#than ppl who “like REAL abuse”

[moonlightcookie]

genuine question. when does toxic yuri become abusive. where is the line drawn and why is one ok but the other bad

[ominous-horse-noises]

main takeaway from certain fan reactions to the finale is this:

the final scene with ankarna was so meaningful to the bad kids' arcs and how they made peace with being wronged by people they loved, and if all you can focus on is that the rat grinders didn't get much screentime, then you don't love dimension20 and you don't love this world: you want to be playing your own hs themed dnd campaign and you're mad the oc versions of the rat grinders you made up in your head acted ooc. these are not your characters and this is not their story.

[themoonking]

when people bring up the racism, homophobia, transphobia, romanticization of domestic abuse / rape / pedophilia / incest, literal actual written porn of literal actual real life flesh and blood children, et cetera et cetera on archive of our own, one of the ao3 stannies’ main defenses is “you can just filter out the tags if you don’t want to see that!” when that defense has no fucking legs to stand on.

ao3 is not an archive, it is barely even a website: a rant <3 (very long)

ignoring the fact that it’s a problem that all of that is permitted on the site in the first place (i guess child porn and racism are fine, and the people who allow it on their platform are fine, as long as i, personally, do not see it), that defense literally means nothing. it’s assuming that every little thing on ao3 is tagged properly and it absolutely is not, and if you think it is you are dumber than rocks. i mean for fuck’s sake, just touching on archive warnings and not tags, “creator chose not to use archive warnings” is literally a valid option for fic authors to use when it should fucking not be.

if someone is a freak who thinks that pedo shit is hot, they might not tag it as “rape” (archive warnings OR tags). i’ve literally seen underage father/son rape porn with no trigger warning tags but “child abuse if you squint”. IF YOU SQUINT. if someone thinks that domestic abuse is actually cool and sexy when attractive people do it, they might not tag it as “abuse”. if someone is a freak who likes incest, but bends over backwards to justify it by only shipping adopted family members, then they tell themselves that they don’t view it as incest, and might not tag it as “incest”. if someone is a racist, a homophobe, a transphobe, et cetera and they wrote bigotry into their fic (or else wrote a deliberate troll fic to trigger people on purpose), do you really think they’re going to tag it as racism / homophobia / transphobia / et cetera? and some people get kicks out of writing purposefully triggering content and either leaving it untagged or mistagging it so that people will read it unsuspectingly.

even for just general content tags, it’s a mess. people just forget to tag things all the time. people deliberately won’t tag the endgame ship of their fic because “it’s a spoiler heehee”. people use the romantic or sexual “x / y” tag instead of the platonic or otherwise “x & y” tag, sometimes by mistake sometimes on purpose. it’s a joked about issue how people will tag characters or ships that appear in their fic for two sentences.

there’s no standardization of tags, which is a pretty obvious problem. what first comes to mind is the “dead dove: do not eat” tag which should just not be a tag at all because it just has no meaning. depending on the individual fic writer using it, it could mean anything from “literally the most sickening and depraved thing you’ve ever read in your life” to “horror w/ gore”. but it applies to other vague tags too - different fic writers will have different ideas of what the tag means.

in addition to that, what is and isn’t made a filterable tag, what tags are made synonymous, et cetera, is entirely up to the whims of the site staff. as an example, if you’re trying to look for fanfiction of a singular animated disney movie, the infinite crossovers with other disney movies will not actually be counted as crossovers (which they are) because they’re classified as the “disney theatrical animated universe” (which isn’t a fucking thing), so you can’t filter them out the “exclude crossovers” way. if you try to filter out the fandom tag “disney theatrical animated universe”, it’ll show up with zero fics because that tag is synonymous with every disney animated film (regardless of if the fic author actually used the tag “disney theatrical animated universe” or not), thus also filtering out the one you actually wanted to find.

and do not get me fucking started on the “all media types tags”, which also just shouldn’t be a thing because it makes it fucking impossible to find the specific fics you’re looking for. some people use it in place of tagging a specific canon / adaptation when their fic very clearly draws from one specific canon / adaptation, and you can’t filter it out because it’s synonymous with every fandom tag under its umbrella.

