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queenpiranhadon · 8 months ago

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A/N: You all voted on this poll, and this poll, and this poll, and after a LOT of voting, I present you this :) BIG thanks to @that-multi-fandom-hijabi for beta reading this go follow her writing acc rn (@novaaaaaa-writes). Here's my masterlist!

Warning(s): Enemies to lovers trope, mentions of burning, stabbing, blood, bad descriptions of both fire of water (ice, snow ?) bending, Zuko is whipped, just a little confused about it, reader is a baddie, water benders unite (not me tho), reader is GN but written with f!reader in mind, reader looks non-threatening, is underestimated a lot, this takes place at the end of season one, I think that's it

Pairing: Prince Zuko x GN!Reader

•──•°•❀•°•─── ʜɪꜱ ʟɪᴛᴛʟᴇ ᴡᴀᴛᴇʀʙᴇɴᴅᴇʀ ───•°•☁︎•°•───•

“You shouldn’t be here” you glare, your gaze sending shivers down his spine.

But that could just be because of all the snow and ice surrounding the both of you.

The fire prince remains unfazed though, his amber eyes sweeping over your form- assessing the threat you posed.

He could take you down in seconds.

Zuko doesn’t respond to your jab though, because he knew you were wrong. He had to be here, it was the only way he could finally receive his father’s favor- as the heir and as the son of Firelord Ozai. It was his duty, his honor.

And he wasn’t going to let a non-threatening waterbender get in the way of that.

Reaching back, he unsheathes his dual swords, the glint of the waning moonlight reflecting the dangerous glint in his eye.

And yet you didn’t back down.

Pooling some water from your waterskin, you assumed the stance you had trained yourself to take whenever you honed your skills. One with the water, one with the ice.

‘Power should flow, not force itself” Master Pakku had told you once.

People had always underestimated your skills, saying you were better suited for healing. But after showing Master Pakku how you could use your bending to control the falling snow around you, he gave you a chance.

He had told you to let the power settle in your body before releasing, instead of forcing it out immediately. Conceal and then control.

You met Zuko’s fiery gaze with an icy one of your own. You were going to protect your home.

With a yell, you form flurries of snow, whipping around your form as you channel your strength to change the form of your flurry, snow turning to water, water turning to sharp daggers of pure ice.

Zuko scowls, setting his hands ablaze and you run at each other, fire meeting ice.

Time slows down, as the intensity of your elements picks up, until all you could hear was the steady thump – thump – thump – of your heart, and the roar of crystalline knives swirling around you.

Flames lick the side of your leg, wincing as the raw burn of the fire sears through your skin in white-hot pain. Razor sharp icy shards cut into Zuko’s skin, finding chinks in his armor, piercing his flesh and drawing blood.

The snow beneath the both of you was dotted red now, both of you staring at each other, panting heavily.

“You really shouldn’t be here.” you repeat again, but this time, it was barely a whisper, swallowing down tears as the cold wind of the Northern Water Tribe stung your gaping wounds.

Zuko growls, grunting in pain as he pulls a shard of ice out of his skin.“I don’t take orders from a little waterbender” he spat, venom dripping from his words.

You reciprocate with a snide comment of your own. “This ‘little waterbender’ just sunk 5 icicles into your skin.”

Zuko was just about ready to tear your head off, hands igniting with vermillion flames before you collapse, the burns along your thigh and calf were much more severe than either of you realized.

You choke out a sob of pain but keep your control of the water left in your waterskin. You couldn’t die, not today, and not at the hands of the prince of the Fire Nation.

Zuko’s heart throbs unexpectedly, the look on your face too familiar for comfort. The face of someone who worked so desperately hard, only for all that effort to go down the drain. But he didn’t care for you. He couldn’t- couldn’t grow attachment to a non-threatening waterbender. Yet you sat there on the snow, dotted with blood, with that raw look in your eyes. His flames extinguished, without him meaning to.

You flinched as he threw his swords down frustrated, impaling themselves into the nearby snow mound, standing straight up.

He stomps over to you, and you frantically move back, but your leg flares up in pain again, and you yelp, hissing in pain.

“Stop moving, you’ll make it worse.” he says, glaring at you, but not as intensely as he had before.

You want to scream, kick him, punch him, anything, but your body betrays you as he sweeps you up into his arms, carrying you to the nearest place he can find, where he can keep you safe. You feel his strong arms hook under your knees and under your back, holding you securely to his firm chest. Even through his armor, he radiates warmth, a gentle heat, unlike the flames he threw at you merely minutes ago.

He hates this, with every fiber in my being, his voice screaming at him to drop you and burn your frail body to a crisp, vengeance for the blood dripping from his own body, but he keeps moving, step after painstaking step.

You try to stay awake, you really do, yet channeling so much energy from your battle, the numb throb in your lower leg, and the comforting heat radiating off the fire prince who refuses to look at you, you slip into unconsciousness.

Zuko feels a weight press against his chest, and he huffs, honey-colored eyes catching onto the details of your face, the curve of your nose, the apples of your cheeks, the slight pout of your lips as you nuzzle into his armor unintentionally, how pretty you were when you were at peace.

He stops himself there, reprimanding himself for thinking such things. He can’t have feelings for the enemy.

And yet, even as he and his troops head home, battle wearing and dejected from the loss of a major battle, Zuko can’t help but think about his little waterbender.

***

When you wake up, the kind woman tending to you tells you all about the mysterious and handsome man who carried your sleeping form across the entire Northern Water Tribe because he didn’t know where the healing center was.

#zuko x reader #zuko x you #atla zuko #fire lord zuko #prince zuko #zuko #avatar of the last airbender #atla #prince zuko x reader #prince zuko x you #prince zuko x y/n #water bender reader #help 'power should flow not force itself'??#I have mixed thoughts about this #zuko x y/n #avatar the last airbender #zuko avatar #zuko avatar the last airbender #⋆｡‧˚ʚ 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖈𝖑𝖔𝖚𝖉 𝖆𝖗𝖈𝖍𝖎𝖛𝖊𝖘 ɞ˚‧｡⋆

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zephyrchama · 9 months ago

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ZephyrChama's Obey Me! Masterpost

Updated October 7th, 2024.

Hi! I'm zephyrchama. I don't read much fanfic but it seemed fun and I wanted to try getting closer to the fandom, so I started writing Obey Me stuff as a self indulgent treat. As this is a side blog that I never expected to get followers, I can't follow or like anybody's posts or send asks from it, only with my main blog. I've also started writing some Twisted Wonderland stuff on another blog.

More info about me can be found at the bottom of this post.

You can find almost everything I've written in these links, sorted from shortest content to longest. Though, it is possible I've missed a few stories.

Headcanons

Self explanatory, these are headcanons! My shortest posts, some are even just a sentence long.

Longer Headcanons and Super Short Writings

This is for more fleshed out ideas: headcanons that are 2 paragraphs and longer or really short stories/ideas.

Short Stories / Detailed Headcanon Lists

These are posts with multiple paragraphs. Detailed headcanon lists with at least a paragraph per character and fics that aren't a page long.

Fics

Full one shot stories.

Ask Requests

Obey Me! posts that are submitted requests.

My ask box is always open and I"m happy to receive requests! Please know that it may take me literal ages to respond as there is a large backlog, but I earnestly think about every submission and greatly appreciate each ask. If you praise me, I'm probably going to hoard the ask and smile and giggle every time I see it.

Series

Multi-part fanfics. Usually one segment for each character or segments that can be read as one-shots but are part of a bigger tale.

More about me!

I've been playing Obey Me! since literally the day the OG was released. I am a hardcore cosplayer so whenever a convention is coming up this blog will get slow as I focus on sewing. I'm close to 30 years old. I'm ace, so this blog has suggestive content but won't really get more intense than that. Everything on this blog is SFW. I have an A03 account courtesy of a friend who referred me, but it's pretty barren and mostly used to cross post more popular stories. Anything explicit I write will go on the AO3 with proper tags.

My asks are open but expect a really slow response because I am so shy hkgahkj. I take requests but no guarantee I'll write them, or it may take several months. I don't do much proofreading at all so I'm very open to constructive critique, if you see a typo please let me know! Thanks for reading.

#now that I have some time and more than 5 posts I made a masterlist! I'll keep it updated after each post. or at least try to.#obey me #obey me fanfic #obey me headcanons

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clarenecessities · 1 year ago

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He-man.org will close in 5 days.

He-man.org has been a staple of the Masters of the Universe community since the early days, originating as an email list that worked to document episodes before anything (not footage, not lists, nothing) was available online. It grew into a sprawling, multi-faceted beast of a thing, including an encyclopedia (an in-house wiki), merch lists, a marketplace, forums, anything you could think of.

Several years ago now, the main site went down for updates/maintenance. For a few weeks, we were told, maybe months. The forums remained open for fans to communicate, and barring a period of downtime earlier this year things were going smoothly.

