#or story at all (fandom or otherwise).

[chaos-of-the-abyss]

Folks really claim that turning Luthien into a rapist and making a victim out of the man who canonically wanted to assault her is doing her character a favor and it's for #feminism since they're giving her more "agency"... Silm fandom is cooked lmao

pretty much lol. somehow it's woke now to turn a woman who's canonically a victim of sexual assault into a sexual predator instead. it's woke to make her assault her own fault, and actually double back and make her the one committing assault while making the man who in canon tried to rape her into the victim, because slay girlboss uwu. it's okay that the author of the source material is sexist and wrote your story to revolve around a man, queen. we'll fix that problem and we'll save your character by making up half-baked stories about how maybe you actually enchanted your abuser and forced him to abuse you. we're adding so much depth to your story and making you such a complex nuanced character <3<3<3

[greenerteacups]

thoughts on Ginny and Harry as a couple?

There are a lot of people who find their romance in HBP forced. I don't think it's forced so much as underwritten, and the books don't get the chemistry quite right (though the movies certainly don't, either). There's potential, but they just don't get enough actual scenes of substance (besides Harry thinking she's pretty or feeling jealous of Dean) for a lot of readers to buy that they're not only in love, but deeply enough in love to break up, get back together, and wind up married.

That's not to say I don't see the appeal. There's a very cool scene in Book 5 where Harry's doing a woe-is-me-Chosen-One act, and Ginny effortlessly puts him in his place about it by reminding him that she was possessed by Voldemort at eleven, which is a rare glimpse into her character and also a great synecdoche for their relationship — Ginny is a grounding presence who, like Ron and Hermione, isn't going to be awed by his past adventures because she knew him before they happened. In that respect, Ginny's probably one of the few women Harry could feasibly wind up with, because he only ever seems comfortable around people (let alone girls) who can see past the Chosen-One schtick and treat him like a normo (see: Ron, Hermione, the Weasleys, Luna, Hagrid). True to type, he doesn't get interested in Ginny at all until she's ditched her celebrity crush and ceased to view him as an idol, because in his heart of hearts, Harry wants to be a normal boy, and it's stressed over and over that part of what he likes about his relationship with Ginny is how normal it feels. He kind of has a horribly supercharged version the celebrity dating problem: after the Battle of Hogwarts, anyone he meets is going to know him first as Harry Potter, Chosen One, Boy Who Lived, and Actually Fucking Resurrected Messiah of the Wizarding World, which is... I mean, it's possible that there are witches out there who could get over that, but Harry's not an extroverted guy, and I'm not sure how he'd go about finding them. Ginny's the one who's been there since the beginning, doesn't need anything about him or his past explained to her, and actually likes him for who he is.

When you look at it that way, it's not surprising he married his high school girlfriend. She's one of the few people still alive who doesn't see him as a demigod.

[crownedwille]

Are there still Crown Prince!Wilhelm stans out there despite S3 turning it into the number one problem? Please report, we need to unite and no, that doesn't mean that I don't support Wille's mental health and happiness and that I love the monarchy, some people out there must get it

[starlightseraph]

stream-of-consciousness regarding fandom discourse here:

i really don’t understand some of the posts i’ve seen lately.

david and michael are obviously drawn to each other like magnets, but such wild speculation about their most personal relationships is really just in bad taste. i know that if someone was saying these things about my private life, i’d be incredibly disturbed and honestly disgusted by it, no matter how untrue or ridiculous the claims were.

i’m really not sure how people can come up with such an expansive mythos from the tiny bits of their lives that we see. lots of the “evidence” i’ve seen really doesn’t add up. people get dates wrong and mismatch timelines, are missing (or deliberately ignoring) things that counter their beliefs, and completely misinterpret (i think) behavioural patterns to work in their favour.

now i’m not saying these claims are wrong. they could be completely correct, but people really have to be reaching to get to these conclusions with this information. i’ve half the mind to call it wishful thinking, that people want georgia to be messed up because she’s married to david (which might make her both the object of envy and an obstacle to other relationships) and try to antagonise anna because she’s “stifling” michael. i’d be lying if i said that anna has the best chemistry with the others, but that is no reason to make these assumptions.

