#ro's bottomless salt mine

[kainissoable]

Side-eyeing that person who seems to think that Vorador's character flaws are him being polyam and a whore, then implicitly accused him of being heterosexual. Sorry you're insecure, boring and straight, I guess 🙄

[lancrewizzard]

Okay, before I start this little ramble, I want to make it clear that I'm not angry at anyone and this isn't intended as a vague post. A while back I went digging way, way back into some blog's "#rincewind" tag, and frankly going back to anyone's posts circa 2012 is asking to see bad takes, so this a purely self inflicted annoyance. But it's still niggling at me, so I'm going to air my grumbles and give my perspective.

The post in question was about how they hated how Rincewind was written in later books (specifically UA if I recall) and I was expecting it to go on to mention how The Embuggerance was having a clear impact on Pterry's writing by that stage. Instead, all the things they picked out just seemed to be obviously after-effects of trauma to me.

Rincewind is a coward. He is not brave. And yet he has been thrown into dozens of situations that no one should ever have to be in. You can call him brave for that or not, but the important thing is that he survived. He got out of those situations and spent the last 20-ish books of the series living a quiet life in a safe environment that nevertheless necessarily carried constant reminders of the trauma he'd been through. And, as is often the case in real life, this is where you see how badly he's gone to pieces. Many years down the line, his trauma still has physical effects on him (nightmares, skittishness, incontinence, scars). Whenever something new happens, his first instinct is to run because new situations have always meant danger. He has a little corner of the world where he is Safe, and doesn't want to leave it.

[goodgriefwhatanerd]

Fuck people who think x Duke shippers aren’t interested in a person’s looks and that somehow makes them ~deeper and more intellectual~. That man is fucking gorgeous and his voice is liquid sex. In short, I want that man’s body and I’m sorry you don’t have good enough taste to see how attractive he is.

If you don’t find him attractive why the fuck are you even in this tag. Get on our level and worship that body like he deserves.

[kainissoable]

Okay, fuck it. I’m too tired to hold back the tide of salt any longer. Not linking OP of the weapons grade bad take that’s been on my mind for days now, but I do feel the need to go through every awful part of the most insane LoK post outside of early 200′s DA in an attempt to cleanse my soul. It was this or re-traumatise my friends by trying to turn this into a mini-book club. Under the cut for obvious reasons, but if you want to join in on the salt fest, please feel free.

One sentence in and I’m already taking massive amounts of psychic damage and tripping over the number of red flags. “Lack of objectified females” BRO??? First off, there’s a lack of women in LoK full stop. Two, buddy did you see the designs used for half the female enemies in these games? Not objectified my arse. Third, “female” is not a fucking noun and only really creepy misogynistic fuckers use it as one. And speaking of misogyny, there’s simply too much to unpack with the aside about Umah, so we’ll just file that under yikes and throw out the whole bloody suitcase.

Second. Wow. Count the TERF red flags, everyone! “Sexless utopia,” completely ignoring things like, uh, 1) Vorador, 2) almost every town in Blood Omen having a brothel or two, 3) Utopia?? Nosgoth??? idk where to start with that. And once again we see the weird gender critical obsession with penises as if they mean something. I’m not saying the OP is a terf, but they’ve clearly been poisoned by radfem rhetoric to talk like that.

I’m going to go insane if I keep trying to read through this bullshit for the second time, but I’ll leave you with the fact that someone really wrote these words in 20-fucking-22. This person calls themself a feminist, folks.

[lancrewizzard]

I’ve seen a few people actually complaining about Ao3′s upcoming tag limit of 75, and I don’t know how to say this nicely, but if you’re one of those people, you either can’t use Ao3 or you don’t know just how many tags 75 really is. You see, tags are for telling people what your fic is about so the can find/avoid it. That means you tag relevant characters, not the person who turns up for one scene to have a chat and is then never seen again. It means you tag relevant fandoms and don’t add, for example, “Harry Potter” to a Good Omens fic which has Aziraphale drop a line about his friend Irma Prince.

