#that's a separate thing

[jojojooo33]

Saw a post about Dib being an incel and Dib would NOT be that. Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time around Gaz would not be an incel, Dib included. I don't imagine him feeling entitled to girls/women's (or anyone's) advances and blaming them when things don't work out because of his own shortcomings specifically.

(za//dr etc DNI this post ain't about that)

[eastgaysian]

[tossawary]

This is petty fandom salt, BUT... I've been chewing on this phenomenon that I've been calling "Fandom's Darling". It is related to things like "Author's Darling" and "Mary Sue / Gary Stu" and "Protagonist Halo" and all that jazz, where one character gains a peculiar narrative weight in a story.

"Author's Darling" is when a writer has a favorite character, and the world and all other characters sort of get... warped to put the Darling in the spotlight. It's most noticeable in TV shows with multiple writers, when a character you personally like suddenly has their previous characterization destroyed to make another character look good somehow. Every other character might become weirdly incompetent. The Darling's feelings are treated as The Most Important Feelings in any given situation. The logic of the fictional world seems broken past suspension of disbelief in order to validate this one character's beliefs or skillset or some other fantasy. And so on.

"Fandom's Darling" is what I've been calling the pattern where a fandom essentially crowns a New Protagonist for their fanfiction stories (it's often a side character rather than the original protagonist, but it can also happen to protagonists). This character becomes the self-insert for all sorts of indulgent fantasies, gaining special powers or backstories, and/or becoming the focus of extreme whump, and/or hooking up with all the various hotties, starring in all sorts of tropey AUs, and so on. They're not always an obvious Mary Sue version of themselves, but the character's original personality and interpersonal relationships tend to get warped or dropped completely, and other characters tend to become a little flat around them. I call it "Fandom's Darling" because it's not just one self-indulgent fantasy fic (you do you! Have fun!) with characterization choices that I don't vibe with (I have neither the time nor the desire nor the authority to police anything, I am just venting), but rather a prolific mini-fandom of sorts revolving around this empty doll / fanon version of the chosen vessel character, so it becomes a little unavoidable.

I am salty about this (mildly frustrated) (imagine a soft sigh of disappointment before I just go do something else) because you are FUCKED if you actually liked the canonical version of this character and their interpersonal relationships. It's almost worse than liking an obscure character that no one cares about. There's about a thousand fics starring your fave, but maybe only about a dozen of them are actually rooted in any kind of recognisable canon.

[locusfandomtime]

compilation of all the iconic insane mumbo jumbo posts

wanted to get them all in one place. feel free to add

[navree]

gonna be entirely honest i think a LOT of people are missing the point here. the issues surrounding characterization and bad dialogue and lazy plotting and changes that weaken the story and lack of internal cohesion would have existed anyway, because those are issues that came directly from condal and hess, yes. but it IS actually a massive fucking problem that the network decided to slash a FIFTH of the time the writers thought they were gonna have to tell their story, and that they decided to do that mere weeks before shooting, likely when things were starting to be pretty firmly locked down. it IS a huge issue that this created an insane amount of work for the writing team to try and make that sudden limited time work, especially with the deadline of the strike on top of the deadline of shooting. that was ALWAYS going to create a disaster of a season.

imagine if, a month before it was schedule to start filming, hbo had demanded that succcession cut, at minimum, a full episode from their season. imagine if season 4 had that similar mandate, going from ten episodes (which it was, and which it crafted its story around) to eight. it doesn't matter how good the writing is, how on point the characterization is, how fantastic everything is on all other cylinders, demanding those changes in such a short time span is always going to lead to something sloppy and just not good. adding on top of that the fact that the writers were not able to keep on working on the show as they were filming (possibly using the time they were shooting early season episodes to work around the clock to try and make the time crunch make more sense wrt later episodes) due to the strike, which kept up for literally the entirety of shooting, at hbo's behest as well, any change that could have been made was likely incredibly half baked and needed a lot more refinement before it could even hope to work, and would have been that way for any production, even of the shows getting the most applause for their brilliance this year. abbott elementary, interview with the vampire, shogun, they would have suffered the same issues of pacing and lack of climax and both too much buildup and lack of buildup that hotd has been noted as having because of hbo's choices, and these are all shows where we know that the writing team is top notch and the showrunner has known exactly what they're doing and crafted it all expertly.

it's not about your antipathy towards condal and hess as showrunners specifically. i'm not pleased with them either, but in this i could honestly give a shit. it's about the fact that this is an insanely popular property, one whose success creates a lot of money, and the network responsible for it still made decisions that severely and detrimentally impacted its ability to succeed. this season was doomed to fail before a second of footage was shot, and a lot of that blame can and should be laid at hbo for the choices it's made here. there likely wasn't much that would have been able make the writing of the season better, because of the issues already highlighted, but this didn't fucking help. this made it infinitely worse, and created an unsalvageable situation from the getgo that possibly wouldn't have been there if the episode count hadn't been cut, if the writers had known their final count from the getgo, if they'd been given more time to rework the season, if hbo hadn't kept up filming in spite of the strike so that the writers could keep working without screwing over the rest of production.

way too many people are missing the forest for the trees here. yes, condal and hess made bad decisions all the livelong day, and yes that's on them, ring the shame bell at them. but it doesn't matter in the discussion here. the discussion here is on what's now a very clear pattern of hbo and the broader wb/discovery crew making constant choices that denigrate the actual craft of storytelling and are clearly meant to maximize their own profits at the expense of the artists involved in creating those profits, as part of the broader entertainment executive industry's disdain for creatives as a whole that we've been seeing with the strikes and generative ai and now this (and also the trend of david zaslav's incredibly bad business management that is alienating so many people from everything under the wb/discovery umbrella). that's why hbo making these choices is essentially dooming the season to fail from the outset (which is what it was, there's no way anything good could have come from this situation even if the entire writing staff was blessed by the muses themselves, it was dead in the water from the getgo because of this specifically and then only made worse by shitty writing), and something that should be talked about with the gravity it deserves, irrespective of whether or not the dragon show did a plotline you liked or not.

