#sorry for being obnoxious with the tags but people need to know about this show

[deadwinpayne]

If you love any of the following shows, please check out Dead Boy Detectives (at least watch the trailer)

The Sandman (obviously), Good Omens, Supernatural, Shadowhunters, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Lockwood & Co, Teen Wolf, The Umbrella Academy, Sherlock

[cece693]

Hello (Joe Goldberg x Male! Reader)

Hello. So after however many years, I've decided to begin watching YOU and fell in love. I know Joe's psychotic and a stalker, but how can you look at him and not see a cinnamon roll :)

Summary: A new customer has entered the bookstore and, unsurprisingly, caught the attention of Joe Goldberg. After his disappointment with Beck, can M/N be his one true love?

tags: love at first sight, Joe feeling possessive over male reader, however male isn't what he seems, flirting, fast fast-paced relationship, no smut but hints at it

Hello. And who might you be? Joe’s eyes followed the man. Browsing each aisle with sharp eyes, obviously searching for something but not wanting to ask for help. Dressed in a formal shirt and trousers, it’s clear you work in an office—or perhaps you simply like dressing up. Do you enjoy the attention—the stares that follow you in awe of your beauty? Or perhaps it's a disguise to hide your self-consciousness?

Joe was so focused on analyzing the new customer that he didn’t notice Ethan joining him at the counter, following his gaze. “Wow, what’s up with the weather? First that chick, and now him?” Ethan’s voice broke through Joe’s thoughts, causing him to drop his stare. “What was her name again?” he whispered to himself, snapping his fingers obnoxiously.

Beck. Guinevere Beck.

The person he thought would be his perfect companion was an utter disappointment. When Joe first met her, she seemed perfect—intelligent, charming, and full of life‚ but as time went on, cracks began to show. Beck was just an image she crafted from the people around her, constantly making the wrong choice in matters of her life. Joe tried to fix her but she’d failed—choosing recklessness over stability, lust over love. 

Before Ethan could probe further, the new client approached the front desk, holding a book. "I'd like to purchase this." he said, his voice smooth and confident. There was a hint of amusement in his eyes as he glanced between Joe and Ethan as if he’d heard their conversation from across the room. For the first time, Joe was grateful that Ethan picked up on the unspoken tension, making a half-hearted excuse to leave the counter.

Joe looked up from the book and met the man’s gaze. There was something magnetic about him that he couldn’t ignore. “Finding everything you need?” he asked, his voice carefully neutral, though his eyes betrayed his interest.

The man released a knowing smile that made Joe’s pulse quicken. “I think I’ve found what I’m looking for.” he replied, his gaze never leaving him. There was no mistaking the double meaning behind the man’s words. Swallowing nervously, Joe placed the book in a bag and grabbed the money from the client’s hand. He was thrown off balance; no one had been this direct with him before. It was typically him doing the chasing, the planning—did the man have an ulterior motive? Was he sent by Beck?

The silence wasn’t missed by the stranger, who quickly retracted, his expression softening. “Sorry if I’ve made you uncomfortable.” 

“No, it’s fine,” Joe said, forcing a small smile as he handed the bag over. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” His voice was steadier now, though his heart still raced. “I’m just not used to people being so…upfront.”

“Well, I don’t like wasting time.” The man said with a hint of playfulness. “But I also don’t want to push if you’re not interested.”

Joe’s mind was still reeling, but he couldn’t deny the pull he felt toward this stranger. There was something about him—something different, something that made Joe want to take the risk. “I’m interested.” Joe admitted, his voice barely above a whisper, as if saying it out loud made it more real.

“Good.” the man replied, a glint of satisfaction in his eyes. “Because I’d really like to get to know you better.” Joe nodded, the words lingering in the air between them. He still couldn’t shake the feeling of uncertainty, but there was something about this moment that felt right. Maybe this stranger was the one meant for him. “I’m M/N, by the way.” 

“M/N.” Joe repeated, letting the name settle in his mind. It rolled off his tongue heavenly. M/N Goldberg. Perfect. “I’m Joe.”

Seeing another customer heading their way, Joe watched as M/N reached into their pocket and pulled out a card. “Here’s my number. Give me a call sometime.” 

Joe took the small piece of paper, feeling its weight in his hand. Without another word, M/N turned and left the store, the bell above the door jingling softly as he disappeared from view. Ethan soon returned and began to babble about M/N’s suaveness, yet Joe barely registered his words. His mind was consumed by how M/N made him feel. It was strange being on the receiving end of flirting, but Joe found it exciting and arousing. 

It didn’t take long for Joe to call M/N and much less for them to somewhat fall into a relationship. It was never dull—M/N had a way of keeping Joe on his toes, setting his skin on fire with mere words. They kissed only once, a heat-of-the-moment thing as they were walking back to the car after a dinner out. It was brief but electric, leaving Joe wanting more. And today, he was ready to take the next step. Joe had spent enough time letting M/N lead the way, always waiting for him to initiate. It was only fair that he returned the favor.

They had planned to meet at M/N’s apartment tonight, under the guise of watching a movie, but even before M/N could greet him after opening the door, Joe launched himself at the man, kissing him passionately. The impact made M/N stagger back, his hands instinctively grabbing onto Joe’s hips for balance.

“I want you.” Joe murmured, drawing back just enough to speak, his breath warm against M/N’s lips. His eyes were dark with desire, the usual careful composure nowhere to be found. 

M/N blinked, taken aback by the intensity of Joe’s actions, but a slow, appreciative smile spread across his face. “Well, that’s a hell of a greeting.” he teased, his voice low and husky. But the playful tone didn’t mask the heat in his gaze as he pulled Joe closer, their bodies pressing together. Joe didn’t respond with words. Instead, he captured M/N’s lips again, pouring all the pent-up emotion and desire he had been holding back into the kiss. It was hungry, almost desperate, as if he was afraid that if he didn’t act now, the moment would slip away. 

Finally, M/N broke the kiss, both of them panting for breath. He looked at Joe with a mixture of amusement and arousal, his eyes flicking to the open door before returning to Joe’s flushed face. “We should probably get inside before the neighbors get a show.”

Joe nodded, a small, breathless laugh escaping him as he realized just how quickly things had escalated. He stepped back, allowing M/N to close the door behind them. But the moment the door clicked shut, something inside Joe snapped. He grabbed M/N with sudden urgency, pushing him onto the couch with a force driven by pure, uncontainable desire.

Straddling M/N, their lips met again in an all-consuming kiss, filled with a desperate need that neither of them could deny. Clothes were discarded carelessly, tossed aside without a second thought—every touch, every kiss, sent shockwaves through Joe’s body, intensifying the fire that burned within him.

As he looked down at M/N, taking in the sight of his swollen, ruby-red lips and the way his hair had become a tousled mess, something primal surged within him. M/N looked utterly irresistible, and the thought of anyone else seeing him like this, touching him like this, drove Joe wild with possessiveness.

“You’re mine.” He murmured, his voice thick with emotion as he traced his fingers along M/N’s jawline, his touch both tender and demanding. 

M/N’s eyes darkened with desire, a small, knowing smile curving his lips. But instead of responding immediately, he shifted beneath Joe, his hands gripping Joe’s hips with a firm, commanding touch. “Are you sure about that?” M/N asked, his voice low and challenging, a playful glint in his eyes. “Because I’m pretty sure it’s the other way around.”

Before Joe could respond, M/N took control, flipping their positions so that Joe was the one lying on his back, pinned beneath him. The sudden shift made Joe’s heart race, the thrill of being overpowered sending a shiver down his spine. M/N hovered over him, his gaze intense, his smile widening as he saw the effect it had on Joe. “You like it when I take charge, don’t you?” M/N whispered, leaning down to brush his lips against Joe’s in a teasing kiss, barely giving him a taste before pulling back.

“Say it.” M/N commanded softly, his voice steady and authoritative. His hands trailed down Joe’s sides, his touch both possessive and tender. “Tell me you’re mine, Joe.”

Joe’s eyes fluttered shut, his body responding instinctively to the command in M/N’s voice. “I’m yours.” he whispered, the words barely audible as he surrendered completely to the moment. “Only yours.”

“Good,” M/N replied, satisfaction evident in his tone. “Because I don’t like sharing.” He captured Joe’s lips in a searing kiss, his hands exploring Joe’s body with a confidence that left no doubt about who was in control.

[yanderemommabean]

You know a concept stardew fans seem to not bring up? How wonderfully pathetic Yandere Clint would be. Like he is such a pathetic and insecure guy but I have a feeling he can become dangerous if in the right circumstance. Like we know he’s a blacksmith and you’ve even mentioned he’d make cuffs/chains. So what if he decided enough was enough and chose to take his beloved for himself.

I can already imagine how it happens; After so many years of pining for Emily, he’s grown tired of being alone and can’t work up the nerve to talk to her… But then a charming new farmer arrives and he can’t help but fall head over heels! He tries to deny his love for the farmer since he doesn’t want his years of loving Emily to feel like they went to waste, but the farmer seems to naturally grab his attention. He starts using his crush on Emily as an excuse to ask for the farmer’s help, but in actuality just wants to get close to them.

But naturally, the farmer has both men and women fawning over them and Clint feels threatened by this. He closes up out of fear of rejection and is terrified that he’ll end up pining for the farmer just like Emily. He doesn’t want this and decides that his only course of action would be to take the farmer away from everyone else.

(Sorry if you’re not up for discussions of stardew valley, I just remembered seeing one of your posts during my dive into the tags)

Omg??? I can’t believe I never considered this option. I’m not the biggest fan of Clint but he hasn’t really done anything for me to hate him, so this really puts him in a new light!

He really does just want someone to love him and once he finally gets someone to show even a shred of attention to him, he makes sure to hold an iron grip. He doesn’t want to hurt the farmer, not ever, but sometimes in order to have what you want you have to do some…questionable things.

Such as spreading rumors that you up and left once the bus was fixed, finding the town horrible and the people obnoxious. The whole town is left broken hearted and bitter about it but Clint seems more or less unphased. Swears he’s just not that attached to you and you leaving was sad but won’t hurt his life.

They all go with that lie too. They don’t question the banging coming from his shop because well, he’s a blacksmith, heavy clanging and banging is apart of the job. They don’t pay attention to certain marks and scars along his arms either, probably just apart of his job too, accidents happen.

Gunther started poking around a bit too much but a brutally busted display and some broken museum artifacts made him stay in his place. He didn’t know who did it, but his job and reputation isn’t worth the risk.

All of this while you’re locked in a new addition to his shop, beneath his bedroom, nice and locked up where no one can take you. It’s nice that you’ve learned to stop screaming for help, your poor throat used to get so sore!

It’s nice to have all this alone time with you too. Most of the town stays away from his shop, not really needing anything unless they want to sell some odds and ends. Just you, and him, and all the time in the world.

-Mommabean

[kisisbie]

No Strings Attached | 1

Chapter Index - chap 1 , chap 2

✰ Satoru, your childhood best friend, invited you to come skating with him on the outdoor rink. You were excited about the activity, until Satoru had mentioned a certain someone would also be tagging along.

✰ authors note- This is my frist time ever writing a fic, please let me know what you think. I am open to constructive criticism! Hope you guys enjoy 🫶

Word count- 1.5k

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

It wasn’t the chilly weather that bothered me, or the loud bang of pucks being shot against the boards, it was Suguru Geto.

The outdoor rinks had only just opened, so of course I knew there’d be a load of people playing on them.

“Why does he constantly have to invite Suguru.” I mumbled to myself, biting my cheek as I stood, skates in hand with the hockey stick I borrowed from my dad.

Sighing, I walked through the small path leading to the rink, snow crunching under my boots. As I got closer to the icy bench, I noticed there wasn’t anywhere to tie my skates.

Now standing over the bench covered in mismatched boots and bags, I looked around making sure no one would notice me aggressively knocking off the equipment on one side.

I sat placing my bag down beside the bench and stuck my hockey stick into the mound of snow behind me. Kicking off my boots, I opened my bag grabbing my skates that were very much in need of a sharpening, when I heard a loud slam against the boards, followed by a familiar voice calling my name.

I whipped my head upwards, eyes blown wide as I looked for the only person I knew it could be. He called again before I realised that it was in fact , Satoru who had thrown some poor stranger into the boards.

When our eyes met he smirked, his bright blue eyes squinting, “Finally decided to show up?” Gojo taunted, leaning over the edge of the rink.

I rolled my eyes, before looking back down as I stuck my freezing foot into my skate. “You already sending people to the hospital?” I scoffed in response.

Gojo snickered, “Just asserting dominance on the newbies.” He said jokingly as he pretended he was posing for a bodybuilding competition.

Just as I looked up to stress that it could have been a child, another boy with black hair skated by Satoru, smacking his ass causing him to turn around almost instantly.

“Cut it out Kamo!” Gojo shouted, throwing his glove at him, missing horribly.

Once I realised what had happened I burst out into a fit of laughter, Gojo turned back around, shaking his head, extremely unhappy with my reaction.

After managing to regain my composure I went back to tying up my other skate. Satoru decided to wait for me, leaning with his back against the boards.

_________________________________________

I hoisted my stick out of the snow, walking over to the rink door slowly so I wouldn't fall on my face in front of everyone.

