#hopefully op doesn't mind my editions

[icyrambles]

OH MY GOD THIS!!!!!

i've had several discussions with people regarding this sort of thing. i do not understand the hype around skybound's unrelenting violence when it does literally nothing for the plot whatsoever. what is the point of killing off, or removing characters from the plot in a significant way if they're nothing burger characters.

like, skywarp was promoted as a serious villain. and he would be a really good antagonist considering his outlier abilities. i was very excited to see how the writer's would utilize his teleportation in a way that would work with the sheer amount of violence that they were throwing into the panels. having him teleport partially into a bot to rip out their internals would be interesting, same goes for having him teleport into secure locations and quickly teleporting out because it would provide a serious amount of threat story wise. never knowing when your enemy will strike is a really good motivation to stop him as soon as possible

and instead, he gets brutally ripped apart like he's a background character.... and it just disappointed me so much. like what's the point of me feeling sorry for him when he's had like no character development. obviously as shown by the latest issue, he's not 100% dead, just fused into the ark and brain damaged. but that's still shitty.

i don't care about soundwave or starscream or any of the decepticons because the story doesn't bother to develop them as characters. even the autobots are disappointing. like, yeah sure cliffjumper is getting the spotlight but we still don't really know anything about him. starscream killed his clan, what the fuck does that mean? what is a clan? who was part of his clan? obviously they meant a lot to him but if we don't know the characters who were lost, then we don't really have the ability to get emotionally attached in a meaningful way. same goes for arcee. she's got the same story as cliffumper, the decepticons killed her clan, but i don't know any of the people she did so i don't particularly care

OP is right about the starscream thing. i don't know anything about him. sure it's cool that he's allowed to be a violent piece of shit, but why is he acting like that? does he have a reason for being so violence? is it a byproduct of being a decepticon? is megatron responsible for his mental decline (because starscream is nothing if not smart and he's very clearly desperate in this continuity)?

it's very telling that i managed to read only 3 issues of this comic and only got the vibe that it was the original g1 cartoon but with less comedy and more violence. and it doesn't do anything for the story. what's the point of so much violence and repeated character death? cause i've just become desensitised to it all. i've stopped caring when character's get hurt because they'll either die and never get shown again, or they'll come back and be perfectly fine.

it's a very clear example of telling instead of showing and it's a disappointment.

maybe i'm just petty about idw 2 getting cut short, but i don't think skybound deserves the level of praise it's been getting. it's poorly written, kills off characters without any reason or benefit to the plot, and generally is worse in every way from the previous comics i've read in the transformers series.

i know we're only like 8 issues into the series but i'm not hopeful that we'll get any development considering the writers seem more focused on showing an unnecessary amount of violence rather than actually telling a story

i can appreciate the few moments of neatness that we've gotten, but overall i think this series is a disappointment. they could've chosen to create a genuine comic centred around the trauma of a war, maybe something actually centred on cybertron and it's culture, but instead we just got g1 cartoon but worse

People are raving about Skybound Transformers and I'm just sitting here like "This comic is so committed to being G1 But Edgy that it's not actually bothering to develop its characters before they get killed off."

Optimus and to a lesser extent Cliffjumper are the only ones who feel at all more three-dimensional than their G1 toy bios. I feel like I know more about fucking G.I. Joe Man than I do about this version of Starscream, who was the main villain of the comic until last issue.

Like, what do we know about Skybound Starscream's personality? He likes killing people and he was allegedly friends with Jetfire. I say 'allegedly' because he lasts all of a page before killing Jetfire for not immediately throwing in with the Decepticons. There's not even a token attempt at manipulation, the fucking cartoon did more with this idea than Skybound did.

The badly-animated 23-minute toy commercial with the budget of two coffee beans and some pocket lint is not a high bar to clear.

And hey, how about a different example? How about Skywarp's sorta-death?