while i find all of this unfounded, i’m not gonna tell anyone what they can write on their blog, but i will say this: spreading these ideas about people can hurt them. even if everything theorised about is true, david and georgia and michael and anna will tell us if/when they want to. their identities, motivations, and dynamics with each other are theirs and theirs alone, and they do not need us to be scrutinising their every move and dissecting their relationships. we have no place in their lives other than to support their work and admire their accomplishments. if they don’t share something, it’s no one else’s story to tell. no matter how used to the rumours they are, no matter how many people are gossiping, why would you pile on? why would you say things that might be upsetting to someone that you admire? i’m certainly not naïve; i fully acknowledge that these people could be in the most convoluted and difficult relationships in all of britain (really saying something lol), and i’m not going to be all happy-smiley and act like they can’t possibly have imperfect lives, but it’s not my place to say. i can talk about whatever i want, but i simply don’t want to do something that might be hurtful to (or, at the very least, uncomfortable for) people that i look up to.

anyways, i hope i’ve stayed civil and level through this random rant; i’m not even irritated by this stuff, just genuinely baffled as to how people reach these conclusions lol

[dollypopup]

y'all can all cancel me (again) for this, but if there's even a SHRED of 'who should I pick?' from Penelope in season 3, I am tuning out SO fast because like. . .sorry not sorry, there IS no choice. Debling is some crusty OC suitor she barely even knows and Colin is a man who she has been so supposedly in love with to the point where she'd ruin her entire family's reputation to have a potential love story with him. Penelope and Colin have background, years of knowing each other, intimacy that few people in the Ton can boast of having (letters, conversations about purpose, fights and arguments and makeups) and her and Debling have. . .a dance or two at a ball because he's a rebound for Penelope's broken heart. he means nothing. he has no nuance, he has no weight to the story, he is such an afterthought to me. either I wanna see Penelope going 'you know what? I don't even LIKE this dude. he's. . .fine, but I don't care about him even a shred as much as I care about Colin' or the INSTANT Colin's like 'you know what? we should get married' if it's not an immediate 'say less, you're already my husband, try returning me without the receipt, Debling whomst?' then I don't want it!

like. . .it's just so frustrating to see all the 'I hope Debling sweeps her off her feet and she rejects Colin's proposal and she makes him work for it and and and-' nonsense from the fandom and it's always tagged and no matter how many times I block it, it just keeps popping up. I go into the Polin tag for POLIN. I don't give a SHIT about a male love interest other than Colin. Not one. Not a shred. Not an iota.

and also. . .Debling has the 'benefit' of not having depth, or character traits, or HISTORY, so peeps can project onto him however they want, but I'm calling it now, there is NOTHING he could do or be that would make me like him more than Colin. Colin will always hit different, and I will always love him more. and if Pen's not on that same page? lol bye

you want me to believe Penelope and Colin are soulmates and it's romance for her to hem and haw about how difficult a decision it is for her to marry a stranger who knows barely anything about her. . .

when Marina was out here dropping banger lines like 'You were the only man with which I could see myself being happy' and 'I do not care about any of these men, where is Colin?'? like hello??? and she wasn't even fully in love with him!!!! but we'll demonize her until the cows come home in our fandom and make her the villain in Polin's love story for DARING to get in between Polin, yet Debling, a white man, is a darling dear perfect prince for getting in between Polin? existing in our fandom solely so Penelope can be like 'lol, Colin ain't shit, let me entertain any and everyone else'?

if that's the direction it goes then, ten toes down and on my mama, she doesn't deserve Colin and she can move because I'm on my way to court him my damn self

and that's that on that

[nintendont2502]

my only fandom Hot Take (tm) is that, as long as you aren't interfering with other people's enjoyment or telling them theyre wrong, there's genuinely no wrong way to be a fan of something. yes this includes people who mischaracterise and otherwise change characters so much theyre basically their ocs, or who've never read/watched/played the source material, or who focus exclusively on shipping or aus or whatever the fuck else. fandom is for fun at the end of the day. who cares how you do it

[fazgoo-connoiseur-1987]

The idea of discourse around FNaF theories or interpretations is so funny to me cus this franchise has the plot foundation of fuckin' swiss cheese. Nothing means anything you can literally do whatever you want. Free reign, baby.

[eddiemunsonsmum]

Just saw this comment on a story posted a month ago.

