#if you have a character/ship/piece of media that makes you so angry every time you see it

[leidensygdom]

The ways in which being asexual feels isolating

I've been pondering whether to post this or not, but I figured out I wanted to explain a bit of this experience.

So, I could go on a very long tangent on how being asexual is usually a lonely experience, and how much I've been otherized here and there- Specially in real life. How the same people that claimed to be queer (or allies) had been much weirder about my asexuality than they were about me being bi/pan or whatever.

But I think I wanna talk about how something like that bleeds in every aspect of socializing, even down to something like fandom. I stay away from fandom usually- I like to look at cool fanart and that's about it. I hate discourse, I hate drama, I hate reading people getting worked up because they're treating fanon as canon. But there's one thing I've noticed, over and over, that just sends me off my rails.

And it's how fandom tends to treat asexuality (or aromanticism). So, you get a character in some piece of media that explicitly, unequivocally, states they're either ace, aro, or both. "I do not have interest in a partner", "I don't desire to have sex nor do I enjoy the topic", whatever. And as an ace person, I do appreciate being able to see myself in media- There isn't many chases where something is established that bluntly.

Now, you decide you want to check some fanart for that. Fandoms have this tendency to make absolutely everything about shipping, even when the media they're basing it in does not revolve about that (and it's annoying, because a lot of times people aren't interested in the actual themes- It's all reduced to shipping). Suddenly, you notice people treating the aforementioned character as anything but aro or ace. It's all about shipping. "This person interacted with this other person in a way two friends would, but we gotta make this their entire personality now". Some people may instead go for "well, maybe the character is not having sex, but they're probably an absolute freak about it, studies it extensively, has encyclopedic knowledge about it-"

Now, there's of course sex-favourable aces, and that's completely valid, but it's already straying from what, canonically, the character had mentioned. Asexual or aromantic characters aren't really allowed to exist as themselves. People often see them as a blank slate to fill, to change, to fix. I could talk forever about how people react to real life aces like that. I've had people asking me incredibly invasive questions because they saw my lack of sexual attraction as something broken, something they could fix.

And I hate that! I think I'm allowed to say that I hate that! It's hard and unusual for media to cement an aro/ace character, because they're defined by the lack of interest for something, which is often hard to show. But when it does- No one seems to care. It's all shipping, it's all "well, he's gay in denial", "well, she's probably super repressed". If you took a canonically gay character and made them straight on a fanfic, you'd get angry people. Which is bound to happen when you erase representation that people identify with. But aro/ace characters are NOT even seen as queer, they're not even seen as "representation" by most people. You can erase that bit of it, put some god awful shipping on top, and people will applaud you. And it sucks!

I wish people would see being aro or ace as an identity worth respecting, not an identity that needs overwriting. It feels a bit too close to how people often treat aro/aces irl, and it sucks. It reeks of this sort of exclusionism, where "aro/aces are technically queer but it's queer lite at best, it's less interesting than being gay, and we kinda don't want them near us anyhow". Again, I've had far worse experiences about being ace than I have about not being straight.

Sorry if the post got long, but I hope this experience may at least resonate with other people who have been struggling with this, too. It has always felt just kind of lonely to be ace, and see how little people do even consider it an identity, even when it comes down to something like fandom.

[zoiched]

just a (not so) little rant of mine about canonxoc pairings

(A quick clarification on the beginning: all of that said below DOES NOT APPLY to those who just see people shipping their OCs with canon characters and walk away in silence cuz that’s not just their cup of tea. I rly appreciate that guys)

TW: mentions of really harsh bullying

I grew up on 2010s fandom community and some of ya could possibly remember that those times shipping canonxoc pairings was something of big mauvais tone and a reason to drown a person in public shame, bully them and give their OC a Mary-Sue label just because they are shipped with canon char, and thank god fandom community grew up from it, weeeeell, almost.

I myself am Russian and I, therefore, come from Russian fandom community, where in some places and in some fandoms, canonxoc pairings are still said mauvais tone and cringe, and every OC shipped with canon gets called a Mary-Sue in instant just because of that. I’m a big canonxoc/selfshipping fan and apologist, and I myself have an OC to ship with canon for each of my fandoms. And because of my constant fear of being mocked and harassed by canonxoc and fandom OCs haters, I never posted my art and fanfics anywhere/never commissioned artists to draw my canonxoc ships for a long time cuz I KNEW haters would come for me (cheers for my nowadays friends from whom I get support and appreciation with my fandom OCs and canonxoc pairings, you guys and girls are the best, love ya). I felt ashamed and wrong for my desires. Geez, I was mocked for having a fandom OCs canonxoc shipping even around my friends, and one of them actually BULLIED me for that, saying “gurl you need yourself a man or a woman to have some descent fuk with them so you could forget your narcissistic(?!) desire to insert your OCs into canon and make them smash with canon chars, it’s just your desire to romantic and smexual practice that makes you keep doing so” (DAFUQ??? Even if we are accepting this stinky rhetorics just for a moment, then what’s the difference between shipping canonxoc and shipping canonxcanon or ocxoc if we are sublimating our romantic and smexual desires anyway???)

It took me to 10 years or so to become a grown ass 25yo woman who obtained an ability to shoo away those angry toddlers who are trying to be a self-proclaimed morality police and put me to shame because I have a fandom OCs and canonxoc ships. You don’t like it that much you come to bully me, call me cringe and call my OCs a Mary-Sues for being a fandom OCs/bring in ship with canon chars? Oh you sweetie pie, why dontcha write to Hirohiko Araki/Brendon Small/Nikolay Dybovsky/Thomas Grip/any other person created my fav piece of media to let them know that my stuff is cringe so they could write me a prohibition warrant for my canonxoc ships then? Or maybe you are just pissed off to see my female OCs being in shipping with male canon chars because of your internal misogyny? (I’m not a radical feminist, God forbid, but I’m here for all cis/cishet women who love man and are called “boring straights” and “normies” for such a desire). Or you want to stick on canon of the media like it’s holy? Or you just want to assert yourself in any ways possible? Lift up your self-esteem by accusing something you consider “bad and wrong”? Solve those problems anywhere else and not in my and any others canonxoc shippers expense. Grow up.

(I found this picture I don’t remember exactly where, so if you an author, DM me so I could credit you or remove this picture if you want me to)

[highway-stars]

I FINISHED DEEP SPACE 9 HERE ARE MY THOTS ::

Absolutely fucking stunning series to the point where I'm like "why isn't this THE Star Trek ppl talk about in their daily lives" but like I get it. It def doesn't have the fun chaotic exploration vibes of the other series but IMO the characters and plots are so multilayered and interesting and so much can be said and explored about them.

But when it sucks it SUCKS. Which I guess is every Star Trek but like. God I hate the Mirror so fucking much. I haaaaaaate the Mirror. Also why did Miles O'Brien send his kid back in time after trying to acclimate her for like a week in that time travel episode that sucked so bad holy shit.

Captain Sisko favorite captain. Far and away the best captain. He's harsh and serious and makes really intense, tough decisions that MAKE SENSE for the position he's in. Picard can be a lawfully good goodie guy cause he CAN and the Enterprise is FUN. Sisko does not have that luxury and it makes him do things that are kinda shitty sometimes and also he's a GOOD DAD and I love him.

Kira worship all day every day 24/7 thank you for giving me a female character in the 90s that isn't just "OUGH STRONG LADY" and actually has weaknesses and depth and can laugh and fall in love while also being angry and ruthless and unforgiving. I love her. I worship her.

Odo was my fav for a while but I kinda hate what they did to his character towards the end. I shipped Kira Odo like I really did but once they were together there wasn't much there. Garak actually ended up being my FUUCKING meow meow sorry I love him like I get it he's precious I LOVE HIM. Pale Moonlight was one of the best PIECES OF MEDIA I've ever watched. Garashir forever.

Every plot with Quark actually made me like Ferengi SO MUCH. I fucking HATED the Ferengi during TNG, but DS9 made them really fun and just so ridiculous I ended up loving them.

Uhhh I have a lot more thots but this got long so idk send me a message so I can talk about My Man Garak

[culpeppercheckers721]

Turn Week 2024– Day 6: Crossover

Ok I initially came up sort of empty on this prompt again, but I give you a few things now!:

I know this isn’t really a proper crossover since Hamilton was in the show, but something that would’ve been fun to see in Turn for me was Abe and Hamilton getting to interact (even if it was totally plot irrelevant)!

I feel like they actually have… a decent amount in common, if you know what I mean. (At the very least, they’re both small and angry 5”7 men 🤪)

Now for something slightly closer to a crossover with other pieces of media, though both of these examples are closer to just regular AUs than crossovers I think(???) I want to shout out a Turn/National Treasure style AU fanfiction that I will simply never get over, Of Treasure & Treachery; this fic is honestly one of the funniest and cleverest concepts I have seen in this fandom so far, and not only does it have me laughing my ASS off every time I read it and picture Abe doing dumb shit as always (though you may say stealing the Declaration of Independence is particularly wild even for him 😂), it also has me going feral over the Townhull dynamic (since sometimes, you just wanna see your ship in ridiculous scenarios from pop culture films), and living for all of the Abe & Anna friendship it contains because that is a dynamic I cherish so much! It’s like I didn’t even know what I was missing before reading this fic, but genuinely, I wish we could have canonically seen them just be friends more, since when they’re not committing adultery together every five minutes, I do truly believe that Anna and Abe had underrated and wonderful platonic chemistry, if that’s a phrase, and I just enjoy their childhood friends connection and banter so much.

Once again, I cannot stress enough how hilarious this fic was to me. Maybe that’s because my sense of humor is wildly specific and unhinged, but I thoroughly enjoyed this writing so much, and I totally recommend this rollercoaster ride of a story for anyone seeking a good time!

(And an edit since apparently today was national kissing day, as much as I don’t want to spoil specifics there will be kissing in that fic!! Just go check it out!)

And finally, I’d like to introduce another AU based on a piece of media, this my own concept that I will hopefully finish someday— a crack-treated-seriously type parody of The Afterparty (the Apple TV series). The idea of matching each character to a specific film genre was something so inexplicably fun and exhilarating to me, so I do have a HEAVY heavy work in progress of this AU in the making right now, featuring, similarly to the original, a high school reunion afterparty turned murder mystery when one John Andre “mysteriously” dies 👀 Once again, it’s a very loose story as of now (though I do have a pretty extensive murder timeline written out 😂), but I figured this a somewhat fitting occasion to mention it given all the other creative combinations of Turn and other series that I’ve seen so far! If anyone is interested, I may very well talk more about it haha. Until then, I wish you Turn folk good luck on your other (more legitimate crossovers than this lmao) pieces of crossover content! 💕

[i-like-sticks]

2 and 10!

2. Are there any popular fandom OTPs you only BROTP?

I don't usually get involved in fandoms as heavily as I did years ago because that sort of shit landed me in a hot mess of trouble. The same goes with shipping. I usually prefer to keep my distance with all that noise.

But there are a few so called fandom OTPs I do see and go "Eh, more a BROTP for me".

One being Barb x Poppy from the Trolls fandom. Like I get it. Its cute and I don't have anything against it, but I more prefer them as a BROTP then I do a couple. Trolls in general has a number of that for me. Same for FNAF.

SuperJail was another one of those fandoms that had a lot of shipping discourse with the Warden being shipped with everyone and everything around him. Me, personally, I just don't see him fitting with anyone for how selfish and childish he acts. BROTPs maybe with some of the main cast if he didn't annoy the hell out of some of them.

ATLA though... Oh boy, so many popular ships and I am like a good chunk is BROTP material for me.

But overall, I don't really involve myself in big fandoms anymore nor the whole shipping discourse of it. It's a bit pointless and tiresome for me.

10. Most disliked arc? Why?

I guess it really depends on the show/movie/whatever piece of media it is.

I don't much care for idle/filler arcs where literally its just the characters doing random shit for filler. A filler episode is fine every so often but when its an entire arc/season, it feels completely wasted and pointless. Like all that time just wasted on stupid shenanigans that really did not need to be seen.

Same goes for character arcs where a character is just spending the entire time being moody and mopey, angry at everyone who helps them and never makes an attempt to help themselves when people help them. But suddenly in the end they act like they knew this all along and just become great at everything. I really despise a rushed arc of development like that. It doesn't feel rewarding nor does it feel like the character is likable at all, but just instantly forgiven for their nasty behavior despite never saying sorry or anything of the sort. They go back to being mean and its just..meh.