Skywarp gets ripped apart in Issue 4, and used to repair Teletraan 1 so the Decepticons can revive more of their guys. But... why? They're currently surrounded by dozens of corpses they could cannibalise instead, many of whom are much less useful to the cause than the teleporting fighter jet. Like fuck, you've got three of Reflector and he's nearly always useless. The only reason this doesn't immediately backfire on Soundwave is that when the Autobots retake the Ark, Wheeljack accidentally reactivates what's left of Skywarp's brain and he starts blocking their efforts to revive more Autobots. Congratulates my guy, you turned the teleporting fighter jet into a minor software bug, and him being anything besides a corpse wasn't even intentional.

But you can make this work. Let's say that there's a reason Soundwave needs Skywarp gone. Maybe Skywarp, as a Seeker, is ultra-loyal to Starscream, and being as powerful as he is, makes Screamer's position as the leader of the Decepticons basically unassailable. The only way Soundwave can depose Starscream is to first trick him into helping eliminate Skywarp.

And like that, all three Decepticons get some extra character. Soundwave's manipulative side is put on display, an aspect of his character that often gets left out. Starscream's cruelty and ineptitude as leader is elaborated on by demonstrating that he doesn't reward loyalty, being more likely to backstab even someone who has always had his back if he's convinced it will benefit him. Skywarp gets a personality trait before he's violently killed, and now him dying means something other than another demonstration of weirdly organic robo-gore.

Instead we get "Starscream, we need to kill one of our most dangerous soldiers instead of literally any of these other assholes we've got lying around. I am a better leader because this worked out for me accidentally."

[werehamburglar]

The anon that sent the long message here again (with another big message too!): I didn't see that post that you said the OP was probably referring to, my bad. Still, they're being extremely aphobic (ironic, huh?) accusing a literal ace/aro person of being an aphobe, especially when looking at your blog for more than a few minutes, it's CLEAR that you are 100% pro-ace / pro-aro.

I would honestly block that person, they seem a little too... unstable? That doesn't feel like the right word because I'm genuinely not trying to insult them. Like I think they fell into the discourse crowd and went to the extremist side of "if it looks like it's supporting shitty people/statements then context is completely unnecessary, they're guilty call them out now". Which has gotten plenty of minorities bullied off of here by "allies" with discourse blogs not checking their sources or information.

They're not worth your time, or your emotions. They're a stranger in a sea of strangers. Block them, and anyone who seems to have appeared through them. Those extremists pockets aren't very big and often never have actual reach, so it'll die with their blogs whenever they grow up and mature.

Lastly -- I would contact your professor and let them know what happened with the internet being down. Especially if this is college. Practically any instructor will brush off any deduction for being little late if it was caused by something out of your control, especially if it doesn't happen often and you make sure to communicate. That's what most instructors (and people in general!) want -- just communication.

i just got to this, sorry.

1. Yeah, I... I don't know. My discourse blog is specifically for being a little shit. And if you look at the rest of the conversation that happened there (on that post), it should be very clear that that's what was happening. Contrasted with my posts on main and my more genuine posts on that blog, I don't know? I genuinely don't know. I don't get it.

2. I don't have to worry about blocking her because she has already blocked me. (She also apparently marked me red on shinigami eyes, which is... wild, because I don't know what I did that was transphobic and nobody has told me yet.)

3. I've already updated my bio to reflect what I'm going to be doing. I'm just going to be on less, for my own sanctity of mind.

4. I did tell my professor what was up, actually! God, I hope she's understanding about my connection issues. On the bright side, I'm done with this semester of college! So there's something silver in this dark cloud. I just have to clean up my dorm and move out.

5. Obviously you shouldn't, like, platform TERFs, especially on your main blog, and I'm sorry about that post I reblogged a few days ago. I should have known better, and I took it down as soon as it was pointed out to me that OP was, in fact, a TERF. But, like... me getting pissed at yet another troll blog made specifically to mock my identity isn't the same as that. Of all the things I could theoretically be called out for, this is the thing?

If anything, all this proves my fears-- that someone is watching every little move and misinterpreting everything I say as something malicious. I know myself and I know that all this is going to make me wildly paranoid and I'm already jumping to the worst possible ends (somehow this gets back to my university, they don't believe me when I defend myself, I get kicked out, someone finds me and recognizes me for what was said, etc.), so I think it really is best if I go on that semi-hiatus. (I want to say, though-- it's not someone else's fault that I'm being so up my own about all this. I'm generally a very anxious person and there's a lot happening right now, so it's making it a little harder to cope with what's happening on here.)

