#in terms of like. fandom stuff lol. mostly just my rambles & live reactions to things

[orcelito]

With gay moon post approaching 600 notes (600 notes... 😥) I have had a few realizations

1: not everyone shares the same observations that I do. Which I say just bc I was IMMEDIATELY struck by the framing of Vash with the moon in that one panel the first time I saw it, but I've had a number of ppl mention they hadn't noticed it

Which leads into 2: the reason that post has so many notes is bc pointing out moments like that holds value to people. Plus I guess my commentary & conclusions? Plus acting as something for people to bounce their own ideas off of.

And then 3: there are probably more moments I could explore in such a way, & that could hold value to people

[brightblueinky]

Long winded ramblings about a Bronycon video

So I’ve seen some hubbub about a YouTube essay going over the history of the Brony fandom up until the last Bronycon. (You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fVOF2PiHnc ) I just got around to watching it today and I was...somewhat confused by some of the stronger negative takes I was seeing floating around Twitter, and I’ve been in a “fandom discourse” mood lately so, hey, I thought...why not talk about it. The first part of this was originally going to be a Twitter thread until I realized Twitter wasn’t going to let me keep going on the thread so I gave up and decided to put it here instead (lol) so it’s probably going to be a bit choppy since I was trying to keep it readable for that format.

So first of all, my background, so I can be completely honest about where I'm coming from and try not to portray what I'm saying as like...an end-all-be-all take here, because I don't wanna do that. I was never really an MLP fan. I watched the first season of FiM and really enjoyed it, but I didn't really engage with the fandom because by that point I'd gotten to where I didn't spend much time in huge fandoms. So I can't come at this from the perspective of an MLP fan. When I’m addressing the fandom here, I’m coming at it as an outsider in the sense that I am not a MLP fan/brony. What I AM going to do is come at this from the perspective of something of a "native" to fandom. I've always been a geek. I've engaged in online fandom in some form or another since I was about 8, which was in the mid 90s. I've been around the fandom block. Actually, I can even say that I used to lurk on 4chan a lot and I saw a lot of the early Brony discussions there. I also watch @JennyENicholson's videos, and yeah, there's been times where I've been bugged because we had a disagreement of opinions and felt like it was a little harsh. She's got a dry sense of humor and sometimes it's hard to read when she's joking and when she's being genuine. So like, I wasn't surprised when I saw some hubbub from some people online about her doing the video about Bronies. Not at all. But I gotta say...I am really surprised by some of the more INTENSE takes on the video after watching it?? The LARGE majority of the video is @JennyENicholson covering this fandom from an INSIDER'S perspective. She was an MLP fan before FiM, she was active enough in the fandom to be a BNF. A huge, huge amount of the video is positive and nostalgic. In fact I now wish I HAD been in the fandom! It seems like it was a lot of fun! The only thing I felt was maybe harsh in the video is I think she gave the impression that being "furry" is exclusively a sex thing, but by the end she talks about furries being a community that's a very inclusive, kind community with a lot of queer people, so even then I think if you're really paying attention to the whole video you're not going to come away with the idea that the furry community is bad. Just maybe could've had more nuance earlier in the video?  So from glancing through mentions of her in a Twitter search (which is definitely not going to be a perfect sample) from what I can tell there's like two things that people seem to be upset about with the video: 1, the idea that the fandom is "dead" and 2...just...Body Pillows. So let's talk about the dead fandom thing first. As I mention, I have been in fandom a long, long time. Although I (usually) shy away from big active fandoms now, I started off in bigger ones--Sonic, Pokemon, Digimon, LOTR, etc. The two fandoms I currently care about the most, though, are definitely fandoms that tend to be called "dead" and were never HUGE to begin with (Princess Tutu and Chrono Crusade). I think I can count on my hands the number of ppl who actively discuss or create fanwork for CC.   So I guess what I'm trying to say is, I've been on both sides of the coin here. And let me reassure Bronies: "Dead", while maybe too strong of a label for what it actually means, does not have to be a negative thing and you don't need to defend your fandom from it, IMO. I think the "dead" label simply means that interest in the fandom has cooled, the number of active participants is significantly down from the heydays of the fandom, etc. And I don't think that's an unfair label for brony fandom from what I know.   If there was a large scale replacement for Bronycon then maybe it'd be unfair, but...yeah, if you're losing your large hubs for the fandom community, if the flow of fanwork and discussion has slowed, I think "dead", as it's used, isn't an unfair label.   But again, I don't think this is a bad thing! I'd imagine that even the current state of the brony fandom is larger and more active than the Princess Tutu fandom at its greatest heights. It's a pretty relative term. It doesn't mean nobody cares, or that you can't still enjoy it! All the "dead" label really means is acknowledging the change in a fandom. It's not a bad thing. I might be 1 of ~30 writers for Chrono Crusade on AO3 but I still have fun writing fic and I still get hits and occasional positive comments. It's not bad. Just different. Okay so now let's talk about the body pillow thing and oh man, is this going to be a minefield, lol. Let's first talk about my personal lens I'm going to come at here... I've created NSFW fanwork. Some of it taboo. I'm also (somewhat) a part of the "proship" discourse on Twitter which is basically a community of people that push back against another community of "anti"-shippers who feel that some ships are problematic (because