I reached my arm over the door, trying to unlock it, creating lots of unnecessary noise as I struggle. Satoru noticed, looking over his shoulder, skating over to help open it.

He grasped the metal lever with his bare hand, opening it with no issue as he stood off to the side giving me room to step onto the ice.

I was so focused on not slipping while I was walking to the door that once I got one foot over the ridge, I slipped and fell into the splits.

Groaning out in pain, I pulled my other leg through the door along with my stick. Standing up as fast as I could, I frantically looked around to see if anyone saw my sorry attempt stepping onto the ice.

But of course, the struggle with the door had caught everyone’s attention beforehand. It wasn’t long before Satoru’s obnoxious laughter broke the silence, along with several others joining him.

Extremely embarrassed, I stood still as I rubbed my aching thigh. “It’s not that funny.” I spat glaring at gojo, ignoring the others because who am I to scold a bunch of strangers?

Gojo stood up straight, still heaving as he wiped away tears. “I’d be lying if I agreed with you.” He said, closing the door, before skating over to his previously discarded hockey glove.

Still rubbing my legs, I watched the other boys continue to giggle among themselves. Now feeling very unwelcome, my head dropped as I watched gojo skate over to the others.

I stood still for a moment debating just packing up and leaving, before a gloved hand rested on my shoulder. Flinching at the sudden contact I spun around to meet a wide eyed boy with short dark brown hair.

He greeted me with a warm smile, “sorry about that.” He started, pulling his hand away to rub the back of his head. “You uh, you alright? That was a pretty nasty fall.” His eyes shifted down to my legs, before coming back to meet my eyes with concern.

Still startled by this random confrontation, I got distracted by another boy standing behind him. This one was blonde and slightly taller, although he had a less approachable look to him.

Realising I completely ignored the dark haired boys question I quickly spat out an answer “Oh yea, me? I’m fine!” I smiled awkwardly hoping he would move on with the conversation.

He nodded, returning my awkward smile. For a moment no one spoke, other than the hockey boys on the other side of the rink.

I started to break eye contact, looking around before the boy started again. “You know gojo?” He asked, motioning to the group of guys.

“Been friends since 2nd grade.” I answered absent mindedly as I continued looking around.

Someone among the group of boys yelled over to the two boys that were with me. I didn’t quite hear what they said but the boy with dark hair seemed to.

He waved over the blonde boy before turning back to me, “Names Haibara by the way, and this is Nanami.” Nanami waved silently.

I hummed in response smiling at Nanami as they both skated off to the group, leaving me alone, awkwardly standing in the corner of the rink.

_________________________________________

All the boys on the ice threw their sticks into the middle, before they started picking teams. I watched them do this for a while, the boy named Haibara was separated from Nanami, but they didn’t seem to mind.

I knew Satoru was a D1 athlete, he was picked during one of his high school hockey games. There was no doubt he deserved it, he was an amazing player, both fast and strong.

Thinking back to the many games Gojo invited me too, I realised some of the boys were on his team. Noticing the matching jerseys some of the boys wore I internally smacked myself, of course they’re on the same team, they have the same jerseys.

As I was deep in thought, something hit my skate blade, causing me to trip. At least I didn’t fall this time, I thought to myself as I looked down, finding a puck at my foot.

Looking up in the direction that it came from, I found Gojo, with that goofy smile he always seems to have. “You gonna join us?” He yelled, waving me over.

I thought about joining for a minute, but my lack of experience with hockey and the fact that they were all practically born playing the sport was all too intimidating. Sure I could skate, and I know all the basics, but I didn’t want to embarrass myself any further. “I’m uh, I’m just gonna stay around the sides.” I yelled back feeling like a buzzkill.

Satoru gave me a thumbs up, turning around as he picked up a puck on the ground, handing it to an older man, who I had assumed took care of the rink.

I looked down at the puck next to my foot again, might as well enjoy my time here right? I held my stick with a different grip, and started “practising my stick handling ” like Satoru taught me a few years back.

Skating back and forth, I took the puck with me, I’d even say I was getting pretty confident with my skills. I smiled at the thought as I skated behind the net with my eyes focused on the puck.

All of a sudden I hear someone call my name, panicked, I look up from the puck, much too late though. A large figure came crashing into me, it felt like I was hit by a damn car, I thought falling onto my back as I squeezed my eyes shut.

With my eyes still closed I felt someone’s breath fanning against my forehead, along with the sound of people skating over, digging their skates into the ice as they stopped.

“Geto, you’re crushing the poor girl, get up!” An unfamiliar voice yelled. So Geto was the “car” that crashed into me, I thought, groaning as I opened my eyes.

I was met face to face with the same egotistical asshole I’ve unfortunately grown familiar with due to Satoru and his oddly close relationship despite both Geto and I hating each other.

Once he noticed who he slammed into, his face turned from apologetic, to completely uninterested as he scoffed, pushing himself up onto his feet.

I sat up, rubbing my head, great day not to wear a helmet, I thought. Looking around, slightly disoriented from the collision, I noticed that asshat didn’t even bother to help me up?

Every other person on the ice was surrounding me, making sure I was okay, and apologising on behalf of Suguru. Before finally, Gojo bent down, weaving an arm around my waist, and throwing my arm over his shoulder as he helped me up.

By now, almost everyone had rejoined the hockey game, except for the boy with black hair who smacked Gojo earlier, Gojo himself, and the two boys that were speaking with me when I “gracefully” fell onto the ice.

All of us were sitting on the bench together, as Gojo helped untie my skates. “How bout we all get hot chocolate, on me?” Gojo proposed, looking down to my skates.

I was the first to respond, “I would kill for some good hot chocolate right now.” I said almost too excited for the free beverage.

Everyone else with us had no complaints about the free hot chocolate either.

[kvaradonaa]

It's always exciting to read people's headcanons 👀

I'm so sorry I let this rot in drafts! I assume it was about my tags to this post, so I'll share some general characterisation headcanons. Obviously, while they're inspired by numerous articles and interviews, they're still my fictional headcanons, not facts about Sheva (unless I say otherwise). Under cut for lenght, not for any sensitive content.

1. He is surprisingly sensitive about self. He takes criticism badly and gets really defensive about it. He doesn't like being teased and made fun of either.

2. Despite that, he is still a people pleaser kind of guy. It's mostly fear of consequences. Him, and even more so his parents, grew up knowing that even saying the wrong thing can have terrible consequences. So, quite often, he'd just let others walk all over him (and try not to cry about it), because he is scared of crossing them.

3. Unless he knows he can do what he wants without consequences, of course. I mean, in real life, he did throw tantrums at his coaches from time to time. He definitely can be a bit toxic sometimes.

4. Speaking of throwing tantrums, he generally tends to have a rather childish way of expressing strong emotions, from anger and sadness, to happiness even. Not because he is childish in general, but because he never really learned a way to express them as an adult. Perhaps he felt like he was never allowed to.

5. Others don't seem to mind that very much. In real life, Ancelotti once described a situation in which Sheva banged on the door to his office, whining "You left me on the bench. You were wroooong." and honestly? From that description, he didn’t seem to mind, he found it funny and endearing even. So I guess there's something about him that just sparks some protective instincts in people.

6. He really likes to feel special. I imagine his self-esteem is surprisingly low for such a successful person, or rather it's really unstable. Sometimes he feels like he deserves special treatment. Sometimes he needs constant reassurance.

7. Related to the previous one, he gets way too excited about all the tiny signs that make him seem like he was chosen by fate, born to do great things, etc. etc. The way he, in real life, was excited about number seven in Hebrew 😂. (And the fact that he didn't choose it himself? But was given it by his teammate? And it's "sheva"! Must have been fate.)

8. All those headcanons might make it seem like I think he's a horrible person. Maybe in a way he is, but mostly he's just so lost, shaped by his experiences (maybe that's a thing for another post?).

9. In real life he claims he values freedom very much. In my headcanon it's a bit more complicated. He likes to believe that whatever he does is his own personal choice, but he finds safety and comfort in having others make decisions for him. But when he needs space, he's going to make it obvious... By not interacting with anyone.

10. Despite claiming to be a shy little boy that doesn't like luxury very much, he does like it very much. Maybe not in an obnoxious show-off way, but he likes designer clothes and expensive trips... and rich friends who can sponsor such lifestyle. Somehow he's always known how to get the latter.

[starry-eyed-never-satisfied]

Get to Know Me and My Obsession with KISS 🎸

Thanks for the tag @sluttery-withoutshame

1. Who is your favorite member?

Paul

2. Who is your least favorite member?

MSJ

3. Best album?

Ooh this is hard cause my favourite changes depending on my mood, but Revenge is usually up there.

4. Worst album?

I'm so sorry, I don't wanna be one of those people, but Monster

5. Favorite song?

Love Gun

6. Say one nice thing about each member.

Ooh only choosing one thing is hard! I love these guys soo much!

Paul- Only one! Okay, the soul of KISS, there would be no KISS without him

Gene- sweet lovable demon teddy bear!

Peter- energetic crazy idiot (positive)

Ace- baby girl

Eric C- such a sweetie

Vinnie-talented songwriter

Mark- ummm? Filled in the gap between Vinnie and Bruce

Bruce- the loveliest guy on earth

Eric S- friendly and fun

Tommy- loyal, sensible, stepped up when he was needed and has taken shit for that he didn't deserve

7. What do you dislike about each member?

Gene- Can take the obnoxious act too far sometimes.

Paul- Paul, my love, please stop being so critical of what you've done in the past. The Elder is a great album, let it go!

Peter- He was really bitter for a while (seems okay now though, hope that is reality)

Ace- Sorry Ace moots, but I really despise his attitude rn

Eric C- I wish he had been able to conquer his insecurities

Vinnie- a bit pushy in some of the interviews, answering questions that Paul or Gene should have been answering

Mark- yeah, I don't need to go into that

Bruce- too nice

Eric S- I've heard he talks a lot and i don't usually like people who talk a lot, so maybe that

Tommy- he's not Bruce! Sorry Tommy, I know it's not your fault

8. How did you get into KISS?

Sorry to anyone who's heard this story before! When I was 10 or 11 I saw the Crazy Crazy Nights music video on tv, and loved them!

9. Have you been to a concert?

3! (shoulda been 4 😡) 1997, Reunion, Auckland, 2008 Wellington, 2015 Auckland

10. Do you have any merch?

All the albums, too many t-shirts to count, books, figures

11. Unique thing you have related to KISS?

I don't know if I have anything especially unique. I have two of Paul's guitar picks, from the 1997 and 2015 shows and a copy of the Kiss my ass cd that is signed by Paul, Gene, Bruce and Eric (no they didn't sign it for me, I won it on a radio competition.

12. Who is/are your favorite lineup?

Paul, Gene, Bruce, Eric

13. What's your favorite era?

Revenge

14. What are your opinions on Tommy and Eric?

I love them! They stepped up, kept KISS going through the 21st century, and in all honesty I reper them to Ace and Peter. I would hae cried (not for joy) if they had been kicked off the stage in the last show to bring those two back

15. A question you would ask the band if you could?

I don't know that i can think of anything. I'd probably fall to my knees Wayne's Word style and go I'm not worthy!

16. What other bands/artists are you into?

Iron Maiden, Metallica, Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, Judas Priest, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath

17. Do you have a KISSona?

I'm not sure what that is

18. Who are some of your favorite blogs?

@ladyshandioftheendless @namelessbutters-doodles @elrohare @insanityisdivine @loveherallican-blog @tanookikiss @therockywhorerpictureshow @doctapuella @spacefoxy

19. If you could spend a day with one member who would it be?

Paul of course!

20. How would you explain the band to someone who isn't familiar with KISS?

I'm not good with verbalising my feelings, these guys are, after my family, my everything. People who dismiss KISS are missing out on a helluva lot.

[dennisboobs]

i just read your tags on the uncle jack post and you put into words what i've been feeling for a long time now! the gang used to be ignorant people doing evil shit, now they are self aware of what they are doing (i also agree that this is prevalent in meg's episodes) knowingly doing evil shit. it's as if the writers decided the audience is too stupid to understand what's happening and they need to now inject "this is all bad, actually" into the episodes and they do it by having one character comment on the behaviour of someone else in the gang. they have given up toeing the line and like you said and it's detrimental not only to the interactions between the gang, but the overall essence of what made sunny unique. their writing used to be so good and now it feels severly lacking (not all the time, but often imo)

(the post in question) sorry i took so long to answer lmao

yeah. yeah. its funny because i've talked about the opposite before (in the tags here), because i feel like it's specifically an issue in the gang gets new wheels (which is my absolute least favourite episode) where the gang SHOULD be doing exactly that; someone playing the straight man, but. yeah. i don't know if id say this is entirely meg specific - i do think it's an issue mostly contained to season 13-15, though. i think the difference between early sunny and late sunny is like. instead of watching the show take both sides on issues for comedy, or because.... it's something the character WOULD DO (dennis being self righteous), youre now watching the writers try to insert themselves to be like oh but WE dont think this, don't worry! thundergun 4: maximum cool is like. one of the worst fucking episodes for the Commentary Mouthpiece thing (conor galvin is 2 for 2 here) like. obnoxiously preaching via the characters who are just. reading a script instead of feeling like youre watching an episode featuring the gang.

