#let them live ffs!!!

[darlingpeasant]

Istg… if I see another “oh I’m so upset Luke and Nicola aren’t together how could they do this to us, how dare they, this is awful” post I’m gonna throw fucking hands

Shipping characters together is great, amazing, wonderful, etc, etc but real people??? Man it’s just so icky… like… stop?

Don’t get me wrong, the two have great chemistry and obviously care very much for each other but that doesn’t automatically mean oh, they’re dating. Having a strong and meaningful friendship is just as important and it is clear that’s what they have…

They are two of my favourite people, they have amazing energy, they’re chaotic, they’re funny and just very very sweet. But I’m not gonna throw my weight around because Luke has a girlfriend and has ‘betrayed’ Nicola and the fandom??? That is insane behaviour…

And once again, their private lives have NOTHING to do with us, they don’t owe us ANYTHING

[sparkbirdmusic]

smh at this slut shaming

[space-sabotage]

damn, who knew being anti-endo would be on the same level as being racist or transphobic?

pack it up poc and transgender systems, the endos are taking you too

[krysmcscience]

So, uh...it turns out that over $2500 worth of solar power stations was stolen from the inside of my locked cargo trailer, which was supposed to be a makeshift camper for me to live in if my general situation went too far south. The thief just switched out the locks so I wouldn't notice anything amiss whenever I passed by. And...I cannot afford to replace those stations, by any stretch of the imagination.

Which means that, once again, my commissions are open. If the prices are a bit too painful for your wallet, just sharing the word would do wonders to help me out. I also offer Timed Drawings, where I spend two minutes drawing for every dollar spent - and I can do more with that time than you might expect, so you can get a nice quick sketch for just a dollar!

I will not ask for donations, meanwhile, but if you're willing and able to spare a little change, I would be ever so grateful to you!

✨Thanks in advance!✨

Meanwhile, to everyone who steals from poor people, enjoy these two whole middle fingers and shared custody of my reliably shitty luck! :D

[verysmolspams]

Crackcanon time: Dad Joke edition

Family AU! In which everyone lives and retires from Shinra. When Elyse and Sephiroth get together, she gets pregnant with triplets (iykyk):

*in the delivery room*

Doctor: Good afternoon, I will be delivering the babies today.

Sephiroth: I would prefer you let them keep their livers, thank you.

Elyse: *shocked, first time she’s heard him make a dad joke* 😱

Angeal: *proudly grinning form the corner of the room, starts laughing because he taught Sephiroth how to make a dad joke*

based on this meme:

[emeraldbabygirl]

Fuck twt I hate the stupid people on it ffs let people grieve, y’all made the same sick jokes when Cameron died let people grieve how they want don’t be a prick ffs sake I mean ok so he wasn’t the perfect person, nobody is and he’s not the only one that did bad in his life and died but ffs even if he was on drugs, addiction is hell and a lot of people end up dying and never get the chance to heal and be better. They go through hell too.

Another thing I’m seeing everywhere is that everyone wants Seunghan back in riize but me personally even tho I do I think it’s best that he doesn’t come back because like those toxic people said they would make his life a living hell. I don’t want that for Seunghan. I think a lot of fans are being selfish about this cause they want Seunghan back and think everything will be like before but the damage is done and I think he is safer out of the group. If sm does decide to listen to the fans and put him back in the group he could be in danger and so could the other members. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to have him back in the group.

[born-to-lose]

The time when my sister and mom are blasting old Italian pop is coming rip

[msrandonstuff]

I AM TRYING TO LOOK FOR MY BLORBO HERE

STOP POSTING SHIT BASHING HIM WHEN YOU ARE GOING TO TURN A BLIND EYE TO YOUR BLORBO'S PROBLEMS TOO AND CRUCIFY HIM FOR HIS

AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[daezedglownut]

I still think, at the end of Turnabout Ablaze, Miles, Kay, Gumshoe, and Missile deserved a cutesy vignette sat by the side of the road where they all just wolfed those Samurai Dogs

Just let’s mislay that one bit of evidence ffs, the week they’ve had 💀

[berlinini]

Is AFHF a one of a kind, stand-alone, annual event that Louis happens to be headlining (for now) or is it a fancy, extra special Louis tour show?

