#me; getting into certain fandoms 20 years later

[i-am-creacheur]

making one of these because the world sucks and I need outside motivation to get better. I'm not popular enough to get any traction but I need help so I guess spamming welcome.

1 note: I start my Latin game project which is due like three days from now- complete!!!!

5 notes: I will text my crush along the lines of "hey we have a lot of teams and clubs in common but I don't anything about you. What are somethings you like" except less creepy- working up the courage.

10 notes: I will try to write more on my fics.- busy atm but will work on them when I can

20 notes: I will ask my parents for a birthday cake, because my birthday was two weeks ago and we were out of the country so I didn't really get anything (they said the trip was my gift but I think it was a joke) and I always get the same cake and my internal calender is now screaming in agony- they bought a lot of sweet stuff i like earlier today so I'm considering not asking. Or just asking for a cupcake with buttercream icing or sm

30 notes: do so much laundry- doing a load of shirts and stuff atm

40 notes: try to get better at taking care of myself (eating breakfast, showering more often, drinking more water)- put a water bottle on my desk and am working on this

50 notes: organize my mcyt folder in my photo gallery (has over 3k pictures)- I'll do this while procrastinating later today

100 notes: properly clean my room- laundry is a major part of this but yall swarmed the notes so it will take me a bit to reach. I mean I did say spamming was fine so I dug my own grave

200 notes: buy magnets from a fandom I really like

300 notes: buy more jeans. I only like certain kinds of pants and I haven't gotten new ones in like two years so I really need some that haven't been beaten to hell

500 notes: ask my parents for an adhd coach

700 notes: start properly planning my eagle project

1k notes: ask my crush out/tell my parents I think I like girls

2k: make three cosplays of my favorite characters

3k: start researching colleges (this is very stressful to think about for me hence why it is so high up)

Likely to add more 👍

[sassydefendorflower]

There is this common misconception in the fandom that to get the "fullest" Fullmetal Alchemist experience, you should watch the first 20 or so episodes of 03 (up until Hughes' murder) and finish the show watching Brotherhood.

I think that's bullshit.

Not because I have anything against 03. Oh, I think 03 is a perfectly valid interpretation of the text with a few absolutely genius moments thrown in there that make Brotherhood pale in comparison.

But it is an interpretation of the text.

Don't get me wrong, so is Brotherhood.

And while Brotherhood is a lot more faithful to the text, especially later on, that anime as well cuts out a lot of important worldbuilding in the beginning. Which is where this idea of inter-cutting those two animes even stems from.

But these two stories have wildly different interpretations of the same characters! The depth of characterization in both 03 and Brotherhood gets undercut by a mix and match that does both a disservice.

Ed is a lot more vulnerable in 03 - he is the tragic hero we follow who will make horrible choices in order to save his brother only to suffer and fail and break. The anime establishes this by introducing him to us at the age of 12, when he's only just starting in his journey. Many of his first adventures (the train, meeting Hughes, Nina and Alexander) take place at a point where Ed is a lot softer, a lot less hard, a lot less broken - they are what breaks him in a way. What eventually leads him down the path he takes.

That is a hugely different interpretation of the text as Brotherhood offers it to us.

In Brotherhood we meet Ed when he's at the top. The priest of Liore is no problem for him, he's been doing this for years, he's internalized a lot of the hurt he grew up with. Getting hurt doesn't faze him, his biggest hindrance is his urge to finally get this done and over with. He's cocky and self-assured and oh, so insecure. Which is why we need Nina, to remind him of the fragility in life and his own powerlessness. In Brotherhood Nina is the linchpin that leads to Ed finding out about Philosopher's Stones.

In many ways this interpretation of the text is a lot closer to the source material, but, yes, it is still an interpretation. Someone once said the biggest mistake Brotherhood made was include the Elrics' backstory in episode two and I agree - it is often what hooks first time viewers with the stark horror of what these kids went through, but it stands at odds with the original purpose of the backstory only being revealed in vol.6 of the manga.

Because in the original story, up to that point, we don't know why Ed and Al are the way we are. We've seen flashes, we know Ed has nightmares, we know certain things spook them, and we know they committed a taboo whatever the hell that means. And only when we meet Izumi, only when Ed has to forcibly drop all the walls he spend the last three years building, do we see what actually happen. It's also the closest Ed comes to crying - clinging to Izumi and begging her for forgiveness.

These are three very different ways to tell the same story.

All of these are valid. All of these can be fun.

But they hold fundamentally different approaches to the characters within them, which makes them not interchangeable.

The same is true for Hughes, who - in 03 - is a presence in the Elrics' lives from the very beginning, their friend and confidant in ways not even Mustang is. He helps them during the train hijacking and Elicia shares Ed's birthday.

That's a significant switch-up from the manga, where Ed and Al only meet him once they go to Central to search through the First Library - and in which only Winry ever really grows close to Hughes as a person, and not as a mistake made by the brothers.

And Brotherhood tells a different story again, by having Ed and Al meet Hughes in the first episode, as they visit Central to catch the Freezer and befriend Mustang's ally who invites them home - placing that relationship somewhere in the middle of coworkers and close, intimate friends.

These are three different characters, who are connected to our main duo in three different ways.

There's overlaps and I am not keeping anyone from having fun (03 Roy Mustang being the one to kill Winry's parenty, my beloved) but to really enjoy these stories, they need to be understood as three different texts.

03 stands strong in its originality, Brotherhood in its closeness to the source material, but if you want the OG experience just read the manga. It shouldn't stop you from enjoying the other two as well.

If anything, it should be more fun to have three similar - but different - worlds to play in.

[anxious-witch]

I apologize for irritable tone of this post, but a portion of this fandom is starting to irritate me, so let's analyze catwin through the lens of how age works for ghosts and how situational irony is used in a scene where Edwin and Niko talk about kissing.

Let's start with age. Right at the beginning, when Emma asks Charles and Edwin to take her case, she tries to play it off as her being just a little girl. This is what Edwin replies:

And before anyone jumps the gun and says: "He said SUPERNATURALLY speaking! He is still physically 16!"

Okay. Let's unpack that. Considering how for people who are immortal, which ghosts essentially are, and as such unchanging, that isn't quite a proper argument, is it? Because the way I see it, there are two ways someone could argue this. Either your gripe is about the Cat King finding Edwin attractive despite him physically being a 16 year old or your gripe is that Edwin is mentally 16 and as such, cannot consent.

If it's the first, I think that argument is quite lacking here, because we know the Cat King is aware Edwin is older than 16. And as someone who is an adult and often gets mistaken for a minor, I think the idea that you can just always tell someone's age by looking at them quite funny. Also, by that logic, I shouldn't be able to consent either, because people generally gauge my age to be between 16-18, when I am in my mid 20s.

If it's the second, your point doesn't work because being frozen at 16 would mean being unable to learn and develop firther than what you did by that age. Which we know is false for ghosts, especially Edwin. He changes and develops constantly throughout the s1, and we have a front row seat to that! Human brains aren't clear cut, and before you jump under the post to say your brain isn't fully develop until age 25, I will kindly tell you that human brains, in fact, never stop changing and developing. And that experiences, traumas, etc hugely impact developments of individuals.

One argument I can sort of is perhaps Edwin and Charles having somewhat stunted emotional growth, but as we also see throughout the season, that has more to do with them stagnanting rather than them being unable to emotionally develop. And frankly, I know bunch of adults with the same issues, so.

Now for the "But Edwin said he doesn't want to kiss the Cat King!" argument. How about we look at what Edwin says before that, huh?

He says he has never been kissed and didnt understand the appeal, until recently. And you cannot tell me it wasn't the Cat King who made him realize it. Yes, he wanted to kiss Charles and I am not saying he didn't like Monty too, but if it wasn't for the Cat King getting physically close to him and playing into his desires, he wouldn't have realized that he too, feel physical attraction!

As for him saying "Absolutely not!" When Niko asks him if he wants to kiss the Cat King, I think that's laughable argument to saying "Well, see, he didn't want him!" Because first of all, characters can lie. Edwin most certain, lies about things he wants, both to himself and others, up until pressed.

Besides, if I am not mistaken, given English isn't my first language and I learned this stuff in a different language, this is also called situational irony, aka, someone say something won't/can't happen and then it happens. This is very often seen in romance plots too. A characters says they hate someone and then they end up dating them.

Think of Lizzy Benett and Darcy

And then she goes ahead and married him later, once her opinion of him changes. It's a classic romance trope!

Similarly, Edwin says he doesn't want to kiss the Cat King and what happens at the end? Oh yeah!

He kisses the Cat King. Shocker.

But yeah just like. Y'all are free to not like the ship for whatever reason, but for the love of god, stop making up stuff that's just blantantly untrue. There is an "anti catwin" tag for a reason, if you truly cannot stop yourself from commenting, but in all honestly, you could just enjoy your own ship without putting other ppl's ships down. Cat King is not perfect by any means, but this isn't a predator type of situation. I and many others have addressed the whole "coercion" bit quite a few times so I won't get into it again, but these two arguments I have seen pop up and I just had to address it. Thank you for coming to my ted talk

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Errors, “Errors,” and Sci Fi

@strawberry-crocodile

tvtropes calls stuff like the wolf example "science matches on" which I think is a pretty fair shake

This.  This is what’s got me thinking so much about errors.  There’s a certain danger, here.  A certain way that this particular effect — delicious dramatic irony — tempts the mind when reading old stories, even true ones.