[petitprincess1]

Sorry for being unspecific, I'm referring to the anon that said it's best to ignore anons specifically coming to you with aggression or starting discourse or whatever, and your response was something like, "They're the ones coming to my inbox, it's not like I wanna start discourse lol"

Like, my point is that you could very easily just ignore those types of asks. You're under no obligation to answer them, but you do so anyways, as well as put them in all the fandom tags. I think that's what that other anon was saying gets tiring to see over and over, and if I'm right in that assumption, I kinda agree with them. It just feels overly petty on both sides. (I'm not sure if the other anon was referencing a specific event or just discourse-causing in general, but I'm speaking more on the in-general side of things, I guess)

I get what you're saying, but I don't view some of the stuff that you may see as discourse. I'm guessing this is based on an anon I got telling me about Striker being OOC/poorly written. I didn't view that as discourse in my eyes, which is why I didn't really understand what that person was talking about. That's someone who was just speaking their mind, even if it was a little passionate.

The second anon that came afterward probs was a troll, but meh. A troll/bait is only successful when you give a shit and I've ran out of that lol. I play it off as a joke or not really caring, which is why I put the "tomfooleryy" tag in there. I don't feel it's discourse, just silliness/foolishness.

Plus, some "discourse" where it's misinformation or rumors or harassment, I want to nip in the bud as quickly as possible. I don't view that as discourse, just people spreading around crap that doesn't need to be. Especially when it comes to leaks going around in both fandoms. Yeah, it's drama, but I think that has more "danger", for lack of a better word, in the fandom versus opinions.

While I cannot promise that none of the discourse will be in the tags, I will say that the ones where they're clearly trying to piss me off won't be. I hope that's understandable. I just wanted to be as honest as possible.

Yeah, I know it can be petty, but I'm okay with forgoing some maturity just to show how obnoxious that troll is being.

[robo-mox-motley]

[Video ID: Gorg, a tall blue mech, runs forward brandishing the blunt grip end of his tank gun. He lifts the whole long gun upwards by the barrel before striking down on the top of a tank. The original sound of the tank being hit is replaced with a coconut bonk stock sound. End ID.]

Always Gorgin' time at Mox(ter)'s

Mox(ter) reporting. Firm believer that Pink Lady apples are superior to Honeycrisp. These are some things you might want to know. Or not, your choice ┐⁠(⁠´⁠ー⁠｀⁠)⁠┌

Things that keep me up at night:

The camaraderie of the Autobots in Armada.

This loser

How some versions of Ironfist are supposed to sound Aussie. Try rereading Last Stand of the Wreckers like that.

Tokyo Ska dropping a new song.

Trying to make up transforming figures in my head that don't exist for certain characters and getting annoyed the next morning. Only thing stopping me is lack of access to a resin printer.

I am Mox/Moxter and have been a bot nerd since I was an anklebiter. Mostly gung-ho about other stuff like practical effects, costuming, figures/models, 3D modelling, old tech, lizards, and birding. I do art a little too, but I’m not too fond of the idea of putting it out on here quite yet.

Couple years of Spanish under my belt but also picking up and learning bits of Japanese and Welsh when I can. Considering others like Yoruba and Korean for in the future, but sadly I suck sometimes and can be a slow learner. Someday, I guess. I apologize beforehand if you see my dumb ass getting long-winded about Tailgate (full reason being too long to explain here).

I’m generally invested into anything related to toy design—mostly TakaraTomy, HasTak, and Sunrise bot stuff is my focus though. I am hooked on the design development surrounding Binaltech and Alternators for better or worse.

And wouldn't you know, a bunch of car robots helped me to realize what I should re-prioritize my career track to be. That's the power of my dumb interests at work ( •̀ .̫ •́ )✧.

Got tired of updating which music artists I like at the moment, but I tend to stick to ELO, Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, hip hop, rock, metal, J-punk, ska, funk, and EDM. Q-Tip and A Tribe Called Quest are great too. I don’t mind getting music recs.

Delighted owner to my little shit of a gecko. A lot of what I reblog is aesthetic posts, robotic nonsense, and other things. If you want to go ahead and block some of my tags, I’ve got a list of them linked in my pinned post. I try to put alt text in the majority of images I upload. May need a poke on that though once in a while because I can’t remember everything.

Sometimes there's 18+ content though that's once in a blue moon and it gets tagged. Block the tag if you need to. Also be normal about bi and pan people, or I'm conking you on the head.

Please do not ask me my pronouns. Like sorry, but I don’t know you. Just use my name and no they/them-ing me if we aren't all too familiar. That's all I ask.

Don’t be stupidly obnoxious around here; shit-stirrers get Gorg'd:

Things I like or have watched/read. Not exhaustive. Strong favorites are bolded.

Games

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

Destiny (Well, it was good up until every update following Witch Queen)

Fallout 1, NV, 4

Guilty Gear ΛC+, Strive

Halo

Lethal League Blaze

Mass Effect

Rhythm Heaven

Subnautica

Titanfall

Comic Stuff

Astro Boy

Atomic Robo

Dai Dark

Dorohedoro

Hellboy/BPRD

IDW Transformers

Kaiju No. 8

Shimanami Tasogare

Shows

Brave series: Might Gaine, J-Decker

Farscape

FMA 2003

Giant Gorg

Lupin the III

Kamen Rider: Ichigo, Gaim, Zero-One

Stargate

Transformers: G1, JG1, BW, JBW, Unicron Trilogy, Prime, RID 2015, Cyberverse, Earthspark

My MAL profile (I forget to update it though)

Blocked and still rooting through here?

I applaud your tenacity, but I don't get it. Have a little cheer in your life and go watch Iron Leaguer or Kamen Rider or Beast Wars or something.

Signing out.

[minidoons]

whats up i am Also gonna send an ask because i have a lot to say that i didnt want to include in tags

aside from the different interpretations of swagdoons i think another way you can see the divide in lstwt and lsblr's ways of thinking are when it came to kab's like. post-consequences thing and her character portrayal WHICH WAS NOT THAT BAD but definitely had some flaws which lsblr pointed out. however you check lstwt and there is not a single criticism and if there is everyone hates the person who made it. idk just a red flag.

i think lstwt is just generally a lot less receptive to criticising characters and/or acknowledging that they are just not good people like they betray their team or whatever but lstwt just. ignores it?????

idk the thing that makes me obsessed with lifesteal is the fact that none of the characters are truly Good People but some of them bring out the good each other or maybe they're just obsessed with each other. its the relationships of ALL KINDS. and i think the 'all kinds' needs to be emphasised for lstwt

just my thoughts though feel free to disagree :3

While I agree with this...I think there was a post I saw on LSTWT where it read something like 'me making stretches on why my favorite lifestealer is actually a good person' and a video attached and I think it's kind of the crux of LSTWT. I am a Reddoons apologist but I think LSTWT crosses into obnoxious and wrong about the justifications - and I also think there's a line between 'yeah, he's a bad person, *but* he's justified in being a bad person because of an external (or internal) factor he cannot control' and 'well the things this person did are totally righteous, actually' 'post-consequences thing and her character portrayal WHICH WAS NOT THAT BAD' I kind of disagree..I think Kab's character is infuriating, but besides that, yeah LSBLR def does not like Kab's character that much. Not that she has bad writing, but she's so fucking infuriating. 'however you check lstwt and there is not a single criticism and if there is everyone hates the person who made it.' The thing is, and sorry for bringing up age, but LSBLR is mostly comprised of adults, and LSTWT is mostly comprised of minors. I would not be surprised if the reason that LSTWT lacks in meaningful retrospectives of Lifestealers and actually understanding and comprehending that these characters are flawed and are not good people is because, you know, the people are minors and lack that understanding of meaningful perception into a character and how, yeah, a Lifestealer can suck and and that doesn't mean that is an attack on the CC themselves (which is what the core of the problem: I think a lot of people on LSTWT think that a meaningful criticism of a Lifestealer's character means that it is a personal attack on the CC since the line between C and CC are so tangled). Idk this might just be ageism slopper stuff but you know I think LSTWT was a lot more receptive to Red's betrayal of Kab (or it was just that Red's more popular over on LSTWT), but it was mostly just brainless drivel of Kaboodle angst and while it was angsty..I'd also prefer if Red was characterized more in that betrayal, especially since in a lot of those Kaboodle-focused tweets Red is just seen as a monolith that is the cause of Kab's suffering and his reasons for the betrayal are not taken into consideration nor was the betrayal looked at from Red's perspective, really, and that sucks because The Mice divorce was a big thing for me, especially from Red's perspective since it was such an interaction that showed a lot of facets of Red's character and had a lot of themes of mental disorders. Which I wish people would talk about more [LOOKING OUT LONGINGLY AT THE WINDOW] Ya I don't have much to say since my special interests and hyperfixations come to me in a vision and I can't explain why I like teenage-brained boys fighting eachother in Minecraft, but I do and I Like It but y'know

[thewingedwolf]

sorry i keep saying this but my god voting discourse is making me insane.

“anyone who tells you not to vote is a psyop” i’m not a russian shill or a cia plant you fucking idiot i live 20 minutes out of chicago and i’m active in local politics, im telling you my vote doesn’t fucking matter and i can protest vote or leave the president slot empty because chicago will always go for the dem. that’s not being a psyop that’s a fact of how this shitty system works!!

"you're not a real activist you're just complaining" i'm not doxxing myself to score points on tumblr thanks!! you don't have to believe me when i say that i'm involved in local politics, that people i know are involved in grassroots campaigns against corrupt officials and regularly call out, protest, riot, whatever against specific politicians and police officers while risking their Literal Safety bc the mayor loves to use the cops to harass people or that i got pushed out of my job in part because of my political views but that's what fucking happened, you can go back through my text post tag and see me crying about it in real time!!! i know it's crazy but some of us actually DO care about this stuff outside of "trump bad" unlike so many of you vote blue no matter who losers.

"the revolution is going to kill thousands" citation fucking needed thanks

"what's the point you're trying to make with letting trump win" i'm sorry beyond the fact that i think this framing is so disingenuous because centrists and libs will insist that they don't need leftists for the vote so we should all just shut the fuck up but when voting time comes around they always blame US because THEY ran a shitty candidate, people hating biden isn't THE LEFTISTS fault it's BIDEN'S FAULT, but also IT'S NOT LEFTISTS WHO ARE HANDING TRUMP THE WIN. every single fucking vote shows that a) young people find it extremely difficult to vote because of how shitty our voting works while seniors who are disproportionately conservatives have literally all goddamn day to vote and b) leftists come out in DROVES to vote!!! the people not voting are largely low info voters who don't think about politics In This Context, watch their one (1) lil news show with the anchor or journalist they like, and base who they're voting for off of how their life is Right Here Right Now. not only that, but it is heinous and obnoxious to put the blame squarely on the voter when biden is just objectively running a shitty ass campaign.

"this is just like the gore/bush/nader vote" this is how i know all the people on here bitching about voting are not serious people and not serious leftists. just like hilary, there were a LOT of factors that led to this and blaming solely nader just like blaming bernie is insane cope. gore ran a shit ass campaign and gave up way too soon. hilary ran a shit ass campaign and blamed everyone but herself. biden is running a shit ass campaign too. the dems never fucking learn that the vp pick is important, campaigning in important, optics are important (they've been part of our elections since fucking JFK AND NIXON!!), and having a memorable and appealling platform is important. you can't just run on "but the other guy sucks" IT DOESN'T WORK IT'S NEVER WORKED.

"vote-" DEMS HAVE WON THE POPULAR VOTE EVERY SINGLE VOTE SINCE CLINTON. WE DID OUR PART!!!!! WE SHOWED UP AND VOTED. IT'S THE SYSTEM THAT FUCKS US OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND YOU'RE BLAMING SOME RANDOM 23.5 YEAR OLD WITH A SICKLE IN THEIR USER???? ARE YOU STUPID. ARE YOU SILLY???

[heartshapedcreaturefromcriptoon]

@nightofnetter Excuse me, I know I get this question all the time, as well as (abled-bodied) people just thinking that I must be aroace, or even, as insufferable Big Name Fan petitprincess1 would say, "mentally disabled", by default because I'm wheelchair bound which means I face like, real oppression and have more pressing issues in my life to worry about than obsessing over fanfiction for a show that I don't even like, but I'm reblogging the entire wasted tangent that I guess if you're ableist, (which I'm guessing that you are, judging by the obnoxious moving gif that could cause actual serious physical harm to someone in your header) you could say that your whole rant that I didn't need to see anyway has fallen on deaf ears here, but I've decided to reblog with full context (despite you trying to hide it like I wouldn't notice) in order to publicly humiliate you anyway, because I think I'm going to genuinely enjoy being the one asking these very same questions that have been asked of me for years, for once.... Um, so, like.... I know that you're obviously not okay right now so I'm not going to ask that... But like... I'm not sorry because just like... What the genuine ever loving fuck is the matter with you? What the fuck happened to you? And what the fuck is wrong with you?

First of all, if you don't even like the show that much, then stop reading the fanfiction and leave the fandom and you can remove all of the posts pertaining to it from your blog, including mine. Nobody needs anymore obnoxious fantis here, and if I were you I would just go ahead and have your blog be deleted all together.

Second of all, and again, the only thing here that's truly harmful is the fact that you have a tacky moving gif as your header that may cause people with certain sensitivities to have actual seizures...