*cries in Eddie Munson Solo Series no one wanted to read, interact with or request for*

No shade to the person that commented this on their own fic if you recognize it. It's not their fault. I'm not mad at them. More crying in the tags.

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

You know, I'm glad that some of us take the step to embrace things that we like even if they're "cringe" or "objectively bad"

But perhaps we could take the next step forward and embrace the idea of reading into books/shows/movies/etc even if they don't seem deep. Perhaps we could understand that the two kinds of media aren't either "shallow and meaningless so you're weird and brainrotted to read into it" or "incredibly and profoundly deep in every way so if you don't analyze every single angle of the thing then you're brainrotted". Some media is deeper than others, but all I propose is that no matter how deep it seems it's acceptable to dig into the thing and take the media seriously instead of just assuming that because of ____ thing (such as target audience or how cringe it is) the media not deep and will never be deep and everything good about it happened on accident.

[cadybear420]

Look, I completely understand that plenty of m!MC players (mlw route players included) prefer to play their MC with more masculine or masc-associated behaviors. Like, I'm about as "All MCs should have options in how you make them act/behave" as you can get, it's really that simple.

But there's a HUGE difference between "I like to play mlw routes and I personally prefer my MC to have the more masc roles, I'd like MCs to be written with those options" and "MC behaving effeminitely or having more fem roles even with a m!MC/mlw route makes no sense and is poor coding for m!MCs". If you want more options for how MCs behave then I 100% sympathize with that, but the moment you start crying about how "unrealistic" or "behaving like a woman" it is for m!MC to giggle or cry be saved by the LI or whatever the fuck, it's very difficult to take that seriously.

[sisterdivinium]

I'll be posting a little drabble party starting on Dec 8th and ending on Dec 15th to try and explore some other relationships and dynamics between the characters of the show we love.

Here's the schedule if you want to keep up (or even post something of 100 words for the same pairing along with me!):

Dec 8th: Jillian/Suzanne

Dec 9th: Mary/Shannon

Dec 10th: Camila/Lilith

Dec 11th: Ava/Beatrice

Dec 12th: Ava/Lilith

Dec 13th: Ava/Camila

Dec 14th: Mary/Lilith

Dec 15th: Jillian/Suzanne

They will all be tagged "mini drabble regatta" since they deal with, well, ships :)

(yes, both Fridays are reserved for my traditional "doctor superion drabble Fridays", for those who are familiar with my blog -- I allow myself the liberty of giving my OTP emphasis :))

[leafy-m]

So I hit my 700th edit for the WHA wiki today, because I am a totally normal person

[mediawhorefics]

Here it is; https://www.wattpad.com/story/374122214?utm_source=ios&utm_medium=link&utm_content=story_info&wp_page=story_details&wp_uname=isadelrey111

i understand ur tired of this things, people being ignorant about permissions and everything.. couldn’t let this pass, no mercy with plagiarism lol

sending my love and the best for u<3!

i mean its not even a question of permission yk ? how fucking dense do you have to be that you don't understand that copy/pasting an entire text while changing the names is wrong ???? its so messed up. i spent a year of my life writing it. it's a labour of love. plagiarism is not okay. even if it's not of some copyrighted intellectual property.

anyways, thanks for giving me the link. i'll try and message them on wattpad and hopefully that'll be enough for them to take it down.

[seilon]

more and more it makes me kind of uncomfortable (for lack of a better/softer word) to call my own characters ‘ocs’. because like. they’re from a completely original universe and from completely original intertwined stories and all that. so why would i have to specify they’re original in the same way someone would when referring to a character they made for a pre-existing non-original universe/franchise/whatever? by that logic every fiction author ever would be referring to their characters as ocs rather than just. their characters. you know.