Also, for the record: I'll probably take this ask down when I go through and take down the other posts. Hopefully this all blows over and I can do that soon.

edit: this is the one post I'm going to keep up. i'll link it on the deleted posts log, though.

[ais-n]

If your friend doesn't mind, I'd love to add him. I'm at lvl 57 now and I managed to enter the Grand Line. I figured out how to see all the maps that are available so far and holy shit do I have a long way to go all the way to Dressrosa. I want to level up high enough to try my hand at the clash maps, bc apparently the characters you can get there are really good. But I need to improve my timing and stuff, because it still sucks. But yeah I'm looking forward to it. Thanks again for the help! (3)

I’ll send your ID to my friend and see if he’s willing to add you :)

Yeah I’m still on Sabaody tbh. I think my friend might be in Dressrosa or further, not sure, but I’ve been slow as hell going through the main story islands. Part of it was because I was watching all the little previews along the way for a long time, because it was a really fun way to relive the high points of the series. But that does slow you down a lot if you do that vs skipping all the stories and just jumping right into the fights.

One thing that’s really annoying is eventually, like maybe around Water 7/Thriller Bark? A little bit in Skypiea too actually, it starts getting annoyingly difficult to pass some of the levels. I had to use gems on some of those even though I had good crews that could handle extra isles. Not all the levels in the main island are like that, but some are, and I don’t really know why they did that. I guess it kind of makes sense; after a point, the people they fought in story really did get quite powerful, too. So I guess it’s being thematically appropriate. It just annoyed me at times lol So I did end up doing a lot of playing in the extra isles for a while.

(more below cut)

When you get to a point that you can fight in some of the 30 stamina extra isles and not have to use gems, and if you’re at a point where you really want to start leveling up faster, a really good thing to do is find an extra isle where you can easily beat it at 30, do staminax2 so it’s costing 60 stamina but you get double the rewards (including exp), and then just play that over and over. That’s what my friend did, he said, and it worked because we started playing within a week of each other last year and dude’s literally 100 levels above me XD Although, he also lucked out and got a great character as his main character from the start (Fujitora) whereas I got a decent one but who wasn’t as powerful or versatile (Red-Haired Shanks).

btw, one thing I kept messing up when I first started playing was I didn’t get all the different variations of the characters. So people would talk on and on about Legend Shanks and I thought I had Legend Shanks, so I invested a lot in upgrading him, but I didn’t have the right Shanks. So he wasn’t the person everyone told me to put in this or that team or do this or that with. I ran into that problem a few times, thinking I’d properly verified it was the right character they were referencing, only to later realize I misinterpreted after all.

Also as a side note I forgot to mention in the other message, if you see people talk about God Coby the way they talk about God Usopp – be careful. God Coby is a joke. Do not waste time upgrading the hell out of the normal Coby you get. God Usopp (aka GPU) is the real deal, he’s definitely helpful. But the regular Coby (starts out as the tiny Coby Luffy first meets) is kind of useless. However, regular Helmeppo (also starts out the way Luffy first met him, except I think he’s like Marine Sailor Helmeppo?) actually does get useful to an extent as you upgrade him. So he can be worth some investment. I just wanted to mention that because I had gotten GPU and saw he was really helpful, then I saw people saying God Coby everywhere and I was so new to the game I didn’t know it was an inside joke, so I upgraded him and then was like, “Wait, why is he so lame???” Those reddit jerks lol ^_~

Oh also, the clash islands are fun because yeah, you can get some cool characters, but even at my level I struggle with some of them. So depending on what characters you get, it can take a while to be able to play them effectively without wasting gems, or spending more gems than you prefer. However, there are a bunch of other islands that keep popping up, including a bunch almost at the end of the island list that when you click it, there’s like 20 islands or something that pop up. I think some of those are less dramatically difficult than the clash islands, so you could start with some of those to work your way up.

