#its been 8 YEARS?!?!?

[animelover329]

I don't know about anyone else, but I've been getting back into fandoms I was in between 2014 and 2020.

It's been strange. I see all of the fanart I saw during those times, and I see new fanart with it. I remember finding the fanfics and art for the first time and experience it that way too. It's like I'm falling in love with all of it again.

It's also making me feel really old. Like, the biggest one I'm looking back at right now, Yuuri!!! On Ice, it released in 2016..... and now it's 2024, and I'm not a teen anymore, and I'm not obsessing over it like I did back then. But even 8 years later, I still feel the same emotions, just with nostalgia interlaced with them.

It just feels so weird, but I love it. I love going back and being able to see things from a new perspective and being able to look at things closer.

It's a nice, bittersweet change.....

[ruporas]

captain's warm hugs! (id in alt)

[writer-room]

Dragons Rising really is the best sequel series for diehard Lloyd enjoyers, cause, yes, we acknowledge that he has panic attacks, crappy mental health, and also he's the grandson of God, but you know what really gets me? Lloyd is tired.

He's plagued with migraines (the visions are also migraines don't @ me), he's bemoaning about never getting a good nights sleep, hes struggling so hard to be a good leader and clearly doesn't have all the answers, and he's just some 20yo who's been cursed with saving the world since he was younger than his own students.

That's the realest way Lloyd could've ever been written in a future-series. It's what he is. But he's not angry (usually), he's not telling everyone to deal with it themselves, and he's not giving up. I love when Lloyd has finally had enough, but the real, genuine Lloyd? He'd never stop caring. He cares so much it'd kill him. He's tired and by god does he refuse to quit. I love that kid. Please get him a warm blanket

[bobabirdd]

y'all ain't gonna believe what I've been re-watching

[crabfungi]

Happy late valentines <3

Havent touched hs since I was but a lad... got dragged back to the pits of hell it seems

I liked the sketch lol

[lilybug-02]

"You ever wonder what would have happened if we had died for real?"

[horseshoemybeloved]

AW LORD HES DRUMMIN PATREECE ON DRUMS RED ALERT RED ALERT

[andr0nap]

experienced a naruto renaissance in april

[antsday]

okay i will admit it: i don't like 431 from a narrative standpoint (or really any standpoint) but if you view it exclusively as the true epilogue in an alternate universe of mha in which 5 year old katsuki is right about deku looking down on him and doing everything to spite him and wanting to bring about his downfall then the whole thing becomes kind of absurdly funny

[beananium]

*remembers the best gamefaqs forum question of all time*

[yangscowlick]

Because the “shrodinger’s queerbait” nonsense will never go away, indulge me an analogy (and a long post).

wlw ships are the “made from scratch” cake in a world where we only ever expect cake mix from the box.

Say you have a show where, in the first interaction between a male and female character, there is a red box. It could be a Betty Crocker box of cake mix. Because all it takes is just one smile — one wink — one raised eyebrow— and the fans don’t question it. We’re clearly making a cake here. The box is red.

Meanwhile, you have two female characters building their own relationship that have elements that could build to romance. There are eggs in the fridge. A few more episodes, there’s flour in the pantry. Sugar. Baking powder. Queer fans start whispering…we could be making a cake here. Other fans scoff “you will read into anything. They’re just eggs! Everyone has eggs in their fridge!” Maybe so, maybe not. They are written off as discrete ingredients, nothing to see here.

That red box is still sitting in the pantry. Obviously we’re going with that one, and it’s definitely cake mix. That guy and girl stood next to each other again.

The wlw relationship is now full-on batter. It was a cake recipe all along, but it’s not baked yet. The crowd that wrote off every ingredient is now saying the writers are just going to “squander” that box that could be ready-made cake mix or that they’re being “forced” to bake a cake with the very ingredients the writers deliberately bought and put in their pantry.

Now it’s in the oven, the cake is baking. That crowd will still insist it’s forced, or maybe its actually something else, or it’s rushed, or it’s pandering. Whether the writers painstakingly built a pantry to make the cake they truly wanted or they were cultivating good ingredients and realized they had the fixings for a more decadent cake and went there, it doesn’t matter. It’s still a recipe. One that fans who always have to piece together ingredients had hoped for or saw from the get-go, despite being scoffed at and disparaged. Just because that crowd didn’t see (or refused to see) those ingredients as part of a whole, doesn’t make it any less of a recipe.

And wlw fans shouldn’t have to keep writing essays to demonstrate that the wlw “cake” has all the ingredients every cake mix does, or keep pointing out that fans were ready to believe a cake was being baked when they saw a nondescript box, but that they’ll do anything to discredit or doubt the cake from scratch that’s now cooling off on the counter.

It is partly a function of heteronormativity from the audience in immediately seeing romance in any whisper of interaction between m/f characters and passing off all charged interactions between female characters are sisterly or platonic. And it also comes from writers, who are either being cautious so as not to spook corporate overlords or audiences, or who are preserving plausible deniability.

To take the analogy further, box cake mix is fine! It works! It is, practically speaking, what a lot of folks know by default. I thought I was a Duncan Hines girl once myself. Vanilla cake mix has the ingredients measured out, it’s a safe bet, it tastes like cake.

