#like allow that shit to just live within a fandom space

[caiusmarciuscoriolanus]

I hope whoever asked ebon about sydrichie and genuinely thought it was a good idea has perpetual hell temperatured pillow syndrome on both sides and loses ample amount of sleep from it. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT? WHY DO Y’ALL ALWAYS DO THAT WITH EVERYTHING THAT IS SACRED TO ME? That was meant to stay in this space and you weird mothertruckers in fandoms that just have to know what actors think about ships think it’s okay to ask (ALSO ALWAYS AT EVENTS THAT DONT EVEN PERTAIN TO THE SHIP). LIKE Y’ALL ARE RUINING IT.

ALSO JUST TO ADD ON, THIS IS THE TYPE OF SHIT THAT CAUSES WRITERS AND ACTORS SO SHY AWAY FROM SCENES INVOLVING CERTAIN CHARACTERS INTERACTING BECAUSE THEY DONT WANT PEOPLE TO “GET THE WRONG IDEA” WHEN REALLY ITS JUST THAT Y’ALL DONT KNOW HOW GO BE NORMAL ABOUT ANYTHING.

[dirtytransmasc]

thinking about how Spider had nothing to claim as his own again

there is nothing that Spider can call his own.

his siblings, his parents, the sully family, the forest, hellsgate, base camp, the forest, Pandora, his name, his culture, his identity, his language, his very life. he has no claim over any of it. he can barely hold any claim to himself.

he as nothing.

he cannot, in any way, claim any of these things, not without resistance or hostility.

because he is not allowed to have things. because he's human, an unwanted wild child, a stray, a reminder. because he's the demon son of Miles Quaritch, who must pay for his sins. whatever the reasons, he is denied a connection to them. he dirties it. he is undeserving of it. he is alien to it.

and while in some way or another, he does continue to partake in these things, stay within these places, and such, it's not without comment or resistance. he isn't supposed to. and just cause he's resilient enough of a kid to do so, to power through it all, it doesn't mean he should have to.

he has known nothing else, yet he is denied a place or claim to almost any aspect of his life.

Jake and Neytiri reject him, to varying degrees, not allowing him to even truly be able to claim the kids he considers his siblings, the kids he would move mountains for, as his own. he does claim them, but he can't do so openly and confidently.

same with the village and The People. Spider would lie his life down for them. for their safety. he has done so. but he, like with his siblings, is barely allowed to claim them as his people, and he isn't really given a space amongst them.

many strip him of most, if not all, of his claim to his identity. it is "odd" and "wrong" and "inappropriate" of him to act Na'vi and partake in the culture. to have a complex relationship with being human, with other humans, with Na'vi and the Sullys and their treatment of him, with both the idea of his father and the actual man himself.

he doesn't even have a true place to call home or parents for 16 years! Jake and Neytiri, Norm, other scientists, were all out adopting kids and giving them loving homes, and he…. got the McCoskers? who didn't like him and abused/neglected him? he got to be a stray?

he got to watch all the other kids with their families. he got to know they liked going home at night and felt safe and loved. but he got none of it.

and then Q rolls around, and genuinely gives 2 shits about him, but he isn't allowed to hold a shred of love for him-no matter the sea of hate and hurt it drowns in. he isn't allowed just this one thing. he couldn't even talk about him, couldn't get support, like any orphan should be able to get, prior to him coming back. but now he can't even have him. he can't even save his dad without being overly hated and punished for saving Quartich, many can't even understand the difference, cause it doesn't matter to them.

that's not fair, he's just a kid.

and the most interesting aspect of this, which was really the point of this entire post, is that it spreads to the audience, and that's actually where we see this trend most prevalently. because while it is mostly hinted at in the movie and comics, a good portion fo this movies fandom and audience are the quickest to question, deny, and even argue over what Spider holds claim to.

every aspect of his life is torn apart by the audience. his behavior and connection to Na'vi culture is inappropriate. he doesn't deserve to call the Sully's family or the forest home. he isn't allowed to like, let alone love, his dad. many don't even think he deserves to live.

when did we forget this was a child born and grown on pandora, around the na'vi, and that he is deserving of a life and a culture and a home and a family?

(this post is cross posted and extended from Twitter. so anyone who follows me on both sites might recognize this.)

[blitzwhore]

I just saw Blitzø get called Stolas stockholm victim I can't with this fandom anymore😭

😂 As outrageously incorrect and stupid as that take is, I'm going to go on a tangent here. I hope you don't mind.

I think every fandom has annoying people with awfully terrible takes in it. People with zero media literacy. People who hatewatch. People who think they're entitled to the exact show they would've wanted, which has nothing to do with the actual, existing show.

This is especially true for queer media, and especially true for queer cartoons. (Hi, yes. I was active in the Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Voltron, and She-Ra fandoms when those shows were airing, respectively. I've seen some stuff). Some people just can't handle queer cartoons, period. If the queer characters/ships are soft and wholesome, they're infantilising and boring, and if they're complex and nuanced and actually have conflict, they're abusive and problematic. You'll hear the same recycled arguments over and over again. Like, the shit some people are saying about Blitz and Stolas after The Full Moon? Is literally almost word-for-word what they said about Catra and Adora post-season 3 of She-Ra (and even at the end of the show).

Here's the thing, though! Those people and their bad takes are not what I want to think about what I think about a fandom. Those aren't the people I want to call the fans. They don't deserve that title. Not when so many other people are out there dedicating their time to making gifs and art and meta posts, and writing fic, and commenting/reblogging to show support, and sliding into people's DMs to scream and squee together about a thing they love.

At the end of the day, "fandom" is just a lot of people each doing their own thing. Which people you engage with and allow to stay within your line of sight will determine your fandom experience. Fandom can be a huge, convoluted, online space full of people who are constantly arguing with one another and whose takes make you unfathomably angry... Or it can be you and your 5 friends and mutuals who scream gleefully at one another in 2-note posts. You can't control what others post online, but you can control your engagement with it.

How? Well, here's what I personally do to avoid getting upset by people's stupid opinions online:

Filter 'critical' and 'anti' tags (eg. #anti stolitz #anti vivziepop #Helluva Boss critical #HB critical #vivziepop critical). Many people actually do tag their critical posts because they know it's the respectful thing to do!

If I come across a post that has one or more of those tags, obviously, I don't click through to see it under any circumstances.

If I stumble across a stranger's untagged post with hate/criticism that upsets me: I stop reading and BLOCK. Immediately. I don't look back. I don't finish reading. I don't engage. I just block block block. I <3 the block button, seriously.

If I feel my mind reeling from a bad take I just came across: I take a step back, close my phone, breathe, remember life is beautiful sometimes. Go back and watch an episode I really like. Clean my living space a little. Vent about it to a friend (but only if I really need to, because if not, I'd rather not dwell on it).

If I'm starting to feel the need to reply to someone's bad take (directly or via my own post), I instead make the decision to channel that energy into making fandom posts out of love. (I don't do this just with fandom. If I see something transphobic online, I usually react by reblogging a bunch of trans art or trans positivity posts on my main, for example). I like to think of it as putting some positivity out into the world to compensate for the negativity I just saw. So, for example, if I see someone shitting on my blorbo, I may make a silly post just saying how much I love blorbo. Or I'll make (or draft) a post about how interesting I find some of blorbo's actions. Or reblog another person's positive/interesting post about blorbo.

And finally, I stay the hell away from Twitter. Or at least, if I go on Twitter, I try my best to avoid any tweet that has text in it instead of just art. Even the people who have good opinions spend too much time arguing with the people who have bad opinions on there. I don't want to see people's bad takes! No, not even while reading founded and perfectly articulated criticism of those bad takes! So I just limit my time on Twitter. And again, if someone is putting bad takes on my TL (even if it is to counter them), I unfollow and block as needed.

All this to say, yes, it really fucking sucks to read the opinions of people who don't understand and who hate the characters and ships and worlds you love. Gosh it's the worst. But you can curate your fandom experience. You can focus on the things you can control. You have the power to decide if your fandom experience is draining or fun!

And because I don't know how to finish this, here, have a Stolitz kiss to heal you:

We will keep winning and there's nothing the haters can do about it. 😌

[anonymousredactedconfessions]

Let's have a talk, shall we?

Major Trigger Warning for rape, false accusations, and mentions of child sex crimes

I let you guys get away with a lot of shit. I let you be a little bitter, or mean spirited, or pissed off. I let you guys vent and let out grievances and complain for the sake of complaining. And i do all of this because it is important to have a space that you can do so without fear of judgement, it is unhealthy for you to bottle up negative emotions. I provide this in a public space because with the way this fandom is, if I didn't many of you would be pressured into not doing so at all. This fandom has a habit of ostracizing those who have differing opinions and interpretations, those who wish to critique the art they consume, those who have unpopular opinions, and all of it is done with the utmost aggression and vitriol. The things that have been said to some of the people in this fandom genuinely makes me lose faith in humanity if i think about it too hard.