And anything that is rushed/pacing is too fast, that almost all the info/lore is dumped on you in one go that you have no time to soak it in. ESPECIALLY, when its cast off as not important later on. Like, come on, dude. Really? It's so annoying.

[windydrawallday]

Hey. Thanks for the reply. My friend typed that. They get REALLY angry because of the Lockdown X Prowl ship, and I respect their opinion, thinking that Lockdown is an abusive individual who beats Prowl in an abusive relationship, but not attack and harass artists for that. Again, I'm really sorry for my friend. I just wish they would change.

If that first and last part is true: keep them in good company.

The way I read them, even if yeah made me very mad and were super rude (hating something and more if is fictional NEVER justifies what they did), put me too on the edge of feeling something off… like they were seeking something else and that all this shipping hate was just their nearer, easy outlet. That is why I decided to be patient and wait… and see if they could make a more approachable stand.

And believe me when I say this: invading the virtual space of a fellow human and making them feel like a criminal for interpreting fictional ideas that don't hurt anyone is never, EVER a way to cope with the fear and fury those ideas produce in you. Hate breeds hate… and then, hurt for both parties. I think there's something more under all of it, and making a boogeyman from a fantasy pairing to fight against is just the tip of the iceberg; I suggest reflecting more about it with your friend, in a critical and objective way. For me, reading this [wiki article] aided me a lot to expand my knowledge about the nature of the events and feels stories with "dark" characters and themes can provoke in people. Is a very complex and long theme. But if it helps to put some peace or open a new perspective in them, it's worth the time!

I'm not gonna deny the Lockdown in the canon is the prince of jerkasses in the TFA cast (Megatron is still the King coff) but the one I interpret under my wing is more of a petty rascal badbutt than anything else (I enjoy putting flaws and more grey morality to characters), so I can promise there's nothing abusive on my work (just a very tick-of-processor and tongue-tied bounty hunter).

I swear, I have my own blacklist of themes, characters, and things I don't enjoy or squick me… but what I gain in searching intentionally every piece of media that upsets me, including the non-canon work of others? What do I gain in telling others they are wrong for finding joy in what I couldn't because there's still something to heal in me but instead of seeking help, I purge my fears in the form of discouraging and confusing text?

N o t h i n g.

But I occasionally find those "boogeymen" and-- They scare me. Sometimes even makes me cry. But I don't fight them back by confronting creators. Is not the responsibility of creators for my safety. And they can make mistakes. We are imperfect. Instead, I open a new canvas or doc and depict smiles, cuddles, and soft kisses, I find soothe in taking control of what once made me sad and hurt. I make it mine. And no one can take that from me. The boogeyman now is just a silly colorful sock with a painted smile.

And this. This is something that everyone can do. And is something that enlightens and makes you bloom in true feels, even being productive if you like that haha.

But that's it. Thank you to you for leaving me this message! There's nothing more calming for me to have closure.

But for you two? Especially your friend: they need to find closure. And that path is beyond my power. Only they can decide if to keep stuck in the now or confront the boogeyman and paint a smile over it. It probably won't be easy but is better than sitting down and drinking from the bottle of poison that's hate, slowly dying inside.

Cheers, and good luck!

[slyveonwrites]

i. please please please do not interact with my account if you’re under the age of seventeen. this blog is probably going to be focused around sexually explicit / mature content, and having a younger audience view my writing makes me a little uncomfortable.

ii. if you decide to drop a request/commission me, i’m pretty much okay writing about every topic! however, there are a few things that i absolutely won’t write about, those being scat, pedophilia/age play, and alpha/beta/omega verse. i reserve the right to refuse anything i feel i can not do justice out of respect.

iii. as of now, i will accept requests on an inspiration standpoint. i'm really tight money wise, and so i will focus on getting commissions out in a timely manner.

iv. i will give any character a shot at writing, however, i am quite rust on male ! reader and mlm so please be gentle as i work on it. i do have a preference for afab bodies, but will write anything.

v. this is the obvious one, but don’t interact if you’re racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, antisemitic, just fuck off if you are a republican or a 4chan asshole.

FANDOMS

One Piece, Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen, Genshin Impact

DOs

x reader, f/gn!reader, oc x character, ships, rare pairs, crossover, mature, explicit, LGBT+, NSFW, fluff, angst, death, AUs, ask first in regards to dark content ♡

DONTs

minors, pedophilia, scat, necrophilia, non-con, abuse, vore

COMMISSION INFORMATION BELOW

I reserve the right to refuse a commission.

Due to my horrid schedule and even worse fluctuating inspiration, I will only take five commissions at a time so I can give my full effort and not rush. For others hoping to commission me, a waiting list will be available.

You will get a rough draft in the form of bullet points, to make sure I'm on the right path.

After the final piece is sent, the client may request minor revisions ( spelling/formatting/punctuation ). Major revisions, depending on the greatness of the revision, may cost extra. 

The final work will be posted on my tumblr and/or sent in PDF / Epub / docs format via email. You may repost it wherever you want (as long as it is for non-commercial use only) but you may not remove the byline that includes a link back to my blog (i.e written by Maokomi.) If you prefer that I don’t post it to my social media, please feel free to say so!

Completion time varies according to details of the commission + my own personal circumstances. Expect about 2-7 days (or more) completion time, depending on these factors.

Feel free to ask for updates, but please try not to make them too frequent!

Please be open to any questions I may have! I want to make this as best as I can for you, and sometimes I may need to ask for details or clarification.

If you have any ideas or scenes or prompts or whatever that you would like me to use as inspiration for the work, please feel free to tell me! They can be super helpful in knowing what kind of vibe you’d like :D the more details / points in the story you have in mind, the better !! moodboard for your oc? hand it over. a fic you read 3 years ago and what something inspired by it? give it. you get my picture.

That being said, please also manage your expectations! If you pay for only 100 words, do not give me so many points or details as if you expect me to write 1k+ words and then be angry when i leave some things out :))

1.) PRICE ; every 500 words will be $5 (i.e. 1000 words will be $10, 1500 words will be $15, etc.)

2.) PAYMENT METHOD ; cashapp . paypal .

3.) CONTACT ; you may message me through dms on this blog to request . please give me the character you want, a name for y/n, and the amount of words you desire . once i accept your commission , i will invite you into a small private server, where we'll discuss the important details.

4.) LIMITS ; i will write anything besides scat, race play, age play/pedophilia, and alpha/beta/omega dynamics. i do reserve the right to refuse.

thank you for taking the time to read this! examples can be found via my roleplay blog for now.

[deepeststrawberrymoon]

I'm sick and tired of people acting like a ship has to be canon for it to be enjoyable!

No! It doesn't!

Sure, it might be an added bonus, but it's not the be all and end all of its enjoyability!

Please read below!!! vv

Chances are, if you go into it with the mind set "My ship has to be canon or else I will be angry, and anyone who disagrees is wrong", it's not going to be very fun for you or for anyone else in the fandom.

But if you go into it with the mindset "This ship is nice and I really think the characters should end up together, but I recognise that it might not become canon, and that's ok", then most likely it will be a lot more fun for you and anyone you interact with!

Also, the creators of whatever media your ship is from do not owe it to you to make the ship canon no matter how much evidence you have or how much chemistry you think the characters have, ok? They're just trying to tell a story, and getting angry with them is utterly pointless. At the end of the day, the plot is usually the most important aspect of any piece of media. I'd much rather have a satisfying ending to the plot than to see my ship become canon, wouldn't you agree?

Perhaps I'm biased since most of the media I consume is more focused on plot and characters/platonic relationships so there's next to no chance of any of my ships becoming canon, but that's ok!! I know that some ships mean a lot to some people, but I guarantee you that you will have more fun sharing theories and headcanons and fanart and fics or whatever with other people who enjoy the ship than you will ever have seeing the ship become canon.

And a lot of the time when a ship is made canon it's still disappointing because it didn't happen exactly how you expected or wanted it to happen. At the end of the day the characters' fates are up to the creators, so if you really don't like that a certain ship was/was not made canon, or if it was made canon in a way you didn't like, then why not try writing fanfiction? Or, better yet, why not try writing your own original story? That way literally everything is up to you!

I guess another thing I'm trying to say here is that fighting over ships is absolutely useless. It accomplishes nothing, and usually it's just a case of two people having different views on a certain character. But guess what? That's what's supposed to happen! It's fiction, which means none of the characters are real, which means everyone can interpret the characters and their actions differently! It's really interesting seeing everyone's different views and interpretations of the source media! And wouldn't it be kind of boring if everyone just had the exact same opinions on every character and ship?

Just because you believe a character has romantic feelings for another character, that doesn't mean that everyone else has to believe that too, and it doesn't matter if it's canon or not because it's your opinion.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, even if it contradicts your own.

To summarise:

A ship being enjoyable is not dependent on whether it's canon or not. Instead, it's totally up to you to make it as enjoyable as you can by interacting with others who ship it, or even by discussing it with people who have opposing views! And don't be upset if your ship isn't canon! :)

Also, don't start ship wars because they're stupid.

(I'd like to add that this isn't anti-any particular ship, this is a message for everyone)

[c-is-for-circinate]

For a long, large part of my life, being queer in a media landscape--finding queerness in a media landscape--has meant theft.

I'm a Fandom Old, somehow, these days, older than most and younger than some, in that way that's grown associated with grumpy crotchetyness and shotguns on porches and back in my day, we had to wade through our Yahoo Groups mailing lists uphill both ways, boring and irrelevant anecdotes from Back In Those Days when homophobia clearly worked differently than it does now, probably because we weren't trying hard enough. I've seen a lot of stories through the years. I've read a lot of fanfic. (More days than not, for the past twenty years. I've read a lot of fanfic.)

When people my age start groaning and sighing at conversations about representation and queerbaiting, when we roll our eyes and drag all the old war stories out again in the face of AO3 is terrible and Not Good Enough, so often what we say is: you Young Folks Today have no idea how hard, how scary, how limiting it was to be queer anywhere Back In Those Days. Including online, maybe especially online, including in a media landscape that hated us so much more than any one you've ever known. And that is true. Always and everywhere, again and again, it's true, we remember, it's true.

We don't talk so much about the joy of it.

Online fan spaces were my very first queer communities, ever. I was thirteen, I was fourteen, I was fifteen--I was a lonely, over-precocious "gifted kid" two years too young for my grade level in an all-girls' Catholic school in the suburbs--I lived in a world where gay people were a rumor and an insult and a news story about murder. I was straight, of course, obviously, because real people were straight and anyway I was weird enough already--I couldn't be two things strange, couldn't be gay too, but--well, I could read the stories. I could feel things about that. I would have those stories to help me, a few years later, when I knew I couldn't call myself straight any more.

And those stories were theft. There was never any doubt about that. We wrote disclaimers at the top of every fic, with the specter of Anne Rice's lawyers around every corner. We hid in back-corners of the internet, places you could only find through a link from a link from a link on somebody else's recs page, being grateful for the tiny single-fandom archives when you found them, grateful for the webrings where they existed. It was theft, all of it, the stories about characters we did not own, the videotaped episodes on your best friend's VHS player, one single episode pulled off of Limewire over the course of three days.

It was theft, we knew, to even try and find ourselves in these stories to begin with. How many fics did I read in those days about two men who'd always been straight, except for each other, in this one case, when love was stronger than sexual orientation? We stole our characters away from the heterosexual lives they were destined to have. We stole them away from writers and producers and TV networks who work overtime to shower them in Babes of the Week, to pretend that queerness was never even an option. This wasn't given to us. This wasn't meant for us. This wasn't ours to have, ever, ever in the first place. But we took it anyway.

And oh, my friends, it was glorious.

We took it. We stole. And again and again, for years and years and years, we turned that theft into an art. We looked for every opening, every crack in every sidewalk where a little sprout of queerness might grow, and we claimed it for our own and we grew whole gardens. We grew so sly and so skilled with it, learning to spot the hints of oh, this could be slashy in every new show and movie to come our way. Do you see how they left these character dynamics here, unattended on the table? How ripe they are for the pocketing. Here, I'll help you carry them. We'll make off with these so-called straight boys, and we only have to look back if somebody sets out another scene we want for our own.