Because on one hand you had the festival account posting stories all day up until the headliner took stage.

On the other hand you have Louis making a special IG post that only features pictures of his performance.

I get wanting to separate his performance/ his involvement as an artist in the festival and not as an organizer, but the festival doesn’t stand on its own without him so it makes no sense. Why are they ignoring him on the official accounts.

I am genuinely puzzled. I’m of course not surprised by the legendary inability of his team to do something well but I’m curious about Louis’ angle here.

[taegularities]

so people ring jk’s bell, send him food, find his boxing location, make him feel unsafe. taehyung cannot enjoy a different country, a different continent without being chased and followed and thrown into new rumours. disrespectful monks disregard namjoon’s privacy and share info he didn’t want shared.

and now that nurse thing that happened to jin? what the actual fuck. hybe, what are we doing

[thats-a-lot-of-cortisol]

My mom just sent a message to the family group chat suggesting that my siblings download the 'For the Strength of Youth' magazine on their Gospel Library app and talked about how much the youth magazines helped her testimony growing up and like, cool. Fine. Don't know why the 'sending random spiritual thoughts in the gc' thing started out of nowhere when it hadn't been a thing for a decade but this is just another one of those, and you're ofc allowed to talk about things that are significant in your life.

I don't think sending the 'What I Did When Someone Close to Me Challenged My Faith' article right afterwards was strictly necessary though 🙃

[ultr6violnce]

i genuinely hate talking ab this cus i thought this was dropped months ago but clearly not. why y'all care sm ab someone you don't even knows personal life and relationship genuinely baffles me. saying you hope for bad things to happen to him , calling him a 'scumbag' etc all over RUMOURS. you don't know what happened and either way whether it happened or not it's none of your business. you're not here for his personal life and relationship you're here js to read or write for him / about him. yes cheating is a shitty thing and in no way should it be justified but if it happened you can't take it back and nothing will do undo from it. so stop being saddos and just get a grip. he's happy , she's happy. they've both moved on now. so get a grip. swear some of yous r acc so tapped 😭😭

[sonnburntskies]

I’ll never understand the appeal of fanservice.

Like, am I alone in absolutely not caring about celebrities real lives at all? I love the things they make (like the characters they play or the music they make) but I usually know next to nothing about who the actor/musician/artist etc. is behind it and I don’t want to. Those are real people, not content for me to consume. I want them to have privacy and I regard them as completely separate entities from the things they make.

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one with this hard line separating fiction and reality.

[racingliners]

I don't really go here (F2) but I will be fistfighting the racing gods for expanding the Leclerc Monaco curse to Arthur

[superstardestroyer]

I know every time we start talking about how fandom is now/used to be it's quickly pointed out that this group has always existed but "It is, by nature of fandom, impossible to "manage" because no one owns fan spaces." This is what's changed.

When moderators existed, there was an expectation that once someone had proven themselves to be this type, they would be removed. It didn't always work great - this type seeks out becoming mods more than most! I recall a hilarious event with a Gundam LJ community in particular. But because they are such a small percent of the whole, they can be bullied back (which was what made the event such an impeccable and memorable time).

The algorithm has changed things though. Fanart and fic don't drive comments and retweets and discourse vids as much as contentious senseless beefing does. Discord communities are naturally hidden away so instead of being open and allowing the larger groups to come in and air things out politely they fall prey to the one or two who come in.

Fandoms end up virtually controlled by this demographic now in public perception as a result. That article about how studios are going to run things past gam*rgate types to avoid their ire speaks to a phenomenal shift in the perception of the power of the 1% of horrific fans.

I think it's also exacerbated because of the prevalence of phones and the power of social media. Doing numbers can make you real world money and get you real world attention, and back pre-2010 you had to log off to go to work and school. You didn't really impress anybody by being on fandomwank for being a fandoms nightmare.

Growth and normalization of fandom are huge factors, but the design and influence of social media are a kerosene on the fire of the 1%.

Dismantling their power and preventing their behavior relies on the rest of us realizing the role we play in it: QRTing them shouldn't happen. Linking to their content is the last thing we should do. Certain things that used to work for naming and shaming are now exploitable hacks for them.