Yesterday, the owner of the site, Val Staples, announced the site would be closed on November 14th, 2023. Six days later. We are currently attempting to contact him, to see if he’s interested in selling, and if he means closed as in “no new posts” or closed as in deleted entirely. Regardless of its eventual fate, the archiving of these forums is essential to preserving the history of the franchise, the fandom, and the brand.

TO SHE-RA (and MotU) FANS SPECIFICALLY: I have personally used these forums to answer questions that could be answered nowhere else. Had I not had access to them, I would never have been able to prove that Purrsia was fake, or found so much unpublished concept art, or discovered that Scott “Toyguru” Neitlich personally wrote Catra’s MOTUC bio (even if he’s put off answering my questions about it for over a year now). Forum members have conducted interviews with the likes of Jon Seisa, Cathy Larson, Janice Varney-Hamlin—essential figures in the very foundations of POP, and those interviews revealed and recorded priceless information for future generations (me! you! us!) to find. Did you know Cathy Larson named Adora? That she originally pushed for “Dorian”, after her own daughter? We cannot let this treasure trove disappear into the ether(ia).

TO THE UNAFFILIATED: Please help. Pretty please. If you’ve ever liked my art or my writing or my haphazard blogging, ever, at all, consider archiving just one board. Just one page. Literally anything helps. I am spiraling into madness & this is my library of Alexandria. The mythical one that was totally unique and persevered nowhere else and was destroyed in a single cataclysmic event. Pretty pretty please help.

HOW TO HELP:

Archive.org has several ways to upload shit but most of them are longer term than “a few days” so we’re focusing on two (which can be run simultaneously): Save Page Now, and browser extensions. From their help page:

1. Save Page Now

Put a URL into the form, press the button, and we save the page. You will instantly have a permanent URL for your page. Please note, this method only saves a single page, not the whole site.

We want to keep outlinks and screenshots wherever possible. The Archive does not keep your IP address, so your submission is anonymous.

2. Browser extensions and add-ons

Install the Wayback Machine Chrome extension in your browser. Go to a page you want to archive, click the icon in your toolbar, and select Save Page Now. We will save the page and give you a permanent URL.

One plus to installing the extension is that as you surf around, when you run into a missing page they will alert you if we have a saved copy.

More extensions, apps, and add-ons:

Firefox add-on

Safari Extension

iOS app

Android app

I strongly encourage you to use these tools even if you aren’t helping with this project/after it ends. Documenting and preserving information is essential in this day and age & The Internet Archive is at the heart of it. Please support them however you can.

I’m serious about paying you, though I may need more communication with folks I don’t know so we can coordinate/verify shit gets done. I think this is a worthwhile pursuit in itself but I recognize your time is valuable & like, people gotta eat. DM me if you’re interested and we’ll talk. I may need to adjust pay depending how many people bite but I’ll do what I can

#motu #he man #she ra #spop #pop #sorry for tag spam but this is important and relevant to you #catradora #it counts!#sorry also if the formatting on this is a disaster #i’m on my phone and haven’t updated my tumblr app in… a couple years #archives #archive #archive.org #wayback machine #help #org forums #neotag #brothers. this has nothing to do with you but don’t you wanna help a bitch out? do it for illusen #please signal boost if you can

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thedomesticanthropologist · 1 year ago

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Why are people sleeping on the darker sides of Gales character and reducing it down to "he was groomed so it's not his fault/he only does it to hide his insecurity BC he hates himself so it's fine"

Y...you know his hubris is mega sized right? His ego is crazy inflated right? He's a power hungry man who genuinely thinks he's better suited to welding ultimate power than anyone else and he actions this perspective in game if you support him in it/unless you interrupt him right?

Like he has the Wizard Ego we see in Rolan, in Lorroakan. He has it too. It's kind of a wizard... Thing in the game at least, where they act like they're hot shit and spend their time trying to put other wizards down because they treat it like Highlander lol (THERE can BE only ONE ultimate hot shit wizard and of course it's me!)

He thinks he has the best opinions, he thinks he's the smartest, he thinks he's the best suited for power and that he's entitled to it because he's the best. He is extremely ambitious and he thinks being ambitious is one of his best qualities.

Have you seen his reaction if you try to let your Tav deal with that magic in that scene? Where he goes off about being the most qualified and that you CANT do it, and if you do he calls it sheer dumb luck?

Like you can totally say he acts this way due to severe insecurity but *he 1000%* DOES act this way in game and again, it's good writing! Is he a loving gentleman? Was he groomed and abused? All yes.

Does he have the hubris of a man who thinks he's better than everyone else and deserves godhood for himself and does he have an ego the size of Faerun that is also so delicate he threatens to explode if you tell him he's unimpressive ? Yes

Cause he's multi faceted and well written and he has good aspects and rough aspects and questionable characteristics and negative characteristics almost like a person who is capable of being many things at once, like real people are.

C'mon, fandom, let's try to take characters for all that they are and not pedestal them. It really take the flavour out of the experience because there's so much potential in characters that are more than just the 'best' parts of themselves

He also grows and changes throughout the game based on your characters influence and that's important to note as well because that's super cool and it means he has character development

#love Gale #hes totally a little shit #who thinks he deserves to be a god bc hes the highest qualified #power hungry wizard #gale dekarios #gale of waterdeep #baldurs gate 3 #bg3 gale

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suguann · 10 months ago

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Hello! My name's Anne | An adult in my mid to late 20's | A hobbyist writer

RULES:

• I write for many fandoms, including Call of Duty, JJK, Shadow and Bone, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Haikyuu, One Piece, etc.

• This is an 18+ space, and I also write dark content, so please read all content warnings if that makes you uncomfy!

• Don't copy, paste, or translate.

LINKS:

General tag

Writing tag

Fic Recs

MASTERLIST:

JUJUTSU KAISEN

ও GOJO

• Possessive Gojo (18+)

He gives you another once-over, thinking of several ways to describe you, silly not being one of them.

• I Hope You Stay (18+) | Long Fic

He’d asked why your coworkers weren’t waiting outside with you—it's not safe here—at the same time you asked for a kiss. It just sort of slipped out.

• Virgin Gojo (18+)

His last slip of restraint is when he finally looks down to find a wet patch on the front of your panties and how you're starting to form a dark gray spot on his sweats.

• Messy (18+)

You look so small like this—smaller than usual because everything about him is big in comparison—and that stirs something foreign in his gut that he can’t name.

• Three's A Crowd (18+)

“If you ask nicely for what you want, maybe he’ll give it to you,” your husband offers evenly. (Gojo/ Reader/ Nanami)

• Be With Me (18+)

The feeling sneaks up on him without his knowing, a throbbing in his chest that festers and grows over time until he can’t ignore it anymore or contain it in the proverbial cup of his hands no matter how hard he tries.

• Everything Comes Back to You (18+)

"Did you know we'd end up here?"

• Possessive Geto (18+)

• What I Never Told You (18+)

Gojo doesn’t understand that the parents (mostly the moms who try to hide behind their giant sunglasses) at Mio’s soccer games talk, and he chooses today to pull you into his lap.

ও GETO

In times like this, he wishes he had never come up with the rule about keeping your relationship a secret—so nobody thinks I’m picking favorites—regret is a thick pill to swallow.

ও MULTI

• Prettiest Baby (18+)

They can't help it, they're kind of obsessed with you.

• Fuck It, I Want You (18+)

They're so infatuated with you.

CALL OF DUTY

ও GHOST

• Good (18+)

“Just a little more,” a small lie because there’s never just a little more when it comes to you.

• Let Me (18+)

There comes a point where Simon finally admits that he hates your new boyfriend. [Part Two]

• I Left It Wet For You (18+)

Simon doesn’t share, but he makes an exception this time after his best friend’s date is a no-show, and he isn’t heartless enough to let Johnny hang out at the pub alone. [Simon/ Soap/Reader]

• Smitten

He watches you swipe lipstick across your mouth, grinning at your reflection in the mirror atop the dresser, and it's the cutest fucking thing.

• In Threes (18+)

Your ex-boyfriend makes you think you are the problem. Simon shows you that's not the case.

• New Girl

He has a feeling that the new girl running the front desk at the gym is going to be a problem—a distraction disguised in a gym uniform polo and khaki pants.

• Neighborly (18+)

Simon looks at you with a cocked brow and something akin to amusement as he watches you squirm in his doorway.

• Abience (18+)

He’ll only realize this after the fact—weeks late, sleepless nights filled with images of daisy-shaped buttons down the front of a summer dress and a smile that nearly knocks him flat off his feet.

ও PRICE

• Redamancy (18+)

You tried not to grow feelings—you really did. Feelings make things complicated, but you can’t help it. John’s just…John.

BALDUR'S GATE

ও ASTARION

• Oh, Darling (18+)

He’s in a perpetually strange mood for the rest of the day, quieter than usual and more sulky, and you have the sneaking suspicion he's upset with you.

#anne's navigation #jjk x reader #mw2 x reader #gojo x reader

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twelve-forfend · 11 months ago

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Well, I did say this was a multi-fandom blog... Alright, let's do this.