We were thieves, all of us, and that was fine and that was fair, because to exist as queer in the world was theft to begin with. Stolen time, stolen moments--grand larceny of the institution of marriage, breaking and entering to rob my mother's hopes for grandchildren. Every shoplifted glance at the wrong person in the locker room (and it didn't matter if we never peeked, never dared, they called us out on it anyway). Every character in every fic whose queerness became a crime against this ex-wife, that new love interest. Every time we dared steal ourselves away from the good straight partners we didn't want to date.

And: we built ourselves a den, we thieves, wallpapered in stolen images and filled to the brim with all the words we'd written ourselves. We built ourselves a home, and we filled it with joy. Every vid and art and fic, every ship, every squee. Over and over, every straight boy protagonist who abandoned all womankind for just this one exception with his straight boy protagonist partner found gay orgasms and true love at the end.

Over and over, we said: this isn't ours, this isn't meant to be ours, you did not give this to us--but we are taking it anyway. We will burglarize you for building blocks and build ourselves a palace. These stories and this place in the world is not for us, but we exist, and you can't stop us. It's ours now, full of color and noise, a thousand peoples' ideas mosaic'ed together in celebration. We made this, and it will never be just yours again. You won't ever truly get it back, no matter how many lawyers you send, not completely. We keep what we steal.

.

Things shifted over time, of course. That's good. That's to be celebrated. Nobody should have to steal to survive. It should not be a crime, should not feel like a crime, to find yourself and your space in the world.

There were always content creators who could slip a little wink in when they laid out their wares, oh what's this over here, silly me leaving this unattended where anybody could grab it, of course there might be more over by the side door if you come around the alleyway (but if anybody asks, you didn't get this from ME). We all watched Xena marry Gabrielle, in body language and between the lines. We sat around and traded theories and rumors about whether the people writing Due South knew what they were doing when they sent their buddy cops off into the frozen north alone together at the end of the show, if they'd done it on purpose, if they knew. But over the years, slowly, thankfully, the winks became less sly.

A teenage boy put his hand on another teenage boy's hand and said, you move me, and they kissed on network TV, in a prime-time show, on FOX, and the world didn't burn down. Here and there, where they wanted to, where they could without getting caught by their bosses and managers, content creators stopped subtly nudging people around the back door and started saying, "Here. This is on offer here too, on purpose. You get to have this, too."

And of course, of course that came with a whole host of problems too. Slide around to the back door but you didn't get this from me turned into it's an item on our special menu, totally legit, you've just got to ask because the boss throws a fit if we put it out front. Shopkeepers and content creators started advertising on the sly, come buy your fix here!, hiding the fine print that says you still have to take what you've purchased home and rebuild it with your semi-legal IKEA hacks. Maybe they'll consider listing that Destiel or Sterek as a full-service menu item next year. Is that Crowley/Aziraphale the real thing or is it lite?

And those problems are real and the conversations are worth having, and it's absolutely fair to be frustrated that you can't find the ship you want on sale in anything like your color and size in a vast media landscape packed full of discount hetships and fast-fashion m/f. It's fair to be angry. It's fair to be frustrated. Queerbait is a word that exists for a reason.

There's a part of me that hurts, though, every time the topic comes up. It's a confusing, bad-mannered part of me, but it's still very real. And it's not because I'm fawning for crumbs, trying to be the Good, Non-Threatening Gay. It's not that I'm scared and traumatized by the thought of what might happen if we dare raise our voices and ask for attention. (Well. Not mostly. I'll always remember being quiet and scared and fifteen, but it's been a long two decades since then. I know how to ask for a hell of a lot more now.)

It's because I remember that cozy, plush-wallpapered den of joyful thieves. I remember you keep what you steal.

Every single time--every time--when a story I love sets a couple of characters out on a low, unguarded table, perfectly placed to be pilfered on the sly and taken home and smushed together like a couple of dolls, my very first thought is always, always joy. Always, that instinct says, yay! Says, this is ours now. As soon as I go home and crawl into that pillow-fort den, my instincts say, I will surely find people already at work combing through spoils and finding new ways to combine them, new ways to make them our own. I know there's fic for that. I've already seen fic for that, and I wasn't really interested last time, but the new store display's got my brain churning, and I can't wait to see what the crew back at the hideout does with this.

Every time, that's where my brain goes. And oh, when I realize the display's put out on purpose, that somebody snuck in a legitimate special menu item, when the proprietor gives me the nod and wink and says, you don't have to come around the side, I know it's not much but here--there is so much joy and relief and hope in me from that! Oh, what we can make with these beautiful building blocks. Oh what a story we can craft from the pieces. Oh, the things we can cobble together. Look at that, this one's a little skimpy on parts but we can supplement it, this one's got a whole outline we can fill in however we want. This one technically comes semi-preassembled, and that's boring as shit and a pain to take back apart, but that's fine, we'll manage. We're artists and thieves. I bet someone's pulling out the AU saw to cut it to pieces already.

And then I get back to our den, which has moved addresses a dozen times over the years and mostly hangs out on Tumblr now (and the roof leaks and the landlord's sketchy as fuck but at least they don't charge rent, and we've made worse places our own). And I show up, ready for joy--ready for a dozen other people who saw that low-hanging fruit on that unguarded table, who got the nod and wink about the special menu item, who're ready to get so excited about this newest haul. Did you see what we picked up? The theft was so easy, practically begging to be stolen. The last owner was an idiot with no idea what to do with it. The last owner knew exactly what it could become, bless their heart, under a craftsman with more time on their hands, so they looked away on purpose at just the right time to let me take it home. I show up every time ready for our space, the place that fed me on joy and self-confidence when I was fifteen and starving. The place that taught me, yes, we are thieves, because it is RIGHT to take what we need, and the beautiful things we create are their own justification. We are thieves, and that's wonderful, because nothing is handed to us and that means we get to build our own palaces. We get to keep everything we steal.

I go home, and even knowing the world is different, my instincts and heart are waiting for that. And I walk in the door, and I look at my dash, and I glance over at twitter, and--

And people are angry, again. Angry at the slim pickings from the hidden special menu. So, so tired and angry, at once again having to steal.

And they're right to be! Sometimes (often, maybe) I think they're angry at the wrong people--more angry with the shopkeeper who offers the bite-sized sampler platter of side characters or sneaks their queer content in on the special menu than the ones who don't include it at all. But it's not wrong to be mad that Disney's once again advertising their First Gay Character only to find out it's a tiny sprinkle of a one-line extra on an otherwise straight sundae. It's not wrong to be furious at the world because you've spent your whole life needing to be a thief to survive. It's far from wrong. I'm angry about it too.

But this was my den of thieves, my chop shop, my makerspace. Growing up in fandom, I learned to pick the locks on stories and crack the safes of subtext at the very same time I learned to create. They were the same thing, the same art. We are thieves, my heart says, we are thieves, and that's what makes us better than the people we steal from. We deconstruct every time we create. We build better things out of the pieces.

And people are angry that the pre-fab materials are too hard to find, the pickings too slim, the items on sale too limited? Yes, of course they are, of course they should be--but my heart. Oh, my heart. Every single time, just a little bit, it breaks.

Of course the stories are terrible (they have always been terrible). Of course they are, but we are thieves. We steal the best parts and cobble them back together and what we make is better than it was before. The craftsman's eye that cases a story for weak points, for blank spaces, for anywhere we can fit a crowbar and pry apart this casing--that's skill and art and joy. Of course we shouldn't have to, of course we shouldn't have to, but I still love it. I still want it, crave it. I still thrill every time I see it, a story with hairline cracks that we can work open with clever hands to let the queer in.

That used to be cause for celebration, around here. I ask him to go back to the ruins of Aeor with me, two men together alone on an expedition in the frozen north, it feels like a gift. And I understand why some people take it as an insult. I understand not good enough. I understand how something can feel like a few drops of water to someone dying of thirst, like a slap in the face. If it was so easy to sneak it hidden onto the special menu, to place it on the unguarded side table for someone else to run off to, why not let it sit out front and center in the first place? I know it's frustrating. It should be. We should fight. We should always fight. I know why.

But my heart, oh, my heart. My heart only knows what it's been taught. My heart sees, this thing right here, the proprietor left it there for you with a nod and a wink because they Get It. It's not put together yet, but it's better that way anyway. It's so full of pieces to pull apart and reassemble. I bet they've got a whole mosaic wall going up at home already. We can bring it home and make it OURS, more than it was ever theirs, forget half of what it came from and grow a new garden in what remains.

And I go home to find anger, and my heart breaks instead.

[nellynee]

The makings of greatness, or why, as a ride or die Treasure Planet stan, I’m glad there’s no Treasure Plant 2

You ever see somethings that makes you unreasonably angry? Yes I understand exactly what I’m saying, and how that indicates that my emotions and opinions on this are exactly that. Opinions. There’s a good chance I have some objective truths mixed in, but that does not make my opinions based on those truths truth. If you disagree or have different tastes or opinions or interpretations, cool, let me know! maybe you’ll change my mind. That being said.

The plot synopsis for the Treasure Planet sequel makes me angry. Not like, actively so, just annoyed enough to be in a bad mood. And now you guys all have to be in one as well. Why?

Reason 1, and probably least important: Disney sequel syndrome.

Ok so Disney sequels aren’t inherently bad. I’ll stan the Aladdin sequels to my grave, who knew Cinderella could world build, obligatory Rescuers Down Under (the first one was better) blah blah blah.

But there is an inherit problem with sequels in general, and that usually has to do with cast and crew. An original piece of fiction has to grab the audience yes, but there’s also freedom in that. Media touches people in different way. The worldbuilding can mean more to some than others. Some are in it for the animation, or the character developments, or relationships. What connects with one person won’t connect with another. The problem with sequels is that different people who worked out the original material might and usually do not work on the new. And those new people are already working on that new material with their own personal lenses and experiences and interpretations coloring the old. The reason sequels (and remakes, and big budget presentations of other materials like books into movies) tend to bomb hard is because you are essentially being forced to accept someone’s fanfiction into the canon material. Usually, there’s a pretty strong correlation between more successful franchises/extension material, works staying true to the core material, original crew working on the material, and the enjoyment of the audience.

And sources say very few of the original crew remained. Some yes, but mostly voice cast. Even worse, TP2 was a DisneyToon production, not even a mainline feature. Now I’m not saying the new people weren’t talented, or passionate about the project, or were lacking in experience. It doesn’t really matter if any of those things are true or not. It’s the warping of their personal lenses I don’t trust. Fanfic I can disregard, meta I can disregard. This would have been canon.

And reading the Artbook makes is abundantly clear that the parts that touched me personally would have been missing. The very core of Treasure Planet for me was the relationship between Jim and Silver (and their exquisite animation budget). However you choose to interpret that relationship, you can not deny that Treasure Planet is a powerfully emotionally romantic movie. It’s quiet moments and emotional resonance shaped my views of intimacy with a sharp and fine touch. Silver and Jim’s bond is as undeniable and powerful as it is compelling and awe inspiring to witness unfold.

And a lot of that is owed not only to  the voice acting of Joseph Gorden-Levitt (Jim) and Brian Murray (Silver), But to animators Glen Keane and John Ripa, who were the head animators of Silver and Jim respectively. Not only did Gorden-Levitt and Brian Murray deliver stunning performances, but made sure to work together and jointly play off each other in ways most voice actors don’t have the opportunity to do. And the Masters Keane and Ripa took an already stellar and carefully crafted vocal rapport and took it one step further. I highly recommend the Artbook as a good read, both Keane and Ripa talk about the journey of discovering who Jim and Silver were with delight, acting out entire scenes together using their own body language to build the characters together, using the same animation reals to animate, tag teaming in and out of the program rather than do it separately, becoming so attuned with their characters attitudes and mannerisms that you can tell they poured entire pieces of themselves into Jim and Silver.

I’m not saying the Sequel would have been inherently bad because it’s a sequel, or because a new crew worked on it, but I am saying I wouldn’t trust it with a ten foot pole.

