#i dont know what fucking tags to use im just trying to get more traction

[wellsbering]

i generally don't post about my personal life on here, but i went to high school with ariel and watching her cystic fibrosis progress so rapidly in recent years has been devastating. she's entering hospice today and is raising money to pay for her care, as her insurance won't cover all of her medical bills and as we all know healthcare in the united states is unbelievably expensive.

please donate if you're able, and please reblog this so it can reach other people.

[toziers]

can you explain what's going on right now? i keep seeing big IT blogs talking about some discourse or something but i have no idea what they're talking about other than it involves you lol

alright i like. i truly do not like having diScOurSE out in public because i’m not one to air out my dirty laundry 24/7 but seeing as how it was brought into public against my will i feel like the least i can do is clear up the situation for those who’ve been seeing the posts. 

i’m putting this under the cut bc it’s long. tws for some biphobia, brief mention of transphobia and, at the end, a rape mention. 

so if you don’t know: hi, i’m migz, i’m an it fandom blogger. its okay, i know, its really cool. part of my shtick here is that i like to turn normal thirst tags into works of art for the sake of comedy. perhaps you’ve seen some of my highlights from my “fhg” tag - perhaps your brain has been spared. either way, it became kind of “my thing” around the third or fourth week (mid nov) of me having this blog. at first, i tagged just about every ask i got mentioning the thirst tags with “bill hader” - they had to do with him, so why not tag him? it would draw more like minded people! about two days into that i got a message asking me to tag my nsfw. i am a big dumb idiot, and apologize for not initially doing it. i havent had a following bigger than like 10 in several years and completely spaced on basic etiquette. so by the end of november i was tagging everything applicable  with “notsfw” and “bill hader”. 

now you’re caught up.

on december 1st i got this message from user billhaderanti:

now i want to start by saying i absolutely was in the wrong here. i didn’t even think about how many people were being subjected to the asks i was getting - especially ones who had no idea they were all jokes. i don’t track the bill hader tag, so it just didn’t even occur to me - that’s ignorance on my part, and to anyone who was subjected to the terrors of me before my tagging system: i am genuinely sorry. i relay the same sentiment in my response, though you can tell i’m on edge.

and they replied:

clearly they Were offended by it but thats.. not the point. at this point, im feeling Really weird about the whole interaction, but still understanding, because again - i GET it. i know my posts are gross - that’s the point. it doesn’t make it excusable, though, which is why i understand why people are offended. so i responded with the only solution i Knew would keep us both safe and happy posting on our own blogs. 

so i thought this would be the end of things! i’d been pretty anxious lately already since i’d started to receive anons telling me i was gross and whore-ish for thirst posting in this way (i delete all of those, so if ur thinking about sending one, i guess no one’s stopping you but it won’t be seeing the light of the dashboard). i’m unsure if it was immediately or a few hours later, seeing as how i have a bad concept of time and the post-dates are right on the edge between nov 30 and dec 1, but i went to their blog - because anyone who has been on the internet knows the opportunity to vague post is near irresistible. and...what do ya know

fair! it’s their blog. however i am an emotionally fragile egg girl and immediately got freaked out. the odds that they were the only one who thought this were low. and, again, i’ve been very open on my blog about how important it is to respect boundaries; my posts are absolutely prone to breaking those boundaries people have created for themselves. 

so i made my own, semi-vague post, letting my following know (and i’m pretty sure i’d answered asks about it before, but this is going to be long enough w/o me searching those up too) that i understood if they wanted to block me or unfollow or whatever - people need to create their own safe spaces. the tension is pretty clear in the tags, i’m not trying to hide that. i felt that the way this woman slid into my dm’s was pretty abrasive (just my opinion/how it made me personally feel) and i let myself be a lil emotional about it in the tags of my post.

alright! maybe this is the end. maybe we both go our separate ways and post happily on our own blogs... except it’s not the end. later in the day (some of this was happening like 1/2am, so now its Day day, i believe - again, not good w time passage lol)

clearly, i’m upset. my groupchat double checked that i didn’t get too emotional in my response - did i mention im anxious about discourse lol - and apparently.. it did the trick. she didn’t message me again. great. it was over. 

at this point, i decided i needed to make an even bigger change. so a few days after i’d calmed down i created an entirely new tag for my thirst posts so if people hadn’t already hidden the notsfw posts or just blocked me outright, they’d have a third option to escape the madness. at this point, id had my blog about 6? weeks, but there were still 2k posts for me to sift through - some of them were completely untagged. i also had to do it post by post, because one of xkits features - the mass re-tagger - was getting blogs deleted for some reason, and i wasn’t going to do that. so i spent a few days going through all 2k+ posts, adding the “fhg” tag. 

