#fully people I was having active conversations with that I have been in fandom spaces with for literal years

[bharv]

It's such a weird thought that there are multiple people whom I thought were Beloved Mutuals and then I've done something so heinous that they just blocked me and I don't know what I did?

I mean it probably was something legit, I'm very annoying, but it's just... the never knowing.........

[myfandomrealitea]

ok I’ll be honest, I was one of the people who approached your safe space post with the mindset “yeah, but…” like, I now whole-heartedly agree that there should absolutely be fandom spaces devoid of real world issues. We all need our spaces to rest and relax. I think I just felt weird about your post because previously ive been in fandom spaces which did operate on the (perfectly fine) rule of ‘no politics’…but ‘politics’ would also include talking about a gay ship or any queer headcannons.

That obviously wasn’t fair to you because you obviously didn’t mean that w/ your post, but I can personally see as to why some people would feel that way if they were in similar fandom spaces. I do still want to reiterate I do agree with your post and I think some of the rebloggers took it…a bit far? Like Jesus Christ some of y’all need to eat a snickers. I also think some of the wording like “bitching about world issues” and “whining about their shitty parents” might’ve thrown me off but that’s not your fault and really a non-issue 🤷🏽‍♀️

you can delete this ask if you want I really won’t mind, I think I can just see as to why there were so many ‘yeah, but…’ rebloggers.

I actually really appreciate asks like this. For a multitude of reasons, but also because it gives really good insight and outer perspective for both me and other people who are aware of or involved in the discussion.

I think what a lot of people don't yet grasp about me is that while I may hold an opposing view to yours (general, not directed), in the vast majority of cases I still very much understand why people would think the way they do and where that thought process comes from and goes.

Its very, very easy to fall into the mindset of thinking that not helping when you have the ability to makes you a bad person or however in/directly causes suffering. Its very easy to be in the mindset of one single individual making a magnitude of difference.

I fully and genuinely understand and comprehend a lot of the points being brought up.

I just don't agree with them and hold a different outlook on those issues.

For example:

Talking about enjoying a queer ship to me is not 'political' in the sense that, personally, if you're a homophobe and upset by generic conversations about queer people, I really could not give a fuck. And if you raise objections to me talking about two dudes kissing, I'm simply going to remove you from my space because clearly it is not beneficial for either of us to share it. And I made it.

Its obviously very very much down to personal discretion to decide where that line is and what that bracket encompasses, but I think the most universal aspect of that safe space post was trying to get people to understand that forcing others to suffer in solidarity isn't activism and that strangers are not obligated to allow you to use them as support and a dumping ground for your needs.

Spreading around videos of people's dead loved ones isn't activism.

Spamming taglines and buzzwords on completely unrelated posts and videos isn't activism.

Relying on complete strangers for emotional and mental support and regulation while dumping vulnerable, graphic, personal information on them is neither safe nor healthy.

People are not obligated to smother or confine their happiness because of your misery. If you're having a bad day you have no right to tell other people they can't be happy in front of you.

A lot of people, mostly white knighters and people of color took the post as "a white privileged pig saying its okay to let racism slide because you want to play your video games" (actual hate mail I received) and that's so laughably and wildly far from the actual basis of the post.

I've had bigots in my servers before. Homophobes or racists who've slipped through the cracks.

You know what happens when they say something homophobic or racist?

They're immediately removed, blocked and reported, and their information is placed in a private document I keep. I issue an apology to the members of the server for their actions, and life goes on.

People are, of course, entitled to take the post as they see fit. They're entitled to their own perspectives and opinions. I'm more than happy to simply focus on the people who have taken support, guidance and solace in the post.

[comicaurora]

Lighting critique of a recent panel ! Dark ambient lighting is a favorite art subject of mine, so i figured this would be a good time to give some input ! ii say as if we havent been in the undergroound chapter for like a month in which it didnt occur to me to pay attention to lighting Oh well loool here it is nowwwwwwww hope you dont mind the input

Huh.

Okay, so first off, thanks - this is cool and your lighting looks very nice. I look forward to seeing what you make!

Second - I really hope sending this kind of ask isn't a habit of yours, because unsolicited artistic criticism comes across as remarkably rude.

Art criticism for the purposes of improvement is a social contract entered between two artists, typically in a scholastic environment. An artist presents their work to other artists whose opinions they trust and value, and those artists weigh in with their thoughts. Critical to the process is that the presenting artist is showing their art for the purpose of improvement, and they're prepared to receive that input because they're actively asking for it.

In contrast, I make this comic so people can read it, and while I certainly don't mind if they take it apart to analyze it or find ways the writing and art could be improved, I, the creator, am not asking for that and - more importantly - will not really benefit from it.

For instance, in this case, my style of background lighting and shading is optimized most specifically to accommodate for the fact that I need to make a lot of these pages quickly, and correspondingly cannot give everything 110%. Any individual panel could absolutely be more polished, but I often shade these backgrounds in batches of ten pages or more, each page with an average of six panels that need individual shading. So that's sixty individual backgrounds I need to shade in one go. It doesn't make your advice wrong, or even unhelpful for an artist setting out to learn this kind of technique - but it does make it unhelpful for me. This is something you realistically had no way of knowing, and I don't hold it against you! But this is why I have a short list of artists and writers whose input I actually ask for sometimes, and that list is composed of people who know me, my creative priorities, and how my process works. Because they know what I'm working with, their advice stands a much better chance of being actually helpful to me.

Criticism, like all art, has an audience it is designed for. In art school environments or artistic coworker situations, the audience for the criticism is the artist being critiqued and the other artists who are learning from the communal experience they are all agreeing to share. This is the exception and not the rule, however. Outside of this space, the audience for criticism of a work of art is typically the subset of the audience for that work of art that are trying to learn something from the experience or understand what did and didn't work for them. This group can discuss what they did and didn't like, what they would have changed, what parts worked for them that may not have worked for other members of the audience, etc. This space of critical analysis forms the backbone of most fandoms and can be incredibly interesting and rewarding to play around in.

The audience for that kind of criticism is not the creator of the art. In the same way a creator can never be fully immersed in their own fandom audience, this form of communal critique from the audience side of things does not work when directed at the creator. In the context of this work of art, we exist in very different spaces and operate under different parameters. If there's one thing I learned from back when I used to check in on the fan discord community, it's that most conversation in this space operates under the assumption that the creator will not see it or take it personally. I cannot be in the audience of my own audience.

All that to say, thanks for the thought, but please be careful doing this in the future - tumblr is the land of kneejerk hostility and poor reading comprehension, and I don't want to see you getting shredded for a kind intention. And I hope some people find this impromptu tutorial helpful!

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

aita for pretending to be cis online? im a trans man and have been trans for almost ten years now. i am pre-most transition even though i would like to fully transition, due to money and medical phobia complications. i do not pass irl.

a few years ago i attempted stealth (saying i was a cis man) on a discord server before ultimately admitting to being trans because i was afraid everyone could tell, and was informed that even though they even heard my voice on the server, no one there suspected i was afab, and even when i said i was trans, some people assumed i was coming out as transfem, because i had passed myself as a cis man so well. this gave me euphoria, of course, and made me regret telling anyone since i was apparently passing so well.

i held onto those feelings, and a year or so after that, quietly changed my bios and stuff to remove the trans part. a little while after that, i started actively saying i was cis male in my bios and to new friends.

i should clarify this is not out of safety or fear of transphobia, all my family and irl friends know im trans and are 100% supportive, im lucky enough to live in a very progressive area, and my online existence is small and filled with tons of trans and supportive people. it's only because i feel dysphoric when i know people can perceive me as afab, and since i don't have control over that irl, i just want someone in the world to see me as amab, even if im not and never will be.