PS: I’m still pretty shit at tap timing tbh XD Some of my crews I’m boss and can tap time even if I can’t see the special FX words, but others I’m awful at consistency. So hopefully you get better at that than I do lol Eventually, with the characters you do play a lot, I do think you’ll get used to it and get really good at timing on them, because even with my klutzy ass self that happened. 

Good luck! Let me know if you ever need anything else! obvs I can talk a million years on OP and OPTC, soooo….. ¬_¬;;

Oh wait, one more thing! Best ships to upgrade: Merry Go (regular), Merry Go (Flying Model), and Thousand Sunny (regular edition, you might get random other editions as specials here and there). I personally liked the Merry Go flying model for a while there because it heals you in addition to boosting crew attack, and for a long time I needed that little bit of HP healing help more than I needed extra HP + attack boost like the regular Merry Go does. But once you get normal Thousand Sunny, imo that’s the best all around ship, because it boosts crew’s attack, plus it can deal 50,000 damage to all enemies every 15 turns if you upgrade it to the top grade. It has smaller variations of that before it’s fully upgraded. There are other ships that exist that you get in story or might randomly get some other way but most of them are much more specific in usage so I never use them. A really thoughtful OPTC player might be able to do a better job properly utilizing them than I do. But in the beginning like where you are, I’d just spend all my Cola on Merry Go and ignore the other ships, and set all my crews to that ship.

[gibbearish]

this post is long as fuck already so i'll try to be brief here (no promises)(update: failed) (update: turbo failed) (update: mega turbo failed holy fuck how does this keep happening) (update: gdi), but i've seen a small trend in the notes and i just want to say that if you fell for the original post, please don't beat yourself up about it too much. my main point here is that this post was deliberately set up in a way to mislead an audience with no involvement in the discourse into automatically distrusting a specific side by piggybacking off of predstrogen's banning. op knew that people would already be in a frenzy about a very public display of transmisogyny, which makes it easier to slide things like this under the radar.

a few people now have commented that the reason they shared the original was because they wanted to elevate and support transfemme voices during a time of open hate, which is good and you should do! but that doesn't mean you shouldn't also be critical of the things those voices are saying, or ask yourself what their motivations might be for saying it. because while you might have excellent intentions in boosting things like that, people like op can and will use those intentions against you. and while i said earlier that this post wouldve set off my alarm bells even if i wasnt familiar with the context already, truthfully i have no way of knowing if i would have or not. i'd like to think i would, but i have certainly fallen for internet misinformation in the past and likely will again, so i'm very much not trying to come across as like. "you fools didn't think it through good enough and now look at you. not like me, for i am cool and smart," that's a big part of why i explained this as thoroughly as i did is specifically because the lies are hidden very well from an uninvolved audience. the blame for you being misled lies with op, not with you.

with that though, i should also address something op claimed in an edit (one that i do not have the energy to to break down fully the way i did this one right now nor do i think there would be much more to gain from that beyond what's already been pointed out by others in the replies), which is that that this post wasn't intended for a larger audience and was instead only intended to reach her direct community, not the wider trans community. i'm going to go ahead and classify that as another lie, and an incredibly blatant one at that, because it. literally is not directed at other transfemmes. like, explicitly. it is directed at nontransfemmes to tell them about an issue transfemmes are facing, albeit a very skewed version of it. like, that just. is who the post is directed at. transfemmes do not need to be told about the issues they themselves are facing, especially in the format of an introductory brief, and if there was something else op was meaning by "direct community but not the wider trans community" then i can't see it to address it. regardless, considering her also saying "i didn't want this many eyes on my writing," i feel pretty comfortable in concluding that the real target audience was "anyone who doesn't know i'm lying and can point out the holes in what i'm saying."