Let’s take a hypothetical story which might need a lot of tags, say a big crossover fic, since they seem to be the ones which keep clogging up all the tags. I’ll accept there might be half a dozen major fandoms in there with a handful of characters from each one having enough of a role to be worth mentioning. That gets us up to 30. Accounting for one prominent relationship per fandom still doesn’t get us above 40. That still leaves another 30-odd freeform tags, while the average total number of tags is only 17. You can likely list relevant AUs, tropes, and the like in half that, and if it’s something really dark that somehow needs more than 20 trigger tags, you can still list more and chapter specific ones in the author’s notes.

I can’t describe quite how easy it is for a remotely competent AO3 user to use less than 75 tags. Under the cut, because I’m a petty bitch, I’ll do a breakdown of tags by someone who is not remotely competent.

First, feast your eyes on this wall of tags that takes up almost two whole screens (title, author, and description hidden to protect the guilty. sadly this is one of at least 4 they have like this)

Look at it. Let this wall of tags fill your soul and remember this isn’t an outlier, the (very small) fandom I found this in has had half a dozen similarly tagged fics added to it in the last year. This abomination has 178 fandom tags alone. That huge chunk of relationship tags? That’s what 63 tags looks like, and some people are saying 75 is too few?? Freeform tags add up to only 17, and absolutely none of them are characters.

All of this for a fic about 34k long, so let’s look closer.

1) They’ve tagged just about every animated Disney movie ever made, but also “Disney - All Media Types.” You do not need to do this. Tag the major properties and add the broader tag, so readers know other Disney movies are going to have a bit part.

2) I don’t know who the main characters are, you don’t know who the main characters are, and even if we did, we wouldn’t be able to find it in their character tag because they haven’t tagged a single character. Tag for your major players, maybe notable supporting characters if you feel it’s relevant.

3) Is the fic relationship centric? Which relationship? Who knows! if each ship listed gets equal page time, they get roughly 500 words each out of 34,000. You don’t need to tag every background relationship, especially if it’s canon since most readers will presume canonical relationships unless told otherwise. Only tag a relationship if it’s a major part of the story. Whether that means focusing on the romance or if them being a constant presence in the near background counts is up to you to decide. Just don’t do the nonsense this person did, okay?

4) Basically, I should have a rough understanding what’s going to happen and who’s going to be involved after reading the tags and summary. If that’s not the case, you need to do both better.

[kainissoable]

Ah, I see Jessica Neema (sweetprincessrenee) has found my Ao3. Only took her three years. I’m genuinely not sure if it’s more funny or more pathetic, but we could all do with a laugh/cringe to end the year on.

...I wonder if this is her way of celebrating our three year anniversary? If so, she’s about a week late.

[lancrewizzard]

If one more person starts running their mouth about how much they love Harry Potter on a post criticising Rowling for being a transphobic cunt, I’m taking a hammer to their face

[kainissoable]

“So Ro, what’s your advice for getting along in the LoK fandom?”

“Oh you know, the usual. Ship and let ship. Block liberally without starting an argument. And if you get a message apparently from an edgy 12 year old who’s just discovered what swearing is, it’s probably from a 40 year old Russian woman.”

[lancrewizzard]

Why is it that whenever trans men try to talk about our experiences and the specific problems and bigotry we face, there’s always some chucklefuck who crawls out of the woodwork going “actually sweetie, it’s all misplaced misogyny and general transphobia :) everyone knows trans men aren’t actually oppressed for being trans men :) I’m going to completely ignore all the vile bullshit every terf says about trans men because that contradicts the narrative I want to believe and this way I don’t have to pretend to give a fuck :) right below this post you’ll find one about how we have to listen to minority voices (just not yours)”

[kainissoable]

So a bit of fandom etiquette since someone absolutely smashed it into little pieces the other day on my Ao3 and I’m still a bit icked out.