What do you know about R.M.S. Titanic? I ask my class every year, and the first hand rises.  “It was unsinkable,” the student inevitably says, and everyone is nodding, “or so they thought.”  I write the word UNSINKABLE on the board, underneath my crude drawing of a ship with four smokestacks.  It will be crossed out before the end of the hour, but not for the reason they expect.

“I find no evidence,” Walter Lord, preeminent biographer of the ship’s survivors, wrote, “that Titanic was ever advertised as unsinkable. This detail seems to have entered the collective mind so as to create a more perfect irony.”  Indeed, historians’ examinations of White Star Line documents show the shipbuilders themselves worried it would be so large as to risk collision; they stocked several more lifeboats than 1910s regulations required.

The War to End All Wars (deep breath, satisfied exhale), also known as World War ONE. Chuckle.  Shake of the head.  What if I told you that this phrase, used primarily in American newspapers after the fact, wasn’t meant to be literal? Nowadays we’d say The Mother of All Wars, or One Hell of a Fucking War, but we wouldn’t mean literal motherhood, literal intercourse.  What if I said the armistice and the Lost Generation and the Roaring 20s were all braced for another outbreak of European conflict, and yet we still failed to prevent it?

Did you know they were so confident in the safety of the S.S. Challenger that they put a civilian schoolteacher onboard? I do, because I’ve heard that one repeated many times.  Only, see, it’s got the cause and effect reversed.  Challenger launched on a day the shuttle’s engineers knew to be dangerously cold, because the first civilian in space was on board. And NASA knew its shuttle project would be cancelled entirely, if they couldn’t get that civilian’s much-delayed entry into space in the next two weeks.  So they launched on a cold day, and killed her instead.

These are all what cognitive science calls Hindsight Bias on the personal level, what sociology calls Presentism on the cultural level.  Social psychology’s a little of both, is primarily interested in why you’re sitting on your couch in a Colonize Mars shirt watching PBS and chuckling at the fools who believed in El Dorado.  It wants to know why the mind flees straight from “marijuana will kill you” to “marijuana will cure cancer” without so much as a pause on the middle ground of its real benefits and drawbacks, its real (mild) risks and rewards.

And they can paralyze the sci-fi writer, if you think too much about them. Jetsons is futurist one decade, retro the next.  “There are no bathrooms on the Enterprise,” the creators of Serenity say smugly, as if Gene Roddenberry should’ve simply known that decades later it’d be acceptable to show a man peeing in full view of the camera, nothing but the curve of the actor’s hand to protect his modesty.  “No sound in space,” the Fandom Menace says, “No explosions in space,” and “A space station can’t collapse in zero-G.”  Only then NASA burns a paper napkin outside of atmosphere, transmits music using only the ghost of nearby planets’ gravities, and logs onto Reddit long enough to point out the Death Star would implode in its own gravity field.  And now we’re the ones pointing, the ones laughing, at those earlier point-and-laughers.  Self-satisfied, smug in superiority.  As if we did the work to find out ourselves, instead of just happening to be born a little later than George Lucas.

[whoishotteranimepolls]

My observations after running this blog for a month

I have observed trends relating to multiple fandoms and how they behave/interact with my polls here's some examples. I hope someone finds this entertaining as I did. Because I do read most of the comments and tags

Black Butler, Jujutsu Kaisen and Dorohedoro. You guys are the most insane, feral, unhinged and I have debated marking my post as mature content simply because I knew what you will put in your tags and comment. I worry about you people sometimes Because I do read what you put in those comments and tags and now I know what you will allow these characters to do to you and what you want to do to them. (This also applies certain specific characters from other fandoms) But you three. My little unhinged trio. It's just fandom wide. Doesn't matter the character. You will go crazy. It's entertaining to watch. Don't get me wrong but I hope everyone is doing okay

One piece You guys request a lot and show up. You guys also like meme and cursed polls. Yes they are funny most of the time and you guys have plenty of characters to choose from for the meme and cursed variety. But your fandom also has a list of characters that fall under the should I mark this as mature content because of what is inevitably going to end up in the tags and comments. Because I have seen your characters referred to as "daddy" or "mommy" Way more than JJK or the other two members of the unhinged trio and those fandoms are way more crazy collectively.

Trigun is the most loyal ride or die fandom that will show up for any poll with one of their characters no matter what. With a level of enthusiasm that is impressive but lacks the pure crazy of the unhinged trio

Mob Psycho 100 I've only had one character submitted from your show but you guys show up almost as much as Trigun but I don't know if that loyalty translates to other characters

Jojo you guys either show up and vote and reblog quietly or are just as bad as the unhinged trio 50/50 chance also depends on the character so I never know what to expect.

Now Attack on Titan. Is that fandom alive? Because I have gotten a few requests to do their characters but they have never shown up to defend their character. Which is funny because they're still in the top 20 anime and Manga fandom charts. But as far as I can tell the fandom does not exist or they're invisible so are you guys doing okay? I know the final season was supposed to be traumatic or something but I mean so was JJK season 2 and it just turned that fandom into an unhinged mess so you all should be fine or at least have a pulse. Do you guys need to speak to the Hannibal fandom for support? I mean they're still alive all these years later even after their tragic ending.

Hunter x Hunter You're a fandom that shows up consistently. Vote and reblog but you don't make a scene. That's all I can really say. It's very similar to how the Trigun fandom behaves but not quite the same enthusiasm as Trigun that is ride or die no matter the character

Fate is another fandom where you either show up or you don't. There is no in between. I wonder if it depends on the character. But I don't know. There just hasn't been enough polls

Soul Eater. You guys are unhinged only when it comes to Stein any other character I don't know but Stein 100% ride or die.

Dungeon Meshi very similar to JoJo except if it's Senshi or Falin guaranteed you guys will be just as bad if not worse than the unhinged trio any other character there's a chance you might not show up at all

Now to all the people who find the Senshi polls annoying. I would like to apologize for the monster I mean meme I accidentally created. It was never my intention for this to get out of hand I hope you can forgive me one day. But apparently they're going to kill King Charles. I still don't get it I might be getting old

If I haven't mentioned your fandom, it's probably because your characters don't get submitted enough for me to notice a trend but I will be watching. This is just what I've observed so far I hope you enjoyed my observations. I found these trends interesting

[accio-victuuri]

February CPNs

hello! it’s that time of the month again that i compile the sweets brought to us by the boys! this month started out very quiet but in this fandom will mean that things will take a turn in the next week/s. you just never know what will happen next. i have added some commentary here on certain incidents that i didn’t talk about separately on my blog to have “bonus content” for this round-up.

• XZ’s GQ cover and collaboration sweets + additional ones connected to fake rumor

• not really cpn, but our boys continue to make it in the weibo hot search trend report - i still hate sina weibo but i understand how it’s relevant for them.

• XZ’s wedding suit from the AV festival. yes, this was made for him but we just had him wear that white backless wedding suit by jacquemus for GQ and now this? hmmmm. me thinks he has a preference? lol. he prefers white and that’s fine, but the choice of what looks like a wedding suit is 👀. i am on standby, let me see if this continues.

pair it off with WYB! and it’s perfect. tho i would prefer it if they are both in white. 🤍

• xzs has the same caption as a cpf

• yibo’s watch and gg’s GQ props connection the number 91 and 3.

• chinese new year candies - gg’s weibo post, wyb’s red envelope cover clues etc

• rufeng shares new thailand fm rehearsal footage

• tencent video posting their new year vcr so close together! they could have easily posted it one after the other but maybe they didn’t want some solo fan drama. i’m happy that bobo continues to collab with 10c, and ZZ is not exclusive to 10c anymore— so hopefully this means in the future they can work on a project together <3

• clowning over XZ’s song in spring festival gala as you wish + same composer as wyb’s singles and how wyb was listening to a song from this artist lately.

• this parallel between their looks. it’s not just their characters that match each other, but their outfits from certain events. so classy!

but i think this one is the best. seeing them get recognition for their acting in the past few months has been very rewarding. all the hard work and challenges are bearing fruit. remembering them talking about wanting to become professional actors and really take that path — studying and dreaming together. now here we are 🫶🏼

• a cute tidbit, but the cat xz is playing with is called xiao wang. that’s because on it’s back looks like the character for wang! what a coincidence!!!! 🥹

• Bottled Joy stirring the CPN pot again by posting this on 2/13. As You Wish. The context of the post is that, as you wish — fans can get these wallpapers and photos of Bobo. but it’s a coincidence cause it’s the english title of the song GG sang @ BRTV Spring Festival Gala. 👀 the colors too, white and silver which is the same color combination of GG’s outfit. This may be meh to some, but knowing Bottled Joy’s cpn history, you can’t blame us.

• Golden Hour and Eason Chan songs @ yibo’s playlist

• Small weekend roundup - includes mention of asian pop magazines where the boys are both mentioned, supplement to xz using tickets for his spring festival photos last year as support of bobo’s movie and the phone card case appears.

