#for the record. I’m not complaining

[cuteniarose]

Me, yesterday: Yeah I’m gonna draw out a family tree and pick names for Jia’s family bc if we’re gonna develop the storyline of Aiza moving in with them it will be useful. Just names though, nothing more

Me, not even 24 hours later: I have BACKSTORIES I have PERSONALITIES I’m going to BUILD A HOUSE IN THE SIMS FOR THEM

[petrichormore]

I’m sorry it’s still crazy to me how fast shit hit the fan yesterday. Like Bad’s last conversation about Forever was a completely hypothetical, extremely early-stage venture into what might be making him act the way he’s acting. It wasn’t even really a plan. He literally had no information of his own, he was solely going off of what Phil and the eggs told him.

And then the next day @v@ pulls up - Bad had never even seen it before - with a gun to Dapper’s head and is like “get in the van”

[torturedbitchesdepartment]

being a debut stan hearing stans of other albums complain about taylor hating their album:

[anthonycrowley]

can i say something. i think unironically one of the reasons straight women are having such a bad time with men a lot of the time is that so many of them think it’s a red flag for them to be friends with other women. first of all it’s such a weird reductive thing to be like men and women can’t be friends. huh? what? i have guy friends! i always have! are they never supposed to find partners because of me? insane thought imo. and second of all to be honest why do you want to date someone who is only capable of seeing an entire fucking gender as sex objects? i would rather date someone who is friends with women, even if i KNOW he’s attracted to them on some level, because i know that a guy who’s capable of being genuinely friendly with girls will probably be more likely to respect me and treat me like a person. idk. maybe it’s the bisexual in me talking so it feels weird to exclude an entire gender from friendship based on your attraction to them. but just saying. there’s large groups of girls out there ignoring great guys because they’re the type who could be invited to a girls night??? could never be me

[sparro48]

maybe this is a hot take, idk, but some people in the mdzs fandom specifically get SO WORKED UP over people having opinions on their favorite characters

like there’s a huge group that loves to shit on jiang cheng fans, but seriously, it’s not that deep…? it’s just a story, and if people “interpret the characters wrong” does it really matter? who cares? if it makes someone happy then it’s not anyone else’s job to tell them that they’re wrong and morally wrong for liking a specific character. i mean, seriously, it’s literally a fictional character that doesn’t exist, so why does it matter so much? just mind your own business people

[bestworstcase]

Quick question: When and how did you start realizing that fandom tends to be hostile or anti-analysis? Was it just something that happened overtime?

i mean. have you ever made a textually-supported point contradicted by popular fanon? people seethe

but it’s also just sort of baked into what fandom is. the whole concept of ‘headcanon’ is inherently antitextual—things held to be true irrespective of the text—and the whole point of fanworks is to engage transformatively with the text. fandom is explicitly not a community oriented around textual analysis, and while analytical readings can (and do) support and enrich transformative works, they are also just not what fandom is about.

so within fandom receptivity to textual analysis is generally lukewarm and varies widely depending on how closely it happens to align with the fanon, and in my experience fandom has a particular difficulty parsing character analysis outside the blorbo framework (ie liking / disliking / personally identifying with a character).

there is in particular a tendency for analytical readings to get parsed in fandom spaces as critical of the story or the characters being discussed; for example i’ve had explicitly positive character analysis of mine (as in, posts where i directly state my appreciation for or enjoyment of the thing i’m talking about) get reblogged and tagged ‘anti-whatever’ because the thing i’m talking about is, like, a character flaw. or something bad that a character did that caused conflict in the narrative.

and i think that really gets to the heart of the, like, cultural divide between transformative fandom and analytical engagement, because in fandom spaces if you say, for instance, “yang has a hot temper she works hard to keep in check” that is generally going to be understood as a value judgment (either a positive remark on her maturity and emotional discipline or a complaint about her expressions of anger) whereas in an analytical context it’s just an observation that needs to be evaluated in terms of whether the text supports it or not.

the consequence of that is that if i write analytically about the role of anger in yang’s character arc—which is a facet of her that i personally really enjoy and think is done quite well—and if that breaks containment and travels outside of my immediate circle of followers (who presumably follow me because they like reading my analysis and who obv know what i’m about) then odds are it’ll land in front of someone who goes “UGH not ANOTHER person picking on yang for bEiNg AnGrY, she’s got good reasons to be mad when she gets mad and also she doesn’t get mad NEARLY as often as these assholes think” (which is true) (yang almost never loses her temper and she’s very quick to check herself on those occasions; and when she chooses to let it out she’s always justified)—because anger is culturally perceived as bad and the social norm in most fan spaces is that you don’t write lengthy posts focused on a character’s flaws (or ‘flaws’) unless you just think they suck.