The Qing Jing Peak Lord's Bamboo House

(and the symbolism therein, as recorded in the donghua)

I was snooping through the establishing shots of the Qing Jing Peak Lord's Bamboo House, and had to laugh as I always do at all the gay symbolism that managed to sneak its way inside. But then I looked a little closer, and was floored by just how much passive storytelling was packed into background assets. I talked about it at length over discord, and at the urging of others decided to make a shareable post on social media as well.

First, the shots which first piqued my interest in this topic years ago:

Shen Yuan transmigrates into the stallion-genre webnovel entitled 狂傲仙魔途 (translated as Proud Immortal Demon Way). The author's and his own usernames are dick jokes.

Notice the chrysanthemum vase, the cock vase, and the stallion statuette.

The stallion and cock are obvious nods to these jokes on their own, but for the uninitiated, the chrysanthemum is a symbol of gay sex between men, as the asshole itself is often euphemistically referred to as a chrysanthemum. This should have been Shen Yuan's first clue that not all is as it seems here! These are the personal quarters of Shen Jiu — the original Shen Qingqiu!

But let's move to the main room you first walk into upon entering the bamboo house.

There it is: the writing on the wall.

As the Peak Lord of strategy and the scholarly arts, Shen Qingqiu would naturally have calligraphy and paintings hanging everywhere! So let's break it down.

On the top we have 道㳒自然 ("Dao Follows Nature"), which comes from a Dao teaching by Laozi (founder of Daoism) meaning that life, death, the entire universe, the heavens and earth and everything outside and inbetween, all follow a set of laws referred to as the nature of things. Although unrelated to the Buddhist couplet below, it's certainly relevant!

Originally hanging in right-to-left order, I've arranged them to read left to right here to make things easier to keep track of. The calligraphy reads 西方竹葉千年翠；南海蓮九品香 and is a couplet commonly found in Guanyin temples. My classical chinese is not as strong as I'd like, but this translates roughly to "The bamboo leaves in Paradise are green for a thousand years / The fragrance of lotus flowers in the South China Sea is as thick as 9 sticks of incense."

The character 西 for West is used to denote the destination of enlightenment/purity: the buddhist Paradise (think Journey to the West). The South China Sea is where Guanyin was born. Upon the Lotus flowers is where Guanyin is commonly depicted as sitting. The "9 sticks of incense" though literal can also refer to the 9 tiers/grades of reincarnation lotuses with the 9th tier being the lowest, meant for those who in life committed the most evil of crimes — the 4 parajikas — and who can only manage a sincere Amitabha recitation 10 times and no more than this.

To put this in context with Shen Jiu (the same jiu as in 9/九), the 4 parajikas committed by the 9th Tier Lotuses Reborn (officially entitled the Lowest of the Low) are:

Sexual Intercourse

Stealing

Murder

Claiming attainments of stages of pure mental concentration that have not been achieved (in other words, rushing or lying about your cultivation/enlightenment, or maybe even becoming a Peak Lord without having formed a golden core beforehand).

From what we know in the context of the novel, Shen Jiu is innocent of at least the first of this parajikas, but the overall view of Shen Jiu in the eyes of others in the story is that he is guilty of them all. This calligraphy can be seen as a condemnation or a reminder for the character Shen Jiu, who even as the Peak Lord Shen Qingqiu is widely thought of as a scum villain and the lowest of the low.

Phew! That's a lot to unpack.

But if you turn your gaze to the original screenshot, you'll see to the right that there's a vase painted with a blue bird. This vase appears in several rooms of the bamboo house, and seems to be the image of a qingniao (青鸟; lit: Qing bird, wherein 青 can mean blue/green/clear-but-brackish black).

These qing-coloured birds are messengers and foragers of the Goddess-Mother of Paradise (Xiwang-mu 西王母, the "west/paradise" character from before, lit West-King(unisex)-Mother). They're a highly intelligent species who are exceptional in song (a good representative for Qing Jing's scholarly arts and pursuit of qin!), and the older ones might learn to speak human tongue. As a subspecies of luanniao (鸾鸟 lit: luan bird), they're thought to be related to The Phoenix and indeed thought to be the lifetime/samsara just before being reborn as a Phoenix.

If given to a "master" they don't like, the qingniao may refuse to pass messages or sing until they're set free, but if they do get along with you then they're loyal to the end.

As a point of interest, the Qing generation of Peak Lords uses the character 清, which is 青 ("colour of nature; brackish black, blue, green; young) + the radical for "water," resulting in the meaning of clear (as in water or heart; see-through); distinct; quiet (as in still); just and honest; pure; to settle or clear up; to clean up, expunge, or purge.

And as a bit of trivia, Liu Qingge's sword Cheng Luan 乘鸾 means "to ride the luan, take flight on the back of a luan." (Relevant, because the qingniao is considered a subspecies of luanniao).

With the Lords of both Qing Jing and Bai Zhan referencing this bird, I really wonder about its significance! It's spawning plenty of theories and headcanons for me.

Heading back outside for a moment, you'll find that in the Quiet Pool (清静小池 qingjing xiaochi (yes, the same Qing Jing the peak is named for)), there are lotuses, and on land there are flower shrubs which are either wide-petaled chrysanthemums (gay bottom jokes ahoy), or a type of peony, the king of flowers demarcating wealth and prosperity. Either way, a blossom fitting of our Qing Jing Peak Lord Shen Qingqiu!

My one regret is that I cannot get a clear shot of the fan hanging on the wall to try and translate the calligraphy on it. If anyone can snag one, please tag me! I also couldn't translate the paintings with poems hanging in Shen Qingqiu's bedroom (it's just too small and blurry for my bad eyes to make out). If I make another post attempting these things, I'll append them to this initial post in an edit afterwards.

#svsss #shen qingqiu #liu qingge #i started writing this at 3am #and now it's 8am #what am i doing with my life #who have i become #qing jing peak

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sewing-needle-anon · 27 days ago

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Currently working on a multi fandom discord server.

So far the fandoms I put are tmnt (tmnt 03, tmnt 2012, rottmnt), dc and fnaf.

I will put the link here when I finish it completely.

Anyway fandom should I add?

#ooc post #discord server #multi fandom #multi fandom sever

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centrally-unplanned · 2 months ago

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IRL (In Real Life) - Buffydom Propaganda And The Internet-That-Was

It is 1997. You just got back from the latest Hot Topic run to restock on whatever the most raven-black bomb of Manic Panic they have on the shelves is, so you can do double-duty bleaching your hair in the shower while watching a CRT TV precariously mounted on the lip of your sink. On that TV is the Season 1 finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and you are obsessed. Unfortunately for you, no one else in Bowling Green, Ohio, shares your passion for a CW WB show about vampire hunting teens who purposefully fumble their line deliveries. You are alone, and you have shit you gotta say about it to someone, anyone, who will understand.

Fortunately for you, the marketing team at ye old WB anticipated that their audience would be a bunch of fucking nerds, and boy do they have a solution to your problem! Welcome to the Bronze:

A while back I stumbled upon the inexplicable existence of "IRL (In Real Life)", a 2007 documentary about the community that formed around the aforementioned Buffy fan discussion forum/chatboard. Officially running from around the launch of the show until it switched over to UPN after its fifth season (with the forum dying a dramatic death in the process), The Bronze was a highly active center for the Buffy fandom, which generated several spillovers into real life. In particular, it was famous for the creatives and even actors on the show occasionally posting on the forum, which culminated in members of the community organizing a yearly party in Los Angeles where posters would fly out and be joined by said cast and crew. This documentary charts its culture & history via interviewing an array of its members.

As always, I am not here to give the blow-by-blow; instead, what is the narrative this documentary is trying to sell?

My previous documentary write-up was about nerd culture in the 2010’s; newly ascendant, growing confident in its own values and looking to justify that to itself, wealthy and with a developed enough ecosystem for crowdfunding to create professional, polished documentaries of its own heroes. None of that is true for IRL. Filmed on whatever camcorder/potato hybrid proto-Ebay would cough up from its zero-bid listings in a series of hotel rooms and people’s living rooms in 2003-2004 after the forum had died, this is the era of nerd culture at its most conflicted and insecure; mocked by the mainstream and unsure if it should be proud of that fact or deeply ashamed of it. And this documentary wears this conflict right on its sleeve; one of its opening lines is a confident assurance to the audience of “don’t worry, we aren’t like those nerds”:

Throwing Trekkies under the bus in the process, cold! Particularly given how it proceeds to barely even blink before pivoting to explaining their hobby of running “WITTs”, multi-day-long collaborative roleplays:

You are exactly those Trekkies my dudes; you weren’t just at the devil’s sacrament you were hosting it! "WITT" stands for Whedon Improvisational Theatre Troupe, you can't recover from that guys.

(I love how “dozens” is large by the way - it was for the internet in 2001, right?)

Anyway, beyond documenting the forum and its members, the conclusion this documentary wants you to hold is that the Bronze was a special place of real community, and it is a community of “normal” people, who made real relationships. And in particular, that internet relationships can be just as real as those found in meatspace, that these relationships transcended the digital and entered the physical; and that this is what fandom can be about.

