#people always look at me weird

[heyitsspaceace]

don't let their seemingly straight-passing tension fool you, they are still very gay and dysfunctional

[introspectivememories]

was it casual when i sat in your lap in public? was it casual when i said "recently my heart is crying because you're leaving"? was it casual when we decided how your last name would fit with mine? ("yuki tsunoda-gasly" / "no tsunoda, only gasly" / "yuki gasly?") was it casual when we sang adele's "someone like you" together at your going away party? was it casual when i knew it was you just by touching your ass? was it casual when i knew it was you by smell alone? was it casual when "will you miss me?" / "for 2-3 minutes maybe" / "i'll take that. even if it's just 2-3 minutes, i'll take that"? was it casual when that bus was completely empty and we still sat right next to each other, all the way in the back? was it casual when i picked you up multiple times so you could dunk a basketball? was it casual when i begged to come over to your house multiple time and then you finally let me and we cooked fried rice together? was it casual when we played christmas twister together and i said "your big eggplant is touching my ass"? was it casual when we were pressed up against each other on a scooter going two miles per hour? was it casual when-

[aroaceleovaldez]

What is the PR disaster in question that made Rick announce TSATS? I wasn’t active in the online fandom at that point

Of course! This was awhile ago so it figures people don't remember it/aren't familiar:

Basically a couple years back (2020) the fandom had some posts circulate discussing the ways different characters in the Riordanverse were written poorly or offensively. There was a masterpost that went around tumblr but the two major points people were particularly focusing on were Piper and Samirah (particularly because Piper had featured prominently again in Trials of Apollo recently and the third MCGA book had further emphasized and discussed Samirah being Muslim, since it was supposed to take place during Ramadan). Basically each had multiple posts breaking down the ways they were depicted incorrectly or offensively. The entire fandom for a little bit was VERY intensely discussing this (and it's around this time the "RR crit" tag got very popularized on tumblr - it did exist before, but suddenly was being used VERY frequently - cause it was that wide-spread - though the discussion took over basically every side of Riordaverse social media on different platforms). People really wanted Rick to respond to these criticisms, so he did!

He made two blog posts, one about Piper and one about Samirah. He has since deleted both so the links are to archived versions. The short version: he essentially tried to justify his poor research and double-down that he hadn't written them offensively, actually, people were just being mean to him. The fandom, of course, reacted poorly to this.

[Further elaborated events under the cut since this got a bit lengthy]

(Fun fact, this all happened within a month or so of the time i posted an open letter on aphobic tropes in the Riordanverse that Rick replied to, and then he immediately followed with announcing that Reyna was intended to be ace-coded [which cause a LOT of fandom debate] before Rick dipped for a couple of weeks, and then came back to post the blog posts in response to Piper and Sam stuff. So I like to jokingly refer to this as "The time I imploded the fandom/drove Rick off of twitter." Twas I that set the house ablaze.)

Rick fully left social media after this and the LT Musical social media manager became Rick's social media manager for the time being.

So this all happened June/July of 2020. Tower of Nero would end up being published in October of 2020 and a few months after that Rick would state that he was done with the series and wouldn't be writing any more series installments involving Percy, and also that he wouldn't be writing a Nico quest following Tower of Nero as it "wasn't his place to" and encouraged the community to write their own versions of Nico's story.

The community continued to circulate the tumblr posts and discuss the topics of Rick's offensive character depictions, and this is also where we see the dramatic shift in how the fandom depicts Piper in fanwork (though in most cases it is admittedly not an improvement 😬) because of all this discussion. This is also around the time when the fandom brought Viria under scrutiny claiming that she was whitewashing Piper as part of the same discussions, through the justification that she was drawing Annabeth as having tan skin (which she does canonically), and if Annabeth has tanner skin then Piper then that's whitewashing Piper? Except they were using completely separate images of not fully rendered Piper art versus Annabeth in dramatic lighting, so it's all very awkward and poor logic, and did actually get kind of racist. A lot of people were calling it "Tannabeth Blackchase" (yeah, i know) or similar and a common sentiment you'd see repeated is "Don't draw Annabeth as having darker skin than Piper, because that's offensive/racist/whitewashing." (Note: it was not phrased "don't draw Piper as having lighter skin than Annabeth" - we also won't get into certain offensive depictions of Native Americans, but I digress). But yeah, the Annabeth stuff in all that did not age well at all.

