#technically this is fandom wank

[ivyodessa]

I am begging, BEGGING tumblr users to please use the hellcheer tag! We've been exclusively using hellcheer on other platforms since like August. If you wanna continue to use eddissy/edissy that's fine but please, please PLEASE use hellcheer too!

[vanmarkus]

calling people you hate ugly to demonstrate that they are worth less actually falls into the category of bodyshaming and it's a mentality that originally stems from misogyny and especially from hatred towards masc/gnc women... ngl seeing more and more people and for some reason, especially lesbians thinking it's fun and quirky and saying it's "their right" is incredibly baffling and disappointing to me

[jamiethebee]

You know what irks me the most about the mha ending. (Sorry I'm still on it.)

Like the early parts of the manga, there were so many grown up hero AUs in fandom (like storylines that took place when they're adults and heroes) and they're fun! A little silly!

And then we had the war arc and cities are being destroyed and everything's torn up and for over a hundred chapters, it's been oh huh I guess every AU like that will just be canon divergence lmao

And then Horikoshi basically wipes the slate clean so I guess all those AUs could technically canon compliant. There's not even much in the way of lasting physical damage! Because it's dealt with???? Immediately???? Within months?????

Which is fine! Nothing wrong with it! The AUs are fun! But, it just irks me that you could throw out half the manga because it didn't matter. Nothing majorly changed. Silly adult hero AUs for everyone I guess because the League may as well have been 2 bit villains for all the effect they had at large was. Idk. Maybe I'm bitter? Maybe my brain still trying to process the ending and the change in how AUs relate to canon? I guess - what was all the constant sprinkling in of "society has let people down" that we see from chapter 1? It meant nothing? I guess????? I mean A WAR HAPPENED. But whatever I guess heehee wasn't that soooooo silly???? That people's take on early story can be the same as post story?????

[insomniac-ships]

Look. If you're into fucking Homestuck, I'm going to assume you're at least okay with some pretty fucked up shit being depicted in fiction.

[prettyboybillyhargrove]

I just realized S2 Billy's(17) first scene is high school girls checking him out and catcalling and S3 Billy's ("freshly" 18 like some of y'all like to call) first scene is grown ass women checking him out and catcalling.

Seriously I know Duffers are piece of shits and everything but how could they get away with so much creepy shit? Why no one is confrontating them about sexualizing teens/kids (i talk about this before but Mike/El kissing a billion times is totally them sexualizing the kids i don't accept criticism about this) why not even one person comes out and says you guys are fuckin grown ass men in your 30s why the fuck you're shooting a show with this much kids where you sexualize them? Like? They're doing this for some type of people ig? I'm not even saying the part where they force Sadie and Caleb to kiss when it was not in the script and their excuse was "you looked so nervous we had to do it ahahahahaha" again these are 35+ men the kids were 12-14 at the time.

[hypodermicfroggy]

The one reason I will and always will encourage gatekeeping in fandoms/nerd culture is because without gatekeeping we get the stupidest ass opinions from people on all sides of ideology spectrum.

like the one I saw today:

"Women ruined Mad Max!" Women have always been an integral part of Mad Max and you're a fake fan, does Tina Turner as the smooth jazz queen of the apocalypse Auntie Em mean NOTHING to you

[rogueddie]

I've been seeing a lot of my favorite people taking a break from tumblr, and I want to ask you if I could get your discord to make a big discord group of all my and your mutuals. Or ask if you have discord in general.

I do technically have a discord, though, forewarning, I never use it because I suck at talking to people. It's the same name; rogueddie. It sounds like a real good idea though!

And I hope you don't mind me using this ask to now complain about the state of things but also... fucking hell. It's something I've thought was just a me problem. It's kind of upsetting to see that others are feeling just as pushed away or finding the fandom lacking.

I recently tried to find a post mentioning me and I couldn't remember if it was my current @ or my old 'babyboymunson' one and even that was such a horrible contrast. This fandom space used to be so fun and friendly and creative. And now it sounds like people are being pressured out with hate anons.

Hopefully the amount of events that I've seen popping up already will help revive the love this fandom deserves. Hopefully more things like this, or group chat things in general, start happening a lot more too. Hopefully addressing the issues now will help people figure out ways to navigate the fandom in happier and healthier ways.

This drama has been going on for so long now- it completely ruined 2023 for me- and I'm so sick of it. We're all just trying to have fun and enjoy a shared interest. Some people in this fandom so desperately need to learn to curate their space instead of turning into hate blogs.

And I'm sorry that this has rambled into a weird place lmao.

