#they could have made a funny show about nerd culture

[centrally-unplanned]

I have begun watching Andor; my first Star Wars media after the the Rise of Skywalker burned all possible hope and legacy the series could ever have. It is pretty good! Finished Season 1, am a few episodes into Season 2 so far - though as usual my thoughts lean towards the complain-y side, don't let that bias you:

Andor at its best is portraying the Empire "in transition", moving towards greater levels of centralization and authoritarianism but no longer at the breakneck pace of coups and gigantic wars. Having say private military contractors filling enforcement gaps, and then being annexed by central authority as the knee-jerk response to the inevitable failures that accrue, causing the center to be overburdened? Very kino stuff. We need more stories about bureaucracy and Andor, while not committed to the bit, at least flirts heavily with it.

What makes the above work is the hard commitment to "realism", and that only works because the show is harshly pretending so much of Star Wars doesn't exist. All these grubby human stormtroopers and officers, making mistakes, defecting, and so on? Why aren't you using, oh I don't know, the clone army you made in the prequels bred for loyalty? I know you have an answer for that in one of your infinite spinoffs, but the answer is stupid and half-baked. Even if you couldn't make everyone a clone, you would still be using the clones, and robot soldiers, and force-sensitive ninja warriors, and all that stuff. Same with a dozen other things - the show will hand-waive away why they are using slave prison labor over droids with "droids are more expensive" but bro - I have seen Star Wars droids, they cost as much as a trash bin because they are sometimes literally trash bins. This is the right decision, to be clear! Just very funny.

Honestly Andor really throws into relief the, uh, arc of both Star Wars & sci fi more broadly? The original films are very "classic adventure", for all audiences - the sci fi elements are aesthetic, the magic elements are loose and mystical, the plot is a Hero's Journey in war. As the franchise grew in the 1980's, it made "1980's content" for nerd audiences at the time - pulpy, action-oriented, and with a lot of "technobabble plots". Oh the Emperor has a clone machine! Oh now we have the Sun Crusher, it crushes suns! This alien species can drink luck somehow! Stuff like this is the bread-and-butter of the EU, and a lot of the ~vibe~ if not focus of the prequels. Time marched on, Star Wars broadened while sci-fi declined, and these stories lost their appeal alongside the audience for Star Wars fully morphing into an "every generation" affair with many older adults wanting content. Andor is of course the answer to that demand, a fully gritty political drama with an entirely-human main cast. But it sits in the same universe as Jar Jar Binks and you can't really escape that.

While the median "expression of political hatred for the Empire" is via a longing for democracy & political freedom, it is very cute to me how "70's liberalism" a lot of the more concrete complaints are coded? There are a lot of vibes of central authority is bad, localism should rule the day, let each unitary planet make its own decisions. The successor government is gonna have a TON of NIMBYs opposed export-focused mining projects on its hands, I do not envy them that. #TeamStripMineGhorman

Why does the galaxy have all these human indigenous tribes all over the place? Did humans evolve independently on all these planets? Presumably these humans are settlers, which means they would have the kind of culture an expansionist, space-faring, scientific civilization would have, right? Awful lot of people crash-landed and lost all their digital books it seems.

Okay, an actual, real complaint now: what is the empire currently fighting? I know that fascist regimes "invent" security crises to justify their authoritarian control, but, well, they kind of don't actually do that whole-cloth, 1984 isn't a history book. It typically is tied to real events, even ones of their own making. If Franco's Spain wanted to allocate 25% of GDP to massive military projects, it was gonna need a reason. And all the senators, who are not imperial propaganda pieces, seem to accept the need for expansive military preparations. So what enemy are these for, exactly? You might say "the rebellion, duh", but that actually doesn't track - for one at the beginning of the show they are explicitly small fry, that is the entire plot. And they are also at this point entirely insurgency-based - not something building more Imperial Star Destroyers really helps you address. The Empire-as-portrayed acts like it has peer adversaries somewhere? It seems like it is conquering planets (and in the lore I think it is). But we never see any of this, it is never actually mentioned. Add Andor to the list of hundreds of stories that finds itself in need of a scene of a dozen people sitting around a big map displaying current strategic threats, priorities, and status-quo force deployments, but is too much of a coward to do it.