• Rumor of Wang Yibo being in Hengdian - one / two / three ( i feel like this one is up there with the leica camera and gg’s bday cpn but this one is more risky on their part. as i have said in my posts, what is important is they are safe and happy. it’s their personal life. their relationship is between the two of them. as cpfs, we should be protecting them and not be people they are wary of. if we are not careful, we are no different from ss and yxh. )

• On 2/20, Yuehua & YBO have posted about the slander recently going around related to WYB and that they have reported it to the police. This went really high on HS and was widely talked about, even Du Hua reposted and reacted to it. Hours later, XZS has posted their own reminder to fans in relation to people disturbing his drama filming. What made it more important is that XZ reposted it too and put in a very firm reminder to everyone.

to give some context, the horrible rumor regarding WYB was spread around by mostly XZ fans. There was a melon that said “X” has STD and then toxic people started saying it’s WYB ( cause toxic xz fans doesn’t want it linked to XZ because of the clue given so they throw it to WYB. i know it sounds stupid, but it’s actually a common tactic done by both sides ) and even fabricated some photos. another actor, xukai was also implicated and he also reported to the police.

so this can be read by so/os as XZ&XZS trying to cover up for the toxic solos and what they did. i get why other people will think that and i personally wanted them to address the bad things his solos do. however i also understand why xz and his team can’t “betray” the solo fans. that’s just how it goes. however, in cpf interpretation, this is XZ’s way of taking away the heat from wyb and a way of putting a stop to the conversations about that horrible lie. it worked in a way that it went on HS, but not as high as WYB’s. I was also surprised that XZ reposted it himself. i am aware that the leaks and everything else is a serious issue and XZ is someone who hates being a bother to the crew. but he usually doesn’t do this. he usually leaves it to XZS or the drama account. This tells me that he personally wants to lend his name and his weibo account, to get more of the heat. The last line he said can also be a message to his toxic so/os: respect others and respect yourself.

• On 2/20, there were tarot readings some BXGs have enjoyed. One is this that is a new year CP reading done on 2/4. What made fans 👀 are:

1. this card, where OP said it’s them being hand in hand and don’t get tired of each other. and in the background is a sacred building, which symbolizes them having a vow to each other.

more cpn was added into it when GG did MFW and people realized not to take this literally cause it could be representing the Duomo.

2. Here is the part that was v interesting to cpfs cause this person gave a prediction that followed what we cpn and happened in the next couple of days.

The two of them haven’t had many official activities recently. So from February 4th, there is a chance for the two of them to meet each other in the past few days. And as soon as the two of them meet, they won’t be going out. Yibo knows he is active but he will close up and be willing to hide at home for XZ.

this is so close to what we speculated! that they spent a quiet cny break together. 🥹🥹🥹

3. Next one is so on point it’s scary cause i have already discussed the bad rumor going around and was directed at WYB before this entry. OP was sort of right. tho i don’t know it this will be another hateful rumor, i hope not.

My prediction is that it will be in March 2024, around this time, I feel that WYB will have a a force of public opinion surrounding him. It's unfriendly to him. This power of public opinion including but not limited to WYB. If we use the 8 of Swords to understand the external environment, it is a relatively sharp. There is some public opinion about the two of them that may cause some trouble

If something happens to WYB, XZ will immediately rise up and have to rush out to protect him. XZ will work hard behind the scenes silently in his own way and are some practical actions.

I don’t think i need to further explain. It fits what happened in 2/20. 👁️👄👁️

4. WYB’s resources for 2024 will be very good. In the first quarter, the number of resources was not very large but the quality of the resources is very good. Then the Queen of Pentacles in the third quarter. In the fourth quarter, the Queen of Cups.

For context: The Queen of Pentacles, therefore, depicts a certain level of success and prosperity. But the rabbit at the bottom cautions us that we should be careful of where we leap when we are chasing that success. Queen of Cups - Generally speaking, this is a positive card for both career and finances, suggesting you're "in tune with yourself, have a good work-life balance going on, and overall a positive job experience.

The reading is close to 1 hour long and I just can’t translate it all so i’m going off what CPFs are highlighting.

• XZ’s pre Milan flight Gucci & camcorder cpn

• Fake Rumors : getting caught kissing / spending time during CNY

• XZS first post in Milan is the invitation given to XZ by Tod’s for the show. Those who had the same time as Milan saw the actual time stamp which is 1823. A beloved kadian number!!!!!

• xz’s collar and whole look for GUCCI MFW gave us so many thoughts. lol. i know sexualization of the boys is a complicated issue in the fandom but when things like this happen — how can we stop? lol. no. but seriously. it is what it is.

• checking their fingernails + similar pose to HB

• a comment that implies xz went to zhuhai with wyb to ride a motorcycle

��� their photos match so well. 🌅

from zz’s post in milan. it’s filled with the elements they love like the moon and a beautiful sunset background. gg was also showing off his re web shoes which is of course, because he is a gucci ambassador and all that but the “web” cpn is getting stronger. however, i am personally losing my mind over the implications in the caption he used.

• clues in zz’s mfw interviews, matching talismans on their phone cases and similar ads for shu uemura & loreal

• 8 fake rumors from CQL shoot/era that i posted about 📝

• A place CPFs landmark lol

• spotted same mannerism! twins ☺️☺️☺️☺️

see you all next month for another round up of sweetness! just continue to support the boys and ignore the toxic moves of irrelevant people. fandom is supposed to be fun and a safe space so i hope we all fight to keep that love & peace here 🫶🏼

[jmagnabo92]

Hey The Prongsfoot Anon, who is dissatisfied with James, here, ,,

THaks for taking your time out and replying.

I did not get what I was looking for but i am really grateful for your words all the same.

Have a nice day!

Also i have read the small stories you wirte on the pair. I told you that i was talking about the long stories on Prongsfoot. It wasn't about the stories you write. THey are sweet and cute. I love them all. But then I go looking for long stories and don't like that the source of all angst is about made about sirius who is struggling more than James is. There it seems that James has it easy.

Also I wanted to clear that i am not against divorce. In fact I am pro for it. I meant that in the society around me, divorce has a reason. Like in your recent fic, Marlene felt that Sirius has always been in love with James and tried with her less etc. she felt cheated and wanted to hurt sirius. THis is the type of divorce I was talking aabout feels real. In comparision Jily divoice felt like they woke up one morning. Talked , they were on the same page, ready to divorce and co-parent harry and harry is all okay and chill with his parent's sepration. No one has gone through any emotional turmoil due to sepration. all is fine is dandy. Again, I am just using your story as an example because almost all the story with lily alive and jily divorce are based on the concep of a painless smooth jily divorce and that is what i was saying that if they were so good in communication, if they are so in link with each other, why divorce and not try more for the marriage. so it feels unreal- the being in each other's life - best friends and giving advices and being all chummy after divorce.

Also the serial you mentioned. I only have watched the initual episodes of 911 but that lady and thier kids are really effected by that man's coming out. The children are not readily acceptng. THe woman herself feels betrayed for a brief period. Later they may have reconcilefd etc but they have had a journey. Also i remeber that the lady married the man because her bilogical clock was ticking. Almost like the pact of marrying your freind after certain age. Jily is different because if canon way is chosen then at 20 they were not compromising by saddling with each other. They chose each other.

I think the grit is missing with jily break and divorce in Progsffot fandom. James and Lily behave too matures.

You don't have to reply for this. I was just really appreciative of the efforts it took for you to type that long reply and i wanted to explain my side of story a bit more.

WHat I said about James's maturity is that after those early years in stories that his struggles are over. WHat i meant when i said that i imagine him as a person who will have trouble maturing is because i think that he is the perfect mix of naive and optimistic to be like that. THe teenager who thinks that all problems are over once he reaches adulthood.thinking that being adult means having anwers to all problems. Etc.

What I mean that a James in his 30's has to have his own struggles with life. which are appropriate to experiece of a man that age which brings new obstacles and pains. Maybe Harry is entering his teen age where all kids begin hating their parents. Maybe he is having quarter life crisis. MAybe Lily is upset that he is asking for divorce when she is happy in her marriage life. Etc.

This is alos the issue, Lily is Petunia's sister. Petunia wanted to come accross as a settled woman with great life. SO, Lily being okay with divorce seems ooc.

Also I think i mentioned in my previous ask but i never said that SIruis is feminized. What i meant him taking that girly roles meant that in soap operas and in traditional romance stories, the girl is the one who is struggling and then the boy swoops in to save the day. A prongsfoot story in which James has no life problems and is chill feels like that. Not the best comparisiion but Prongsfoot angst is always heavy on Sirius's side that is why i drew the comparision.

So, yes this was all.

Again you don't have to reply again. I just thought I owed it to you to explain my side a bit better. I am not sure if I was succesful or not....

Anyways. Take care.....

Well, hello, Anon.  

I know you said that I didn’t have to answer, but I felt compelled, too, because I’m genuinely curious - what WERE you hoping to get out of these asks?  

I’m also curious about why if you know that my stories genuinely don’t focus on the Sirius angst or struggling more than James, that you came to me?  

If you’re curious, I think Sirius angst comes from being Sirius fans first.  Some people like to torture their favs and Sirius has more page-time than James does.  We know him better from canon than we do James, so we tend to focus on him.   I also don’t think James has it easy.  He still has to deal with figuring out himself and breaking up his marriage (if he’s married, which isn’t easy), he still loses his parents and finds himself without that safety net.  My dad’s 62 and just lost his last parent recently and he’s been struggling - I can’t imagine losing both parents when he’s still technically a teen and not struggling with that.  That’s almost always there.

So, he has struggles.

