#ik he's a fictional character and everything but imo it doesn't matter

[k9punkout]

saw a post about this art on twitter and thought it was gonna be ppl crying over it like i am but no.

they're fetishizing it. i hate everything

[teaveetamer]

Shipping and liking in fiction don't really need to be consistent imo, like you can like black chocoloate and dislike white chocolate even if they are both chocolate but that doesn't makes you an hypocrite so liking a character that does something and not another character that does the same thing or as a similar personaily falls into taste, the only moment where i would disagree would be if they tried to justify it by draggin down the other people who ike what they dislike

My blog archive can attest to this, but I've always hated the "you wouldn't hate so-and-so if they were a man!" or "but you like this character who did something I think is the same!" arguments.

If the character were a man, then they wouldn't have been written with misogynistic dev bias in the first place, AKA they would be a completely different character, or at least handled in a completely different way.

Just because you can draw some surface parallels between characters doesn't mean they're the exact same. Even if they do the exact same thing that doesn't mean they're treated the same, which factors into how much I like or dislike them.

Like we'll just take the example of Arvis for a second. Surface level he and CF!Edelgard do a lot of similar things. They:

Conquer a continent

Ostensibly for the good of the people

Through extremely dubious means (killing or trying to kill the MC, stealing sovereign territory that they are explicitly not in charge of by force, etc.)

Which would realistically have serious and far reaching negative consequences for the people conquered (death of able-bodied men to work the fields, trampling of crops, requisitioning food from the poor and hungry, civilian deaths as tends to happen in war, etc.)

While allying with a shady evil cult who want to bring about the destruction of humanity

They attain their goals

And the narrative implies that everything went well in the immediate aftermath and everyone was kind of chill about it despite point 4 above.

And I don't like Arvis, but I don't dislike him as much as Edelgard either, and that's because of what happens next in Arvis's story:

Arvis realizes he was never as in-control as he thought, and in fact he was completely played by an organization far more powerful and intelligent and dangerous than he realized

He has a significant fall from grace, basically becoming a puppet for the evil cult

Everything he worked toward is in the gutter and things actually become significantly worse for the people living in his empire. Not only that, he has to witness his family ripped apart and used as pawns in the game he was unwittingly, hopelessly outmatched in from the start

He has a come to Jesus moment and realizes just how badly he was outplayed and how much worse he made literally everything for literally everyone with his actions

And then he spends his last moments helping the MC try and defeat the evil he unleashed. While it's not necessarily a redemption or even sufficient atonement, there is at least the understanding that Arvis understands just how responsible he is for everything that's happened, and that he needs to do everything he can to try and fix it

Meanwhile Edelgard's story in CF is:

She gets everything she wants no matter how brutal or vile her methods are or how much pain she causes to the people around her

And then the game ends with absolutely no acknowledgement of that or consequences for those actions

Like... Yeah. I don't like either of them, but why would I feel the need to criticize Arvis for the bad shit he's done? When Arvis did bad shit the plot made him fuck his sister and turned his son into a literal demon god who hunts children for sport. Not only is the game fully aware of the bad shit he's done and takes every opportunity to point out how shitty he is, Arvis is fully aware of the bad shit he's done and takes the opportunity to atone for how shitty he was once he realizes this.

The frustrating thing about Edelgard isn't that she does bad shit. It's that the game never wants to engage with that bad shit beyond surface level "woe is me" pity speeches. Not only that, but it takes every opportunity to try and make you pity her, the person inflicting all of this suffering, instead of empathizing with the people she is inflicting suffering on. Like? Can you just imagine if FE4 stopped dead in its tracks and Seliph looked at the camera and said "Gee I know Arvis killed my dad and fucked my mom and brought the apocalypse on us and all, but actually I think he's kind of dope and I wish we could have walked hand in hand together uwu"? Holy fuck I would clown on FE4 so hard for that shit.

And I'd like to say I'd feel that way about a male character in the same situation, but honestly? I can't think of any. And that's because I feel like female characters are either the most evil, vile creatures to ever exist or they're handled with kid gloves and the narrative is terrified to criticize them in any way. It feels like writers are less afraid to write flawed-but-not-irredeemably-so male characters, who can have their flaws not only front and center but also a core part of their narrative.

And if I wanted to go deep into it and draw parallels to real life... look at how often we're expected to give men (most often cishet white men) the benefit of the doubt in society, and how often women are not afforded that privilege. E.g. if a man yells then he's just having a bad day, but if a woman yells she's a bitch and a horrible person. Fiction reflects our society's attitudes in real life. So men get to be nuanced and flawed and women get to be either an Angel or a Bitch, and a lot of writers have no idea how to write anything in between those two points because they actually believe that's all women can be.

[mallowstep]

What is oc culture?

oc culture is a product of roleplaying.

that, by the way, is not a statement i can back up with like. sources.

so. you're just going to have to take it at face. that said it's not relevant to terribly much else.

there's a tendency to view characters as divorced from stories. like. i don't mean without having stories. i mean it's a character, and oh yeah there's a story to go along.

i can't QUITE put it into words, because it's hard to get at, but like. as someone who's written quite a lot of original fiction, i'd never be like. oh guys ask me about my oc marcy who meets several old gods while going to college.

i'd be like this is a story about a girl who goes to college and runs into several old gods.

and the distinction there might seem minimal. hell if i add in a girl named marcy the information would be EXACTLY the same. but. the presentation matters.

and it's like...to be CLEAR i am not criticizing anyone. this is just a difference in how i view stories and it's not wrong to not be like me. this is not a criticism of like. anything.

but.

when i see like. ask me about my oc jokes i'm always...very conflicted? like i have a lot of original characters i'm quite obsessed w? stonefur's kits in ioth. a whole set of fanclans now. the kits from ashes.

but it feels REALLY WEIRD to me that people would ever ask me questions that focused on the CHARACTER and not the broader story.

and i want to say it's totally in the context of asking for questions because like. asking who stonefur's kits are is not weird. asking what their relationships are like, designs, personality, everything i can think of, none of that is weird.

maybe personality but that's because i struggle with defining personality outside of the context of interacting others sometimes.

but like...i think that's because when i mention stonefur's kits in ioth, it is Understood that they exist in a broader story. i mean ik everyone reading this may not know what i'm going on about.

(and for you: ioth, "in offering to hestia," is a whole ass au, but the key details are: stonefur and leopardstar have kits and he raises them because of social obligations to riverclan. he loves them; he's kind of unhappy about how his life shook out; he's got bigger concerns tbh.)

but still, if i started with the kits and then revealed the story spiralling out, that would feel weird to me, y'know?

so it makes me hesitant to do any amount of discussing my ocs because well. even SAYING that feels wrong. like i don't like using the term oc it just doesn't feel right. i mean yes they are original characters. BUT. they're not...like my image of original character does not line up with a lot of how i see people behave and it makes me feel like. i don't like it.

so yeah that's oc culture: it's a product (imo) of roleplaying that leads to focusing on characters over stories. it's not bad/wrong but i feel hesitant to interact with anything regarding my original characters because the main attitude towards them is so antithetical to how i think that it makes me a little uncomfortable.