*Extremely* cute that apparently the galactic financial system still heavily relies on physical currency. This admittedly isn't a crazy anachronism, I can see how communicating digital exchanges across space might be difficult (ofc Star Wars is completely inconsistent along these metrics but w/e). Someone has gotta tell the Emperor about the blockchain...

Cassian is so much hotter with a beard, he needs to own that and stop all this shaving nonsense he does on and off, get your priorities straight. Bix meanwhile is hotter with ___; it is literally impossible for Bix not to be hot in any context and boy does this show try to disprove that! Fails every time.

[lej222]

Literary Allusions and Pop Culture References in ASLFUA

After School Lessons is a series that has minimal plot, but great underlying themes and references to other famous creations/pop culture moments. I thought it would be fun to collect as many as I can in this post and their possible narrative connection, not necessarily in order. :)

Cheol & Miae

One of the biggest running gags of the series is that the main characters have the same names as the famous Korean musical duo Cheol and Miae. The group was formed in 1992, with Cheol as the rapper and Miae as the singer. Their single, 'Why do you' became a huge hit and was referenced in ASLFUA plenty of times. Obviously, the main joke here is that the singer Miae was taller than rapper Cheol and they were only friends, while Unripe Apples Cheol is taller than Miae.

Nostradamus

The prophecy of Nostradamus said that in the 7th month of 1999 a great king of terror would descend from the sky and bring end to the world. Which makes it even more interesting that the supernatural powers in the story started to be very active around July with the end of the first term and the start of the summer break.

Miae's posters on the wall: E.T (1982) and The X-Files (1993)

Interestingly enough, both feature aliens. E.T The Extra-Terrestrial might be more interesting for us readers, as it features a young boy named Elliott who befriends an alien. In one of the most famous scenes of the movie, E.T. is riding Elliott's bike in his basket, and the bicycle lifts off from the ground and two are shown flying in front of the full moon. In fact, in a poll made by Universal it was voted as the most memorable movie scene in 100 years of cinema.

Needless to say, there are some ovbious similarities with our story - the boy with the bike, the strange friend, the moon symbolism. In fact, Cheol is always looking at the moon so it wouldn't be a surprise if it was inspired by Spielberg's movie, plus one of the most impactful scenes of aslfua is when Cheol allows Miae to ride his bicycle with him in ep 95, the scene that I personally consider the end of the first part of the story.

Backstreet Boys

Miae is singing the 1997 hit song 'As Long As You Love Me'. Miae, like a typical teenager, likes boybands like the Fire Boys who might be the parody of The Backstreet Boys😃

Romeo and Juliet

There are quite a few references to the 1996 Romeo and Juliet movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. On 3 separate cover pages, Miae is portrayed as Juliet, while Cheol and Jisu are dressed like Romeo. There's also a scene where Miae imagines being Juliet who is not allowed to meet her Romeo when she cannot see Cheol. I wonder if Jisu will also have a Romeo-like element in his story that could create a similar situation, it would be an amazing foreshadowing element.

Man in Black

It looks like Soonkki really loves her alien references, because we also have the 1997 movie starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, who play agents tasked with monitoring extraterrestrial life on Earth.

Titanic

Another movie that is mentioned many times in the story, the Titanic (1997) is one that Miae seemingly loves and has watched many times. In fact, it's funny how her favourite part is the car scene because it really shows us readers that Miae is interested in the idea of love, even if she doesn't know what it truly entails to be in a relationship.

Green Day

People born before the 2000s all know that characters listening to the American band's songs were often the slacker/stoner stereotypes. I've also written a post about how Jisu is seemingly the subversion of the 90s slacker/stoner and nerd archetype, while Cheol seems to be the subversion of the jock trope. Jisu is listening to Basket Case (1994) that has become the anthem of many slackers/stoners in the 90s, and weirdly fits his character really well considering Jisu is usually described as a strange person. I've also made several posts about Jisu possibly being on the spectrum, and it's interesting to see how Jisu expresses himself with the songs he listens to, no wonder his hobby is listening to music. If we consider Jisu might be bad at expressing his feelings through his body language, it makes this scene even more precious.

Speed

Cheol invites Miae to watch a movie together and it happens to be the 1994 classic starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. Reeves plays a police officer who has to save the passengers of a bus without the speed of the bus dropping below 50 miles per hour, otherwise a bomb would explode the vehicle. It's one of the most creative action films ever made, but if someone wants to watch it, I advice not to watch the sequel because it is awful lol.