Reason 2: Thanks I hate it (I’m saying it’s inherently bad because the plot is bad and I hate it)

I’m sorry for the length, but for you to really understand just how bad this is, I actually have to pick through every single line and tell you why it fails critically at some junctures and where it would be so simple to fix. For those of you who were unaware that there was a sequel in the works at some point, I’m pulling these quotes pretty much wholesale from the AnimateVeiws article Buried Treasure: The ill-fated voyage to Treasure Planet 2, specifically the interview with Jun Falkenstein who was set to direct the now canceled sequel. Spoiler warning, I guess?

So, from the begining

“The sequel was to pick up where the first film left off, with Jim Hawkins going to the Royal Interstellar Academy. At the Academy, he is a hotshot “natural,” but he doesn’t follow the rules very well.” - Strong start but then dropped the finish. I think the interstellar academy would be a very compelling starting point. I see no fault in it at least, it’s a good opportunity to world build. Clemence and Musket like to make a point that Jim was crafted to connect with the emotionally wounded and distant youth in a age of divorce, so showing what happens when that youth hikes up their britches and gets to work can extend on that theme aaaaaaand you dropped it. Dropped that strong start. Yes, Jim was more than a bit of a bite back rebel in the film, but that was a reactionary response to the bad place he started in. Jim was abandoned, and tied his self worth into that abandonment. His kickback against society was a reaction stemming from an inability to see his personal worth and any sort of future he could craft from it. He outgrew this, his very character development was about this in the film. His character arc was about realizing his inherent worth, embracing a sense of confidence and learning what he could do. Even disregarding that, bonus material outside of the film shows that Jim has a very strong sense of respect for Captain Amelia, her military career, and the hard work she put into it, and he’s there on her recommendation. Why would he act out in this? He is a natural yes, but the film shows he’s incredibly sharp and intelligent, if unlearned, and more than ready to learn given opportunity.

“Hence, he gets off to a shaky start – especially with his classmate Kate, who is very smart and has a type A personality. Kate’s father is Admiral Blake, the Commander of the Navy. Jim and Kate vie for top of the class but have very different skills.” - So building off this to fix the problem before. I guess the dynamic they are going for is something like “the kind of a jerk hotshit hotshot who’s got it all figured out and the straight laced rule fallowing stick in the ass rival”? I’m not apposed to to a rivalry, but lets tweak this, given how “hot shot natural jerk” isn’t really where Jim settles at the end of the film. Jim is a natural talent, who excels under tutelage, but more importantly, he has practical experience. While the time period spent on the RLS Legacy is not defined, they do sail to a deep and unexplored part of the galaxy, probably well outside of regular settlements, so no small distance, though Jim is young enough that a very long period of time would be noted in physical growth. Given comparisons to classic nautical sailing of the source time, months, perhaps up to a year? That’s a long time to spend, learning the rough and tumble basics, tying knots, experiencing food and water rations, extreme temperatures, playing with the rigging and mechanical aspects of the boat. Jim knows what it’s like to actually sail. Meanwhile, this is the Royal Academy, who probably takes in upper class second born children and pumps out military accolades for well learned mathematicians and strategists. Jim doesn’t fit in because he can visualize, he can think outside of the box, he can weld a damn engine to a hunk of shrapnel and ignite it freefalling against a metal hellscape and outrace a boat in a high adrenaline situation. He adapts where the other’s frantically look through their notes for the answer. Worse yet, he’s poor and not classically educated. Make it a class issue. In this aspect I do like Kate. Being the Daughter of the Commander of the Navy, she probably has a very technical and far more expansive understanding of navel ships, particularly the running of them. In this way Jim and Kate are perfect foils. Jim representing the poor, instinctually and practically knowledgeable crew, and Kate the upper-class, technically knowledgeable command, a dichotomy representing the haves and have nots in their skills, experiences, an class.

I don’t want to post a picture and break the post, but I do love Kate’s design. I do recommend looking up the article and checking it out. that being said, being a feline species, they messed up not spelling it Cate.

“Captain Amelia is dean of the Academy, which has a brand-new vessel: the Centurion.” - I… why, why is Amelia the dean? Additional material shows that Amelia broke ties with the military because she didn’t like their rule stickling ways and red tape. Why would she want a red tape position? She helped with a war and then bailed first opportunity to become a freelance captain so she could fallow her own rules. Even if you don’t know any of that additional material, you do know that she is a freelance captain. Why is she dean? what happened to the old one? Are they dead? Did DisneyToon kill them? Did Disneytoon kill the old dean?

“Designed by Doctor Doppler, the Centurion is the fastest ship in the galaxy.” - HE’S NOT THAT KIND OF DOCTOR!

“B.E.N. is its pilot”. - NO

In all seriousness all three of those statements show a serious problem, in that none of those characters are in fact those things. Amelia I’ve already explained. But Doppler was a debatably youngish bachelor with too much money who was fascinated by astronomy specifically and who suffered from ennui. And BEN was a navigational unit, so maybe it makes sense for him to be a pilot, but why is a robot who was functioning under a galaxy feared pirate for who knows how long given any kind of agency over a brand new incredibly important ship? These decisions were probably made to incorporate as much of the old cast as possible, to not exclude fan faves. But any decision that makes BEN a prominent part of the plot and thus gets more screen time is a BAD one.

“The pirate Ironbeard desires to commandeer the Centurion. This ruthless villain is relatively all iron – almost nothing of whom he originally was, inside and out, is left.” - On the one hand, I have a weird feeling that this would somehow violate the 30-70 rule. Buuuuut on the other hand, the Artbook does describe the decision making process of what and how was mechanical on Silver (my favorite tidbit was the wheel on his head representing his constant thinking and assessing) and states that that they in a way represent the pieces of humanity he gave up looking for Flint’s Trove. Extending that to a pirate who has given up everything could be a powerful thematic tool if used right (or intentionally)

“He leads a group of pirates to hijack the Centurion while Jim and Kate are aboard.” - ok, yeah, I’ll buy that. If they are butting heads constantly, I could see them sneaking off to the new piece of hardware to one up each other on who knows their stuff, or maybe bond over wanting to learn about the said new tech and being frustrated with restrictions.

“The Navy can’t catch the Centurion, due to the vessel’s speed and armor.”- sure

“Jim and Kate escape the Centurion. Jim decides he needs a pirate to help catch pirates. They find his old buddy Long John Silver in the Lagoon Nebula, where he is running a smuggling ring. “ - So what Jim just goes “I know just the pirate to help us” and then finds him? That journey of itself deserves it’s own movie, anything less is a disappointment. Alternative. Jim and Kate escape onto a particularly lawless planet. Jim has some tricks to keep them safe and fed, maybe he even excels in ways he’s been straight up stop gapped at the academy. Maybe his knowhow is appreciated by others who society also rejects. But Kate is a frustrating fish out of water, getting offended and worked up over things that are big deals to an average citizen but not criminals and pirates. But such reactions are putting them in danger and she needs to get perspective fast. It’s plausible maybe that Silver tracks them down through interesting rumors, but more than that, let it be fate. Neither having any idea the other is there till the second they see each other. Bonus points if Jim and Kate get in a bind and Silver is the leader of the harassers. Better yet lets add some thematic mirroring not only to the scene where Silver saved Jim from Scroop, but directly contrast it to the scene where Silver doubled back and down against the notion of caring for Jim when called out before the mutiny. *kisses finger* Touching and hilarious.

“ Silver agrees to help when he hears about the Centurion. “ -  Silver agrees to help when he hears about the Centurion without Jim even having to ask. Storywise, lets make some kind of deal over how Jim, an upstanding enrollee of the academy, apparently is chummy with a pirate. Tension doesn’t just have to be external, and Kate is the daughter of the Commander of the Army. Maybe she’s recognized and this gets them in trouble. Maybe Kate has issues with her identity outside of her father’s career and need to learn a lesson about being outside of a rigid social structure?

“Jim and Kate receive a tracking signal from B.E.N. – who is currently hostage aboard the Centurion – and follow via Silver’s creaky vessel. They discover the Centurion docked near the Botany Bay Prison Asteroid. “ - While being the fastest ship yet is a good excuse for wanting it to get stolen, my suspension of disbelief breaks a little at any ship, let alone a creaky little pirate vessel, catching up to the fastest ship yet, or the tracking signal being the only way to track it to a guarded prison. Seeing as how I’ve written BEN out of this scenario lets fix it. After the events of the movie, the Royal Military swoops in after to confiscate the debris of Treasure Planet. For those in the know, canon lore states that the Planet was a giant computer, and it and the map were the byproducts of an ancient and advanced civilization. Studying the debris led to the Centurion, notable not for it’s speed, but for it’s stealth. It can cloak itself. Which is why no-one can find it. Meanwhile Silver lets it slip that he snagged the map from it’s pedestal as they escaped the planet as a souvenir. (handwave why the portal was still open with a “the whole thing was exploding, the computer froze). The map is able to track the remnants of said planet, aka the Centurion, meaning Silver has the only means of tracking the cloaked ship

“Ironbeard is using the Centurion to disable Botany Bay’s security systems. Jim, Kate and Silver sneak aboard the Centurion, where Silver reveals to Jim that he wants to take the Centurion for himself. He asks Jim to join him.“ YES. YES YES YES YES YES YES! Understanding that  Jim’s decision to not go with Silver in the first movie is key here. He rejected Silver’s offer the first time because Silver had shown him he had intrinsic value, and Jim finally felt that the natural gifts he had were worth cultivating, that he did have the chance to explore who he could be on his own terms. Jim was comfortable being on his own, because he felt capable. Now, Jim and Silver bring out the best in each other, and the time apart has done them harm. Jim’s strings of social rejections are starting to fell like a glass ceiling he can’t overcome, and is finding more and more comfort in being a big fish in a pirates small pond, and the emotions of of being wanted that come with Silver is a powerful drug. But it’s a one way ticket away from any opportunities he could work towards, not to mention his barely repaired relationship with his mother. Meanwhile Silver has been slowly slipping back into the colder, more selfish self he was, a necessity for his lifestyle, and doesn’t want to loose his connection to Jim and what Jim brings out in him, but is still far enough gone to make the offer and try for the boat anyways, even if he knows it’s not what’s best. It’s an emotionally compelling decision. You want them to say yes, you know they shouldn’t

“Kate overhears this and is horrified, especially since the two have, of course, started falling for each other during the adventure.” - Hate. this I hate. Leaving shipping to they way side, what’s that “of course”? why do they have to fall for each other? Why the Disneytoon sequel love interest? I have a feeling her characterization would come at the cost of it. Why can’t they be rivals? why can’t they develop a mutual respect outside of attraction? Why can’t they both learn an individualized lesson about finding their own place in the world outside of social constraints as foils without macking? I hate this concept. Kate overhears, and is horrified, because Silver is a Pirate which is actually in universe get yourself hanged offense, and Jim is considering this, and they are going to steal a VERY IMPORTANT BOAT and and leave her stranded in a dagerous prison, and are making an objectively morally bad decision.

“Ironbeard discovers the intruders, charging into a fight in which Silver is injured. Meanwhile, the other pirates throw down ladders to the prison below, allowing swarms of elated prisoners to climb up into the ship. Silver, Jim, and Kate exit the Centurion amidst all the confusion. However, Ironbeard shoots down Silver’s ship. They plummet to the prison asteroid below, crash-landing” - cool. Drama. But for my purposes, lets tweak it so Silver isn’t injured yet. But I really want to emphasize that this attack does not interrupt before Jim can react to Silver’s offer. Even something as tentative as “I’m not sure” has consequences. None of this “misunderstanding” BS.

“ Kate is angry at Jim and storms off. “- again, make it clear that Jim showed a real chance of agreeing to steal the ship. if she’s angry before he had a chance to answer that’s contrivance for drama’s sake. Give her a reason to be mad

“ Jim is about to blow her off as well when Silver tells him to give her a chance. He reveals a part of his past through a flashback, when a young (non-cyborg) Silver screwed up a relationship with the love of his life – a decision which directly led to his life of piracy. “ - nope. nope nope nope . I’m gonna put a big old * here because this is reason number 3 why I hate this potential movie, and I will get to that believe me, but here’s me, putting a pin in it. That being said, have Silver selfishly try to double down on getting Jim to join him in a three way argument instead. This is the conflict of the film. Kate, who was learning to grow outside of the strict restrictions of her life and do her own work, make her own way, is being rejected. She is as morally repulsed as she is hurt that she wasn’t included, and hates herself for that hurt as well. Jim is torn between the freedom of what he could be after the academy paired with the strict social constructs around it, and the freedom of a life “full of himself and no ties to anyone” but running from the law and the two friends they represent. Silver is the aggressor here. He likes Kate, he does, but he loves Jim and only has one place in his heart, and has spent his life being selfish. There’s already a crew on board, and Iron beard is hooked into the Centurion. With having the only other means to navigate, they take down ironbeard, the rest will surely fall in line. This is paydirt. A fantastic ship, a bloodthirsty crew, and Jim.