I want to start with the ways that narrative was correct within the context of the time. I can actually explain that Klingon comment! I have one extant interview with the director of the film, Stephanie Tuszynski, and she put her motivation as follows:

FFN: What made you decide to study Buffy fandom, particularly the Bronze, for your documentary? ST: The idea to do a documentary film about the Bronze actually came to me very early on, because "Trekkies" came out in the late 1990s so I was already a Bronzer at that point. And when I saw it I started throwing things at my television. I was incensed. That wasn't a documentary about the fandom experience, it was "hey let's find the most extreme examples possible and have a freak show!" It infuriated me […] It reinforced every awful stereotype about media fans while purporting to be objective.

It wasn’t a random example - the 1997 documentary Trekkies set the “standard” view of fandom as extremist oddballs, and Tuszynski specifically wanted to counter that. It was the early 2000’s after all, nerd stereotypes were strong, you had to fight them explicitly! In a society where there is strong background hostility to one’s identity, you will attempt to normalize it using known reference points; and certainly the people on these forums were more “normal” than the stereotypes admitted to because that entire binary framework is a dead end.

More importantly to the narrative is the online aspect, “making friends on the internet”. Another find I have is a blog post from a professor who used the film in a class; and in the film’s narrative of “people with no one ‘irl’ to share their hobby with finding friends online” triggered a debate around if the online relationships are “taking away” from in-person relationships that are presumed to be more valuable. A debate that still rages to this day over social media! But the contours were different back then, the internet was presumed to be niche, ancillary, and relationships made online in a completely separate box from “in person” friendships. The documentary goes to great lengths to explain that they were a real community because that idea is so contested. Ironically, they do this by emphasizing that they met up in person, hung out, attended each other's weddings, etc; as if only by meeting up in person could the relationships be validated as real? But you can’t truly fault them for meeting their implicit critics halfway in making their case.

So what can I fault them for?

*****

I was perpetually amused when watching the doc that they included two married couples in the filming, and for both one of the spouses would talk and the other would sit there, in silence, the entire time. Maybe they were members of the community and just not talkers; maybe their lines got cut in post. But what I kept thinking was that they were there selling normality to me; married couples are just inherently less oddball, less threatening, and in the era where “nerd = virgin” just less nerdy. Like with the Klingon line, there is an intentionality to the “just like you” vibe.

Which, as mentioned with the extensive forum roleplay, inevitably breaks down once the reality of forum activity is dug into. And I buried the lede here - you may have seen the title of the “longest” roleplay was “RTBS Soul Restoration Project”, but what does that mean? RTBS was a forum member’s name, and well:

Oh yeah, we are saving our friend from “a fate worse than death: worshiping Britney Spears” - welcome to 2001 baby! This is peak “nerd wars” stuff, the normies hate our shit so we hate the normie shit right back. Which is exactly how nerd culture was in the 2000's. I am not at all throwing shade at their tongue-in-cheek roleplay, resplendent in the ludicrously purple prose and asterisk-laden action descriptions as required by the early internet; but it sits in clear tension with some of the other messaging in this film. Leave Britney alone guys!

The documentary highlights a number of common practices from the forum - people doing daily greetings, the way that it being one unending massive chain of posts with no threading or topics meant people would mass-tag individual people to respond to and form “circles” that way - but there are things it leaves out. I did what any normal person would do after watching this documentary and read through over a year of archived posts on The Bronze to understand the community - but man did I not have to, as on literally the first page of my archived link I see:

And through God’s good grace that second link is archived:

Yes there are pictures at the link, and yes later on it does compare Buffy’s cleavage to the Mona Lisa. (The Giles link is not quite functional, but I was able to find it; sadly it is not nearly as thirsty)

I also found these “onboarding” sites for new members. Remember, this forum was the official forum, which meant there were no community mods or ability to “pin rules”, it was pure anarchy - so advice filled the gaps. And one of the bigger ones, in its *sighs and rubs forehead* blue font on black background, warns against “hottie posting” aka talking about how hot say Angel is, not because it isn’t allowed, but because it is like “pointing out the sky is blue” - it is so common that it will just get washed out.

It might seem like a similarly sky-is-blue comment to note that this forum was heavily about shipping, hotness discussion, fanfiction, and the like. Of course it was, right? These website “senior members” were trying to minimize it, police it, but it broke through constantly and also simmered under the surface through discussions and RP’s from my own review of the forum. The documentary, however, spends incredibly little time on it. Brief mentions of Angel fics, and no mention (iirc) of discussion of how hot the women were at all. Because once again those details really don’t fit into the narrative it is trying to sell.

At one point in the documentary someone notes how diverse all the friends they met in this community were? Which I broke out laughing over. In one way it is not wrong, I get it! Midwest college kids meeting people from all over the country, ages 40 to 14, talking about something no one in their podunk town understands. But on the other hand, you could not come up with a more standardized slice of humanity if you tried to rig it. Everyone here is an American+ with computer access in 1998, it is a grab bag of sys admins, nerd creatives, and comp sci majors. I did a random sampling googling the people interviewed to see what they are up to now, and literally a third of them are librarians. Even their fashion is like God played a prank on this director; not even a 2000’s anime con panel lineup is this stereotypical in the combinations of alt-goth lit girls and nerdcore computer bros.

The evolutionary process of joining this forum -> liking it enough to go to the live meetups -> liking that enough to participate in a documentary about it was a pressure cooker spitting out only a certain kind of person. Which is truly fascinating to see on display! This is the internet-that-was; and it bleeds through the grainy film despite the director’s efforts at times to the contrary.

Though even then it was only a very specific slice of the internet-that-was, because this is a very special breed of Online; namely, the professionals.

*****

Something that is decidedly not typical of The Bronze as an online community is that, as mentioned before, Joss Whedon and other creatives posted on the web forum, answering questions and also just playing around, and how that led to in-person parties where both forum members and cast/crew attended - the Posting Board Parties, or PBP’s. At these they hosted fundraisers, talked about the show, and in the documentary one girl reverently describes with incredible Repressed Lesbian Energy her experience of seeing Eliza Dushku dancing next to her. The PBP had a panel of party organizers, admission systems to keep out the “undesirables”, budgets, the works.

All this the documentary shares openly; it is a peak moment where the digital becomes real in a transcendent way, opening doors analog reality never could. It is also a cold-sweat-waking nightmare story from the lens of a modern Hollywood social media manager; one person in the documentary tells the tale of how one time lead actress Allyson Hannigan posted her phone number on the forum asking people to leave her cute voicemails. The person in question immediately called, and got Hannigan herself instead of the voicemail, so they chatted for a bit (The guy telling this tale is obviously lovestruck; his wife is sitting in typical silence next to him). Today this would be a code-red, nuke your phone situation; but the circle was so cloistered, and the rules so unwritten, that no one cared in these early years.

What they share less openly is all the drama that went into this event. They wax nostalgic about how the parties brought them together, but what isn’t mentioned is the church schism it caused, as the moment cast from the show started attending the party it got mobbed by outsiders. By its ~3rd year there were approximately 400 guests but only ~50 or so were from the forum. They had a huge fight about it, the head of PFP planning committee - “Morbius the Vampire”, who was later jailed for financial fraud btw - told the dissenting faction why don’t they just throw their own party if they hate his so much, and so they did. There was more fighting about it, and eventually they held a peace summit at an LA joint called Mel’s Diner to merge the two factions together. (My source for this is a book, which I will link later)

Hilarious, for sure, but while so much of what we have discussed is “proto online nerd communities”, this part is most decidedly not. The typical web forum absolutely cannot replicate the experience of roleplay-posting your way into shaking hands with Joss Whedon and having a shitfight over party budgets in LA. But most posters never got to attend these parties, of course, this didn’t mean much to them. While for those who did, you cannot help but imagine that this played a gigantic role in making them all become a “real” community. And care enough about that circle to, well after the forum was gone, schlep to a hotel room to be interviewed for a documentary about it. Participating in a documentary is always, in some way, an exercise in selection bias; but here the pruning is turned up to 11 - this is a very elite slice of a very unique fandom experience.

*****

I have one deeper level to go on this thread, somewhat buried in time today, that further shaped the participants here: “Whedon Studies”. The 2000’s was not the birth of media studies as an academic discipline; but it was the birth of fandom-driven media studies, and Buffy was nearly unassailably the leading light of that movement. Academics hosted entire conferences (and inexplicably still do!) on Buffy, Firefly, etc; almost all from the lens of gender & media, as Buffy’s brand was deeply entrenched in that deconstructive milieu. This movement would die a fiery death during the 2010’s shift in media & gender politics, and when the controversies around the toxic working conditions on the set of Buffy/Angel led to Joss Whedon’s near-total expulsion from creative pursuits. The whole edifice is, in a deep way, “cringe” for many of its former participants today.