Scream

Miae wants Cheol to join the academy kids watching an R-rated movie which leads to a hilarious misunderstanding. To Cheol's relief, the movie turns out to be the horror movie Scream (1996).

Shakespeare and Carl Jung

Like I've mentioned in my supernatural involvement post under ep 116, we get a close-up of 2 interesting posters.

One of them is about the forest in Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare. The 4 central characters in the play all get entangled with the supernatural, and the forest symbolizes a world where the line between reality and fantasy is blurred. Dreams play an important role in the story as they are sometimes real, sometimes simply dreams. In aslfua, we also have dreams, a forest where young Miae and Cheol played, a stone tower fairy that allegedly grants wishes and an unknown supernatural power that talks to Miae.

The coincidences poster is likely a reference to Carl Jung's synchronicity, a concept that states that seemingly meaningful coincidences have a deeper meaning. One has to realize the connection between their psyche and the material world to experience synchronicity, so basically you have to notice the coincidences that keep happening and put meaning to them. Because these coincidences have no rational explanation, they can be proof for a deeper order in the universe, almost like destiny, no wonder Jung used this concept to argue for the existence of the paranormal. A simple example: you really cannot decide what to study in the future, but have seen many posters on your way about one school. You go home and it pops up on the Internet. You start to wonder if it's a coincidence, and decide that it's a sign from above and eventually choose it. You've experienced synchronicity.

-> this happens when seemingly unrelated events become meaningful to you. Miae wonders how she keeps bumping into Cheol. She says he must have come to her neighborhood because of her wish. Miae experiences synchronicity when it comes to Cheol. Or we could say Miae acknowledges a deeper order in the universe that, through coincidences, let her meet Cheol again. Jisu also notices that he keeps meeting Miae through coincidences, he acknowledges the deeper order, he even remarks it's fun, but he goes beyond and says he feels like there's a higher power involved. Miae has no idea about her coincidences with Jisu so she her psyche doesn't make the connection with the material world. So we have synchronicity experienced by: Miae->Cheol and Jisu->Miae.

Jisu, the grateful magpie

Jisu's backstory gives us a reference to a famous Korean folktale about a man who saved a group of baby magpies from a snake and in return the magpies sacrificed themselves to protect him. Here, the illustration clearly shows Miae as the person who uses her bow and arrow to kill the snake, while we know she called Jisu a magpie when they were kids. Throughout the story, we see Jisu trying to protect Miae and repay the favor without much luck, which pretty much foreshadows one big possible role for Jisu in the storyline, no wonder he's the one who's aware of Shim bullying Miae. It's no coincidence either how in the present she thinks Jisu resembles more of a bald eagle, a predatory animal.

Stone tower

Although it's not an allusion, I wanted to include this one because it's a very famous superstition in Korea. People used to pray to the mountain Gods by building stone pagodas so their wishes would be answered. This tradition is still alive, though nowadays most people tell their wishes or pray for good luck. You usually put your stones on an existing stone tower because it also shows how people are interconnected and how you should respect others so your wish can come true through the wishes of others. That's why you should never destroy a pagoda that somebody else made, and it's also very disrespectful. Miae also makes wishes to the tower so Cheol can become her friend and he would one day come to her neighborhood. When Cheol wants to give her a book, he accidentally falls on the pagoda and injures himself.

The Matrix

The Matrix (1999), one of the most famous movies of all time, is about how reality is actually an illusion, and people can be blinded about the truth about their own existence. The main character Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, is someone who awakens within the Matrix, similarly to what we see in The Truman Show starring Jim Carrey.

In one of the most iconic moments of the movie, the oracle tells Neo not to worry about the vase, while Neo doesn't know what she's talking about until he accidentally drops a vase. This scene poses many different questions about predetermination and free will. Was Neo's act predestined by prior experince, free will, or maybe both?

If you look at my aslfua screenshot, you can notice the code from Matrix in green. And what happens in the scene? Miae and Jisu injure a plant in a pot. An accident, right?? Well, depending on how you interpret it based on the movie. And what does Jisu do? He intentionally throws the pot and destroys the plant. Can Jisu's act be considered a sign of free will? Because that is what he tells Miae- that he is not a bully, so he took the blame by flipping over the plant. Jisu might just be a glitch in the system if you know what I mean :D

The Bible

Last but not least, we have this super symbolic illustration at the end of ep2 after Miae meets Cheol. The biblical allusion is obvious, Miae is holding out a green apple to Cheol, a half-eaten apple. In the first part Miae is the one providing her knowledge to Cheol in order to help him mature. :)

There are probably way more references, but I'm kind of tired so I might add others in the future. :) If anyone read this whole thing, thank you so much! :D

[anafanjestic]

◇ Dr. Stone inconsistencies ◇

Before reading my nerd thoughts down there, keep in mind it's my personnal reflexions. Don't misunderstand, I do love very much this anime/manga, but there are things that let me skeptical.

