Question- If you take a preexisting fictional character in a fandom but either add things to them or change them to the point where they are difficult to recognize, is that an oc?
Especially for fictional characters that have very little canon material to go off of- you can keep their name, their time period/fictional world, and some of their canon actions but add enough to make them a fully fledged character, leaving them unrecognizable to anyone but the most hardcore fans of said character
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I'm thinking about Tumblr Live again and ruminating on WHY it's such a huge flop and I think I've figured it out: They've completely refused to make it a tumblr feature...
By which I mean (begrudgingly goes to unsnooze Tumblr live) this:
^This is meant with zero insult or derision to the people above, but these are absolutely not Tumblr users.
Every single thumbnail I've ever seen for Tumblr live seems to say "This is for clout!" "This is for a thirst trap!" "This is for influencers!" "This is for Tiktok wannabe stars!" "This is for showing your pretty filtered face and reaping what people on Instagram and Tiktok are desperately chasing!"
I'm remembering that Reddit has (or had) livestreams you could tune into like this. I've tapped into some. Ones I remember offhand include:
a guy just wandering around downtown in his city silently showing people the streets and stuff
a guy streaming his attempt to beat the last level of Celeste
a guy streaming his dog he was petting
And that, that was Reddit. That was undoubtedly just regular Reddit users going "oh stream feature? yeah okay. here's my dog." "here's my video game." "here's my street corner in Prague."
And when I think of all the recent successful Tumblr features, they're all things that correctly tapped into actual Tumblr user interests. Blaze had people go "haha yeah here's my dog." "here's my advertisement for a horse lawyer (lawyer who is a horse)." They let us buy crabs because, fuck it, crabs. The blue checkmarks were funny. Polls turned into the fandom brackets people have desperately wanted to make for a decade+. I'd wager the merch that calls on old Tumblr memes is at least decently successful.
If Tumblr Live wanted the chance to be successful, it should have been angled toward Tumblr users. "Here, you can livestream your cat if you want." "You can livestream yourself working on some fanart and chatting." "You can livestream yourself going bird watching because birds are your hyperfixation and you can identify them all by their song to all your followers who want to tune in for bird facts."
But Tumblr Live has never tried to be that. It ONLY seems like it wants to be a Tiktok-clone, Instagram-clone, clout-chaser baited-hook trying to pull converts over from Tiktok/Insta/etc who are trying to grow their influencer brand, which Tumblr is lethally hostile to.
(And ALL of this is only touching on the concept behind what's happening here. I haven't even touched on the third-party streaming service and questionable data protection.)
Like fine, I guess I get it from a business model of trying to grow your userbase--since catering to your existing userbase doesn't pull in new meat. But this will not work. Because anyone, tumblr-native or not, trying to grow themselves as an influencer will NOT find success here. This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. We will not watch your Shein haul stream.
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thinking about the poll about canon vs non-canon ships that didn't define terms, and the current fandom focus on things "going canon," so i made up a scale.
this is NOT a question about whether canon matters to what you ship (or matters at all), just how to define the phrase "canon ship."
many ships start low on the scale and slow burn their way up, so vote for the point when you would have called them "canon." i agonized over the order (especially #4-6) for a day and a half, but i went with the order in which i think joe random with a nielsen ratings box and no tumblr account would notice/call something a romantic relationship.
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being in true sexyman nostalgia mode today (on account of. IT'S BEEN ONE YEAR BABY.) i think one of the most fascinating things about it is that we will never manage to do that again. like, not in a "we couldn't organize it better" way; there were better ways to do the spreadsheet, we would just turn off comments on posts and anon asks from day one so that we wouldn't then get people accusing us of censorship while we tried and failed to control the tide of things that ended up in the comments and inbox, we'd definitely have a WAY higher non-hermit contingent, both thanks to qsmp and thanks to the sexyman blog and medusa now having MUCH wider reach to other corners of the fandom and the original spread not all rooting at me, etc.
but the reason we couldn't do it again is that i don't know if we could ever replicate the exact circumstances that lead to it blowing up quite to the extent it blew up.
it was while tumblr polls and doing tumblr poll brackets on tumblr itself was still new-ish, and people were still excited about them. the idea of a mcytblr bracket was basically brand new; i won't claim we did it FIRST (because i have no idea if we did and doubt we did), but certainly we did it big first. so there's that; we can never again invent in real time "shit people are sending us threats about fraud lets legalize fraud because its funny, we can't stop it, and that neutralizes that drama as a thing anyone will take seriously", and then in turn accidentally invent a fandom culture of. um. wide-spread voter fraud.
