#there are also a few who unfortunately aren't very active in the fandom anymore :(

[ask-codeearasure]

STOP STEALING OTHER PEOPLE'S WORKS YOU COWARDS (and other disorganized ramblings)

Yeah, I'm starting this off aggressively, big whoop.

Hi.

The point is right there in the title. Yeah, I'm looking you in the eyes and telling you right the hell now, I want you, yes you, the one with the massive galaxy brain who thinks that you can make a better Dreamtale or Underswap, or whatever the fuck, to listen to me. Walk with me to this pier please. This fandom has a harassment problem, everyone and their grandmother's crusty white little dog knows that, but there is also a massive theft problem as well and half the time I see it's born out of hatred for creators dubbed "bad" for whatever reason. (I am not debating whether these reasons are justified or not, I know it varies on a case-by-case basis)

"But Ouija, why shouldn't I harrass that person and just credit the AU to the fandom?"

Because it's a genuinely shitty thing to do. It's literal theft. Unless the creator blatantly says their creation belongs to someone else now, what you're doing is theft and there is no good defense for that. Yes, even if the creator is an asshole. Yes, even if the creator isn't active in the fandom anymore. Plus, if you sell the impression that it is OKAY in this fandom to take things that aren't yours, things you DID NOT CREATE, you are going to teach others that that behavior is perfectly acceptable, and along the way, discourage other creators from sharing their work. You will actively participate in what makes this fandom look so monstrous to outside audiences. Congratulations, you have become the asshat you didn't have the awareness or foresight to think you would become. I hope you have enough sense to not want that outcome.

Stop that. Do something else, you have plenty of options here. Creating your own shit is the one I highly recommend.

Sometimes the best things are written out of spite and instead of pouring your energy into harassing some random middleschooler for drawing Rose Quartz just a little too thin for your liking -- fuck you by the way -- do better.

Let me give you an example.

I hate the fandom's spin-offs of Dreamtale and there are very few exceptions to this statement.

I said it.

I fucking hate them. Not gonna specify which ones, just know I absolutely despise most of them. I find that next to none of them have any real passion or love put into them, no effort or respect to the source material whatsoever. The vast majority of them were created to specifically target Joku, and there was no genuine drive in that project outside of that one thing, which is malicious intent. Congratulations, you have submitted yourself to uhealthily parasocial behavior. This is unfortunately a theme I see in quite a few fandom remakes of other AUs as well. You don't like the creator, therefore, you assume you can do "better" despite knowing jack shit about what they actually created. (I am not defending Joku by the way. I'm saying this behavior reflects badly on whoever does it and has done it within the past eight years.)

They're boring, and if not boring, absolutely horrific. A lot of the time, they're used to romanticize shit like incest, abuse, and other inherently harmful things that should NEVER be presented in a favorable light. This is NOT me saying it's a bad thing to want to make your own versions of AUs and put your own spins on them, that is not what I am saying at all, and I literally did the same fucking thing several times over. Just bear with me here, I am begging you.

I made my own variation of Dreamtale using a few concepts I liked and ran in the complete opposite directions of both the original version -- which is actually fascinating when I learned about it thanks to Sarco -- and the fandom's trashy as hell boring as shit versions of it that makes watching paint dry seem like a more entertaining spectacle. I did this not out of hate for Joku, someone I don't fucking know (nor should I personally care about), but out of fascination for the Dreamtales I did see and picked and chose what ideas I liked, then added a lot more ideas from other inspirations. This is not a new concept, just about everyone does this.

What I am saying is that instead of talking shit with no supporting evidence and doing your best to humiliate someone you don't like on the internet (which in this fandom are people you don't even FUCKING KNOW, nor have 90% of you been present for the actual issues in action, if there were any), apply that energy to your own projects. That is arguably the more productive and enjoyable thing to do.

Hell, Palworld was made to spite Nintendo for being boring pieces of corporate shit, and that piece of work turned out to be pretty fucking good. (Note that spite in this context is used as a creative drive, not malice)

American McGee's Alice was made using the concept of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland out of literal LOVE for the original story.

Ever After High was made out of the ORIGINAL FAIRY TALE STORIES that Disney twisted into being more kid friendly to various successful extents.

