#it was written in response to the fandom

[the-blaze-empress]

WOOOOOOO JUST FINISHED CHAPTER 1 OF MY MAGIC AU I AM TRYING SO HARD TO NOT IMMEDIATELY POST IT

[dreadfuldevotee]

I'd like to discuss the elephant in the room. Why did we get zero Loumand sex scenes? We got hints and implications, but season 1 was pretty explicit. Do we think that that's a creative choice or something else is happening?

I'm glad I ended up ruminating on this for about a week because episode 7 & 8 really solidified my opinion on it.

I do wanna start by saying that it's very clear to me that there was supposed to be more explicit scenes between them. There has been some thoughts tossed around that censorship happened with the 9 pm timeslot (as opposed to the 10 pm timeslot of S1). I believed this hearing Assad and Jacob talk about the BDSM dynamic between Louis and Armand, but what really sold me on this was Production Designer Mara LePere-Schloop talking about the bedroom set and more specifically about their beautifully carved custom headboard. (If you're a production nerd like me or just want to know more about the design philosophy of IWTV I recommend giving the entire thing a listen!).

I think there are several reasons I think as to why they decided to leave any more explicit scenes on the cutting room floor but above them all is: you cannot separate Armand's sexuality from his abuse. I am really against pulling a "well if you read the books" card but reading just the first couple chapters of "The Vampire Armand" makes me understand so much about not only Armand as a character, but the care being taken to his adaptation. It's clear to me that alongside Rolin & Co.'s commitment to not watering him down to a one-dimensional villain they are also trying to not fall into Anne Rice's tendency to romanticize his trauma.

Sex and sexuality is not the same pillar of Louis and Armand's relationship it was in Louis and Lestat's and so I don't believe their story suffers from the lack of on-screen sex. But I also firmly believe that maybe we don't need to be slutting out the character who we literally just watched talk about how he doesn't remember his life before being sex trafficked. And even when he was "freed" he was still being repeatedly assaulted at the hands of, and under the eye Marius de Romanus. Like it is extremely important to remember that Armand's craving for dominion in his relationships is a manifestation of trauma that deserves the same level of care and depth given to every other trauma portrayed in this show.

I think people have gotten too comfortable calling IWTV a romance when it has always been Gothic Horror. Romance and sex are pivotal to the story but I have found the demands for sex scenes this season a bit absurd and also? unfounded? Loustat share more kisses on screen but there are two sex scenes and both are very plot relevant. I truly figured we were all in agreement that the eroticism of this show is found in the various displays of power, and the dynamics it creates and not the actual clapping of ass-cheeks...which also wasn't happening in S1 either. S2 does not suffer because of the lack of sex-scenes, but the likelihood if it suffering trying to make one work is

[somewhereincairparavel]

I like how Jason's reputation amongst the gods kind of cements his character as a dutiful leader. I know most ppl don't like the fact that he's all goody goody, but it really fits his arc well, and i like reading about it. it's one of the things about Jason that Rick didn't fumble. He was consistent with his character being dutiful and noble till the very end and makes it a point to show that through others perception.

Zeus- Okay he's a horrible dad, but he did initially respect his son (before jason opposed him in front of the gods, that kinda warped his ego) even going as far as to saying that he was proud to have him as a son and stuff. Which was a pretty ooc thing for Zeus to do especially to his sons. Too bad it only lasted for a few seconds before he went back to being bitchy.

Hera- Jason changed her perception of demigods, we know Hera hated all demigods bc half of them are sired by her husband, she wanted to use jason as a pawn to Gaia's defeat. But all those times she treated jason as her champion, she ended up actually caring about him and considered him a son. She mourned and cried about Jason MONTHS after he died, even going as far as to yell at her husband for not caring or grieving about the child that HE sired.

Apollo- self explanatory, Jason stood up for Apollo from the very beginning, and ended up dying for his sake, even when didn't have to do that. Jason made Apollo understand to have empathy for humans ("Remember what it's like to be human") and made Apollo stop being so full of himself with his selfless sacrifice. So apollo is the Olympian who has the most amount of respect for Jason. And made sure that Jason's sacrifice would not be in vain.

Artemis- if you go to the official Riordan wiki fanpage for Artemis, it's mentioned that Percy and Jason were two of the only male demigods that she had immense respect for. She mentally thanked Jason for standing up to Zeus for Apollo. Of course, being Thalia's brother could also give jason browny points aswell lol.

Athena- She seemed to respect Jason's wisdom in blood of Olympus, when he told his dad that it was unwise to punish apollo for Gaia's waking. Well know Athena respects anyone who has shown wisdom. She shot Jason a very approving look. So it's nice that Athena, who is very critical and picky, observed that Jason is a well thought out and insightful individual.