Like, is that ... Cop? In your obnoxious moving gif header that could cause seizures, also having a seizure? ... Were you having a seizure when you wrote that huge wall of text in the tags of my own post thinking that I wouldn't catch it and reblog in full for everyone else to see just to make sure you know that I hate you? I would assume that you were having your own little seizure on my post just then, all things considered.

Thirdly, I wasn't going to bring this up because I hate minors being in this fandom (and I do hope for your sake that you're at least not one):

But this video made by a lovely 25 year old ace in the fandom showcases the fact that terminally online aroaces just like you have been harassing and bullying aces just like her for using fiction to experiment with and figure out their own sexuality and where they might fall on the ace spectrum and she talks about as well as provides evidence for the fact some of the people using Alastor to help figure themselves out also happen to be aroace minors who are being bullied, harassed and policed by militant aroace weebs just like you and while I don't necessarily approve of minors being in this fandom at all I do think it's very sad so I wanted to just show at least the thumbnail of this video to prove that it exists and it's not only the "acephobic" allosexuals (is that how you say it?) that think your behavior has passed obnoxious and annoying at this point and that you need to stop with this shit. Right. Now.

Aroaces like you are the only ones causing such harm and isolation in this fandom (aside from like, all of the general harm and isolation genuine fans have faced for just daring to try and spread joy for our little show out in the open or even speak about it in any kind of more "public" way, which is the kind of the exact sour vibe you're contributing to by just making an almost immediate disclaimer. on a fan post. about how you need people to know how you're already 'not that much a hazbin fan' which like... Your opinion on the show is one that I didn't *NEED* to know at all? And on my very genuine hazbin fan post. Like, what the fuck man I already don't care?!) and maybe this is the reason why nobody likes you.

Now kindly delete your whole blog, including your reblog of my post, and fuck right the Hell off.

~As a cripple~ (keep my reclaimed slur out of your rabid arse little bat mouth) I just want to add one more thing: That I was only ever able to see a doll like me repped in Barbie Movie TM at least once and for a mere split second of screentime before she was shipped the fuck off to the doll hospital, locked away, never to be seen again, isolated from her peers forever, and you know Becky couldn't have shit in Barbie's little aroace Dreamhouse because her wheels couldn't fit in there anyway, she just wasn't able to fit in and they didn't want to address that the house itself wasn't accessible to her which is why she wasn't included in Abled-Bodied Barbie Land, so it's no wonder why she'd rather go to Hell with Bild Lili and share more than a smile with the The Radio Demon and have her Service Deer push her around all she wants 'cause I guess she's a little bit more of a Bratz Ghoul now ... ;)

And I think you are the type to block evade, so I'll be warning you right now that if you don't accept you're blocked and you try to make contact with me or my posts again, I will just have to kill you, again! 💀🔪🩸

Okay the way they're being playful with Alastor's aceness like he doesn't even know what it is? Is so good!

Still fluid and open to interpretation, meaning people can still ship him! 💀🌹

[lamouratorrrrry]

Extremely Unbiased Thread About Why Kintoki’s Design is Good, Actually

hello. you may call me Luna, however im sure most people here know me as “the kintoki huge tits artist”. today i’ll be doing something quite a bit different than my usual posts, and thats that im going to be analyzing why exactly i think kintoki’s original design is actually really nice. no i am not biased in any way. 

the reason for this is that, being a huge fan of kintoki (and frequently browsing his tag on here), a sentiment that i see a lot is “i really like kintoki, but i hate his design/i like his rider and heian designs more”. which is fair! you are very much allowed to think that. all i want is to possibly give a different perspective on why i think the opposite (and to gush about my favorite character). 

so come with me on this design-analysis slash luna-talks-about-how-sexy-kintoki-is journey!

(this thread will for the most part be discussing his 1st ascension. the reason being is that he really doesnt change much design-wise as he ascends aside from the big coat in his 3rd ascension. also, its my favorite of the three! see, totally not biased.)

hi handsome ;)

we’ll start at the top and work our way down. first, i need to address the elephant in the room, aka my biggest fate fandom related pet peeve. 

this hairstyle? this is not a bowlcut. this is a bob haircut. and its CUTE OKAY. (op has a bob cut and therefore takes these jokes very personally)

a bob is typically longer, enough so to hide the ears. a bob is also meant to frame your face. the bowl cut is much shorter, shows the ears, and is one length all around. 

for reference, the only other character that i can think of who cant beat the bowlcut allegations is tsuna. i see a lot of people saying stuff like “wow, they both work for raikou and they both have bowlcuts!” when their hair looks completely different... 

firstly, his bob is cute! come on :( second, this haircut has roots in historical kintarou depictions! 

this is a kintarou doll, and is clearly what inspired fate kintoki’s hair! despite the rest of his design being very modern inspired, i quite like that he keeps his “historical” hair. i think its a nice little touch/nod to his younger self. 

moving on, lets talk about kintoki’s fashion sense.

breasts...

it took me a bit to pin down what i think kintoki’s fashion sense is exactly, and i think its fair to say he’s very 70s inspired. this is extremely funny to me for reasons i will talk about later. after doing some light research, a big *big* staple of 70s mens fashion ive picked up on is having your shirt unbuttoned like. basically all the way. just absolutely tits out, and i respect that so hard. 

(technically his extremely popped collar is more 80s, but i think its fair to say hes designed after some amalgamation of decade-fashion)

all kintoki’s missing is a crazy pattern on his shirt. come on raita i believe in you

something else of note is, of course, his jewelry! kintoki very clearly wears a lot of big, bold jewelry like his necklaces and bracelets. ive said it before and i’ll say it now, i wish to god he had been given earrings. that would take his design from a 10 to an 11 imho

one word i see thrown around a lot about kintoki’s design is that its very tacky, and im 99% sure these comments are referring to his obnoxious amount of jewelry. however, i believe kintoki’s design works so well because its tacky. again i’ll talk about this more later, but i think a lot of kintoki’s charm comes from his dorky, tacky accessory choices. 

(im sorry kintoki for just straight up putting your crotch on the dashboard)

speaking of tacky and gaudy, kintoki’s belt buckle. yet again kintoki’s quest to look as cool as possible makes him look absolutely silly, and i adore it. i dont have much else to say here except that i love that he wears not one but two belts. (and yet we still see a peak of his underwear in his 2nd and 3rd ascensions? i love him so much) at this point, we all know that kintoki looks the way he looks because hes trying to be as cool as possible in the modern era. but its not very modern, is it? im not sure if this was intentional or not, but a small detail i really really love about kintoki’s design is how... outdated it is. sure decade fashion comes back and becomes cool every few years, but kintoki looks very outdated. again, i think this all adds to his charm. as much as he tries to look like a 21st century cool guy, he just ends up looking like the bully jock in an 80s film. 

i want to take a second and talk about another small detail that i absolutely love about his design, and that’s the use of pink. its kind of small, but its present enough that i feel justified talking about it. kintoki has a pink bracelet on his right wrist, his sunglasses are tinted pink, and my personal favorite, he wears pink underwear! judging by the other characters hes drawn, im sure this might just be because raita happens to like pink, but i love the implications here regardless. definitely a “real men wear pink” sort of thing (toxic masculinity? never heard of ‘im). or, maybe kintoki just likes pink almost as much as he loves gold! he has good taste. 

and not just pink but hot pink! 

(up till this point, ive been talking about and had only planned to talk about berserker kintoki’s 1st ascension design, but for this small portion, i would like to direct your attention to heian kintoki as well:

PINK!! AND LOTS OF IT. kintoki definitely has at least 2 favorite colors.) 

this guy slaps your girls ass wyd

lets look at kintoki’s full body one last time. like i mentioned earlier, at first glance he definitely looks like he shoves dweebs in lockers as well he should. and this, i dare say, is the best part of his overall design. i know that at this point when talking about fictional characters, subverting expectations is not exactly a new thing, but i think kintoki does this so well. just look at him. this man wants you to know he goes to the gym. he wants you to know that he’s over 6 feet tall and has a 6 pack. he wears sunglasses at night and indoors for gods sake!!! he’s also extremely kind and dorky. he loves his mom. he loves children and teddy bears, and he respects women.  

kintoki’s design is tacky and silly and outrageous and thats exactly why it works so well. it bums me out when i see people write this design off as being ugly just because they think they see a bowlcut, because i personally think a lot of thought went into this. well done raita! i do see why people might prefer his other designs, because its hard to compete with a cool leather jacket or a half-tits out samurai. that being said, this design is my personal favorite of his! his cheerful personality and lack of objective swag has endeared him to me greatly. 

this may have been incoherent, but i hope you’ll walk away from this thinking differently about our friend kintoki <3 

if i missed anything or you have anything youd like to add, please feel free! 

[waitimcomingtoo]

Tuffy

Pairing: Arvin Russel x reader

Synopsis: you win Arvin a teddy bear, and he acts like he doesn’t like it

Masterlist

Arvin pulled up to the annual town fair in his beat up old car and parked out front. He lit a cigarette, spotted Lenora near the entrance, and made his way over to her.

“You girls ‘bout ready to go?”

“Just about.” Lenora answered. “Y/n was just finishing up at a game. Oh, there she is.”

“Arvin!” You ran up to them with a teddy bear in your arms. “Thanks for driving us home. Don’t you want to go in at least on ride?”

“Nah. I don’t trust these things in the slightest.” He smiled at you in your high waisted shorts and button up shirt.

“See? I told you he was no fun.” Lenora teased her brother and poked his side.

“Well since you didn’t want to come with us, I won this for you at the balloon game.” You proudly held out the teddy bear you’d been holding. “Since you’re too much of a tough guy to win your own.”

It was a classic carnival plush with a cheap red bow tied around its neck, but Arvin adored it right away. He accepted the teddy bear from you and looked at it, fighting the massive smile that wanted to break out on his face. He didn’t want to stray from his typical cold and uncaring exterior, so he didn’t let it show on his face how much it meant to him.

“Oh. Thank you.” He said softly. “But I’m not much for dolls. You should keep it.”

“It’s not a doll. It’s a teddy bear.” You playfully rolled your eyes. “I’ve been holding it all night, so it smells like my perfume. And I won it for you so you better keep it, tough guy. It’s yours.”

“All right.” He smiled shyly, grateful that you were letting him keep it. “Not sure what I’ll do with it, but I’ll keep it. Thanks, Y/n.”

“You’re welcome, Arvin” You said as you linked your arm through his. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

A few weeks later, you didn’t join Lenora in the back of Arvin’s car like you usually did. He almost always drove the two of you home after school, but you were nowhere to be found that particular day.

“Y/n didn’t need a ride today?” Arvin asked with slight disappointment.

“She was running late so she said she was gonna walk home.” Lenora told him.

“Oh.” He nodded. “Okay.

“Why? Do you miss her?” Lenora teased.

“Shut up.” He blushed. “Just want to make sure she has a safe way home.”

“I’m sure she’ll be fine.” Lenora said, so he let it go. He checked back in a few hours later with Lenora to see if you’d made it home safe.

“Do you know if Y/n made it home yet?” He asked.

“She hasn’t called me yet, so probably not.” Lenora realized. Arvin frowned and looked out the window, not liking the thought of you walking home with how hard the rain was coming down.

“It’s pouring out. She’ll catch her death.” He said as he grabbed his car keys.

“So will you if you try to find her. You know how slippery your tires get.” Lenora reminded him as she followed him to the door.

“I don’t want her walking alone in the rain.” Arvin said as he slid his jacket on. “Imma go get her.”

Arvin got in his car and drove in the direction of your school. A few miles up the road, he saw you walking with your backpack over your head.

“Y/n!” He called out the window. “Get your ass in the car now.”

“Arvin?” You squinted in his direction. “Is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me.” He pulled up beside you. “Get in.”

“How’d you find me?” You asked as you got into his backseat. “And how’d you know I was out here in the first place?”

“Lenora told me you was foolish enough to walk home in this weather.” He said as he looked at you in the rear view mirror.

“I didn’t realize it was gonna rain. Sorry, Arvin.” You apologized to him, making him feel guilty for how he spoke to you. He didn’t mean to make you feel bad, he just worried about you.

“You don’t have to apologize to me, darling.” He said in a softer tone. “And you don’t have to sit in the back either.”

“Um, I think someone’s already sitting in the passenger seat.” You smiled a little and adverted your eyes.

“Who?” He furrowed his eyebrows before looking beside him. Sitting there in his passenger seat was the teddy bear you had won him a few weeks before. To make the sight even more embarrassing, the teddy bear was buckled in with a seatbelt. He had forgotten that he put the bear there and now there was no hiding the fact that he drove around with it.

“Oh.” He blushed and grabbed the bear. “Him.”

“Is that the bear won for you?” You asked coyly. “From the carnival?”

“Yeah. It is.” He adverted his eyes as you climbed into the front seat.

“Why did he have a seatbelt on?” You chuckled as he set the teddy bear on his lap.

“It’s very dangerous to drive without a seatbelt.” He said seriously. “You know that, darling.”

“But he’s just a teddy bear.” You bit back a smile at the way he was behaving. You’d into ever seen him frowning or fighting, so it made you happy to hear him being silly with you.

“A teddy bear you won for me.” He reminded you as he smiled down at the bear. “That makes him special. I gotta protect him.”