YEEHAW! a brand new tagging system, no more hopping into the bill hader tag (minus one or two really funny, not super explicit asks, like the bill hader farquaad meme), and, tbf, i’d completely put this woman out of my mind. i don’t seek out drama and do my best to stay in my lane. yesterday, i checked my activity for the first time in awhile since id put out a couple new original posts that had started to get traction and i Love reading tags. i noticed a mutual had @’d me, and realized i havent checked my @’s in...ever, maybe. i see a post from my good pal billhaderanti. 

since i dont follow them and never check my @’s, i’d completely missed it. however, once i did see it, i was horrified. id gone through all that fucking work to keep my blog My Blog and also respect everyone’s boundaries and it still hadn’t been enough. i’d been awake for almost 24 hours and went. a little crazy. and i didn’t reply immediately because i just had no words. i sent it to my friends because i... i just wasn’t going to be able to figure it out myself. 

there’s a lot to unpack in this post alone, but whatever, i’m gonna put my own grievances with the immaturity of 1. making a callout post to begin with when i’d been nothing but civil 2. making a callout post about something as (in the grand scheme of Life) minor as some tags where i refer to a someone’s genitals as a “whack pack” and 3. making a callout post in such a rude way - aside. at the end, she calls me (and whoever else!) a demonic mlw (man loving woman, we assumed, and then later confirmed with a post further back on her blog). 

which - yeah, we started scrolling. at first we were looking for more vague blogs, and then we just...started finding things. billhaderanti is a self proclaimed lesbian separatist, which... fine. but it’s already pretty clear that this woman hates me on some level simply because i am a bi woman (demonic mlw, remember!) which is just. damn man i can’t believe we are still fighting the biphobic fight lol. so the more we scrolled, the more we uncovered - and not just the biphobic / vaguely mtf transphobic things they posted (or put in tags), but we also found that they had their OWN thirst tags. certainly not as hyperbolically comedic as mine, but they were there, talking about his body and his person the same (and, frankly, a bit creepier for other reasons) as mine. 

there’s one post in particular that snatched my wig in it’s creepiness - and i say creepiness in the sense that it feels personal. like this woman feels like she knows bill to some degree where she can say these things. my tags have always had a sense of distance, as they’re written for humor. and maybe this particular post was written for comedic purposes, but it doesn’t read that way, and if it WAS, then she has no right to call ME out for MY comic tags and posts. 

i’ll let it speak for itself, mostly because i don’t want to read it again. 

i also won’t be going through her blog again to find the posts with biphobic and other Interesting:tm: tags because there are plenty and i just really! want to be done with the whole ordeal! her blog is public and i’m sure you can all find it and look to your heart’s content. 

feeling a bit feral and a bit pissed off now that we knew the depth of how rotten this woman’s vibes were, a couple of my pals made a post or two similar to what my tag’s are like except turned up to eleven (if possible) - and tagged them with “bill hader” (and notsfw!!). yes, a bit childish, but at this point, the entire situation was childish, and making jokes was truly the only way we were going to get through it. another vague post went up on her blog soon after.

talking down to us, calling us children, and then for whatever reason calling us virgins... whatever, weird post. around this time most of us (est) went to bed, because it was nearing 3 or 4 in the morning. 

and then today happened. i woke up fresh and ready for the day after a wonderful 4 hours of sleep and found that jane had made an incredibly intelligent post in response to the situation. i won’t ss it, but i’ll LINK in case you missed it. attached there in the reblog is my own response. i think they can speak for themselves. 

after that, things were kind of jumbled, since i wasn’t online a lot and when i was i was Not checking my activity simply because i was afraid of what i’d see. for the most part, it ended up just being support (which i am very grateful to all of you for - it means a lot that you all enjoy my content to any degree). 

there was some more vague posting from both “““““sides”””””” of the “““““argument”””””” - mostly just people restating the fact that this is a public space and we should All be aware of how we effect others. i still hadn’t heard directly from billhaderanti, so i assumed we’d all be dropping and disengaging and moving on. i still wasn’t blocked, though, so who really knew what would happen. 

eventually, it culminated in this last post. tw for mentions of rape

i’m going to start by saying that 

1. there are nearly no teenagers that were involved in this. im turning 23 in january and most of my friends are 20+. maybe one or two are 19. 

2. none of us sent any sexually violent asks - most of us didn’t send asks at all. i believe one or two of my friends admitted to sending asks however they assured me their nature wasn’t bad; as far as i know, everyone remained civil in whatever went on (again, unclear to me as to what was being sent; no one was actively posting or talking about it. if billhaderanti wishes to elaborate, they can, but i don’t have anything to put in). 