But what is relevant for our story is that director Stephanie Tuszynski was a full member of that movement; while composing this film she was, for example, giving talks like these at conferences devoted to the Buffyverse:

God that is a lot of talks. This film itself was her thesis project for her I believe philosophy masters, and in our scant interviews lists other fandom-academic film projects she wanted to tackle (which as best I can tell fizzled out later). And the interview subjects were often participants in the same space as well! Academic-types doing media studies with a Buffy bent, or things like culture writers for new media outlets. One of them, writer Allyson Beatrice, even published a book about the Buffy fandom that was in regular bookstores:

To quote the blurb:

A hilarious collection of true stories from Allyson's days as one of the Internet's leading cult TV fan gurus, her mind-boggling escapades include meetings with network executives in dark steakhouses to try to save doomed TV shows and one hastily arranged wedding for two committed Buffy fans.

I highlight this not to say that academics cannot make documentaries, they certainly can. What I am saying is that if you point your camera at career Buffyverse writer Allyson Beatrice, and label her as a typical forum member giving you the hometown everygirl perspective on the community, you are, however unintentionally, lying to your audience. In its quest to give you the just-like-me Buffy fandom experience, what this documentary elides is that it is often giving you the lens of people who are fans of Buffy as a career. Those people are going to be bringing very different experiences to the table - of course they are concerned with sanitization, with nerd culture debates, the works. That is their bread-and-butter trade.

This dynamic bled into the forum’s day-to-day; there was a very clear hierarchy of “veterans” and “top” posters, who organize the live parties, have deep roots in the community, and even the ear of the show team...and everyone else. Particularly because as mentioned there were no rules on the forum, but since that can’t actually function in practice they self-generated community rules and thus their own leadership class. Cliques and groups were common and named, and veteran posters even had formally designated groupies:

I had also by this time become a groupie. I so enjoyed one particular Bronzer’s posts that she allowed me to become the seventh of her groupies. It was through groupie-dom that I got my first taste of firsthand WITT: several Bronzers, on the occasion of the birthday of she-to-whom-we-group, each took turns grabbing the microphone and praising the day that she was born. In retrospect, I’m not sure why we did this. But it was fun, and very funny, too, as we each took turns waxing melodramatic off the top of our heads. And from work, no less.

The source for this by the way is a 400 page ethnography of The Bronze posted by academic who did *cough* “field research” there; I am sure their membership in the “Bronzers Adoring Darla” fangroup was purely for comprehensive data collection purposes.

And to emphasize, I am not saying this is problematic or anything - the groupie things were all in good fun, best I can tell. I simply aim to showcase how the Bronze wasn’t just a baby version of online fandom forum dynamics; but also a baby version of e-celebrity mechanics. Something the documentary does not even attempt to touch on because that would be something normal people would not understand.

*****

All of the above may have come off like one big roast, and it is a little bit, but as I have mentioned before every documentary is propaganda. It is just impossible to have a tight film building a narrative out of the pieces of letting people speak to the camera without that narrative being but a slice of the truth those people want you to know. The Bronze web forum was a very special place to these highly invested fans, and this documentary is not lying to you about that.

But it is also a big part of early internet fandom! The Bronze was famous at the time, and it is right there at the beginning of so many shifts; the first generation of non-technical internet users, a new era of ‘fantasy’ media with the trappings of prestige and social critique, a boom in critique-as-community, and more. I very much want the full picture of that community; who made it up, what did they want from it and what did they get from it, and so on. No film could offer the full picture; this film’s homebrew rawness gives a valuable piece of it, and I enjoyed it for that. I just aimed here to draw out not only what the broader, more accurate dynamics of The Bronze were, but also the cultural question of why the film focuses on what it does, hides what it refuses to show, and what that says about 2000’s internet & nerd culture. Hopefully I succeeded in that.

And also to have fun looking at some incredibly dated Buffy fandom bullshit. May it have been fun for you too! {hugs you and waves goodbye}

#essay #buffy the vampire slayer #history of the early internet #Yeah I have no excuse for the length on this one - sometimes you just wanna be self-indulgent

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rockrosethistle · 7 months ago

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Workin Boys was literally the only thing that saved Hidgens from being flanderized beyond recognition

(Spoilers for Workin' Boys)

So what I think a lot of people don't give much thought to is how much Professor Hidgens as a character has evolved since tgwdlm, essentially becoming a parody of himself.

Think of Hidgens as a character. What are his defining traits?

Did you think about how he is a doomsday prepper who has been stockpiling supplies for 20 years? Because that's how he's introduced in Guy.

Did you try think about how he has a weird relationship with his Alexa? Or did we forget about that?

In fact, for the majority of TGWDLM, Hidgens' main character trait is that he says weird shit with a Doc Brown voice.

The whole concept of Workin Boys isn't even introduced until the last half hour of the show. That's where he reveals his real motivation: to live out the musical he wrote as a young man.

Actually, no, that's not right. Because his motivation was world peace, and Workin Boy's was just a convenient means to that end.

I won't disregard the fact that Hidgens clearly has an emotional connection to the show, but in Guy, it serves as a punchline rather than a driving force.

So now we have this lovely, morally-grey, multi-layered character that we can work with.

By the time we get to Time Bastard, the fandom is expecting a show stopping number reference, so of course we get that.

But at this point, Hidge is still that multi-layered character. Sure, showstopping number gets a callback, but we also get a callback to his strange relationship with robots. They make up an equal part of him as a character.

By the time we get to Honey Queen, we have lost several aspects of Hidgens altogether. He is no longer a doomsday-believing recluse. He is now active in the community and his only motivation is to get his show funded. He brings it up at every chance he gets, and his loyalties lie with whoever is more likely to make Workin Boys happen.

So how the hell do we come back from this?

Well, at first it seems like we're not going to. Workin' Boys (the short film) comes out, and it looks like we're leaning even harder into this aspect of his personality than before. But then we get hit with something we're not expecting: Hidge gets the Ted Spankoffski treatment.

I'm referring to Ted's backstory in Time Bastard, where we learn that all of his actions actually stem from a single, traumatic moment, which in his eyes forced him to alter his behaviour, so as to not go through the same trauma again.

Can you see where I'm going with this?

The backstory we get from Hidgens certainly puts things in perspective. No, it's not enough to explain why his behaviour has been so laser-focused on this one show, but it's a start.

Then comes the part that changes everything.

It's left up to interpretation whether these ghosts Hidge is seeing are actually there, or just hallucinations, but that doesn't really matter.

Hidgens had been through a horrible experience, so traumatizing that he is still literally being haunted by it decades later. For one reason or another, he believes that the only way he can relieve himself of these ghosts is by bringing honor to the loved ones he's lost and telling their stories.

This reveal recontextualizes everything we know about Hidgens as a character. Suddenly, this isn't a story about some guy who just really wants to put on his musical, this is a story about guilt. Of course it would be the driving factor in his life. Look at him apologizing to his boys. He feels like he is slandering their memories with everything that goes wrong for the show.

This is supported even more with the ending.

Henry Hidgens dies with a smile on his face, believing he's finally achieved his goal: to tell the real story of what happened that night.

It finally makes sense as to why we've lost those parts of him--we've retconned the character by revealing that all that simplification of his goals and traits wasn't flanderization at all, but a steady downward spiral of grief over his loved ones. It wasn't Hidgens getting a little too into being a playwrite, it was him descending into madness caused by the inability to please the part of himself (or the literal ghosts, if that's how you interpret it) that believes he's not doing enough.

And if not for Workin' Boys, he would have remained that one-dimensional character.

#starkid #hatchetfield #npmd #tgwdlm #hatchetverse #team starkid #professor hidgens #henry hidgens #jeff blim #nightmare time #nightmare time 2 #nmt #nmt2 #character analysis #analysis #rose rabbles #honey queen #time bastard #the guy who didn't like musicals

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virtualtadpole · 1 month ago

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Behind the blue shorts: How an all-boys Catholic school sparked the origination of Thai BL

(Cross-post from Reddit)

One evening this past July in Bangkok's long-time youth hangout of Siam Square, a crowd was gathering in the street, around an area set aside for busking musicians. The mostly young-adult female audience politely applauded as several high school bands took turns performing, but they were actually waiting for a different act. After some time, the crowd began to stir as members caught sight of some two dozen teenaged boys, all in a uniform of white shirts and bright royal blue shorts, headed towards the gathering. As they filed out onto the makeshift stage area, the boys were loudly greeted with passionate, enthusiastic screams, all too characteristic of fans cheering on their idols.

But these boys weren't actual idols - not yet, at least. They were all brand new actors, yet to appear on screen anywhere. They were the cast of Love Sick 2024, an upcoming remake of the pioneering Thai BL series whose tenth anniversary they were celebrating that day, in one of their first public appearances.

Why, then, would such inexperienced newcomers inspire such fervent devotion?

The Love Sick 2024 boys (and three girls) with their audience (Tia51)

Well, for starters, the original Love Sick series is a quintessential classic of Thai BL, arguably the one pivotal work that kick-started the entire TV genre - which in the decade since has developed into an industry worth multi-millions and recognized as a major cultural export. It still holds a place close to many long-time fans' hearts, and BL, like other phenomena of fandom culture, has been known to elicit very enthusiastic emotional responses from followers.