Anyways, in October of 2021 however Rick would announce that he was co-writing The Sun And The Star - with a lot of heavy emphasis on how Mark Oshiro works as a sensitivity reader, and some false advertising from the official social media that Mark Oshiro was the first time a non-Riordan author would be collaborating on the series (disregarding the ghostwriters completely). One of the big criticisms in the breaking down of issues in Rick's writing was his lack of ever seeking a sensitivity reader, and fans claiming that a sensitivity reader could solve a lot of the problems. This was basically Rick's "look! I totally listened!!!!" (though it did little to actually improve things, based on the book) and in TSATS as well Piper gets a large cameo at the end where the text very directly addresses a lot of points made in criticism of Rick's writing of her.

We also then of course got the CoTG trilogy later, explicitly stated to be for advertising purposes for the show.

So basically, short version: Rick came under scrutiny for a lot of offensive writing within the span of two months, made some bad blog posts doubling down about it, left social media. TOA ends. Rick says he wasn't going to continue the series/write what would become TSATS. Community celebrates the end of of the franchise but also continues to discuss Rick's poor writing and the blog posts at length. Rick suddenly announces TSATS and Mark Oshiro's involvement. Everybody gets distracted from being mad. Show announcement stuff also happens and the discussions peter out.

[bandtrees]

they would get divorced in one universe just to find eachother in another one

alternatively titled: sometimes you're the level-headed token flesh-head impulse-control-and-polycule-member of a stubborn, eccentric, and hearty telephone-headed drug addict, and there's cruelty in the world you deem fit to suicidally fight, and that either goes about as well as you'd expect it to, or you learn about love and the value of your life and junk along the way

[moeblob]

A lil guy !

[uncanny-tranny]

The thing that gets me about history and humanity is that you never know what is immortalized, and the things that will be immortalized are things you would never think.

I saw a person sharing a new tattoo, and it was one of Onfim's drawings. A boy who lived so long ago he is barely a blip now, but his drawings meant so much to people that somebody is now permanently marked in their skin with one of those drawings. Do you ever look at the things you make and just sit there and wonder if this is the thing that future people look at? Do you ever look at your art, your writing, your schoolwork, or anything that is yours and just wonder who will find it, who will fall in love with a piece of your humanity and become overwhelmed with emotion over? It's not unlikely. It's not totally unlikely that somebody will find a piece of you in the distant future and devoid of any other context of who you were will still love you because you were here. You were here, and you are still here, even hundreds or thousands of years later. Treat yourself with the same love that so many have for dear Onfim.

[syn0vial]

regrettably, neither is them being even a little bit ironic

[collophora]

haha I'll never finish this

but hewwo new followers <3

[basslinegrave]

last time i posted my messy sketches people liked them. so im posting this one do people want this

[bad-traffic-smp-ideas]

what if grian went through this blog for wild card ideas. what would you do if the effects started seeming reaaaaally familiar. what then.

I would cry. a lot.

[ganondoodle]

sometimes i wish i was one of those artist that make people go "this is a PAINTING???" or "with WHAT programm/medium???" but its just not what i can do or find fun :/

[fisheito]

found a baby yaku amidst the Sketchbook-glitch-corruption wreckage..... wondering if he flipped skin tones between black and red and everything in between until he saw his to-be-grandparents (and started mimicking THEIR skin tone....... )

[yardsards]

im like the lorax when it comes to women's body hair. we should let it grow.

[icewindandboringhorror]

I know this is just a silly bad quality random screencap of a screencap that I found on facebook lol, BUT it's a succinct enough image to easily describe the concept in a quick/accessible way hopefully :

-

(and of course, feel free to elaborate in tags, etc.! (especially elaborating about other senses as well.. can you "hear" in your mind just as well as you can "see"? taste? etc.) It's an interesting topic to me, as someone who's like a 4.5 at MOST lol. I'm curious what option will be the most common :0c )