[choices-and-voices]

Okay, so we’re now up to Chapter 10 of Crimes of Passion Book 2, and I have Thoughts. Most of them are not evidence-based, and they’re also incredibly messy, but ruminating over them by myself is not making them any clearer & it’s gotten to the point where I’m bursting to hear some outside opinions. So, without further ado:

[1] I’m pretty sure that Sebastyan isn’t the murderer, but just a big red herring. We all know PB, we know how they love their plot twists, and they’ve presented Sebastyan as much too obvious of a suspect from much too early in the story. I might have accepted him as guilty if there was the opportunity for a plot twist about additional people being involved, like how Eleanor was the plot twist of Book 1. But this time around, we already know that there are additional people involved, because Book 1 ended with Juliana’s robed murderer phoning somebody whom they called ‘Your Majesty’. That could only really be Queen Viktoria or King Maksim – I guess it could be a foreign monarch, or a Thorne sibling who’s prematurely claiming the title of Majesty amongst their supporters, but those are very left-field options. So basically, the identity of the Big Bad behind the murders is already fairly obvious, and it seems unlikely that the identity of their robed minion would also be obvious at this point. On top of that, the motives that MC & Trystan have identified for Sebastyan are very personal – they really seem to be pinning everything on his personal conflicts with Juliana & Nadja – and that doesn’t gel with what we know about these being political murders overseen by a monarch. My gut feeling is that our crew will arrest Sebastyan, the monarch will encourage that because it hides their own involvement, but then something will happen to make MC & Trystan realise that there’s more to the story, and Sebastyan will end up becoming our ally as we defy the monarch to find the truth.

[2] Elaborating on the above – this is a bit of a stab in the dark, but I think that the major driver of the murders is the monarch being politically-conservative and trying to maintain the status quo. They had Juliana killed even after she withdrew from the Act for Heir Equity, because she was still a politically-progressive future queen & she also had sensitive information about one of Queen Viktoria’s children being illegitimate. They implicated Trystan in the death in order to have them exiled, because otherwise Trystan would have ruled progressively in Juliana’s memory. And then when Trystan returned, and wanted to revive the Act with Nadja, they had Nadja killed in order to prevent that. It’s such a simple explanation that covers all the facts, whereas if Sebastyan is the murderer, you end up with this convoluted theory that he killed people whom he politically agreed with just because they’d personally let him down. And by extension, if the murders were a politically-conservative power trip, then it makes no sense that a politically-progressive underdog like Sebastyan would agree to work with the monarch to facilitate them. I really do think that he’s innocent, and that it’s another one (or multiple?) of Trystan’s siblings who’s been doing the monarch’s dirty work. Which leads us to three very obvious follow-up questions:

[3a] Firstly, which monarch is involved in the murders: Queen Viktoria, King Maksim, or both? Viktoria is the obvious choice – we know that she’s strict & traditional, that shutting down the Act would protect her children above Duchess Eveline’s, and that shutting down Juliana would also ensure that said protection extended to her secret love child. I do think that it’d be cool if I’m wrong, and if Maksim is revealed to be rigid & ruthless under his warm exterior, but I honestly don’t think we know enough about him to even say if that’s plausible. The one thing that gives me pause is that, again, we know how PB likes to be surprising, and they’ve gone to so much effort to set up Viktoria as an antagonist, I feel like their ultimate plan might actually be to blindside us by pivoting to Maksim.

[3b] Next on the list of obvious questions – who is the robed figure who killed Juliana on the monarch’s behalf? This is maybe the most interesting of the questions to think about, because there are very limited options for the answer. It’s obvious that Juliana’s murderer is the Thorne sibling who courted her before Trystan – we even hear them using the Drakovian nightingale whistle to call her onto the yacht’s deck. We’ve decided to discount Sebastyan, so the only options in the right age range are Vasili, Lydea, and Astrid (Marguerite was only 16 when Juliana died, and the twins & Patryk are younger than her). Honestly, of those three characters, the only one whom I can see Juliana maybe dating is Vasili, and he has always been one of the siblings whom I found a little suspicious. There’s no real reason why – just the fact that he would be first in line to the throne if the Act passed & if Trystan was deposed, and he has always seemed almost unnaturally quiet & unassuming for somebody that close to the action (he is totally the kind of person to enjoy a Drakovian nightingale metaphor), and then we find out in Chapter 10 that he & Astrid knew where Trystan & Juliana were on the night Juliana died, because Trystan asked them to provide cover. Then again, Vasili has the most cast-iron alibi of all the siblings for the time of Nadja’s death, because he was with Marguerite (whom I refuse to even contemplate is a traitor, I know PB likes twists but there has to be a line). And that brings us to the final obvious question:

[3c] Were Juliana & Nadja definitely physically killed by the same person? I personally think it’s totally plausible that different people could have been acting on the monarch’s orders to facilitate the two deaths, or even that the monarch could have killed Nadja themselves. Honestly, I would find it awesome if this was a Murder on the Orient Express-type situation, where pretty much every Thorne is involved in some way and they’re all covering for each other. That’s a pretty wild theory, and it would make all our other attempts at prediction impossibly complex, so I’m not going to dwell on it too long. But it would be cool, right?