This blog exists explicitly to counteract that. I refuse to encourage or enable it. What you are doing is actively dangerous, and I won't be having it in the space I curate within this fandom.

If you haven't noticed, this is one of my rules:

It means that you are not allowed to come in my inbox and accuse people of serious harm over this fiction.

You will not come and accuse people of something as egregious as rape apologia in my inbox. You will not accuse people of rape, abuse, assault, or child abuse/rape/exploitation in my inbox.

These are serious real world issues, and the reason they are bad is because they cause direct harm to real living people who can feel pain and can be violated. Your disgust holds absolutely no ethical weight. At All. You should have the mental, emotional, and intellectual capability to understand the ethical difference between allegories for rape, stories with/about rape, erotica of rape, and actual real life people being raped. Making accusations of this weight over make believe is abhorrent, and as a matter of fact, it shows that you don't treat these tragedies with the weight or gravity that they deserve. If you believe that it is appropriate to accuse someone of violating another person like so because of the creation of or opinions about art, then you have some serious learning and growing to do as a person if you wish to navigate these topics with any level of maturity or respect towards victims.

There is no good that comes out of accusations such as these. They only ever serve to:

Demonstrate to victims that the tragedy of their abuse is as trivial as fanfiction/art that you deem nasty (but is ultimately ethical), or even something as inconsequential as someones' love for a fictional character.

Shame those who love these characters, or this art, or creating, into hiding their opinions for fear of harassment and serious accusations when they have done zero harm by enjoying it.

Stifle creation and participation in fandoms.

Limit the spread of ideas, interpretations, critique/criticism, and general opinions in the fandom, which just turns fandoms into boring echo chambers devoid of variety and creativity.

Encourage actual censorship and moral policing. (More on that on this reblog by @escapedaudios on a post of mine. Thank you Escaped for your two cents, they are much appreciated 💖)

Spread the incredibly harmful idea that people are defined by the art they enjoy. You cannot accurately judge a person’s values or morals based on what tropes and themes they enjoy in fiction. You create an environment and culture incredibly dangerous for vulnerable individuals (like minors) when you tell them that they can know who is safe to trust based on whether they consume "the good kind" or "the bad kind" of fiction. This makes it so very easy for predators to virtue signal about fiction to lure in potential victims to abuse.

The majority of you are very good and well behaved when it comes to this, but the amount of people i have had come into my inbox and accuse others of being rapists with no evidence other than "they made X" or "they like Y" is not zero. And i will not be satisfied until it is.

This is all i have to say about the subject.

[olderthannetfic]

I don't even think this is the type of thing you would normally get Asks about, but at this point I genuinely can't think of anyone better to come to and ask for their opinion.

I don't know if any of your followers have seen this situation as it's been occurring, but this massively popular mobile game that's been blowing up recently (called Love and Deep Space) has incurred a lot of drama and discourse as of a few days ago.

So LADS is an otome game, with a visibly femme/female protagonist who romances the male love interests. And a few days ago, the dev team behind LADS introduced this rule to all of their official groups and servers like Facebook and Discord: "Absolutely no BL materials are allowed to be posted or discussed in official spaces"

So, naturally, quite a few people are upset about what is basically a "no gays allowed" rule being forced onto the fandom. Because the "no BL" rules includes the posting of ANY queer content with "official" #LADS tags. Which for platforms like Twitter is absolutely unreasonable. They're stating that fanart of M/M ships can't be posted with any tags for the source material? It's ridiculous.

There's been people trying to defend it, saying things like "oh it's because of CN censorship laws" despite the fact that LADS isn't a CN game and the company isn't a CN company. Or "they only banned queer stuff in their official Discord and official Facebook group and for the official LADS tags on socmed!" even though that is still censorship and erasure of queer content (and somehow the fact that it's officially sanctioned makes it okay?)

But the worst part is the fact that there’s been an EXPLOSION of aggressive homophobia within the fanbase. It's as if all the cishet women who play the game were just waiting for their chance to go mask off, because the second those "no BL" rules were put in place the rampant harrassment and bullying started. People are getting attacked for M/M ship fanart, people are getting attacked for having male self-inserts or male MC or OC designs, and several artists have already been harrassed into deleting all of their artwork and leaving the fandom.

There's now a LOUD number of fans screeching that otome games "are only for girls" and that anyone even slightly queer or masc-leaning "doesn't belong in otome fandoms" and "needs to go play something else"

I've seen baseless accusations that "men want to force us to play as a gay male MC!" and "gay men are demanding that LADS turn the female MC male!" when absolutely no one anywhere has ever said anything close to that.

I have tried telling these fans that queer people, including queer men, have ALWAYS played otome games, that gay men and queer people have ALWAYS been a part of the otome community from the very beginning, but anyone who deviates even slightly from the new majority of "no gay shit allowed, otome is for straight women only and everyone else kys" gets immediately shouted down and harrassed/attacked. I know a lot of people have deleted the game and have stopped playing because of both the official "no gays" rule and also the extremely toxic and homophobic fanbase.

I was wondering if you knew about any resources (blogs, articles, anything) talking about the history of queer people playing otome/dating sim games, or even if you happen to know anything anecdotal about it yourself. Because we've ALWAYS been here, otome games have never been JUST for cishet women. I'm also just wondering what your/your followers' thoughts are about this whole mess in general.

--

Oof. I don't play many games of that sort, so I don't know a ton about their history, but there has often been pointless beef between the more self inserty types and the more m/m shipping types.

I don't think you need evidence that people besides cishet women consume media X. It should be self-evident from being a human who lives in the world. These people are denying it because they don't want it to be true, not because they do or don't have evidence.

"LOL, you're a homophobe in 2024? Criiiinge!" is the only appropriate type of response to these idiots. Facts won't help.

[paradoxoftrees]

…

Ok what is actually going on here in the utmv community?? I haven’t been here very long but I sure do know that this kind of stuff, this targeting and hatred, is in no way acceptable anywhere, anytime, real life or not.

I never understood it. I never understood and I still don’t understand why human beings feel the need to instill fear and hatred into others. I truly feel I am incapable of understanding the plague of this concept. It appalls me every day with the lack of human sympathy and understanding that this society is literally reeking with. There is just so much hate. This is the LAST place that we need hate. Fandoms are supposed to literally be a place where we create fictional realities, ones that allow us to escape what lies beyond. But somehow the poisons of society are leeching into our celebrations and safe spaces. And those safe places are becoming more and more like the hateful society we are unfortunately faced to live within and somehow attempt to clean up. Utmv is literally crumbling and collapsing into the debris, bringing us down with it. If the real world is filled with hateful waste, the least we can do is create something that represents what human decency looks like. We need to take responsibilities upon us as human beings to uphold this decency.

Please, all I ask is for decency. I know for a fact that everyone will benefit from this. I’m not sure why humans sometimes have so much hate infecting their souls to the point that they suck the creative and individualistic energy out of our bodies and minds. Look at us. We are petrifying people into abandoning their passions, their fandoms. People are SCARED to create. People are SCARED to be here. We are amounting to nothing more than a toxic solution, forcing ourselves to literally jump out running for the hills with scalded minds.

I know this is a bit odd to say, but I always like to compare our society to the big picture of the universe. The universe itself is so expansive and undeniably unique with all the crazy shit inside it. Exploding stars… planets with glass rain… nebulas that smell like raspberries… Yeah. All that stuff exists in harmony. So why can’t all our interpretations, ideas, creations, do the same? Stars explode and reconstruct into new creations. People are the very same way. NO ONE is the same and NO ONE stays the same. And NO ONE has the right to somehow take a person and put them into a box to be pointed at. As people we need to let people be people.

Let us be free. Let us be free or hate. Let yourself understand what this fandom really wants for itself, because this persistent fear is literally freezing our creativity and expression in place. With what we have now, we are scared to create, we are scared to express, we are scared to outwardly acknowledge our own identity. I mean that in all honesty.

NEVER do I want to make someone feel petrified to create or to embody individualism. I couldn’t imagine it. Don’t do this to people. Just don’t.

I don’t know what’s going to happen. But the funny thing is, we can fix this world we have created and yet we continue to twist it into something sour and sickening. Somehow I know we can fix it. I’ve seen what people can do with decency.

Alright. I’ve said my piece. We’ve got a lot to do and think about. If we’re willing. If we can put in effort to hate, we can put in effort to be a decent human being. In fact, it’s easier to do that.