3. before i finish this, i would like to apologize to billhaderanti. as a comedian - not just my stupid tags, i mean in real life, too - i know that humor can hurt. it’s not always funny, it’s not just stupid hahas. sometimes things that are supposed to be jokes just hit people differently and cause bad things. i recognize that. i never meant to trigger you (if you’re reading this) or cause you any severe mental/emotional harm. i apologize for my humor bringing up your trauma, and i never meant for that. regardless of my own thoughts and opinions about the nature of my posts/the thirst tags themselves, they hurt you, and i’m sorry. 

anyway, i’m going to wrap this up (i’m bad at endings, what can i say! steven king and i took the same writer’s class!). if you read all this... sorry. i probably won’t be taking any asks about it, because i find the whole “drama” of this to be stupid and rooted in some seriously biphobic issues this fully grown woman has. 

tldr; i attempted to contain my blog so this woman could exist and function safely on her blog, but it wasn’t enough for her, so she called me out, and then some of the fandom called Her out for being biphobic and mean and overall just immature about the situation. as of now, she’s yet to block me, though her and her wife have blocked a few of my friends. her wife continues to clown on my friends. this post was made for clarity’s sake. the end, i’m getting a drink. 

[mugmyremarsh]

getting (back) into trading

have YOU just joined (or rejoined) animal jam? do u wanna get into trading? do you just know absolutely NOTHING about rares? cool. im gonna try help you to the best of my abilities :'D also for this ill be typing pretty damn normally just so that its legible so yea!

first things first tho! what do you know about rares? im talkin like. do u know what a long collar is. do you know what its worth.

your answer is PROBABLY at least a BIT. which is sick! good for you (*not sarcasm) but if your answer is smth along the lines of. absolutely fucking nothing to a little bit then may i suggest: reading up on the aj worth wiki. i only rlly recommend this if you dont know a whole lot. bcus the sites listed worths are not really the most accurate but they can be a good way to get a vague idea of the shit show!! id reccomend starting with rims n then working your way up cbs -> dbs -> (short wrists) -> long wrists (etc)

alright alright! next. do you know what things are worth? how many dbs should you trade for a good wrist? what shorts are fair for a green long? (lol idk why but that soundz kinda funnie)

if u dont think you know the answer to those questions then id recommend !!!! going on2 instagram unfortunately. the animal jam community is at its peak there i think (the animal jam amino can be kinda useful too).

what you wanna do there is just see what kinda trades ppl r accepting n stuff. the aj community there posts trades a LOT n theyll ask people to comment smth like o/f/u. o/f/u is outdated for some reason n they use something else. o/f/u stands for over/fair/under btw. jus checked- now theyre using g/f/l standing for good/fair/loss. so yea! most trades on the tag are for ajpw so :] i guess!

another way to learn is just through practise. what are people willing to accept and what are they declining? this one can be a bit tricky because some people are very picky with what they accept but overall? still pretty solid

btw the learning process can take about a week or so!! but also im slow.. at things. so hopefully itll be quicker for u!

finding people to trade with.

this shit is HARD. most jammers just go into aldan or wootmoos den. specific places in aldan are coral canyons, temple of zios, bradys lab (big boys only). ofc these places r only sometimes full of people. places which for sure have ppl is about any jamma township. trading parties are also popular!!

if u wanna be a cool kid u can post ur offers ~online~ main place id go to are the aj worth wikis and comment on either the item you are offering or that youre offering for ;w; makes sense right. you can also post your offers on instagram (tagged with animaljam) or the animal jam amino. i unno theyre both p good options.

actually getting shit 2 trade. well if ur gonna trade u need shit 2 trade ykno?

if youre a member, like every other person will say, i recommend the forgotten desert!! just host it or find sm1 else hosting it. it doesnt usually take very long for it to fill up. another thing- finding a group of people who will do it over and over again w you so you dont have to find new people every time.

if youre doing tfd (the forgotten desert) you wanna avoid doing the purple crystals. they waste time and u still get shit prizes from them. there were like. myths that youd get a headdress if you did them.. not true. jus do not bother w them. have your map open when you play tfd so you can see where youve already been n stuff, playing with audio helps cos youll hear a sound effect when youre able to collect a shard (useful for yellow 1z). its possible but unlikely that youll get a spike but i mean hey! i got my first spike from tfd!!! it was a yellow long! also be sure to pick up ground chests. there was a rumour that opening those would worsen your prizes which again. isnt true lol.

if youre a nm then i think people tend to recommend replaying the first adventure over and over again. i dont rlly have a lot to say abt this. its pretty simple.

and ofc :) the third way 2 get rare. the most... well i unno how to describe it but its something. ENTER GIVEAWAYS. you can find giveaways on instagram and youtube. honestly takes nothing to enter them and you have a chance of getting good stuff!!!