But the scenes witnessed with Love Sick 2024's actors are actually quite reminiscent of those previously seen during the original's release, when BL series didn't yet even exist as a category. Surely, there must be something else underlying this series' - and its actors' - popularity.

Let's take a closer look.

Love Sick's real-life inspiration

In chapter 21 of the original Love Sick novel, Noh, having taken delivery of the music club's new set of drums and overseen band practice for the evening, spends some time sitting around on the stands along the sports pitch next to the F. Building, wondering how he's going to pay for them. It's not long before Earn shows up to rescue him from his financial troubles, but let's pay attention to the location.

The F. Building Noh mentioned is an actual place - F. Hilaire Building at Assumption College (AC) in Bangkok. It is named after Frère (Brother) Hilaire, one of five French missionary teachers of the Catholic Brothers of St. Gabriel who arrived in Siam in 1901.

In the late 19th century, Siam (Thailand's historical name) was rapidly modernizing in response to colonial pressures. American Protestant and French Roman Catholic missionaries played a large role introducing technological and medical advances, and also established some of the first schools in the country as the royal government introduced reforms to formalize the education system. Father Émile August Colombet, the head priest of what was then Assumption Church, founded Assumption College as a school for boys in 1885, and after a decade of growth, the Brothers were invited to help run the school. A convent school for girls, run by the Sisters of St. Paul of Chartres, was established next door soon after.

While the early government schools mostly served the aristocracy, the missionary schools catered more to the general populace, especially the minority ethnic groups who also formed the majority of their congregations. However, while they are remembered today for their legacy of modernization, the missionaries had relatively little success proselytizing, and the large majority of their students remained Buddhist.

Over time, these schools expanded and grew. The St. Gabriel's Foundation now operates over a dozen schools, as well as a university, and Assumption College is regarded as one of the most elite private schools in the country. Its lengthy list of famous alumni includes names from several of Thailand's biggest business families, as well as major political figures, demonstrating its historic stature and the strength of its alumni network. Today, the stereotypical image of its students is of those coming from wealthy or upper middle-class families of Chinese descent, and hefty donations are the norm for families looking to secure placement for their sons.

AC student Keen (Only Boo!) giving a presentation in 2022 on his team's experience joining a NASA-sponsored CanSat (miniature suborbital satellite) competition. It's not like every school has an aerospace program. (Assumption College, via Workpoint Today)

Brother Hilaire, barely 20 when he arrived in Siam, spent his next 67 years dedicated to the school. He learned Thai well enough to write the foundational Thai textbook series Darunsueksa, which remains in use over a century later. Along with Father Colombet, he is memorialized as one of the school's two most celebrated figures.

Today, the building which bears his name overlooks the school's central courtyard, an assembly ground of red brick facing the apse of Assumption Cathedral, an imposing Romanesque Revival structure nestled in Bangkok's old European district along Charoen Krung Road, the city's first modern paved street. Guests headed to the famous Mandarin Oriental Hotel nearby might catch glimpses through the steel palisade fence of boys in their white-and-blue uniforms playing football in the tiny sports pitch - the very place where Noh and Earn had their conversation in the novel. The stands are no longer there, but were present in 2007 when The Love of Siam was filmed at the school. Also appearing in the film, and the site of Noh's classes in the novel, is the 13-storey school building which now towers over the cathedral in order to accommodate its secondary student body of some 2,500 within the limited historic space. (The primary section had been split to a different campus in 1966.)

The F. Hilaire Building clock, and Kao Jirayu as young Tong in the sports pitch, seen in The Love of Siam (Sahamongkolfilm International)

A nativity play right in front of the cathedral would be epic. However, this is artistic licence, as the school's primary section lies elsewhere. This area is now the red brick courtyard; Noh actually mentions in the novel that the school was undergoing a lot of landscaping projects. (Sahamongkolfilm International)

The Love of Siam may have been one of the first few instances where the wider public got to actually see what things looked like inside the school. Although it was only standing in as a location for the fictional St. Nicholas School, there was something about seeing students in their sea of blue uniform shorts that tickled the imagination. Such was the effect that when Love Sick began serializing as a web novel on Dek-D.com a year later, the Thai subtitle, usually translated as The Chaotic Lives of Blue Shorts Guys, undoubtedly helped fuel its popularity.

But what's so special about these blue shorts anyway?

This might come as a surprise to international viewers who've only primarily seen Thailand through its TV series, where they tend to be over-represented, but school uniforms with blue shorts are actually rather uncommon in real life. Let's look back again to Brother Hilaire's time, to find out more about their origins.

A history of the blue shorts

In the early days of formal education, most schools did not have defined uniforms, and AC students wore a varied assortment of costumes according to their ethnic background. The school first introduced a uniform in 1933, consisting of a white standing-collar jacket with metal buttons bearing the school insignia, blue shorts, a white pith helmet, white socks, and black leather shoes (though the helmet, socks and shoes remained optional). This was similar to a form already used by some royally affiliated schools since the 1910s,* though their shorts were navy or black. The reason AC opted for blue shorts is not recorded, though some writers have postulated that it may have been to reflect the common colour of the raj pattern costume, the formal dress of the time.

A class of AC students, with their teachers, in the 1940s. It's unclear whether the shorts were the school's original blue, or khaki green in accordance with the 1939 law. (Assumption Association, via The Cloud)

The first piece of legislation governing school uniforms came out in 1939 under the Fascist-leaning regime of Prime Minister Plaek Pibulsonggram. Male students in government schools were assigned a khaki green military-style uniform to match that of the government's Yuwachon Thahan military youth movement. Some AC students also joined the movement, though those who didn't continued to wear the white uniform, creating an interesting contrast which we'll come back to later. In 1943, at the height of World War II in Southeast Asia, a new law extended the khaki green uniform to all schools, but it's unclear whether it ever took effect as Pibulsonggram was ousted the following year and the Yuwachon movement was dissolved after the war's end.

In 1949, the old regulation was scrapped and replaced with a new one, which codified school uniforms to the almost exact same appearance we see today: for boys, a white shirt, shorts, a belt, socks, and shoes. But the shorts were to be khaki for all schools, except those who requested otherwise to the Ministry of Education. Assumption, together with its sister Gabrielite schools, were among the first to register exemptions and became the only schools with blue shorts for their uniforms for several years.

In 1961, the national regulation was changed again to allow schools to choose between khaki, blue, navy, or black shorts. As time passed, boys' uniforms developed into the convention we see today: black or khaki shorts for government schools, blue or black for private schools. But given their prominence, the image of the all-boys Catholic school has remained one of the strongest associated with the blue shorts uniform.

Not that it mattered much back then, though. In the pre-digital era, people's exposure to different schools was mostly limited to their immediate locality and depictions in the media. While blue-shorts uniforms did feature in some teen movies and sitcoms in the 1990s,† those works didn't really play into the stereotype, and the 1997 financial crisis soon disrupted most media production anyway.

Attracting attention

Then several things happened. The BTS Skytrain opened in 1999, and Bangkok became much smaller overnight - at least for the middle class. Cram schools moved into building spaces in Siam Square left vacant from the recession, and saw an explosion in popularity. School students from all over now flocked to Siam Square in the evenings, and the video classrooms became something of an inter-school melting pot where one could catch sight of all sorts of uniform styles and colours.

And the AC boys, they very much stood out.

It's unclear exactly when things began, but throughout the years, Assumption students had developed a fashion culture of their own. The school is one of a handful that require leather shoes (as opposed to canvas),‡ and its upper-secondary students usually opted for a certain pointy style produced by a couple of old shops on Charoen Krung Road. They would also have their shorts tailor-modified to be very short - typically 15 inches or less, while uniforms coming out of the factory are usually 18 inches at the shortest for high-schooler sizes - and wear them with waists pulled very low. This was despite the rule book stating, like any other school's, that shorts should reach no more than 5 centimetres above the knee. It's actually a common refrain of experiences retold by AC students and alumni that they'd get into trouble for their shorts and shoes whenever the disciplinarian teacher would inspect their uniforms. But it was also part of the challenge, to stay on top of the fashion of their peers and at the same time get away with it.

This fashion only added to the fact that those vivid blue shorts are very visible, like, even from 100 metres away. So, coupled with the stereotype of them being rich kids with likely above-average attractiveness, these AC boys' uniforms easily caught attention, whether they were entering late into a cram school classroom or queuing for the train at the BTS's central interchange at Siam Station during rush hour.

This group strolling down the streets of Siam Square would surely draw plenty of eyes in real life. (Sahamongkolfilm International)

The turn of the 21st century also saw the spread of internet access, and with the early web came the proliferation of online discussion forums, both smaller ones serving specific groups like schools and larger public communities like the youth-oriented Dek-D. Suddenly, it became possible to peak into some of the conversations kids elsewhere were having and share in the knowledge of their hijinks at school. This, in some ways, helped fuel the fantasy of this exclusive boys' world, filled with good-looking guys in revealing shorts who weren't averse to having physical contact with each other.