(<- this isn’t a hypothetical btw. like i’ve gotten blocked over my yangposting being interpreted in exactly this way grbfksj)

the funny part is that while my analysis intermittently makes people SPITTING MAD, the fanfic i write (which follows from my analysis!) doesn’t. i’m sure there’s plenty of people who don’t like my fanfic, but if i write a character in a way that contradicts the popular fanon what happens is folks will comment stuff like “this is such a cool unique take on this character” brfhkg. and that’s primarily why i think it’s a cultural thing, where textual analysis—with its strict grounding in textual evidence and dismissal of ideas that can’t be supported by the text—gets people’s hackles up bc it’s a) examining the text at an emotional remove and thus hard to parse in a social environment where the primary mode of engagement is driven by emotional attachment to specific characters, and b) often perceived as telling people their headcanons are wrong, which is rude.

(sometimes headcanons ARE wrong, in the sense of being textually refuted. that is the entire point of headcanon. i think the experience of fandom is much improved by keeping this in mind. analysis is never a threat to headcanon because headcanon is supposed to be transformative. equally, headcanon is irrelevant to analysis because analysis is strictly concerned with the text.)

more broadly i just find fandom culture to be interesting in and of itself. so in addition to participating in fandom directly i also lurk a lot and pay attention to cross-fandom phenomena (e.g. migratory sapphic and slash shippers) and read discussions about fandom and that sort of thing. and i think approaching fandom from that perspective, it’s sort of a what it says on the tin situation; fandom is transformative by definition, ‘fuck canon’ is an ubiquitous meme, fanon… exists at all as a concept and is widely celebrated as superior to canon, AUs are terrifically popular, “fix-it” fics are terrifically popular, etc etc.

so i don’t think my view here is even unusual necessarily except insofar as i articulate it in a very precise (and perhaps pedantic) way. like the average person in fandom is probably aware that playing in the sandbox is different from constructing a lego set and that people in the sandbox are, as a general rule, not all that keen to make sand castles in strict accordance with the lego instructions. because it’s sand. lmao

[thatskindarough]

Celebrating the last day of the full time job before I get to go back to only 1-2 days because of school. GET ME OUTTA HERE

[demigod-shenanigans]

It’s kind of wild seeing people discuss whether or not Valgrace (which is at 1.2k tagged ao3 fics) is a rarepair when the last fandom I was in had like 6k fics total

[steve-brules-rules]

Oh

I blew through wallaru in 3 days

Oops

[0th3rw0rldl1n3ss]

Annoyed rn because recently *several* random accounts that I followed for the art, fashion, or other aesthetically pleasing shit they posted have been turning out to be crypto(ish) T ERFs (typed like that bc I don’t want those obsessive ghouls on this post or really just anywhere near me or my blog at all). I guess I’m just gonna have to start term searching every time I want to follow a new blog, cuz I never want to see that shit.

So I just wanna say if y’all ever see me reblog from an account that you know is a T ERF or adjacent 1) please let me know so I can block them and 2) it’s because I follow nearly the maximum number of accounts possible and also have a life outside the internet so I don’t see every single post that the people I follow reblog.

In general OOMFs, please do not hesitate to come into my asks or DMs and let me know if you ever see me reblog a post from a T ERF or anyone else that has straight up abhorrent, bigoted views, because I don’t want to interact with people like that and I don’t want to contribute to those people and their ideas having platforms on here.

[disappointeddyke]

Bro if I don’t stop feeling so lonely, isolated, and doomed soon I might just have to radically change my entire life

[hobermallowed]

I’m sick of the drama about feminine Louis. They’re not trying to protect Louis at all, they’re just mad that for once a black man is being portrayed as soft and now they want to gatekeep the fics. But notice how when the reverse happens these blogs have NOTHING to say. Transparent ass bitches. I’m gonna write some loustat mpreg with bottom louis especially for these haters. Black fandom can’t have anything for themselves bc of people like this.

I’m not disagreeing anon. If anything, I support you.

[imaginarypasta]

is everyone just super ok with being filmed all the time? am i uniquely avoidant to like surveillance? because the number of times i’ve had to argue with people i live with about me not wanting to be filmed seems high. like i’ve had multiple conversations about not wanting security cameras inside my house/apartment (especially ones i can’t access but other people who live with me can), not wanting to be in someone else’s streams while i’m just like… chilling in my own bed in full view of the camera, people filming/sometimes just audio-recording conversations we’re having. and to me that seems…. awful. like, i’m in my house. i do not want eyes on me all the time. this has happened with literally everyone i’ve ever lived with—roommates and family are both included in that. and i know im more sensitive to this generally than most people i know, but in these situations it feels entirely reasonable to be upset?

[steviescrystals]

i’m so jealous of people who can go on long walks in the summer bc i live in arizona like i literally cannot do that

[justsquibby]

Oh jeeOh gosh-Oh how did that happen

[frenchtwistresistance]

Four fifty year old women with their original, naturally aged faces in mother-of-the-bride get-ups singing their old hits to sold out auditoriums across America in 1978… never not low-key thinking about this. 😍😍😍😍