AAAND if youre artistic!!! enter art contestz!!! these dayz people barely enter art contests meaning that you have a higher chance of winning!!! and also! think about setting up animal jam commissions. post your art on the animal jam amino to get traction, people are more likely to see your commissions there!!! finding art contests is best on instagram though.

alright!! thats about all i have to say.. might add more in the future. but another thing. if youre trading then TRADE. offer for others peoples stuff. dont just sit in aldan and say unwanted on trd. alright. thats super not efficient!! also dont resort to scamming people? thats an asshole move.

next time! i wanna write abt how ppl subconsciously treat nms and unrare looking people while trading!!! ill link that here if i ever write it lol.

[yoshi-p]

everyone and their dog is doing it and everyone is absolutely allowed to share their opinions so i want a turn but first let me clarify:

hello im yase, been around since 1.0. I am of turkish and nogai descent and i can speak fluently in tatar, turkish but my english doesn’t hold 100% so i will be all over the place.

Unfortunately this will all be word of mouth and may be taken as vague posting, but I have experienced issues since the release of 4.0 and would like to give my opinions. I want to let this all off my chest this is just a huge vent basically so i guarantee my english will be terrible.

the most important point: NEVER EVER SPEAK FOR ANOTHER CULTURE. NEVER EVER SPEAK ABOUT A CULTURE YOU DON’T KNOW. YOU HAVE SPREAD FALSE INFORMATION AND I AM SO HURT.

another point is ITS A VIDEO GAME GUYS (does not apply to everything but some people really need to take a step back because people are concerned.)

Here’s the hot topic I’ll talk of first: garleans. I personally do not play one as I prefer to play characters that would never be involved in a sense with the political agenda because in real life im too stupid to comprehend anything like that so i wouldn’t even know how my character would behave with the hot topics. I really do think people need to take a step back and see that everyone who is putting in their input is making solid points but personally I would never compare them to nazi germany though I see why people are generalising. I always saw it as tsardom of russia with the use of roman influence as well, something obvious in naming conventions and the way the ranks/monarchy(?) works but it’s not so clear what the main influences of most places in this game if you have a look at the bigger picture. Without like full on spoiling, its weird to have this view to me with the knowledge that ascians are behind this. Are you implying anyone who plays or was influenced by ascians is also under this umbrella? 

Also why THE HELL WOULD YOU TAG SOMETHING KNOWING IT WOULD GET A LOT OF TRACTION AND RESPONSE THEN BE LIKE “you guys misunderstood, I was expressing my feelings” lol no. “ I don’t understand where this is coming from, and at this point, I don’t really want to.” then why did you even fucking bother do it in private dont tag it.

You are COMPLETELY valid to feeling uncomfortable, it is fine because with how much of this world we have there will be aspects some of us don’t like. You are not inclined to involve yourself with someone if they roleplay as a garlean but you do not need to start publicising it in a way that will paint the community in black and white when its truly a wider spectrum.

YOU CHOOSE WHO YOU INVOLVE YOURSELF WITH AND WHO YOU PLAY WITH, PLEASE GET AWAY FROM PEOPLE WHO GIVE YOU NEGATIVE FEELINGS OR YOU’LL SPREAD IT TO OTHERS.

from that initial and very brief tagged post there popped up many others and new discourse is arising, opening discussions about many things which is better then being blind to it all. but if you have personal grievances with someone and you state its over, let it be over. It’s not healthy behaviour. it’s also troubling to see someone complain a lot about the game and continue to play, no one is forcing you or holding a gun to your head. take breaks if you need to and play less frequently. like, real life is so much more important and there are people in this community that prioritise relationships with players etc.

Also, please stop fucking talking about mongolian/turkic/turkish culture like you know things. 99% of the big mouths in this community are americans. like majority are white americans. 

over the course of this expansion i have had many people of varied backgrounds share with me some terrible experiences and i myself have seen some truly stupid shit. 

WE ARE HERE TO HELP YOU LEARN OF OUR CULTURE AND WHERE TO CONTINUE DOING SO. DO NOT INTERPRET MEDIA AS ACCURATE REPRESENTATION OF CULTURE.

it is absolutely not hard to tag a post and ask around, someone will pop up. I’ve been doing my very best to let everyone i know that i can help with learning about my culture or to find someone who would be more then happy to explain and share with other cultures. But when you go off of a documentary you saw of Genghis khan or only know of the tourist white people scenes of istanbul you as a community say some TRULY dumb shit.

I like to try and be patient because i myself when approaching someone of a culture i admire and am curious about i want that in turn. But if you say to me things like “Ainu aren’t real” or “Tatar people have nothing in common with tribes from the Altai mountains” its hard to do so.