It can be done.

[archivalofsins]

I really want to vent about something Milgram related, but I don't want to spread negativity either. It's about my general experience in the fandom.

Something that has been less than ideal and the ways it has led me to engage with fandom as a concept in general.

It isn't fair to myself not to use my blog for me, though. This is my space to recount my experiences and opinions on Milgram as a series. The way the fandom has personally impacted me is a huge part of that. Regardless of how impartial I attempt to be, the experiences I've had within this fandom will impact how I engage with the content to an extent.

To the point that I've committed to trial three verdicts already based on the actions of people in this fandom.

I'm not above being petty.

So, I'm going to explain this as politely as I can and move on.

People who have been around on this blog long enough have seen a lot of the experiences I've had in the fandom. I wish I had whined about it publicly more in hindsight instead of going on defense immediately. It's not like I'm ashamed of being defensive or regret my previous actions. On the contrary, in fact, I was going through a lot of stressful and downright dehumanizing shit publicly and privately.

It was a terrible time, and if I knew it was going to be that way quite, honestly, I would have never posted any of those theories and just kept them to myself. Honestly, I'd like to see what the fuck this fandom would be like if I didn't. Considering some of the stuff I'll touch on here.

I'm going to be candid.

I've been spoken about vaguely on more posts than individuals in this community care to admit to the point that I literally had to stop engaging in the tags. I've been directly messaged emotionally manipulative remarks and then blocked by the sender from people in this fandom.

I've been basically called out on confession blogs because people are cowards and the first time they're given the ability of doing something under the guise of anonymity of course they're going to use it to harass someone else in ways they know they could never do publicly.

I've been harrassed and emotionally abused by other fans. Who I considered friends in private. Had my lived experiences and feelings consistently diminished for several months by those people. Plagiarized numerous times which I'm most mad about like you actually stole the fucking words out of my mouth that is a whole different form of disrespect.

I have been gaslit numerous times by well-meaning people again using the guise of ambiguity and anonymity to go,

"Well you can never know for sure, so you should just let it go! Be the bigger person."

And I just gotta go,

"Yeah, you're sooo right. I should have thought of that. I'll never know for sure! Anyone here could have said this. But do I have to stoop to their level? No, I should just be happy that I can't go in the tag because this keeps happening."

Then I gotta feel like I'm losing my mind because no one recognizes the previous thing is more fucked up. It's weird no one sees how that's fucking worse. If someone suspects I vagued about them, they block me and spread rumors in the back that I did vague about them that eventually come back to me anyway. They have this face, this image of me in their mind that they are allowed to act against and keep out of their vicinity. I have nothing, I have to sit here and see people in this fandom and think,

"Was it you? Did you say that?"

Then go no, no, that's not a healthy way to think. Then, I attempt to course correct when it feels like everyone here hates me. Because there's nothing else I can do other than control my response and how I navigate moving forward. I can admit that sometimes I don't navigate these things in a mature and considerate manner. That I get defensive and my language invokes that regardless of how jovially I attempt to take it.

Because when the shoes on the other foot. When I'm just discussing something that it seems as though everyone is discussing. Then someone feels as though that is me speaking vaguely about them regardless of how much i preemptively state it's not about anyone.

Then I inevitably get a,

"Like, hey, why did you do this? Why did you vague about x?"

In a way, that has made it so apparent how heavily policed I am in this environment and how hostile it is toward me. To the point that I can't even speak about something occurring in real time without being perceived as hostile by someone.

Something that felt like it was the case so much that I have post in my drafts that's in fucking Morse Code,

That just says Fuck- because at the time I really felt like I couldn't say a fucking thing without someone taking offense. Then i didn't fucking post this because at the time I was like no even that will be misconstrued just say nothing. So, it's just sitting in my drafts as a reminder.

To just shut the fuck up you don't have to say anything on or engage in this.

This has not changed either. I've adapted, of course, but this has not stopped. When I post, I am now incredibly particular about my wording and overexplain a lot.

Yesterday, I was hanging out with friends while editing that Kazui post over a discord call and said aloud,

"No, I can't say it that way because someone might take offense."

And my friend literally went,

"Who cares if they take offense let them."

As I changed it like no, no... Oh, that wording is too candid and curt, which will be perceived as anger. Then they're going to respond as though they've been attacked or belittled. So, I have to say it this way instead.

Do you know how many times someone has discerned a tone from my texts out of the clear blue sky and gone,

"I didn't like x's tone."

I had one mother fucker go I didn't like "his" tone and gender me as he throughout all of a convo until corrected like uh hey this person is genderfluid they use he and her. It is kind of dismissive and sexist that because you viewed them as hostile and forceful that you immediately gendered them as he.

Other times it's like eyy nice when that happens. Because it's usually not done in a,

"Ew, you're making me uncomfortable. You're scary, and I view you as a dangerous entity. So, I will now project masculinity onto you in order to highlight the danger I see you as."

Be me genderfluid use he and her. See how you experience text-based sexism where people call you her when they view you as more harmless, timid, and uninformed than switch to he when they view you as more hostile, dangerous, or direct. Something that is just what people do to blunt or straightforward black women generally and the fact that's happening through tone policing text really fucking highlights how inescapable this is for me.

To the point that just speaking how I normally would through text, which I very much type the same way I speak is something I have to work to tone down now and be attentive to. I felt as though I couldn't just post like everyone else. This is because that over time, it became apparent to me that regardless of what I said or how much I tried to articulate myself in a more docile way, someone was going to take offense.

I literally talked about a bird and got a lecture. There is no winning. If something is too short, it's like, did you think of this. Too long no one is reading all that. Then, if someone feels as though I was discussing them regardless of how much I truly can't even go in the tag to see whatever they're discussing.

It leads to me having to apologize to that person. Even though I am not responsible for their assumption. I push that to the side and suck it up to the best of my abilities, and apologize. Because my intent, my feelings at this revelation, and the unfairness I feel about it does not change that my actions have negatively impacted and hurt this other individual's feelings.

There is a point that this does stop being on me, though.

However, when an instance in which I've genuinely hurt someone's feelings is brought to my attention, I won't dismiss that. Take note of this it leads into another problem later. I am not responsible for imagined slights and did not have to apologize at all. A good few people who consider themselves good individuals and are would not have apologized.

Because the assumptions of others simply are not their responsibility. So they would consider this an instance of someone taking them egregiously out of context because they choose to view them through bad faith. Then would have gone,

"This seems like something you did all on your own that should have stayed that way. I owe you nothing."

Or would have just ignored it.

Now, I want to touch on how invasive and entitled some people within this fandom can be. I have had so many people ask for private medical information that they are not entitled to.

Yes, saying-

"If you don't have x, then don't speak on y."

Is pushing someone else in a corner where their options are to give personal information on themselves that again wrapping around back to point one is not the business of person saying this nor will giving this information change their opinion. People who say this don't care if you have x they just want you to shut up. People who say this do not care about people who have what they are discussing outside of themselves. It's that simple.

At best, if a person says

"Yes, I have x."

This sort of person will either state the person is lying or that it doesn't matter because what that person said was still wrong. And having x doesn't change the fact that they just think this other person is wrong actually so they should still shut the fuck up. This is really annoying when it comes to how this fandom engages with dissociative identity disorder specifically.

Because they say and do shit like this, then still have the audacity to be wrong about how the disorder works. I've seen posts that state with their full chest that Dissociative Identity Disorder is when there is an existence of three or more distinct personality states.

Just legit redefining the term to exclude two. I've been told two alter system don't deserve representation because they're so rare and it's less likely to occur. Again, it's wild to me how no one recognizes how that sounds. Like to me, that sounds like this specific presentation of this disorder is a minority. Therefore, it is an inaccurate depiction of the majority of individuals with this disorder and should not be represented in media in any nuanced way actually.

That sounds suspiciously like people who said black people rarely buy comics as such, they are not our target demographic and should not be represented in the media. Because it just won't sell, they don't read comics. Girls don't read shonen manga. We do not need well written female characters here. That's not our demographic.

Furthermore, when I have told people that I trust this very sensitive information about myself and my mental health. They weaponized it against me to abuse me for several months. Literally stating in response to me being like hey what you're doing is really upsetting me and hurtful with,

"Well, you have x and y. So, you have to accept that and recognize how you telling me your emotional needs is actually unreasonable. It's holding me to a standard that's far too high. Something you're only doing because you've yet to accept your own limitations due to your impairments. Causing you to project the high standards you put on yourself onto others around you as well and straining your relationships. You need to accept you're disabled. Something that means there are just certain things you won't be good at and won't be able to receive or achieve in life."