as an example of the issues of both the “all media types” tag and mistagging in general: as a fan of the witcher books, it used to be a fucking ordeal to find fanfiction specifically for the books (post netflix show release). some show fans would, for whatever reason, tag their fics with the book fandom tag in addition to (or even in place of!!) the show fandom tag when their fics were unquestionably show-specific, meaning i could not simply search only in the book fandom tag. i could not simply filter out the show tag, because some show fans would, for whatever reason, tag as fucking “all media types”, when their fics were unquestionably show-specific. and alas, i could not filter out “all media types” and the show tag, so that i see only those fics which have been deliberately and exclusively tagged as the book, not only because as mentioned some show fans would tag their show fics with only the book tag, but also because the fucking all media types tag filters out the book tag as well, leaving me with zero fucking fics REGARDLESS of if the author actually used the “all media types” tag. now, thankfully, i’ve thankfully seen this issue in this specific fandom lessen, but it still occurs in other fandoms and i guarantee that it didn’t lessen in the witcher fandom because of any fixing of the site on the part of ao3 staff.

another common defense of ao3 freaks is that it’s an “archive”, and therefore can’t get rid of anything anyone posts, and disregarding the fact that that is not how archives fucking work, they don’t just allow anything and also ao3 DOES get rid of fics... when they say that they don’t like proshippers, apparently, archives have... you know... archivists. they have someone or a team of someones making sure that everything in the archive is *properly fucking categorized*. they have someone or multiple someones making sure that everything they recieve (1) belongs there and (2) is properly labeled and organized. same for libraries. meaning that if ao3 really were an archive and not a sub par fanfiction website, they’d have something like that in place. something as simple as a report button for fics with a review team that will see if something’s been mis- or untagged. they’d have some kind of standardization of tags (especially the warning / trigger tags) and have proper tagging enforced in some way. and then they could also do something like stop being spineless racists, queerphobes, and pedos have the barest minimum of content guidelines saying that you can’t post fucking hate speech.

if something is mistagged or untagged, the most you can do is leave a comment politely asking that the author fix the issue, and then hope and pray that they do that. and if that person thinks [insert form of abuse] is hot, or if they’re just straight up a bigot that wrote bigotry into their fics to be bigoted, or they’re a troll that gets kick out of deliberately traumatizing people by tricking them into reading their mis/untagged fics, they might not! AND if you see a major tagging issue on an orphaned work, or a work that has an inactive author / hasn’t been updated in forever, good fucking luck getting even a negative response.

you can’t permanently block tags (i mean even tumblr.hell has that), meaning that if you would like to search for fic without coming across something troubling, triggering, or just something you don’t like, you have to either (1) do a work around by having a bookmarked link for every fandom you’re in or every character you like with all of your tags already blocked, (2) download browser extensions that do the work for ao3 because they can’t be bothered themselves, or (3) input every individual tag every time you search ao3 and don’t forget that all of those options only fucking work at all when everything is tagged properly, and we’ve already established its not. you also can’t actually block people (you can only prevent them from commenting) meaning that if there’s a specific person you’d like to stay away from your fics or a specific fic author that you don’t like and would like to stop seeing their fics clogging up the tag, you’re out of luck (though for the latter you could insert “-[username]” into the “search within results” box, but then uh oh we’re right back around to having to input that every time or have a bookmark)

their archive warning system is shit. first of all it’s functionally useless because, as mentioned, “creator chose not to use archive warnings” is an option. what’s the fucking point of special required archive warnings if you’re going to allow people to opt out anyway. second of all, aside from “chose not to use warnings” and “no warnings apply”, the only warnings are “major character death”, “graphic depictions of violence”, “rape/non-con”, and “underage”. disregarding the fact that they shouldn’t be allowing porn of underage characters in the first place (but i’m talking to a brick wall on that issue) and that “non-con” (and “dub-con”) as terminology needs to die, it’s just fucking rape lets not use weasel words... this is a paltry list of possible warnings. there’s no official warnings for depictions of: domestic abuse, animal abuse, depictions of racism / homophobia / transphobia / et cetera, suicide, self harm, et cetera et cetera. and we return to the issue of standardization of tags. in your required archive warnings at very least, there should be a standardization of what these mean, but ao3′s own faq is just like “ehh... you decide. we’ll leave it up to you”. what qualifies as graphic depictions of violence? two people may write the same level of violence, but qualify “graphic” differently, and make different decisions regarding their warnings. and we also return to the issue of: if a freak doesn’t see something that is clearly rape as rape, they might not tag it as such.