“Arvin.” You swooned. “You really kept it? That’s so cute.”

“People don’t usually give me things.” He said quietly. “So he means a lot.”

“Did you name him?” You asked hopefully.

“Yes.” He said softly. “He’s called Tuffy.”

“Why?” You wondered curiously.

“Cause you always call me tough guy.” He admitted without looking at you. He hadn’t planned on showing you the softer side of him, but you seemed to be enjoying it.

“Can I see him?”

“Careful not to get him wet. Can’t replace him.” Arvin warned, proving further to you how much he cared about the bear.

“I didn’t think you cared that I won him for you.” You said in disbelief. “Didn’t think you cared ‘bout anything, in fact.”

“I act tough, but I got a soft spot for you.” He said as he looked at you.

“Me and Tuffy, I presume.” You teased.

“Yeah.” He smiled. “You and Tuffy.”

You looked down at Tuffy and held him to your nose, inhaling his scent for a moment.

“He smells like you.” You giggled. “Which means he smells like cigarettes and Old Spice.”

“Well he sleeps in my bed.” Arvin told you. “That’s why.”

“Arvin Russel.” You gasped. “You do not sleep with a teddy bear.”

“Said he sleeps in my bed. Not in my arms or nothing.” He chuckled as he took the bear back from you. He put Tuffy on his shoulder and rested his head on him as he looked at you.

“That’s a shame.” You nearly exploded from how sweet Arvin was being. “If I was sleeping in your bed, I’d want to be in your arms as well.”

Arvin opened his mouth to speak, but found himself too flustered to form a sentence. Before he could respond, you spotted something out the window and sighed.

“Oh no. It’s Chuck Greenwood.” You pointed out the window. “He’s got a crush on me. Never leaves me alone.”

“Do you like him too?” Arvin frowned a little as Chuck approached his car.

“Absolutely not.” You stuck your tongue out. “He’s nothing but a pest. Ugh. Here he comes.”

“Hello Y/n. You look awfully pretty, even in the rain.” Chuck smirked obnoxiously as he knocked on your window. “What’s the matter? Lenoras Bible didn’t tell you it was gonna rain?”

“Leave me alone, Chuck.” You rolled your eyes and turned away.

“And is that the Russel boy?” Chuck pointed to Arvin. “What are you doing driving around with a teddy bear? Did your mommy give it to you?”

“No. But your mommy did.” Arvin shot back.

“Can I see it? It looks so cuddly and soft. I just wanna hold it for a minute.” Chuck laughed as he reached for the teddy bear.

“Hands off.” Arvin smacked his hands away. “Don’t you inbreds have something better to do?”

“What could be better than picking on you and your fuzzy wuzzy teddy bear?” Chuck asked.

“It’s my teddy bear.” You lied as you took the bear off Arvin’s shoulder. “Arvin won him for me at the carnival last week.”

“Did he? Don’t tell me you two are going steady.” Chucks jealously got the better of him.

“Whats it’s to you?” Arvin smirked, liking your plan. ���Not like you ever had a chance with her.”

“Whatever. Enjoy your teddy bear.” Chuck scoffed and walked away.

“We will! Bye!” You called after him before rolling the window up. “Did you see his face? We totally got him.”

“That’s what he gets for making fun of Tuffy.” Arvin smiled as you handed the bear back to him.

“Yup.” You agreed. “He’ll know not to do that again.”

You looked at each other for a minute, soft smiles on your faces as a comfortable silence settled in his car. The comforting sound of rain hitting his windows added to the soft ambiance in the car. You gulped and sat up a little, giving him all your attention as he nervously played with the bear.

“Darling.” Arvin began quietly. “What did you mean before when you said you’d want to sleep in my arms?”

“Well, you know.” You shrugged and played with your nails. “I’m just saying. If Tuffy ever needs a night off, maybe I could take his spot.”

“Well.” He smiled softly and cupped your face with his hand. “I’ll have to check with him first.”

You leaned forward and smirked against his lips before mumbling, “You’ll have to let me know what he says.”

“He should be fine with it.” He sucked in sharply against your mouth.

“Arvin?” You asked as you gazed at him through your lashes.

“Yes, darling?”

“Stop talking about your teddy bear.” You chuckled before connecting your lips to his.

Tag List 🏷

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[thebibliosphere]

So I'm currently unemployed because I got fired for taking too much sick leave (it was legally sketchy blah blah blah but in the end I just can't work and take care of myself and investigate my mystery health problems at the same time). So I've been spending more time writing!

I really admire your writing and loved Hunger Pangs. I'm looking forward to the poly elements developing and I'm wondering if you have any advice for writing about poly. I've made one of my projects a snarky take on "write what you know" ... Apparently what I know is southern gothic meets Pacific northwest gothic, chronic illness pandemic surrealism, and falling back-asswards into threesomes.

I know this is a very open-ended question and I don't expect an answer, I'm just curious about it if you have the energy. As a writer, trying to write honestly / realistically about polyamory/enm, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on what's different about portraying monogamy or nonmonogamy in books, romance or erotica or otherwise.

I'm trying to read examples but it's hard to find examples that fit the niche I'm looking at. Excuse me if this question is nonsense, it's the cluster headaches.

I'm sorry to hear you've been dealing with all that and solidarity on the cluster headaches. But I'm glad you're finding an outlet through writing! And I hope you're happy with an open-ended ramble in response because oh boy, there's a lot I could talk about and I could probably do a better job of answering this sort of thing with more specific questions, but let's see where we end up.

There's definitely a big difference between writing polyamory/ENM (ethical non-monogamy) and what people often expect from monogamous love stories.

Just even from a purely sales and marketing standpoint, the moment you write anything polyamorous (or even just straight up LGBTQIA+ without the ENM) you're going to get considered closer to being erotica/obscene than hetero romances. It's an unfair bias, but it's one that exists in our society. But also the Amazon algorithm and their shitty, shitty human censors. Especially the ones that work the weekends. (Talking to you, Carlos 🖕.)

So not only do you start out hyper-aware that you're writing something that is highly stigmatized or fetishized (at least I'm hyper-aware) but that you are also writing for a niche market that is starving for positive content because the content that exists is either limited, not what they want, or is problematic in some fashion i.e. highly stigmatized or fetishy. And even then, the wants, desires, and expectations of the community you're writing for are complex and wildly varied and hard to fit into an easy formula.

When writing monogamous love stories, there is a set expectation that’s really hard to fuck up once you know it. X person meets Y. Attraction happens, followed by some sort of minor conflict/resolution. Other plot may happen. A greater catalyst involving personal growth for both parties (hopefully) happens. Follow the equation to its ultimate resolution and achieve Happily Ever After. 

But writing ENM is... a lot more difficult, if only because of the pure scope of possibilities. You could try to follow the same equation and shove three (or more) people into it, but it rarely works well. Usually because if you’re doing it right, you won’t have enough room in a single character arc to allow for enough growth, and if ENM requires anything in abundance, it’s room to grow.

And this post is huge so I’m going to put the rest under a cut :)

There's also a common refrain in certain online polyam/ENM circles that triads and throuples are overrepresented in media and they may be right to some extent. Personally, I believe the issue isn't that triads and throuples are overrepresented, but that there is such minuscule positive rep of ethical non-monogamy in general, that the few tiny instances we have of triads in media make it seem like it's "everywhere" when in actuality, it's still quite rare and the media we do have often veers into Unicorn Hunter fetish porn. Which is its own problematic thing. And just to be clear, I’m not including this part to dissuade you from writing "falling back-asswards into threesomes." If anything, I need more of it and would hook it directly into my brain if I could. I'm just throwing it out there into the void in the hope that someone will take the thought and run with it, lol.

I’d love to see more polyfidelitous rep in fiction, just as much as I’d like to see more relationship anarchy too. More diversity in fiction is always good.

Another thing that differs in writing ENM romance vs conventional monogamy is the feeling like you need to justify yourself. There's a lot of pressure to be as healthy and non-problematic as possible because you are being held to a higher standard of criticism. Both from people from without the ENM communities, and from the people within. Granted, some people don't give a shit and just want to read some fantastic porn (valid) but there are those who will cheerfully read Fifty Shades of Bullshit and call it "spicy" and "romantic," then turn around and call the most tooth-rottingly-sweet-fluff about a queer platonic polycule heresy. That's just the way the world works.

(Pro-tip for author life in general: never read your own reviews; that way madness lies. I glimpsed one the other day that tagged Hunger Pangs as “ethical cheating” and just about had an aneurism.)

And while that feeling of needing to justify yourself comes from a valid place of being excluded from the table of socially accepted norms, it can also be to the detriment of both the story and the subject matter at hand. I've seen some authors bend so far over backward to avoid being problematic in their portrayal of ENM, they end up being problematic for entirely different reasons. Usually because they give such a skewed, rose-tinted perspective of how things work, it ends up coming off as well... a bit culty and obnoxious tbh.

“Look how enlightened we are, freed from the trappings of monogamy and jealousy! We’re all so honest and perfect and happy!”

Yeah, uhu, sure Jan. Except here’s the thing, not all jealousy is bad. How you act on it can be, but jealousy itself is an important tool in the junk drawer that is the range of human emotion. It can clue us in to when we’re feeling sad or neglected, which in turn means we should figure out why we’re feeling those things. Sometimes it’s because brains are just like that and anxiety is a thing. Other times it’s because our needs are actually being neglected and we are in an unhealthy situation we need to remedy. You gotta put the work in to figure it out. Which is the same as any style of relationship, whether it’s mono, polyam or whatever flavor of ENM you subscribe to* And sometimes you just gotta be messy, because that’s how humans are. Being afraid to show that mess makes it a dishonest portrayal, and it also robs you of some great cannon fodder for character development.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to my current pet peeve in how certain writers take monogamous ideals and apply them to ENM, sometimes without even realizing it. The “Find the Right Person and Settle Down” trope.

Often, in this case, ENM or polyamory is treated as a phase. Something you mature out of with age or until you meet “The One(tm).” This is, of course, an attempt to follow the mono style formula expected in most romances. And while it might appeal to many readers, it’s uh, actually quite insulting. 

To give an example, I am currently seeing this a lot in the Witcher fandom. 

Fanon Netflix!Jaskier is everyone's favorite ethical slut until he meets Geralt then woops, wouldn’t you know, he just needed to find The One(tm). Suddenly, all his other sexual and romantic exploits or attractions mean nothing to him. Let's watch as he throws away a core aspect of his personality in favor of a man. 

Yeah... that sure showed those societal norms... 

If I were being generous, I’d say it’s a poor attempt at showing New Relationship Euphoria and how wrapped up people can become in new relationships. But honestly, it’s monogamous bias eking its way in to validate how special and unique the relationship is. Because sometimes people really can’t think of any other way to show how important and valid a relationship is without defining it in terms of exclusivity. Which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how ENM works for a lot of people and invalidates a lot of loving, serious and long-term relationships.

This is not to say that some polyam/poly-leaning people can't be happy in monogamous relationships! I am! (I consider myself ambiamorous. I'm happy with either monogamy or polyamory, it really just depends on the relationship(s) I’m in.) But I also don't regard my relationship with a mono partner as "settling down" or "growing up." It's just a choice I made to be with a person I love, and it's a valid one. Just like choosing to never close yourself off to multiple relationships is valid. And I wish more people realized that, or rather, I wish the people writing these things knew that :P

Anyway, I think I’ve rambled enough. I hope this collection of incoherent thoughts actually makes some sense and might be useful. 

----

*A good resource book that doesn't pull any punches in this regard is Polysecure by Jessica Fern. It's a wonderfully insightful read that explores the messier side of consensual non-monogamy, especially with how it can be affected by trauma or inter-relationship conflicts. But it also shows how to take better steps toward healthy, ethical non-monogamy (a far better job than More Than Two**) and conflict resolution, making it a valuable resource both for someone who is a part of this relationship style***, but also for writers on the outside looking in who might have a very simple or misguided idea of what conflict within polyam/ENM relationships might look like, vs traditional monogamous ones.

** The author of More Than Two has been accused of multiple accounts of abuse within the polyamorous community, with many of his coauthors having spoken out about the gaslighting and emotional and psychological damage they experienced while in a relationship with him. A lot of their stories are documented here: https://www.itrippedonthepolystair.com/ (warning: it is not light material and deals with issues of abuse, gaslighting, and a whole other plethora of Yikes.) While some people still find More Than Two helpful reading, there are now, thankfully, much, much better resources out there.

*** Some people consider polyam/ENM to be part of their identity or orientation, while others view it as a relationship style.It largely depends on the individual. 

[crimsonxe]

Get your biased bigoted bleeting over things not going how you wanted and/or that you don't have a clue about in misusing the concept of "bad writing"; completely wrong and spreading misinformation; and CRWBY bashing bullshit the fuck out of the main tag shitlord. You want to present the mentally unwell Shane that ignored Monty's own words about M&K being the writers to his animator; as well as by your own words FACTS; I'll stand by said facts, Monty's own words in interviews, his friends, and y'know HIS BROTHER who has told ones like you to stfu with trying to use his brother's name against his show. Though its really telling that you clearly are taking issue with a particular set of vids, which I'm pretty sure I know the reference without a name being mentioned; cause that person actually did their research and is a fan that shreds through the bullshit. Meanwhile your entire post is filled with outright lies, spins, failure in comprehension, and bias. The show's legacy will outlive both you and anything your sorry ass ever does.