A lot of the AUs Sarco and I tore apart and rebuilt take small aspects from the originals and tweak them just enough that it makes a wave of difference, and we later expanded them to have MASSIVE differences. This isn't to flex or put others down. I am just sick and tired of seeing a bunch of people online (mostly people who left this fandom) saying "there's nothing good in the fandom anymore" and it makes me want to grab my giant ass Edgar Allen Poe collection and beat them over the head with it. ...Figuratively, I stress that part. I don't wanna go to jail. I'm frustrated, I know that's obvious. What I really want to do is encourage more creativity than the constant rehashing of the same shit repeatedly, and perhaps make it abundantly clear that shitty behavior is not something that should drive ANY community. I mean I'm not the boss of you, by all means create whatever you want, it would just be nice to see more variety than I do today, y'know? Give me more weird shit like Gastale and GZtale did, something that makes it stand out and has room for so much more character exploration and fascinating concepts. Hell, I would LOVE to see more OCs too! There should always be room for more of those. But perhaps you're already doing all that, and I just haven't seen it yet. I'm still re-learning how to navigate this fandom and all it has to offer, after several years of inactivity as a mere observer, and now as a creator.

If you want me to expand on all of this and also help with giving you all some concepts and even an example just ask. I'll happily type a mountain for you to help you all with expanding your creativity. -- Ouija

[on-stardust-wings]

This addition made me think about it, and it probably makes sense there are so few votes for practicing Christian with negative feelings about Good Omens?

A poll like this will naturally have a pretty considerable sample error. (Every poll is already biased towards people who are willing to take polls. That sounds stupid, but is unfortunately true, and a real issue when you try to gather data for science.) As a Tumblr poll, this one is also biased because of how it spreads. On Tumblr, there are three main ways to come across a post: you see it while browsing a tag/topic directly, someone you follow reblogs it to your dash, or you visit someone's blog and they reblogged it. Tumblr is additionally prone to create interest bubbles: if you are in a bigger fandom for example and you dislike a ship or a character, or in the positive sense if you have a fave ship and character, you'll usually have peers who share these preferences and who put posts on your dash that have a lot about the character you like and not much about the ship you don't care for. This happens to any post, people mostly reblog posts they like/agree with/want their peers to see (with the exception of people who so strongly disapprove of a post that they choose to argue on it, and that's a minority, if a very loud one). If you follow or visit people's blogs that aren't fandom but multiple random topic blogs, you'll be exposed to content from fandoms and interests you aren't personally into, but also those are unlikely to be completely opposed to your own interests (you wouldn't follow this person if they frequently posted stuff you dislike or disapprove of). So this poll? Was posted to Good Omens fandom spaces. People who stay in the fandom, especially long term, are unlikely to be people who oppose of it. It's been, like, a year since the second season aired. If there were people who actively and strongly disliked the way Good Omens handled religion, they wouldn't stick around here anymore. They might (and probably will) have posted directly after the individual seasons aired. To voice their complaints and all. But complainers move on to new complaining grounds fairly quickly most of the time. The people who stay around are primarily people who overall like the material. They like it enough to look up fandom posts on Tumblr. I feel like it's in the nature of the thing that people whose religiosity negativity affected their opinions of Good Omens are going to be a small minority in the fandom. (It's also difficult to be a minority like that: Good Omens fandom is happy to be critical of Christianity and likes to be pretty blasphemous, I imagine if you are already struggling with religious guilt, it'll feel difficult to talk about it to other fans who don't share this guilt. In comparison to the different bubbles for different ships, it's quite possible there is a bubble of GO fandom for people who have these feelings about religion and Good Omens, but this bubble probably doesn't interact that much with other bubbles, ie, the bubble this poll ended up circulating in.)

Which isn't to say it's not a good poll or that that polls on Tumblr are bad in general or that I don't love seeing their results. It just means that when interpreting the results (and that goes for any poll or survey) one has to keep in mind the biases that are naturally part of the data we acquired. The results are interesting, the tags are fascinating to read, but it's not a representative poll. It just can't be.