So, you said that this wasn’t about a particular fic, but then you bring up “Fun in the Sun” - well, what you probably don’t know is that the prompt behind that fic was Sirius/Marlene have a terrible divorce while Jily have an amicable divorce.  James was always *meant* to help Sirius per the prompt and discussion with the artist.  It was written purposely to highlight the two different types of divorces, and I wanted to follow through with that concept because it’s what the artist wanted.  I don’t usually do divorce fic (or focus on it if I do) like I did in this fic.  Jily also divorced 3 years before SM did because Marlene dragged the divorce out to punish Sirius.  So, yeah, Jily is friends and have had an easy time co-parenting because it’s been going on for *years* all the growing pains that initially happened, already happened.  

This was a Prongsfoot fic, I don’t care about Jily’s divorce, it was a plot device.  That’s it.  And like, that’s another thing with Prongsfoot Long-fics that deal with Jily divorce.  We aren’t here to focus on Jily - we’re here for Prongsfoot, so why would we bother having the ‘emotional turmoil’ especially when the divorce happened years before.

Yes, Athena/Micheal struggle at first in 9-1-1, but if you were to look at the middle/end of S2, they’re perfectly fine.  Which is approximately a year or two into the divorce - which is where Jily was during this fic.  So, yeah, no there’s no reason for there to be issues - again, that was part of the prompt.

Again - we’re not here for Jily, so maybe there’s no grit, but that’s not why we are Prongsfoot fans, so… Sorry?  Not, Sorry.  If you don’t want Jily divorce, you can always filter it out.  A03 is amazing for filters :)

Like I said, James’ struggles are subjective.  Sometimes the fic just focuses more than one thing than another and like that’s up to the writer, if it’s not your cup of tea - that’s cool, you can always write your own?

I usually don’t get into Lily’s head much, ‘cause again I’m here for Prongsfoot - over 400 fics tells you that - Although sometimes I have them share James (I bet you’d really love those fics :) ). Anyhoo, maybe she is struggling or maybe she feels relief.  But I can’t imagine why you think Petunia’s views on Divorce have any impact on her sister’s?  ‘Cause like, siblings can have different views - I know I have four siblings and ain’t none of us agree on nothing.  :)3

Lily’s view on divorce is highly subjective since we know so little about her.  But she doesn’t seem like the type to stay in an unhappy marriage and forcing someone to stay always leads to unhappiness.  

I never said you said he was feminized, although I think you did?  What you’re saying here is suggesting that he’s a “damsel in distress” and needs a hero - which is a) very sexist and b) just not true.  Sirius is a badass in every Prongsfoot fic I have ever read.  I can’t speak for every fic in existence but Fuck man, struggling and having support from James is not the same thing as being the heroine that waits around for her hero to save her - and even if that was the case… the implication that he’s girly for it really grinds my gears.

Anyway, we focus on Sirius and angsting him because he’s easier to angst since we know more about him, but if you don’t like that - that’s okay, you can always write what you wanna read.  

Thanks, take care :)

[just-a-carrot]

Carrot, please don't feel bad about your age! You're not that old, honestly, I never understood why people think that anything after 20s is immediately "old". Like you still have so much life ahead of you! Most people in their 20s are still barely figuring life out, tbh I feel like 30s is the age when most people just start becoming maturing (and then again, almost everyone at every age is still figuring something out, we never stop growing after all). And even if you are "old" there's nothing wrong with that! It's not like you're supposed to stop enjoying life once you hit a certain age. I know this probably means nothing coming from a minor, but I genuinely don't understand the obsession with age! Your life isn't over until it's over, yet some people act like hitting a certain age means you have to be miserable.

Also, I don't know if I ever told you this, but this is one of the reasons I love Our Wonderland, and why it had such an impact on me. I used to be very scared of growing up, feeling like I was on a time limit and that the older I got, the less fun I would be allowed to have. But seeing these fully adult characters who are struggling, and still figuring things out, and most of all having time to themselves and their interests: it really opened my eyes! I thought by that age I should have everything figured out, like how I thought most people did, but OW made me realize that's not the case. The truth is everyone is still figuring things out, and that's okay! At the end of the day, we're still human, and we all need time to ourselves.

So thank you, Carrot! You helped me conquer a fear of mine, and I'm really grateful to you for that. Your work has honestly inspired me so much in so many different ways, and I want you to know that! Anyways, I hope you have a good day. Bye!

that's incredibly kind of you... 🥺💕

honestly a big reason why I wanted to make the OW chars older is because of that exact reason: because I didn't figure out so much about myself until I got older, and to have a story about that, that it's ok to keep discovering more about yourself later on in life, and also it can be really hard at times too. like... going through so much of your life wondering why things are so difficult and why you never feel right because you had to figure everything out for yourself. like I didn't figure out I was ace until a horrifically traumatizing and confusing event in my life that I vented about once in an anon fandom forum and another anon told me it sounded like I was ace and I didn't even know the term and then spent the next weeks in existential crisis as I came to understand myself better. If I had known I was ace before that event, it might never have happened (or might still have, who knows) or at the very least I would have grown up not feeling so broken for much of my life. And that's not getting into the gender stuff that came even later that I was bullied for as a kid. It's hard when you have zero knowledge or role models or safe places to go about these types of things growing up... The internet was not like it is now when I was growing up. And there wasn't a single person out in my school growing up (but I know of many that came out years later including one of my best friends). But that doesn't mean you can't figure yourself out later and reclaim some of that joy for yourself of knowing better who you are

this became really rambly but I just wanted to say that I'm glad that everyone can enjoy these chars and their stories despite them being older. And I hope they (and even myself a bit) can be inspiration that indeed, life, fun, your passions and hobbies, none of that ends when you finish school or when you turn 30. keep on doing what you love always and keep on learning and discovering more about yourself!!

[laurellerual]

in a modern scenario, do you think gendry and arya would’ve pinned as friends for a lot of time before becoming lovers (around late twenties-thirties)? or do you see them getting together while they’re still teenagers/early twenties?

It really depends on what kind of modern scenario you have in mind...

The first issue that comes to mind is the age gap. Although we are not certain if it's true, the gap declared by the books is five years. In my opinion this is an irrelevant gap from 20 years onwards, but for minors it is very relevant. It's also relevant because the character's culture influences what they find desirable. For example in a medieval-like world a mutual attraction between a teenage girl and a young man is not out of place, because the social norm is for girls to be of marriageable age once they have flowered and for boys to be of marriageable age once completed their apprenticeship and found a job that allows them to support a family.

But in the modern world this is not the case, most young men out there would not look at a teenage girl like a possible partner, because this is not socially accepted, if not even illegal. This is reflected in several modern au fanfictions for this ship, where Gendry is often shown as a friend of Jon and Robb, who considers Arya only like a little sister and then their relationship gradually changes over the years. I think this is one of the more “realistic” ways it could go, but I don't particularly like this scenario. I think it's out of character for Gendry to make friends with the rich kids, it work with Arya because she is the one to make the first step.

Another element to consider is classism. Nowadays it might be easier for Arya and Gendry to start a relationship, but I fear the Starks would try to hinder them if they wanted to make it more serious. The way I see it modern Ned and Cat wouldn't go so far as to arrange a marriage for her, but they would still expect her to marry someone from their social class. I can see them considering Gendry as a simple rebellious whim on Arya's part. Someone that they hope their daughter will get tired of sooner or later, or even suspecting him of gold digging.

Finally, another interesting factor to think about for a moder au could be the relationship between Gendry and Robert. Gendry is still an illegitimate child but nowadays it is a little more difficult to completely free yourself from basic parental responsibilities. Did Gendry's mother ask for a paternity test to make Robert recognize her son, or did she keep it a secret? Does Gendry receive maintenance? Is he entitled to a part of the inheritance of the rich Baratheon family? In that case, the dynamic with the Starks could change a lot.

Sorry, about this scenario I have more questions than answers. One of the reasons that makes it difficult for me to visualize modern Westeros is that often the fandom imagines it as a very US-like place. This is totally fair because Martin is american and a lot of his readers are too, but... I'm not, that's not my culture, I've never been there.

[picturejasper20]

So, i was trying to think of the strange connection that there is between Danny Phantom fans and Steven Universe fans, aside from SU being a show that was very popular on its moment. Like one show is from 20 years ago and the other is from last decade, both with different executions and genres.

...Which lead me to write a whole essay no one asked for, so here you go:

One of the first things that comes to mind is how the main leads are hybrids- Danny Fenton is half human/half ghost, Steven is half human/ half gem. And like both series give an idea that they are pretty unique in their experience as hybrids and they both belong to both worlds yet not fully to either of them.

Danny has a lot of issues with having to hide his part of himself from the world, his parents included. Meanwhile, Steven doesn't understand certain social norms and can feel disconnected from other teens around his age, having lived a somewhat recluded childhood from his peers. (This gets more explored in Future)

Aside from the struggles that being an hybrid it brings to them, they have episodes about learning new powers or learning how to control them. You see them start rather powerless only to become pretty OP on the long run. -Steven getting tired for summoning one shield to being able to do it without sweat-Danny having his powers glitching at the start to gain a power like Ghost Wail later on, etc.

Another thing that Danny and Steven share in common is that they want to help and be useful. In Steven's case, he wants to help people with their problems or "fix" them. Over time Steven starts to define his identity around helping others a little too much to the point that he doesn't know who to be outside of that.

A pretty common headcanon for Danny in the DP fandom is that his ghost obsession is about having to protect everyone he can, something you can see in the series in a way. After Phantom Planet, Danny doesn't know who to be outside being the hero and feels that people don't need him anymore in the context the world having being saved after the series finale. ( A Glitch in Time)

Both try solving problems talking it out if possible, if it is a misunderstanding or they think the antagonist can be reasoned with.