Adam is an abusive co-opting TERRORIST that got what he deserved ; which was setup in the Black trailer with him laughingly dismissing the lives of the innocents on the train.

The WF that was swayed by Adam is an incredibly apt to current times anti-extremism storyline. Any group that resorts to violence towards innocents loses any goddamn cause they purport to be for; instead being nothing more than a TERRORIST. This is shown by Yang's showing empathy towards the faunus rights cause and Velvet being shown as a victim of racism vs. extremist terrorists like those under Adam. The main issue there is Sienna having been killed off way too soon, cause she could've served as the "controlled violence" figurehead opposed to Adam's extremism over more of the show to further highlight that message.

Ironwood is an authoritarian genocidal general that threw away his humanity after showing admiration for Salem who tried to throw a city of poor people to the wolves. Yet clearly has his boots down many people throats like its a kink going out of style

Males have never nor ever will be or should be the center of the story. That includes Jaune who isn't given anything outside of his status as a SECONDARY MAIN that has been through some shit.

BB is one the top tier mature wlw slowburns that shows a normalized non-world of gay non-rushed non-aimed at an LGBT+ specific audience with an actual bi character that feels bi that was planned from the start. Not to mention how its development fits so well with Monty's prior work Haloid, where it presented the idea of Master Chief x Samus (hetero fan-pairing); only to rug pull that MC was actually a femme other Spartan still getting with Samus in a wlw pair.

Along with them there's:

2 confirmed canon lesbian characters

1 confirmed gay character

mlm basically canon pair that just needs to come into the show proper from the Before the Dawn book

a married wlw couple w/ kid who're living their best life

a trans character that isn't a joke or centered around being discriminated against as a trans character

Which throws out the homophobia bullshit.

The show respects its femme characters by keeping the story centered on them, not doing fanservice with them, not diminishing their roles, allowing them to be complex, actually having two get together officially, and overall just avoiding the usual sexist tropes especially in anime/manga.

You try to go after separating out CRWBY when time after time even those with issues with RT, they will separate out CRWBY. And if it comes down to obnoxious shitbags like you who's entire basis is being a salty ass little bitch cause things didn't go how YOU wanted it or CRWBY who's story this is; I'm going CRWBY every.single.fucking.time. You're just another piece of shit that thinks the show is bad cause its CRWBY's story not their shitfest version of things.

So as someone with the show from the Red trailer, who followed Monty since Dead Fantasy 4-5, and is LGBT+ thus actually having a stake in the LGBT+ rep; go fuck yourself and get the fuck out of actual fan spaces as your ass isn't one.

RWBY Final Thoughts: Legacy

Very rarely would I ever consider a fandom on its own worth its own section of a Final Thoughts. ... [Basically,] they behave like a cult.

This is a repost of a post I made February 1st, 2024 on another site. At the time, it was the final post of a deep-dive recap of RWBY and the history of the show, its fandom, and its direction under Rooster Teeth.

I felt this out with some of my peers and the feedback I got in relation to posting in on Tumblr was that, well, why not? It was my main haunt to begin with, and I may as well, since Rooster Teeth is closing its doors. I'm posting this mainly as a shot in the dark just to see how it gets received. Only minor edits have been made; I'm sure there's some stuff in here that would make people mad, but that applies to pretty much anything someone could say about RWBY. Click the read more to get a glance at how my time with RWBY ultimately wrapped up.

Nine years ago today, Monty Oum died of an allergic reaction. Today is a day of mourning for fans of his work, including RWBY. There’s no sense in waiting. Let’s finish this and heal.

The Showrunners

Miles and Kerry often received the brunt of the attention when it came to RWBY. As the writers of the show, they bore responsibility for the largest chunk of why it eventually went into the shitter, and fan anger against them was almost certainly not helped by the damn near idolization heaped on them by fervent stans. They are, undoubtedly, the focal point of RWBY fans’ parasocial relationship with the show.

Of course, despite sharing about the same credits space as his partner in crime, Kerry tended to fly under the radar a lot, with it being Miles who received the brunt of the fandom’s fury with each successive volume. It’s not hard to see why; the character Miles voices has been consistently over-exposed and is in many ways an obvious creator’s pet, with denials as to this fact falling on deaf ears as Jaune’s screentime continued to balloon past its merits, whereas the character Kerry voices could just about wrangle an average of ten seconds of screentime every three years. Certainly Miles has been in trouble with fans more often than Kerry for the shit he’s said and done. The Ruby body pillow and the Tifa Lockhart ‘prostitute’ comments come to mind. Oh, and the slurs, that one too.

But perhaps the reason Miles gets so much more flak than Kerry is that Miles just...acts like an asshole a lot of the time. Even aside from above examples, Miles’ flaws come out in his writing: he’s petty, holds grudges, can’t take criticism, and just overall has way more power over the story than someone of his caliber should. He’s very poor at disguising his real feelings and often lets them bleed through, and when he actually decides to voice them on purpose, things get ugly—refer to that Cameo about Ironwood.

But as tempting as it is to treat Miles as an out-of-control cockwaffle on the rampage and Kerry as his sympathetic ineffectual shadow, the reality is that they’re co-writers, have been for ten years, and anything Miles gets away with doing is as much Kerry’s fault as his. If the Gray Haddock situation has taught us anything, it’s that more people tend to harbor blame than the one individual that makes an easy scapegoat.

Since aside from aforementioned n-word business, Miles and Kerry are almost never connected to moral outrage, this makes it easy for the stans to uphold them, since all they really have to defend them from is accusations that they didn’t honor Monty’s “vision” for the series. This is only easy because the stans are fucking insane, but that’s for later on down the page.

“Vision” is in quotes because that’s how fans treat it, we all know they don’t really care. Miles and Kerry’s vision matters, and we know that much because of Calixyn’s interview where she all but begged to be told that RWBY Volume 5 was as bad as it was because the “good bois” had control of the show ripped from them. Nope, turns out all that racism, homophobia, and plain shitty writing is all on them. But at least they’re nice!

(Miles was 26 when he said the n-word. I’m 26 now when writing this. I think it’s pretty fair to call him an asshole.)

But the truth is that it’s objectively stupid to think that the direction of RWBY hasn’t changed since Monty’s passing, it’s impossible for it not to have. There are more writers on board than before, and it’s been a long time since he was alive to contribute his thoughts. The real question is whether they at least tried, and I don’t think they did.

I mean, Shane Newville never names Miles and Kerry in his letter, but he does state several times that the choices made for the show were not only not what Monty wanted, but “straight up just shitting all over what Monty made”. I find it very difficult to believe that that insinuation, and all of the people caught up in the net it casts, wouldn’t include those two. And like it or not, but the person who is able to compile tons of clips and interviews over the years as some sort of seeming immutable proof that “CRWBY” are good-hearted people determined to preserve Monty’s vision, isn’t really looking at any more evidence than the person who’s come to the conclusion, based on what they’ve seen, that that the opposite is true. And they’re certainly looking at less evidence than the people who actually did work there around Monty, Miles, and Kerry. The facts sometimes boil down to ‘if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and is implicated in the walls of text like a duck, it’s probably a duck’, guys.

Even in the best case scenario in which the work of Monty Oum turns out to have been treated with dignity and respect (and was just really shittily written from the beginning), the fact remains that Miles and Kerry did not put a quality product into the world. I will be very surprised if either of them manages to get a lead writing position ever again, because once the popularity of RWBY fades, so too will the goodwill they’ve somehow amassed among its fans. RWBY, much like Twilight, is inevitably going to taint the people who were in charge of writing it.

But Miles and Kerry are just two dudes. What exactly is going to happen to those fervent fans who hung on their every word and insisted they were the embodiment of everything pure and innocent? What, exactly, is going to happen to the RWBY fandom that once seemed to be unavoidably populous on the internet?

F, N, D, M

We already went over “constructive criticism” and “worldbuilding”, so let’s add another eternally-misused word to our roster. You know, something I’ve occasionally thought about in terms of online spaces is that no one knows what a “comfort show” is. It’s one of those terms that became too popular almost as soon as it was introduced, to the point that it became meaningless, much like “hyperfixation” and “anxiety”. I see people refer to RWBY as their comfort show and I’m just like...how? A comfort show is supposed to be the show that always puts you in a good headspace, a show you rest easy with because you’ve always connected with it because the love was always there. A comfort show is a show that you watch in your down moments to feel better, not a show you think is just the greatest thing ever, the bees’ knees if you will.

A comfort show is not a show you force yourself to like, it is not a show you defend at all costs, and it is not a show you only still cling to because enjoying it once coincided with a time when you felt popular and among friends. Which, increasingly, seems to have been the case for RWBY fans.

RWBY’s Fandom

Very rarely would I ever consider a fandom on its own worth its own section of a Final Thoughts. But I’m doing it now because the RWBY fandom, though now it’s a shadow of its former self, is still a sizable chunk of people and took a lot longer to die than most other fandoms.

The RWBY fandom itself was an especially big and very online fandom, and the show produced an abnormally large amount of big name fans who continued to use their own influence to push its success and keep its momentum going. As I’ve said before, the RWBY fandom is something that Rooster Teeth were able to extract an excessive amount of praise out of for minimal effort; it simply seems to be in RWBY fans’ nature to speculate and theorize and over-analyze and fill in blanks, and to perceive good writing and animation where there is none. But you know how fandom operates—the bigger its size, the more infamous it becomes.

Long since famed for being especially toxic, those who are in the know consider RWBY fans a different breed, really. They create and move narratives at high speed and act quickly to correct any perceived dissent in the ranks, casting out anyone that feels disillusionment with the product and insisting everything is peachy even as their world crumbles around them. To RWBY fans, the “CRWBY” are always separate from the “problematic” aspects of Rooster Teeth (which is basically the whole company) and it doesn’t matter how many of its flaws get highlighted; RWBY and the people that make it are always great, innocent of any harm done and fantastic, and anyone that dislikes them is a villain—even if those people were at one point part of the “CRWBY” themselves. Loyalty is everything. In other words, they behave like a cult.Those acronyms themselves have always bothered me, and I’ve grown a strong distaste for them. Originally they were just a quirk of the show; a format for team names that spawned the name of the show and eventually stopped being relevant altogether. But RWBY fans are simply unable to not use them. It’s not “the fandom” it’s “the FNDM”. They’re not “the RWBY team” or “the RWBY crew”, they’re “CRWBY”. Even people that the fans are actively trying to shame, shun, and harass don’t get to simply be people—they’re “RWDE” and, when that became an actual community of sorts unto itself, was switched to “HTDM”, short for “hatedom”. They remind me distinctly of code words that get formed and passed around in cult movements, identifying terms that quickly provide boxes to put people in and make it easier to sort loyals from disloyals. “Hatedom” itself is another one of those terms that spread and got so prolific it really doesn’t carry any meaning anymore. Real hatedoms are surprisingly rare, guys. Every fandom that becomes big enough for its respective product to become criticized eventually comes to believe it has a ‘hatedom’ because how could someone dislike something I like so much? But a hatedom on its own arises out of very specific circumstances and environments, and causes the spread of hate for a product based on broad foundations that are often unfair to the product and which creates perceptions that spread faster than the work, so that the work is often talked about in mocking reference rather than true dissatisfaction.

RWBY doesn’t have a hatedom guys, it never did. The Last of Us doesn’t have a hatedom. Fairy Tail didn’t have a hatedom. Blackpink doesn’t have a hatedom. Even Marvel doesn’t have a hatedom.

Paris Hilton had a hatedom. Nickelback had a hatedom. Hell, the website Tumblr itself had a hatedom. These were examples of people or products whose reputations spread too quickly and eventually swallowed rational perception of them, with people who have never experienced them or their work dismissing them and the fans who enjoy it wholesale.

Using the term “hatedom” is understandably common because (and in spite of the fact that) it allows for easy miscategorization. A hatedom is not composed of people that were actually exposed to the work, found it lacking, and expressed that. A hatedom does not occur in the wake of a product that was so bad it pissed off its fans and caused them to walk. People don’t hate Metroid: Other M because they can’t stand the sight of a woman being vulnerable and don’t understand challenging drama, they hate it because it was poorly written, badly designed, and tarnished a long-running and highly cherished gaming heroine’s reputation. People didn’t hate Fifty Shades of Grey because of some bias against women expressing their sexual freedom, they hated it because it was a wildly misogynistic and badly-written piece of dreck. People didn’t hate The Last of Us Part II because of homophobia and transphobia, they hated it because it was a misery fest with a tired moral theme that posited itself far more deep and compelling than it really was. And just because people with the above disingenuous views also hated these things does not discount the fact that the works got the reputations they did because they were getting back the exact amount of love and respect that was put into them.

Similarly, RWBY doesn’t have a hatedom. It does, in fact, have an ex-fandom. Those are also things you don’t see very often, but when you do, they almost always follow the same pattern, don’t they? A work which got wildly popular very quickly, took really deep nosedives afterward, and became disowned by the people that had formerly propped it up.

But that’s a discussion for later. What exactly makes RWBY’s fandom so toxic and cult-like, and why and how did it get that way? I think it’s a combination of several key factors that were baked in and collided badly.