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

Random funny thing to me is when people insist that two characters are basically siblings to each other and it's so weird to ship them (because they're connected in some way through a member of their family)

And the truth is that yes they can technically be considered family (in the nuclear family way) if you want them to be, but not because they're siblings. You actually have at least a miniscule argument here and yet you've lost arguing that they're basically siblings😂

[lostandbackagain]

can we have one poc doll release without saying weird shit about what features what races are allowed to have

[qprstobin]

Just saw someone say that a) b/yler was a "slowburn" and b) that "modern gay media" doesn't do slowburns anymore. Begging people to please engage in actual queer media that isn't Stranger Things.

[heartbreak-sandwich]

I'm - I - But -

So....if Billy wasn't around....we can't just sit there and lie to ourselves about the fact that the Mindflayer wouldn't have just simply...picked a different person, and the story would've unfolded either way. We really cannot be having that idea in our silly little heads. Really. We just can't.

Someone honestly just said if Billy wasn’t around then the Mindflayer wouldn’t have gotten a host or its “powers.” I’m absolutely stunned.

Now we’re blaming Billy for the Mindflayer? Billy who had absolutely no fucking idea what was going on at all? Like literally the entire time this guy was used as a meat suit for an unimaginable horror. Had to watch as his body was used to commit many crimes? Cried, begged, PLEADED. Died protecting everyone? APOLOGIZED WITH HIS DYING BREATH!!!!

But SOMEHOW it’s still his fault?!?!

I will honestly NEVER understand how people function with certain mindsets. Honestly I’m seething right now.

Yep. That’s the face of someone who made premeditated deal with a goop monster.

I cannot fucking stand what this fandom has become. If it weren’t for the small sliver of salvation I’ve found with all of you, I wouldn’t be in it any more.

[olderthannetfic]

I'm trying to understand AO3's tag synning, but I'm honestly lost. Bratting is a canonical tag. Brat Taming isn't marked as common and can't be filtered on, and it's linked to nothing else. But (slight) Brat Taming is not only marked as common, but it's also synned with Bratting?

I don't think I'll ever understand.

--

What's not to understand?

Tag wrangling is done by specific humans on specific dates. So is the tagging of works.

No doubt, someone used the synned tag a long time ago when wranglers were allowed to go mess with those tags. Later, there was a freeze on wrangling the pan-fandom trope stuff because 1. it was slowing down the archive for technical reasons and 2. there were a bajillion internal wanks about trying to standardize rules and make actual guidelines. Some of this was dumb fandom drama. Some of it was trying to get clueless but well-meaning people to stop repeatedly synning shit like 'asexuality' to shit like 'sexless'.

The other tag must have come in later when nobody was allowed to touch it.

--

That said, nothing can be both marked as common and a syn. It's one or the other.

[gascon-en-exil]

Do you have any thoughts on the way Edelcultists are so weird about stanning for Monica?

Ooh, more Houses (technically Hopes discourse). Haven't heard about that in forever.

I feel like I pretty much covered my thoughts on Monica in her section of my Which Game Are They Gayer In? video from 2022. I'll also be talking about her for a bit in my upcoming video in early October, so there's that as well. In both cases it's less about any specific fandom discourse, which as mentioned I've not been paying much attention to for a long time now, so much as it is my frustrations with how much the writing treats her as a joke and makes her come off as more ridiculous and/or less developed in contrast to various other characters in comparable positions: Shamir, Dedue, Catherine, Hubert, etc.

If there's any particular wank on what Monigard shippers have been up to in the last two years or so, I'm probably unaware of it.

[exhausted-capybara]

Gerrymandering is a form of voter manipulation in which you change the shapes of districts so you'll favor a given group (or exclude a group altogether, from e.g.: having access to certain benefits such as education within a given district)

A classical example is this picture from WaPo

Which is why AO3 being gerrymandering makes absolutely no fucking sense.

AO3 board is not a democracy that uses "district" votes or some form of electoral college: you get a vote if you pay the 10 dollars, and all the votes count exactly the same.

AO3 also doesn't gatekeep any of its features (besides voting) along any kind of lines or paywall, so it's not like it has a formal sense of "you're a second class citizen" or not. Nor does it have "district / state politics" in which gerrymandering could be used to affect outcomes.

But to make things worse, this last answer is in the context of the broader Internet, which isn't a democracy to begin with.

AO3 is popular because it's competent at what it does, it just has a different culture than they like and now they think that they're being systematically sidelined and made politically powerless.