if she really didn't want eyes on her writing, she wouldn't have formatted it like a PSA. there's a reason why my post is formatted and phrased in a similar way, i AM addressing a wider audience with no prior knowledge of the situation and i DO want eyes on it, despite my bone-deep reluctance to get involved in discourse ever again. if i didn't want people to see it, it wouldve just been a vague post about how it sucks seeing misinformation being spread, in fact i did make one of those when i first saw this yesterday. but then i changed my mind and decided addressing it in full was something that needed to be done, so i specifically formatted things in a way that would (hopefully) be accessible to others rather than just yknow. unorganized rambling and forgetting the alt text. and while i do reserve the right to turn off reblogs if things get out of hand (no worries yet), i wouldn't then turn around and try to pretend it was never meant to be spread in the first place, ESPECIALLY if the reason i turned them off was because Too Many People Were Pointing Out I Was Lying And I Couldn't Keep Up With It. although i guess if that was the reason i turned them off i probably would say that since i'd be the kind of person to make a post like that in the first place. if lying gets you into a mess then surely more lying will get you out right?

anyways. don't feel too bad if you fell for a post that preyed on the fact you wanted to help, but also remember what you learned from this. when something big happens that has a lot of people angry for very good reasons, don't let that lull you into assuming everyone else who's mad is on your side or is giving you the full story. be extra critical of if the posts you see are actually good faith attempts to spread awareness, or if it could be an attempt to use the anger already clouding your judgement to push you towards beliefs you would otherwise not be open to. and critically, take all of this and apply it also to the ideologies behind posts like these. don't just keep an eye out for lies, but also ask yourself what it means about a group's ideology that they have to lie like that in the first place. if they have to misrepresent things this badly to get people to spread the things they say, you should be questioning the things they say, because that tells you if they said what they actually meant, you would probably disagree. the notes on this post have plenty of examples of people saying they didn't even notice this was the underlying meaning and were disgusted to find out they helped play into something like that, and that is precisely /why/ it was hidden the way it was, was so that people who didn't know better would just take them at their word and not look any closer.

remember, "you are not immune to propaganda" isn't an accusation, it's just an acknowledgement. i'm not immune to propaganda either. i just happened to be resistant to this specific strain because of prior exposure, so now i'm sharing those antibodies with you! and sitting there feeling bad you got an infection doesn't help anyone, so now that you've recovered go forth and give them a rigorous workout. and in turn when i next fall prey to a strain i haven't run into before i hope someone else will share theirs with me.

and with that, if you are able to call out misinformation and feel like no one else is bringing it up, you can be the first! you can start the conversation! if you look through the notes or the asks ive gotten today, you can see a bunch of people saying they noticed these things too but didn't feel like they could say anything since no one else was bringing it up, and sometimes life is just. heaving a deep sigh and saying "well somebody has to fuckin do it" and getting your hands dirty. and thats not to say theres any shame in not being able to do so, and i leave it up to you to determine what "able" means for you, as there were certainly a lot more factors that went into it for me beyond "can i physically type out these words." if you're not able to call it out yourself then you can still do your part by learning the signs for things like this so that you don't pass misinformation you come across to others. but if you ARE in a place where you can call these things out, it very much is worth it. and even small things can help, it doesn't have to be a full comprehensive breakdown ten times the length of the post itself. shit you can just slap a "that doesnt sound right but i dont know enough abour stars to dispute it" on there and hope that someone else who knows more is encouraged enough by you starting the conversation to break it down for others. and even if no one person picks it up, a hundred people all saying "hey this doesnt sound right" can be just as revealing as one person listing out a hundred things, yknow?

but i mean also, if youtube proves anything it's that people love freakishly long breakdowns of extremely niche things that don't effect them, so like. if that's what the lord has put on your heart to do then don't be shy about listing out your hundred things baybee, embrace the gibbearish lifestyle, the people want your word avalanches, grip it and rip it. anyways, i don't know how to conclude this. um. take it easy but take it. yeah that kind of fits the theme here, sure. ok love u bye

so this post has been made unrebloggable now (shocker) but ive been feeling the need to address it since i saw it on my dash multiple times, so let's explore how lying on the internet works. more specifically, how blending truth, lies, and omissions to whip uninvolved people into anger works, because i think this is an excellent example and that pointing out the misinformation and the tactics used to spread it here is important, both in correcting the specific falsities but also in helping recognize similar tactics in the future.

so here we have several things that are technically true: staff has been very openly shitty to trans women for a long time and them banning predstrogen is clearly part of that, there is currently a movement regarding discussing transmisandry/transandrophobia, transmisogyny and transphobes sending transphobic asks is by far nothing new, and baeddel is/was a slur. however, among all of this are half-truths, unprovable speculation, or outright lies made to make you believe these events are originating specifically from transmascs.