Bro, I would just like to not be ghosted. What the fuck does that have to do with this? This person's reaponse to me saying,

"Hey, if I continue to get treated this way, I'm going to leave. Because this isn't even a relationship at this point if most of it is spent avoiding proper communication. It seems neither of you want me here because you're actions and avoidance are displaying that to me."

Was to say,

"If you did that, then that would make you no better than us. Plus, all your relationships will continue to be this way. If you're incapable of compromising here."

That's been my last ten months in private on top of the Milgram shit. At a point, I spoke about the incident semipublically in a shared discord server. Then these two people had me apologize for doing that, like stating how they treated me-

In a space, they were already discussing the situation in instead of communicating with me privately by the way. Yet, me doing it was crossing the line, actually.

Yeah, they had me apologize for this over text not once, not twice but five fucking times in a row, each apology longer and more in depth than the last.

Because me doing that was just such an inconsiderate breech of their privacy and dismissal of their feelings. They even said this was something to be handled in private despite ignoring me privately for months and taking it there.

I want to sit here and say I have no more sympathy or good faith to extend to individuals within this fandom. It would be incredibly fair for me to say this given my experiences. However, I fundamentally believe just because the world can be cruel unreasonably so and kindness is rarely rewarded. That is no reason to spread pain. I would like to believe in people. To believe that they can be considerate of those who exist outside of themselves and respectful of those others.

It is just very difficult to enjoy a space that has seemingly been hellbent on breaking me in every sense of the word.

I didn't think it was possible to say this in a way that didn't feel self pitying or unnecessarily harsh. This may still be harsh to some. Yet I can not comfortably move forward without honestly writing down for myself the impact these experiences have had on me.

It makes me want to engage with fandom less.

Make myself less accessible and that's been reflected in how I do fanfiction now. I'd like to get comments and feedback on the labors of love and appreciation I've made for this series. Yet these experiences have been so damaging that I'm not even comfortable leaving comments on for fanfics anymore. Comments are now off on all my fanfics, not even just milgram ones, and I don't think I'll ever cut them back on.

I locked all of my fanfics for a while, so only registered users could read them. I reached out to be in the milgramblrgram thing because I thought it would be a fun thing to do and a nice way to get more feedback on these things on my own terms. Yet I truly don't think it matters how I do it or how much work I put in because to a lot of people, it just being attached to me makes it wrong.

Because they've built this impression of me that simply isn't true and is isolating.

It makes this a little less fulfilling to continue doing. I only really continue doing it because I do enjoy Milgram a great deal, and it matters a lot to me. Like one of the reasons I was so cool with dumping those people was like well one of you is literally trying to tell me to stop engaging with my hobbies and interests because sometimes I have complaints about them. Which makes it a lot easier to go mm fuck you I had this hobby before I met you and probably will have it after you. Because unlike you this brings me joy it is fulfilling sure I don't like the treatment I've received from other fans but don't get it twisted.

I love Milgram.

That's not going to change. Milgram is not its fanbase. Regardless of how the fanbase can impact the series. I'm writing this to move forward more comfortably with everything that has occurred in this going on two years.

And it may be too much for some, but it's just what I've gone through for me.

[a-forger-and-a-point-man]

007 FEST 2023 / Fix-It Day

[The greatest fix-it experts lie within the @00qad-fandom. There is nothing we have not endured and subsequently fixed. Forever.]

A FIX-IT DAY COLLAB BROUGHT TO YOU BY @kitten-kin of @teamqbranch and @a-forger-and-a-point-man of @teamofvillains!

Every year after the buzz and the noise and the packed calendars of Pride Month and 007 Fest are behind them, the 00QAD family pack up the cars for the 10-hour drive up to the Scottish Highlands to Skyfall, where they spend August keeping Kincade company and getting some fresh air.

James loves driving all the way in his highly prized Aston Martin DB5, and Danny joins him for the intimate (read: cramped) ride. It's very special for Danny because he's never really had nice things - and James treats him like a star.

This naturally means that the more grounded and practical gentlemen in the family - Q and Alex - take a more sensible vehicle that fits luggage and two cats on leashes and their litter box. It's a lot safer to have two cars for the journey anyway.

When they pull up to Skyfall, Kincade's doggos run up in excitement to the familiar faces, but they're immediately put in their place by @princesspampuria who scares the SHIT out of these fierce hunting companions. The boss lady has arrived.

Pam loves the August vacation because she can hunt sheep and deer, and yes, she does it alone, and no, not always for food. Possibly just blood thirst and sport.

Kincade always has the finest Scottish salmon prepared for his little princess. Despite James' best efforts, Kincade is as in love with Pam as Q is.

It has taken a few years for James and Kincade to reconnect - or even reconcile, in many ways - and get to the place they're in now. James isn't used to genuine, older, wiser, paternal mentorship. But no matter how old he gets, he sure as hell needs it, and the boys are keenly aware of that.

Kincade knows what they all do now. He doesn't ask too many questions, but he allows them the space to let things out when they need to. He loves them like his own children and grandchildren, and this is what James must get used to: a natural, unconditional, familial love that isn't tied to what he does or where he's been. It's just there.

This yearly visit to Skyfall is also critical for James to reflect on where he came from, and spend time at his parents' gravesite. When a man knows his roots and understands that he was always loved, it changes him.

All that said, Kincade's favorite humans are actually Danny and Alex. Danny and Kincade send each other care packages throughout the year, and Danny is such a wonderful listener to the lifetime of stories Kincade always shares around the fire.

Turing always joins them, laying across Kincade's lap. Turing was officially given to Alex by Q to be his therapy cat, so Turing recharges in these settings.

Alex is also a good listener, but he knows to take advantage of what Kincade can teach him in the time they have together. They are both very outdoorsy people, and Kincade has taught Alex hunting, fishing, archery, and the cooking of certain animal parts. Alex is game to try out new things.

Q and Kincade have a warm and cordial relationship, but Q lives in his own head a lot, and he's not exactly fond of lacing up his hiking boots for a sunrise trek. So he'll spend. lot of time doing maintenance on Skyfall's security system, broadband connectivity, and electrical supply.

You're wondering what Kincade thinks of their relationship. And that's a very valid question. He thinks they're all well-raised gentlemen and he wouldn't trade them for the universe, and that helps tremendously in accepting that his little James - that jumped up shit - has become a man with not just an unconventional job, but an unconventional family life. They're all happy, and that makes Kincade happy, and Danny teaches him about queer culture and how to celebrate Pride at Skyfall. Kincade still affectionately calls the community "the gays" and tells his mates down at the pub that all of his sons have delivered him sons-in-law.

A great amount of time is spent in the kitchen on making three meals a day and eating together at the table. There's hearty haddock soup and tattie scones and plenty of "stovies" after their big Sunday roast. The twins' sweet tooth (Q & Danny) means Kincade always has plenty of ingredients to make his famous Cranachan every week.

Danny and Turing bake pawprint shortbread to leave as a parting gift for Kincade, and the boys all make sure they've cleaned up and done the laundry and are leaving the house in better shape than they found it.

Goodbyes are never easy, and Danny cries, and Pam cries too then screams bloody murder and refuses to let go of Kincade. An ice box filled with wild Scottish salmon for the ride helps a little bit. After a month, even the doggos are sad to see the boss lady go.

James never ever shows that he's getting emotional, but in the car, alone with Danny, he lets out the breath he's been holding, and confesses that the trip was the best time of his life - until next year.

[rpedia]

Hello, I have a question about combat roleplaying. Is there anyway to counter someone trying to wipe your character from existence? I have a character whos high 1-A, just wondering.

I cannot tell you how wild of an ask this is because of how much of it must be entirely contextual to your current situation. A-1 means nothing to me, this isn't a universal term in RP, but after some looking around it seems to be a categorization used in the vsBattle fandom to allow people to rank character power stats against each other like classes of heavyweight versus lightweight. And it seems to have been very thought out by a bunch of people who are very very serious about it, so it's a well-thought out thing. So, I'm assuming if this is the right power ranking to go off, your character is an "High Outerverse level" character similar to God/Death in some series.

Whew, back in my day we just had Marvel Mutants being Omega class, or Naruto Ninjas being S-Rank... Looks like you're in somewhere with a lot more math and intensity than I'm used to considering I just had to read "structures with a number of dimensions equal to the cardinal aleph-2" with my own two delicate innocent baby boy eyes. This means whatever advice I am about to give you is unlikely to be useful, but fuck it, I'm game.

So, you're getting wiped out of existence...