“Silver has a very dangerous cargo with him that he had been trying to smuggle and sell for a fortune, which has the power of a neutron bomb. Jim, Kate and Silver reconcile and work together to fix Silver’s ship and prevent the Centurion, filled with the most evil pirates in the galaxy, from going on an insane robbing-and-killing spree. At the last second, Silver reluctantly gives up his “retirement fund” in order to destroy the Centurion, with Ironbeard and all the pirates on board.” - this entire section needs rewritten. That’s a mcguffin Silver put it away. I have retconned the mcguffin to be the old map, so that is now moot. Now to not blow up the ship. Afterall, Silver and Jim have both already overcome what Treasure Planet represented with it’s destruction. Rather, B plot

If we are that desperate to have past characters in, let’s have Amelia and Delbert back home. When the Centurion is captured, Amelia immediately volunteers to fallow, feeling responsible for Jim and secretly pining for some adventure. Delbert feels the same, and he to a bit of an adrenaline junkie after the events of the first movie, but they have the children to think about and only one can leave. Delbert is the one chosen to help by the navy officials searching for the Centurion. While Amelia bickers with the Admiral Blake over his pragmatic but emotionally distant decisions over the situation of his missing daughter, Delbert is an astronomer, and is blah blah blah science meta, fallow the flashing  and bending lights around the cloaked ship to find it. As in Delbert is helpful. Amelia in a reflation to Admiral Blake, is torn between her family and commandeering her own ship to help. Blake is frustratingly headstrong in his decisions, and the script makes it seem like that emotional distance is disinterests, but reveals to the audience that it incorporates a great deal of suppression of his anxieties and worries over his daughter, and trust in her abilities, though he has issues expressing this pride to Kate herself. Amelia, Delbert and fam make what is probably a poor decision in commandeering a ship and leaving on their own to track the Centurion, the navy hot on their heels.

Back to A plot, the navy is approaching. Jim has to make a decision. He is the only one who knows how to unmask the ship using the old ones tech without training, as it’s based off the map. While Kate and Silver are distracting iron beard, he has to either steal the ship and sail off, or uncloak it for the navy. Iron beard is taken down, but not without Silver getting injured. Jim decides that Silver’s life is worth more than anything, and after agreeing with Kate that she’ll commandeer a doctor and wont let Silver die, uncloaks the ship. The Centurion is retaken in a blaze of naval glory that is the action climax. The pirates fight back up are over run. Maybe Kate gets taken hostage as the Admirals daughter, as an opportunity for a resolution with her arc as Blake’s distant daughter, though obviously said resolution comes at her showing her abilities in taking care of herself and the practical skills she has learned.

“Silver again parts from Jim and Kate, telling them to take care of each other. A few years later, Jim and Kate graduate with honors, while a proud Silver secretly watches from the shadows, smiling” - Boooooo. Kate and her dad make up, and she challenges him that she’s going to one day Captain the Centurion, with him understanding that she needs less a mentor and more an emotional support while she works her way up the ranks. She invites Jim to be her first mate, to which Jim accepts as a navigator, (a thing I’ve pointed out to be his real strength in another post). But to Silver, who has been “pardoned” for his part in retaking the Centurion, the movie hinting that he to would be on the eventual crew there I fixed it fic to come I s2g.

yeah there’s a lot of good there, but it’s so easy to fix the bad it’s frustrating. which brings me to

Reason 3: that little pin

“ Jim is about to blow her off as well when Silver tells him to give her a chance. He reveals a part of his past through a flashback, when a young (non-cyborg) Silver screwed up a relationship with the love of his life – a decision which directly led to his life of piracy. “

Nope nope nope I’ll tell you why.

First of all, sources like the artbook say that Jim is so Important to Silver because he’s the first person Silver has ever let become important. he’s specifically stated to have no family, never married, no children. And that’s something he cultivated actively. His life of piracy, his metal limbs, his loneliness and moral failings were all gleefully accumulated for one reason and one reason only

Treasure Planet.

Treasure Planet was the great love of Silver’s life. It was a lifelong obsession. It destroyed his body, took his youth, his opportunities and nearly his life. He broke Jim’s heart over it.

And he let it go. For Jim.

And Jim understood this

This is the crux of treasure planet’s very themes. This is where Jim found self worth. Another person finally looked at him and said “you matter, you matter more than anything. I like being around you and I choose you first.” and it made Jim realize he’s someone worth choosing.

The treasure was EVERYTHING to Silver, and Silver let it go, for Jim.

That one line there, attributing the start of Silver’s fall to a girl? that actively retcons the entire theme of the previous movie. IT rewrite the emotional linchpin of Silver’s sacrifice of the gold. And actually fuck that. right into the ground. I do not accept. I do not pass go. I refuse. Fuck you non existent movie. That makes me mad. every single time. Hate I shall never let go.

No

[autisticcassandracain]

I have many thoughts on the weird phenomena in the DC fandom and the Batfam fandom specifically where probably the majority of people just straight up. haven’t interacted with the source material. and almost all of those thoughts can be summarized as ‘lmao that’s weird and mildly concerning’.

and because I’m annoying I will list them all here right now <3

1. To preface this post, I mean, obviously, comics are inaccessible as all hell, both in the disability kind of way and the ‘you need to understand the concept of hypertime to fully comprehend the DC timeline’ kind of way. Because of this, even if you don’t have a disability that prevents you from reading comics, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to look at the amount of comics you need to read to have even a base understanding of a character and go ‘no thanks <3′ and just enjoy fanart and fanfic in a vacuum. Ultimately, this is fandom, this is supposed to be fun, it doesn’t really matter.

2. That said, it’s VERY weird to me that the majority of this fandom just straight up hasn’t interacted with the source material, and moreover, that it’s considered rude to tell people that they should do so. It’s especially weird considering the amount of fanon-only fans I’ve seen who straight up have a superiority complex over canon. The idea that it’s gatekeeping to tell fans of something to actually interact with canon is just. so weird, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what ‘gatekeeping’ actually entails. 

3. But honestly I’m less interested in discussing the ways in which canon and fanon fans should interact with each other (personally, I think it would be helpful to create separate tags of some kind, but that’d require quite a big overhaul of the current fandom state) than in figuring out how this actually happened in the first place. On the one hand, it’s obvious; long-running superhero comics the way DC writes them have made themselves so thoroughly inaccessible that most people are simply too daunted to even try. Most media has a cohesive beginning and end (or at least, a planned end somewhere). Comics just... don’t.

But I do think it says something that, even among people who are clearly interested in the characters (since they have, you know, entire blogs about them), the effort to get into comics just seems to be too much to even bother. This really doesn’t bode well for the future of DC Comics. Obviously, I am no expert on anything at all ever, but I’d personally be surprised if DC survives beyond the few decades, at least in its current form/without a big overhaul.

4. But on the other hand, I don’t think the confusing state of DC Comics is the only thing to blame here. Fandom has a well-known problem with reducing any character down to archetypes to more easily ship and write fic/make content with. This problem is particularly prominent in fanfic, which, if you read enough of it, you’ll eventually start seeing not just the same tropes and trends, but essentially the same fics over and over again. And not just within the same fandom; everywhere, or every large fandom, at least. 

Fanon Batfam is entirely built on a bunch of those tropes; insecure/depressed sadboy Tim, team mom with optional hidden trauma/emotional problems Dick, bad boy with a heart of gold + sadboy combo Jason, abused sadboy Damian/angry easily-villified-for-fic-reasons monster Damian, good dad Bruce for found family fic and bad dad Bruce for angst fic, etc. This all culminates in a found family dynamic that’s generic and malleable to whatever fic the writer wants to write.

(This isn’t getting into the ship fic, which I avoid like the plague because the vast majority of it is incest, but I’d bet real actual money that the tropes in those fics fall under what is often preferred by the Migratory Slash Fandom.)

By having a decent excuse not to get into canon (the inaccessibility of comics) and a, by now, well-established fanon fandom, many fans feel free to use the batfam fandom as essentially an excuse to write whatever fic with reduced archetypes and tropes they personally feel the itch to write, without having to bother with even consuming a canon. This is compounded by the fact that canon itself is often contradictory and frankly bad, meaning that whatever interpretation of a character you want/need to go for your fic is at least theoretically backed up by canon (for example, you can just as easily cast Bruce as an abusive shithole dad who his kids need to get away from as a loving father figure who cares deeply for his children), which you can always use as a defense if people question your characterization.

5. This focus on fandom trends and tropes over actual creativity or care for the characters is also visible in the way bigotry manifests in this fandom; namely, in literally the exact way you’d expect. The female characters and characters of colour are shuffled to the side, non-existent, vilified, and/or reduced to harmful stereotypes. 

Barbara is probably the one I saw the most often in fanfic, but usually just as ‘Dick’s girlfriend’, and even then, she was often vilified for Dick angst (especially in fics about examining Dick’s trauma from his canon sexual assault; Kori also often gets the short end of the stick in those). After that, probably Stephanie, who fanon fans don’t really seem to know what to do with, so she’s basically just there as comic relief waffle girl, most of the time, though sometimes she can be used to either further Tim angst or further vilify Tim, whatever the fic calls for. Cass has gotten included more in batfam fics as of late, likely in response to critiques of fandom racism for leaving her out, but again, it’s clear people don’t actually know what to do with her. She’s often reduced to a racist stereotype of a quite, stoic therapist for whatever guy du jour needs it. That, or she’s in Hong Kong and just not there. Duke especially gets left in the dust in fandom, usually just being non-existent, but when he’s there, he’s almost always nothing more than the straight man for the actual fun characters to play off of. Talia probably has it the worst, though, and almost universally gets vilified by fanon stans in order to write sadboy Damian.

All of this is extremely predictable behaviour and falls entirely in line with general fandom misogyny and racism; ignoring or vilifying women and characters of colour, or using them as very minor characters at best. The only two characters of colour who aren’t regularly left out of fic are Dick and Damian, who are both also conveniently the two characters most often drawn and written in a whitewashed manner. In addition, there’s a real trend of demonizing Damian in fanon fics where he isn’t written as an abused sadboy, which I’d argue is in no small part due to fandom racism, considering Damian’s behaviour is in no way as bad as Jason’s, who doesn’t get anywhere close to the same demonization and gets woobiefied instead. I also find it convenient that Damian is probably the batboy who receives the most vilification in fic, when he’s the most obviously non-white of the batboys they’re willing to acknowledge.

Fandom often cries for more diversity in canon, only to ignore the diversity already there and focus on the same generic white guys. The batfam fandom is a brilliant example of this.

Which is not to say that fandom racism and misogyny isn’t present in the canon parts of the fandom (and canon itself); it absolutely 100% is. But I’ve found that canon fans are also more likely to like and care about at least one of the characters I’ve listed as ignored/vilified, and are willing to create and consume content for them, whereas fanon fans... aren’t, really. I’ve never seen a fan of fanon Cass the way I’ve seen fans of fanon Dick, for example. Obviously, this could just be by coincidence, or I’ve just surrounded myself with people like that, but it’s been a trend I noticed. Racism and misogyny is present in every part of this fandom and should be addressed as such, but I feel like it manifests the most blatantly in the fanon parts of this fandom. 

(I’d also recommend the articles Migratory Slash Fandom’s Focus and Beige Blank Slates, which expand more on the type of fandom racism I think is especially prominent in the batfam fandom, as well as literally every article in the What Fandom Racism Looks Like series.)

6. All this leads me to conclude that the majority of fanon fans don’t actually like the characters all that much; they’re convenient excuses for them to participate in fandom. Which I also think is, in no small part, a reason why so many of them react so negatively to being told to pick up a comic; they came to this fandom specifically to consume it as a fandom, because they wanted the fandom experience without having to consume a canon. 