Ishigami and Treasures Island people :

Let's start with something that hurts. The genetic variety is too few to make proper new society. We are closer from Adam and Eve mythology than a scientist reasoning.

Funny considering Dr. Stone is about science ! It would be more coherent to have sometime some unpetrificated people too grow the diversity of the DNA.

For the following reasoning I will definitly pass over this fact.

No technology ? :

Come on, 3700 years, it's very long ! Ishigamis don't start from nothing, their parents/ancestors were scientist, spaceman and they had Byakuya 100 stories. We can see some learning about shellfish utilty, don't tell me they never had education than that.

They don't know earth is round ???!

NO WRITTING ????

They do not have farming, but made villages. This isn't coherent. They fish, hunt and picking. They should live as nomad OR have groups of explorers/pickers/hunters that should know like the back of their hand a vast territory around the village.

They have concrete way to build. We can notice there are similarities between

Low culture ? :

They doesn't seems to have much traditions. I don't say, no tradition at all. Have same kind of clothes and shoes. But no deities ? They have bit of folklore with Hundred Tales, but speak poorly about it. Shouldn't it be their EVERYTHING ? They could make representation of it, festivities, public narrates ? Okay, Ruri is ill, but it's super crazy that they would stop to celebrate it.

No music ? No arts ? No jewelry ?

We can see Suika use a big shellfish to attract people to the noodle stand. But no musicians more than maybe a drummer during the party to celebrate Senku bout's victory.

They seem to live in boredom... But when people get bored they do create art to entertain themself. It's the reason why artists are very important in society. Houses decoration, clothes detailed for their prietress, ritual pot or tool, tatoo, dance...

Language :

They still seemingly speak a good japanese. Even if there is a sacred text, living language evolves and no one can stop that.

We can suppose the Hundred Tales could maybe being keep like it was at first, but all the words that aren't in it can easily change thru the times.

◇ Conclusion ◇

Dr. Stone is a good story about science, but definitly not about civilizations. I do understand this show and its discourse to push the audience to learn more about science. Plus it's teaching about how much the perseverance is the key to accomplish your aim.

Anyway. Don't think too much like me, and go enjoy it ! (but if you read until there I know you are the kind to overthink this show and I love you for this)

(Note : I maybe will continue to update this post)

[ducktracy]

Looney Tunes really fucks up with your sense of time. It makes you contend with facts like "the last Looney Tunes short could have been about a Tasmanian tiger and it wouldn't have to be justified because they weren't extinct yet."

DOESN'T IT??? THAT'S WHY I LOVE IT SO MUCH!!!! OHHHHHHHHHH YOU'RE GETTIN' ME STARTED

IRONICALLY i'm usually the opposite frame of reference, a thought i regularly have is "the earth is millions of years old and i get to live in the fraction of a fraction of a blip just a little bit after these guys were around and some of the directors and animators were still alive when i was born, we're really not that far apart, everything is so recent in comparison, i'm so lucky to be alive and get to experience this" LOL.

but yeah, the historical aspect is a huge huge huge huge huge reason why i'm a LT fanatic and why i have no plans of ever slowing down and haven't yet. it's like an anthropology lesson. i love seeing what trends were current with what year. i love seeing radios in the shorts evolve into televisions, i love hearing jokes about then-new things (like Daffy crying in the cut dialogue from Daffy Duck in Egghead about how if he gets shot then he'll never collect on his social security, which was less than 3 years old at the time of the short's release), i love seeing how the fashion evolves, how the music evolves, how the attitudes of the characters evolve depending on the needs and wants and assimilation of the public... it's one huge time capsule, and i think that tends to be viewed disparagingly and there IS a lot to view disparagingly. we all know how much hasn't aged well at all. but i do love that these shorts show their age (when not in the sense of discriminating against a group of people) and it's such a big part of the charm. these characters and stories are timeless in many ways, and many ways they're not! and i think so much of the charm comes from the era in which these shorts are born. explore it! have fun with it! IUNNO! as a history nerd and an anthropology nerd and pop culture history nerd it's just.. AHH. things like these really get me emotional in the best way. it's an animated time capsule we have at our finger tips