Your character is, as far as I can tell, able to manipulate all of existence, including every multiverse, hyperverse, and whatever-the-fuck-have-you because they can fuck with but infinity times infinity, except they're a step below the ultimate Boundless, and one step above the guy who can mess with infinity times three. Really getting back to the playground "infinity plus one" argument. You must be going up against someone who is going a little faster than you or doing better than you to have them cockblock your entire existence. I think I have the scenario broken down for more feeble minds like me can figure out what the hell this means.

Logically, the answer is you can't do shit. Guy is faster/better/more tactically sound, so he wins. He's managed to outdo you on every level, and made your existence just stop, you can no longer be who you are, you're a never-was similar to Cul from the Thor comics. Absolutely buckshit wild stuff here. This suggests to survive, someone has to remember you, which may be a way through if there's space where you still exist while you don't exist. How does time work in your universe? What's the standards here for how to change existence? Is there a ripple effect, or is it impossible to change the timeline? Are you forced into an alternate universe where you DID exist, and how is the other guy handling the obvious issue that if you never existed, he would never have gone back to erase you, and shit— we've got either a figure eight loop forcing us to repeat these two states of 0 and 1 endlessly, or a paradox.

So go for the throat, make them explain the paradox. Make them fix the paradox, which can paradoxically never be fixed because that's what them boyes do. You might have to live one step ahead of them in only alternating universes for the rest of existence and be satisfied with that. Or, I suppose, find someone bigger and stronger than old Jokey-poo here who is putting you in the un-birth grave, and have them de-powered or something to end the rigamarole. Maybe you have a good trap for them set-up where the state of your birth is a fixed point, and them entering it makes time stop entirely so they can never reach the point at which they actually delete you.

But this is all just Watsonian fuckery, stuff from within the perspective of the story. If you go Doyalist, we can ask the question "What kills a vampire?" and come up with the answer "Whatever satisfies the narrative." because those blood thirsty bitches be fictional. This is all fictional. You are imagining a story. The only truth of a story is the satisfaction of those who write/read it.

Therefore, if you are happy with the end of your character, and you feel like it's been given weight and meaning, and you like the outcome. You win, you finished the story, they are gone.

If you are unhappy, you can make up whatever bullshit you want because it's all in your head anyways, and suddenly your character survived going over the falls due to some vague handwaved plot point far in the misty difference that is really an in-universe cover to 'they made me write Sherlock after the Reichenbach Falls was supposed to be the end of the damn serial'. It all comes down to what you're happy with as a player and a writer.

You think any Shonen writer had the good sense to end their series after the bad guy seemed all-powerful? Absolutely not, these other guys had trickery and even more power beyond the power that is infinite power to call on, and they sure did win because they said so. Same thing here. As long as no one is upset, you can do whatever you want. "Blue fairy said I could come back." "Some Boundless Character found me beyond the universes and pulled me back into this world." Seriously, make shit up, it's all you've been doing anyways.

I recognize at this point it's more of a thought experiment, kind of a highbrow push against the mundane realities of our existence. It's where philosophy meets story. Making something that really sticks to the bones of your story, and gives you something to work off can be a huge ask when it gets to these extremes. You're working with a framework outside our actual existence, a thing we can comprehend only because we've pushed so hard against the limitations of this world we've given concepts like infinity not only a limit, but a word for when that limit is breached and repeated.

Being able to truly understand what you're asking, and whether there's any rules to it is more than a simple roleplay help blog can give you. You're bending rules that aren't even confirmed to exist, that have been developed to create a framework by which people can enjoy fighting tiers to simplify things that are wildly imaginative and unusual. Certainly you are at the moment asking me if I can conceive of a situation in which literally Death themself, if they were a character, could be erased from existence by something just as powerful or even more powerful than themselves, and then get around that somehow. It's mythical. It's entirely a toy that you, yourself, are defining the rules for play with. I can simply say "this Roleplaying Blog is actually a Boundless level character and has rebuffed that attack" and it would be equally true because the canon of this blog now says so.

So you can do whatever works for you.

Just make sure it's satisfying, so you can do it again next week and relish it all over. The point of RP is to be fun. Keep having fun. You do you, in whatever style makes you happy. Even if it's a lot of math and now I know there's a term for approaching the infinity after Real numbers run out of integers because someone made their character so powerful they ran out of numbers for them and somehow this is the same power level as Those Who Sit Above In Shadow, which means Loki's punked their ass plenty of times in-comics by saying he's the Storyteller who tells them into existence anyways. God damn Beyonder ass...

But you're the Storyteller now, so write something true to your heart, and see how far you can take it. See if your character can manage to break reality one more time, and level up to becoming Boundless themselves. You have the power, because that power is imagination. The true Boundless power.

[the-resurrection-3d]

Decided to post the essay I wrote a few days ago. Of course, this isn't meant to shit on anyone, but to work through my feelings on TOH's themes and how I see the fandom working through them.

TOH has a very – let’s say uneasy relationship with its fantasy elements—or at least, that’s how the fandom has received them. I just saw someone talking about how Luz shouldn’t have gotten a Palisman of her own because she “doesn’t need to look any more like Azura,” considering that Luz’s whole thing at the beginning of the series was needing to better “tell fantasy from reality.” But I feel like that’s only getting half the point—the issue with not being able to tell fantasy from reality rests, as the series argues, with expecting the world to cater to you and then lashing out when it doesn’t.

The series makes this most clear with Belos, who rejects the traditional high fantasy genre signifiers as spiritual pollutants and yet is living in as much of a fantasy world as Luz was. “[He needs] to be the hero of his own delusion” locates Belos’s major flaw—in a character way and in a thematic way—in his refusal to see himself as just another part of the world, rather than its center. All of this is spoken to us directly by the embodiment of the Boiling Isles and its magic. This character flaw is then reinforced by how Belos gets defeated and starts rambling on about how humans are innately “better than this” Because Reasons.

I think part of this disconnect might be happening because we’re used to anti-escapist stories rejecting the fantasy world in its entirety. For example, Ready Player One ends with the reveal that the creator of the VR world—it was called the OASIS, wasn’t it?—regretted not spending enough time in the “real world,” and the main character rectifies this by enforcing a weekly one-day service outage. Even though the book explores reasons why people would want to escape into the VR fantasy, including escaping the confines of marginalized identity categories like gender and race, it still asserts that you’re missing out by leaving the “real world” behind. I think also of modern fantasy stories with creatures like vampires and werewolves that bend over backwards to justify why being a human is still totally the best option— “Be glad of your human heart, Feyre,” and so on. Even in series where the human main character becomes inhuman, it’s often through force—characters like Feyre and Elena Gilbert are killed and then revived as monsters, but only Bella Swan actively wants to become one. (It really is the equal-but-opposite response to the question Robert McRuer says is asked of disabled people IRL in his article about compulsory able-bodiedness: “Yeah, but in the end, wouldn’t you rather be like me?” In both cases—whether disabled or super-abled—the normate, abled, “regular” human position has to be reinforced as the ideal.)

And let’s be real, it’s all cope. We can agree it’s just cope, right? But even besides that, I think we also need to keep in mind that, contrary to what internet discourse would have you believe, subverting tropes is not good writing in and of itself — subversion and deconstruction need to be ways of creating meaning within the work, rather than the meaning itself.

I think, then, we can see TOH’s conversation with escapism from s1 to s3 as a way of asking, “What parts of our childhood should we keep?” In Luz’s case, like in many of our own childhoods, the fantasy elements are from the actual fantasy genre because Luz wants to imagine a bigger life for herself than Earth allows, one that is scary and dangerous but in the end still caters to her/us. (See also Freud’s concept of the family romance, wherein a child dreams that their parents aren’t their “real” parents and that their “real” parents are magic space fairy royalty who will one day reclaim their child and everything will be awesome forever.)

In episodes like “Witches Before Wizards,” these genre signifiers provide Luz with a set kind of “script” for how she believes interactions should go—the disappointment and restlessness she feels in the episode is from the fact that it’s not catered to her just because she’s there, in a similar way that Belos believes humans are better just Because They Are. Worth noting that even in that episode, the “reality” Luz needs to learn to accept is still based in a fantasy setting—signaling that the word “fantasy” in “differentiate fantasy from reality” should not be about the genre or the act of consuming fantasy in and of itself. Season three then literalizes this with The Collector turning people into puppets and acting out “The Owl House” as a game with suffering participants.

Conversely, season three adds more nuance by revealing that Luz’s hyperfixation stems from her relationship with her father. The season does a lot to explore the relationship-building potential of fiction, from Amity suggesting her and Luz dress as Hecate and Azura to the reveal that Camila is a secret Trekkie.