[4] Now that we’ve handled the really big questions, it’s time for some side-notes. I want to mention that I also find Patryk very suspicious, but I’m not sure if that’s because of the murders or because there’s something else shady happening with him. Patryk was ‘filming overseas’ at the time of both murders – which is an alibi, sure, but a very vague one, and MC & Trystan haven’t really tried to corroborate it. Everyone always overlooks him so much, it feels totally possible that he could have slipped back into Drakovia unannounced & killed somebody unnoticed. The only barrier to that would be that he does a lot of livestreaming, but like – is it ‘can’t-hide-what-country-you’re-in-for-even-six-hours’-level livestreaming? And have MC & Trystan even checked? On top of that, Patryk’s appearance is the most distinct of all the siblings’ – he’s the only one who doesn’t really look like either monarch – and he’s the most irresponsible of all of them but is still adored by the uber-strict Queen. I really would not be surprised if he’s her secret love child, and if he’s implicated in the murders either directly or indirectly because of her desire to protect him.

[5] While we’re on the topic of Queen Viktoria’s love child, I also want to theorise a bit about Trystan’s future on the Drakovian throne. We know that Trystan is personally concerned about being the love child, and I think the writers have done a good job of subtly setting them up as a candidate – it’s a similar-but-inverse version of what they’ve done with Patryk, with Trystan categorically looking like Viktoria while Patryk looks like neither parent, and Trystan having the rockiest relationship with Viktoria while Patryk has the smoothest. If Trystan is the love child, then that might end up being used as a plot device to get them off the throne and back in New York with MC. But on the other hand, given the whole storyline about the Act for Heir Equity, it feels like a big theme of the book will be how birth doesn’t make a good ruler, and I actually think the most likely outcome is that Trystan will end up being the legitimate heir, but they will capitalise on all the public discussion about the rules of succession to make it merit-based instead, handing over the crown to the sibling whom they think will rule best. I also think that, to really tie up all the story’s threads, there’s a strong possibility that this sibling will be Sebastyan. This is obviously all a huge stab in the dark, but it just feels really on-point for where the story is currently going, and it would also solve the complicated question of MC’s & Trystan’s future in a really neat way.

[6] Before I wrap up, I also want to shoot off from the idea of Trystan using the legitimacy question to revise the entire monarchy, and talk about how realistically the book portrays social progress. This is something I think was especially prominent in my playthrough because I have a female Trystan, and Marguerite made an interesting comment about how after Juliana got engaged to Trystan, Sebastyan & Nadja stopped trusting her objectivity about the Act, because it had turned into a way for her to ensure that her children could be considered heirs at all. After all, Drakovian law states that the heir must be descended from both rulers, but how is that meant to work when those rulers are two queens? This is a really interesting point because when you think about it for more than 2 seconds, the existence of same-sex marriage completely obliterates Drakovia’s succession laws, and that feels like a plothole until you realise that hey, similar things happen in real life all the time. I mean, Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1952, she ruled through increase after increase in women’s rights, and still nobody thought to change the law that preferenced sons in the line of succession until Princess Kate got pregnant and forced the issue, literally 60 years later. Basically, the implementation of oppressed peoples’ rights always reveals these glaring archaisms in our social structure that it takes decades for the world to wake up to, and to see that referenced in the book was really, really cool. I’m not even sure that it was intentional, and I don’t expect it be explored in any greater detail, but hey. It’s part of what has made the book thought-provoking enough to inspire this entire essay, and since you’ve read this far, I thought you might enjoy hearing about it as well 😊

[7] And finally, since you’ve stuck with me this long, one last thing – I feel like we’re all sleeping on the fact that Duchess Eveline’s surname is Goncharov, because given how terminally online PB is, that has to be foreshadowing for something. That’s it, that’s my final point 😅