FFXIV regions are not just “Germany” “Turkey” “Mongolia”. If you think this, it’s clear to me you don’t know shit and are too lazy to explore, further just google shit its not that hard. I had someone tell me that my people could never be in this game since its “Straight up mongolia” fucks sake NO ITS NOT. The designs vary and i can see the differences in simple things like words because i actually bother to do research even coming from a turkic culture. There were some beautiful little things dropped that linked to not only my people but others like Uyghur and Altai. The only place in FFXIV i think could only have a singular influence is Kugane, because from a foreigner’s perspective that’s already interesting enough. Many people have grievances and real issues with how SE has handled Doma’s influences and no one ever talks about that. Representation for asia in media has turned into this mess of specific east asian countries, the trio that even then gets categorized into China/Japan with brief mentions of Korean culture. 

Its frustrating. There are people who are happy to teach you. Who are willing to show what is wrong with the picture.

I have read several posts about Turkey/istanbul/Antalya. Yall fuckin weird you guys seem to think its in U.A.E or some shit with how you act. It’s in the Mediterranean/Europe/Asia/Middle East and there is no such thing as a specific looking Turkish person. You claim everyone is specifically white/brown, HELL NO. It’s a mixed nation and that’s the history of the land, if you had ever fucking stepped in turkey and spoke to any person on the street they’ll say their heritage that lead them to there. People claim Ala mhigo’s influences are turkey but i have yet to see that. As someone who has lived there and has heritage there and is strongly connected to that culture, i dont see it. sure the ala mhigan gown had patternings but thats also present in my nogai culture too because parts of turkey’s society descended from the line of the Kayi tribe. Just fucking LEARN TO READ GUYS. None of you guys even know what the altai mountains mean and i could sit and explain over and over again if you let people SPEAK.

Look at Thavnairian items. We have outfits that are completely different, a full length dress and then a bustier. you can’t start generalising things in video games to be one culture you have to realise most places in this game have several influences. We don’t know a lot but everything we have been given has been varied enough to pin point it to ONLY one influence.

I don’t want to just keep going about this simply because im growing frustrated.

The thing with Viera complaints. I think some are valid but some are stupid. For one as I make this post it hasn’t even been confirmed so there is no reason for policing Viera to a severe extent. Considering all the Ivalice content in game has been an alternate universe kind of thing its dumb as shit. But feol viera being made without understanding the knowledge that people who have played rw picked up is quite frustrating. As a community, its important to help people when we have information that others may need that they cant understand the context of.

I know people are worried about them being fetishized, that is my legitimate fear too as a huge ivalice fan. But this is a repeated cycle especially when we consider generalizations like miqo’te especially seekers and belly dancing or when au ra arrived and people thought xaela were genghis khan basically. 

The game is not solid, there are so many holes in the lore and the plots and i know people hate that but we fill the gaps with our own opinions and theories. While I understand some people think we need to move forward in 2019 because “japan is xenophobic”, its a very difficult thing to do. THEY DO HIRE PEOPLE FOR CULTURE ADVISING. THEY TRAVEL OFTEN AND DEVELOP WITH THIS. IT’S NOT LIKE THEY WENT ON GOOGLE AND SAID “yeah a japan land would be fun” they literally have people hired specifically for this stuff. however, at the end of the day its a company that has yet to show it can evolve with the times. Its becoming more and more evident with the recent patterns of main titles in FF and side projects having so many issues in story/lore/management. remember 1.0 basically died being absolute garbage and this is salvaged from that.

its really late and i had a terrible evening so i may not be making the most sense but theres more important things to worry about then to make this game a miserable experience when it could be a huge learning opportunity for everyone. There’s no need to generalise people into categories because of characters they choose to develop but its important to note with majority of people standing up higher on the pedestal are those speaking for the minorities groups that have direct influences in the game.

also lol if you fucking say ainu aren’t real to me one more time i will fucking throttle you

[harmicist]

the torbcourse, version 2.0

around 2 weeks ago, i made a very long post about the amount of hate/types of hate being directed @ the character Torbjorn from overwatch.  I actually never expected it to gain much traction, given i only had about 100 followers at the time it was posted.  

thats the backstory.  it now has over 7,000 notes on it. if you never actually saw it going around on tumblr, here’s the permalink to it if you’re interested in what i said on it.  the tl;dr of it though, is that most of the hate has some root in ableism.  

Torbjorn has dwarfism.  i got too many people asking for the source on that, and so i’ll just say it up front. someone who medically has dwarfism is beneath the full grown height of 4′10.  Torbjorn is only 4′7.  regardless of any and all references and poking at world of warcraft “dwarves”, as dwarves dont exist in the real world this classifies him as the very first little person who is a playable character in a videogame, to my knowledge.

I should clarify before I begin with v. 2.0, as i should have then, that im not referring to how he’s annoying in game to play against.  the amount of responses i got that “i only dislike him because i dont like playing against him” is overwhelming.  I’m referring to comments about how he’s unshippable, the complete and utter lack of him in fanart and fanwork, to calling him ugly or claiming that he’s undeserving of any of the things has has, from his family to his wife to his friends.  those things are entirely unrelated to gameplay, and entirely related to how people producing and consuming overwatch fandom content perceive him.

