed as. I do not believe harassment or censorship is an appropriate response to it. I believe there are instances where fiction has affected reality and usually reflect the values of the environment and time period it was created in. I'm autistic so i know how fictional portrayals can affect the attitudes for how others treat Autism: for better or for worse. If a dark subject has been portrayed as romantic despite it not being so for years, decades - it will inevitably affect reality. Like how Navobov’s Lolita was treated by the public. Trying to say otherwise for the sake of fanfiction discourse is ignorant.

My take is if you ship incest or pedophilia/child x adult and go on about how hot it is, you're fucking weird and I recommend you don't interact with minors if you openly identify as a proshipper. That's really it and it's still a hard feat for proshippers to not do, especially from adults who should honestly know better. That would consider me an anti or an "proshipper" depending on who you ask because I don't want proshippers dead or doxxed. But just consider, I don't like proshippers.

The community has a pattern for ignoring racist content because of the argument “fiction is not reality”. People of color and other marginalized people were kicked out of proshipper circles for disliking racist or nazi art. Proshippers have called others who don't like RPF of real minors “antis”, so believe it or not, they also change definitions on a whim. They talk about AO3 as though it's a beacon of anti-censorship, while the site goes on to censor fics with "Free Palestine" tags. I believe comparing fictional shipping discourse to the subjugation and injustice of marginalized groups in order to defend those ships is highly disgusting and insensitive. derailing serious political discussions to bring up antis shows how little some people actually understand oppression to think it's comparable. comparing antis to cops and authoritarian institutions is disgusting. using the pink triangle to compare the abuse and mass-murder of queer people in the Holocaust to shipping incest or pedophilia is in poor taste AT BEST.

It's not just fanfiction, it's a type of behavior that people in fandom ignore and celebrate. Pardon me if I think they are annoying and insufferable at the very least and I don’t want to talk to them. This is why I dislike proshippers. That is why I have the “Proships DNI”. Thanks.

[kerosene-in-a-blender]

Others have talked, very rightly, about Bells Hells having an extremely Us vs. Them style of morality and one thing I find interesting about all that is many of their most virulent (read: actively nasty towards other fans) defenders are also taking this stance. The party line has become that the segments of the fandom that are disappointed with how this campaign shook out have never been happy with anything Bells Hells did from the beginning and have been actively hating on people who do like it for just as long. Us, the beleaguered Campaign 3 lovers versus Them, the mean c3 haters (who are often characterized as being hung up on the Mighty Nein and simply mad Bells Hells aren't the Nein again).

What's been quite funny for me personally is that I have seen vague posts clearly targeted at myself giving me the above detailed characterization of the c3 hater when I: have never seen Campaign 2 (though I did watch Campaign 1 back in 2019), started watching live with the first EXU, got into the fandom (as a lurker) at the start of Campaign 3, didn't make any of my own posts about it until late 2022 and didn't start really posting in earnest until mid 2023. Practically none of the characteristics applied to the archetypal c3 hater certain fans have created actually apply to me, other than of course thinking Campaign 3 actually isn't very good. So it's been interesting to watch people draw lines in the sand and create an Us vs. Them narrative that I know isn't true based on existing as myself.

[mewkwota]

There's this particular feeling I'm trying to capture when I think about Juno's eyes (not in battle), so I did another sketch based on that one NxC comic I did a while back. (For effect, I loved how that one close-up shot came out, but I kinda wished I was able to draw more of him.)

It could also be due to the choice of color or so, but Juno's eyes make him seem very docile. Like the rest of his face, they're soft and round, so to keep that feeling I wanted to draw them as lightly as possible. And yet, being a machine, I keep his pupils extremely pin-point.

So then, like the rest of Juno's body, there's this little mix of delicate and dangerous mixed into them. Or so I'd like to see it that way.

Now take a good look because you will never see them open again.

[kindahoping4forever]

📸: Rich Fury for Madison Square Garden

[mold-soda]

kalinka malinka or smth like that

art for a matryoshka utau cover i’m making

[commsroom]

Ok so I absolutely love your Hera art.

But

Have you considered

Pink/orange/multicolored Hera

Honestly I feel like warm colors in general just suit her so well.

oh, i don't know! when i ask people to draw hera blue, the reasons for that are: 1) it makes her more immediately recognizable, and 2) i like what it represents! it draws on existing sci-fi imagery of holograms. a projected image of someone who is physically elsewhere. it's associated with water and sky, distance and longing.

physically, i think there are two heras: there's the way people literally perceive her from an outside perspective - formless, or associating her with the hephaestus itself, which is misidentification. i love when people draw eiffel interacting with hera's cameras + monitors very much, but i also think it's clear she feels she's seeing through them, not that she is them. and there's hera as she sees herself in her own mind (and in eiffel's mind, in the finale), where... i really think she just perceives herself as an average, tangible person.

so i don't think she's literally blue, i just think it's a good way to give her a visual presence in art that's closer to her self-perception, while still communicating some sense of distance / disconnect, if that makes sense? if hera had a body and could wear clothes, i think she'd love to try on all sorts of colors!!

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[volchitsa-of-winterfell]

I think nearly all of lewis' aloof persona is carefully constructed, as is his over the top style in the paddock. He's extremely good at distracting ppl or showing only what he wants to. He mimics vulnerability but he's hiding the stuff he's really vulnerable about. All the woowoo spiritual "ohhhhh he's so GENUINE" stuff is also a front (see how kate wagner talked about him).

ooooh bold take and as a fellow mimicker of vulnerability to hide the stuff i'm really vulnerable about, i'm into it!! i understand from your tone that you don't mean this as a particularly good thing but i personally am here for interesting/compelling characters in the vroom vroom soap opera and don't care too much if they're Good People ™ or not lol. (and thank you for the reminder that I still haven't gotten around to reading that Kate Wagner article!)

[tearlessrain]

I've actually been having a lot of fun with my Durge (plural) and their whole bond + the general way the interact with the world both pre and post tadpole. because like. yes "villain incapable of love" can be interesting but "villain who is absolutely capable of love but real fucked up about it" is so much fun.

They are so full of love but the problem is their love language is Murder and Stabbing.

[pwurrz]

*looks at all the similarities between me and kaveh*

*slowly adds him to my kin list*

[edensrose]

˚◞❀˳  not to be rude or anything but just filter it out? sure you won't get all of it but that's just the nature of media in general. also the fluff tags on ao3 and tumblr are both bigger than the smut tags?

I’M TIRED OF SMUT, I WANT TOOTH ACHING FLUFF AND HEART SHATTERING ANGST.

[staff]

A message from a few of the trans staff at Tumblr & Automattic:

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The reality of predstrogen's suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.

Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.

Last year, the "mature" and "sexual themes" community labels were erroneously applied to some users' posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr. 

Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.

When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.

Going forward, Tumblr is taking the following actions:

Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.

Building more internal tooling for us as Staff to proactively identify and mitigate instances of harassment.

Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.

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We appreciate the space we have been given to express our concerns and dissent, and we are thankful that Matt’s (and Automattic’s) strong commitment to freedom of expression has facilitated it.

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— This statement was authored by multiple trans employees of Tumblr and Automattic.