The first was ease of access. RWBY was sold extremely well early on, and shared enough similarities with both anime and video games that it attracted many curious people from those communities. Combine that with vibrant colors, an attractive visual aesthetic, an air of badassery, and good music, and it gained a lot of loyal fans quickly—fans of anime and video games, specifically, being fans that tend to get more attached than to other mediums and are known for spending a lot on merchandise. These, in turn, morphed into nostalgic elements ripe for misremembering—people often have difficulty acknowledging that something they once liked isn’t good anymore even on its own, and I think RWBY fans in particular put way too much energy into the show to be able to admit that all the time they spent defending it (and harassing people who criticized it) was for nothing.

That skyhigh rocket to fame early on, of course, was attached to the reputation of Monty Oum, and once he died, he quickly became a martyr, which galvanized the loyalty of the show’s most toxic fans even further. To this day, talking about Monty at all, even for the right reasons, is seen as disrespectful or distasteful unless you’re trying to use him to prop up Rooster Teeth, a double standard I’ve unfortunately run into even in seeming safe spaces. I think if we’re comparing RWBY fandom to a cult, then Monty Oum and his memory can be compared to a central mythologized figure, the center around which are formed all of the pretty lies the members of the cult will tell you. Monty’s name is irreplaceably tied to RWBY, and as such, in order to defend Monty, its fans have to defend RWBY...and you can see where this leads. Attempting to talk about the mistreatment Monty and his family went through at Rooster Teeth is seen as using his name as a weapon—nevermind the fact that Rooster Teeth and their fans regularly use his name as a shield.

Of course, what this really reveals is that many such people don’t care about Monty, who he was, or who he went through, but rather his name alone. In fact, I’ve straight up seen RWBY stans say that people shouldn’t “take Monty’s name in vain”, as if Monty were in fact some sacred religious figure. It’s both bizarre and harmful.

A third factor was popularity. For a lot of the same reasons as, say, Supernatural, the perception of RWBY skews much more broadly between fan and ex-fan than that of the typical over-hyped show. The truth of the matter is that when a show gets popular, or really any work gets popular, enjoying it becomes a cliquey sort of thing. People that enjoyed being into something well-respected and widely known and basically the hottest trend are far more prone to become overly attached, put too much of themselves into it, and remain unequipped to deal with the fact of that trend’s eventual passing, especially if it’s a fall into disgrace rather than a quiet entrance into history. You can still find certain especially toxic big names from the RWBY fandom active and posting, pretending not to notice that their audience has become smaller and smaller over the years. Let’s face facts here, a lot of people that enjoy being part of the “in” crowd never manage to figure out how to accept losses and will do anything to try and regain lost popularity, or fool themselves into thinking they’re still on top of the world.

But we can reason and explain all day. Another truth of the matter is that it shouldn’t be other people’s problem that fans can’t accept reality and adjust, and that the RWBY fandom quite honestly deserves its reputation as abysmally toxic. The way terminal fans of the show have treated anyone who dissents, most prominently Shane Newville and other ex-employees, let alone other ex-fans of the show, is quite frankly disgusting. RWBY stans are difficult to look at in all of their bewildering, teeth-gnashing toxicity and forgive...so I’m not going to. People that still insist there’s nothing wrong with this show or the company making it are, as far as I’m concerned, beyond help, and are part of the problem. Many an ex-employee certainly thinks so.

In a lot of ways, you could call the fandom one of the driving forces of the show’s failure, mostly because they had an abnormally large amount of influence over the show. Pleasing the fans has always been a major goal of the RWBY team (unless you like characters Miles Luna doesn’t, I guess), but it’s almost disturbing how the Rooster Teeth strategy has been to lead them along and bat their eyelashes at every turn and how the fandom laps it up.

Of course, Rooster Teeth feeds the parasocial engine by engaging with the fans as equals, and I was given a disturbing reminder of how many of the people who worked on the show—the ones who aren’t pissed and digging themselves out of trauma ditches—behave exactly as the fans do, tweeting twenty times a day about their favorite ships and memes. By creating the perception that RWBY’s team is just like the RWBY fanbase and wants the same things they want, they tap that line of excess energy that’s kept this fandom going so long despite how far it’s fallen. It’s that “hey! my friend said my ship is going to be canon and he works on the show” feeling.

Of course, a probable reason as to why so many employees who worked on RWBY behave the way RWBY fans do is because a lot of them started out that way. As in, student hires. This has long been an open secret of Rooster Teeth’s M.O. for a while now, hiring people who look up to them and engage heavily with their content. Many an ex-animator has lambasted this tactic because it’s insidious, and purposely designed to make the incoming staff feel honored and indebted and excited so they won’t notice how they’re being fucked over. Arryn Troche, who made the ‘gays greenlighting volume 10’ tweet, rings up as a particularly eerie example considering they have the same rather-uncommon and unconventionally-spelled name as the voice actor for a ship they’re obviously very attached to. A quick search reveals them to have been a longtime fan and cosplayer for the show before being signed on as a junior animator.

And it is the fandom who ultimately makes the legacy for any given work or body of work. So what is RWBY ultimately going to be remembered for?

Legacy

I thought about it for a little while and found five things that are most likely to be associated with RWBY in the public’s memory after its death. The first should come as no surprise to anyone.

Bumbleby

The only part of RWBY that will likely be carried on by fans who stuck with it until the end is, of course, the only part of it that mattered, to many of them. You’ll know from my earlier recaps that shipping was always a big deal in fandom, but due to key choices (or if you prefer, mistakes) made during Volumes 2 and 3, one ship grew larger and more promoted in fandom circles than any others.

This is a combination of the unique features of the RWBY fandom and their one-track mind. The fans are well-known, as I said, to fill in the blanks in a pattern that best suits their narratives, and this works out with Rooster Teeth because it means that any sudden changes in direction they make will always be excused and praised rather than critically examined. Unsurprisingly, Bumbleby’s fandom, now that their victory has been cemented, have doubled down on their narrative that this was the intended goal from the beginning, despite it being plainly obvious that early RWBY was angling for Sun Wukong as the love interest and threw the occasional bones to Blake/Yang shippers to try and play nice.

This used to be one part of the fandom, of course, but as the show continually bombed with viewers and made more and more decisions that pushed them away, all competitors were slowly filtered out as their fans left, until Bumbleby shippers were the fandom. It’s no coincidence that Blake and Yang suddenly started acting unusually touchy and sentimental in Volume Six, following on the heels of a volume of RWBY so wildly unpopular that it woke up the company execs and forced them to acknowledge that the biggest part of their fanbase was only going to remain loyal in exchange for one thing: their ship.

The sad thing is that you can tell Rooster Teeth wanted to explore other options. Volume Five features a rather sudden shift into Yang and Weiss interactions in what I remain positive to this day was an attempt to sway shippers into a potential second choice while Black Sun was still in the oven, and this really represented one of the major errors of Rooster Teeth, in that they failed to understand the audience they were trying so hard to please.

Bumbleby became what I call a “Big Red Button” ship, and it is only the second of its kind that I’ve seen. The first? Destiel.

Yes, there’s a reason I kept comparing RWBY to Supernatural whenever Blake and Yang’s relationship came up. I admit I wasn’t a part of the Supernatural craze in its heyday and have never really enjoyed the show, but I’ve watched enough of it to connect the dots from what cultural osmosis I had to the eventual downfall we saw in November of 2020.

Both Bumbleby and Destiel were held up as the gay ship that would change everything, the biggest ship in the fandom and the one that would’ve been a major push for LGBT visibility, at least during their heydays. The problem was that its fans were not really that interested in LGBT visibility and were simply obsessed with the ship itself, applying it value as a win for LGBT audiences purely to bolster its perceived importance. Fans like this were not ever going to accept any alternatives regardless of the sexual orientations or gender conventions involved. Hence, the metaphor that is “the big red button”. You have a big red button that says “canon gay ship but not the ship you want” and ask the fans you’re trying to court whether they’d press it or not. Whatever they might say out loud, you know none of them is pressing that fucking button, ever.

Both of these Big Red Button ships became what they were due to showrunners being forced into courting an audience they really didn’t care for, and how could you blame them when both were infamously very, very over-active and annoying in general. Just like with RWBY’s well-intentioned but misguided Freezerburn phase in Volume 5, Supernatural also tried to gently shut down fans who then managed to obliviously ignore any and all hints that their ship was not meant to be endgame, and I can say that because “he’s like a brother to me” in any fandom but Supernatural would’ve been a tactical nuclear strike that sent the shippers packing. Once it failed, the gay bait came out in full force. It’s well known by now that, contrary to what one would imagine, the CW was not pulling a profit off of Supernatural’s minor mainstream success pushed by a cult following, so it’s no wonder they eventually resorted to desperately baiting the one audience that was going to stick it out no matter what, provided they had the right relationship dangled in front of them. RWBY went through the same thing.

The main problem with these two ships is that for all its diehards insisted that it was all about the gay representation, their respective shows teased and baited for so long that the world outside the little bubble these shippers lived in had moved on by the time they came to fruition. Gay visibility in media these days, at least western media, is easily available, to the extent that sometimes people believe homophobia is totally over when it really, really isn’t. If you’re looking for gay representation, you can find it plenty of places, and the first place you look probably isn’t going to be Supernatural or RWBY. So the huge wave of viewers that these shippers expected upon their victories was never going to occur, which might could’ve been avoided if the writers had simply grown a pair and made moves towards canon much sooner than before the shows were on their last legs and due to be scrapped.

Or, you know, just been honest. Diversions and alternatives were never going to work. The only thing that these shippers were ever going to understand was a hard no, a “sorry, this ship isn’t going to happen”. But the execs in charge of these shows were never willing to take a hit like that, so instead they dug their own grave.

And where does that leave the shippers, those people who devoted their whole lives to these fictional characters, only to find the show that bore them into the universe dead in a ditch? Well, nowhere good. Much like Supernatural, RWBY is heavily associated with its booming period, the heavily online portion of these shippers’ lives in the early and mid-2010s when it was all the rage, and yet in modern day, it’s seen as a bad neighborhood to hang in, an abandoned mansion at the corner of the street where awful things happened. These shippers don’t have many friends except each other.

Just like RWBY, Supernatural also exists primarily as an ex-fandom now. Much of its former fanbase remember the good days fondly but make no secret that they stopped following it once the writing tanked, and this left the shippers without many allies to associate with since so many of them had been pissed off with the way their shows ultimately became the Destiel Show and the Bumbleby Show, respectively. Contrary to an unfortunately popular idea, these shows did have actual LGBT fanbases, only a lot of their LGBT fans were not on kool-aid and avoided being sucked into a trap called “if you don’t ship this, you’re homophobic”.

You will find that the Bumbleby fandom are often looked on with disdain by quite a number of viewers of RWBY who have accused them of speaking over minorities, sexual and otherwise. Many fans have noted that, aside from Blake’s bisexuality being a seemingly late addition (Arryn Zech is noted to have cast her as straight when discussing Ilia Amitola’s ill-fated crush on her as late as 2019), Blake was very swiftly removed from all faunus characters who held romantic connotations in favor of Yang, implicitly saying that Blake was better committing to a white human woman than to an ethnic faunus male. There are obvious reasons why this left a bad taste in peoples’ mouths. Not to mention, other LGBT fans that invested in the show were not exactly welcomed with open arms.

Fair Game, or as I tend to call it, Qrowver? Qrow x Clover? Yeah, that was huge in Volume 7’s airing days. It very much experienced a rapid ballooning in fans and fandom love...but we all know how that ended. Many a fan who felt heartbroken and, importantly, betrayed by Clover’s sudden and rather pointless death turned on RWBY and Rooster Teeth and accused them of gaybaiting, which is of course exactly what happened. They received no sympathy from Bumbleby shippers—because of course they wouldn’t. If Rooster Teeth would gaybait with Qrow, a popular male character, that would mean they could potentially be gaybaiting with Blake and Yang, too. That was unacceptable, and so ironically the part of the fandom that had always crowed about the importance of extending a hand to LGBT viewers turned on LGBT viewers, valiantly defending Rooster Teeth as they always had.

And because Bumbleby fans had no room in their hearts for anything about RWBY except Bumbleby, and were hostile to anyone who didn’t ship it, they ended up being their own best friends and everyone else’s bad memories. When RWBY has faded from the public’s memory and is no longer a source of active income at all (so, basically right now), one of the only relics you’ll find of this show will be the two women making out in all the fanart you’ll find on the occasional Tumblr blog.

The Bigotry

You could call this section “the Racism” since that’s the biggest part of it, but we’d be remiss in neglecting the harm done to other minorities as well. We’ll get to them in a minute, but race is the thing that’s going to pop to mind when we talk about one of the other things RWBY left behind in the common memory.

One of the longest-running subplots that RWBY ever went through with was the racism subplot. Its basis is one of the things that so severely dates RWBY: creating an in-universe stand-in for people of color through the existence of people with animal traits was something you would absolutely not get away with after 2020, and even by 2016 was something liable to be seen as tacky. Nonetheless, RWBY openly used the faunus as stand-ins for black Americans and the struggles they faced in a white world.

Except that the company, based in Texas and headed largely by white staff, did not feel the importance of that. What slowly started out as a main character’s attempt to redeem an organization she felt had been driven too far and was no longer her home was slowly transformed into a means by which some incredibly racist people could spout off about what they felt were the real issues to be talked about, which were the condemnation they felt was deserved by activists that turned to violence, labeled, a little too quickly, as terrorists.

