i already know what the story behind the picture is but please explain it anyway we need to educate the masses
oh my god thank you for enabling me ive been thinking about this all day. regarding this post i made yesterday and this classic image (which i actually just found out was posted seven years ago today!)
basically as can be read in the post at BigFest in 2016 somebody had what i believe was a fan-made prop based on the laptop from season 2 of gravity falls. alex hirsch attended this convention and decided to type in the password to the laptop. we never learned the password in the show so lots of people were excited to find out!
a HUGE thing to note here is that journal 3 was still months away from releasing and in fact while a couple pages had been released as promotional material it was still being worked on until, like... gosh i wanna say may is when they finally started printing it? don't quote me on that though my point is that this was all taking place pre-journal 3 and, therefore, many fans were still operating under the (sensible) impression that the laptop which
had been designed by fiddleford
had been built by fiddleford
had fiddleford's name on it
said "PROPERTY OF F" on it (at this point it had been established through promo images that "F" referred to fiddleford)
was assumed to be fiddleford's by, like, four different main characters
was given to and used by fiddleford following s2e7
fiddleford presumably knew the password to
would also belong to fiddleford. right? i mean logically. logically, guys.
so when alex hirsch revealed that the password had been "STANFORD" all along, people thought that was a little bit... well
of course, a couple months later journal 3 would be published and it would say that the laptop had actually been STANFORD'S, not fiddleford's, and that he had made the password his own name. so technically i lied in my earlier post, there IS a heterosexual explanation for this, but imo it's still bullshit. like sorry i don't believe for a fucking second that stanford "i need to encode all of my messages in multiple ciphers and write in invisible ink" pines would ever make a password as simple as his own name. he wouldve picked like something with six different layers of alternate meanings and also put it through atbash at the VERY least. also as i listed above there is a LOT of evidence which would support the laptop belonging to fiddleford, as opposed to ford, which has this random retcon (and like... some of the computer keys are different colors? i guess?? idk that bit was stupid) as its only supporting evidence.
my theory is that, while writing the show, alex and the other writers had intended for the laptop to belong to fiddleford, but for whatever reason, when they were writing the book, they decided to make it ford's instead. i want to make clear that i DON'T think this swap was motivated by homophobia, or as a reaction to seeing people interpret the password in a gay way. by the time that this photo was taken several promotional journal pages had been released, so it's safe to say that even if they were still adding the finishing touches to the book, it was pretty much in its final stage and in fact might have already started printing (i think the first photos we see of the book itself were posted like a week or two after bigfest). so to assume that there's a correlation there is both unfounded and extremely unlikely.
now, the stargazing scene reprint, on the other hand
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My refusal to finish haikyuu by reading the manga is finally gonna pay off when I get to experience Karasuno v. Nekoma for the first time in a theater next month, procrastination is a great idea actually.
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I saw a post that reminded me of this which is why I'm talking about this out of the blue but whenever I see the 'do canonically male characters you headcanon as trans girls count as female characters' debate pops up I remember this one event from the Voltron fandom where an f/f ship week banned genderbending and people lost their SHIT about it, SPECIFICALLY because the mods were like 'we want people to actually focus on the female characters and not submit already popular m/m ships but genderbent'.
This was years ago obviously so standard 'my memory may be fuzzy' disclaimer, but while I believe part of the reasons the mods banned genderbending was bc they believed it to be transphobic (which you could actually argue against and is a stance I don't agree with), and ppl were using that as leverage to argue, but that's not what ppl were actually angry about. Also, I believe the event was run by antis, who had a 'no age gap ships' rule in place, and people were mad about that, but like. The only f/f ships at the time with even kind of an age gap were ones involving Pidge, (which, again, for the record, I never personally gave much of a shit about), and yeah I do believe those were banned and ppl were pissy about that, but most of the ppl arguing with the ship restrictions were doing so in combination with the genderbending restriction, bc what they were mad about wasn't actually about a major female character being banned from the f/f ship week for Ship Discourse Reasons.
What they were angry about was specifically being told their genderbent m/m ships didn't count because they did not, in fact, contain female characters. Arguments were made that, because it was genderbent, it was now f/f and should be allowed in the f/f ship week. The mods went no, those are still canon male characters and popular m/m ships, and we're trying to run a week about the female characters and f/f ships because they don't get enough attention. The mods were fending accusatory and argumentative asks for ages and told people to create their own f/f ship week if they didn't like how theirs was run, which. People did.