it's also kind of reassuring, too, because there's so many jokes or premises or character tics or just. THINGS. that make you go, hey, we aren't that far removed at all. again, earth is millions of years old, we're very close to these guys in the timeline range! and so it's really fun seeing certain jokes or phrases that seem current. like i remember watching Porky's Preview for the first time and genuinely struggling to believe that it was almost (and now is OVER) 80 years old. or, you can argue that Daffy Duck made the first YouTube Poop with Daffy Duck in Hollywood. and it's not some sort of freak accident. humor is universal and transcends time! "this is so funny for being so old" No, it's just funny! i've gone on this soapbox elsewhere about how i get so incensed when people seem to imply that just because something is old doesn't mean it can be funny, or if it is it's in a "freak accident" sort of way. no! it's funny! these guys knew what they were doing! they had a sense of humor, and it's not too different than ours in certain points! it's not some freak accident!

IM GOING ON A BIT OF A SEPARATE RANT HERE HAHA but the timelessness and not timelessness of these shorts is incredibly important to me and so big on why i'm doing what i do. it's really humbling, it's really fascinating, and there's just so much to learn and soak up

[yumecherie]

Okay so heres my actual unhinged review on Kpop Demon Hunters/thoughts I had while watching it (Very long, very chaotic, spoiler warning under cut)

-Kpop Demon Hunters 🤝 Ultraman Rising, two summer netflix movies that I make my personality for a solid month because a hot black haired ficitonal man was in it)

-One thing I love (as a Korean) is all the references to Korean mythology and culture, for example the first generation of hunters shown at the beginning of the movie were Mudangs (Korean shamans), and each passing generation since were hunters from different periods in Korean musical history (From the flapper era, to trot, to earl iterations of a girl band in the 70s to 90s to now the modern day), I was watching this with my sister whos a Korean Studies Major and she was nerding and studying every reference, there could be an entire analysis on this

-How It's Done is the best song definitely

-Zoey is literally me, slightly neurodivergent Korean american who grew up in Burbank LA, who loves bedrotting all day? Yep, thats me

-Speaking of Zoey I thought she would be my favorite but I thought it was a bit dickish for her and Mira to almost threaten killing her when they found out about Rumi being a demon

-I thought it was funny that Rumi herself released Golden when isnt it supposed to be the company who usually plans that?

-Speaking of company/music label..do they even have one? All we get is that Celine helps plan their music but thats it

-I guess that shows the main problem wiht this movie, I wish there was more backstory, like, how did they become idols and what was it like? (Both Hunterix and The Saja Boys), why did they get chosen and why did they chose these idols in the first place? where did the demons come from and whats the deal with Gwi Ma?

-Its never exactly confirmed why Mira has those demon powers besides saying her mom was a hunter (Likely part of the Sunshine Girls with Celine at one point) and her dad was a demon, so thats why shes also a demon, but then..how did they die? Did they die in battle? Did they kill each other? I wish they said that cause its kinda important

-The animation is beautiful, its made by the people who made Spider-Verse, so thats expected, the anime type facial expressions are all amazing too

-I could take Jinu (Not in a fight, demon form ONLY)

-I love Jinu's weird ass bird (Whos actually a magpie/까치, Korea's national bird) and the tiger (/haetae)

-I cringed a bit when they performed the Soda Pop song but like...its a good type of cringe, its supposed to be unserious and I love it

-The show the Saja Boys were on with the hot sauce was CLEARLY a reference to Weekly Idol I KNOW IT (White background/the mcs designs looking like the mcs from the show), the Idol Awards are a reference to MAMA, the logo is even similar

-This movie's honestly hilarious, the comedy is on point

-I want the Hunterix lightstick can someone PLEASE sell a real life version of that its literally better then some actual Kpop lightsticks nowadays

-I totally thought Celine was gonna be an antagonist but she was just a stressed Asian mom