With Steven, he doesn't need an explanation as most people know his personality, for Danny- it depends on the situation and his mood, sometimes being kinder and other times more violent. I would argue again that he still tries to talk things out when he sees that violence isn't necessary -just not the same as Steven

That's not to say their characters are the same, in fact their personalities are pretty different and their ways to approaching problems differs too. They do, however, share some parallels in their character arcs that i already discussed.

Another aspect are the main antagonists, both Steven Universe and Danny Phantom have their antagonists have motivations outside of being evil for the sake of being evil.

In Steven Universe this is a main theme and i don't think it doesn't need much introduction. Antagonists (most Homeworld gems) have been taught and were socialized to act in a specific way in the totalitarian society they were born into. Examples of this are: Peridot, Jasper and Lapis- these motivations can be mixed with revenge or similar things as well.

In Danny Phantom the main antagonists are Vlad Masters/Plasmius and Valerie Gray, both characters who aren't evil by nature and the series leaves clear that their antagonism comes from what happened to them and the decisions they took in result of that.

Vlad Masters role as a villain comes from the insolation and abandonment issues that came from the Ghost portal accident in college caused by Danny's father, Jack Fenton. Vlad became obsessed with getting revenge on Jack and believing he "stole" a family that should have been his.

Valerie comes from her blaming Phantom for (accidentally) ruining her life and trying to get revenge on him, becoming a ghost hunter. Valerie's role is a mix between anti-hero and antagonist since she wants to protect people but opposes Phantom at the same time. Eventually she becomes a bit of a friendenemy to Phantom over the course of the seasons.

Other recurrent antagonists have their own motives to do bad things ( Sidney, Desiree, Ember) while others are more naturally classic evil (Ghost King, Spectra). It depends on the character one is talking about.

Diving more into Vlad Plasmius, both series have this idea of "legacy", as like protagonist having to deal with what their parent/s "left behind for them".

For Steven is a huge deal for him since many of the antagonists who attack him are for things his mother Rose Quartz did, having Steven deal with all this issues and believing he has to fix them, blaming himself for what how Rose hurt people in different ways.

As for Danny, Vlad Masters' antagonism comes from the portal accident caused by Jack, Danny's father, when Vlad, Jack and Maddie (Danny's mom) were still friends in college. In a way Danny has to deal with something that was caused by his father. It isn't something he choose to but yet still brings him a lot of problems to his life.

I'm not sure which character from SU Vlad could be compared to, but i would say that Spinel is the closest one, since Spinel was abandoned by Rose Quartz (as Pink Diamond), who was her best friend, similar to what supposely happened between Vlad and Jack after the ghost portal accident.

Other theme is the idea of redemption, or how you can be your worst own enemy. As i mentioned, antagonists in SU usually get redemmed and change their ways from the systematic ideas they were raised in. There is this idea that people have the capacity to change if they propose themselves to.

In Steven Universe Future, Steven is "his worst enemy" as he has to deal with his own demons he has been avoiding for years for trying to repress them or being too busy helping other people. He goes through a negative corruption arc because of this, ending with him realizing that he can't hiding his issues and needs help with them.

In the Danny Phantom series, this is very important theme in "The Ultimate Enemy", where Danny is confronted by the possible evil future version of himself, called Dan Phantom in the DP fandom. Danny battles against this version of himself and tries to fix his mistake, proving that he can avoid that future from happening.

Danny also meets Vlad Masters in the dark future timeline in this special, who regrets his actions after so many years passed and how he accidentally helped with creating Dan in that timeline.

A Glitch in Time expands on this theme further by exploring Vlad and Dan's motivations a lot more and giving them second chances. The novel itself shares parallels with Steven Universe and SU Future in multiple ways.

Back to Dan Phantom, he shares quite a lot of things in common with Malachite to the point people have pointed out these parallels.

In Steven Universe, gems can fuse with other, creating more powerful gems. A fusion's personality and manners are determined by the relationship the partipants in the fusion have and a combination of their personalities.

Malachite is the fusion between Lapis Lazuli and Jasper, two characters who hated each other and carried lots of personal issues the moment they fused, resulting in a fusion that is unstable. Malachite represents the toxic codependent relationship between the two characters.

Dan Phantom is the fusion between Danny and Vlad's ghost halves, Phantom and Plasmius. Dan was created in a timeline both Danny and Vlad had a lot of issues, with Danny having to deal the lost of his family and being left traumatized. All this trauma along with Vlad's mental state went to Dan, turning him into a destructive ghost.

These are the elements i see that Danny Phantom and Steven Universe series share in common to explain why fandoms often overlap, i'm not sure if there are more that i'm not able to recall at the moment.

[horizon-verizon]

Same anon who asked about George talking about Daenerys here. Was referring to how there was originally supposed to be a five-year jump, and before that time was supposed to move faster over each book. George is pretty open about how that part of the story keeps getting away from him. He's also very open about which character he'd most like to spend time with and why, whenever anything close to the question comes up. Even if the question doesn't focus on "romance," he likes to find ways to bring it up. And look I try not to judge too much, but it does add some weirdness to how he likes to write older men falling over themselves for Daenerys and how he writes about the appearance of a (at least on paper) teenage girl.

Anon refers to this post. And I saw a tweet finally as to what i think you were talking abt.

This is extremely fair (what a weird adverb to use for this adjective).

Because the difference b/t how many over 20s males w/under-18s girls George thinks are appropriate versus what most people reading his books (excluding a lot of cis-hetero men, let's bfr) is a pretty large difference. Me, I've already argued for Rhaegar-Lyanna (no I don't consider Rhaegar the issue here), I disagree with the idea of Dany-Drogo being in any way "positive" or arguable for reasons other than the ages, and etc. But I understand your thoughts bc there are bonds that could have been comfortably cute if they hadn't been...suggestive, like Sansa and the Hound. It's a Watsonian/diegetic vs Doylist/exegetic thing for me that is not as static as you may think bc I still get weirded out for some interactions and wonder why exactly we needed say a 14 yr old to get groped by a grey-Frey troglodyte. There are other ways to convey Frey's grossness as well as the power such noble men are licensed in Westeros over younger girls and women.

I'll just say that maybe (and I think I'm being generous bc I remember a certain video whose link I do not have, sorry) that made me look askance at dear George abt Dany. Because even if you wanted her aged up in the beginning and later changed you mind, now that she is canonically nowhere near 18 (which would still be weird at your winter age) why are you now making comments about her attractiveness being a critical reason as to travel with her? Hmm...You really do fight for your life in this fandom.

[selkie-tea]

My special interest timeline and ranking score bc why not

Note: ages listed only describe when these fixations were Loudest in my brain. I still maintain interest in most of these subjects even if they are not front and centre.

Earliest I can remember — Fish: 10/10

legally I have to score this one a 10/10 bc it literally came in first

Circa 7-10ish years old — Cetaceans (whales and dolphins): 8/10

Following on the marine biology thread, I was enraptured by the social behaviour and intelligence of these fellas. Also learning of the vast scope of dolphin species unfamiliar to the general public was terrific enrichment for my little autistic brain. I distinctly remember a book in my elementary school library that listed dolphin species of the world and that was my absolute favourite thing. I am genuinely saddened not to remember what it was called. Unfortunately this special interest hit me at a particularly annoying age so I’m giving it a lower score for just how bothersome I was about it

Tweens/early teens — HTTYD book series: 10/10

Can’t possibly imagine why a socially outcast protagonist with a particular interest in a certain type of animal spoke to me at this age. Also giving this one a 10/10 because of not only what a great series it is, but the role it has come to play in my life. These books grew up with me, moved me, but also came to save my ass from depression much later. Cannot express my love for these books enough

Early/mid-teens — Avatar: the last Airbender & The Legend of Korra: 8/10

An absolute classic, both are incredible shows. Only reason it’s not getting a higher score is because it didn’t have the same lasting impact on me as the httyd books. Korrasami did make me a lesbian for a time though*

*Gender and sexuality are fluid don’t @ me with deterministic shit

Mid/late teens — Steven Universe: 6/10

Great show still, don’t get me wrong, but I have no idea why it grabbed me as much as it did. Actually wait, I do know. It was a gay cartoon pioneer and I was just coming into my queerness. Which is still pretty cool, but my current assessment of the show just doesn’t line up with how thoroughly obsessed I was. It also gets a knocked down score because of all the teen angst I associate with it. Not the show’s fault, but this is a list about my experience so it does have an impact.

Late teens/Early 20’s —

Look, every interest in this era was fleeting and not particularly strong so everything here gets a 5/10 given that none of them can really be considered *special* interests, just interests. I was incredibly depressed so my brain just didn’t latch onto things in the same way. Interests in this era include the care and keeping of parrots, snakes, and other reptiles. I was also interested natural history as a whole. Very interesting subjects, but they hardly count as special interests given where my brain was at.

Early/Mid 20’s — Httyd books 2: electric boogaloo: 10/10

Oh would you look at that, a relapse. Not complaining though, this bad boy gets full scores once again. Given this was my first time experiencing a true special interest again after a very rough depression it was a very exciting ordeal: I genuinely wasn’t sure if my brain could do that anymore. I got involved with an incredibly based fandom and made some great friends. I’ve been having an excellent time here.