firstly, the transandrophobia movement has been drastically misrepresented here in the same way it has been for the whole argument, "they're just trans MRAs" has been repeated so many times now that i'm gonna be hearing it in my dreams when i'm 80. i can understand not being willing to address the nuance of that whole discourse in one post that isn't directly focused on that, i'm certainly not, but in this example it's not unwillingness to address a complicated topic, it's a deliberate misrepresentation to frame one side of the discussion as The Evil Bad Ones That Can't Be Trusted. additionally, this post IS about that discourse and is just pretending it isn't to mislead a wider audience, so refusing to address it at all beyond this brief mention is deliberately misleading people about the goals of the group because They're The Other Side Of The Discourse. "transmisogynists" is used as a buzzword here, it doesn't actually refer to Anyone Who Hates Transfemmes, it refers to Transmascs Who Discuss Transmasc-Specific Oppression Using A Word They Coined To Point Out That Queer Spaces Have A Big Problem With Masculinity and just. doesn't tell you that's what it means, relying on the structure and framing of the post to create the Transmisogynist = Transmasc association in the audience's head so op doesn't have to say it outright (and of course the implied Transmasc = Transmisogynist association that follows because creating THAT association is the Actual Point of this post). the mentions of transmascs in this post are designed to look like afterthoughts, op says "typically those who espouse transandrophobia" to make it look like they're saying there's other people they're referring to here too, but almost everything in this post draws from the transandrophobia discourse. some random cis transphobe in texas has never heard the term baeddel in their entire life much less used it in a debate about transphobia, this is an intercommunity argument through and through, but op is trying to mask the fact that they're just referring to "transmascs who disagree with me specifically" and make it look like it's part of a wider trend. and again, i'm not going to go into the nuances of transandrophobia here, but i highly recommend reading some of the theory on it by @nothorses (x) and @genderkoolaid (x) because the "theyre just trans MRAs" argument kinda just collapses under its own weight as soon as you look into it even a smidgen. i've linked a couple broad overviews there but they both discuss it frequently and in-depth, specifically nothorses has a pinned post linking to many different discussion threads that i would recommend checking out if you do want to learn more about what the actual conversation surrounding these words is.

so, after framing the movement this way, they go on to say that the reason predstrogen was banned wasn't /just/ because staff has a long and established hate boner for trans women, but because the transandrophobia movement was teaming up with TERFs to mass-report her and other transfemmes, and implies that this is part of a deliberate conspiracy between Transandrophobia Truthers™, TERFs, and staff. you'll notice that there are no, say, screenshots of transmascs saying theyre deliberately reporting her or of that they're working with TERFs, behind-the-scenes lists of people who reported a certain account, or any evidence for this beyond "she was a trans woman, they're trans men who hate trans women, she got banned, so these must be related". which i find especially funny now given that photomatt has continued melting down about this since it happened and made it pretty clear it yknow. was just part of staffs ongoing hate campaign against trans women that has been going on much longer than the transandrophobia debate? and that maybe the fact that The Literal CEO is having a personal meltdown about this might explain where that could be coming from or at least why it's been allowed to continue for so long, moreso than any individual users reporting someone could? but i digress.

who reported what account is completely unprovable as a casual user unless people directly admit they did it, so to bring it up like this begs the question of what actual reasoning they have for saying it beyond trying to tie a current display of bigotry into an unrelated discourse. that's not to say it's impossible people who discuss transandrophobia were wrongfully reporting her, because again, thats something we have no way of knowing, and the internet is a shit place so i wouldn't be surprised. but given the circumstances and the rest of the lies here, i have my doubts about this being an actual yknow. Thing That Happened rather than just another lie to make people mad at transmascs. now one could make the argument that op wasn't saying transmascs are /deliberately/ teaming up with TERFs/staff, that "teaming up" was just a poor choice of words to refer to multiple groups who happen to have the same goals in mind at the same time but aren't actually coordinating with one another, but given the deliberate misinformative slant of the rest of the post and the overall phrasing in this section, i have trouble extending that grace. regardless, however, that doesn't change that who is reporting who isn't something verifiable, so stating it here as a confirmed fact is disingenuous at the absolute best, and a lie chosen specifically because it's unprovable at worst. if op /does/ have proof that transmascs have been teaming up with TERFs to get trans women banned, not including that with this post is just uhhhhh dumb, and if op /doesn't/ have proof then Why Would You Go Around Telling People That's What Happened Unless You Were Lying To Them On Purpose With Ulterior Motives.