A fellow autistic person once described their special interest not just as something they’re obsessed with, but as part of how they processed the world. We can see this kinda play out in Camila’s conversation with Luz right before Stringbean hatches: she says she has forgotten the “Astral Oath” and responds to Luz’s question of her being a “secret nerd” with the admission that she shouldn’t have let her own fears of and experiences with being non-conforming compel her to try and change Luz. The Astral Oath and how it played out within Cosmic Frontier provided a framework for Camila that she admits she should have followed: “My biggest mistake was trying to protect you by changing this beautiful, good witch into something she wasn’t.” The best things about Luz are also the things that make her more drawn to the fantasy genre.

The rampant egoism of the genre should be left behind, the show says, but not the good lessons and the relationships you’ve built from it.

This anti-egoism does, of course, run up against the fact that Luz is still the main character. If Luz getting a Palisman makes her too much like Azura and therefore undermines the message, then honestly I don’t see how the final battle itself isn’t just a colossal fuck-up. Not even in the sense that Luz got Titan magic, which I have seen people say is now suddenly Luz being A Chosen One all along, but in the sense that Luz straight up shouldn’t have been in the final battle at all. (Honestly, if you want YA with a good anti-egoism message imparted through its structure, you’re looking for Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War—book, not movie.)

I said on Twitter while I was reading Charlie Ledbetter’s “The Dysphoric Body Politic” that TOH has an interesting relationship with its escapism messaging because Luz DOES leave the human world. Even though she had to finish high school in the human world, the finale makes it clear that she’s been putting all of her spare energy and labor into the literal rebuild of the Boiling Isles. She entirely gives up on making a life for herself on Earth.

This isn’t super surprising, (I was always sure it would happen) but I do think it’s where the uneasiness—the messiness—between TOH and its genre comes into play. Yes, Luz needed to dial back her daydreaming and yes, her being in the demon realm ultimately led to it almost being destroyed, but it still is the worst possible ending if she doesn’t get to stay there.

In the article, Ledbetter, a transmasc who discovered themselves through fandom, writes that “Escapism is not a departure from reality. Rather, escape decenters the hegemony of oppressive systems that announce themselves as real and creates space to imagine alternatives.” And yet within the show, it’s a closed circuit—the threat to diversity and self-expression comes from the human realm, and yet there is no attempt to save it. Ledbetter, writing of fandom’s political potential, suggests using fanfic to imagine alternatives specifically so we can give ourselves the drive to try and enact them in the real world.

TOH’s sister show, Amphibia, gives us a taste of this in its finale: in the ten years since the Calamity Trio has left, the once-evil king lives out his final days planting seeds, and the girls themselves are dedicated to either educating others or creating art. They honor the memories of their childhood fantasy—Sasha with two crossing swords as a patch on her jacket and a charm dangling from her rearview mirror, Anne with her entire career—but the portal is closed. It’s not coming back.

Given everything TOH does in season three to reaffirm the value of fantasy as a lifelong interest, though, I think what it wanted to avoid suggesting, like a lot of traditional portal stories do, that the fantasy world is the world of childhood and needs to be escaped. Aslan tells Peter and Susan, after all, that they’re getting too old for Narnia. Peter and his siblings return there only in death; Susan isn’t so lucky. If Luz shouldn’t have gotten a Palisman, something which symbolizes she’s discovered a fundamental truth about herself and has “earned” her place as a Witch, then honestly she shouldn’t have been able to come back to the Boiling Isles, either. How many of us would've been happy with that?

If we want to square this with the show’s politics, I think we can read this as the show saying that, yes, there are some things you have to do as a child, but once you’re free, you aren’t obligated to stay with the society and people who won’t ever see you for who you are. In a way, Luz going back and forth between the human and demon realms parallels the teenage fantasy fan, making space in their lives for fandom as a place of joy and connection after all the boring hard “adult” work is done for the day. You don’t have to leave it behind; building outside of the system and making your life centered around your joy is hard work, yes, but worth doing.

[thestrangestthlng]

I have some opinions about this whole recording of the live whatever yesterday because, of course, I do.

Firstly, they hosted a whatever they're called to bitch. Okay? What's your point?

People don't like to admit it, but fandoms are communities, and communities are allowed to discuss whatever they want with each other. Fandom conversations are supposed to stay within fandom spaces. That conversation was in a fan space and the people who violated that are the ones that made it public.

But the fact that you spent four hours of your life recording it and then other people spent four hours of their lives inserting themselves into conversations that they weren't invited to is honestly weird.

The thing about discourse is that it requires a dialogue. Y'all have your own conversations and happenings about shit, honestly has nothing to do with y'all yourselves.

I am not today, or ever, going to dictate how other people feel about actions that harm them. What I will say, however, is that we are parasocialing a bit too close to the sun.

We do not know these people, any of them, and we never will. We see their public persona and see what they want us to see. We see them through a looking glass.

People saying bitching about OS not "defending" his co-worker from the vitriol from his fans is honestly weird. Firstly, he left social media because the fandom was so toxic. I'd be very surprised if he knew the extent to which these hateful and toxic individuals have gone. When he has seen things he has said something. OS seems, from an outside POV, that he's pretty disconnected. I love that for him.

Now, the cognitive dissonance of some people from a certain faction of fandom should be studied. The number of times I've seen posts about BT shippers being "hypocrites" because they're supporting a "racist/misogynist," which they then immediately proceed to imply that the LFJ supporters are racist because they shit on the Hispanic man, but not the white man.

Babes, those shitty ass memes were a decade ago. Were the offensive? Yes. Should he have shared them? But it was a decade ago. Please share with the class any REAL evidence of him being racist/homophobic/transphobic/xenophobic/islamophobic/harmful since then. If RG is allowed to grow and develop as a person, so is LFJ. And if you are like "well at least RG apologized... LFJ didn't", just say you don't know how PR or social media relations work and move on.

(Don't you dare use that fake ass meme that homie and his little friend made up. It's not real, bsffr.)

That being said, people are calling out RG because he has a history of racist actions. Within the past week he's shared content from transphobic accounts. Have you seen some of the accounts he follows? It's weird.

That being said...

Doxxing people is illegal and fucking unhinged. What the actual fuck is wrong with y'all? People are allowed to hold celebrities accountable for their actions and inactions, in their own spaces. They shouldn't have to do it in private to not risk their personal fucking safety being put at risk.

Ship and let ship and live and let live.

No one is telling you that you HAVE to like LFJ or RG or OS or anyone. But when people are keeping fan conversations in fan spaces where they belong and y'all come in a violate their safety - YOU'RE THE ONE IN THE WRONG. Full stop.

They are real people and people aren't perfect. Those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and I got news for ALL Y'ALL: We all are in glass houses.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

I know you make it a point to not get involved in fandom (esp. on this site) because it's not worth the inevitable drama but I just need to vent a little.

Yes. Tumblr is "the queer site" or whatever. Okay fine. I believe everyone should be free to enjoy their content however they want its whatever that's what tags are for etc etc. But within the only fandom i even sort of interact with here there's been a recent uptick in the bullying of people who don't push certain messages, politicks, or HC/Ships. So some of us thought we'd make things easier and try to make things calmer in the tags by making a discord dedicated to actual factual tolerance where everyone who wanted to join in could openly discuss what they do/don't like no judgement no strings no doxxing and no requirements for everyone to agree just freedom to have whatever opinions even those that don't necessarily match the majority. Yknow, so I don't have to be dogpiled for not liking the ultra popular coffeeshop au fic series or Adam B Example isn't getting crucified for not enjoying whatever ship.

But no. No this cannot be allowed. Clearly everyone in this server is a raging ist-o-phobic slur-slinging terrible-no-good-very-bad villain with a capital Evil. Look we have redacted (and faked, but how do you prove that) screenshots of them being vile nazis in their semi-private server! More cropped proof seen here where they got annoyed after my friends and i decided to brigade and troll their introductory room by spamming it with graphic imagery and childish namecalling! They banned the smurf accounts we made to do this with too see how hateful!

Sorry i know it's not your drama I just.

Ugh. Is it really that impossible for people to leave others alone? We're literally trying to give them all they space they want, none of us care or hate that the popular ship is popular or whatever their personal HC is abt X characters's sex life or any of that we just wanted to be able to freely chat about the franchise we love. And tired of being browbeaten and wanted to maybe make our own little space to do that.

Also wish these people could understand it is perfectly possible to be lgb et al and not like the current things '~Pride(tm)~' has going on these days. I know that's part of it. But demanding political conformity from people who just want to enjoy their hobby in peace is so so stupid but i can't articulate it in any way that people will listen.

If you don't mind, I would like to know what this fandom is so I don't accidentally become adjacent to it at any point.

But you're right to be upset by all this. These people have no lives and are bitter and hateful. I hope you don't let it ruin your enjoyment of The Thing or drive you and your friends to be silent about it. The only way to even begin taking fandom back is by ignoring this kind of shit and pushing through. I'm sorry you have to deal with immature little nothings who can't handle people enjoying fiction in ways they don't approve of.