i'm sorry hbo allowed this writing team to plan out a ten episode season until a MONTH before shooting when they cut it down to eight????? and then kept production going when the writer's strike started like two weeks after and kept up for the entirety of the filming schedule??????? i said that filming during the writer's strike was the death knell of this season but oh my god i did not expect to be this fucking right

[angel-in-your-basement]

God, I love giving blowjobs. I love giving someone pleasure like that. Licking, kissing and sucking their cock to find out which spots draw out the best sounds. Stroking them up and down with my mouth and hands. Letting them push my head down so they can feel the back of my throat on their dick. Gagging and hearing them groan at how good it feels. Licking their balls while I stroke their cock. Feeling them tighten up just before they fill my mouth with cum. Holy fuck, it gets me so turned on to have my mouth put to use like that.

[ruporas]

trigunned the hades or hadesed the trigun (id in alt)

[sixth-light]

I have had these thoughts bubbling away in my head for like...eighteen months or so now (it will become very obvious why shortly) but the discussion in this post has pushed me to write them down: I think societally we HUGELY underestimate how motherhood for primary caregivers, particularly first-time motherhood, can be a source of vulnerability to radicalisation.

There is obviously huge cultural variance here, but for a lot of cis women becoming primary caregiver to an infant in a capitalist Western society represents a time of immense vulnerability because in general you are:

Incredibly sleep-deprived (which has well-documented knock-on effects for your judgement, mental health, etc)

If you gave birth, recovering from a significant challenge to your physical health (even in the best-case scenario)

Isolated from your previous networks and communities of people in full-time work

Completely separated from the context of your prior career goals and achievements

Under huge amounts of stress to learn how to care for an infant (don't get me started on breastfeeding)

And on top of this, you are also be experiencing a huge amount of messaging about how all this is natural, wonderful, something you're meant to do, something you should love doing, and something that you must do for the welfare of their child. It's a huge amount of pressure and life change even when everything goes right and there's very little cultural space to express negative feelings about it.

Any group of people who offer community, support, and affirmation to cis women in this situation are going to have a really good shot at radicalising them into some very weird and dangerous headspaces and in fact we see this happen all the time - think antivaxxers and TERFs. It flies under the radar because of the hazy positive glow that associates with motherhood and babies and also because we don't take the radicalisation of women seriously I guess because they rarely shoot anybody, but...yeah. It is such a vulnerable time!

[time-woods]

Twitter seemed to like these so here’s some work in progressthings

[shadowsandsunset]

So, in Stranger Things fanfic when the author has Dustin bugging Steve about dating Robin and won't drop it, why doesn't Steve ever turn to Robin (because it's them, she's never far away lol) and go "Hey Robin, do you want to go out with me?" and have Robin respond "Ew no, you know you're not my type. You're my brother, gross."

And Dustin defends Steve (sweet boy, clueless but sweet) and goes "Really Robin, you would never date Steve?"

Robin snaps back with a "Would YOU date Steve?"

Dustin, flabbergasted, being like "That's my brother, Robin! Gross!"

And she's like, "Exactly!"

Steve is brother shaped. I don't make the rules.

He can date Eddie as a little treat though.

[ap0llx]

while I am breaking the seal on posting my actual face. I heard thru the grapevine that the yugioh fandom has been drawing yami yugi/atem with natural hair since long before I got here... thank u for your service. here is my contribution. (last photo taken by @stuck-in-a-surrealist-painting)

[ionomycin]

ligament

[quesocheeso]

Both Macaque and Xiaotian (MK) live in FFM full time unless there’s a special event happening in the celestial realm that requires the royal family being there.

since FFM is a laid back type of kingdom, both Macaque and Xiaotian wear normal clothes, nothing fancy especially not the type of outfits they wear back in the celestial realm

Bonus:

Wukong misses his husband and child L

[forgettable-au]

FORGETTABLE-AU (Page 44-47)

*...

[BEGINNING] [PREVIOUS] [CONTINUE]

[boatemlag]

grian is so funny to me because he is all about posturing and performing. he has a strict moral code that he came up with which is divorced from everyone else's sense of correctness, but he loathes this. he hates the rules. he came up with the rules. it's entirely unnecessary to follow the rules, because they're his rules. but he has to be Correct so even if he hates it he performs like he's following the rules, even if that means abusing loopholes that he invents within his own moral code. sometimes he forgets himself, too! like he's not always successful at performing Correctness. but then he'll go back and justify it (im not red so the trap on dogwarts wasnt my fault it was scars) (guys i had to betray you to help king ren because thems the rules!) (i had to kill jimmy and mumbo because they attacked me)... he has to make a show of dragging his feet because he often questions his own rules, why they even exist, or even outright disagrees with himself! but because Those Are The Rules he has to follow them

[ffwix]

IM SO SORRY ABOUT BUBBA! I didn’t have enough room

//Bubba, the smartest of the gang, usually a tutor for any child that’s struggling in any academic studies, he’s the calmest and mostly seen with old kids, where some struggle in Algebra or Geometry.//

Anyway, very slight redesign.

Also yes, I’m ignoring everything that happened in chapter 3, cause I’m in denial.