next, op goes on to discuss the rise of the term baeddel. now as i said before, the truth here is that it certainly was a slur and certainly can still be used as one, again the internet is a shit place so i would be a fool if i tried to say "no one is using this as a slur". however, this is once again a drastic misrepresentation of the situation. baeddel's rising use is due to certain trans women reclaiming it and aligning themselves with the original group's politics, namely that femininity is good and masculinity is bad (aka terfism 101), with the added caveat that by abandoning femininity for masculinity, transmascs are evil and betraying devine womanhood and their community by putting more Evil Manhood into the world. of course that in turn is a drastic oversimplification of their politics and i highly recommend checking out this post with an actual in-depth exploration of the history (and without my added flavor), but the important part to note here is that this is not a term transmascs just Started Using one day because they hate transfems so very much as is implied here, its use is directly tied to a group of people saying "hello, here is what i am, and here is what this word means about what i believe," so others went "ok, these specific beliefs are called this." bringing up the fact that it historically was a slur is misdirection here, when you look closer this is almost a 1 to 1 translation of TERFs crying that TERF and radfem are slurs because People Don't Like Their Politics And Therefore Them, so the name for their politics is used negatively, so therefore it's a slur. that argument just has a little more oomph behind it this time because It Was A Slur Originally. and again, that isnt to say no one is now using it as a slur, the rate of decay for online discourse is ridiculous so it being boiled down to and used as "evil transfemme" has certainly already happened, but to act like /every/ use of it is a slur is literally just a lie, when you self-identify with a term based on your shared politics with the original group then you do not get to claim everyone using that term to describe those politics is doing so exclusively to attack you. also this part is entirely speculation but given that op's url is basically just. baeddel switched around to dae bel, i would hazard a guess that they perhaps are indeed aware of the origins of its re-use? but again, that's entirely unprovable and based just on wordplay, but like. given the Everything here i wouldn't be surprised. now, there's definitely an argument to be made about calling users baeddels based just off of their politics when they don't personally self-identify with it, if that constitutes calling someone a slur and if TIRF should be used instead, but crucially, that is not the argument being made here. the argument being made is "ANY AND ALL use of this term is calling someone a slur," and that literally just Isn't The Case.

finally, to tie the whole post off, op reminds us 1) if you hear anything bad about any trans woman ever, it's probably a lie to make her look bad, and 2) if you hear anyone say anything about transandrophobia, disregard everything else they have to say because they hate trans women. not "be critical of the things you see or get sent" or "be on the lookout for things following a certain pattern," a unilateral "anything bad is probably fake and anyone who uses the bad words is probably evil." that is not something someone does if they are genuinely trying to raise awareness of an ongoing trend, that is what someone does when they want you to turn your brain off and be mad at a group no matter what they say.

so yeah, in summary, do be critical of the things you see and be on the lookout for certain patterns, because sometimes people will just Lie to you. or, sometimes people will tell you portions of the truth while leaving out crucial bits so that you'll come to the conclusion they want without anyone being able to say they lied to you without typing up a thirty paragraph long hell post. transmisogyny is absolutely a problem on this site and there are 100% valuable conversations to be had about it and its presence within the trans community, but this post is not that. this post uses real transmisogyny and the wrongful termination of a trans woman's account as set dressing to say that it was all because of evil transmascs who run the trans community behind the scenes conspiring to take out transfemmes, so you should ignore anything they have to say because All of it is secretly motivated by transmisogyny. they're never discussing transandrophobia because it's something that actually effects them, they're doing it to hurt trans women by saying they have it worse. they're never telling you about shitty things a trans woman did to spread awareness, they're lying to make her look bad, or even if it's true they're only talking about it as part of a hate campaign because she's trans, they wouldn't care otherwise. they're never using a specific term because People Use That Term For Themselves, they're calling someone a slur because they hate trans women. there's always an explanation you can think up that ties it back to transmisogyny, and op says that instead of assessing all of what someone says and the context behind it to determine if that's what's happening, you should assume transmisogyny is the answer and refuse to engage any further as soon as you see a word you've been told is bad.