-I watched this in the English dub with Ahn Hyo Seop as Jinu and I was wondering how he could pull this off considering acting and voice acting is very different (its kinda like my gripe with that Lost in Starlight movie on netflix where they used a Korean actors voice in the Korean dub despite the fact they couldve used a professional VOICE actor) but he actually pulled it off really well! I almost couldnt tell he was Ahn Hyo Seop by the end and same with everyone else (I know Ahn Hyo Seop cause I watched Business Proposal), also Lee Byung Hun as Gwi-Ma..like Squid Game Byung Hun as a fire lord demon

-There is no way they could set up an entire stadium on Namsan Tower, I went there last year there is no way they could have a concert there lmao

-I could've SWORN I heard Bangchan from Stray Kids voice during Your Idol

--Rumi and Jinu are cute, but THEY DIDNT EVEN KISS OR HUG OR SAY I LOVE YOU AND THEN HE FUCKING DIED but all the fanart and memes are cute keep them up for my sanity thank you

-THERE SHOUDLVE BEEN A SCENE WERE JINU GOT REINCARNATED AS A HUMAN AT THE END SOMEONE DREW HIM GETTING REINCARNATED AND COMING TO RUMI'S FANSIGN THAT SHOULDVE BEEN A POST CREDITS SCENE FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUU

-Final review:Its..kinda light on story and more focused on action, but really, thats the point. And I'm okay with it, people yearn for cute girls being in a girl band while fighting monsters cause the final battle/song is SO Equestria Girls, Lolirock and Winx Club (which were all shows i grew up with and it feels like that). But this story/world also has so much potential so I hope there is some kind of sequel or smth in the future

[kairiscorner]

Can we get more filo reader with any of the 2 miles ehehe

We could do like showing him the different family owned filipino restaurants in nyc, and him totakly loving the food

Feeling ko na magugustuhan niya yun ube pandesal LMAO and as a chubby girl I would totally love showing him all the good food spots <3 i luv ur writing so much oml

OMG YASZ, I LOVE THIS SO MUCH !! ykw, imma do them both, wai nat dibuh <33

(reblogs are greatly appreciated, it helps get my content out there! if you guys like what you see, please reblog it too <:D)

☆⋆｡°‧★ food trip !! — miles morales (1610 and 42) x filipino reader (headcanons and blurbs!)

⋆｡° ✮ miles morales (1610)

he's always up for trying new food, especially food that you enjoy and grew up with! he likes going around with you to experience new things and enjoy new kinds of food together, especially if it meant he'd get to learn more about you and your culture.

the first place you took him to was at a quaint mom and pop shop ran by a filipino family. miles was amazed by how delicious it smelled inside, the myriad of aromas and sounds from the bustling kitchen and lively conversations filled his senses and made him excited to try the food you wanted to show him and have him try.

you ordered all kinds of treats for him, but a staple of your childhood that you desperately wanted him to try was the pan de regla.

"ooh, it's red, real pretty." he pointed out with a grin as you tore off a piece for him to try. you chuckled. "the 'regla' part of the name references why it's red." you explained as you took a bite out of your share, with miles swiping some of the filling on his finger and tasting it. he widened his eyes in pleasant surprise and nodded as he savored the taste of the filling. "that tastes great, what does the 'regla' mean, uh, red?" he asked you as he ate his share and you shook your head. "y'really wanna know?" you asked him with a giggle as miles nodded and looked at you with a confused face.

"what's so funny, babe?" he asked you with a light chuckle at your chuckling. "it's that, um... 'regla' means 'menstruation'. it's because the bread looks like it's, you know, having that; the filling's perfectly good, though, i personally don't mind. sorry, um, too much...?" you asked him with a shy voice as miles' eyes widened and he whispered an 'oh' under his breath as he took another bite and shrugged. "hey, it's what the people in culture call it, i don't find it funny, it's pretty creative, not gonna lie. besides, this is so sweet and good! do you... do you know how to make it, by any chance?" he asked you with a bashful grin as he finished his share.

you smiled and handed him your share, seeing how he eagerly wanted some more of the bread. miles refused and insisted you can have it. "what? babe, no, you should have it—you bought it, it's yours." he said with a smile as you gently pushed miles' hand back to him. "oh, no! no, no, if you want more of it, i can always buy you some, it's no problem, mahal." you told him with a gentle voice as miles' face got all flustered and happy, like the sweet little nerd you fell in love with. "fine, but... i'll learn how to make this for you." "we'll learn how to make it together for each other." you corrected him as miles smiled and ate away at the piece you handed him, feeding you the final bit with a joyous grin.