[humanitys-strongest-bamf]

hi Kat! how are you doing?

I wanted to ask, do you have an advice about negative people in your life? I have some classmates that started talking behind my back for no reason in particular, and I honestly feel like shit about it. I know that it’s us that give others the power to hurt us, but I really can’t seem to ignore them, no matter how much I try… Thank you lovely🫶

hi nonnie!! ngl, school's wrecking my butt already, i was up until 2am doing a lit review and had to get up early today skdjflskdjf

tldr: you're allowed to feel hurt; screw your classmates; find people who are supportive; some of my best friends are internet friends; and if tumblr and the fandom space is how you cope, then pls engage in the fandom space all you want

idk if i have advice advice, but i definitely know what that feels like :C but i also wanted to let you know that like, yes, it's us that have the power to not be hurt but also like

if it hurts, it hurts, right? no matter how much we tell ourselves to not care, that their opinion doesn't matter, that we should just ignore it and move on, sometimes that just doesn't work, and that's okay.

like fr screw your classmates that are just starting stuff about you completely out of nowhere, but also, you're allowed to feel hurt. you're valid over feeling hurt. humans are literally a social species, it is unfortunately programmed into us that, on some degree, we care what other people think.

if one of these classmates was a "friend", my main advice would be to think about whether it's worth confronting them and what you'd get out of it. if there's nothing, then cut them off. it's not worth having toxic people in your life, and you also don't owe them an explanation if they're starting shit behind your back.

sometimes, confrontation isn't something we can, should, or want to do, and my main advice for that would be to find people that do actually support you, and that can look like anything! i have VERY very few irls that i would call supportive (other than my husband lol) and i have much closer bonds with my internet friends. some of my literal best friends are people i met on the internet. hell, my fking maid of honor at my wedding (hi @ghostlykeyes who also named their pseuds after my cat LMAO) was someone i met on the internet when i was hella depressed and had zero irls to go to

even some of my irls that i'm close with were originally internet friends and we just happened to live by each other. not saying you should go around announcing where you live lmao but it just worked out

anyway what i'm trying to say is that people are assholes, but there's also beauty and support that exists within people as well, you just have to find who—and that can look like whatever works for you. fuck your classmates, i'll throw hands with them 🔪

also some people might say maladaptive daydreaming is just that: maladaptive, which is valid, but also like

if i'm upset and i wanna imagine levi ackerman comforting me, then i'm going to exactly that, and if that helps me cope, that's how i'm going to cope ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[bleedingredridinghood]

(CW: include personal anecdote regarding the same vein of fandom conflict, mentions the emotional side effects of this kind of drama within fandom spaces, in a way that could be considered graphic, followed up by personal example of how these harmful side effects can present. Goes on to describe how to use writing to recover from trauma, gets a little too philosophical with it, honestly probably not worth the read, but I wrote it, so I'll post it.)

Tbh, this why I don't like being an active part of fandom anymore. Like, I got into MHA when I was younger than class 1A, and yeah, I developed a crush on Bakugou. I was like a year and a half younger than him when that crush first developed, and it's been long standing. I do think of him as being the same age as me, because manga time doesn't work the same as actual time. Even still, I don't wanna be lumped in with people who think a lot of this shit is okay, y'know? While he is 26 by the end of the series, it's still tricky. I don't post a lot of my fics anymore because of that-- most of my fics are fluff, but even still.

And for JJK, Gojo is an adult the whole time, which is honestly such a relief (I mean, I was also already an adult when I got into it). And while, yeah, kinks and fetishes are fine (I guess), some of it still goes to an extent that's concerning. I get if it's a scenario (like roleplay or something, idfk), but without the addendum of aftercare, it's hella dicey.

Idk, it just makes a lot of fandom spaces feel unsafe, because someone's either going to forcibly associate you with something that makes you wanna burn your skin off, or you're going to stumble upon something that makes you wanna burn your skin off.

And, like, on a maybe too personal note: as someone who is gray-asexual and mostly sex-repulsed, these things cause a lot of harm!!! Like, A LOT of harm. Maybe I'm just not equipped for how weird people get online (I spend most of my time with people IRL), but I often have to take WEEKS off of being active on various platforms because of how harmful all sides of this can be.

Like, to imply that a character with a Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, or Lawful Neutral alignment would just be okay with half of the shit people pull??? Is INSANELY out of character, and genuinely should be considered a crackfic.

Please don't get me wrong: writing out your own trauma is an important and wildly effective treatment method used in various trauma-based diagnoses. What people don't mention is this means that somewhere along the way you have to acknowledge that this trauma you experienced was not only something you did not ask for, but was also something BAD!!! Something that SHOULD. NOT. HAVE. HAPPENED. TO. YOU. The point of writing it is not to romanticize it, but to process it so you can see the situation rightly, and begin the process of recovering from it!!!

Most of my trauma involved a lot of really painful decision making, torture, violence, homelessness, etc. Writing about that and all the emotions from it help me grasp what I feel and process what was actually my fault and what wasn't. It's made me a more compassionate, happier person, with a pretty lively sense of humor. This is not in spite of the disturbing nature of what I've survived, but because I now understand what happened and how I can use that understanding to grow from the wounds I carry.

You cannot do that if you keep romanticizing all the blood you've spilt. It isn't lovely. It isn't glittering. It isn't exhilarating. It's just blood. It's just red. It's sticky as it dries and crumbly once fully dry. It smells like salt and iron and humidity. After awhile, it smells too sweet, like Splenda mixed with Robitussin. The blood you have spilt is not beautiful. The beautiful part is you. By romanticizing ones trauma, you dissuade yourself from that truth, and I don't know why anyone would be okay allowing others to walk that kind of deceptively cruel path.

The amount of incest, noncon, and pedophilic jjk smut content is getting out of hand.

"Just scroll if you don't like it!" - this doesn't negate the fact they're posting disgusting scenarios. They're targeting an audience of people who should seek therapy. That kind of shit is not okay.

It's like saying "scroll part a zoophile account on Twitter if u don't like it." See how stupid it sounds?

This Fandom is slowly becoming one i regret being in because of just how disgusting people are becoming. Come on guys, do better.

It's okay to have kinks and fetishes, but that doesn't mean they're okay. It's not okay to sexualize minors, it's not okay to sexualizw little space, it's not okay to sexualize r//pe! I get dubcon, but noncon? That's literally just nonconsensual sex.

Anyways. Rant over. Do better, people.

[thequietmanno1]

TheLreads, Vigilantes ch 93, Replies Part 2

1) “Rappa down! Send the EMT unity ASAP, we can’t allow the timeline to be fractured, we can’t lose him!”- Mirko heard the call, but she only knows how to heal by beating up the enemy worse than the patient, so they don’t hurt them anymore.

2) “Yeah I don’t think that’s in the rulebook of free-for-all illegal cagefights, but then again, it’s not like there’s something against it in there.”- He is technically still fighting within the cage this way, depending on which side he’s holding.

3) “THERE IS MIRKO, SHOWING UP TO SAVE THE DAY ONCE AGAIN! and somehow here faster than All Might. Huh.”- All Might was further delayed getting the officers some healthy snacks before rushing in. Stakeouts can be hungry work.

4) “Why of course because she’s this manga’s best character and her presence here is a blessing to all of us mortals? And Horikoshi demanded her appearance whit a gun to Furuhashi’s head?”- Truly, the side-characters can upstage the “heroes” whenever they take action. The more the fandom loves them, the stronger they’ll be.

5) “I don’t know Rappa, you ever seen a bunny fighting? Those kicks are vicious man.”- More lives have been lost facing off against mad bunnies than there have been against bears.

6) “Unfortunately, you can’t hoodie, the time-space continuum must be preserved no matter what. We are bound to the fate laid forth.”- Hood’s acting like their demise would automatically make him stronger from it, like they were metal slimes in a video game, due to give a ton of exp if he could just finish them off. No wonder he was mad the encounter was forcibly ended early.

7) “She’s more capable than the both of you doltz, why are you being mean to her now?”- They’re just annoyed she’s showing them up when they’re fighting 2-on-1 and losing and she comes crashing in and belts Hood easily.

8) “the fuck you are on Knuckles, you saw her holding her own even better than Rappa! Not gonna refute the wild allegations, she is absolutely feral, that there’s no denying.”- Pretty sure that’s just Rappa mouthing off to Knuckles and him giving him his trademark silent treatment in response whilst he monologues.