I am gonna put the rest under a “read more” bc mom, holy fuck, this is a long, long read, but i tried to be as concise and answer the various rebuttals i’ve gotten over time that weren’t total nonsense.  Additionally, if you could spread this that would be nice, because, damn.  If i leave one good thing on this fandom without a doubt I do want it to be a reevaluation of how we treat certain characters.  

i think that deflection is actually a good bouncing point to start off with.  So many people say that “I only hate him because of gameplay” and i just want to say that is very much patently wrong. The most hated character to play against in overwatch, to my knowledge, is Mei.  Symmetra is quickly coming in as a close second because of how overpowered she’s become after the massive buff blizzard gave her.  And yet, you see tons of fandom content with both mei and symmetra.  Yes, originally, torbjorn was a very hard character to counter because of hero stacking, but after both nerfs hit and there was the elimination of hero stacking, he’s become far more manageable to play against and has been entirely eliminated from the meta.  The same is true of bastion- who also is included in overwatch fanworks frequently.

I cant say for lower ranking players at all how that works, but as i am a diamond player the meta is pretty close to what i actually play.  Frustrating? sure, but no more so than bastion, who is also difficult to play against in the short turn but if you counter correctly isn't much of a hassle.  Its actually to the point both bastion and torb need a bit of a nerf to bring back onto the player map.

However, there is an unprecedented amount of hate directed at him considering all of these factors, essentially I’m saying he’s actually less frustrating than other characters who receive more content than him and another character hated for the same reason also doesn't get the same treatment as torbjorn.  the reason im saying that is, is unconscious ableism.  I’m not saying you’re consciously thinking “he’s ugly, im going to add more hate onto an issue because of that,” im saying that there is a complex process where your anger and frustration towards his playstyle is aggravated by an unconscious bias against disabled people.  

Think of it in a different context- you are in a checkout line at the grocery store.  The cashier is going slow, because they are moving slow because, say, they have downs syndrome or are perhaps are an amputee.   the issue is yes, they’re being slow and you, in a humans inherently selfish manner, care about your time as well.  there’s that disconnect in your mind because you dont want to call someone the r-slur or point out that they are having trouble bagging because they dont have full use of motion.  (though some might not share your unwillingness, lord knows i’ve heard grocery store employees get harassed before).  But you are still irritated with them in a way they are undeserving of receiving.  Even if you keep it quiet while interacting, sometimes as I’ll hear my mother say after she leaves, “I understand they’re trying to be inclusive, but does it have to get in my way like that?”  Rather than being irritated at being slow, it transforms into irritation that they are disabled and therefore getting in your way.  

the tl;dr of that is that yes, even though you’re not necessarily angered/made upset by the disability it can become an aggravating factor in response to another irritant.

Moving on- the “creepy” trope as applied to torbjorn.  I would personally like to thank @necromin for this comment, even though I cannot tag you in this?  

It is true!  There is a massive trope and history surrounding the idea of dwarfs/little people as being depraved or perverse, or imp-like.  Our willingness to apply how some people use torbjorn to the character itself is not a thing that just happens in a void.  How fandom interprets the intent of his voice lines also does not occur in a void.  

Another commonly said thing in the tags was that oh, i only hate him because he hates omnics!!! and as many, many other people pointed out, that in itself is a fallacy, because plenty of characters in overwatch dislike omnics.  From Zarya (who outright threatens both Zenyatta and Bastion), to Junkrat (Also makes threatening lines towards the Shambali monastery), to Reaper (tin cans, a dime a dozen), there is a long history of hating omnics for a variety of reasons. Interestingly, he’s not even so much a “violent racist” as some would have him made out to be.  His line to bastion (I hate working with those talking tin cans!) actually does make some sense, because he did have to fight against them in the war, and can you blame him for not wanting to go into the Shambali monastery or Numbani after seeing what large numbers of omnics grouped together can do?  Far more violent omnic “racist” lines are Junkrats- (If these bots want to go into the light, I'd be more than happy to help), and (So we're delivering a bomb to scrap some bots and I'm getting paid for it. My kind of job!)

However, much like how characters who are also “annoying” to play again dont receive the same amount of flack, there is a hypocrisy in that a lot of the people who claim not to like torbjorn because of this, love and produce content of other characters like reaper, or zarya, or junkrat.  and so the question that lies therein, is “why does torbjorn get hated for this reason more than those other characters?”  the answer is back at the end of the second paragraph.  