This is not a phenomena unique to the batfam fandom (again, see the Migratory Slash Fandom), but it does fascinate me. While fandom is often said to be an experience focusing on transformative art, I think it’s also safe to say that, especially as fandom has become more mainstream, an increasing amount of people are looking to it less as a way to engage with their favourite pieces of media, and more as a type of media in and of itself. I think the reasons for this are similar to the reasons mass media entertainment like the MCU are so popular; you gain a lot of enjoyment out of it with very little risk involved. 

By consuming the same fics of the same characters (or the same archetypes) over and over again, you are rarely at risk of being challenged or even disappointed. It’s often very clear right from the start whether or not a fic will appeal to you, and if it isn’t, it’s easy to just look for another one. It requires less emotional investment than most other types of media, even ‘popcorn media’ like the MCU - or, yes, DC Comics. It’s safe, it’s enjoyable, it’s comforting, like McDonalds, but just like McDonalds, it’s ultimately bland and unsubstantial. 

7, TL;DR. Ultimately, I don’t think it’s like, wrong to enjoy the fanon version of the batfam without wanting to engage with canon, and I certainly don’t think it’s okay to harrass people over it. But I do think it’s in large part based on a desire to interact with fandom rather than other pieces of media because people are scared of being let down by those pieces of media (or worse, just uninterested in actually thinking), which is mildly concerning. 

[ilikekidsshows]

These cyberbullies who worship Chloe are not the first "mob of fans to be outraged by what happens in a story". Anon has seen this kind of collective outrage before--except in previous generations, it used to be in defense of the victims, rather than their tormentors. For example, when It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown aired in 1977, Charlie Brown got punished for losing a football game when it was Lucy's fault. Fans sent lots of angry letters to the TV stations about it in Charlie's defense.

(addendum) Besides, Chloe stans aren't abuse apologists, or even bully apologists--that would actually be an improvement. If someone has toxic principles that "some people deserve to be mistreated", at least the person HAS principles. What this anon actually thinks is happening is that they're "person I like apologists". For instance, I've seen one Chloe stan demand that Bakugo be punished, so the person does want bullying punished UNLESS they like the bully. Stans "make up morality as they go."

Writing a strongly-worded letter/email to the company actually responsible for a piece of media about your concerns with what messages said piece of media is sending people is very different from bullying and harassing a single person every single day. The person receiving that correspondence won't be receiving it as a personal attack for one thing, and writing such a thing will make sure you think about what you're saying and what you actually want before sending it instead of typing something in a couple of minutes and hitting "send". I see the "how" in your example as more respectable than the "why".

In my personal moral code bullying is never justified, because I believe that we should strive to do as little harm to others as possible and prioritize lessening the harm someone can do over punishing them for personal gratification. Bullying someone, even for "valid reasons", is not justified in my moral system. The reality is that bullying someone with a toxic belief system will not change their mind and will, in fact, only radicalize them and make them double down on those toxic beliefs. That's why the two ends of the political spectrum have been growing more and more extreme in the online space, because both sides are harassed by the other side so they double down and become more radicalized. Bullying doesn't put a stop to the harm caused by someone's toxic beliefs, there's a high chance it'll worsen it. So I can't even condone the bullying of "bad people", because it's been proven to be counterproductive to the betterment of society.

Also, since it's so hard to determine whether or not a claimed "wrong" has been committed by the target of a harassment campaign to begin with, it's best to just reject those campaigns on principle, so that there will be less later proven innocent victims. The outrage narratives are meant to make you not question and, a lot of the time, as soon as someone has questioned what was going on, it's come to light that the harassment was just bullying and the "crimes" we fabricated by a small group of people who like to launch these campaigns for the sake of clout or just for the high of "taking someone down".

So, you're right, anon, cyberbullies are not actually about protecting people or even some belief system, they just use the idea of defending something as a justification and smokescreen for their actual intentions, which are just to bully someone, and also to "recruit" people into their cause. Cyberbullying works the best when you can get an actual mob going. But, I don't think Chloé Stans are in it for the clout. I do think you're right that it's about their highly conditional moral code, and the condition is how they feel about a particular thing. This is why even people with a "valid reason to raise concerns" are suspect to me, because you can twist anything into being about the children when, in reality, it's about that person's own personal feelings about a character. And that’s in addition to the possibility of their arguments being fabricated.

People who are out to change media to suit their personal tastes think that they experience emotions differently from others, that theirs are more real and painful and important. "Chloé has to be redeemed because her being the antagonist she's always been hurts my feelings!" The implication that Thomas Astruc deserves to get harassed because he said something generalizing that hurt Chloé Stans’ feelings is all about this narrative based on hyper-individualism.

Modern western society is very individualistic. The good thing about this is that we're more likely to defend our rights. We think: "We exist, so we matter." The bad thing is that some people take that thinking to the extreme with: "I am the only person who truly exists, I am the only person who truly matters, and so everything should cater to my personal preferences or it's Objectively Bad and Morally Evil." Hyper-individualism, or toxic individualism, basically means that you experience the world around you so stuck inside your own head and your own emotions, that empathy and sympathy become impossible and you might even consider yourself above normal society. This mostly only happens online, though, where the idea of “society” and “other people” feels less real anyway, so we get entitled fans harassing content creators on twitter to make their ship canon etc.

[iholli]

I took down the previous post because it shouldn't be directed at a single piece of media when every fandom is guilty. That and it wasn't worded well.

The point is, not everything has to be about romantic relationships. No, I don't give a damn if you want to ship characters (as long as it's not harmful obviously), that's not the fucking point.

Fandom spaces have been completely consumed by shipping, specifically LGBT+ shipping. And it's boring. It's so boring to go into a tag and it's all ships and ship wars and it's boring. Fandom used to be about theories and fanfics and ocs AND shipping. Am I really the only one who feels like there's nothing but romantic visions now? I want to go into a tag for theories and fanart. And YES, shipping is FINE. But there's so much else to talk about besides who's sleeping with who (and seriously, that's all the ship wars are).

Invader Zim was fun because we bonded over ZaDr, but we talked about so much else. Theories about Irkens, how time works in that universe, discussing the Membrane family dynamic (or lack thereof, and how that affects the kids), making ocs and discussing where they would fit in...of course there was a ton of ZaDr too but that wasn't the entire fandom.

Now I try to look at other things I enjoy and it's just...all shipping. Hazbin isn't quite so bad because there's so much to theorize about the universe but there's still a lot of shipping stuff. Helluva is...worse. I see very little besides ships anymore. Marvel...yikes. I want to look at Loki content and I get blasted with ship stuff. Again, if that's your thing, that's fine. But it's not mine and I want to read theories, not a constant stream of shipping stuff.

And it's worse in spaces that don't have confirmed LGBT+ characters. Stories that have nothing to do with romance, characters with zero romantic subplots, everything gets steamrolled by ships. And everyone says "well it's because there's no LGBT+ representation" that isn't TRUE anymore. There is so much actual, confirmed, POSITIVE LGBT+ rep now. The Owl House, Adventure Time, She-Ra (NOT c*tradora), Kipo...

Yet I watch fandoms time and time again not only ignore healthy relationships (or non Canon ships), but even go so far as to pair up characters who would be incredibly toxic together for the sake of it being gay. AND shove it down everyone's throats. And if it bothers you or you disagree with it you hate gays and don't think LGBT+ rep should exist. (I'm seeing this happen especially with bi characters. Y'all disgust me.)

Seriously? How are you guys any better than the cishets? Forcing it on everyone? Getting angry at people who don't agree exactly? Demanding more rep to the point of harassing and sending death threats to content creators? It's like you got recognition and now you'll burn the world if everything isn't all about you immediately. LIKE CISHETS HAVE DONE FOR LITERALLY EVER. Why are you stooping to their level?

Fandom isn't fun anymore because of this shit. I'm tired. I want to enjoy my fandoms in peace. I love ships too but I don't want it in my face ALL the fucking time. There is so, so much else to talk about.

Most importantly, not everything has to be about romance. Again, y'all sound like cishets. People can be just friends. People who aren't related can be like family. Not. Everything. Has. To. Be. Romantic. Let people be just friends. Please.

[im-the-punk-who]

Hi! I’m new to the fandom and I’m simply curious (not trying to start a feud or anything), why don’t you like Steinberg?

Hello dear anon! And welcome to the fandom! 

Oof. That’s a question. xD 

I’m going to try and stay as uh. neutral as possible. Because I’ve already written the post I know I failed but, the intent in answering this is also not to start a feud or hurt anyone’s feelings. 

Okay, so I got fairly negative in this chilis tonight, so I want to start by saying that even in light of the opinions I’m about to express, Black Sails is one of, if not my number one, favorite TV shows of all time. Certainly in recent memory - I’ve been hyperfixating on this show for 18 months with no sign of stopping, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for everyone who worked on the show - even Steinberg. (The one exclusion is Michael Bay, he can go twist.)

AND I think Stienberg is an incredibly talented writer. Black Sails is one of my favorite shows because it does such a wonderful job of weaving stories, creating characters, and melding things in a way that is both unexpected and makes sense narratively. I have changed as a person because of the show, and they will have to pry James McGraw and Thomas Hamilton from my cold dead knives-attached-to-them hands. None of what I’m going to say is meant to detract from that.

I will also say that a lot of these issues are not particular to Steinberg and are in fact a systemic problem with American TV + Film. And I’m not leaving Robert Levine out of my criticism, it’s just that Steinberg had the biggest hand in the pot(he wrote a full half the episodes) and a lot of what I’ve heard as far as talking about the show comes from Steinberg. So, he gets the brunt. But it isn’t that I think Steinberg was the only problematic element of the show. 

Also, these are all my opinions and are colored by how I interact with my fandoms. I am not only a fandom veteran, but I work and pretty much live in the entertainment industry. I work in indie film and theatre and am surrounded by artists and creators of all walks of life, like, constantly. I know what is possible, and when I see something that can be improved, I want to note it because it is important to me to always be striving forward. Like Miranda says about Thomas, this isn’t out of malice, or out of hate. It’s because I genuinely love this show, and I love entertainment as a whole, and I think in order to get to a better, more inclusive industry we have to have hard conversations and look critically at the media we consume, and it is frustrating to me to time and again see the same faces in the room. 

But if that isn’t your cuppa, that’s fine! Fandom isn’t meant to be stressful and if all you want to do is watch a show about gay pirates that is your tomato and I applaud you. Have at it you funky motherfucker.

OH! One more. At some point I’m going to talk about Silverflint. When I do, it is NOT meant as a ‘you shouldn’t/cant ship this’ or ‘this pairing is bad’ or any negative attack on the people who ship that pairing. My criticisms in this post are exclusively about what it means for Steinberg as a writer and Black Sails’ representation of gay and mlm men. While it’s not my cuppa, this is a sail your own ship blog. 

OKAY! SO! 

My main criticisms of Steinberg & Co boil down to:

The homozygosity of the writers and directors shows a complete lack of desire to include marginalized people in the writing of a show that is about them. Which leads to:

The centering of white men while choosing a historical setting and time period that was in fact dominated by people of color and specifically a black woman, 

The gratuitous inclusion of violence against women, particularly sexual violence, and again, that the female characters are often sidelined for the central male characters. 

SO.

Black Sails is a show centered around queer, female, and black leads, and yet there were only two non white-male directors (one bi-racial man and one white woman) and only 7 female writers - one of whom was Latina. The entire rest of the major creative staff was white men. I’m not going to comment on sexualities but none of the writers or directors are out as queer according to a quick google search. 

Let me reiterate the important bit there. 

In Black Sails, where the last two seasons specifically feature around a real, actually-happened-in-history event that shaped black history in the Caribbean, there was not a single black writer on the entire show. 

This is the main difference between inclusion for inclusion’s sake, and actually centering marginalized voices. Black Sails has a ton of gay, POC, and female rep in front of the camera but practically zero representation behind it, which leads to storylines and implications that Steinberg and his writers, as white men, simply would never realize.

It’s like why Silver and Miranda never realized the true reasons James was waging war on England. They just did not have the life experiences to realize they were missing a piece of the puzzle, and so they filled in their own without even realizing they’d done so. 