Aphrodite- kind of self explanatory too, she called jason a lovely boy in piper's dream, even alluding that jason needed absolutely no physical improvement in his looks aswell. I know this has nothing to do with Jason's dutifulness but Aphrodite can sense a person's heart and nature, and she immediately thought jason was perfect for her daughter even before they started dating. We know how picky Aphrodite is when it comes to who people date lol

Bacchus/Dionysus- We know that Bacchus had somewhat remembered Jason (calling him John green and all lol) because jason had done services for him (something about a leopard, iforgot lol). And annabeth pointed out that it was a good thing that jason and Bacchus were on fairly good terms. So there's that.

[zukosdualdao]

on the whole “atla is a good show but sometimes fandom acts like it’s perfect and entirely unproblematic and it’s not” note, are we ready to talk about the fatphobia that is, at times, present in it it? like. Are We. i, as a fat person, would like to be able to talk about it, but not if people are gonna get up in arms about it and ironically use fatphobic rhetoric in order to argue how it isn’t. lol.

[the-way-astray]

alright everybody can we please stop tagging me/talking about me in the notes of pro keefe/sokeefe posts. i know strieefe has made it so that it's really funny to talk about how much i love him and how much i'm in denial when i say negative things about him under those posts (and that's all in good fun and not the problem), but we have to think about the fact that the ops are just trying to make a positive post and probably don't want a keefe hater in their notes /srs

[allastoredeer]

honestly at this point if i see 'lucifer fan' in bio - i run away and i run even faster if it's radioapple fun 🙃

too tired of 'tall buff stoic manly man and his cute short feminine girlie' i see 99% of time from these people

there's some who only post luci/lilith and these ones are ok (still not everyone tho) but the large part just have veeeeery different view on his character than i do

"too tired of 'tall buff stoic manly man and his cute short feminine girlie'"

Me too, bro. Me too. Why can't we have tall buff stoic masculine girlie and cute short feminine man. Or tall cute stoic man and short masculine girlie. Or short stoic masculine man and cute tall feminine girlie. Let's mix things up a little. Variety is the spice of life.

Apart from him being UwU-ified to Hell and back (lol), I think one of my biggest fanon Lucifer pet peeves is when he's absolved of all his faults and wrongdoings. Like, when the "blame" for Lucifer and Lilith's divorce is put solely on Lillith. Or she's made out to be this super abusive, manipulative partner who's been taking advantage of him since Eden. Like she's the one who kept Charlie and Lucifer apart, and thus is the reason they're so estranged. Like he's this wide-eyed, easily manipulated ray of sunshine who can't defend himself. Like he's this poor little baby man who's never done any wrong, and everyone else just bullies him.

I'm a-okay with Lilith being the big-bad of season 2, or season 3, because evil and/or morally grey female characters fuck yes, but after seeing how much hate she gets (after 5 seconds of screen time at the end of the show) and how much she's blamed for everything wrong in Lucifer's life, it makes me hope that she's not the villain.

A lot of my dislike for Lucifer's fanon characterizations is based on his interactions between Alastor or Lilith, I'm actually just now realizing.

This got a little side-tracked, but yeah, a large part of it really is just having very, very different views about his character.

[starlooove]

No one is asking you to like cops IRL, not even the show. If you look at Arcane and what you see is copaganda, if you look at Cait and only see PoLiCe OfFiCeR and not the character, the problem is YOU.

1. I never said anyone asked me to like cops irl

2. I know that’s what I said.

[qcomicsy]

Lately I've only been wishing to grab a comic about my favorite character and just have a genuinely good time reading it.

[seriousbrat]

im literally so obsessed with the post saying peter pettigrew would never be a traitor… that’s like basically The first thing we truly discover about him. right there from book three. like that is The Basis of his role in the narrative, that he was the traitor and sirius was not. that he was willing to bow to the winning power rather than risk dying for his friends and values (which is. the one issue the narrative never flinches on. doing the right thing rather than the easy.) like these aren’t real people, they are characters with narrative functions. peter is everything harry doesn’t respect, everything characters like ron and neville defy, when they doubt their places among their friends and still fight for what they believe in, and a foil to snape — snape’s love for lily causes him to make a good choice, peter’s lack of dedication to his friends causes him to make a bad choice. a bad choice that KICKS OFF THE ENTIRE PREMISE. like. yes these are characters and you can choose to play with them like dolls. but hp is a very tight narrative, and it’s silly to claim they are somehow at heart the antithesis of the space they fill.