i also am not by any means a transmed. i myself am also gnc, and many many of my friends are loud and proud queer weirdos, and i am too with everything but my agab. i love the wacky ways other trans folks present their genders and refuse to sanitize themselves for cisciety. i do not think anyone should ever have to water down who they are for any reason and i don't think being afab makes anyone less of a man, just i personally don't like facing the fact that i am afab and would rather people see me as a cis man whenever i can control it.

this might be where the asshole comes in here, because being gnc, being surrounded by so many trans people and being in many "afab dominated" spaces (such as fanfic writers, tumblr, fandom in general honestly) as well as having a lot of trans headcanons makes me paranoid people are going to clock me and even if they don't say anything they'll know im faking being cis. because of that, and to avoid the dreaded "egg" conversations (people trying to insist or imply that ill soon "find out" that im transfem) ive sometimes been telling people when the subject comes up that i had experimented with my gender before and thought i was transfem or nonbinary in the past, so i sort of fit the idea of cis+ and that might be why i feel more trans than cis even though im definitely cis.

i also tell them im intersex and have trans family (both of these are true, though obviously im intersex in a different way than i say) to get them off my scent.

i know i dont owe anyone my agab, but when all is said and done, i am lying about my gender and history with gender exploration, and i kinda feel like im disrespecting other trans folks by implying it would personally feel better to be cis, like i can't relate to other trans people saying they never want to be cis and the goal of being trans isn't to be cis. but i do. i also worry that having trans hcs (including in sexual contexts) for characters while im presenting myself as cis makes people think im a chaser.

anyway sorry this is long, but aita for lying about my gender?

What are these acronyms?

[autobot-ratchet]

remember during my MTMTE retrospective when I said I wasn't gonna reread its sister series (aka Robots in Disguise/The Transformers/Optimus Prime/Windblade/Till all are One/etc)

I lied, I reread the entire thing lmfAO (or most of it anyway, I did skip a lot of the crossover stuff)

I did write down a lot of notes, basically a pseudo-liveblog if you will of my experience rereading all this, but I actively decided not to post it for two reasons

reason 1: a lot of the damage the tf fandom did to me in the mid 2010s was the direct result of people being extremely aggressive with their opinions on how characters were written (Starscream, Prowl, and Megatron were the big ones, with Optimus not far behind them) and at the time, I just either kept my thoughts to myself or parroted what the most popular and vindictive people in the fandom were saying so I wouldn't get attacked lmAO

so the main purpose of rereading this entire comic was for me to form my own opinions on the characters and plot and feel whatever I want about them without the fear that someone will come after me for having the wrong opinions and feelings. I wanted my thoughts to be mine and to find out and fully understand why I think them.

and reason 2: I do not like most of this series lmfAOgfbhdsjkd I like the Windblade and Wreckers stuff, and for everything else, I think it's got plenty of interesting ideas but they are sprinkled too sparingly between large swaths of stuff I did not enjoy reading and I felt no need to make pages and pages of posts of me groaning and grumbling about things I don't like. My blog doesn't need that vibe, y'all's dashboards don't need that vibe, people trying to use the search function and tags to look for fan works of the series don't need that vibe, I got my feelings out in my own little contained space and there was just no good reason for me to be putting that energy out there.

Especially since this comic is about twice as long as MTMTE/Lost Light so there would be so many more posts than I made for my MTMTE retrospective and just fghjdsksd nah dude nobody needs that. also if I'm trying to not get attacked, making a million posts about not liking something fairly popular ain't the way to go about that lmfAO

HOWEVER. some of my notes are funny and I kinda wanna share them lmAO so here, a handful of my notes on MTMTE's sister series out of context

________

“perhaps we should give him (Starscream) a chance,” says Metalhawk. Lol. Lmao even

oh what the fuck Megatron just shows up out of nowhere lmAO

He's (Megatron's) basically just a fourth candidate in the upcoming election, the “kill everyone else” party

absolutely everybody wants to kill the fuck out of Spike Witwicky all at the same time and they're all valid for it

“Tappet! You really still don't know my name-?” I sure didn't lmfAO

Scoop is still relevant??? lmfAO holy shit I fully thought his ass was gone after Dark Cybertron

I completely forgot that Starscream rewired Devastator so that Scoop is its head instead of Prowl, it is really funny how much I forgot about Scoop

and now Blackrock is memeing at me. Fuck this lmaO

Optimus deciding to get involved with Earth's business is clearly the result of that conversation he had with the Mistress of Flame but also like. With all the insane political bullshit that's been going on in real actual life recently (it is January 12th 2025 at the time of me writing this paragraph) it's just very funny that Optimus Prime is gonna try to help make our society just lmfAO like I know this was written an entire decade ago but it is very funny to imagine Optimus Prime trying to hold a decent conversation with Donald Trump

I miss my wife, Tails lmAOhjdsfkal

oh I was 100% correct about the Jesus comparison

save me Mairghread Scott girl hELP

TALK YOUR SHIT WINDBLADE

Overlord is out here on his sock puppet twitter account grifting right-wing chuds for fun. Also I forgot what a slut he is, jesus, who talks like this lmAO

he (Starscream) made his own DJD lmfAO but it's the DVD, Decepticon Vengeance Devision. Shut up you dumb bitch lmAO

WHAT THE FUCK IS SHOCKWAVE DOING HERE BRO WHAT???

everyone shut the fuck up about politics Unicron's here and he's eating all the planets we've been discoursing over for the past 50 issues

Shockwave went back in time and invented religion to own the libs

[scoops404]

Taking a break from my Powerpoint Presentation (it's google slides but whatever) preparation to circle back to the thing @jestbee tagged me in - my fic graveyard

Before even looking, I don't think I have many. I can think of one big one, but we'll see if there are more when I open it up.

I organize mine by year, so here is 2022:

"5 times Dream called George baby accidentally + 1 time it was on purpose"

HAHAH i forgot about this. 2,500 words. I think I stopped writing it because it didn't feel like it was going anywhere and I got distracted by something else. I think this was right before I got sucked into writing Curse and Cure so my brain went entirely into that and forgot this one... oops

"Trans GNF fic" 11K - I really liked this one actually but I let a few trans friends read it to do a sensitivity beta and um it didn't really pass? they gave valid criticism and to fix it I would have had to kind of scrap most of it and I didn't really want to do that because my brain thought of another idea so I went and did that instead. This was going to be FWB cunnilingus fic very heavily pwp - so maybe it's for the best. I'd rather scrap it than write anything hurtful or offensive, so maybe in another universe ((also, this is the one I was thinking of that I never finished))

"Secret Santa 2022 Fic" 400 words. It never got off the ground because my giftee left the fandom and I wasn't really feeling it anyway (wrote Deep in Dream instead and won't apologize for that) but it was going to be very we-didn't-know-we-were-dating and closely canon compliant (but then i kinda did that with Just One Touch).

"2022 Halloween Exchange" (35 words lol) this also got canceled because it was around the time of the drituation, BUT -- my giftee was @extrasteps who I didn't know at the time when we were assigned, but is now very dear to me. But this was going to be soulmates, george as a witch/seer vibes gnf flying to orlando. george has visions and can see other people's soulmates but doesn't know he can't see his own so when he doesn't see Dream as his soulmate, he thinks they aren't soulmates until they meet and.... I wasn't quite sure where i was going with it but it would have kicked ass

Okay, I guess I have more than I remember...

"The Whether" 2,500 words - this one was going to be about dream's exploration of his sexuality and using George (with permission) as a safe space to explore that by flirting with him off-stream, etc. But like an explicit conversation is had about it where dream makes sure George is okay with that and then he just fake flirts his way into falling in love with George. Delves into physical -- George is like you keep questioning all this stuff, so just suck my dick if you want to try it. You know, because he's such a good friend. This one is absolutely Scoops bonkers crazy because Dream does a drodcast and like talks it out loud and realizes on the drodcast that he's actively in love with George. Peak comedy. I don't remember why I decided not to finish this one, might have been because someone I'm friends with was writing something similar and I didn't want to inadvertently copy so I put it on the back burner and then just forgot about it. in this era of Scoops, I can see that if I talked about this one, then people would have hyped me up and I would have ended up writing it fully probably.