this post is discourse recruitment masquerading as a public service announcement that doesn't offer you any routes to actually learn more about what's going on, it just tells you Here's What's Happening, Here's Who's Evil And Should Be Ignored, And If You Disagree You're Also Evil And Should Be Ignored. content of the actual post aside, i think anything framed that way should be taken with a MASSIVE grain of salt and this would have raised my alarm bells even if i wasn't already pretty familiar with the arguments, people who genuinely want you to know something just because it's good to know will give you options to learn more or encourage you to actually use your critical thinking to assess things, not tell you to sit down and shut up and ignore anyone who disagrees with them.

anyways i guess tldr

[sciapod]

Dear community of readers who are not female,

While I fully appreciate OP's message and try myself to be more mindful about this when writing and posting my own work (especially re: stating clearly which genders or neutrals are involved), I would like to air a possible unpopular opinion:

If what you want to consume doesn't exist or there isn't enough of it out there, write it yourself.

I say this with every ounce of love and compassion and support I humanly can.

I think many creators, myself included, create what WE miss more of; what we enjoy consuming and want to consume more of. What we feel is missing in the world. And most importantly, what we ourselves have a palette for (hopefully... The more experienced the creator, the more knowledgeable they are of their own palette/taste/style).

Non-females have every means as females to create what they want to see in the world. Please participate and create it yourselves. 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

If you're a whole community agreeing that there aren't enough of what you all want, well, you're A WHOLE COMMUNITY who ought to motivate each other to get started and lead the way! Do your thing! And I'm sure there will be plenty of female creators who will root for you and cheer you on as you go.

A personal note on being a female writer and writing female characters/female reader-inserts:

Most of what I write, I write from personal experience and is an attempt at expressing a female experience. That is my default, my 'ground zero'. It's where most of my inspiration is rooted. Then, occasionally when I read through my first draft, I consider if this experience I'm trying to portray can maintain its meaning and impact (or gain more so) if the character is male/neutral/anything else than female. If yes, I will run through and edit and make sure that the perspective is consistently male/neutral/otherwise. But ONLY if it fits the story.

Readers, please don't take offense if we aren't meeting your needs. This may be a hard pill to swallow, but it's not really our responsibility. Especially if we aren't paid for it (which, mind you, we aren't, when it's fanfiction and posted here). Of course we aspire to write for an audience and of course we're interested in meeting your needs, but yeah... If we force our work to fit a mold that isn't natural or compelling to us, it simply won't work. The strain will be obvious and the story won't read well.

So again, with love and compassion, I ENCOURAGE YOU to delve into your own desires and CREATE WHAT YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD. Do it as a critique of us, if that helps you. Note everything you hate/that frustrates you about how we consistently write female characters rather than male/neutral/whatever you want to read, and invert all those notes into what you WANT IT TO BE.** Your perfect story!

That would truly be the best case scenario.

**Inspired by the Creative Pep Talk Podcast episode, "Give what you didn't get". I urge you to listen to this and then set your own pen to paper 📄🖋️

I am looking forward to reading what you create ❤️

Dear female Fanfiction writers on Tumblr,

Please consider writing for gender neutral, or even male readers, and readers of other genders. We exist, and it is very hard for us to find stories on this website.

If you only write for female readers: Please don’t just say that it’s a ‘character abc x reader’ fic. It can easily misinterpreted as a story for gender neutral readers. Specify the gender of the reader on your fics, that shows some support as well.

Give blog recommendations of writers who write for readers of other genders as well. That helps a lot.

But most important: Show your support. Do not exclude readers who aren’t female. 

Sincerely,

The community of readers who are not female