I know like... if there's ONE detail about him then that's it. It showed up as a recommended post on my dash and I was so baffled for a moment haha. I could understand an attempt to defend his reasoning (I certainly like to understand it) but like... his character is nothing without that moment, it literally defines him as a character, so to say it's bad writing is so silly.

It's like if I made an impassioned post claiming that Voldemort would NEVER kill Lily and James. It moves past headcanon into just... outright denial of the basic facts of the characters and the story. Harry would NEVER have green eyes!!!! Tbh though Peter Defence Movement in general is the last thing I'd have expected a few years ago.

Recently just before I really started getting back into marauders fandom on tumblr, I posted in a discord asking for people's views on Peter, explaining my own interpretation and wanting input. And I was legitimately SO confused when EVERYONE replied in the vein of "hmm well that's not how I see him but ok. he actually was a poor little meow meow who took care of his friends and rubbed their shoulders after a battle, he was a scared little boy and he couldnt help it."

I was VERY taken aback by the complete 180 that peoples views on Peter seemed to have done, since I assumed my portrayal was controversially sympathetic. Fandom used to largely just ignore him, and when he wasn't ignored he was reviled. It once would have been heresy for me to imply Peter had any sympathetic qualities at all lol, whereas here I was pretty solidly shouted down for saying he had the unsavory characteristics we're shown in canon, such as enjoying watching James and Sirius bully others.

It's honestly so fascinating, like when did this happen lmao

[dangans-ur-ronpas]

i think i might actually start mauling people. i think i should be allowed to hunt toshiro haters for sport.

[amorremanet]

disclaimer: blah blah blah, this post is just one person’s opinion, blah blah blah, I’m basing said opinion on my own observations but there are no doubt pieces of the story that I’m missing and my opinions should not be treated as fact, something something, DO NOT harass the volunteers at AO3 support or anyone else over any of this, if you harass anyone over this then you are the asshole, period. not a debate, just a fact.

SO, LIKE. I honestly don’t have anything of actual significance to add to the current round of AO3 Discourse because all of my complicated feelings on it have already been said better by other people

(e.g., axing “all media types” tags was a bad idea; some fans may not like them but they are too broadly helpful to be done away with entirely; this is a complex issue, there is likely no way to make literally everyone happy; there should’ve been more transparency and AO3 upset people more by rolling the change out with little to no warning; lumping former “all media types” works into a specific fandom silo was all but guaranteed to piss people off; the Archive userbase being hair-trigger makes a lot of sense after some of AO3’s very high-profile fuck ups in the past few years; however, the three (3) volunteers handling the support tickets are not the people who made the decision and it’s garbage that they’re the ones who are left dealing with so much of the vitriol from upset fans; etc. etc. etc.)

My big question in all of this is: if the people on the tag-wrangling committee who made this decision actually thought that getting rid of the “All Media Types” tag was going to be a broadly popular decision with a lot of support from users, then why didn’t AO3 do more to announce this change to users before it started being implemented?

If we are supposed to believe the version of the story that has come out from AO3’s people, the one where they really did believe that it was in the best interests of the majority of AO3 users to get rid of “All Media Types” tags, then why doesn’t their behavior about the decision reflect that? Why didn’t they post more to let Archive users know that this was coming? Why didn’t they talk up what a great change this was going to be and how many people and fandoms would allegedly benefit from it?

Why is it that most users (readers and authors alike) seem to have found out about this from popular posts on reddit, tumblr, or twitter, all made by aggrieved fans whose fandoms have been negatively impacted by the decision? Because as far as I can tell, there was a single solitary post on the official AO3 tumblr about this, which went up AFTER the change had started rolling out and got its reblogs turned off because of all the backlash?

Not to treat “say that shit with your chest” as uniformly useful advice, but……… Come on, AO3. If you really stood behind the decision to get rid of “All Media Types” tags as much you’re claiming—if you really, truly believed that it was in the best interests of the Archive as a whole and that the majority of Archive users would support you in it—then why didn’t you say that shit with your chest?