Mid 20’s/current — Danmei/yaoi/BL: 8/10

The score is getting knocked down a peg for the sheer humiliation factor of having this as a special interest. Still, this shit made me an MLM gay the way korrasami made me a lesbian* so we can’t deny the impact it had. Humiliation factor aside though, I learned a lot about myself with this one and also unlearned a lot of biases about the genre that I had no idea were mostly terf propaganda. This one also helped me work through a lot of personal gender and sexuality issues so it will almost certainly hold a special place in my heart going forward.

*same note as before about ~fluidity~ but if you must have a more thorough explanation I’m also trans. Hope this helps.

Current/emerging — Sherlock Holmes: ????

Too early for a ranking. It’s also too soon to tell if this will become an actual special interest or just a short-term passing fixation. This one definitely holds promise though so we’ll see where my brain goes with it.

Anyways, feel free to reblog with your own timeline I’d love to see it :)

Actually, I’ve decided I wanna make this into a tag game. tagging

@bayofalgecirascranes @jusiri @sox-rok68 @zephsthings @it-me-rain @aarie-mudpuppy @jam-ham @wickedcriminal and also literally anyone else who feels like it

[bluemagi]

Re. Jumping ship and multishipping

I've been thinking a lot about this these past few weeks, since a certain hot pilot swooped in and stole my heart. I've seen people giving other people shit for "giving up" and jumping ship, for multishipping or even just for liking and enjoying a character. And it's just weird to me how people are so obsessed with controlling other people's behaviors. Just the other day I saw a TikTok where the creator was saying that people who "jumped ship" to Bucktommy were just fetishising because they want to see two guys kissing. Which is just... a terrible take on so many levels.

I was a Buddie shipper too. I enjoyed their on-screen relationship, I saw the signs that there might be more than friendship, and I hoped that something might happen. But I have also been in fandoms for at least 20 years by now. I've been through queerbaiting, I have been through shipbaiting, I have been through relationships I previously loved being destroyed by what happens on screen. I know that nothing is promised and that we have to have realistic expectations. Our interpretations of things are usually not what the writers/actors/directors/editors intend, and so we can always hope, but we have to know that we probably won't get what we want.

I think I grew a bit bored with the Buddie ship around season 5. I was watching queer representation in other shows, like Tarlos in Lone Star, and I couldn't see 911 ever go there, especially as time went on and nothing happened, there were no obvious signs. I didn't think they would ever make Buck or Eddie queer. I still enjoyed the show for what it was and would watch when I had the time, but I wasn't obsessing over it anymore. I would watch the show and hope that either one of them would get an interesting love interest (I actually sort of liked Natalia at the end of season 6), and until that happened, I would just enjoy Buddie outside of that, in fan fictions and Tumblr discourse.

So imagine my surprise when they finally did it, when they actually made Bi Buck canon. Since Tommy had been on the show before, we already knew a lot about him, and we could also read into the difference between s2 Tommy and s7 Tommy and see that there had been a lot of development there. So yeah, I was immediately interested. The more I saw, the more interested I became. So while I can still love and appreciate Buddie, it is far more interesting to me to have actual substance with an on-screen relationship, rather than having to try to interpret and read into every interaction to see if it can relate to Buddie.

But, back to jumping ship and multishipping. I've been thinking back through my fandom history, and I realized that this is something I have gone through several times before, in one way or another. I started out with soap operas, and in those, everyone cheats and nobody is ever happy for long, so jumping ship back and forth happens. Suddenly a character is killed, only to come back to life several years later. They completely change personalities, they change faces (new actors), so things change a lot. I suppose that might be why multishipping and jumping ship is not really an issue for me. It just make sense that you can change your mind about something when more content comes out. It's sort of like a relationship. You can be happy and in love for a while, or for a long time, but things change, people grow, and suddenly that relationship is not right for you anymore.

So I was thinking back on my previous experiences with jumping ship and multishipping, and I just scribbled down some thoughts on them. Starting with....

As The World Turns - Nuke vs. LuRe

I think one of the first times I jumped ship, was from Noah/Luke to Luke/Reid in As The World Turns. An American soap that ended in like 2011. Nuke were one of the first gay male couples on American day time TV, and if you have the time, please go read about them on Wikipedia, because their story is absolutely ridiculous and overdramatic, as most soap couples are. And since this was in the 00s / early 10s, they barely shared any kisses or intimacy. At certain points we were counting the days between their on-screen kisses, and I think we went 200 days without an on-screen kiss while they were in a romantic relationship on the show, and the first time they had sex, I think they just kissed and fucking jumped on the bed or something. It was just ridiculous. But it was representation, which there was not a lot of back in those days.

Then, my beloved Reid Oliver came into the picture. He was out and proud, he was confident, successful, unapologetic, he was just very interesting. Luke/Noah was young love, riddled with insecurity and drama. Luke/Reid was more confident, more adult. And also, it was an option! Back in those days, there were barely any queer characters on TV, and now there were three guys in one show. At the point when Reid came on to the show, I was already finding myself growing tired and annoyed with Nuke, and Noah specifically. So when he showed an interest in Luke and they began their relationship, I happily jumped over.

I was then punished by the show's cancellation and that fucking train, but that's beside the point.... Moving on!

Days of Our Lives - Will, Sonny and Paul

Now this was a fun one! I remember watching Days back when I was in elementary school. My friend and I would go home together from school and watch it before doing home work. I was better in English and in reading than her, so I would be reading the subtitles out loud to her so she could keep up with what was happening. I think Days actually helped me to learn English much better. So I remembered all the drama with Sami, Carrie, Lucas and Austin, and with baby Will. And it was a bit shocking to me when suddenly baby Will was an adult (or I guess in his late teens) and was coming out of the closet. This was around the same time as ATWT, I believe, around 2010, so again, there wasn't a lot of representation on TV.

Also, side note, this was before streaming was a thing, and I lived in Norway, so we didn't even have access to everything. I had to buy DVDs to watch stuff like Queer as Folk and The L Word.

Anyways, Will and Sonny became a couple, and with that, the first male same sex couple on the show. It was the only real option, so of course I shipped it. I am again reading the Wikipedia page for this couple, and their story is quite insane. They recast the role of Will at one point, and I didn't love how the character changed after the actor was changed. So when Paul came on the show, I was immediately drawn to him. His back story was interesting and the actor had amazing chemistry with everyone. So I shipped him with both Will and Sonny (and both versions of Will, tbh). And again, you simply must read the Wikipedia article about this. It was just pure insanity.

Supernatural – Dean, Cas, Benny

We cannot talk about shipping without talking about Destiel. It is simply not possible. I'm not even going to explain anything, because we're on Tumblr, everyone knows Destiel. So unsurprisingly, I am a Destiel shipper. I can't remember when I first started shipping them, but it must have been quite early. Probably not in season 4 when Cas first arrived, but probably in season 5.

So Destiel is an example where I haven't jumped ship, but instead, I have multishipped. Cas has unfortunately not really had any real love interest outside of Dean. I honestly can't even think of any, apart from that random woman he married when he had amnesia, which... just no, dude. But Dean however, he has had some options, and I haven't hated them.

Lisa, I loved her back in the early seasons. And when he went to live with her after season 5, I didn't hate it. I knew the chances of Destiel ever happening were slim to none, so I could enjoy Dean and Lisa together on screen while enjoying Dean and Cas in fan fictions.

Later, we met Benny. And I immediately loved him. He was so interesting, he had such an interesting relationship with Dean, and I was so mad when he died. Again, Dean was never shown to be anything but straight, so again, chances of anything happening here was also slim to none. But I could happily enjoy fan fictions and content on them, alongside with Destiel.

Other honorable mentions:

I was considering writing a whole section about Robron from Emmerdale, but I realized that I am still so pissed off about that whole thing, so I don't think I'd be able to articulate anything good from that. So instead I will just use this as an example of an on-screen couple that I absolutely loved, but that I ended up hating and abandoning due to what happened on screen. I jumped that ship straight into the ocean, and swam far far far away.

Klaine! The couple that got me into Tumblr in the first place! I loved Kurt from the first season, and I was so intrigued when Blaine came into the show (I was also a huge AVPM fan, so that just made it all the better). And I really enjoyed them together for the first couple of seasons. But thinking back, I think I fell out of love with them quite early on. Their stories didn't hit the same, it got boring. I was actually more interested in Karofsky by the time I stopped watching the show, which was probably part of the reason why I stopped watching. It was quite the unpopular opinion back then. Maybe still? I have no idea.

Gallavich! I loved Shameless back in the day, and Mickey and Ian were among my favorites. But at a certain point, I got fed up with it all and stopped watching. The on-and-off stuff got boring, important things got swept under the rug, and I didn't like the treatment of Mickey. Anyway, I gave up and stopped watching. It was only years later when the show was ending that I caught up and found out they actually ended up together. Which was amazing, but still left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

Anyways, my point is that there seems to be this opinion now that if you ship a couple, you are stuck with them for life. Jumping ship, or even multishipping, is seen as a betrayal, as something horrible. Shipping Buck and Tommy apparantly means that we hate Eddie, and that we don't care about the beautiful friendship and relationship Buck and Eddie have. But that is simply not the truth. At least not for me, or for most people I have seen discussing this.

At this point in time, I am going to enjoy the beautiful on-screen relationship that is Buck and Tommy, and I am excited to see where it goes. If that relationship ends, and somewhere down the line, Buck and Eddie finally end up together, I will probably be happy (as long as it is done right, like Oliver Stark himself has said).

[the-martyrfication-of-the-matron]

I agree so much with the fact that the fandom focuses way too much on the age gap problem with Aarmau and not the other issues.