The 2010s saw a shift in social values, and much as with gay audiences and gay characters, black audiences and black characters—as well as other racial minorities—were experiencing something of a renaissance, with efforts to put the voices of these people into the public’s feeds. It wasn’t just George Floyd in 2020—the unexpected and frankly traumatic reign of Donald Trump as president of the United States galvanized the divide in America and social awareness became a bigger thing than ever, and since Trump was a flagrantly racist person with racist beliefs who enacted racist policies and was uplifted by racist Americans, people pushed back as they felt their lives and existences being threatened by a racist establishment...an establishment which Rooster Teeth came down on the side of very firmly.

No quarter is given to the fictional stand-ins. Sienna Khan’s policies are never examined in-depth, and the only close looks we get at the sorts of activism the White Fang does are at Adam, who is obviously condemned by the narrative and made into everything but a mustache-twirler, with delusional and frankly baffling beliefs of faunus superiority spelled out at length. No matter what concessions Rooster Teeth might’ve tried to make with Sienna’s beliefs before they stuck a sword in her, the fact of the matter is that their beliefs came through in the voices of Ghira and Blake, who made it very clear that the individual motives and experiences of people like Ilia, Corsac, Fennec, Yuma, and the rest simply don’t matter in the face of what they’d been driven to do by them. The whole ‘blacks can be racist’ tone of the final scenes involved in this subplot are both miles removed from the more cautious and neutral tone of early RWBY, and also just a very alarming red flag overall.

I went over this in my Volume 5 Final Thoughts: the shoddiness of the volume does not lie solely with the animation department. Miles and Kerry are known to have had generally sole control of the show up until Volume 7—but we also know that they didn’t have to, if they were writing anything company execs felt wasn’t to their tastes. The sudden twisting of Adam into a homicidal incel ex-boyfriend, along with his mutation into a faunus supremacist, when he was the face of the faunus movement as a whole, along with Sun’s blatant ill will towards the White Fang when he’d previously been willing to give them a chance on Blake’s word, all imply that Miles and Kerry endorsed the worst possible interpretations of racial activists and felt free to condemn them and place responsibility onto the faunus—and by extension, the real-life minorities they represented—to take a stand against the bad seeds within their causes, and the fact no one stopped them from airing this implies the higher-ups felt the same way.

People didn’t just leave RWBY after Volume 5 because of some really badly animated fights—they left because they’d felt too much of the authors’ racism coming through in the narrative and couldn’t comfortably continue watching. Every member of the faunus that had “bad” views was either killed (Adam, Sienna, Fennec), arrested (Corsac, Yuma), or “redeemed” by choosing to fight the first two (Ilia). All of these combined factors, with no room for charitable interpretations…not a good look.

And once Adam was defeated in Volume 5, and the White Fang reformed, that was the last anyone saw of that subplot, which had taken five years to wrap up and somehow still ended too early. Miles and Kerry had washed their hands of it, and references to Blake’s place in society were sparing from then on. This subplot’s inescapable presence throughout the show, combined with how it was dropped out of existence, left no room for redemption, either. No one was going back and saying “maybe this looks really, really bad”.

And so, that’s what a lot of people carried with them as their final and most relevant memories of RWBY: it’s astounding levels of racism. This is a bitter subject for many an ex-RWBY fan, many of whom aren’t white and, even among those that are, it’s simply inexcusable. Meet someone on social media who talks about RWBY at all, and isn’t one of the Bumbleby stans we’ve already discussed? You will find some mention or other of RWBY’s racist elements somewhere within their sphere. And so, that becomes a part of RWBY’s legacy, as a feature of the show that was simply too big to ignore and too poorly-handled to forgive. People don’t get over this shit, man.

This is of course not to mention the well deserved shitty reputation RWBY has for its other bigoted elements, as well. Bumbleby, as we’ve discussed, encompassed pretty much every RWBY stan left standing by 2020, but that left quite a few ex-fans that were fed up with the company’s obvious ploys when it came to sexuality and gender. Remember when I talked about Qrowver up above? Its ballooning and immediate fall from grace was a much-condensed version of RWBY as a whole, and pretty much featured as Rooster Teeth blowing their last remaining patience from LGBT fans to smithereens. The fact of the matter is that when you get down to it, every RWBY volume after Volume 4 was not a good time to be a minority. If you were gay, the show seemed to either ignore or despise you—between the background gays that warranted mockery, the mixed reception Ilia generated, and the outrage that finally boiled over when Clover bit it, part of RWBY’s legacy is how utterly unpleasant it has been for LGBT fans who expected and deserved better.

And so despite entering the scene in 2013 as a supposedly progressive show all for being led by four women, the show died known as a low-effort half-baked cringefest whose politics were always on display and always several years behind the trend.

The Good Days

Of course, another major part of RWBY’s legacy is the early days when everyone actually liked it. This is, again, something the show creators brought on themselves and something fans assisted with. I did mention the nostalgia for the Good Ol’ Days as a significant part of the RWBY fandom’s more cult-like elements, after all. The fact of the matter is, on some level, everyone knows that RWBY has spent several years going downhill. The ex-fans lament this fact, and the diehard stans insist that it’s all just as good as it used to be, primarily by doing what they do quite a lot, and linking completely coincidental elements back to things characters said or did in previous volumes as some sort of evidence that this has been the plan all along.

I’ve run polls on this matter before; even though I’ve recapped Volumes 1-3 thoroughly and shone lights on some pretty significant flaws, you ask anyone what they think the best volume of RWBY was and they’re gonna tell you Volume 3. Yes, even with all of the stalking incel Adam and the deaths of Penny and Pyrrha. It’s the last time RWBY felt cohesive and even though some obvious derailing was in effect, and Shane Newville has openly said that the behind-the-scenes matters were pretty ugly, it’s still the golden child. Shane’s only one person, and it’d be a while before RWBY scandals would become consistent and begin to overshadow the show as a whole.

The RWBY team themselves have certainly nurtured that very much on purpose. That tactic started with them, of course. Many elements that were either unpopular or predicted to ruffle feathers were stated to have originated in earlier volumes, even in situations where this wouldn’t have made sense or where it’s an obvious lie—such as Maria Calavera. They know full well their seasons post-Volume 3 were unpopular and receiving blowback, and tried to minimize it by linking them to more well-respected seasons. Suffice to say that this simply didn’t work. But it does make people remember those earlier volumes. Because so many ex-fans lost their energy for RWBY after its most active period, much of the hype from the hype era is all that you’ll see when you encounter one. Nostalgia wins out in the end, and at least RWBY can say that, as a show, it had enough of a headstart to leave an impression that lasted in a positive way. Although that’s only one side of the coin...

The Scandals

Let’s face facts here, the biggest part of RWBY’s legacy, period, is that it fucking died. It didn’t die instantly, but rather took hit after hit, blow after blow, and slowly had its image tarnished alongside that of the company, which failed to contain repeated scandals as ex-employee after ex-employee after ex-employee spoke out about the abysmal ways they’d been treated.

RWBY is Rooster Teeth’s biggest IP by far and, really, their only one worth talking about. Every other show was either eclipsed by it or unofficially canceled after bad reception. So when Rooster Teeth suffered the consequences of their actions, so did RWBY. It really can’t be overstated how the last few years of RWBY’s existence have been absolutely bombarded by a barrage of terrible Glassdoor reviews and bombshell exposure letters. Fans managed to stay strong through the first few rumblings of ill will, but after Volume 5 shook the fandom loose, discontent entered enough of the fandom sphere to be normalized, and once that happened, it was all downhill. Once people were actually allowed to talk about not liking Rooster Teeth’s content, they sure as hell weren’t going to be dissuaded from talking about not liking Rooster Teeth as a company or its practices.

Separating the art from the artist is a very difficult thing to do and only really appropriate in certain situations. Don’t fall for any kool-aid, guys, it doesn’t make you more mature or ‘above all the drama’ to actively ignore the damage done to real people in the process of getting fictional content out into the world.

If you’re still able to enjoy the Harry Potter books and look back on the good times they gave you in fondness, then fine. If you actually purchased and played the Hogwarts Legacy game programmed by antisemites and which puts money in the pocket of the transphobic owner of the franchise, then yeah, people will be right to give you shit for it. There’s a difference between quietly enjoying a product in a manner that doesn’t hurt anybody, and actively ignoring the people hurt to make that product while feigning concern. The gap in the fandom widened as the repeated leaks and scandals continuously ate away at the protective bubble around Rooster Teeth and it became clear that whatever fans might bleat, Rooster Teeth wasn’t going to ‘learn their lesson and do better’. The habitual cycle of using whatever recent scandal had occurred to cast disappointment and anger on a particular figure and uplift the rest of “CRWBY” (see also: the Gray Haddock issue) gave diminishing returns as the bombs kept dropping. This is part of why RWBY has such an ex-fandom, because if they aren’t enjoying the product and people were hurt to make it, why stay?

Crunching employees so hard they struggle to sleep and suffer debilitating health issues? Writing the n-word on a white board knowing a black employee will see it? Goading someone into trying to kill themselves? Calling an LGBT employee a slur and then making up a public-friendly nickname in place of that slur just to get away with continuing to call her that? Laying off people without warning or a means of letting them stay afloat until another job is found? Not paying or crediting employees and cultivating an environment where those in charge do what they want and those in the public eye reap all the benefit while those without a consistent spotlight get treated like dirt?

Just some of the things I thought up off the top of my head. There’s plenty more in the details. And you can’t blame Fullscreen, you can’t blame Warner, you can’t just write it off as something that happens at animation studios, because it isn’t. Yeah, the work environment in general for animation studios in America is lacking because, ya know, late-stage capitalism hellscape, but that’s dismissive of the point. Rooster Teeth are a bad company and hurt their employees and lie when called on it. It’s impossible to separate RWBY from Rooster Teeth (despite stubborn stans’ best attempts, which themselves have been called out by these same ex-employees) and because of that, RWBY’s legacy is one of corporate abuse and utterly vile behavior towards people that just wanted to make something cool.

People have refused to associate with the show over these things and honestly, they’re right to. RWBY’s ultimate legacy, if we’re honest, is the show that became a shadow of its former self, still trying to dazzle with reminders of its former glory and promises of gay relationships, all while trying to squeeze money out of both the employees who made it and the fans who upheld it. It’s the show that cost hundreds of people their physical and mental health and didn’t even have anything to show for it at the end of the day. It will live on in history as the most bitter of pills to swallow, that something you once liked and wanted to succeed can and will be ruthlessly twisted for profit margins and might actively hate you on the side. And speaking of…

Monty Oum

The biggest travesty of RWBY’s legacy is that Monty Oum is ultimately only the smallest part of it. He’s there, but barely—he’s a name in the credits that quite frankly is only there to keep up the facade of loyalty, when the show had stopped being Monty’s show before he even died and by now can be safely said to resemble nothing he would’ve made.

It’s a shame that for all that Monty was held up as a genius of his craft and a genuinely good man who inspired so many people, all he’s going to be remembered for is...this. A show people only attach his name to in an effort to insist it’s actually worth sticking by. Yes, Monty did other things, had other works, but none of them ever achieved even a fraction of the fame and respect that RWBY had from its first baby steps in 2013.

Maybe this could’ve been avoided if the real carriers of Monty’s legacy—Sheena, his wife, and Shane, his pupil—hadn’t been cast off as they had.

Shane seems to have found a new life and is working with Dillon Gu on animation, but I think we’ve all noticed his name hasn’t gone mainstream yet. I’ve tried to get in touch with him; from what I’ve gleaned, I frankly just advise leaving him alone. He wants to move on and I don’t think the RWBY fandom, which was so awful to him for telling the truth, is ever going to be a place he can feel welcome.

Sheena has mostly been quiet and done her own thing, cosplaying and watching anime and hopefully enjoying herself, although I notice posts on her Twitter feed from last year calling for a New Deal in the animation sector and castigating corporate abuses.

She also plays Hades, a much better product than RWBY with more love put into it and much better LGBT representation, which means her taste is excellent. She has a site now that you can go to, and the about section doesn’t mention Monty, her late husband, at all, for obvious reasons: Sheena doesn’t want to be connected to RWBY. Though, there is something there that’s noteworthy, in the last paragraph:

Still desiring a social element to her career, the animator turned professional cosplayer also has a history in the live stream world. Past broadcasts have included creating costume pieces, playing games with community members and subscribers, RPGs and more. No matter the project, peers or problem, Sheena strives to keep moving forward.

That powerful phrase we all associate with Monty.

It’s a shame that this show had to be Monty’s legacy, and that years off from now, his name isn’t going to mean anything to the public because the project he was passionate about and died making outlived him and his passion. It feels like his legacy was stolen, and his own part in the show’s legacy is held up purely as a pedestal on which the show should rightfully shine.

Every time I think about Monty, I think about how much I don’t want that to be me. For all the years I’ve spent here, with my graphics certifications being wasted since I earned them while I slave away in retail, I wonder if I’m the lucky one. If I were to enter the workforce and do what I loved, would it be worth it in the end? Would what happened to Monty and Sheena and Shane happen to me? Not sure I wanna know.

Snipped here.