this website gets a disgustingly large amount of money every year that it doesn’t fucking do anything with. it’s been over a decade and they’re still in fucking beta. features that would actually be useful, like an actual block system, don’t exist. they technically have a report system for abuse and harassment and such, but apparently what they qualify as abuse and harassment is fickle. ao3 defenders seem to be very proud of the legal work they do for fandom / fanfic authors, but they set aside a very small amount of the money they get every year for legal advocacy, and they actually use even less of that, because it’s not the early 2000s “anne rice hates fanfiction” era anymore - you aren’t going to get fucking sued for writing fanfiction in the first place. based on their own self-reported yearly cost of upkeep, they literally already have enough money to run the site as they are now for the next twenty years.

once again: ao3 is not an archive. it is not a library. it is barely a even a website.

[soomanymoths]

An apology passed on by Crinkles partner a while back. Posting bcs im not waiting another year for him to own up to his flock how horrendously he treated people. Redacted certain parts bcs im not entertaining excuses and reasoning as to why it was ok to treat his partner and "dear friend" like trash. The stuff i left in (biphobia etc) doesnt realistically make sense and should have never been taken out on me. Even if it did make sense, being nasty to a "friend" as a 30 year old over an oc is pretty goofy. He made his biphobia MY problem and thats inexcusable. He made all of his issues other peoples problems actually. Thats the entire situation imo. This doesnt cover the extent of how terrible crinkle treated people but i dont expect it will ever get better than this and im not waiting anymore

[unproduciblesmackdown]

billions also comedy gold presenting winston as a scapegoat for abuse culture fans when it's like but hey it can't be actual scapegoating if you Enjoy It or consider it Justified or experience Reassurance from Its Opportunity For A Group Cohesion Substitute For A Cohesion Based On An Inherent Equal Degree Of Belonging, The Absence Of Which Allows For, Encourages, Reinforces, & Rewards Scapegoating

it can't be Bullying if someone's Weird or you Just Don't Personally Like Them or Nobody's Actually Stopping You, Maybe At Least If They Don't See Too Much Of It, Maybe Others Are Supporting It

it can't be Abuse if you're just doing things Normally or are Following Rules or Aren't Feeling Malicious And Aren't Getting Divine Revelations Otherwise and probably it's just that a lot of abnormal people are being whiny &/or unfair &/or the Real malicious ones. kinda just like how that scapegoat is the real person ruining everything and really just forcing you to treat them like this

[pandoratheprocrasticreator]

ok but every clawthorne-ism that hunter has (the teleport-dash spell, the “byeeeee!” thing, the thing where he twirls his staff in a fight and looks rly extra, the general snark, the self sacrificing bullshit, etc etc etc) he learned all of that from lilith. i dont care if theyve never actually interacted in the show. i dont care if in canon lilith hates his guts and it’s supported by 8 million pieces of crew art. lilith was hunter’s teacher as a kid and MAYBE their relationship grew bitter bc of coven politics and hunter becoming the golden guard but they were still close when he was younger. lilith didn’t get her palisman taken away bc of time travel shenanigans so she could have taught hunter how to use a staff. she was hunter’s first parent in his collection of hopefully many. dana terrace herself can come up to my door and tell me lilith and hunter never had a parent-child or even a mentor-student relationship and i will tell her she is wrong to her face.

[hatake]

.

[jupiterjunebug]

Shaking the bars of my enclosure, screaming "they're fucking nineteen. The reason they are making suboptimal decisions is that they are nineteen! And going through trauma!"

[nururu]

It seems like everyone is scared to acknowledge the fact that Norton drugged Alice in the chamber and then turned into scary monster Norton.... Ppl look at Norton and all their feminism flies out the window.

[gibbearish]

u ever have to back out of a drama explained video bc ur like. i agree that that person was in the wrong but the way youre presenting them is just unsettling

[zemnarihah]

much to think about.