2023:

"George's Pretty Privilege" 660 words. This was like one of those small things I had to write after finishing a big project i'd been working on for months (in this case, deep in dream) for something to be completely different. The idea was all the times George used and then realized his pretty privilege. I didn't finish this one because it was kinda boring and then something else caught my interest. Oh! We did a Spin The Wheel challenge and that made me write Shine Here To Us and that took all my attention away

That's it for 2023, besides a Merthur fic I've been working on forever so I don't consider that one "dead"

I don't even have 2021 on this laptop, but I know of at least one - Dream surprises George in line at a con while he's still faceless and pretends to be a fan. I almost uploaded that one.

Anyway, those are my dead and gone and not being resurrected fics. I hope you enjoyed. I got pretty good in 2023 of picking projects that I actually wanted to invest my time into and work to finish them. Taking that energy into 2024.

If you're a writer, feel free to do this as well!! And feel free to ask any questions you want about any of these ideas :D

[anotherkinnity]

Hey so I've had a peak at the inside of your server and the discussion of psychological alterhumans. I see that you edited one of your posts to say you're specifically open to spiritual alterhumans, but all of your other posts and even your bio still say it's open to all alterhumans. It's strange when a lot of members within your server talk about psychological alterhumans as if they're somehow not as valid as spiritual alterhumans, going so far to call them "kinnies". I don't think that behavior should be perpetuated.

I also noticed that when you edited that post, you edited out the word "serious" and replaced it with "spiritual". Was just really interesting to me after hearing some of the experiences from inside the server and seeing how members and staff talk about psychological alterhumans, talking about therians on TikTok calling them "KFF" or calling them fake, or even eluding to the mindset that all psychological alterhumans are somehow delusional and painting actual delusional folks as if they're bad.

I might be wrong about some things here, but definitely not all of them. If your server is exclusive to spiritual alterhumans, make that more clear, but it doesn't give you the go ahead to talk about psychological and delusional alterhumans in a bad light.

Hello! We are currently in a transitional phase to move from a server for all alterhumans to a server based in spiritual alterhumanity. As most of the staff are adults with jobs or in college, we may not have had time to fully update our advertisements and rules everywhere. Thanks for the heads up - we will make sure our verbiage everywhere reflects this. As for old posts others have reblogged, we unfortunately cannot edit those.

We do believe psychological alterhumans are valid! The issue comes when people have conflated psychological kin with things like copinglinks, cameo shifts, or flickers. We believe that words have meaning, and being kin means to identify as something, not with. People have asked if they can join mem jams with no memories, just to discuss fandom, or cut off conversations about identity to say they only find their kins relatable and nothing else. As for the use of the term “kinnies,” we use this term to refer to anyone, including ourselves. We are aware of the terms origins but prefer to both reclaim it and use it as shorthand, and it has not been used derogatorily.

As far as tiktok therians go, the discussion in question was centered around people claiming therian identity while only identifying furries or quadrobics enthusiasts. We believe conflating a genuine community like therians with a hobby is wrong and waters down the whole community.

Lastly, our server is for alterhumanity, not mental health. We are not equipped to help someone through a delusion, nor do we plan to encourage them. The point of a delusion is that it’s an aspect of psychosis that actively causes harm to the person believing it. That’s the difference between delusion and a personal belief. Additionally, many of the members here have been called delusional for our spiritual beliefs in other places, and would rather have a space to discuss our beliefs freely without them being medicalized as such. The IRL community is notorious as a whole for taking historically kin terminology and saying kin aren’t allowed to use them. They have also claimed kin can’t have memories or are only relating to their kintypes. We prefer to distance ourselves from people like this that refuse to acknowledge the past significance of terms and experiences in a community.

In short, we found people decide to misuse and abuse our welcoming of “serious” alterhumans and have narrowed the scope of the server to reduce stress on both staff and members. We aren’t saying serious psychological kin don’t exist, but rather that we don’t have the bandwidth to question every new member on basic definitions that we’ve seen get misused frequently.

-warren

[bigskydreaming]

Last post on this -

I genuinely would like people who take the opposite POV on this to just think about it, and their own personal answers to this question, which I am not presuming to know. I'm just presenting the question:

Keeping in mind that my opinion on incest is shaped not JUST by the fact that I'm a survivor and aware of its impact on me, but also by how its shaped my entire life, the years I've spent trying to work my mind around why it happened, how it impacted me, how it affected my views of the world, the years of study I've put into the phenomenon of incest and its impact, absorbing all kinds of opinions and input about it while trying to make sense of its place in my life and history.....keeping in mind that my views on incest and even its impact on me were NOT always consistent or linear and there have been periods of my life where I held different opinions on it, and some points where I even internalized a lot of the same things people say in fandom to talk about how harmless it is or how its no big deal and thus am actually QUITE familiar with those POVs and the reasons and arguments for thinking those things -

How many people who kneejerk dismiss my reactions to incest as overwrought, too skewed by personal bias, etc.....can honestly say they are as informed on the subject? I'm not even talking about whether or not any individuals reading this are survivors themselves - as I just acknowledged, I'm fully aware that incest survivors can disagree on a lot of this as I myself have held to different opinions on it at prior points in my life so please don't go there -

I'm simply asking you to ask YOURSELVES.....if you're not a survivor yourself, if your knowledge of incest and its possible impact is secondhand or hearsay....

Can you genuinely, in all honesty, say that you've put as much time and contemplation in actively seeking out additional information, counter-arguments, and dissenting opinions to weigh all sides of this before making up your own mind and only THEN coming to the conclusion that its actually no big deal?

Because that is the part that bothers me the most - how often I see survivors dismissed by people who are citing points of view that are EASILY rebutted by even just relatively basic information out there about WHY incest is deemed so harmful, not because of interbreeding or genetics but through the lens of family dynamics and societal impact upon survivors.

I know I've made post after post over the years refuting various pro (or 'neutral') incest talking points or detailing just why its so much more insidious and harmful than a lot of people deem it to be after just a cursory look at a few biased opinions in favor of it.....

And pretty much none of them have ever been engaged with.

And I know I've never seen posts actually TALKING about incest and its impact on people and families getting any kind of traction in fandom circulation.

So I'm genuinely asking, because if people who argue on behalf of it or who dismiss it as no big deal are basing that on having put time and effort into INFORMING themselves on the topic before drawing their own conclusions as to its harmlessness....

They're not basing that on conversations happening in any fandom spaces I've ever seen draw much attention. So they'd have to either have personal knowledge themselves (and while I make no attempt to presume the survivor status of any individual, I will NOT pretend that the entirety of the pro-incest fandom camps so abundant on tumblr and Ao3 are made up entirely of survivors, that's a completely different thing than asking people to be mindful of the possibility a single individual might be speaking from personal knowledge), or they'd have to be seeking out informed stances on the possible harm of incest through non-fandom spaces before deciding that yeah, actually incest is no big deal.

And I'm sorry, but I do not see that latter possibility as all that likely, based on ANY fandom experience I have when it comes to controversial topics and lived experiences.

So.....if there are a lot of people out there whose insistence that incest is no big deal is rooted entirely in just having internalized fandom opinions in DEFENSE of it or its lack of capacity to do harm....

I would like to ask people to reflect on that, and the implications.

If your own stance on incest isn't based on personal experiences or having sought out or informed yourselves on BOTH arguments in defense of it and in CRITICISM of it.....

Maaaaaaaybe skip the condescending takes about whether people who cite it as a bad thing that does harm have done THEIR due diligence before deciding that yes, it actually IS harmful and SHOULD be spoken out against?

Something to think about, is all I'm saying.

[brehaaorgana]

The thing is, websites being slowly destroyed because of capitalist greed is bad in general for many reasons, but I would like to point out that one of those reasons is that not every social website is built to handle the same kinds of engagement in the same ways, and this destroys spaces that can't simply be ported elsewhere because they are symbiotic to their origins.