If a writer or artist doesn’t say they’re taking requests, don’t send them a request out of the blue, it’s not polite. It’s downright rude when the thing you’re asking for is some fetish shit. Just don’t

Now I’m generally happy to get requests dropped in my inbox here, particularly if it’s from someone I know, and (adult) friends are 100% welcome to talk about weird kink stuff within reason and without any pressure that I actually write it. People are really not welcome to comment on my fics with requests of another chapter with a different kink, especially if I don’t even know you. Who does that?

I’m probably going to delete the comment and might even delete the fic because I still feel really uncomfortable from this. Congrats, random fucking weirdo, all your request has done has made me less likely to want to write weird stuff in the future. We all lose.

[lancrewizzard]

I really want to be excited for GO2, but even having a certain amount of cautious optimism for the series, my main thought is just “oh god, the fandom’s going to become completely insufferable again isn’t it”

At this point I think the Ao3 book tag is just unsalvageable and I’ve accepted and come to terms with that, but this is just going to increase the gap between old book fans and new tv fans trying to “correct” us about a book that’s existed for longer than half the fans.

[kainissoable]

I don’t want to be a bitch because fanfic is free, people put a lot of work into it, I know all of this. But it’s so fucking annoying to look at the MediEvil tag, see there’s a couple of new works, and then feel the crushing disappointment of them both being those fuckoff huge crossovers that can’t possibly have any sort of coherent plot. The sight of “No flames please!” outside of the hellscape of 00′s ff.net was what stole my final spark of life and shred of sanity.

[kainissoable]

In theory I don’t really care what fucked up shit people like quietly in private. My problem is that I’ve noticed a certain pattern in people I’ve met online who don’t care for fictional consent also disregarding the consent and boundaries of real people, which is often how I come to find out about their distasteful taste in fiction.

“Like what you like, just don’t make it my problem” only works if people respect the last thing.

[kainissoable]

I’m not going to tell anyone what they can or can’t think about a piece of media, but if you headcanon a character as mlm and portray him acting in predatory ways, it’s time to take a moment to take a good, long look at your own unthinking prejudices and the piece of media in question. Is you headcanon actually supported by the text or did it just seem right? Yeah, think about why that might be, especially if you aren’t mlm yourself.

[lancrewizzard]

Really can’t comprehend how exclusionists and transmeds over the age of like 17 can exist. How is it possible to be that divorced from the community you purport to be a voice for? How have you managed to avoid real, normal irl queer spaces for that long?

I live in Bumfuck Nowheresville, Terf Island, and yet people I know in real life include:

3 trans women, all at different stages of medical transition, one of whom is nonbinary

2 people who use multiple pronouns

more bi and gay men than you can shake a stick at

a lesbian who’s been out since she was about 15, and had short hair and an ear stretcher long enough beforehand to give us a hint

an ace person who had a lot of sex pre-pandemic

a sex repulsed person who isn’t ace

a transfem person who uses he/him pronouns who’s been part of the community longer than I’ve been alive

a demisexual het woman

a lesbian married to a bi woman, plus their daughter

a bi woman married to a straight man who’s still very active in the queer, swinger, and bdsm scenes

and I’m practically a fucking hermit.

What is these people’s excuse for being so wilfully ignorant about their own community? How can they claim to know who does and doesn’t belong when it’s clear they never once stepped out of their own heads, let alone into the community they’re so fast to exclude people from? I know we’re still in a pandemic, but got the fuck outside, please. I’d be embarrassed for you if I wasn’t too busy shocked by your own sense of self importance and galaxy sized ignorance.

[lancrewizzard]

I’ve seen a few posts about “we should show compassion to TERFs and maybe they’ll get talked around to basic human decency” and I get it, I really do. I hope it works for you.

But they’re part of a hate group that wants me dead, and frankly I’ve got to the point where the feeling is mutual. I’m not going to send anyone hate because I’m not a total piece of shit, but if I find out a TERF dies? Yeah, sorry I can’t bring myself to have even a shred of compassion for someone who wanted the same for me.