The online forums also gave birth to web fiction, which soon expanded to include the emerging Y (BL) genre. Naturally, these trends eventually converged to give us plenty of Y fiction set in all-boys schools. But the epitome of these wouldn't arrive until after The Love of Siam hit screens in 2007.

The Love of Siam was probably the first major work in a decade to prominently feature the blue shorts uniform,§ and this time it was actually used to highlight the Catholic boys' school setting, employing AC itself as the location. Though it appeared only in a few short glimpses, they were powerful images that further inspired fascination with the real-life school.

It might be because it's accurate, or because the film has completely coloured viewer's perceptions, but this scene is exactly how one would imagine things to be like in those Catholic boys' schools. (Sahamongkolfilm International)

Then in 2008, Love Sick quietly began serializing on Dek-D's writers' section. The story's premise was simple, but it so effectively tapped into this collective fascination and quickly rose up the site's readership charts. Its popularity came no doubt thanks to author Indrytime's extremely lively and enjoyable writing of Noh, who narrates the story throughout. But a large part of the appeal is also attributable to the lifelike portrayal of his school life, with plenty of references to actual locations both within the school and outside - including the convent school next door and the numerous shops of Siam Square. The novel also name-dropped some of the school's actual teachers who, in Catholic school fashion, are addressed as Miss and Master, and Noh even mentions specific happenings at AC, like the new belt buckles that had been added to the school uniform for younger students that year. The only thing not mentioned was the name of the school, which was intentionally left blank. So close did the story feel to real life that the author had to emphasize its fictional nature when people started speculating about the real identities of Punn‖ and Noh and tried to identify them with actual AC students.

But the most significant reference to real life in Love Sick by far must be its descriptions of what is clearly meant to be the Jaturamitr football competition - a biennial event between Thailand's four oldest boys' schools: Assumption College, its Protestant counterpart Bangkok Christian College (BCC), and the royally founded government schools Suankularb Wittayalai (SK) and Debsirin (DS). The tradition is a HUGE part of school life at these four schools, which pretty much share this culture of intense collective institutional pride.

These boys and their ball game

It's kind of hard to explain all that the competition entails, but the football is just a small part of it. This YouTube video looking at the BCC side makes for a nice intro.¶ There are parades, mascots, Thai-style cheerleading (featuring not acrobatics, but synchronized arm movements), and most notably, the spectacular card stunt displays, which involve the entire student body from the lower-secondary years. The students will spend months practising to perfect their card flips, under the direction of the cheering president. Sounds familiar? That's Earn's position in Love Sick.

Fourwheels (Oxygen, Nitiman, La Pluie), wearing the cheering crew overalls that Noh dreams of, addressing the AC crowd in 2017 (AC Ed Tech)

Beam Boonyakorn (Make It Right) as AC's eagle mascot, though it's often teased for looking more like a chicken, also in 2017 (TTaewTaew Twitter)

The card stunt tradition actually originated at AC in 1942, from the aforementioned contrast between the military youth and regular uniforms. A teacher came up with the idea of having the differently dressed students arrange to form the school initials on the stands. This eventually developed into the elaborate displays done today, which use coloured card booklets to create pixels that together form a detailed aggregate image. Crowds of 1,250 from each school, seated opposite the paying audience, are needed to perform these.

Oat Tharathorn (Fourever You) in the card-stunt-performing audience in 2014; note the plates of colour card booklets set on the racks in front of them. (oattrt Instagram)

Such plates appeared in Love Sick 2024's episode 4 behind-the-scenes clip, but didn't show up in the actual episode. They later appeared in episode 5. (Tia51)

Regular fixtures among these displays include school logos, the royal family, and sponsors. There are also have these coordinated sequences with portraits of students and alumni greeting the crowd, which may feature some familiar faces.

A sponsor ad for Est gives way to AC student Chimon greeting the audience in 2017. (AC Ed Tech)

Alumni PP Krit (AC), Ice Natara (DS), Nonkul (BCC), and Sky Wongravee (SK) welcoming the audience, 2019 (AC Ed Tech)

GMMTV's Marc (AC) and Ford (SK) from the same sequence in 2019; Inn (BCC) from before 2014; AC alum Net Siraphop in 2023 (AC Ed Tech; Suankularb Photo Club; inpitar Instagram)

This attention to popular students didn't exist during novel Noh's time, though. Back then, few people followed the event apart from the schools' students and alumni, and football people scouting for young talent. But the 2010s' "cute boy" craze brought a sharp rise in attention from the sao-Y and cute-boy-following crowds, who flocked to the matches, some equipped with huge telephoto lenses to capture not the football action but cute guys in the audience.

BCC alumnus Inn Sarin photographed in the audience in 2014. Photos of him from the event were virally shared and boosted his following and "cute boy" stature. (inpitar Instagram)

BCC cheerleaders Winny Thanawin (2017) and Ping Krittanun (2019) (BCC Jaturamitr)

The origination of Thai BL

In some ways, the Love Sick novel helped lay the foundations for the phenomenon. It gave readers this imaginary connection to the school, which drove interest in seeing what its real-life students shared on social media, especially as Instagram exploded in popularity around 2012. And of course, attractive boys in revealing uniform shorts was already a winning combination in itself (and the fashion soon spread to other schools).

So it's appropriately fitting that things would come full circle with the 2013 announcement of Love Sick The Series, which generated huge amounts of engagement as fans recalled their impressions of the characters and shared pictures of real-life AC students whom they saw as the perfect Punn and Noh.

As it turned out, recent AC graduate White was cast as Punn, and several other AC boys were also chosen for the many supporting characters. Fans readily took to following these budding actors from the moment they were announced, gathering to meet them after acting classes and supporting them through to the last post-series events. It was a revelation in how dedicated such a fandom could be, without seeing even a second of these actors' work.

For the production, though, it could hardly be expected that explicit reference to the real-life school would be allowed, so they named the school Friday College in the series. (Which kind of bugs me. Couldn't they have at least come up with a vaguely Catholic-sounding name? Anyway, they developed it into a brand and it's stuck now.) They did model the school emblem and uniform exactly after AC's (in its 2008 form, before the new belt buckle), and the same uniform was featured in Thank God It's Friday, a 2019 spin-off set in the same universe. However, the school emblem was redesigned for the 2024 Love Sick remake, maybe because the resemblance now felt too close for comfort. (Another detail that bugs me is how the 2014 series had four-digit student IDs, while the 2024 has six. Most real-life schools have five digits!)

While it would have been a dream come true to see the actual original locations in the series adaptation (even if unnamed), this was not to happen. In fact, unlike its sister school Assumption College Thonburi, which served as the location for Hormones and numerous other works, AC seems to no longer be keen on allowing access as a filming location, and hasn't been spotted in anything since The Love of Siam.

Anyway, Love Sick's broadcast was a turning point in several ways. Of course, it most importantly kickstarted the Thai BL industry,** but this also led to a shift in Y culture where shippers turned their focus from real people to actor pairs from series. "Cute boys" from social media were now regularly tapped to join the many budding modelling agencies, who would try to push them as actors and influencers, and AC students attracted particular attention. Make It Right (2016)'s Peak, Ohm and Beam, for example, were all scouted from the school.

AC students Peak, Ohm and Beam, taken by a fan account in 2016. (allaboutpeak Twitter)

The boys made use of their newfound cult. Popular AC students were tapped to promote the school's annual Christmas Fair, which drew an influx of visitors from their followers, who happily contributed to their fundraising efforts. This was much changed from Noh's time in the novel, when the fair was still pretty much an internal event for students and their immediate friends and family.

Turbo (Love Stage!!) promoting merch for AC's 2015 Christmas Fair (turbotb Instagram)

However, this trend, as with the cute boy craze itself, seems to have largely petered out, especially as life was disrupted by the COVID pandemic and the 2020 protests brought about sharp changes in ideology among young people. Another victim of this has been the Jaturamitr competition, which was postponed for two years before taking place again in 2023.†† But it then became the topic of a huge online drama over the compulsory nature of attendance for the card stunt performances (which not everyone willingly enjoyed), and the negative public attention soured the experience for a lot of the students.

These new concerns seem to have influenced Love Sick's 2024 remake. In the novel, during preparation for the football competition, Noh talks about how hard the marching band was practising, and how he and the band leaders felt the need to push them to perfection, in order to uphold the school's reputation. There's a clear institutional pride in the way he says, "I'm sure the young ones understand. (Or if they don't now, they will in a few years.)"

This stands in sharp contrast to Earn's stance in Love Sick 2024, where he says in episode 4, "If the formation fails, the school’s reputation will just take a hit. But the school doesn’t have feelings, does it? It is they (the young ones) who have feelings."

We'll find out in a couple of hours how else they're updating the depiction of the competition, which was one of the highlight scenes in the novel thanks to how detailed it was with insider info of the behind-the-scenes workings at the Suphachalasai National Stadium in real life. It's an unfortunate fact, though, that it's near impossible that any TV production with a normal budget would even come close to the spectacle of the actual event, with its crowds in the tens of thousands. But let's see how creative the production crew can be.