of character age, power dynamics, etc) and shouldn't be shipped. (I think that simplifies a lot of the discussion on both sides but it’ll do for the purpose of what I’m getting at here, I think.) At its worse this debate has lead death threats and suicide attempts. I have seen people get treated abusively for fanwork (sometimes NSFW but not always). (And I also want to add that while I think the major component of the pro-ship discussions on Twitter are anti-harassment, there’s been some ‘edgy’ types who think that it’s fun to harass antis with NSFW fanwork and the like and I want to make it clear that is ALSO ABUSIVE AND NOT OKAY.) Basically, I want to say I'm sympathetic to a knee jerk defensive reaction over NSFW fanart. Okay? I can get why people might want to push against criticism of stuff they enjoy/create, and that there’s an element of possibly being harassed for fanwork you create. But the thing is, I don't think this is really the attitude Jenny is taking in the video. She lightly mocks NSFW stuff and body pillows, but often describes it as "harmless" and "fine". The only time she's critical of it is when she notes that sometimes body pillows with suggestive poses could be on display at conventions where young kids were present--at a con celebrating a show MEANT for young kids--and that probably shouldn't have been allowed. She's not saying you can't buy a body pillow, or create one. She didn't even say that while discussing body pillows of characters who were 10! She expressed personal discomfort, but the only restriction she really suggested was "keep this out of the sight of minors." And I don't know why that would be a controversial take. I read lemons when I was younger so I'm not going to sit here and act like it's going to completely ruin kids lives or anything. But I ALSO think it's appropriate to have boundaries for sexual materials for kids (or anyone who doesn't want to engage for whatever reason). I want my stuff to be clearly labeled as NSFW, with tags being clear about the content, so people know what they're getting into. I’ve grown to care about this even more as I’ve gotten older. I don’t really want to know about minors reading my nsfw fanfic or anything. I’m not going to, like, parent them and shame them if they do, but I don’t want to engage with it, I want my stuff to be labeled, and I am DEFINITELY not going to put it on public display at a place where I know kids are allowed, ESPECIALLY not when it’s work based on stuff MEANT for children! I mean, I grew up in a fundamentalist Evangelical household and I will rant at you for hours about how damaging I feel that environment was, and that I don’t think kids and teens should be completely shielded from sex, etc. But that doesn’t mean that having boundaries in place is a bad idea, especially when minors are involved. I also think that boundaries are good just for the sake of consent, too? I’m not saying that someone accidentally seeing suggestive art is the same as them being raped, please don’t conflate it like that, but if people don’t want to see it for whatever reason they should be given the opportunity to make that choice as much as possible. The stuff that Jenny mentioned brony conventions would do (requiring stuff to be sold under the table, or having late night hours for the dealer’s room where 18+ merch could be displayed and sold) seem like really good policies and pretty similar to what I’ve seen at anime conventions I’ve attended (although occasionally some stuff that was maybe a biiit more suggestive than I’d be comfortable displaying in public...but hey, my local con allows kids but also makes it clear in their rules that it’s mostly geared for 13+ attendees and that it’s up to parents to decide what’s appropriate for their kids, and I think that’s fair). And yeah, I know, nothing that Jenny showed in the video being displayed at Bronycon was 100% explicit, just suggestive. She notes this in the video herself, saying that yeah, it doesn’t show genitalia, etc...and as I’m writing this I think I’ve maybe rambled too much about NSFW fanart when most of the stuff we’re talking about here is more “suggestive” than straight-up porn, since that’s probably muddying the waters a bit. But I gotta, gotta, GOTTA address the sentiment I saw multiple times on Twitter in response to her video: “Dakimakura/body pillows aren’t sexual and to say that is orientalist.” I...what? What the fuck? Okay, again, I’m going to make it perfectly clear what my background is here so that I’m not claiming to have some expertise that I don’t have: I am white. I am VERY white. My parents did the DNA test thing and the most “exotic” thing that came up is that my dad is 3% Spanish. Not latin american, I mean from Spain spanish. I am sooooo fucking white. I’ve studied a LITTLE of Japanese culture in college classes but that wasn’t even my field of study (Communication major on a Broadcasing track, minor in Theatre) so I’m not going to tell you I’m an expert on Japanese culture. I’m just a weeby geek that grew up in anime fandoms and never really stopped consuming Japanese pop culture. I have a very limited experience with Japanese culture. I am NOT an expert on what is and isn’t orientalist. I know I’m really hammering in this point here but I think it’s really, really important that I make it clear that I shouldn’t be used as an expert on this subject. But what I DO have a background in is someone who has engaged in Western fandom of stuff from Japan from a young age, I did spend a lot of time on 4chan, this is NOT the first time that I’ve seen some form of an “this isn’t sexual at all and you’re just a PERVERT” discussion about fanservice and...okay first of all, I highly doubt anyone saying this is any more qualified to define what is and isn’t orientalist than I am. I think this is bullshit and it feels like an attempt to make your opinions more legitimate by implying people that disagree with you are some form of bigot. (And look, I was a sheltered, insecure, stuck-up teenager in fandom, part of the reason I feel like I can recognize this is I totally pulled the same shit. I am not going to act like I have never tried to pull this and that I’m a pure innocent woke intellectual who’s never said something foolish, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let it slide, either.)