You destroy specific kinds of communities and communication styles that rely on the uniqueness of individual platforms. You can't move that to somewhere else with a different structure without fundamentally changing something.

This has always been true, but I feel like not everyone is fully...aware or familiar with how this happens. It's not even entirely a Gen Z thing either - there are plenty of Millennials/Xers and older generations who did not have a ton of internet access in the early-mid 2000's and so don't necessarily have familiarity with what vanished. Internet access has only recently been "expected," for more people across the class spectrum.

As a Millennial(TM) who has been connected to the internet basically since infancy (my dad did IT/software engineer management stuff and would literally sit me on his lap while he was on the computer as a baby), I am keenly aware of a) the fact that there are entire internet social communities which I didn't engage with but are now gone and b) that there are ones I did engage in and are lost or no longer really the same because of capitalism.

Like...forums are just not as popular anymore as they used to be. They still exist, but it's harder to find them and they usually see way less activity than other platforms. And we lose so much knowledge/advice/engagement without them. Things like: I turned around one day and found a digital art forum I used to lurk on was totally gone, along with all the inspiration, tutorials, and tips. I remember one thread was this one guy wanting to learn to draw, and it was basically just his progress journal of learning to draw. It went over the course of YEARS of progress from like, stick figures to beautifully rendered art. Shit inspired me so much, and I think it just...vanished?

But then there's things like, entire social norms, jokes, and kinds of engagement that also vanishes or becomes a graveyard. Forums usually have karma systems (which reddit apes, sort of) and that could tell you a lot about an account lol.

Look at the slow death of livejournal! Dreamwidth sort of...tried to fill the gap but there's so many platform specific expectations and experiences that Livejournal had:

Icons that you change based on: interests, content or intent of your post/comment, that you can create and have others use and which change often.

Related: icons and graphics communities.

CAPSLOCK COMMUNITIES WHERE YOU DON'T LAPSLOCK EVER!! EVERYONE TALKS LIKE THIS

Locked communities (especially age based!) Or dedicated communities with moderation and agreed upon rules unique to that comm. Tumblr literally can't recreate that. It doesn't port to how Tumblr specifically works.

Comms like ONTD, stupid_free, or comedy shit like weepingcock, - or even like, scanlations comms. Shit that just doesn't translate to tumblr's style, especially without optional anonymous engagement and nested conversations. There's no such thing as FFAF on Tumblr. It doesn't work. You don't break the internet here the same way ONTD did when Michael Jackson died.

Dedicated fandom/ship comms. As someone who was quite literally harassed on Tumblr for years because I didn't like a specific non-canon ship between a literal teenaged child and an adult and talked about it without tagging it (and even censored it when just words suddenly showed in tags!) I miss dedicated fandom comms so much. Because I had way more control over who engaged with me on my personal LJ and NEVER would've bothered people on a comm about a ship I hated because it's shitty behavior and because people who do that got banned! Shared communities with moderation and better blocking settings were benefits I didn't have on Tumblr.

Just...it doesn't translate to Tumblr and now it's just a tiny space on DW and the zombie of LJ.

Similarly I don't think AITA translates very well to Tumblr because Tumblr doesn't:

Have nested comments/comment threads that can be collected all on one central page

Have easy to make throwaway accounts

Allow for anon responses to posts directly (it's only asks! They can't reblog anonymously!)

Have an upvote system

Have a "sort by most popular" or "sort by oldest."

Have autoretention/bot capture of the original submission.

A way to click through to someone's comments in other communities, or see what their responses to the thread as the op easily.

A collection of moderators and standardized community rules and community ability to report trolling/spam/fiction/shit posts.

Call me a killjoy but AITA won't fully translate to Tumblr for the same reason why ONTD isn't translated to Tumblr, and even a similar concept to ONTD looks totally different on reddit (see: deuxmoi). It will look different, it won't have the same community or feel simply because the platform itself is different enough that it inherently changes how we engage, what that engagement looks like, and what can even feasibly be done.

When a website dies, the unique communities and communication styles of that platform also start to die.

[dynamimight]

cw: THIS IS NOT A FIC, the internet is simply my diary lmao. just a lil thing to get stuff about tumblr rn out of my head. read if you please, i also rly want to talk about this w/ppl 😭😭 (readmore bc i put this in fandom tags)

i recently have been feeling a certain kind of way about reading fanfic; if i find myself scrolling (bored/looking for fun stories as always) i kinda just quickly scroll through the whole page and give?? up??? like im not as excited as i used to be. this is for a few reasons:

1. i feel like a lot of fics are the same now 👍🏼 not a terrible thing, but i really look back to the quarantine era of "forced creativity" (a different conversation) and think about just how much people were writing; not to "give out content," but to truly explore an online writing community and do something that was worthwhile. the resurgence if the "[as]" trend on tiktok really put that into perspective for me: quarantine forced ppl to explore creativity, created job opportunities based on that (influencers/content creators as we now know them), and really pushed artistry to the point of basic normalcy. even though this was a cool kind of thing (seeing so many ppl create), our level of understanding art and its brilliance was lowered. which brings me to point 2-

2. a good amount of the "creative era" of quarantine was simply ppl replicating other ppl's original ideas, or straight out stealing them to add an extra topping of fame, bc ofc "everybody wants to be famous." my best examples of this are the two sides of the tiktok coin: dancing & damelio.

dancing became a big thing, and it made sense to start dancing trends; a trend is just popularity + replication. but charli damelio becoming famous for creating one of those trends and it later being stated that a completely different girl, jalaiah harmon, created it and had no recognition until the news came out?

and yes, she was on ellen, but that pales in comparison to the millions of dollars that the damelio family made bc of one instance of improperly following a trend.

and that's what i see now with multiple online spaces; they've become boring bc everyone is doing the same thing w/o giving proper credit to anyone. before content creation & whatnot became huge, no one irl would go around seriously saying tht they created some huge, celebrity-reach trend without being checked.

now, the difference between tiktok and fanfic pertaining to "trends" is based on power imbalance. no one is gonna believe a middle schooler saying that they started the trend of wearing skirts over jeans when it was very obviously some a-list celeb. in writing, you look to your favorite authors, poets, etc. and formulate your own writing style. whether that's word choice, plot format, or anything else you can cultivate to your own writing experience.

while you can always put your own spin on new dance/fashion trend, writing is different. you wouldn't put a spin on a classic in the same way: it would be a modern retelling, or smth symbolic of the original. adding an extra move is is not equal to adding an extra sentence. and that is what leads me to my final point-

3. writing is becoming/has became very formulaic. a good amount of fics in the most popular fandoms here follow a similar style. we see this with the short cycle of complaints that went around when the fic format of "short blurb with a group of character names under it" came about. along with the fact that the format probably came from the notoriously unoriginal & wattpad-esque booktok, everyone who wanted activity in their notifs was using that format. and so now, with every new group of teens that comes here to enjoy stories and explore writing, the new "trend" isn't a fully fleshed out story: it's like pushing out content.

i'm not complaining, and i'm not saying that everyone lacks originality. i enjoy whatever ppl put out bc i know that any form of writing comes from some place within. i am simply making a written observation of something i've noticed happen over the last couple of years- being a younger teen when it started, and now growing into the basics of adulthood.

the internet is my diary lol

[fangirl-erdariel]

Ok so I am fully aware of the irony of me posting this in English, but

One thing I have to admit I miss of fandoms before Ao3 and big social media sites was the non-English fandom spaces for fandoms centered around English-language works. Like, okay, fine, it was only ever a few big ones, like Harry Potter and LOTR and the like. Okay, fine, I only got to experience it briefly, by the time I figured out internet and fandoms around eight years ago, Ao3 was already becoming big, becoming the site for fic, and fandom stuff was moving onto the various social media sites. But there were still a few non-English forums and fic sites around; I frequented one for LOTR and read my first LOTR fics there, while my English was still so weak that I struggled with reading English fic. The site still exists, but there's been barely any activity for years, and no new fics. The Harry Potter site I know for a fact existed once although I never used it myself, I can not find at all - I don't know if it's gone down (though that seems likely) or if i'm just stupid and can't find it.