(i don't know if we should apologize for, uh, causing the specific way mcytblr voter frauds. i still think it was better than the alternative at least, especially after seeing how so many other polls crashed and burned after us. there were MANY things we could have done better but i have seen SO MANY ways we could have done things worse since then so i think we came out looking pretty okay.)
but also: february 2023 was a very different time in mcytblr. we were in a hermitcraft dead period, where most of the hermits were either on vacation or playing tcg (which was fun, but didn't end up generating that much fandom activity by that time in february). the former dsmp crew was very much doing Nothing (and in that awkward space when the entire fandom knew dsmp 2 was never happening, but also people were still claiming it would happen, so it was just... busy waiting). qsmp didn't exist yet. there was no ongoing life series and wouldn't be for some time. i think even the dominioners and lifestealers were in a fairly dead zone. there was very little new for people to be excited about, mcyt content-wise.
enter: our poll. our poll which cleo then thinks its funny to call out on twitter. our poll, which was not only new mcyt content for the fandom to interact with (thanks to the fact we KEPT GETTING CC INTERACTIONS???), but participatory.
for about two weeks, we were the mcyt event de jour.
and like. the thing is. now we're in february 2024. mcyt is BOOMING. a new hermitcraft season JUST STARTED. we came off of vault hunters before that. meanwhile, qsmp just restarted and is, if i'm understanding correctly, booming. they just added a new guy! the two current juggernauts of the fandom are in FULL SWING. i honestly think we'd be somewhat overtaken by the fact things are actually happening in fandom. there's stuff to do that ISN'T go insane about a poll.
and it's not new, and we've seen it all before now, and frankly, it's hard to cause a mass hysteria event TWICE. lightning in a bottle, as they say.
i think part of the reason we all just REMEMBER mcytblr sexyman so much is that we could never, ever recreate it, so it remains crystalized in a single moment in time, impossible to replicate, forever memorable.
anyway: HAPPY ONE YEAR TO THE JOE HILLS SWEEP BABY,
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Welcome to the Unofficial Top Tumblr Relationships Bracket!
Many people on Tumblr might have engaged in the practice of "shipping" in relation to "media". Some, according to legend, even have opinions on these matters.
If the above happens to apply to you, you might be eligible to vote in this bracket! We have pitted the most popular pairings of the 2023 Tumblr Year in Review against each other to see who will emerge victorious. Round 1 polls drop on Saturday, April 20th at 1PM PDT, and will run for a full week.
Check current vote counts here!
Further information is below the cut!
How was the bracket made?
This bracket was made based off Tumblr's 2023 year in review ship list, and edited to fit into a workable bracket. Matchups were seeded according to ranking on the list.
What are your stances on voter fraud, campaigning, bribing people with drabbles and/or art, etc?
Enthusiastically in favor, although we do ask that you don't DDOS Tumblr, and ideally don't commit any murders that can be traced back to us.
Why aren't there platonic relationships in this bracket? There were in the AO3 one.
The AO3 data we were working with included all kinds of relationship tags, including platonic ones. The Tumblr year in review top ship list does not.
I have an issue with [x] being included in this poll.
This poll is a celebration of fandom and fandom history; we're aware that there are certain issues with some of the listed pairings and sources, but they are a part of that history. Please do not take this as an endorsement of anything included in the bracket, and refrain from harassment.
In general, please remember that this is intended to be a fun time for the wide community which is fandom culture, and treat each other with respect!
Bracket Schedule!
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Alright, so this is legitimately something that I have wondered about for a long time, so I figured that I would finally make a poll about it to hopefully satiate my curiosity
If y'all could reblog, I'd appreciate it! I almost always look for the fics with the most kudos, but I'm curious what everyone else does when looking for fanfics! Sorry if your way is not listed, I ran out of options, ha. Feel free to elaborate in the tags too! As a fic writer, It's interesting to me to see how people choose the fics they read.
Also, this is mostly based on the tag system that AO3 has since that's what I'm interested in. If you choose mostly based on the summary or something else, please mention that in tags!
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