But it doesn’t mean every red box is cake mix. And it doesn’t make the cake that had to be pieced together from scratch due to censorship, caution, time, narrative build-up, what-have-you, any less of a cake.

[doux-amer]

[non-plutonian-druid]

[ID: a comic about Voltron characters set in a Gravity Falls au.

Keith, outside the mystery shack, picks up a stick and throws it. A large canid runs after it.

Pidge, sitting inside and looking out the window, disturbed, asks "Is that a wolf."

Lance leans over her and says "This is why I keep telling you to investigate Keith."

Pidge shoves him away, saying "This again? Keith's not an alien, Lance."

Lance says "What? I'm serious!" Pidge looks unimpressed, and he adds "Not about the alien thing." He presses his face to the window and says "But he's so mysterious. Why's he so weird."

Pidge opens a can of soda and asks "How old are you?"

Lance, counting on his fingers, lists "1. Nobody knows where he lives."

Pidge interrupts, "I don't know where YOU live."

"You're just antisocial. Matt's been over," Lance tells her, and continues "2. Does he even work here."

Pidge hides her face in her soda and says "uh."

In flashback with a much simpler style, Pidge asks Coran "DOES Keith work at the Mystery Shack?"

Coran: Why, I couldn't say!

Pidge: One way to tell is if you pay him.

Coran: Oh yes, I suppose so!

Pidge: WELL?

In the present, Pidge continues, "I still haven't been able to figure that out."

Lance narrates a few one-panel scenes of Keith being weird. He says, "Remember that time Hunk found him in the woods at night?" Hunk, carrying a telescope and looking spooked, says "H-hey, dude." Keith appears to be dripping wet, is all in shadow, and has glowing eyes.

Lance continues, "And that time he robbed a convenience store?" Lance in the past spots Keith emerging from a store and says "Oh, hey Keith." A cashier says "Stop! Thief!"

Lance adds, "And that time-" before being cut off by Pidge, who waves her arms through the scene, dissolving it. She says "OK, OK, I see your point." Looking thoughtful and a bit evil, she continues, "We'll have to stalk him on his next day off..."

Lance, startled, says "I didn't say STALK!" End ID.]

For those of you who don't remember, which I imagine is everybody, i made a gravity falls au of voltron a while back! Pidge and Matt are Dipper and Mabel, Coran is Grunkle Stan and is actually a family friend of their parents and not their uncle, the rest of the paladins sans Allura are collectively Soos and Wendy, and I went with the name "Mystery Shack" for the building instead of Castle of Lions because Castle of Lions is too cool for a tourist trap.

The vld gravity falls au tag, which i haven't updated in one hundred thousand years and which i should get around to talking more about, especially because i have the entire main plot planned out and never talk about it

[funtime29nm]

Sans au human redraws that i wont ever finish but did exclusively for @nu1lst4rs bc i love her

I ramble in the tags btw if u wanna read it

Also theyre all girls now btw and theyre wlw and poly cuz i say so

[crabussy]

I like him :3

[unforth]

Shower thoughts about "kids shouldn't be allowed on the internet until (insert arbitrary age here)" and "kids shouldn't even know about sex until (insert arbitrary age here" are adjacent flavors of the same incredibly flawed idea that like...

There are these Big Things that, when we reach a certain age, are likely to be day-to-day relevant in our lives. Even if we don't have sex daily or use the internet daily, these topics come up in our media, our discourse, our news, our surroundings, every single day.

And the "kids shouldn't be using the internet" thing posits a reality where we can keep kids from knowing about it or wanting to use it - when many parents use it daily! - until some arbitrary time when "they're ready" and then suddenly they are allowed to, with all the knowledge and skills and curiosity of being that age, go loose on something they've never learned how to use. Likewise with sex, the ages most people say it's "okay" when they make these arguments are usually teen years, when the AVERAGE age when USAdians lose their virginity is 17. Considering how many people on this website routinely report being virgins in their 20s or 30s, how many kids are fucking at 13 to make the average that low? What do you think happens if their sexual awakenings come at the same time *or before* anyone has given them age appropriate sex ed?

For the internet, I can actually say anecdotally, what happens! Because we got internet at home when I was 12. Issues included me spending ludicrous amounts of money on pay-by-the-hour usage (did you know that in the mid 90s AOL charged by the hour? Now you know.), addictively hanging out in chats and playing muds until 2 am, then attending school daily on 4 hours sleep, fending off countless A/S/L messages from weirdo old dudes, and being solicited for cybersex with strangers! And I had no idea what I was doing! And here again is the overlap of internet and sex!

Anyway. I told myself I'd keep this short but here we are.

Age-appropriate sex-ed, age-appropriate internet usage, age-appropriate [insert thing you think kids shouldn't know anything about at all for some fucking reason] will almost always keep children safer than throwing them in the deep-end when they're older.

[What WHO says about age-appropriate sex ed][related lit review]

[UK National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children device usage guidelines] [American Psychological Association advice]

Teaching children age-appropriate things about ubiquitous topics is prevention and is the best way to keep them safe. Period. End of story.