And a lot of people call it “omnic racism”, but as a poc blogger who can state it far more elegantly than i can, racism is a very inadequate, if not inappropriate word to describe the relations between omnic and human in the overwatch world because of why omnics are hated.  they started a worldwide war that threatened the very existence of humanity, caused total chaos for an undetermined amount of time.  Racism is an inappropriate word because this implies that racism as we know it has a cause that is justifiable,  since “omnic racism” is rooted in a very much justifiable history. and thats just not true.  The same can be said of x-men being used as an allegory for racism, because there is a fear that is understandable, when in irl racism it is very much not.

but that is just a sidenote, and not really the focus of this.  

a lot of people also asked if this was a joke.  or treated it like a joke.  I am very much serious about this, and a lot of people agree with me that it got very much out of hand, and some people who were guilty of falling into the ableist route of mocking torbjorn for being ugly/unshippable apologized for it or admitted this opened their eyes some to their own internal biases.  Others still insist that hating him is just a meme.  Then, Lets move onto what i am talking about that i count as hate, but is a bit less obvious to see unless you’re looking for it- which is, the erasure of torbjorn’s character in fanworks.  first i’ll start with the math of it, and then i’ll go into other things of note.

If it is just a meme- than riddle me this-why can you quantitatively conclude that he has significantly less content of him than practically any other character in the game? 

The overwatch archive of our own has over 10,000 fanworks on it now.  The two most common pairings on it are mchanzo and reaper76, each steadily on their way to 2,000 works apiece. The 3 most-tagged characters are all original members of overwatch- McCree, Reaper, and Mercy.  8 of the 10 most tagged characters if you include Amelie and Fareeha, had some major relation to the original overwatch or were members.  9 if you include hanzo, being genji’s brother.  Each of them have over 1,000 fics apiece where they are tagged, and really more like 1,500-2,000+ fics apiece where they are tagged.  (Jesse with almost a whopping 4,000 fics where he’s tagged)

Torbjorn only has 437 fics where he’s been tagged.  Of those fics, he’s not in any of the top 10 most tagged relationships.  Compared to any of the other 5 founding members of overwatch that we know of, that is very strangely low.  Reinhardt is tagged in roughly 1,100 fics, Ana, 1,200 fics, 76, over 2,000, and reaper with over 3,400 fics tagged.  

As a side note, the only character with less fics than him is Bastion, who only has about 240 fics where they are a tagged character.  But this isnt necessarily not understandable- they have no spoken lines whatsoever that arent some sort of robotic onomatopoeia, or omnicmatopea, as i might call it.  Even sombra has more fics than him by a slim margin, but it strange considering she’s the new character, and he was one of the very first ones to be released.

The other interesting thing of note is the dramatic drop off in fics after Winston, who also has a relatively small number of fanfics compared to his role as one of the main characters of the series.  of the 7 characters who have less than 1000 fics to their name, 4 of them are women, 3 are woc, and 2 have confirmed disabilities that are unconventional in video games on top of being amputees.  

but please, tell me again that people aren’t interested in torbjorn because he’s a white man.  say it to my face while we both can see the enormous amount of content for Junkrat, Reinhardt, and 76.  

Its harder to quantify this, but when you read as much overwatch fanfiction as I do, you start to pick up on a few trends that are subtle but important to denote nonetheless.  First off, is that when in fics where the “original” members of overwatch are a friend group, Torbjorn is oddly left out.  Second, in the fics that take place prior to overwatch’s fall and there is some sort of science/ engineering/ mechanical fix involved, the role usually is given to Winston- even if it doesnt make sense timeline wise to have Winston even be there, in Overwatch.  

as another side note, an easy benchmark is this- in your overwatch fanwork, if Fareeha Amari is under the age of 18, then Tracer, winston, and genji aren’t yet members of overwatch.  Tracer and winston are both younger than Fareeha by a handful of years (tracer by 6 years, winston by 3) and Genji joined after he turned 25 (if Fareeha is 18, then genji is only 21)

Ok, but if Winston isnt a member, then who would be the one to do the fixes and technological stuff in Overwatch?  that should be easy, given that Torbjorn is both an original member of overwatch and a world class, genius engineer who is stated in canon to be the designer behind a great deal of Overwatch’s technology.  So why do i see time and time again that he’s just not present in these fanworks?  (See the end of paragraph 2).

The same is true in fanart.  He is mostly not included in comics where it would make complete and utter sense for him to be there.  If its a comic about the golden 7- dont exclude Torbjorn from it. (the golden 7 being, gabriel, jack, ana, reinhardt, mercy, mccree, and torbjorn).  As another person pointed out, he’s likely considered practically family to people like Mercy or Reinhardt or Pharah and Ana.  If I see a comic with 6/7 of them in it, and I dont see torbjorn, i do wind up very, very suspicious.  Not of the artist purposefully saying “I dont want to draw torbjorn because he’s ugly / disabled”, but of unconsciously devaluing his character and place in the series because of those aforementioned biases and so erasing him from the fanwork altogether.  