[breathlessdelight]

we read 1d worm kink on ao3 so colleen hoover could run

[unproduciblesmackdown]

billions figuring winston shouldn't just also still be there in the end with the guys we accept so he needs to be sent out, which, it's also remarkable to recall like "okay does he still technically, partially work at/for axe global then? it's a 'maybe' but what matters is that he's not There even if so"....the way that even if we infer he did get to finally be sick of waiting on better, we weren't even given so much of an arc of a couple episode's leadup showing him markedly being more frustrated / fed up with The Usual bullshit or anything like that, the way it went with one ep to spare "oh right winston's catchphrases! we all know & loathe them" like don't strain yourselves....that even in giving up on things, winston still has to be further let down by everyone even after quitting, like well that's probably ultimately helpful for him but it was (a) forced on him and (b) not sure i'd give billions the credit for anything sympathetic towards winston versus "well the only thing to be done with winston material is have fun while epic winners shit on him however they want," the wags plotline had no point just like the later one that could've been scrapped & transformed into "how about taylor gets any dialogue this episode"....the way that billions may imagine like hmm what to do with winston? all that can Ultimately happen with him is he has to go away and die, for him it's [out of sight out of mind out of Existence], just as has been the show's approach for the consequences of him being shitted on all th time for years before this: there are none, b/c we're not looking at them, and winston is never not completely [othered] including right now, and if it helps for some reason we'll talk about how we might be fine if he literally dies. and so we're graced with a "who knows or cares, he's just gone, finally. after being kept around b/c it's so fun seeing winners torment him" ending as the only one they find imaginable for winston

[hadesisqueer]

i think the reason why ppl criticise ruby for the tyrian thing is bc she cut a limb off when her own sister got a limb cut off too

Well you have to be an asshole to compare the situations because they are completely different.

With Ruby and Tyrian:

Tyrian arrived already attacking them. Then, Tyrian says he's gonna take Ruby, so of course JNR all try to protect her and fight him off along with her. He's too strong, they can't beat him.

Qrow arrives and fights him off instead, to defend his niece and her friends. Ruby sees that they're evenly matched and wants to help her uncle. She starts fighting Tyrian with him, but Qrow's bad luck affect her, so he gets distracted for a second to prevent her from getting hurt.

In that moment of distraction, Tyrian poisons Qrow with his scorpion tail, might as well have killed him (if they hadn't managed to get help in the finale). And also now they don't have Qrow to protect them any longer, he's been weakened by the injure. So before Tyrian starts fighting them again and kills everyone, Ruby cuts his tail off.

Now, the whole Adam and Yang thing at the Fall of Beacon?

Blake and Adam have a fight-- well, he's beating her rather than really fighting, while he keeps acting and speaking like what he is: a toxic ex-boyfriend who wants to get back at his ex. He tells Blake that he's going to destroy everything she loves and then Yang shows up calling out Blake's name.

Adam sees Blake looking at Yang with pure concern and can tell immediately that she truly cares about that girl, that she likely has feelings for her. That makes Adam jealous and also gives him a way to hurt his ex-girlfriend, and basically tells Blake he's gonna kill her first.

Adam then stabs Blake to get Yang's attention. Yang sees it, and obviously she jumps in to fight him, without any knowledge of who Adam is or what he is capable of, because he had just stabbed Blake and Yang wants to defend her.

Adam cuts Yang's arm off and then proceeds to go toward Yang to kill her while she's unconscious, but thankfully Blake gets there first and gets Yang out of there.

So, you see, Ruby cut Tyrian's tail off (not his arms or his legs, not even the full tail, only the deadly part) to prevent him from continue to fight her and her friends and kill them. It was an act of self-defense. Adam cutting Yang's arm off was not self-defense at all. It was the act of an abusive ex-boyfriend who was jealous and wanted to hurt and punish his ex-girlfriend for leaving him. So, no. They're not the same. Not even the slightest.

Also let's be real here, if Yang was there instead of Ruby she would have cut Tyrian's tail off without hesitation too.

[lavender-phoenix-flames]

"Jc AnTI's are so jobless the are so obsessed with jc, they should cope"

Says the ppl who rewrote the whole novel and made up stuff with no proof or evidence just to 'like' their fave. Constantly harassing and discoursing with people if they disagree with their deluded opinions calling them 'anti'.

