#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!

[jdorian]

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.

[cerusee]

I've never watched any Chinese dramas but I really enjoy your posts/gifs about them and it's got me interested in trying some! Do you have any recommendations for somebody who's totally new to them? Any tropes/background context I should be aware of? The historical/fantastical ones seem the most appealing to me.

Oooooh! My first thought on reading this ask was, “oh, I’m hardly qualified”; I’m only on my *stops to count on fingers* eighth cdrama, not counting the one episode I watched of the Wang Zhuocheng xianxia where he falls in love with a rock. (Long story.) There’s a lot of cdramas out there, and I myself have not even scratched the surface of what’s out there! That said, if you’re interested in historical/fantastical dramas, those ARE the ones I’ve been watching, so I still have some opinions despite being a total noob myself.

Do not start with The Untamed/Chen Qing Ling. Twas my first cdrama, like a lot of western fans, who were drawn to it in part because of the big censored-but-still-very-evident gay love story between the male leads, but honestly, as much fun as it is for the slash fans, it’s not a great jumping off point for either Chinese television in general, or even for its own wuxia-inspired genre setting. I say this as some who is still deep in the fandom four years later, and has immense love for the show: the first two episodes are flat-out bad, the overall pacing is bad (episodes frequently stop MIDSCENE), the worldbuilding is thin (a carryover from the novel it was based on), and without a larger context for why it’s made the way it’s made (stylistic choices, industry conventions, government censorship, genre conventions) a lot about it is confusing as hell to cdrama newbies, which is…so evident…a lot…in fandom wank I mean in the discourse about what story this story is trying to tell. Like, if you came to me and asked specifically, “I’m thinking of watching CQL. Should I watch CQL?” I would say yes, absolutely! It’s so much fun! I’m obsessed with the characters! I’ve written a lot of fanfic about the purple guy! But it’s not a good first cdrama, nor it is the best example of what the Chinese TV industry has to offer.

A MUCH better first cdrama especially if you like the historical/fantastical: The Legend of the Condor Heroes (2017), which not coincidentally was my second cdrama. It’s one of about a dozen television adaptations of the classic 1957 Chinese novel of the same name by Jin Yong, generally considered to be the inventor of the genre known as wuxia, which is a blend of history, fantasy, and martial arts. (One of the most well-known examples of wuxia in the west is Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which you have probably at least heard of.)

Legend of the Condor Heroes (hereafter known as LOCH) has it all: romance, revenge, evil plots and daring deeds, people jumping off a burning mountain and being rescued by the worst CGIed eagles known to television or cinema, boat adventures, mountain adventures, grasslands adventures, a weird cult leader who lives on a spooky flower island (there will be math), murder, baby kidnapping, more murder, one guy inadvertently racking up a ridiculous number of martial arts teachers, sworn brotherhoods which invariably end with one guy stabbing the other, lots of VERY good martial arts fights, and, of course, Genghis Khan. Technically there are no magic/supernatural elements in this show—no ghosts, ghouls, magic, angels, devils, gods, etc—although the martial artists do have l33t skillz that might qualify as superhuman depending on how you slice your genre conventions, and are awfully fun to watch.

I’ve actually seen two LOCH adaptations (there was one in 2024 I liked a lot, with my favorite Guo Jing so far), but 2017 is a much better adaptation for newcomers as it tells a fuller version of the story and doesn’t skimp on or rush through or rewrite as many elements of the plot as other versions do; it’s meant to be a LOCH for people who haven’t seen half a dozen versions of LOCH already. It has a WONDERFUL cast, including my one of my favorite cdrama leading men, Chen Xingxu,* as the lead antagonist, Yang Kang, who is a trash fire of a person you just can’t root for, but he also can’t help it because he was raised by Wanyin Honglie. You can catch it on YouTube (I recall that there are couple of missing episodes from that playlist, but you can search on YT for those when you get there, to find them subtitled from other channels.)