While writing this I googled ‘dakimakura’ to make sure I was spelling it right and noticed that Wikipedia does note that the origins of this style of pillow are sometimes used by Japanese kids as something like a security blanket, which I’m guessing is where the justification for the argument is coming from, but let’s be intellectually honest here--body pillow covers being sold at a convention aren’t primarily meant to be a security blanket for kids. And, okay, maybe you have a body pillow cover with a character on it that isn’t exactly in a sexual pose, just laying fully clothed on what looks like a bedsheet background. But I don’t think it’s an unfair argument to say that even THEN it implies a sort of intimacy, right, possibly a desire for a romantic attachment? Like, sharing a bed with someone doesn’t have to be sexual or romantic, I used to share a bed with my brother in hotel rooms when we were kids, but I’m also not going to share a bed with my brother and then hug him closely to my body no matter how he’s posed or what he’s wearing??? And look, maybe a body pillow isn’t ALWAYS sexual but to say it’s NOT sexual, which kinda implies NEVER, is so disingenuous. The top result I got when I searched for “anime body pillow” is a shop that includes categories like “18+ body pillow” and “sexy body pillow” and also SELLS FAKE BREAST INSERTS FOR SOME OF THE PILLOWS SO YOU CAN SQUEEZE THEIR BOOBS (obviously, NSFW link: https://www.dakimakura.us/ ) Like, COME ON, I don’t think it’s orientalist to say that something is sexual when Japanese people are actually selling body pillows they label as 18+. The second result even has a second for pillows you can insert sex toys into. And yeah I saw the guy saying “masturbation isn’t sex!” and sir at BEST you have a very narrow and incorrect definition of sex as simply being intercourse and, again, at worst you’re just being straight up dishonest. In fact, I’ll straight up call myself out for this. There’s a fanart body pillow of a fictional character I’ve considered buying several times! (Not porn but still probably NSFW link: https://www.etsy.com/listing/701912275/dakimakura-hypnosismic-doppo?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=hypnosis+mic&ref=sr_gallery-1-4&organic_search_click=1 ) Is this porn? No. You can’t see much. But on one side of the pillow he’s got his shirt untucked, you can see a bit of his stomach, and his fly is undone and you can see the band of his underwear peeking out. This is sexual. I’m not wanting it to like, get off on it, exactly...honestly it’s maybe a bit ironic, and a lot of wanting a body pillow in general is I like sleeping hugging onto something but I have a different sleep schedule from my husband I find him too big to hold all night and too warm in the summer anyway. But I’m not going to tell you that me wanting this PARTICULAR pillow case isn’t at all sexual, I know what I’m doing, I like the character and think the drawing is hot. I’m not saying don’t buy body pillows, okay? I’m not saying don’t sell them. I don’t think Jenny is either (she literally OWNS ONE that she shows in the video!!!). But don’t act like there isn’t ever anything sexual about it existing to try to defend their existence, okay? You don’t need to be a fucking coward about it, and you especially don’t need to say it’s racist if people call out something as being suggestive when, well, it fucking is. And I think it’s totally 100% reasonable for someone to say “hey I don’t think it’s a good idea to display suggestive art around kids, especially if it’s depicting young characters.” TL;DR -- Chill, guys. CHILL. Your fandom is getting smaller and the term people use for this is “dead” but that’s not a bad thing, you’ve still got the fandom, you can still enjoy it, there’s definitely no need to take personal offense over it. And enjoy your body pillows, but don’t be disingenuous about the fact that they can be suggestive and try to act like anyone that calls it such is racist, that is such bullshit. Like what you like, other people’s opinions of it is not automatically a personal attack on you, there’s no need to jump to being defensive every time someone says something vaguely negative about it. Chill, fandom friends. Fandom ain’t bad but it also doesn’t need to be the center of your identity and you don’t need to lash out against people for daring to have opinions about a thing you like. You especially don’t need to act like other people are perverts for noting something being suggestive. Chiiiiiiiiiill.