After all, it's the emotional threads that make the real highlight of the story, isn't it?

Footnotes

* These schools had been set up after the English public school model by King Vajiravudh, who himself was educated in England. Vajiravudh College still uses it as its ceremonial uniform.

† One of these was I Miss You 2 (1996), which was filmed at Montfort College in Chiang Mai, another Gabrielite school. Incidentally, The Love of Siam director Madeaw Chookiat was a student there and became an extra in the film, an experience which inspired him to go into filmmaking. He would later base the Nay-Beam segment of Home (2012, one of the most significant mainstream proto-BL works) at the school.

‡ Most other schools allow both, and their students usually prefer canvas shoes. Nanyang, with its iconic green soles, has long been the most popular brand.

§ Actually there's at least Yong Songyos's Dorm (2006), set at his alma mater Assumption College Sriracha, but it's a horror focusing more on the boarding-school aspect. Yong also created a short film dedicated to the school in 2015, starring four Hormones Next Gen actors (no English subs, but there are hardcoded Thai captions that maybe a tool can translate).

‖ Sorry, but I just can't accept the spelling Phun, as it's plain incorrect. The /p/ and /ph/ are supposed to represent different sounds in Thai, but most Thai people don't understand the system as it's not taught in schools.

¶ As an expat, the video creator misses the meanings of some of the things that happen in the video. The yellow chicken is a reference to a Facebook satirist who's said to bring bad luck to sports teams, while the no-banana sign is a response to the angry chant the BCC side was yelling. It's an expletive that rhymes with the word for banana in Thai.

** Isn't it ironic that a genre revolving around a topic so controversial with the Church should be inspired by a Catholic school? But then, as director Madeaw demonstrated in The Love of Siam, religious conflict has always played an important role in driving social issues, while in the case of Love Sick, it's not actually relevant at all.

†† Yet another victim is the Chula-Thammasat Traditional Football Match, a competition between Thailand's two oldest universities which features similar elements of parades, cheerleading and card stunts. It hasn't been properly held since 2020, and when a substitute event was held in 2024, a huge online drama erupted over the student body's decision to alter certain elements.

#thai bl #love sick the series #love sick 2024 #bl meta #bl history

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thiswaytwoinfinity · 3 months ago

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Emma's Epic Multi-Fandom Rec List: 'Top Gun: Bob' Edition

This is technically like, part 3.1 since I've been working on pulling a giant 'Top Gun: Maverick' rec list together, with all the daggers. I wanted to have this done a little while ago (because August was when I joined the TGM fandom, etc.) but frankly everything has been nuts and so I just figured it was better to share what I had ready rather than wait for the whole thing.

Please cut me some slack, my puppy just got spayed and she insists I hold her bone for her while she chews so I have like one free hand and two brain cells at the moment

I do my best to reblog as much as possible but sometimes I miss it so this is my attempt to make up for that and give all of the amazing creators on here the credit they deserve. Thank you all so much for sharing all of your work with us. This past year has been a long and difficult one for me, especially mental health wise, and being able to escape into these stories has been so valuable and important to me.

If you read anything on here that you like, please reblog and/or comment on these pics to show the creators some love!

AN IMPORTANT NOTE: While not everything listed here will include smut, many of these authors have 18+ blogs. Please, please, please respect their boundaries and DO NOT INTERACT WITH THEM/THEIR CONTENT IF YOU ARE A MINOR.

Stories marked with ❤️‍🔥 contain NSFW content

Robert ‘Bob’ Floyd

Full of Surprises ❤️‍🔥 by @withahappyrefrain — You have to admire a fandom that takes one look at the bespectacled, quiet-seeming character and goes “This guy fucks.” I also had that exact thought when I first saw Bob Floyd (along with several other, increasingly filthy thoughts), so when I read this story for the first time I went “oh, yeah, definitely. This guy fucks and this is how he fucks.” Just like our beloved WSO, it starts out so charming and sweet and then gets so incredibly steamy and sexy. 10/10. And when you’re done, there’s an equally hot Part 2.

Behave ❤️‍🔥 by @withahappyrefrain — Bob Floyd bicep choking. Let me repeat that, a little louder: BOB! FLOYD! BICEP! CHOKING! It’s even hotter than you think it is.

Whodunit? by @attapullman — Fun fact: my absolute favorite genre of fiction (books, movies, games, you name it) is a whodunit mystery. So, naturally, I have been obsessed with this series ever since Mo started teasing it way back when, and I love everything about it. Bob and Fanboy are the perfect goofy amateur sleuths, the teasing hints of cameos from all of the other Daggers keeps you on your toes and there’s a dose and campy ‘80s nostalgia running through the whole thing that I adore. It’s just pure, giddy fun.

The Neighbor!Bob Universe ❤️‍🔥 by @attapullman — I am on record as adoring every single version of Bob that Mo cooks up, but neighbor!Bob holds a special place in my heart. He’s so handy and confident and sexy and he needs help dodging the firtations of all of the older women in the neighborhood who are equally obsessed with him! My bff and I once joked that the perfect man could build you a table and then do both you and your taxes on it, and well, that’s neighbor!Bob to a tee.

do you wanna make somethin' of it ❤️‍🔥by @theharddeck — Hi, hello, are you looking for a Bob fic so hot it will MELT YOUR ENTIRE BRAIN? This is that fic. Bob has a secret side hustle as your favorite audio erotica performer (username: BullRiderRhett) and he is just as brain-scramblingly hot in person as he is in your headphones. I finished this fic and said out loud, to nobody, “omg I need him.” And because the universe is kind, there is an equally scorching sequel.

you don’t have to be a star by @sunlightmurdock — Sweet, perfect Bob deserves a sweet, perfect fic where he gets to hear all about how lovely and wonderful he is, just the way he is. Fluffy and warm and the kind of story that gives you the urge to kiss him all over his perfect little face.

Something in the Orange ❤️‍🔥by @sorchathered — I’m a sucker for a “right person, wrong time” situation and this one is a gut-punch of angst followed by a swoon-worthy reconciliation. I imagine it would be impossible to ever truly move on from Robert Floyd.

Delicate ❤️‍🔥 and I Want Your Midnights by @laracrofted — *Tyler Owens voice* Are y’all ready to pine? Bob Floyd is an absolute dream boy and he’s at his most hesitant and lovestruck in these two gorgeous stories. These give me the same like, sinking stomach-feeling I get when I stare at pictures of Lewis for too long — like just the tiniest bit of melancholy that makes the whole experience sweeter and more emotional. Does that make sense? It’s one of the highest compliments I can give.

Covering the Classics ❤️‍🔥by @roosterforme — BOB AND ANNA! ANNA AND BOB! I COULD SCREAM ABOUT THESE TWO FOR HOURS! I love them, this is such a beautiful, heart wrenching, emotional roller coaster of a story about learning how to find yourself and your people after heartbreak and trauma. Anna is such an interesting, complicated character and Bob meets her at every turn with love and tenderness and the biggest open heart in the world. (And also the steamy scenes are BEYOND, like, damn, Bob, neither Anna nor I was ever gonna be able to resist you.)

I Heard Screaming ❤️‍🔥by @oncassette — Yes, it’s a classic fanfic trope — I heard noises and walked in on you enjoying some *private time* while thinking about me — but it’s a classic for a reason. I love it and I reread it all the time.

Four Eyes ❤️‍🔥by @promisingyounglady — I’m going to quote what I wrote the first time I reblogged this wildly, delightfully, insanely filthy fic: “I need to sit in a dark corner and replay this fic in my brain like a movie now.” It’s that good

Misc. Lewis Pullman Characters:

Dancing Beneath the Moon ❤️‍🔥by @delopsia (Rhett Abbott) — Del is *the* Rhett Abbott fic writer, in my opinion, and choosing just one of their fics was so much harder than I thought. But ultimately, I’m still so spellbound by this one, where Rhett is a ghost haunting the former Abbott ranch. It’s atmospheric and moody and gorgeous and the pining is top notch — as is the image of Rhett being a grumpy, mischievous house ghost. Also please check out their Floytt universe which I also adore.

Coyote ❤️‍🔥by @delopsia (Miles Miller) — An omegaverse with a twist! The reader is a wolf being married off to broker peace with another prominent wold family … only to run away with the sweet, gentle coyote who works at the desk of the El Royale. Dip You in Honey So I Could Be Stickin to You ❤️‍🔥by @laracrofted (Harrison Knott) — Harrison Knott, the man that you are. And the man that you are in this fic, specifically. I need him desperately. Carnally. In a way that is concerning to feminism.

#fic recs #favorites #emma's epic rec lists #top gun maverick fanfiction #top gun maverick #top gun maverick fandom #tgm fic #tgm fanfiction #robert bob floyd #my beautiful husband bob floyd #harrison knott #miles miller #rhett abbott #rhett abbott fic #rhett abbott x reader #bob floyd x reader #bob floyd fanfiction #bob fucks #outer range fic

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