The same thing with him being “shipped” in fanwork.  I referenced this anecdote in the original post, and the numbers confirm that essentially no one is producing content with him in a relationship in fanwork.  It is not always so overt as people saying he’s disabled and therefore unattractive, but rather people finding him unattractive because he’s short, because he’s disabled.  

and lastly, returning to the point of him being a WOW dwarf and him being an uninteresting character for the special kind of ignorant-

“they just dont care about him so they dont bother reading about him, believe me, most people who make fun of torbjorn think hes a fantasy kind of dwarf rather than a character with dwarfism lol

im not saying that fandoms have not disliked a character purely because of their disability before but seriously, its kind of blizzard’s fault for making a character with dwarfism look literally a stereotypical fantasy kind of dwarf without a very interesting backstory or personality.”

Im not tagging this person, im not interested in “callouts”, but this person had both the accusation that people who dont like him because they dont care about him, and so they dont bother reading about him and then say explicitly they just dont care about torbjorn because they believe he’s without a interesting backstory or personality.

From literally everything about his character, how on earth can you conclude he’s not an interesting character with a good personality/backstory?  He was one of the 6 founding members of overwatch, of the 6 he was the only one with any sort of background in causing the crisis, even though he voiced disapproval of intelligent AI to businessmen who were looking to make profits over the safety of others.  In his profile, it says that his worst fears were confirmed when the omnic crisis began.  How come there arent a ton of fics about him seeing his worst fears come to light when that clearly would be a very interesting topic of fanwork- and a very common theme in Overwatch canon and fanon.  (Ie, mercy fanfics and addressing her resurrecting Gabriel, Hanzo’s regret about listening to orders and murdering genji.)  Thematically, the idea of your past coming back to haunt you places torbjorn in with the other characters very well. Similarly, in recall fics, torbjorn seeks out even now, post-fall of overwatch to right the wrongs he made in his youth with the creation of the omnics that are huge.  Storywise, torbjorn is actually both incredibly important and intriguing.  Thematically, his character also fits right in with the various themes established in the lore amongst the older characters.  

Overall, though, this person is correct, because yeah.  People dont read about him because people dont care about him.  But the question is why don’t people care about him enough to know that he’s actually a character who fits right in with everyone else?

And the answer to that question, is on some level, undoubtedly, ableism, due to his disability making him “unattractive” and therefore “unshippable” and therefore unworthy of most attention in fanworks, or his disability making him “unattractive” and “unworthy of friendships” and therefore not included in platonic works with the characters.  

Anyways.  I’m still tired.  Hopefully I communicated calmly what I meant + more people will be receptive to understanding what I’m trying to get across- that regardless of intent or the original reason of why they hated torbjorn, his physical disability is worsening insults and magnifying dislike of him, and causing him to be erased altogether in both fanart and fanfic.

[ss-shitstorm]

tagged by @praise-kink-anon

Why did you choose your url?

ive used it since 2007 or something after getting banned for the 10th time for shitposting on gaiaonline and was running out of ideas for names. The SS part was based off the SS Anne from the first pokemon games tho

Any side blogs?��one for communicating with my lil cousin that I gave up on using after I accidentally messaged her with my robot porn one for a week without realizing. she an adult tho it cool

How long have you been on tumblr? beginning of 2016

Do you have a queue tag? I dont know what that is I barely understand how to use this website in the first place

Why did you start your blog in the first place? found more NSFW TF stuff on here than any other website. Looked nice.

Why did you choose your icon? My blog has been  mostly broken since the great porn ban and I gave up trying to get it fixed. a few months ago I as fucking around with it out of curiosity just to see if it would save a change and lo and behold, for the first time in years it allowed something other than the default and that something as the j00cy Riker shoop I had saved on my desktop. I am too lazy to change it.

Why did you choose your header? 

I have no header that I am aware of

What’s your post with the most notes? 

fuck I dont actually know. 

How many mutuals do you have? 

I reflexively follow anyone who follows me so I don't know anymore.

How many followers do you have? idk

How many people do you follow? idk

Have you ever made a shit post? ask Gaiaonline

How often do you use Tumblr each day? a few times a day I want to stop but its my only social media and a source of quick stress relief.

Did you have a fight/arguement with another blog once? 

no I am too scared to voice opposing opinions bc I am an insecure fuckboi who needs everyone to like them

How do you feel about “you need to reblog this” posts? 

leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Like you know when you were a lil kid and your parents would tell you to do something and that would just automatically make you hate the thing? I have this reaction to it, even if the post is something I agree with. There are better ways to get traction.

Do you like tag games? yes but they intimidate me and I put them off forever and forget about them im SORRY

Do you like ask games? wat that

Which of your tumblr mutuals do you think is tumblr famous?

all of them

Do you have a crush on a mutual? Yes. I have wanted to fuck everyone Ive ever met ever. I hate it. Send help.