Gerrymandering???? How do you gerrymander ao3????? And this comes from an ADULT too 😳

nope antis you don’t get to bastardize gerrymandering as well

[skaruresonic]

"I won't forget the time another games fan admitted on my old Twitter account that the current fannish climate was such that they were going to limit their Sonic discussion to private channels."

Funnily enough, something similar happened to me on Twitter. Someone contacted me in private because they wanted to talk about CV with me, but "I didn't want to message you so publicly because there are some people who don't like you that follow me"

And my reaction was... cool? Thanks for telling me? I'm not even super active on Twitter and I can count on one hand the amount of times I complained and attracted discussions. I just felt sad that this person treated me like a clandestine. It reminded me back when I was in high school and my friend back then was like "don't help these people, they talk shit about you" - what am I supposed to think, other than "oh :("?

And the CV fandom is all but dead, even the NFCV fandom is certainly more active but currently resting. The Sonic fandom, especially on Twitter, is an absolute nightmare. People really do pounce you for any reason they deem justified, and all sorts of petty discourse is pushed in front of your face for the sole reason of making you angry.

Anyway, I say already what I said: for a fandom who will call you all sorts of names if you don't have the right wholesome opinions on minor characters, they sure have zero mercy for real life minors whose crime is complaining in their corner of the internet. Silly you, daring to have an opinion!

Funnily enough, something similar happened to me on Twitter. Someone contacted me in private because they wanted to talk about CV with me, but "I didn't want to message you so publicly because there are some people who don't like you that follow me"

It reminded me back when I was in high school and my friend back then was like "don't help these people, they talk shit about you" - what am I supposed to think, other than "oh :("?

Might be missing some context here, but honestly, that sounds a little backhanded. Best case scenario, they're worried about inadvertently shining a spotlight on you, which just raises questions of why they're hanging around folks who'd dogpile people to begin with.

Like bruh, this is video games fandom, not an illegal gambling ring lmao. Saying "I can't reblog from you because you have cooties" would be more emotionally honest.

To some extent, though, I do have to wonder how much of this is a modern-day fandom culture thing and isn't confined to just Sonic, because patterns seem to repeat across fandoms. Half-Life has settled down AFAIK, but that was after virulent tourists literally called the cops on fic writers for shipping a ship and caused the old guard to disperse. The Silent Hill Reddit, likewise, refuses to hear any criticism of the SH2 remake because you're harshing their buzz. And hey, anything Konami offers us must surely be better than nothing. "Technical limitations" is similar misinformation that gets passed around via games of telephone a la Shadow mandates. I don't need to tell you how Sonic fandom treats unpopular opinions. Don't know what to call it. Toxic positivity? Consumerism? Anti mindset? Clout chasing? Social media-fuelled outrage? All of the above? Whatever it is, it's becoming more prevalent in fannish spaces. Maybe it's because I'm more invested in Sonic fandom than the others, but there I've noticed that there's definitely this added layer of superciliousness to Sonic that just makes the usual fandom wank even more obnoxious. Yes, the HLVRAI stans might lie and say your ship is pedophilia, which is incredibly unfortunate, but nobody was giving them the microphone and saying they ought to be taken as an authority on all things Half-Life. In fact, the old guard pushed for AO3 to separate HLVRAI and Half-Life in the tags for years for this very reason. We weren't all suddenly like "hmm yes, maybe Gordon really was a ~secret pedo~ who thinks of grown-ass Alyx as a child when she flirts with him in-game" because we knew that was fucking ridiculous. But for some reason, we're all supposed to think "IDW!Sonic is Games!Sonic" lest we bu run out of town with torches and pitchforks, I guess.

The worst part is it's hard to tell what people want anymore. You can't say things they don't want to hear even in your own space. You can't say it politely, you can't say it rudely, you can't say it to your friends or to people you're arguing with, you just cannot say it at all without risking a ton of fans going "well you said it, therefore you deserve what you get." And, frankly, fuck that lol.

[ladyloveandjustice]

It can't be avoided that several of these were from the Harry Potter fandom. Please remember that none of these dramas caused such widespread harm as the author now has and support trans rights. While I don't truck with supporting HP monetarily anymore, I believe we cannot forget the fandom's wanky history, lest we be doomed to repeat it.

If you're not a timeless being like me and don't know what fandom wank is, here's the lowdown on fanlore: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fandom_Wank

Some of these, mostly Thanfiction's complete story, cover some pretty rough topics- cw for sexual assault, abuse, and misgendering in that one. I wrote about it in full here. Usagi Kou is/was also very transphobic so please tread carefully.