But these days? Tolkien fandom does still have one active fan forum in my first language, but that site doesn't to my knowledge host fanfic or really put much attention on that aspect of the fandom. As far as I know, there isn't an active Tolkien fan community in my first language on tumblr either, and why would there be? Tumblr is predominantly English-language site, and it's hard, I suppose, to have an active fan community here that uses a language other than English but shares a fandom and relevant tags with predominantly English-speaking fans. The only active fandom community I know of on tumblr that primarily uses my first language is centered around a work that was written in said language in the first place.

And as for Ao3 and fanfic? Well, yes, Ao3 has a lot of language options! But how much do people use them? For my first language, for fandoms I care about myself, not a whole lot. For Tolkien fandom in particular, there's 48 works altogether. Most of them are cross-posted on or archived from that old fic site I mentioned previously. More than I'd care to admit are something I wrote and posted when I was like 12 or 13, and much worse of a writer than I am now. I have left them up, I'm not taking them down because it's more effort than it's worth, but they're not something I like to remember or think about, let alone reread. Many of the rest are about ships and characters I don't care about. That is compared to the something like 700 Middle-Earth fics + an assortment of other non-Tolkien fanfics and oc fics + poetry and song parodies the site also had sections for. (Plus the threads in the conversation sections, but like if we're talking about content you might post on Ao3, that's not on the list). And as I said, some of the 48 works on Ao3 are cross-posts of some of the 700ish fics on the language-specific fansites.

The thing with Ao3 is that yes, it allows for posting in other languages than English. Which is great! But at least in my first language, and I would imagine in many other languages as well, it's not something people do much, aside from a couple of fandoms where the source work is in that language, and a few extremely popular fandoms. Even then you have to go out specifically looking for fics in that language, because if you just look at all the fics in the fandom, fic in other languages gets posted so little that in any bigger/more active fandom, it gets quickly drowned by the English works.

Also, even when people write fic in my first language, I can't really find that sort of dedicated fan community, and I don't have anywhere, aside from their Ao3 comments or maybe some private chat between two people, where I can talk to them. I have, in some fandoms where I'm lucky, one friend who speaks the same language I do, and we can toss ideas back and forth and be fans about our fandoms in my first language, in a private chat. Which is fun and I love that person so much!! But two people isn't a community. And I have to admit, that community is something I kind of wish I could have.

Of course there are merits to the English-speaking fandom spaces and the fandom scene on big social medias! I've made so many friends from all over the world on tumblr and on fandom discords! Even if there were dedicated fanfic and fandom communities for the fandoms I'm into that used predominantly my first language, I'd probably still also hang around in English fandom spaces as well, and read and write fic in English, too. But I just- I would like the chance to choose to do that, you know? I'd like to be able to decide that, you know what, right now I feel like reading/writing something in English. But yesterday I read fic in another language, because I felt like it. I'd like to be able to write fic in my first language and have some hope that it might be read by a handful of people, and I'd like to have enough other people writing fic in the same language to be able to read their work and be inspired by the way they use the language when they write! (Because let's be honest, it's kind of hard to write in isolation, coming up with everything on your own, and I'm constantly getting inspired by and taking notes from the way other people whose fics I read write!) As much as I love that one friend of mine, I would like to be able to have a meta/headcanon discussion in my first language with more than one person besides me chiming in. Everything that's good about fandoms and being in fan communities, I'd like to be able to experience in my first language as well as in English.

And I realize I'm part of the problem, too, posting almost exclusively in English and very rarely writing fic in my first language (although I am planning on making a few things for the None English Fest on Ao3). The dominance of English language in fandoms is in part a self-fulfilling prophecy; no one uses other languages, because no one else uses them either, and someone has to be the one to first start actively writing and/or posting in a given language, and maybe other people would then start doing so too. (Although let's be real, I write fic or post any original content so infrequently that I would probably not be able to kickstart a non-English fandom community by myself even if I wanted to.)

I don't have a solution for this. I don't know whether there is a solution. But I wanted to make this post in the hopes of perhaps stirring up some conversation on the topic, at least making people think about this. So, if you have something, anything, to add - feel absolutely free to do so! I would love to hear other people's opinions on this!

(PS if you speak Finnish and you're into any of the fandoms i'm in, feel free to come chat with me! And if you ever write fic in Finnish of one of my fandoms, please link it to me, I wanna read it!!)

[deoxyrebornucleic]

Actually, I know what I'm going to use this blog for.

Howdy, call me Yoshi. Around 2 years ago now, I ran a Monster Prom writing blog called damien-lavey-is-a-power-bottom. I wrote NSFW fanfictions and headcanons about Monster Prom characters on this blog, and when I deleted it I had over 600 followers, one of whom was a writer on the Monster Prom team.

The Monster Prom fandom was the kindest, most respectful fandom I ever took part in. I love the community and the devs, and I hope everyone reading this post understands my intentions in coming forward with this.

First off, I have a confession to make. I started the Monster Prom blog at 15 years old. The first NSFW post was made when I was 16, and I continued writing for around a year and a half, deleting the blog when I was 17.

I lied about my age multiple times because I knew what I was doing was wrong and that I could get people in trouble. I deeply apologize for what I did. I was hypersexualizing myself through my writing as a trauma response, but even so, what I did was not okay by any means. I am not mentioning my trauma as a means to guilt trip, but as a means to explain what was going through my head and why I chose to ignore the harm I could do.

What I did was wrong, I understand and accept that, and I apologize to anyone I could have possibly hurt. But that isn't the only thing I want to come forward about.

When I was 16 years old, the user @/theotakufairy, also known as Mari, reached out to me via DM's and we began roleplaying sexually explicit content between our OC's and various Monster Prom characters. Mari was 19, turning 20. I remember drawing a picture of her and the character Damien LaVey holding hands as a birthday present.

This continued for around a year and a half. I did not come clean to her about my real age until after I deleted the blog and she found me on Discord. These are the messages I sent her.

I was under the impression that Mari thought I was an adult all this time.

I was wrong.

Mari clearly states that she knew I was a minor and continued to write nsfw things with me, and that she has done the same thing with other minors.

She justified her behavior by saying that I was 17, and not a baby, but it had begun when I was 16 and she knew that. She also said that other minors were doing far more NSFW things than me and made me feel safe, as though I hadn't done anything wrong.

Let me be clear; I absolutely did something wrong. I invaded adult NSFW spaces as a minor and not only was that wrong on a moral level, it was also dangerous for me and everyone I interacted with.

The Monster Prom blog is now deleted and I have no record of our conversations in those DM's, but I do have messages from her on my personal blog dating back to August of 2019. I was 16 at the time and we had already been chatting and roleplaying for a few months.

I fully admit that what I did was wrong and that I put myself in a dangerous place, but Mari knew everything and continued to take advantage of me as a vulnerable teenager.

I often vented to her about my home life, how my parents were divorcing, the abuse I was going through, etc. Her response, more often than not, was offering to roleplay as an escape to get my mind off it. These roleplays were often sexual in nature.

Mari knew fully well that I was a vulnerable, traumatized teenager who was lying about their age to act in NSFW ways online. She knew for over a year and said nothing to either stop me or steer me towards more healthy coping mechanisms, and instead she took advantage of me.

I know she is in at least one fandom that has a lot of minors in it - the Danganronpa fandom. Please, if you are a minor, do not interact with her. She is predatory. Get away as fast as you can, block her on everything. Keep yourself safe.

I will be tagging this with tags from both the Monster Prom fandom and the Danganronpa fandom since I know she is active in both fandoms. Appropriate trigger warning tags will also be there. If there is a trigger warning tag you feel I should add, please let me know and I will add it as soon as possible.