Because no one in the room of Black Sails was a part of these marginalized identities, nuances get lost or mistranslated, motivations get muddled through a white man’s gaze(or a straight person’s) and implications that someone within those communities might think is obvious won’t even come up.

And again, because there were no writers or directors of color in the last two seasons (the biracial man directed episodes 2x02 and 2x04 - WHICH MAKES SENSE IMO) the entirety of the historical lore that the show bases itself on in its latter half is filtered through a white man’s lens. And so there is no discussion of how changing something changes the meaning, how leaving someone out or changing their role to be more minor might affect people for whom that is their heritage. How the entire story they’re telling might change with one simple exclusion or addition.

So, how does this relate directly to Steinberg, you ask? Well, simply, because it was his show. 

Steinberg(and Levine) were involved in every major decision about the show, from its conception, to the script, to choosing the writers and directors. They chose how they wanted the show to look, to think, what stories to tell and how they wanted to tell them. Their decisions(and the biases that formed those decisions) are woven into the show.

And look. I don’t for a second believe any of this was willful or malicious. I don’t think that John Steinberg and Robert Levine sat down one day and said ‘you know what would make the gays really angry? If we locked the only two canonically gay men up in a prison camp.’

But the decisions that were made in the show were based in ignorance in a way that shows more than just simple negligence or laziness(especially given the attention to detail in everything else). The things they leave out or change in the Maroon War plotline for instance are not small details easily missed. They are big, giant waving flags. They are things that are irreplaceable to still have the same events and stories and tell them respectfully. 

It shows an insane amount of privilege to, for instance, write a show airing during a time when the Black Lives Matter movement was at the forefront of the American conscience, include black characters and black storylines, and yet not include a single black voice on their creative team. 

In a show that centers a gay man’s love and his journey in attempting to process the horrible things done to him and his lover because of it, we are given just forty minutes of the entire show dedicated to their relationship - and just fifteen of those minutes actually feature the lover! 

(Relatedly, the entirety of the gay romantic rep is two kisses, and a forehead touch. That’s the entirety of your gay intimacy representation. And yet there are in the first two seasons alone - because that’s all I’ve clocked so far - something like twenty seven minutes of scenes involving a naked or half naked woman. Five minutes of that is explicitly wlw sex.

Again, I just want to reiterate this because it’s important in recognizing bias. 

There is fully twice as much female nudity in the first two seasons, as the entirety of the time the two gay characters have together on screen. )

Steinberg is a perfect example of how a lack of understanding why the diversity you are representing is important, matters. I dislike Steinberg because he, just like every other straight white cis man I have known, profited off of marginalized voices without including them or creating with them in mind.

Art does not exist in a vacuum. You cannot create something - especially something as back breakingly, intensely a labor of love as Black Sails - without putting several pieces of yourself into it. But those pieces color your narrative. They will expose things about you that you don’t even realize. And it’s in these places we are weakest, and why a diverse group of writers with a diverse group of experiences can help a piece be stronger. But for whatever reason, John Steinberg thought that he could make art with only people who looked and thought and experienced like him. 

The lack of representation behind the camera in Black Sails was evident in front of it and yet Steinberg is out here getting to pretend like he created the most inclusive groundbreaking show that ever existed. It is important to me, personally, to acknowledge that. And that it kind of makes my skin crawl in the way all media made by straight white (cis)men makes my skin crawl. I wish I didn’t have to feel that way about my favorite tv show just because it was created by a man of privilege, but here we are.

SO. I hope that helped? Feel free to take what you want and leave what you don’t! 

Below the cut is a more in depth look at things that I think show what I’m talking about, but that up there ^^ is the gist. <3 |D

SURPRISE!

The Maroons and the Maroon War

So the first thing I want to point out is that the Maroon War was a real thing that happened. It lasted ten years, and resulted in the most substantial victory the Maroons ever achieved against the British. Not only that, there was in fact a KICKIN’ badass female leader of the maroons named Queen Nanny, who is to this day honored as a national hero in Jamaica. While they weren’t able to drive the British out, the outcome of this war led to a mostly self-governing Maroon population in Jamaica from the mid 1700s on. This was a long term fight that had a very tangible and real outcome, even if it didn’t end in the destruction of colonialism. 

And what is this war turned into in Black Sails? A white ‘madman’s revenge’  that is doomed to failure after six months.

That, my dear pirates, is a problem for me. (And those familiar with my brand of spiceyness know that I do not ascribe to the ‘Flint is a Madman’ trope, but that IS what Steinberg ascribes to, what he seems to have written the show thinking.) 

There was no narrative reason to include the Maroon War in the narrative of Black Sails. The Maroon War didn’t happen until a decade after the Golden Age of Piracy, and aside from Silver’s wife being a black woman there is no mention of Silver ever having contact with them. To me, this feels like the choice of a showrunner who found a cool historical event and saw a chance to up the stakes of their white male heroes while getting in some sweet sweet POC rep. 

Except that they then took the major events of the Maroon War and gave them to their white characters, Flint and Silver. 

Here’s the thing. If you’re going to take a piece of culturally important history and use it for your show, you NEED to have sensitivity writers. You need to have people who are at least familiar with those events and who care about them to do them justice. Have an expert come in and read your script or go over your ideas. Or just like. Hire a black writer. Hire ONE black writer. As a treat.

The important Maroon figures, Nanny, Cudjoe, and Quao, all get sidelined or ‘sexified’ and then used as plot points for the white characters. Nanny gets split into two women - the older mother queen and Madi, the young naive warbent visionary. Quao(Mr. Scott is the closest, or Kofi possibly) gets killed off because the writers realized they didn’t exactly have a place for him in their writing. Cudjoe(Julius) gets a few scenes and one good speech but his entire role in the war gets given to Silver. And THEN. That sexy Queen Madi figure gets used as emotional bait for Silver and then has to learn he has betrayed her and destroyed the hope and freedom she had wanted to bring to her people. 

Gross, pirates. Gross.

Anne Bonny/Max/Mary Read - a heads up, this section includes a semi in-depth discussion of both Max and Anne’s sexual assaults. If that bothers you, the paragraphs talking about that begin with a ***

COOL NOW LET’S TALK ABOUT LESBIANS. Words my 20 year old self would never have imagined coming out of my mouth. 

Specifically, I want to talk about Max, and Anne, and their backstories both involving extreme sexual trauma at the hands of men. And then Mary Read and the once again sexification of female characters.

(Actually while I’m here another criticism I have of Steinberg is that his writing does not seem to recognize how queer people existed in the past - again, likely because he didn’t have any gay historians to be like ‘actually buddy that doesn’t make sense also why is Anne not dressing as a man? If you want to fuck with anything and insert modern day terminology and ideas into this show, make her non binary and REALLY piss off the hetties.���)

(This same ficitonal gay dramaturg who is definitely not me has also questioned John Steinberg repeatedly about where Mary Read is, unsatisfied with the answer ‘well we wanted her to be hot so we made her a sex worker and then had Anne have to rescue her but then we realized it would be weird not to include her actual character so we gave her a five second cameo at the very end of the series and also made her like 13.’)

Anyway! So my main point in bringing up Anne and Max is the sexual trauma they are exposed to in the show, particularly being that they are the two primary wlw in the show, who Steinberg has said he views as being completely gay, and what THAT whole unexamined idea looks like. 

***Max. My dear Max. There was literally no reason to have her be repeatedly r*ped(and for the love of god there was even less reason to make it that gratuitous and graphic). Max being assaulted like that did not add anything to the gravity of Eleanor’s betrayal. The traumatic event was being tossed aside by Eleanor, and that could have been just as emotionally damaging without the sexual assault. And the only reason for her to be continually assaulted was to bring her and Anne together. 

***The reason imo that Max’s r*pe plot was added was because it was the only thing these white straight men could come up with that felt emotionally damaging enough to them. The act of betrayal itself wasn’t enough, the act of being thrown away, of having a lover put your life in danger because of her own ambitions wasn’t enough, they needed her to be r*ped to really drive home the point. 

***Anne, on the other hand, is never shown being sexually abused, but we are given an explicit account of her own traumatic history and how Jack saved her from this vile beast who was passing her around to his friends.

But here’s the thing pirates - that never happened. According to every account we have of Anne Bonny, she chose her husband, and married him against her father’s wishes. They were probably relatively happy until her husband started being a pirate spy and Anne started cheating on him with Jack. 

And yes, when they were found out. Her husband had her beat. That’s not fucking cool, and if they really wanted to go the damsel in distress route they still could have had Jack ‘save’ her from that. But at no point was she sexually abused by her husband(at least not in any accounts I’ve read.) 

You know who did likely sexually abuse her or at least manipulate her and Mary for his own benefit? If you guessed our Rat man Jack Rackham, you would be correct, because when he found out about Mary and Anne’s (supposed, but probably real) relationship, it’s implied he extorted both of them into fucking him to keep their secret from the crew. 

The addition of sexual abuse to Anne’s past isn’t done to be true to her character and was in fact explicitly untrue. Now of course I don’t know the reasons why they chose to do this, but I can guess. Just as with Max, the most traumatic thing a male writer can think of for a female character is for them to be sexually abused.

And the most disturbing part of this to me? The parallels it has to the real world of why straight men think lesbians exist. These characters who would be called man haters in present day are given these incredibly traumatic man-centered histories. It brings up something very uncomfortable in me about particularly wlw sexuality being viewed as a reaction to trauma at the hands of men. It’s just gross, I dont like it, and honestly there is no fucking excuse for it besides a room full of white straight men writing this bullshit. A room that Steinberg chose, because they fit his ideas.

In Fact heck, the women of Black Sails in general

***I honestly struggle to think of a single female character who I think was treated fairly in Black Sails. Miranda and Eleanor are killed for taking sides and not understanding their partners, Madi is betrayed in the worst way possible, Max is given a pseudo empowering ending but has that fucking terrible start. Idelle ends off fairly well, but tied to a man she may or may not have any actual feelings for, in what is essentially a political marriage. And Anne has her entire identity tied to a man who will be dead in two years as she is robbed of any agency whatsoever without him. (Oh, and the whole r*pe thing. And also her support for Max’s r*pe or death until she started having fee-fees. Who wrote this stuff. >_>)

Even though the characterization of each and every one of these women is PHENOMENAL - and again I will repeat that I absolutely LOVE these characters as they exist in a vacuum. I think they are well rounded, real, feeling people given motivations and drives and FEELINGS and they SHOW THEIR ANGER and i LOVE THEM. 

But the show punishes them for it. Miranda is essentially fridged to move Flint’s storyline along, and to make room for Silver. Eleanor is killed for the emotional damage it will cause Rogers. Madi is placed at the center of a conflict she explicitly says she is willing to die for and then not only is her entire cause taken from her, but when she tells Silver to fuck off he - in possibly the most predictable white man move ever - says ‘no i will stay until you change your mind. I will never leave you. I don’t care about your choice in this matter, I will wait forever for you. I’m your biggest fan. I’ll follow you until you love me. papa, - paparazzi.’ 

And I touched on this before, but I want to talk in more detail about what is possibly my hottest take to date, the sexification of Mary Read and Queen Nanny, as they are presented in the show. 

Max is to Anne what Mary Read is, historically. She is the lover that Jack Rackham discovers with Anne, and then he joins them in their bed. They form a triumvirate that upholds Jack at the expense of the women. But for some reason, Steinberg didn’t want to just include Mary Read as an actual character. For some reason he needed to make Anne’s love interest a sex worker who was in need of saving (and who, coincidentally, we never see working the brothel after she becomes lovers with Anne, because she is now a madam. :) Gross.)

And Madi. My dear sweet fucking Madi who didn’t fucking deserve any of this bullshit send tweet. 

So, historically, Queen Nanny was the Queen, spiritual advisor, and the military tactician of the Windward Maroons. She would have filled both Madi and the Queen’s character roles(and Flint’s, but who’s counting. A BLACK GAY LEAD? Inconceivable. I digress.) But, I guess, because they were wishy-washing with Silver’s sexuality or felt they needed to give him a female love interest because of Treasure Island, or because they were leaning a bit too hard into the gay shit and needed to backpedal, they took Queen Nanny and split her into a character who is for all intents and purposes powerless in the war and Madi, who is young and naive and does not have any real world experience outside of the Maroon camp.