[wiredandrewired]

Was trying to actually work on something but my brain is stuck on loop.  So instead I’m gonna make a post of the Voltron stuff sitting unposted in my writing WIP folder to help me organize my thoughts.

I guess since I’m posting this, if you have anything you wanna say/ask about any of these feel free.  I respond well to outside interest.

1. Project ReVolt is without a doubt the project I’ve posted about the most here.  And talked about in random tags.  And tangents.  Originally it was just the name the project had in my internal brain filing cabinet but it’s kind of spread and stuck to where my wife and I just refer to it as that when we talk about it.

ReVolt is basically going to be a VLD series rewrite more along the lines of how my wife and I would have done it or at least liked to see it done.  In some places it will probably stick pretty damn close to the events of the series canon, but in others go completely off the deep end.  We’re each going to be doing one, so a lot of the headcanon and worldbuilding and such that we’ve worked out together in various other stories and RPs will be consistent between the two stories, but it will also give us a place to veer out and do things without the others’ input (as we’re not gonna let each other see our fics until they post, tee hee).  I’ve done a SHITPOT of rules and infrastructure work using actual alchemy tracts to try and make sense of the series’ largely Powers As The Plot Demands system,  and am pretty convinced I’m going to A)fall hard into my very common Esoterica Ranting Mode pitfall and B)enrage literally everyone who reads it with my character and plot choices.  Most conservative estimate says this will be six ‘books’ long as again, we’re doing literally the entire series.  Current status: at the ‘ridiculously large amount of notes and setting up actual arcs and outlines’ stage, and waiting for the wife to finish ‘Happier HOPEless’.

2. There Are No Monsters Here is a fic I really want to do but cannot seem to get off the ground, set to take place entirely in the ‘last universe’ from season 8--the one native-Honerva died in and crazed-death-god-Honerva picked out as her ideal and tried to wedge herself into.  I guess the basic idea was that, like the ‘main’ universe, it got rebuilt pretty much as it was prior to Nightmare Mom Ruining Everything, and I have it with no one fully remembering the events of season 8 that took place there, but characters really closely tied to those events having some itching feeling that something happened, and all the Altean alchemists agreeing that some kind of massive quantum Event certainly occurred even if they don’t know what.  

Mostly the story exists as  a place for me to have a canon-compliant AU that still lets me explore stuff like Altean history, the racial and cultural tensions of the Coalition, dink around with Oldadins that DON’T die in one fell swoop, a living Daibazaal and Altea, Lotor growing up with a decent-but-not-without-strains relationship with his dad, teen Allura and tiny Lotor being absolute shits to each other while also coming to terms as they grow up with who and what they MUST be both on a political and quantum scale, and generally prove that even a perfect universe isn’t, all in one place.  The title is entirely facetious, and anyone who’s read any of my alien culture headcanons for this series knows that.  Lol.  Current status: lots of bits and pieces, but no good beginning or connective tissue.   I have a lot of notes, some arc outlines, and a few scattered scenes and bits of dialogue from later in the story, but my god, I CANNOT get it off the ground.

3. Someone Must Get Hurt (But It Won’t Be Me) is supposed to be a pretty wholly Honerva-centric fic that starts...sometime in her youth?...and carries forward to an as-yet-undetermined point.  Probably her death.  I mean the first one.  I’m not sure.  Another chance to dig my fingers into Altean culture and Alchemy, this time leading up to All The Bad Shit That Happened, with the added bonus of being done from a focal point of a character I have a lot of really strong feelings about both positive and negative that’s resulted in me somehow being EVEN MORE wrapped up in her than I was before I added abject knee-jerk trauma hatred to the mix.  In no way meant to make Honerva more sympathetic, I think I just want to write her even more like my mother so I’ll feel EVEN BETTER about killing her?  Idk man my feelings about her are so complicated.  Also an excuse to write a shitpot of her and Zarkon because listen, I’m really glad they’re married because I ship them so fuckin hard.   Current Status: SO many notes.  SO much infrastructure.  Like three pages of an opening I’m almost definitely throwing away because I can’t decide where, when, or how to open but feel like this isn’t it.  One short but very telling scene of Honey and Zarkon from late in the story.  I’m obsessed with it but I can’t get anywhere. 