Again, I'm sorry for any damage I did while I was operating the Monster Prom blog. I was in the wrong, I paid the price, and I'm ready for any backlash I may recieve. It's worth it as long as people are sufficiently warned about Mari and her predatory behavior.

I turn 19 tomorrow. I hope coming forward about this helps me move on so I can start healing, not only from this, but from the things that lead me to Mari in the first place.

Thank you for reading. Stay safe.

[wanderingwomanwondering]

Buddie 513 - Bedroom Breakdown & Dining Table Talk

Eddie’s breakdown was a runaway freight train of pent up sadness, guilt, shame, and trauma. He’d lost control in basically every way. What he said to Buck in that room was feeling-fueled and out of control. Which is definitely not a bad thing and was absolutely necessary given how tightly Eddie had been holding everything before. The feelings poured out of him against his will really. The walls were down and he couldn’t rebuild them before the flood of emotions overtook him again. Buck was in the room. He had to be, and he listened even though he himself was so scared for Eddie. He focused on what Eddie needed and slipped his own sadness and fear into his back pocket.

When they moved to the dining room, things shifted slightly for Eddie. He had a little complete-sentence-thought and still-crying-but-not-sobbing-control back. Enough to use all his words to tell his story more fully and to also let the feelings be what they were even if it was uncomfortable and hard to bypass his usual tendency to hold as much as possible in. I think it’s imperative to recognize that Eddie’s dining room conversation with Buck was a choice that he made wide awake and aware that Buck *could* run but he knew he wouldn’t. He decided to open up with Buck and it was excruciating, which is exactly a part of the reason he usually avoids it with most people in his life. He’s afraid of being seen as weak and out of control in addition to being afraid of never feeling normal again. It made his decision to open up to Buck that much more epic. Eddie consciously chose Buck in the dining room conversation, more so than I think he was capable of in the lingering intensity of the bedroom breakdown. He consciously chose to fully and intentionally confide in Buck after the explosive elements had cooled ever so slightly. Think about Eddie’s longish pause and eye contact with Buck before actually answering the question ‘what happened to the others’. He was in decision making mode.

It still blows my tiny little mind! The Eddie growth of it all, not so much the Buck being there part (tho that makes me wanna fling myself into the sun too). Theoretically Eddie could have talked these things through with his bestie at any time but Eddie was *not* ready/able before now. He had to lose control and Buck had to assertively step in. Both were necessary given Eddie’s usual M.O.

Of course Eddie trusts Buck with all things but I think the fandom can miss the brunt of the power and beauty of those raw bedroom breakdown and dining room talk scenes when we treat it like Eddie’s huge catharsis moment wasn’t a choice he had to actively and consciously make, even if he ultimately made that choice somewhat quickly in the heat of the moment. Those scenes were primarily about Eddie getting into the mess and muck in his heart and mind and Buck being *allowed* to stay for the ride, after he showed he was willing to strong-arm (super affectionate) his way onto said ride.

Eddie’s default is careful, measured, curated sharing if and when he shares at all. It was a herculean effort on Eddie’s part to let Buck be there for him at his darkest hour, not because Buck isn’t great but because Eddie’s storage unit of deep personal issues is a heavy fucking lift, which was his point to Frank during his session.

The way Buck navigated the situation was solid gold, he had to approach gently while still asking the tough questions and he couldn’t let much of his own stuff into the mix because Eddie needed the space to just focus on himself and Buck instinctively *knew* that.

I’m still processing but it was all just so damn good!

[crossguild]

quick thots on how to actually create a safe space for poc from a leadership position, keplace week, and racism in the wolf 359 fandom

1. white people need to get educated about racism and racist microaggressions and shut them down WITHOUT PROMPTING when they see it. not wait for poc to speak up, not wait for someone to call it out first, not ignore it and hope no one noticed-- we did, and we see the silence as complicity. we see when they point out homophobia and transphobia and ableism and just ignore racism because it doesn't affect them personally.

2. they need to not immediately get defensive when it's pointed out, IF anyone even speaks up about it. the moment they do, they've lost trust and any opportunity for a good-faith learning opportunity even if they walk it back later. we don't care how good their intentions are, their actions have already demonstrated that they'll defend whiteness and white supremacy as a kneejerk reaction, and take any gentle critique of their implicit biases as a personal attack. there's no walking that back.

3. writing 'poc are welcome', 'this is a safe space for poc', 'racism will not be tolerated' is 100% meaningless when they're actively alienating all the poc in their space. i've been in spaces where white people unfailingly change the topic from race to lgbt headcanons, nd headcanons, and literally any other kind of hc or discussion instead of learning, building, and engaging on any conversation about race just because they don't feel totally comfortable in it. they refuse to shut down racism or racist microaggressions, and that directly contradicts any 'racism is not tolerated here' rule.

4. white fans will infantilize and fetishize characters of color to an egregious degree. some of the worst perpetrators are people who claim to be "fans" of the character when what they're actually doing is projecting stereotypes and/or their own experiences onto a character who has nothing in common with them. poc are constantly forced to empathize with, learn about and relate to white people who have nothing in common with us; we recognize it when they refuse to do the same.

5. if all of the mods and leadership in a space are white, that's a huge red flag. if they can't find poc in their community willing to take on a leadership role, or if they do and that person is used as a token, is not supported when they actually bring up and act on racism, they've been abjectly failed.

6. we see white people forcing identities that THEY relate to onto characters of color and getting really fucking mad when anyone disagrees or has a different interpretation, in ways that they don't do with any white characters or any other kind of identity. i've never seen white people get viscerally angry or uncomfortable at the implication that lovelace is dominican instead of costa rican the way they do at the idea that she might be bi, but that's also because they don't care enough about lovelace to think about her culture and identity beyond what they can project on her. again, fully transparent.

7. zero out of the 7 sign-ups for keplace week in the server are straight (and this isn't including people who didn't sign up but still plan to participate), five are woc, all are interested in a (platonic OR otherwise) dynamic between kepler and lovelace because the infantilizing, entitled and reductive ways lovelace is treated when portrayed by white people in this fandom has basically made us sick of minkowski/lovelace, which is a ship i & most of us DO like but which i trust none but my mutuals of color to write.

8. their assumptions about how qpoc engage with and perceive them as characters and as a dynamic are racist and irrelevant to me, but it would be a lot less obvious if they learned to keep it in private platforms instead of indulging in this pathological need to display their ignorance in public. lots of people in my server aren't interested in the ship! most of them go 'don't get it, but there's plenty of other stuff for us to engage in that we actually enjoy!' or 'i never thought about it before, but i'm willing to listen' instead of immediately doing the pettiest and most obnoxious thing they can think of.

9. podcast fandoms are notoriously racist, as are all fandoms, and to create a space that's genuinely comfortable and engaging for a diverse group of fans is a constant, ongoing and active choice that everyone has to engage in. if you aren't making that choice every day, you are perpetuating the racism and alienation. the difference is stark in who feels comfortable contributing and the kinds of conversations we can have, and at the very least i'm glad i have this space and friends to share it with.

10. this is a server i made in response to seeing a larger wolf 359 server, and the way they refuse to engage on race and make excuse after excuse as to why that's okay yet still trying to claim allyship to poc. there were multiple, gentle attempts to address it, all brushed off or aggressively shut down, and i'm a happier person for not being a part of it! white "allies", once again, proving themselves to be a joke. but we've been saying that for years.

11. you know. we weren't gonna be very public about this event from the outset, but after seeing this aggressive and obtuse reaction (to the point of leaving the server) from some white members, we decided to be a little more public and enthusiastic about it! the fact that white fans reacted with passive-aggression and pettiness was expected, and entertaining every step of the way, since we honestly never expected better.