*If you, like me, come away from LOCH 2017 with your mouth slightly ajar at how great CXX is, I have wonderful news for you! He’s been a lead in at least two other very good cdramas: the 2023 xianxia** The Starry Love, where he gets to play, like, five different characters (huge acting flex, and he’s great, although I would rush to stress I loved a ton of things about this show besides CXX himself), and the 2019 semi-historical drama Goodbye My Princess, which might actually be my favorite cdrama I have seen to date, and arguably THEE best well-made on a technical level, with phenomenal acting, a great script, and editing and directing I am constantly swooning over, but I am not entirely sure I can recommend to you unless you are a Tragedy Enjoyer.

(If you are a Tragedy Enjoyer, please stop whatever you’re doing and just start watching Goodbye My Princess right now, it is phenomenal. It is also available on YouTube. Watch the Director’s Cut, not the regular one! This is important. In its haste to get the main leads on screen together ASAP, the regular version does a Reader’s Digest version of stuff the Director’s Cut spends like five episodes carefully setting up, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense, nor does it flow well.)

**Speaking of xianxia! Xianxia is the high fantasy genre, full of magic and gods and demons and people dying and living multiple lives and whatnot. Important to note: xianxias are soap operas (complimentary). They tend to feature female protagonists, sweeping, epic romances, and put enormous emphasis on exploring the nuances of relationships and emotions. I have watched three that I loved (Love Between Fairy and Devil, The Starry Love, and Eternal Love: Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms), and while technically I could recommend all three, if you were going to watch just one, especially as a cdrama intro, I have to recommend Eternal Love, which really is the quintessential xianxia, the one all other xianxias are kind of shaping themselves around. I have watched it 1.5 times and I can say that it does not properly take off until like, episode 10, or whenever it is that the main couple finally, properly meet. IT IS WORTH THE INVESTMENT. This show made me want to spit blood. I cried multiple times watching it. It made me feel things. It has a wonderful immersive quality that’s hard to describe except to say that the entire show sort of vibrates on its own frequency. The casting is just kind of…perfect? Props to Maggie Huang for portraying the most perfectly hatable xianxia villainess of all time. Absolutely no one is doing it like Su Jin. No one should try. I believe this is available on YouTube, but after an abortive start, I realized it was on US Netflix, and watched it there.

As for tropes and background context: ehhhhhh. I mean, it’s an entire industry? I know substantially less about how it functions than I do about, like, American TV and film. I know government censorship is a not-inconsiderable factor, but I don’t know much of the nuance of how that plays out in terms of filming and airing. Tropes will vary according to subject. Idol dramas (shows built to showcase media personalities regardless of their ability to act) are a thing. Most cdrama audio is still dubbed (this one surprised me!), usually by professional voice actors and not by the original cast, for a confluence of reasons, some of which historically make sense (noisy filming lots rendering original audio useless), and some of which are really stupid (fans throwing hissy fits if lead actors don’t have the “right” kinds of voices for their characters).

Anyway! My recommendations are this: try The Legend of the Condor Heroes (2017) to start with, UNLESS you would prefer having your heart ripped out of your chest, in which case watch Goodbye My Princess (Director’s Cut, 2019), or UNLESS you love soap operas as much as I do, in which case watch Eternal Love: Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms (2017). All three are great shows, but they all hit differently/scratch a different itch.

Oh! Lastly! @dangermousie is a great source of cdrama recs. I should note she prefers dramas and tragedies and mostly does not vibe with xianxias. But she watches like eight million hours of dramas a week and reports her findings to us because she is a river to her people.

[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.

[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.

[marzipanandminutiae]

you know, something that sticks in my craw about Crimson Peak fandom wank is the willingness of some people to believe that Lucille is significantly older than Thomas (usually so they can hate her more/add another Problematic element to their relationship)

like, even besides the fact that their age difference is stated in canon

the actors are four years apart. that's technically more than the characters' two-year age gap...but not by much

on top of that, they look basically the same age. (he actually has MORE visible fine lines on his face, if you pay attention in close-up shots)

and yet.