At the time of my making this post, positive feelings about Good Omens have a significant majority of votes. Which again, makes sense for a poll posted into a fandom space. The results also seem to align with the overall gut feeling I (and op too I gather) have about the population of Good Omens fandom: there are plenty of people who aren't religious/Christian, there are also lots of people who have Christianity related trauma (I definitely know fans like this) but who feel positively about Good Omens, but the people whose religious guilt or complicated feelings about Christianity make Good Omens a conflicted topic? Might just not enjoy being in the fandom much, or keep separate from the rest of us, so might just not see this poll. I think?

good omens and religiosity

ok so one thing about me is that i'm christian and i'm also VERY interested in the sociology of religion. last year i wrote a paper on religion in film and television (more specifically the differences between christianity in film and television vs other religions, both in how they are portrayed and how they are perceived) and i did mention good omens in it so. i wanna see something

*MRWR stands for "my relationship with religion". too long for the poll lmao

**"affected your liking of good omens" can either mean 1. influenced your opinions on the show while/after you watched it, 2. it got you to start watching it, or 3. made you grapple with your liking of the show (e.g. religious guilt)

please reblog for sample size because i feel like there are about 0.7 actual practicing christians/catholics in this fandom lmaoo 😭 also if you care to elaborate in the tags please do so!!! this is very intriguing to me!!!!!

edit: i forgot to add an "more than one/other" option. you know what just pick the most applicable one or tell me in the tags thanks bye

[tetrakys]

Hey! I'm new here and I'm looking for tumblrs to follow about Beemoov games - any suggestions?

Welcome to tumblr anon! 👋

I guess you’d like to follow content creators’ blogs (artists, writers of fics and meta etc), I could actually use the advice too because I don’t follow many people either, here are a few off the top of my head:

Artists: @infernaltear @annie-mcl @miomiofan @leixra @anelectra @impossiblerayanstan @izzychoi @blue-queen-kiko @cintanna @kaumalade @saku-chann

Writers/commentators: @cintanna-rants @marycecilyy @momiyi-chan @idolcandy @mycandydrama @neilada-d6-meghah @akianee @astreia-oniria @aloy97

Also @vanillaamoursucrethings who publishes art, comments, spoilers and is basically fandom Queen

@linlithgow and @lyilouu do great detective work and have always the latest news from other social media.

Also, @kurohabl @mcl-pauly and @whoooki who are my (not so secret) crushes and make me laugh a lot with their memes/posts.

There are also many nice people who rarely write themselves and mostly share and reblog (very important role in the fandom imho) and others who are more multifandom blogs. I’m sure I’ve missed looooots of people because, as I said, I don’t follow many either, so if you have a blog dedicated to BV’s games, or know others feel free to tag in the comments.

[daesungindistress]

Hi, Not a Seungri defender as such, but I've also not "cancelled" him yet. I've personally been following the investigation and evidence closely (like to the point of checking Korean sources). I don't know if it what I say matters to you, but I wanted to reassure you that a lot of the VIPs who are OT5 rn, aren't supporting blindly (although there's a few). In my research, I've found most accusations are unbacked media claims. However, if solid evidence should show. I'd change my opinion on it.

*to clarify what I mean by evidence. A lot of the accusations media claim Ri has done or is being investigated for are false. The assumption he was in the MOLKA has so far been disproven. The prostitution claims don’t meet up with other evidence (women out right deny it) And the two burning sun videos, both the woman dragged out and the woman supposedly drugged, have both stated these are but true. I’m not one to believe things blindly but all he women involved have denied all accusation (rn).

I understand that you want to wait for stronger evidence that might convince you to “cancel” him altogether, and that’s fine, but this far into the investigation much of the fandom has seen enough to decide that Seungri’s role in Big Bang has come to an end. The way I look at it, that is the spirit behind OT4 vs OT5. It doesn’t have to be about hating Seungri specifically, it’s more about Big Bang’s longevity… and at this time it’s tough to envision a Big Bang that can live on with Seungri in it. On that subject, I have to stop there because I’m currently in the process of writing another post about this, and I don’t want to use up all my thoughts on it here… or have to resort to repeating myself there.

As for the rest, I agree that Seungri probably isn’t guilty of everything he’s been accused of. But it’s likely he’s guilty of some things. Some of which may never be proven in court because, remember, he told his friends to change phones before turning them in to the police – which they did. It’s recently been reported that Seungri himself submitted a new phone too. He’s currently being investigated for that, this destruction of evidence, so we’ll see if it goes anywhere. By the way, this info was gathered by police during questioning of Seungri’s friends (CJH, JJY, etc).