12. i don't expect this to reach the people who are the most egregious about it, nor do i expect it to percolate or change anything even if it does, but that's not why i wrote this. i wrote this 'cause i know there's lots of wolf 359 fans of color, and i've rarely seen these issues addressed in this tiny-ass fandom. i don't speak for everyone, but i do speak for myself, and either way i've found my community! i hope everyone else is able to do the same.

[bigskydreaming]

I will forever squint suspiciously at a fandom that overall makes a bigger deal out of Dick Grayson expressing he didn’t want to replace his father when he was still young and actively grieving than they do Tim Drake literally hiring an actor to be his fake uncle and saying no to Bruce’s first actual offer of adoption.

Like, if you can get on board with Timothy Drake-Wayne after that, because Tim changed his mind after he was further along in his grieving process, you can get on board with the idea that at some point after the age of ten or twelve Dick similarly changed his mind about thinking a second father would be an insult to his first father’s memory.

*Shrugs* I just don’t get how hard some people go to bat for the idea that Dick never wanted or needed someone he viewed as an actual parent at any point after he was eight. Because you can’t deny that whatever Dick has said about that in the comics, he’s NEVER made it nearly AS big a deal as most fans who cite it at all do. Like, when you run with the most extreme extrapolation of that but gloss right over Tim’s far more extensive efforts to keep Jack Drake the sole father figure in his memory at first, I feel like something else is going on there.

(And I’m not trying to turn this into a Tim vs Dick thing, btw, I’m honestly just using Tim’s story there as a benchmark for how a clearly parallel sentiment is overwhelmingly referenced in regards to just one character but not another. My issues with the way people engage with this particular idea in regards to Dick like, exists without Tim being in the equation at all. That was simply an example of the fact that there IS a discrepancy.)

But point being, as all roads in this particular direction of thought almost always seem to lead to Dick being slotted into some nebulous category separating him from the rest of his siblings, where he’s only partially Bruce’s kid but not FULLY, not like the others....I am the Wary. 

Because whatever the surface intentions behind that, it almost inevitably voids some of Bruce’s responsibility to him as a parent, while at the same time making it easier to heap parental or caregiver style responsibilities for the others on Dick. If Dick’s more like Bruce than he is like his siblings in the overall family dynamic, this not only lessens the need to show him on the receiving end of Bruce being a parental figure, it simultaneously heightens the urge to make him a parental figure to the others to pick up Bruce’s slack there, because they’re more partners than they are father and son, see. So why wouldn’t Dick pick up Bruce’s slack and help him out there, and why would he need Bruce to actually be fulfilling that very role with him instead?

All the things people are critical of Bruce for in his parenting with Dick aren’t quite as bad, right, when Dick’s not fully his son or doesn’t quite view Bruce as his father....its easier to reframe it as fights between colleagues. Or recast Dick’s estrangement from Bruce as not actually a failure on Bruce’s part to reach out and cement exactly what Dick meant to him every time Dick flat out says “I want to know what I mean to you, give a name to it, give me an explanation for why you made these choices that isn’t that you don’t want me because all I see when I look at those choices is you expressing you don’t want me.” 

Because if Dick doesn’t actually want that explanation ever, if Dick doesn’t actually want that rock-solid expression of Bruce putting a name to what he feels for Dick and what he views him as, then the arguments between Bruce and Dick in his late teenage years DO become two-sided. Its just them butting heads back then. Rather than what they actually WERE in the comics, which was Dick clearly expressing insecurities about his place in Bruce’s life and Bruce repeatedly letting him leave or outright telling him to leave without actually giving it to him.

(I’m not even talking about NTT #55 for once, I’m actually talking about when Dick went to Gotham after he found out about Jason being Robin now. And as the events of that issue get referenced a TON in fandom, its HIGHLY suspect that one specific part of that issue gets rewritten in particular: where its acted like it was Dick that stormed off in a huff there or Dick who didn’t want anything more than to confront Bruce about Robin. It really doesn’t get addressed enough IMO that yes, Bruce said outright that he did it because he missed Dick....and then two panels later, Bruce literally asks Dick to go now. Says I would like you to leave now. Bruce is the one who blew up and lost his temper, literally smashing something while Dick was just heated because he was understandably upset, while Bruce somehow made it like he was the one being hurt by Dick and asking for space from him. Yeah, he said I miss you, but he never DID anything with that and in fact just turned around two seconds later and drove Dick away again, like Holy Mixed Signals, Batman! Y’know? Like what exactly was Dick supposed to do with that? “Oh, so Bruce misses me, but also he didn’t want me there, like I was literally RIGHT THERE for the first time in seventeen months and he missed me so much that....he didn’t even ask me to stay for dinner? Or call or reach out to me afterwards? So....my conclusion is.....what, exactly?”)

Ultimately though, my big beef with the stuff about adoption or Dick not wanting to replace his father, its not even about those specifically. Its about that period when Bruce very visibly was NOT in Dick’s life....and that was BY BRUCE’S CHOICE. That is the thing that needs addressing in my book, and far too often goes unresolved. No matter what the particulars of Dick’s views or wants re: adoption, there is literally no confusion about the existence of comics where Dick is repeatedly the one to reach out to Bruce, at a point in his life where he no longer had any legal ties to Bruce whatsoever.....and clearly express in one way or another that he is there and willing to talk, that in fact he WANTS to talk about why Bruce doesn’t seem to want HIM, specifically. 

It was Dick who brought up the issue of Bruce adopting Jason but not him and asked WHY at that one issue with them at a party. It was Dick who returned to Gotham and asked Bruce WHY he made Jason Robin when he hadn’t wanted Dick to be Robin - (and for the record, NO version of events where Bruce is the one to make Jason Robin aligns with Dick voluntarily giving up Robin.....the one and only continuity in which Dick did that, HE made the choice to pass Robin on to Jason. Mixing and matching continuities specifically to make Dick unable to claim hurt or resentment for the identity he crafted for himself being given away to someone else without his approval because ‘he was the one who said he didn’t want it anymore’ is yet again, suspect, as it serves absolutely no purpose other than to lessen the hurt done to him and abdicate Bruce’s culpability in hurting him when he did that). 

It was Dick who returned to Gotham after Jason died with no intention but to express his condolences and share their grief, and it was Dick who returned to Gotham to check on Bruce after Tim said he was worried he was going to get himself killed, as well as again more longterm in order to help with Tim’s training.

And in each and EVERY one of those situations.....it was Bruce that ended those encounters, and ALWAYS without ever offering Dick any actual resolution or change in their dynamic. Despite Dick’s very presence in each of these being a very clear sign that Dick was unhappy with their estrangement and wanted a change to it or else he wouldn’t even be there, he would be off being comfortably estranged somewhere else and totally content with that.

THAT’S the bigger issue and always has been, I think. That no matter how else you parse it, Dick repeatedly looked for and asked for reassurances, some kind of actual TIES to Bruce, and that Bruce for whatever personal reasons of his own, repeatedly did not give....even when Dick walked him right up to the perfect opportunity to just fucking say “I would like you to come home more, I want you here, I want you as part of my family even though you’ve already aged out of our existing legal bond.”

Bruce still just WOULD NOT SAY IT. Dick was very clear about needing and wanting something from Bruce that Bruce DID NOT GIVE HIM. Bruce gave him basically nothing to work with in these encounters more often than not. 

(In the interest of not being disingenuous here, I do admit that at the party when Dick asked Bruce why he’d adopted Jason and not him, Bruce did give a fairly touching response about how by the time he thought Dick would be open to it, he thought that Dick was too old to actually want or need it anymore. BUT, problem is, even with that it does absolutely nothing to change or address how the very fact that Dick was expressing insecurity about this now meant that Dick WASN’T actually too old to want or need it. It was literally a smack in the face that Bruce’s conclusion was wrong and not actually about Dick’s wants. And Bruce knew this, even referenced it at later points when he threw it back in Dick’s face to accuse Dick of resenting Bruce adopting Jason and not him.....which is a clear indication that Bruce knew it was something Dick still wanted or else there would be no reason for resentment, and THAT is the issue there. That no matter what Bruce said at that party about his reasons for not adopting Dick sooner, that very conversation itself should have been reason enough for Bruce to rethink his stance then there....but he didn’t. Also he ended up adopting Dick like five years later soooooo.....if he could do it then when Dick was even older, that doesn’t work as a barrier for him not doing it then.)