Because to me, failing to announce the change ahead of time—and then only doing the bare minimum to let users know—looks like moves to try and hide what’s happening, which does not make me, personally, inclined to believe the “We really thought that this would be a popular decision with broad user support” story

I do not have any explanations for what could’ve happened instead of the official story. Moreover, I’m don’t actually want to speculate on that beyond saying “The way this was publicly handled makes me personally feel disinclined to believe the official story” because conspiratorial bullshit thinking like that doesn’t help anybody (it’s way more likely to cause unnecessary harm, especially by spreading ideas that may sound true enough but are probably not gonna be based in reality, when you get down to brass tacks about it)

But the way that this whole change was handled publicly makes me personally feel disinclined to believe the story as put forth by the official post from AO3, and as a longtime Archive user with millions of words of fic posted on the site, who donates to AO3 and the OTW when I can? I really don’t enjoy feeling like I have even more reason than before to distrust Archive staff :/

[blighted-lights]

I feel like your approach to criticizing a certain fandom was the wrong way of doing it. Don't get me wrong, you are a hundred percent right about the lack of representation for certain characters. But you had to have known that you would've gotten backlash for insinuating that the only reason that content is being made is because people are... misogynistic? The characters are well-written; that's why they get attention. The women are also well-written, you're right! But instead of getting mad at the people who enjoy specific characters, you could contribute to what you want to see in the fandom. Make fanfiction, make art, talk about your favorite ships, talk about your favorite characters, talk about the head-canons you have for them, connect with other fans of those characters, make AUs with them, make the fandom you want to see! But I don't know what you were expecting when you come out and say in the tags "you must be misogynists for liking these characters and you must be awful people for playing around with AUs" even though every fandom on this website does that. That was hostile and was only going to get a hostile response in return especially when you specifically put it in the tags for fans of those characters to see. Because it reads as you insinuating that fans of these characters existing is why you don't get any representation of your favorite characters. Or, alternatively, that everyone only likes certain characters because they're misogynists who hate women characters. People make content of them because they like them and because they want to make content of them.

Want more content of the things you want to see? Pay or support the artists and writers who make that content or start making it yourself. Its not helpful to complain that some characters get more attention than others but then make no attempt to contribute to it in any meaningful way. You cannot just get mad at people for liking characters and expect the fandom to magically decide its going to give you the content you want.

This is a long-winded way of saying you are correct in that the fandom seems to hyper-focus on some characters over others. But the way you approached that discussion was combative, hostile, and unhelpful, and you're not going to motivate a community into making content by being passive-aggressive to the people making the content they want to make. Be the change you want to see in the fandom, or support the artists and writers who make the content you want to see.

Its like... You can't complain your garden isn't growing if you're not watering it and not adding seeds, and instead are blaming everyone else for having plants in their gardens that you don't like.

anon i dont know how to tell you this but if you felt the need to write a five-paragraph essay talking about how i need to be nicer to other people when i am pointing out misogyny in a fandom space then, well... actually, i dont know what to tell you other than the fact that i was trying to be aggressive and im not going to be civil about misogyny. my post wasn't made in the hopes of getting people to make more content of the women in borderlands because that would never in ten fucking million years work. it was not a constructive post. you are assuming i have some sort of goodwill about this and i don't. i wanted to be an asshole because, surprise, i am an asshole. funny how that works.

you are also pulling so much of this out of nowhere and putting so many words in my mouth that i dont even know where to begin with it?? i mean this in the kindest way possible nonnie but. this is a wild response to make when all i said was essentially "wow it sure is weird that the majority of content made for bl is focused on only three men when there's a full cast of amazing women to look at" and then "its also weird that people are making aus to erase the canon abuse and exploitation of a CHILD in order to make jack a good father". but thanks for the essay, nonnie. i guess.

[adamprrishcycle]

I see your ronan lynch’s catholic guilt and raise you ronan lynch’s god complex. I wrote a tiny fic about it and adam parrish was there (in the fic, not with me although lets be real he’s always w me) It’s here and it’s for you but mostly it’s for @clotpolesonly

[luvbug724]

36 days.

i think we as a fandom don't talk about dan and renee enough aftg hitlist anon. i understand that renison and mattdan (?) prevail but we need to look at the sheer potential in that one short story about dan's recruitment alone. the sports rivalry turned hatred. dan only getting recruited because wymack came to watch renee. the strip club. having to unite in the face of misogynists. do you see the vision. do u see the vision aftg hitlist anon.

[arttsuka]

with the tagging posts, sometimes people don't know the difference between the & and the / and use both because they're like. oh it's the same right??

I used to do that when I was younger. and then got comments like. ew you ship them?? and I was confused.

sometimes the ship name/ duo name stuff going around confuses me too. some people use it platonically but some people use it romantically?? confusing.

Yes, I've been there too when I was younger. Took me a few years to understand how tagging works.

[sunmontuewrites]

Man my brain works in very weird ways... getting a comment like "please write more" make me immediately want to do the complete opposite (like dig in my heels and cross my arms type reaction).

Yet in a post on a side blog I ask people to tell me which fics they want me to bang out >250 words on... (And I also run a poll on which WIP I should focus on next) and I am managing days of 3-5k words EASY...

WHY THE DIFFERENCE BRAIN? WHY?