This is an extremely important point to me. Because if he did tell his friends to ditch their old phones, and took the same measures himself, then that’s practically an admission of guilt, albeit an indirect one. Guilt for what, you ask? We may never know. He made sure we wouldn’t. He pledged to cooperate sincerely with the investigation, but… that doesn’t sound like cooperating sincerely to me. It’s exceedingly weird to me that people aren’t talking about this more.

As for the prostitution claims, yes, some women interviewed have denied. I mean… of course they’re going to deny it, prostitution is illegal in South Korea and confessing would land them in trouble. And yet, it is also possible that they’re being truthful and they are not, in fact, prostitutes. I’m willing to believe that. Keep in mind, however, that there have been multiple chats released that appear to be alluding to prostitution mediation / acting as a liaison in various locations, and the investigation is still ongoing. Police have said recently that they believe they’ve obtained some credible testimony and feel they’re making progress on those allegations, so again, yes or no, we’ll just have to wait and see. Seungri claims that many of those chats are being taken out of context. For some of them, I can accept that. For others… that rosy tint is fading fast.

The Burning Sun video of the woman being dragged is irrelevant, I think. Just a misunderstanding. Last I heard, that video showed her being forcibly removed from the club for causing a disturbance; the woman herself wrote the club a letter of apology and paid for damages. It is true, however, that women have been assaulted and secretly filmed inside the club Burning Sun; not sure about CCTV footage, but police caught two employees who were doing it, using a VIP bathroom and filming it on their phones. IIRC at least one of them is in custody. And many more women are speaking out now – specifically, about how they tried to report problems related to the club but were ignored or silenced by the local police (Gangnam district). It’s quite clear at this point that Burning Sun itself was a hotbed of illegal activity. Many arrests have been made on charges of drug use, and a few for drug distribution.

I’m not actually very interested in discussing Seungri’s role in Burning Sun, as I’m not convinced yet that he had much to do with the seedy goings-on there. Even the prostitution stuff I’m still pretty ‘meh’ about for reasons I don’t feel like going into right now. Gambling = whatever, his drug tests were clean, embezzlement… yeah that’s not great, he’ll probably just pay a fine. Tax evasion, again, sucks, probably another fine. Police collusion… jury’s still out on that one, but it definitely doesn’t reflect well on him, that he’s being questioned about it at all. Remember his comment: “Korean law is shit, that’s why I love it.” Dude. Dumb thing to say when you’re a highly-regarded celebrity who people look up and admire. And now it’s out there for the whole world to see.

Whew. And we haven’t even touched on the main source of fans’ outrage: m o l k a

It’s true that Seungri wasn’t in the majority of JJY’s molka chats and was instead in a chat reserved mostly for business. However, he was sent at least one molka video, and he did see it, because he responded to it. I’m not too fussed by his reply (”Who’s that? Oh, Oo-hyung lol”)… it comes off as more dismissive to me than anything – uninterested, mostly. Unfortunately for him, many are interpreting it as amusement. At the very least, he was aware of JJY’s molka/spycam fetish, because in his Chosun Ilbo interview he said, “Of course I tried to stop him. When I met him in person I tried to stop him and said, ‘Don’t do stuff like that, you’ll get in really big trouble.’” There’s no question anymore whether he did or did not know about his friend’s dirty habits / crimes against women. The most concerning thing, to me, is that he didn’t seem to care enough to cut ties with him because of it. If he had made a visible effort to distance himself, I think people might be more forgiving.

Also strange is his total failure to mention the women affected in any of his apologies. He’s taken the time to apologize to his former agency YG, his bandmates (seen translated as “teammates”), his fans, the Korean public, and even Mr. Kim following his assault by police at Burning Sun… but never once the women. Why? What does that say about him? I’m not sure, but I don’t think I like it.

In the end, here’s what it all boils down to, for me: whatever the extent of his involvement, it’s pretty obvious at this point that he’s not some innocent lamb being led to slaughter. Seungri let this relationship drag on for years and stuck with it, this shady bunch. This wasn’t just a one-time thing, a simple mistake anyone might make. Worse, he was warned by his hyungs many times – on camera, even, in front of fans, in front of TV audiences. They begged him not to mess up while they were away and Big Bang was dependent on him. They trusted him with the name BIGBANG. Will they, or anyone else for that matter, be willing to trust him with it again?