And that’s the troubling part.....how many people try and make that period of their lives unclear with no other visible purpose than to make the fact that Bruce WOULD NOT OUTRIGHT CEMENT DICK AS FAMILY OR ASK HIM TO STAY, like.....less problematic.

And as I’ve said before and will no doubt say again.......that logic process bugs the hell out of me, because it ultimately tries to claim the responsibility for Dick’s unhappiness in this regard back then is at least as much his fault as Bruce’s. That it was some kind of fight between equals, or that it was something Dick initiated or that Bruce had no power to resolve on his own via just his own choices or gestures.

Because it wasn’t! That’s not remotely what all of that was! And like I’m also always saying, you don’t HAVE to stick with the canon by any means. You can literally rewrite things so Bruce adopts Dick before he’s eighteen and they never HAVE that period, you can rewrite things so that Bruce reaches out and ends that period early on by DOING THE WORK of being the parent in that situation, you can ‘fix that’ by any number of means......yet over and over we see that period of estrangement repeatedly upheld as a thing that exists in the history that fics and headcanons reference having happened......but with the only ACTUAL change from the comics being that its framed as though it was just growing pains or Dick being stubborn or a dozen other things that somehow keep coming back to Dick doing something wrong there instead of repeatedly standing in front of Bruce asking for him to clarify their relationship and Bruce changing the subject or asking him to leave.

Again. THAT’S the problem.

You want Good Parent Bruce Wayne? Then WRITE Good Parent Bruce Wayne. Don’t just write Stubborn Teenaged Asshole Dick Grayson who btw doesn’t even really want Bruce to be his parent so there’s absolutely nothing Bruce could have done to bridge that gap back then anyway. 

(As that’s an equally critical part of the equation here as well. See, since Dick DID clearly express a want for a clear connection to Bruce back then, acting like Dick never really wanted a second father is a super convenient way to write over the part where Dick spelled out for Bruce how to bridge the divide between them and make things good again.....by demonstrating an actual WANT to have Dick in his family!)

But writing Stubborn Teenage Asshole Dick Grayson Who Did This To Himself.....that is something entirely different from writing Good Parent Bruce Wayne. You haven’t actually done or said anything with BRUCE’S character by just making Dick the fall guy for every conflict between them as though they were just equals all along and there was never any kind of actual parent child relationship or even a DESIRE for there to be a parent child relationship. Where the responsibility for being the PARENT like, lands on the....y’know. Parent.

And for the record, I don’t think this issue is confined just to this period of the comics, I think rather that its kinda the point of origin of a very large recurring problem in Dick’s conflicts with other people.

Because like I said, it was abundantly clear that Dick was expressing a want to be acknowledged as family, or just flat out acknowledged by Bruce at all, during this time. And if people can somehow make THAT period into just his fault.....then of course it should be no surprise that they can make any conflict he’s part of into his fault. Its a freaking blueprint for doing just that! 

And that’s exactly why this pattern recurs so damn often with EXACTLY the same fanon beats......whatever role the other character plays even in initiating a conflict is shifted onto Dick and somehow made into his own proactive choice and not something he’s actually reacting to. Thus Dick does double duty as both the CAUSE of the conflict and the resulting EFFECT - aka how he reacted to that thing that originally, he did not actually cause or initiate. While meanwhile, the other character not only gets off scot free bearing no actual culpability....no, now since DICK is the one making all the actual choices in the conflict from start to finish, now the other character is actually his VICTIM in it as well.

And that’s just.....so....blegh.

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

This is not my fandom, nor ultimately my business, and I'm happy to bow out of this conversation as preferred by the primary participants

It's....actually kind of important to ask game authors and developers to GENUINELY interact with their characters sexuality thoughtfully and intentionally? "Anyone can romance anyone" is. Fine. Objectively speaking, nothing wrong with it and I'm often quite a fan!

But for that to be the vast majority of "queerness" in the story???? No actual interaction from the characters or the plot or the world who WHO THESE PEOPLE ARE MEANT TO BE, just. Whatever the player decides to invest emotionally in it. That's not actually giving me, as a queer person, ANYTHING. It's a cop out. Not on a case by case basis, but as it is rapidly becoming a way to default heterosexuality while still being able to push back on people who point out that's what you're doing by saying "but all the characters are bi/pan!!"

Are they?

Or are they just. Devoid of sexuality as a construct, an acculturation, an experience of self and love and other? Do they ACTUALLY become queer characters just because YOU play them that way? What does that mean for all the people who REFUSE to play them that way and degrade it? Does their interpretation of the character exist beside, within, or regardless of your own? Not in a "empathize with the bigot" way, but in a "why is any one person's claim to defining a character with no actual story/character work done around major components of self-concept more or less legitimate than anyone else's" kind of way.

What makes any of our individual choices via gameplay an active, thoughtful, or empathetic depiction of selfhood as queer? Why should we accept that as our "best" option for our existence?

You ask if people would have a similar conversation about games that all explicitly defauly cishet and like. Yeah. Obviously. It's been going on for fucking decades, where have you been?

You can be frustrated that something YOU value in terms of ability to engage in the cultural zeitgeist isn't "enough" for everyone. But you don't actually get to decide that other queer people are bigoted because they want and value DIFFERENT things than you about that same access. You mentioned in the tags that you were "trying not to snap" and that you were "sorry if you hadn't managed it", @valleslins, and I'm really struggling why you think it was good faith at all to come in this hard and heavy on another queer person's reflections of their relationship to media, to their identity, and to the access of identity and self to resonance within culture. I appreciate that you tried not to snap. But you were still DEEPLY unkind, and when given a respectful clarification, you really only doubled down on that unkindness and accusation/blame. I sincerely recommend letting your OWN sense of self have a little space from how you see yourself reflected in the rest of life. Because as it is, you are - visibly to all around you - taking it so personally that you are actively viewing differing queer resonance needs as a threat to your own need meeting rather than accepting that maybe what is good for you is NOT in fact a universalized relationship between self and need. That's....not really fair to the people you take that out on, who are fully entitled to their own experience of that relationship.

Anyway, I do love a good universal romancer! You know what's funny? Even as a bisexual queer person, they almost NEVER actually meet my own perception/experience of self. They are, almost universally, still deeply monogamous, and even when they are not, they are still almost never trans as well as queer in the sexuality.

To put this in language you may feel more comfortable with:

Do you only get verbally agressive with queer people who resonate less with things you identify with? Or do you ALSO criticize the heteronormative relationship and sexuality micro/macro aggressions that you AREN'T personally invested in? When was the last time YOU abstained discourse around how frustrating it is as a queer person to almost never be allowed to romance more than one character at a time without insanely heteronormative jealousy scenes and outcomes? Or do you think those complaints matter less because they're about games you like and aspects of sexuality you aren't emotionally invested in?

I really hope, that as you find yourself offended by the previous paragraph, you can MAYBE empathize with how it feels as a queer person to see your accusatory and shaming response to legitimate frustrations about the relationship between our identities and the media we interact with. MAYBE you can empathize with why someone seeing you talk down to another queer person here ALSO felt offensive and unfair/unjustified.

OP is being really polite here. And you REALLY aren't. It may be worth stepping away until you are actually having this conversation in good faith and actually CAN keep from lashing out at others for being different from you in ways that make you feel vulnerable or under threat.

So apparently in Dragon Age: Veilguard all characters are pansexual?

Which might be fun from the angle of "I can romance any love interest with any character I make."

But also. I don't know. I liked characters having their own sexualities.