9) “OH SHIT YOU ONLY HAVE T MINUS 2.9999999 SECONDS NOW MIRKO, QUICK, KICK HIS ASS BEFORE ALL MIGHT SHOWS UP!”- The one opponent Mirko can’t beat: The ticking clock of the inevitable future!

10) “Already? Damn, time really flies when All Might shows up, right?”- Literally, actually. I think the major time skip occurred after the sky egg incident and his major involvement in that chapter of Koichi’s life. All Might is the harbinger of chronology, pushing time towards the present in ever-increasing leaps with every time he shows up.

11) “No no, no throwing a fit, it’s time to go home now, your mom is calling, you need to take a bath and have dinner okay?”- He’s tired himself out from all this exercise, needs a long period of rest before he’s ready for playtime again.

12) “Aaaand time. Oh jesus, that was a close call, those three seconds were way too short for so much to happen I tell you that.”- Furuhasi should have given himself a larger window of time, but like many things, he misjudged it.

13) “Yeah All Might, you wasted too many nanoseconds picking up your body pillow. Shame on you, you pervert”- All Might, always on time to save the day, but never stop the overarching plot.

14) “I don;t even blame this chapter for being uneventful, I think the fact I spent a whole month away from liveblogging rotted my mind and rusted my gears, I need a bit more of it so I can actually put the ol’ reliable brain back on the tracks.”- Get that WD40 spray for your rusty brainpan. @thelreads

[fozmeadows]

race & culture in fandom

For the past decade, English language fanwriting culture post the days of LiveJournal and Strikethrough has been hugely shaped by a handful of megafandoms that exploded across AO3 and tumblr – I’m talking Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Dr Who, the MCU, Harry Potter, Star Wars, BBC Sherlock – which have all been overwhelmingly white. I don’t mean in terms of the fans themselves, although whiteness also figures prominently in said fandoms: I mean that the source materials themselves feature very few POC, and the ones who are there tended to be done dirty by the creators.

Periodically, this has led POC in fandom to point out, extremely reasonably, that even where non-white characters do get central roles in various media properties, they’re often overlooked by fandom at large, such that the popular focus stays primarily on the white characters. Sometimes this happened (it was argued) because the POC characters were secondary to begin with and as such attracted less fan devotion (although this has never stopped fandoms from picking a random white gremlin from the background cast and elevating them to the status of Fave); at other times, however, there has been a clear trend of sidelining POC leads in favour of white alternatives (as per Finn, Poe and Rose Tico being edged out in Star Wars shipping by Hux, Kylo and Rey). I mention this, not to demonize individuals whose preferred ships happen to involve white characters, but to point out the collective impact these trends can have on POC in fandom spaces: it’s not bad to ship what you ship, but that doesn’t mean there’s no utility in analysing what’s popular and why through a racial lens.

All this being so, it feels increasingly salient that fanwriting culture as exists right now developed under the influence and in the shadow of these white-dominated fandoms – specifically, the taboo against criticizing or critiquing fics for any reason. Certainly, there’s a hell of a lot of value to Don’t Like, Don’t Read as a general policy, especially when it comes to the darker, kinkier side of ficwriting, and whether the context is professional or recreational, offering someone direct, unsolicited feedback on their writing style is a dick move. But on the flipside, the anti-criticism culture in fanwriting has consistently worked against fans of colour who speak out about racist tropes, fan ignorance and hurtful portrayals of living cultures. Voicing anything negative about works created for free is seen as violating a core rule of ficwriting culture – but as that culture has been foundationally shaped by white fandoms, white characters and, overwhelmingly, white ideas about what’s allowed and what isn’t, we ought to consider that all critical contexts are not created equal.

Right now, the rise of C-drama (and K-drama, and J-drama) fandoms is seeing a surge of white creators – myself included – writing fics for fandoms in which no white people exist, and where the cultural context which informs the canon is different to western norms. Which isn’t to say that no popular fandoms focused on POC have existed before now – K-pop RPF and anime fandoms, for example, have been big for a while. But with the success of The Untamed, more western fans are investing in stories whose plots, references, characterization and settings are so fundamentally rooted in real Chinese history and living Chinese culture that it’s not really possible to write around it. And yet, inevitably, too many in fandom are trying to do just that, treating respect for Chinese culture or an attempt to understand it as optional extras – because surely, fandom shouldn’t feel like work. If you’re writing something for free, on your own time, for your own pleasure, why should anyone else get to demand that you research the subject matter first?

Because it matters, is the short answer. Because race and culture are not made-up things like lightsabers and werewolves that you can alter, mock or misunderstand without the risk of hurting or marginalizing actual real people – and because, quite frankly, we already know that fandom is capable of drawing lines in the sand where it chooses. When Brony culture first reared its head (hah), the online fandom for My Little Pony – which, like the other fandoms we’re discussing here, is overwhelmingly female – was initially welcoming. It felt like progress, that so many straight men could identify with such a feminine show; a potential sign that maybe, we were finally leaving the era of mainstream hypermasculine fandom bullshit behind, at least in this one arena. And then, in pretty much the blink of an eye, things got overwhelmingly bad. Artists drawing hardcorn porn didn’t tag their works as adult, leading to those images flooding the public search results for a children’s show. Women were edged out of their own spaces. Bronies got aggressive, posting harsh, ugly criticism of artists whose gijinka interpretations of the Mane Six as humans were deemed insufficiently fuckable.

The resulting fandom conflict was deeply unpleasant, but in the end, the verdict was laid down loud and clear: if you cannot comport yourself like a decent fucking person – if your base mode of engagement within a fandom is to coopt it from the original audience and declare it newly cool only because you’re into it now; if you do not, at the very least, attempt to understand and respect the original context so as to engage appropriately (in this case, by acknowledging that the media you’re consuming was foundational to many women who were there before you and is still consumed by minors, and tagging your goddamn porn) – then the rest of fandom will treat you like a social biohazard, and rightly so.

Here’s the thing, fellow white people: when it comes to C-drama fandoms and other non-white, non-western properties? We are the Bronies.

Not, I hasten to add, in terms of toxic fuckery – though if we don’t get our collective shit together, I’m not taking that darkest timeline off the table. What I mean is that, by virtue of the whiteminding which, both consciously and unconsciously, has shaped current fan culture, particularly in terms of ficwriting conventions, we’re collectively acting as though we’re the primary audience for narratives that weren’t actually made with us in mind, being hostile dicks to Chinese and Chinese diaspora fans when they take the time to point out what we’re getting wrong. We’re bristling because we’ve conceived of ficwriting as a place wherein No Criticism Occurs without questioning how this culture, while valuable in some respects, also serves to uphold, excuse and perpetuate microaggresions and other forms of racism, lashing out or falling back on passive aggression when POC, quite understandably, talk about how they’re sick and tired of our bullshit.

An analogy: one of the most helpful and important tags on AO3 is the one for homophobia, not just because it allows readers to brace for or opt out of reading content they might find distressing, but because it lets the reader know that the writer knows what homophobia is, and is employing it deliberately. When this concept is tagged, I – like many others – often feel more able to read about it than I do when it crops up in untagged works of commercial fiction, film or TV, because I don’t have to worry that the author thinks what they’re depicting is okay. I can say definitively, “yes, the author knows this is messed up, but has elected to tell a messed up story, a fact that will be obvious to anyone who reads this,” instead of worrying that someone will see a fucked up story blind and think “oh, I guess that’s fine.” The contextual framing matters, is the point – which is why it’s so jarring and unpleasant on those rare occasions when I do stumble on a fic whose author has legitimately mistaken homophobic microaggressions for cute banter. This is why, in a ficwriting culture that otherwise aggressively dislikes criticism, the request to tag for a certain thing – while still sometimes fraught – is generally permitted: it helps everyone to have a good time and to curate their fan experience appropriately.

But when white and/or western fans fail to educate ourselves about race, culture and the history of other countries and proceed to deploy that ignorance in our writing, we’re not tagging for racism as a thing we’ve explored deliberately; we’re just being ignorant at best and hateful at worst, which means fans of colour don’t know to avoid or brace for the content of those works until they get hit in the face with microaggresions and/or outright racism. Instead, the burden is placed on them to navigate a minefield not of their creation: which fans can be trusted to write respectfully? Who, if they make an error, will listen and apologise if the error is explained? Who, if lived experience, personal translations or cultural insights are shared, can be counted on to acknowledge those contributions rather than taking sole credit? Too often, fans of colour are being made to feel like guests in their own house, while white fans act like a tone-policing HOA.

Point being: fandom and ficwriting cultures as they currently exist badly need to confront the implicit acceptance of racism and cultural bias that underlies a lot of community rules about engagement and criticism, and that needs to start with white and western fans. We don’t want to be the new Bronies, guys. We need to do better.