4. Currently Untitled Demon Hunter AU started because my wife talks to me about Happier HOPEless a LOT and I just got an itch in my bones to work on one myself.  In spite of the entire Demon Hunter AU thing getting started by a prompt on a Shance blog, neither Shiro nor Lance are set to appear for at least a chapter?  And I am not confident in my ability to not veer off into utter non-shipping anyway because man, am I bad at it.  Or like...just an entirely different ship for either or both of them.  Current Status: A lot of vague notes, a POWERFUL urge to structure the chapters and overall arc after Ripley’s Gates even though that limits my chapter count and means I will DEFINITELY have 20k+ word chapters, and about seven pages of the first chapter so I guess I’m committed now?

5. Currently Untitled Post Series Fic basically exists for me to vent my frustrations about two main things: The Universe is Fucking Huge And There Are Dangers Other Than Galra, and The Galra Empire Was Huge and Is Not Going To All Fall In Line Behind Voltron Coalition and Especially Behind Keith Who Just Arbitrarily Fucking Decided To Tell Them They Couldn't Pick A New Leader According To Their Own Traditions And Need To Do What They’re Told Now What The Fuck.  Also there was a lot of stuff in the series that got left hanging, and while ReVolt is an IN-series fix-it fic, I wanted something that patched up loose ends in a way that was satisfactory to me but also kind of canon-compliant.  Current Status: A lot of notes and screaming.  No one has seen my progress on this and they might never.

6. Dog Runs And Death Dreams is a warmup file turned deeply self-indulgent series of scenes in which I choose to assume that Shiro’s rare neuromuscular disorder was left so ambiguous so I could plug the symptoms of mine into it.  It’s genuinely not any deeper than that.  The whole thing is set pre-Kerberos, and includes copious Shiro x Adam content because of it, but also not the kind that makes me feel good about writing because that means it includes the ‘slow fizzle’ that leads up to their breakup before the mission.  Ugh.  Working on it does make me feel better when I've been having symptoms, though, and I’ve been letting myself write it, unchastised, in a really loose rambly way that I usually deride myself for.  It’s just cathartic.  Current Status: no notes, no plan, just strain-writing between seizures, but somehow it feels like it has some kind of structure and just keeps growing?  Possibly too close to the bone for me to ever post.

7. Birth and Rebirth was born out of two things: the fact that Zarkon is shown to have two ENTIRELY DIFFERENT reactions to first being presented with his baby son in different flashbacks and different seasons, and the fact that in spite of the flashbacks we get at the end of the series, earlier on, the impression I got of Lotor and Zarkon’s relationship wasn’t of a young man who had never had affection from his father, but who had instead lost it.  Well, three things: I have a lot of underlying issues at work, at play, and at large when it comes to the Galra Imperial Family.  Also, anyone notice the monitor blips in the first baby Lotor flashbacks indicate a heart murmur?  Anyway, it was supposed to be a thoroughly self-indulgent and thoroughly self-hurtful examination of Lotor’s early life and the death by degrees of what was left of his father in the husk Rift Adventures left behind, but I got stuck on it a little way in.   Current Progress: ten pages, a lot of notes, and some wistfulness.  I keep hoping I’ll get inspired to pick it back up again.  Contemplating rewriting some of the beginning, maybe it’ll help?

Bonus entry that is not actually in any form of progress soever:

50/50 Voltron Trashfire Edition is spawned from the ‘50/50′ challenge on an old TF board I used to haunt.  It’s a fifty-prompt smut challenge using the list of ‘50 reasons to have sex’ from some tv show, and the idea is to write a different ship for every prompt (hence the name).  My wife is blazing through it and has several (like twelve?) up on her AO3, but I’ll be utterly blunt: I haven’t written fifty porn fics in my LIFE.  Over ALL my fandoms.  Current Status: Literally all I have done is assign a ship to each prompt, and I might actually have some prompts with just question marks beside them still.  I have one aborted start to one entry.  That’s it.  It’s not happening.  But the empty file is technically in the folder, SO.