I am going to be completely honest. Their age gap issue in high school bothers me, but in MyStreet, when the reunite years later after having little contact, I don't give a shit. They are adults now with developed brains (based on the fact that in America a lot of the activities they do, you gotta be at least 21+) probably mid to late 20's. 4 years apart when one is 25 and the other is 29 is rather normal.

There are other issues than their age gap, that at the end of the day, doesn't matter when it comes to their relationship as adults.

Cw, age gaps, discussing Aphmau’s infantilisation in the context of Aarmau , Aarmau neg,

I come from the stance of. The age gap does matter, because the things that make the age gap wrong continue in the ship even after they become adults, I just think focusing solely on the age gap and not the other issues is just ignoring the other issues exist.

Like I think it’s the least of the ship’s problems, at the end of the day, there’s a lot for/against it and there will always be people going ‘lol it’s not that big of a deal’… but it’s a pretty damning piece of evidence when you bring up how the relationship is otherwise written.

Because saying that Aph is written like a child and some of the lines between her and Aaron are uncomfortable because they really emphasise a kind of maturity gap is definitely a valid criticism. It’s a weird thing they did. But you can probably just argue that they had a preteen fan base and Jess has always been known for her childish humour.

But when you bring up that Childishness and that emphasis on a difference in maturity alongside the fact that they canonically got together when he was a senior and she was a freshman… it begins to get sketchy.

Because now it’s definitely not just ‘oh the age thing was based off of their own ages!’ Or ‘oh that’s just their humour!!’ Because there’s a growing pattern. You can’t look at the 15/18 thing and then the jokes they make about Aarmau in the mini games and go ‘oh haha there’s no association here!!’

I can name an exact joke they have made about Aarmau that is… gross, and technically ‘not canon’ because its in a minigame, but these are the kinds of perspectives they have of the ship after a certain point and it… just gets uncomfortable. I won’t state the joke until I find the video, because I don’t want to make claims and not have the receipts.

But really the point is, the apology didn’t do enough apologising about the real issue. And people don’t focus on the real issues either. The highschool age gap was bad but what about every joke afterwards that played into it, even after the age gap was technically not bad anymore. The growing infantilisation of Aphmau, the growing sexualisation of her at the same time… it just became very bizarre, and uncomfortable for me even back when Starlight was first airing. And I don’t see it addressed enough. It even seeped into other series (Rebirth) and it makes me yuck out.

I need to rewatch MyS and some minigames before I have any exact examples but… yikers dude

[nocompromise-noregrets]

Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers (except me because obvs I have done it). Spread the self-love 💜

aaaa, thank you so much! Thank you also, and apologies for how long it's taken me to do this, to @mirkwood-hr-department, @scary-grace, @erathene and @verecunda who have also sent me this one over the last couple of months. I'm afraid I took fright because I currently have uh 415 works on AO3 and I kind of don't know where to start. I am also terrible at picking favourites, and particularly terrible at picking a short list thereof. So I am going to cheat and give you some links to series instead, and I am not going to limit myself to five because that way lies far too much stress and anxiety XD

My Heart Is An Empty Vessel - well, obviously that had to be on the list, it's the fic that got me into the Barduil fandom and the longest I've ever finished, not to mention it's sparked a whole 'verse spanning at least three Ages of Middle-earth. :D Almost all of my canon-'verse fics take place in this 'verse, as it happens, and one of these days I will collect them into a series but it is not this day, mainly because it's an enormous task. Maybe when I retire... XDDDDD

All I Want Is You - the one that got me through the third and fourth (I think) lockdowns, the daft Christmas-movie modern AU that morphed into something rather bigger and gave me a chance to exorcise some of my work-related demons.

the hardest choice to make - because it's me finally tackling my favourite characters making their Choice between mortality and immortality. I love the Twins inordinately, more than any other character, and I think I have more very fixed headcanons for them than for any other - I've been putting this one off, or rather they have, but they've finally started talking and I'm hoping to piece the rest of it together gradually sooner or later.

a kiss in the cold and dark (I should have kissed you that summer) and its associated series - because it took on a life of its own and is also letting me channel a lot of my teenage memories :D

paint the sky and burn the stars - because, again, it took on a life of its own and pretty much wrote itself, and unlike a lot of my other stuff, it's self-contained. I don't think there will ever be a sequel, but that's all right; the story is complete as it is.

stained glass heart - another one that pretty much wrote itself, I loved the imagery in @piyo-13's art so much and it just all fell into place.

dancing in the dark - because I'm having so much fun with my old rocker bi widower dads :D another place to channel memories of my younger days, this.

A Little Piece of the Sea - one of my longest-running series, I started writing this 20-odd years ago, and then picked it back up when I came back into the fandom. Legolas/Imrahil my beloved underappreciated rare pair canoe!

I Will Be With You Always - last year's TRSB piece written for @seagull-energy's beautiful art, I finally managed to pin down my Arwen feelings in this rather reflective piece about her last moments on Cerin Amroth, where her life has come full circle at last.

breathe freely - the utterly out of character hanahaki twincest fic the premise for which came to me in a dream XD look I have problematic OTPs, I am old and have been here a very long time it is pretty much a given :D (the twincest is not the bit that's out of character)

Do You Remember The First Time? - the Twins/Rúmil two-parter that got rather out of hand and also gave me the headcanon about the Twins standing in alphabetical order as you look at them XD

It's Always Been You - the other problematic pairings one, featuring the Rúmil/Orophin story that had been sitting in my notes for nearly 20 years until I got back into the fandom with a vengeance in the summer of 2020, and the foundations of the Rivendell and Lothlórien bits of my canon-'verse set stories...

death is certain, life is not - the TRSB fic that ate me alive this summer, inspired by @erathene's glorious art, in which Tilda finally strides into centre stage and refuses to stop talking (I am already working on the sequel because I ran out of time to include most of what I wanted to squeeze in). Technically part of Empty Vessel-'verse but deserves an honourable mention here!

A Quiet Understanding - and finally, because if I don't wrap it up here I'll be going all day, the first longfic/chaptered fic I ever wrote, in the King Arthur (2004) fandom, about Gawain and Galahad and how their lives unfold both before and after the Battle of Badon Hill.

(and that's not mentioning the rare fandom stuff like A Knight's Tale, That Thing You Do!, Fisherman's Friends, Call The Midwife, The Alienist and The Palace, all of which I adore unreasonably, but I think I've rambled on quite enough here XD )

Thank you so much to everyone who asked me for this one, and I'm so sorry it took me so long to work out an answer! I haven't the spoons for askboxes, and I have to admit that the choose-x-people-to-ask games always feel a bit exclusive to me because what about the people who never quite make it onto that finite list, the people who nobody ever remembers to ask - and my memory is terrible and I will always inadvertently forget people. So, instead, I would like to invite anyone who sees this and wants to do it - don't wait to be asked, just rec yourselves! Let us know the works of yours you love the most! <3333333

[39oa]

f1 rpf graphing & archive insights

intro & prior work

hello! if you're reading this, you may already be familiar with my previous post about graphing hockey rpf ships and visualizing some overarching archive insights (feel free to check it out if you aren't, or alternatively just stick around for this intro). i've been meaning to make an f1 version of that post for a while, especially since i've already done a decent amount of f1 rpf analysis in the past (i have a very rough post i wrote a year ago that can be read here, though fair warning that it really does not make any sense; while i've redone a few viz from it for this post i just figured i'd link it solely because there are other things i didn't bother to recalculate!)

f1 is quite different from many team sports because a large part of my process for hockey was discovering which ships exist in the first place—when there are thousands and thousands of players who have encountered one another at different phases of their careers, it's interesting to see how people are connected and it's what was personally interesting to me about making my hockey graphs. however, with f1's relative pursuit of "exclusivity," barriers to feeder success and a slower-to-change, restrictive grid of 20 drivers, it becomes generally expected that everyone has already interacted with one another in some fashion, or at least exists at most 2 degrees of separation from another driver. because of this, i was less interested in "what relationships between a large set of characters exist?" (as per my hockey post) and more so in "what do the relationships between a small set of characters look like?"

process

my methodology for collecting "ship fic" tries to answer the question: what does shippability really look like on ao3? (the following explanation is adapted from my hockey post:) a perceived limitation i have with character tagging numbers on ao3 is that they don’t exactly reflect holistic ship fic; that is, if lando is tagged as a character in a max/daniel fic, it gets attributed to his character tag but doesn’t actually say anything about how many Relationship Fics exist for him on a whole. my best solution for this was essentially uncovering most of a driver's relationships and summing their individual fic counts to create an approximate # of “relationship fics” for each player. so any kind of shippability graph going forward will use that metric.

i used ao3’s relationship tag search and filtered by canonical in the formula 1 rpf fandom and only pulled relationship* fics (“/” instead of “&”) with a min. of 5 works. ao3’s counts are… Not the most accurate, so my filtering may have fudged some things around or missed a few pairings on the cusp, which again is why all the visuals here are not meant to show everything in the most exact manner but function more so as a “general overview” of ficdom. although i did doublecheck the ship counts so the numbers themselves are accurate as of time of collection.