Sharing bad call-out posts that are clearly just personal beef needs to stop: the 1% can and does use our communities and senses of justice against us. We need to stop trying to prove constantly to each other that we're good and pure because let's be real: 99% of us aren't hurting anyone no matter what we do in our corner of fandom.

Weird kinks and problematic fic content do much less damage than a person who constantly sets fires in our spaces. Moderating - as a former moderator of multiple fandom and art spaces, some very large - has never been about policing ourselves for little, weird, gross behaviors. It's about spotting behavior that either is these guys or feeds into the shenanigans of the small number of real troublemakers online and cutting them off from attention and audience and mobs to lead.

And to deny them means I think that all of us need to care a lot less about clout and audience online too, which is what's so hard about it. QRTing or otherwise linking the menace and their content makes them come beef with you. It drives views. Not doing it stops YOU from getting followers as surely as it does the problem-maker. Wanting the approval and notice of popular fans makes you end up part of their hurtful mob.

Politely minding our own business is harder. But in the end it's what we need to start doing more of to starve out this shit. The Tumblr porn ban and folks coming back really did improve this site tremendously: by cutting the chain of communication between them and everybody else. With fewer followers here, many of them focused their attention elsewhere. It may involve posting to smaller communities and tending to your mutuals more and bothering with everyone else less, but I think it is worth doing.

Doing your part to not be part of their behavior is not just passively ignoring them. It is an incredible difficult and active task where you have to dismiss the hold they want to have on your attention all the time and instead focus all your energy on accepting the harmless and annoying parts you don't like about everybody else in your fandom to build a community that isn't going to evaporate in 6 months when it is no longer the cool new show or whatever. Now more than ever, we have to be resilient and care about each other as people and fandom spaces rather than an audience to validate us and confirm that we are important and pure so that we can starve out those of us who will burn our community to the ground so that they can get what they want from the ashes.

I feel like with the new ~fandom drama~ or whatever going around, I should re-introduce my favorite theory of fandom, which I call the 1% Theory.

Basically, the 1% Theory dictates that in every fandom, on average, 1% of the fans will be a pure, unsalvageable tire fire. We’re talking the people who do physical harm over their fandom, who start riots, cannot be talked down. The sort of things public news stories are made of. We’re not talking necessarily bad fans here- we’re talking people who take this thing so seriously they are willing to start a goddamn fist fight over nothing. The worst of the worst.

The reason I bring this up is because the 1% Theory ties into an important visual of fandom knowledge- that bigger fandoms are always perceived as “worse”, and at a certain point, a fandom always gets big enough to “go bad”. Let me explain.

Say you have a small fandom, like 500 people- the 1% Theory says that out of those 500, only 5 of them will be absolute nutjobs. This is incredibly manageable- it’s five people. The fandom and world at large can easily shut them out, block them, ignore their ramblings. The fandom is a “nice place”.

Now say you have a medium sized fandom- say 100,000 people. Suddenly, the 1% Theory ups your level of calamity to a whopping 1000 people. That’s a lot. That’s a lot for anyone to manage. It is, by nature of fandom, impossible to “manage” because no one owns fan spaces. People start to get nervous. There’s still so much good, but oof, 1000 people.

Now say you have a truly massive fandom- I use Homestuck here because I know the figures. At it’s peak, Homestuck had approximately FIVE MILLION active fans around the globe.

By the 1% Theory, that’s 50,000 people. Fifty THOUSAND starting riots, blackmailing creators, contributing to the worst of the worst of things.

There’s a couple of important points to take away here, in my opinion.

1) The 1% will always be the loudest, because people are always looking for new drama to follow.

2) Ultimately, it is 1%. It is only 1%. I can’t promise the other 99% are perfect, loving angels, but the “terrible fandom” is still only 1% complete utter garbage.

3) No fandom should ever be judged by their 1%. Big fandoms always look worse, small fandoms always look better. It’s not a good metric.

So remember, if you’re ever feeling disheartened by your fandom’s activity- it’s just 1%, people. Do your part not to be a part of it.