A counter f/f ship week was organized but with less restrictions, specifically the restriction on genderbending was lifted. Now, I never followed Ship Week B, because I don't care about shipping and I was there to see more attention given to the female characters, which allowing genderbent m/m content seemed pretty anathema to. But I did check in on it out of curiosity, and to no-one's surprise, Ship Week B contained very large amounts of mostly genderbent sheith, with some shiro/lance and lance/keith thrown in. Like, I'm sure there was also actual f/f content (I remember there being some Pidge/Allura specifically), but I remember very little of it.
And as I alluded to in the large Nuance Disclaimer paragraph: yes this was the Voltron fandom, yes the Disk Horse was involved and made everything far more explosive than it probably would've been otherwise, and also, if the mods hadn't explicitly put the genderbending restriction in the rules list they probably would've gotten maybe a few genderbent m/m submissions tops. It's pretty obvious that a large motivation for Ship Week B was spite, and as someone whose username is literally spitecentral on AO3, I can confirm there is no stronger motivation for fan content than spite. I don't actually think that genderbent m/m is such a major problem in f/f spaces that it needs to be explicitly banned to avoid having it overrun ship weeks.
But even taking all that into account, this whole thing was completely fucking bonkers. Regardless of your opinions on the mods' opinions on genderbending and the Disk Horse, asking ppl not to submit genderbent m/m content on account of it not containing canon female characters is completely reasonable, and the fact that people got mad enough about it to create a whole seperate f/f ship week SPECIFICALLY to allow genderbent m/m content is insane. All the f/f ship week asked was for people to pay attention to female characters for once, and people threw a fucking tantrum about it and not only point-blank refused, but created more content for the male characters out of spite.
So yeah that was kind of a formative fandom experience to me that taught me:
People will take any excuse possible to avoid paying attention to female characters.
People will make literally anything, up to and including female character-centric fandom events, about men.
And that's what I think about any time I see people get offended when others point out that headcanoning a canon male character as a trans girl isn't the same as engaging with female characters.
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(whole post is /nm)
i think it's a tragedy that espresso and madeleine's already sparse characterization get diluted so much by fans' projection of classic bl tropes onto them.
it's an undeniably universal truth that characters often get boiled down to their most notable components by fans in order to be easier to digest in casual, non-analytical scenerios. which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be when said character starts getting mischaracterized. which is the case for madeleine and espresso's fanon interpretations.
the most egregious example of this is the nigh-complete omission of madeleine's narcissism and vanity, which is his defining characteristic in canon. very rarely do you ever see madeleine portrayed as anything other than an oblivious himbo who is either a macho, manly man or a loud theater kid. the fandom completely ignores how utterly selfish he acts in almost every single canon storyline he's appeared in. and i do mean almost every.
in his bond with knight cookie, he deliberately cuts in front of him in line for the blacksmith because he thinks he's too important to be waiting behind some peasant boy. in his bond with angel cookie, he's baffled by the fact there isn't an entire procession dedicated to his mere arrival. in the guild storyline, he constantly brags about the dragon being no match for him and demanding a fair fight from a mindless cake monster of all things. in the promo art, he thinks signed autographs are an appropriate gift for someone.
the only times he's seen not acting selfish is when he's with espresso cookie, which is supposed to be the very thing that makes their relationship special. espresso is the only one he's shown to value as an equal; in their bond story, he calls espresso a comrade, he's excited at the prospect of doing great deeds with one another, he's disappointed when espresso doesn't share his same enthusiasm. and that's not all, he tries to help espresso up on his sugar horse, he asks him what's on his mind when he seems lost in his thoughts, he presses him to stop overworking himself and get a good night's rest for once. he cares for espresso. he never does anything like this for any other characters, not even his aunts—he simply sits back as they pepper him with love and affection that he so shamelessly indulges in, which they allow. if anything, they're enabling his narcissistic tendencies—which, and i repeat, is supposed to be what makes their relationship so special. keyword being "supposed."
most reduce their dynamic to a simple opposites attract narrative, where one is a grumpy, intelligent loner and the other is an energetic, oblivious extrovert. which does bare some truth, espresso is very intelligent and he prefers working alone most of the time; madeleine is very cheerful and can be very unaware of how he affects people. but the fans make it so those two traits eclipse his actual characterization.
they erase his very noteworthy flaws so he can fit into a dynamic. which, ironically, cheapens the espresseleine ship significantly. it just makes me so sad.
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New ko-fi commissions post!
(my kofi link is riiiight here so you can’t miss it)
$3 per kofi, so $3 per character you request! Of course, the more you pay the more detailed and nice I’ll make the work, but you can also DM me about more complicated commissions if that’s how you wanna do it.
Also please be patient! Sometimes it takes 3 days, sometimes stuff happens and it takes 3 months! But do know that it will get done!
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