(*i excluded wag ships, reader ships, threesomes to make my life easier—although i know this affects numbers for certain drivers, team principal/trainer/engineer ships, and any otherwise non-driver ship. i left in a few ships with f2, fe, etc. drivers given that that one character was/is an f1 driver, but non-f1 drivers were obviously excluded from any viz about f1 driver details specifically. this filtering affected some big ships like felipe massa/rob smedley, ot3 combinations of twitch quartet and so on, which i recognize may lower the… accuracy? reliability??? of certain graphs, but i guess the real way to think of the "shippability metric" is as pertaining solely to ship fic with other drivers. although doing more analysis with engineers and principals later down the line could be cool)

also note that since i grouped and summed all fics for every single ship a driver has, and since one fic can be tagged as multiple ships, there will be inevitable overlap/inflation that also lessens the accuracy of the overall number. however, because there's no easy way to discern the presence and overlap of multiship fic for every single driver and every single ship they have, and attempting to do so for a stupid tumblr post would make this an even larger waste of time… just take everything here with a grain of salt!

data for archive overview viz was collected haphazardly over the past few days because i may have procrastinated finishing this post haha. but all ship data for section 2 was specifically collected april 22, 2023.

PART I. f1 rpf archive overview

before i get to ship graphing, here are a few overviews of f1 ficdom growth and where it measures relative to other sports fandoms, since i find the recent american marketability of f1 and its online fandom quite interesting.

first off, here's a graph that shows the cumulative growth of the top 8 sports rpf fandoms from 2011 until now (2023 is obviously incomplete since we're only in may). i've annotated it with some other details, but we can see that f1 experienced major growth after 2019, which is when the first episode of dts was released.

something that fascinated me when making this graph was the recent resurgence of men's football rpf in 2023; while the fandom has remained fairly consistent over the years, i had noticed that its yearly output was on the decline in my old post, and i was especially surprised to see it eclipse even f1 for 2023. turns out that a large driver behind these numbers is its c-fandom, and it reminded me that out of all the sports rpf fandoms, hockey rpf is fairly unpopular amongst chinese sports fans! i wanted to delve into this a little more and look at yearly output trends for the top sports fandoms since 2018, only this time filtered to exclusively english works (a poor approximation for "western" fandom, i know, but a majority of sports fandom on tumblr does create content in english).

another thing i've long been curious about with f1 specifically is—because of how accessible dts and f1 driver marketing are to fans online, does f1 rpf and shipping culture skew a bit more "public" than other fandoms? i'd initially graphed the ratio of public fic on ao3 for hockey because i also wanted to see whether it was on the rise (again, apologies for how many callbacks and references there are in this post to hockey rpf... it's just easy for me to contextualize two familiar sports ficdoms together *__*), but i was surprised to see that it's actually been steadily trending downward for many years now. f1 fic, on the other hand, has steadily been becoming more public since 2016.

another note is that c-ficdom follows different fic-posting etiquette on ao3, and thus chinese-heavy sports rpf fandoms (think table tennis and speed skating) will feature a majority public fic—here's another old graph. since f1 fandom has a relatively larger representation of chinese writers than hockey does, its public ratio falls a little bit if you filter to english-only works, but as of 2023 it remains significantly higher than hockey's!

anyway, onto the actual ship graphing.

my ship collection process yielded 164 ships with 57 drivers, 46 of which have been in f1. all 20 current active f1 drivers have at least one ship with min. 5 fics, though not all of them had a ship that connected them to the 2023 grid. specifically, nyck de vries' only ship at time of collection was with stoffel vandoorne at 56 works.

once again because f1 is so strongly connected, i initially struggled a lot with how i wanted to graph all the ships i'd aggregated—visualizing all of them was just a mess of a million different overlapping edges, not the sprawling tree that branched out more smoothly from players like in hockey. this made me wonder whether it even made sense to graph anything at all... and tbh the jury is still out on whether these are interesting, but regardless here's a visualization of how the current grid is connected (color-coded by team)! i graphed a circular layout and then a "grid-like" layout just for variety lol.

of course, i still wanted to explore how ships with ex-f1 drivers have branched out and show where they connect to drivers on the current grid, especially because not too long ago seb was very much the center of the ficdom ecosystem, and the (based purely on the numbers) segue to today's max/charles split didn't really come to fruition until the dts days. so here's a network of f1 ships with a minimum of 75 works on ao3:

before i go into ship breakdowns, i also have a quick overview of the most "shippable" drivers, aka the drivers with the highest sum of fic from all their respective ships. the second bar chart is color-coded by the count of their unique ships to encapsulate who is more prone to being multi-shipped.

PART II. ship insights

first let's take a look at the most popular f1 ships on ao3, again filtered to driver-only ships.

here's another graph filtered to the current grid only, and then one that shows the 15 ships where one driver isn't and has never been an f1 driver:

for this section, i ended up combining my ship data with a big f1 driver dataset that gave me information on each driver's birth year, points, wins, seasons in f1, nationality... etc., so that's what i'll be using in the rest of the post. disclaimer that i did have to tweak a few things and the data doesn't reflect the most recent races, so please note there might be some slight discrepancies in my visualizations.

anyway—in my hockey post i did a lot of set analysis because i was interested in figuring out what made the players who were part of the ship network different from the general population. with f1, since almost Every Driver has at least one ship and it's a much more representative group, doing a lot of set distributions wasn't that interesting and so i stuck more to pure ship analysis. still, the set isn't completely representative, which i noted by checking the ratios of driver nationalities in my dataset and then in the large database of f1 drivers i merged with (though filtered to debut year >= 2000 to maintain i guess the same "dimensions").

while british and german drivers have been the most common nationalities in f1 since 2000, both in general and in my ship data, it seems that ficdom slightly overrepresents/overships them and then underrepresents brazilian drivers. i was also curious to see the distribution of ships by nationality combination (which is actually quite diverse), and though it once again wasn't surprising that uk/germany was the most common combination given that we've just established the commonality of their driver groups, i found it somewhat interesting to realize just how many ships fall under this umbrella.

i then once again wanted to see what the distribution of age differences looked across ships. the ships i graphed yielded a range of 25 years, with the oldest age difference being 25 years between piastri and webber. tbh, something that's interesting to me about f1 ships is not just how connected current drivers are but also how there is a very strong aspect of cyclicality, wherein long careers in combination with well-established celebrity culture and post-retirement pivots to punditry & mentorship position drivers perfectly to still be easily shipped with any variety of upcoming drivers, hence why we encounter a relatively significant variety of age differences.

of the ships with two f1 drivers, 38% were within 2 years of each other, while 44% had an age difference of 5 years or more.

more experimentally (basically i wanted to use these performance metrics for something!), i tried graphing driver metrics against "shippability" to see whether i could uncover any trends, normalizing to percentile to make it more visually comprehensible.

one thing that was interesting to me is that there is a strong correlation between a driver's points per entry and their number of ship fic; really, this isn't surprising at all because it's basically a reflection of whether they've driven for a big 3 team, and we know that the most popular drivers are from big 3 teams, but then i guess it does become a bit of a chicken and egg question... which is something i'm continuously fascinated by when discussing success and talent in sports fandom, especially in a sport like f1 where there is so little parity and thus "points" do not always quantifiably translate to "talent," making it difficult to gauge why and when a driver's skill becomes consciously appealing to an audience. i don't know but here's that scatterplot.

similarly, i also wanted to look at years active vs. fic to gauge which drivers have a High Number Of Ship Fic relative to how long they've actually been in f1, basically a rough rework of the "shippability above expected" metric i'd tried exploring in my old f1 post haha. because the set i merged with attributed 1 "year active" to a driver just like, filling in as reserve for a single race, and it also included drivers who maybe raced one season and then never raced again, but then i still wanted to include current rookies in their first season to show where their Potential lies... i settled on filtering to drivers who were or have been active for at least 5 seasons OR who debuted recently and thus have a bit of rookie leeway. there's a decent amount of correlation here, which is again... in f1, the underlying argument for remaining active for many years is that you have to be good enough to keep your seat, so it's expected that if drivers stay on the grid for a long time they will eventually accrue more fandom interest and thus ship fic. still, we can see some drivers who underperform a little relative to their establishedness—bot and per, interestingly also below the trend line in the points/entry graph–and then those who overperform a decent amount, like nor and lec.

this is somewhat interesting to me because i'd tried to make a similar scatterplot with my hockey set and found that there was... basically nooo correlation at all, but i also had to make do with draft year and not gp which i think might move the needle a little bit. regardless, it's just interesting to think about these things in the context of league/grid exclusivity and then other further nuances like the possibilities of making your niche in, for example, the nhl as a 4th line grinder or f1 as a de facto but reliable #2 driver for years down the stretch, and then how all of that impacts or shapes your fandom stock and shippability.

moving on, here's a look at the current top 20 f1 ships and how much of their fic is tagged as fluff or angst! out of all their fic, kimi/seb have the highest fluff ratio at 38.44%, while lewis/nico hold the throne for angst at 34.74%.

lewis/nico are also the most "holistically" tragic ship when you subtract their fluff and angst percentages (by a large margin as well), while jenson/seb are the fluffiest with a difference of 17.38%. really makes you think.

and finally this is a dumb iteration from my old f1 post but i thought this was kind of funny haha so: basically what if teammate point share h2h but the points are their shippability on ao3.

closing thoughts

that's really all i have! again, i don't know whether any of these graphs make sense or are interesting to anyone, but i had fun trying to adapt some of my hockey methodology to f1 and also revisiting the old f1 graphs i'd made last year and getting to recalculate/design them. i know there's a lot more i could have done in examining drivers' old teams since many ships are based on drivers being ex-teammates and not the current grid matchups, but it would have been too much of a headache to figure out so... this is the best i've got. thanks for reading :)