I hate to say it, but it looks like Seungri chose these people over Big Bang. He chose Jung Joonyoung, Choi Jonghoon, Yoo Insuk, and others over Kwon Jiyong, Choi Seunghyun, Dong Youngbae, and Kang Daesung. Forget the warnings, OT4 teased, complained, and scolded him often enough about not spending time with them outside of band-related activities. Well, I guess now we know why. He had other friends, other loyalties, other priorities. Even as recently as late February of this year, when the first KKT chats were dropped (the Arena prostitution chat), Seungri’s first concern was contacting his friends to make sure they’d be safe in the event of a “mandatory police investigation”. I don’t think he’s this horrible person that so many are making him out to be, no, but this is not behavior befitting a member of a world-renowned boyband with a tremendous following of adoring female fans. It’s a coveted position of great power and great responsibility – to his fans, to his bandmates, to himself. But with his burgeoning interest in business, I guess Seungri felt he had better, more important things and people to attend to.

And then on March 11, 2019, he saw the writing on the wall and left Big Bang.

I’m sad to lose him. But I think, in a way, we lost him a long time ago. We just didn’t know it yet.

[luminescen1-sapphire]

Hey, I'm a bit of an outsider. I only relatively recently have learned about and become a little involved in fandom spaces.

I think the disconnect that you are seeing in those arguments is also happening in yours, and neither side is "getting" it because both sides are operating without information or understanding of the other.

You're right! An algorithmic feed can be built without the profit-motive, and could be a good tool.

They're also right, algorithmic feeds don't exist in a vacuum, and it's reasonable to be skeptical of anything suggesting they are good.

The "kids these days just need to learn to use search tools" is a miscommunication and unfair. On the surface it is just a "kids these days..." BS, but like some of those cases, there's missing information about why a previous thing may have been better.

Not having an algorithmic feed doesn't mean you have to search or do a lot of work. There's a null hypothesis problem in that. There are other tools which aren't familiar to new internet users that used to be used that allowed people to see the kind of content they wanted to, without having to do programmatic filtering of any kind.

At the risk of "back in my day"ing, a few years ago (around 8-15 when I was actively involved) one of the main places where a lot of internet socializing and content lived was forums. Forums at the time were very simple websites. You had threads, comments on them, and a couple hierarchies of thread organization. The closest thing to an "algorithm" was a recently comments or posts section. If you wanted to see what people were up to on a given topic you went to the topical forum, and checked out the new threads in the subtopics.

If you wanted to keep up with several topics, you could setup an RSS feed which was a simple system that would show you the latest posts from several websites (blogs, forums, etc) all in one place.

There was a little bit more work involved, but it wasn't "more" work than it is now, just different work.

The point is, that kind of platform was brutally murdered by algorithmic feeds. And strictly speaking, those older tools were vastly better than any algorithm in what they could provide for you. Maybe not quite as easy to use, but I personally feel a huge sense of loss that we don't have those tools anymore.

We can and should build new platforms which have the capabilities the old ones did. We could include an algorithmic feed of some variety, but the unfortunate truth is that building those at all is actually quite hard. Much harder is building them in ways that don't programmatically include bigotry underneath, as all of them currently do. The places that have the resources to do it are primarily large corporations and VC-funded startups who have profit-only motive.

So it's very reasonable to be aggressively against algorithmic feeds from certain points of view. It's similar conceptually to being angry about cryptocurrency stuff. There is an underlying tool which is value neutral, but has proven itself to be primarily valuable to scammers while hiding other, better things by being noisy.

The older gens need to remember that we are operating on different information than the younger gens, and to share that info. We also need to remember to frame information we know in approachable ways to people who don't have the same background. The younger gens need to try to be patient with older gens affected by normal human nature and try to remember that if a person who you think is reasonable in most ways but "stuck in the old ways" about some things is impassioned about something, there might be more information that you don't have.

Recommendation algorithm means "a system that figures out what you might like looking at next" THAT'S IT THAT'S ALL IT IS IT CAN BE IN AN UNOBTRUSIVE LITTLE SIDEBAR THAT CAN BE TURNED OFF, OPTIMIZED FOR ENJOYMENT INSTEAD OF ENGAGEMENT, WITH NO ADS ATTACHED AND NOT BEHOLDEN TO ANY OUTSIDE COMPANY OR PROFIT MOTIVE WHY IS THAT BAD I DON'T GET IT