Babying a whole ass adult man and "wwx is an unreliable narrator aksually you should look at both sides" while they parade jc's words like it's the ultimate truth. Making up millions of excuses for his abusive and toxic behavior that harms jin ling and people around him. Undermining the effects of the abuse that jl goes through and blaming wwx for shit he didn't do. Holding wwx responsible for deaths of jiangs and yanli even when they know he wasn't at fault here. And worst of all saying "mxtx doesn't understand her own characters" like be for fucking real. In jc stans minds everything jc does is justified they will not show any proof for thier arguments but seethes at the facts we dared to point it out to them.

If engaging in fandom discussions makes someone jobless than every fricking person on tumblr is unemployed lmao.

Now they wanna barge in on canon jc tag and say "this is slander and bashing of my lil meow meow tsundere angry grape, you anti!!!😡" meanwhile the text itself presents and highlights jc's behavior in a negative light. Ask them to present proof of 'jc good natured behavior' and they are blank or they would post/take shit completely out of context.

In conclusion there is no point in arguing with jc stans who have completely and willingly let go of any kind of sensibility, logic, and chose to accept their delusions. Also canon jc fans and "jc antis" y'all are doing great, mxtx is proud of us. Keep discussing canon jc more so than ever. We don't need to make another tag, let's protect this one.

[badaziraphaletakes]

The autistic community in this fandom has repeatedly said that Aziraphale is extremely autistic coded. Maybe we should start listening. Let's go. *SIGHS*

There's so much I could talk about the critiques I see over this mostly pretty harmless scene, but I'll try to focus on the ableism here:

Aziraphale's playfulness is called "roleplaying" and "dismissive of Crowley's feelings" here. And I must say, as an autistic person, I find it offensive bc this is an extremely autistic coded moment where Aziraphale was unmasking in front of the only person he allows himself to do so and that usually implies he was inviting Crowley to do the same, he was most likely aware of Crowley's anxiety there and making himself vulnerable to him by unmasking, inviting him into his space and vice-versa. (I think calling his special interest, magic, "horrible" is also anti-autistic bias btw)

We never see Aziraphale acting like this with any other character besides Crowley, with whom he does this repeatedly. It's not a new situation. Crowley knows this, and he is used to this kind of behaviour from Aziraphale. And he loves to complain about it btw, and Aziraphale indulges him on that. This is love. This is intimacy.

I know it isn't perfect, I know it lacks verbal communication, but this isn't abusive behaviour in the slightest. Better communication is something they both need to work on after 6k years of having to hide their feelings bc they were being persecuted and abused, the story is telling us this. We have a whole other season for that, the story isn't over.

Now, regarding the second paragraph, the plot made it painfully obvious that the clue was real, so Aziraphale was not going to Edinburgh for fun. He had to go, and Crowley knew it (he never even argued against it), bc of the mystery of Gabriel's situation thay could backfire on them in the future. Who knows what Heaven was doing to their angels (and what they could do to aziracrow!! That's why Crowley had an informant. Didn't Metatron prove this in the end, that the threat was real?). Sure, Aziraphale had fun, bc he was bonding with Crowley through the Bentley and he loves him, so that makes him happy, but that's it. We're allowed to make the most out of a bad situation, guys. It's also a way to deal with stress. Aziraphale and Crowley have different ways of dealing with stress, and both are valid, they're different people, it's normal that they react differently to a crisis.

This scene was a very married moment tbh, filled with comfort with you partner (enough to unmask), an old known and comfortable dance for the both of them, and even an invite to take a step forward in their relationship.

Food for thought: I've been wondering why the fandom likes to say Azi and Crowley are like a "married couple" but some ppl at the same time hate when they in fact act like one?

And finally, again, this is such an autistic coded moment that I, an autistic person, had the exact same interpretation as Aziraphale. I had never noticed, until I read this take, that Crowley could've meant anything other than "you don't know how to drive" lol. Aziraphale was being himself here. His true confident unmasked self. Bc Crowley allows him that. Bc Crowley makes him feel like he can. He wasn't pretending or intentionally misinterpreting or manipulating anyone. Assuming the absolute worst of him bc he interpreted something in a literal way is anti-autistic bias. Assuming the worst of him bc he doesn't use the same code as you to communicate is ableism. Assuming his decision-making logic is invalid bc of the way he acts when unmasking is both.