Because that’s sexy, or something. They could have had the Maroon Queen be a fucking badass lady who works and fights alongside Flint and Silver and one ups them and teaches them shit and has her own ideas about where the British can stick it, but instead they made her into the perfect caricature of a female monarch, letting the big strong men handle the dirty work or something. Because white male power fantasies. 

Just let women be powerful and not nubile and let them have character arcs over fucking thirty and let them be CENTERED in their own. fucking. narratives. 

God damnit Steinberg.

James Flint, mlm extraordinaire

Oh, my love. My most amazing child. The light of my life. My purest cinnamon roll. 

~~And now we’ve come to the dreaded Silverflint criticism part of our programming. Please please know and remember this isn’t a criticism of people who ship Silverflint. As I said up top, Your Tomato Is Not My Tomato and that’s cool. Please don’t take this next part as an attack on Silverflint as a fandom ship.~~

My criticism of Steinberg as it relates to Flint is related to:

What a romantic/sexual relationship with Silver being the basis of the tension and plot means for Flint in particular as a gay or mostly mlm man. 

Refusing to confirm Thomas and James being alive at the end and honestly the whole finale in general but like I’ll try and focus.

The major problem I have with Silver and Flint being coded as in love with each other is the implications there in terms of gay men’s relationships to other men. 

From every corner, men are inundated with the idea that any close relationship between them must be gay. That intimacy cannot exist unless there are sexual feelings involved. That a relationship cannot be close, deep and soul shattering and life altering, unless one guy secretly(or not so secretly) wants to bone the other dude. That two men cannot value each other as partners or friends or truly know each other unless they are gay.

Seeing both of the meaningful relationships Flint forms with other men be sexually coded feels a bit the same way as Anne and Max’s sexual assault plotlines does vis-a-vis being wlw. (Even with Gates, Flint never spoke about Thomas or his plans - Silver is absolutely the closest person to Flint besides Thomas and Miranda.) And this is just as true for Silver. Having both Flint and Madi - the two people he trusts - both be people he’s in love with also just feels. I don’t know. 

It feels like a confusion between male intimacy and male love that is so so familiar to me as a gay man I could choke on it. Where they wanted these men to have a deep and really lasting connection, but could only figure out how to do it if they were in love. Friendship wouldn’t have been enough - only romantic and sexual love is enough for the gay man(or men, at all).

Just because it isn’t queerbaiting doesn’t mean it’s good rep, and I would have liked to see truly deep male friendships that did not center on sexual attraction - particularly for Flint as a confirmed mlm(and Silver too, if you’re counting him. The same arguments for why I dislike Flint being paired with Silver are also true in the reverse.) 

Even if both Flint and Silver were confirmed mlm I still would have LOVED to see a platonic relationship between them. In fact I would have loved that EVEN MORE. Men! Who fuck men! Not needing to fuck each other to be important to one another! Who made this. Very delicious. 

But because there weren’t any queer writers on the show, writers who understand this kind of struggle that gay and mlm men face, they thought ‘oh, let’s also have them be in love with each other. More gay rep is better gay rep, right?’ False. THOUGHTFUL gay rep is better gay rep.

Okay and here’s my last thing. The fact that Steinberg refuses to say whether or not the explicitly mlm men are alive at the end of the show - that the words he specifically uses are ‘up for interpretation’ is. Fuck, it’s gross, okay? It’s fucking gross. 

I have been around enough men, enough people in power, enough people with leverage who also know how to play the field, to know that when someone wants a group’s support but does not agree with them, their go to phrasing is that it is ‘up for debate’ or ‘up for interpretation.’

Say the gays are alive. Steinberg refusing to acknowledge the reality of the ending of his show to maintain his own sense of artistic integrity is what, honestly, really sets me off about him and I don’t care if this is a nuanced take.

Like yes, death of the author. I honestly don’t care if he thinks they’re dead or alive. What I care about is that he thinks he can get away with being clever and leaning hard into a story is true/untrue’ - doesn’t realize what the implications of that are, and didn’t when he was writing, and didn’t have anyone else in the room who would think about it either. 

ANYWAY. So this is....my long drawn out explanation for why I do not like Steinberg. Uhhhhh tune in next week for more of my totally unpopular opinions!

[sunsetsover]

"I swear half this fandom don't actually like Ben" lmao true! Thing is though he's not likeable all the time and he can be a right old dick. But personally even if I don't like him or his actions at certain times, I feel like the broader picture is still there and I root for him because I get why he's like he is? And I can see and appreciate the softer sides of him even if they're fairly well hidden at times.

I also think some people in the fandom intellectually understand that he's traumatised and a survivor of various abuses, and when that shows in certain ways e.g. like if Callum or Lola is comforting while he's crying. But when it comes to situations like this week with Jags and Whitney, I personally think some people have struggled to understand how his trauma connects to it because it's not as obvious as e.g. Whitney's fiance dies, Gray manipulates her, bish bash bosh hit and run. Even more broadly I think it's easy for the audience to underestimate how Ben's experiences have shaped him because there's a distance created by time, his criminal actions, his (un)likeability factor, not viewing Phil as an abusive parent etc.

I don't wanna say everyone criticising him is like that btw! I'm sure there's a few reasons but I think this plays a part tbh.

i get what you're saying but to me it's like.... why would you even waste so much time invested into someone you don't like most of the time. i genuinely don't get it. ppl tend to ship ballum but hate ben AND hate the majority of the sls lately and it's like.... it's 2021 bro it's not like gay couples are THAT rare anymore there is so much media out there if you're not enjoying what ee are doing then you literally do not have to watch. in fact im BEGGING you for your sake not to. literally just do not engage with media that you aren't enjoying. do not sit in your own negativity writing 20 posts a day abt 'why are they doing this? why don't they do that? if they did this i would enjoy it more' bc you're only making yourself miserable. like this goes for any type of media but literally just stop engaging w it if you're not enjoying it anymore. the think pieces don't help anyone. your opinions aren't universal and they aren't gospel. we all need to stop confusing our opinions w facts. just bc i'm not enjoying smth doesn't mean other ppl aren't and vice versa. just bc i'm not enjoying smth doesn't mean that the thing needs to change. eg i hate the fact that callum is a copper and pray every day that something will force him out of it BUT it doesn't really affect my overall enjoyment of him as a character and it doesn't mean that the show has to make him quit just bc i don't like it. you (the royal you not u specifically anon lmao) might hate the fact that ben still does illegal stuff but that doesn't mean the show has to make him stop just bc you don't like it. if it affects how much you enjoy him as a character/ben and callum as a couple then maybe consider stopping watching. festering in the energy of 'i hate this, i hate what they're doing and here's 1200 words why' is unhealthy! i learned this the hard way !

i know this seems like an irrelevant ramble but i think i've realized that this is what my issue is. ppl not understanding trauma is frustrating and damaging and still pisses me off, but i feel like what actually pisses me off more are the ppl who just don't even attempt to be understanding bc underneath it all they're angry/frustrated at the show/sls and that's how it manifests itself. ppl don't like the direction ben and/or callum are going in and so the minute they (and it's usually ben lbr) step out of line they JUMP on that as an excuse to vent their frustrations and often end up saying shit that is ignorant or damaging or mean or just straight up cruel abt things that are so often symptoms of mental illness or trauma. so they're out here posting so many things and making these cruel little comments bc they can't just acknowledge that they don't actually like ballum anymore meanwhile ppl who are actually disabled/mentally ill/traumatised are sitting there reading all of these things and seeing all the people agreeing w them and it's doing real life damage to people.

is it on purpose? probably not. but that doesn't make the damage any less real. i have never forgotten or forgiven the way ppl reacted after ben went deaf. it was vile. as a disabled person who reacted very badly to being disabled just like ben did, it genuinely fucked me in the head seeing what ppl said abt him during that time. now i understand that it was partially ignorance but also a big chunk of it was ppl being unhappy bc they thought they wouldn't be able to enjoy their ship anymore bc ben was disabled (not that he hadn't been disabled before, but now it wasn't ignorable anymore).

idk there's more i could say but i feel like it's pointless. ppl don't care lmao all they care abt is their ship. which, ok fine whatever, but stop letting ur mentally ill/traumatised/disabled followers get caught in the crossfire bc you can't just admit you're not enjoying it anymore and feel the need to tear the thing down and rant about how it's 'bad writing' or 'out of character' etc etc. it's frustrating to read (which is why im never on here anymore) and speaking from experience it hurts YOU in the long run. negativity breeds more negativity.

you don't need to make excuses! just let it go! find something that does make you happy! you deserve that! and we deserve to be able to enjoy something without seeing ppl tearing it (or worse - us) down every 5 minutes !!

(edit - to clarify anon none of this was aimed at you i just sort of started ranting and didn't even really answer ur question im sorry !! i get what ur saying tho lmao 💞💞💞)

[ravenfan1242]

Ya know what, screw this! I may be totally manic, and chaotic when it comes to fandom, but who in all of the 9 level's of Hell gets to tell ME or YOU what we can and cannot say, what we can and cannot like, and most importantly (AND I'M SCREAMING THIS TO ALL OF YOU TYRANNICAL, OPPRESSIVE, TORMENTING, HIVE MINDED, TWITTER HEN'S) what we are ALLOWED to think?! You people have all these fandom "rules" everyone is supposed to follow. What kind of Twilight Zone are we in that this is even a thing? Rules......for how to be a fan?

But, for a while, I say nothing, nothing ever gets better, and the abuse continues (for everyone) while I remain a doormat who has to be happy and pretend I don't see the constant belittling that happens on the daily to all fans (especially over ship's). I fight back occasionally and I'm part of the "fandom problem" everyone is so tired of. If we are all so tired of it, why can't we stop it? Tell me, what is the point? Are we all seriously under the delusion that everyone has to like exactly what we like or we treat them like they are absolute idiots? As if anyone has the right to judge people they don't even know over a ship or a character or a comic they enjoy. Something that gives them happiness. Do you see what's wrong with this picture?

Am I being a drama queen? Of course I am, but this has much more to do than just one or two incidents. This is a build up of all the things I've seen and all the horrible ways people have treated each other. This has to do with groups of people sucking every single amount of love and joy a person should get out of the fandom in order to make them miserable. Sometimes going so far with their domineering as to make people just give up and leave.

What the hell business is it of yours what other people like? Why do you even care? Is it affecting your own life personally? (Pssst, it's not, at all) Why do peoples difference in opinions become so offensive that we attack each other, and where do any of us get off telling each other those opinions are wrong?

Do you know what an opinion is not? A fact. It is not, and never will be a fact, no matter what "I'm smarter than you" arguments you bring to the table. Therefore it cannot be wrong or right, especially when it's all just works of fiction. Is it ridiculous that I'm going off about fandom culture again? You bet your ass it is! It's stupid, being a fan is not meant to be serious, it's meant to be fun. Have your fandom discussion's and arguments in a RESPECTFUL way and have fun with it. That's what we all want!???

Respect

The reason I'm going off on this particular occasion is the way I see how bad social media has gotten in hurting people, every single day. Young people, who may not know how to deal with this crap. They may have a hard time ignoring thing's like adult's can (shit I even have a hard time). And heaven forbid you are over 20 and still like these things as much as you do, then you get called pathetic. (Apparently your personality completely changes after a certain age 😱). They LOVE to shame adults, as if there is something wrong with still liking these things. But someone will always take the bait, and the trolls will jump on them with their big group of friends and rip them apart and then take thing's a little too far. They find this fun apparently. It makes them feel good to try and prove they are the smartest person in the room with the most amount of friends (damn, that sounds like middle school). And making others look stupid is the ultimate prize.

I have seen people literally change what they like and enjoy because they were bullied by a group of people that what they like, and what they think, is wrong. And it makes me so angry. It's childish for all of us, but if you get nothing else from this long rant,

Please, for the love of all that is holy in this world, THINK. FOR. YOURSELF.

If you liked it to begin with, stick to your guns. Like what you like. Be the freak because you refuse to follow behind the sheep. Trust me, the sooner you start doing this, the better off you'll be in life. Because this behavior of being pressured to think like everyone else, and following the sheep, is a problem that will follow you for the rest of your life. Start learning how to deal with it now. You have a brain, use it, I know you are smart. So you choose for you, not for them.

Have a lovely evening or day

Much 💕 love and piece

- J