⋆｡° ✮ miles morales (42)

miles was always willing to learn about you and your heritage, especially trying the food you grew up with and love. there were times when you'd have him over for dinner at your place and he'd be introduced to filipino cuisines, but you wanted to show him the treats filipinos loved.

a new shop opened up nearby in your neighborhood and you wanted miles to try a pastry you've been meaning to try as well. it was a humble mom and pop shop run by a filipino family, and miles was enthralled by how homely and welcoming the whole place seemed; it felt like visiting an old friend's home or a family member you missed a whole lot.

you bought all kinds of treats and pastries for him, but a pastry you've been seeing often on your social media feed and wanted him to try so badly was the ube pandesal.

"purple, hmm?" miles pointed out with a hint of awe in his voice as he looked at the purple-hue bread before him. you nodded and gleefully handed him a piece that you broke from the bread. "it's been trending ever since the pandemic happened, my parents have said it was good, but they keep forgetting to bring some home for me. well, i wanna know how you'll like it, mahal." you told him with a grin as you dug in to your ube pandesal. you let out a small exclamation of joy as you chewed. "this is a total upgrade from pandesal, it's so good! give it a try, mahal, please!" you urged him as miles chuckled and went for it.

he chewed on the piece of purple bread and his eyes widened. "this... wow, it really is good, cielo." he said with a small smile as he reached for some more. you leaned over to him and, with a wide smile, wordlessly asked him to feed you. he sighed, still smiling, and let you take a bite of the ube pandesal, and he bit the rest of it. "you could've asked me to hand you one, we've got a lot more here." "yeah, but isn't it more romantic when you feed me?" you said with a cheeky grin as miles chuckled.

"you know, my parents have this saying: 'walang matigas na tinapay sa mainit na kape'." you told him, which he raised an eyebrow at. "what does that mean, cielo?" "it means... 'there's no hard bread for a warm coffee', i'm your warm coffee, and you're my hard bread; tough on the outside, but soft when you're paired with me." you teased him as he got all flustered and stuffed his mouth with a piece of ube pandesal to distract himself from his fluster. "eres demasiado romántica, cariño." miles muttered with a bashful grin as you sneaked an ube pandesal from him and chuckled. "alam ko, mahal." you muttered back to him as you kissed his cheek, still full of the chewed up ube pandesal he was eating.

[blue-thief]

oh the wonders of realizing due dates are actually farther than i expected

@marcsnuffy this is all basically just based off how this guy is made up of twelve billion contradictions esp when we're considering gender expression.

i've gone over this before, but he's the type of guy who would read dazai, dostoevsky, kafka, etc in a male manipulator kind of way. this type of guy also goes in hand with the type of guy who watches fight club, american psycho, etc with zero self awareness (i'm not much of a film nerd so i can't really speak about his taste in films specifically).

his dad probably had a collection of old films he worked on, and kaiser watched them all on some old cd or cassette player in hopes of finding some with his mom. even though his mom showed up in more dramatic films rather than tougher serious ones, these ones hold a special place in his heart. he's not in denial about this, but he never brings it up to anyone. around the time he was a tween, he snuck into a movie theatre to watch one of his mom's films.

i believe it was mentioned that his parents started off in theater, and once kaiser became rich enough, he took time to see live productions at least once a month. his goal is to catch up on shakespeare since he never got a chance to learn about him at school (i had to check r/askeurope to see if shakespeare is taught there 😭😭).

as much as it's funny to imagine hamilton fan kaiser, i don't think he'd be drawn to musicals that much. he doesn't mind them, but they aren't usually on his radar. he's considered going to the opera though. for the sake of affirming to himself that he's now financially stable.

he canonically reads psychology textbooks, and i think he has read jordan peterson's books. (SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP BECAUSE I HAVE PROBABLY WALKED ON THE SAME FLOOR AS JORDAN PETERSON ON MULTIPLE OCCASIONS GET ME OUT OF HEERREEEEEE) i don't think he'd care or agree with jordan peterson but he definitely has read him, maybe even bought some of his works shudders he also read the dictator's handbook + the art of war and has used this in ways that are disastrous for everyone involved

beyond the dazai, dostoevsky, kafka, etc vibe, i don't think there's much fiction he'd be drawn to. at some point, he decided to check out f. scott key fitzgerald, saw jay gatsby, and went "he's just like me fr" (again, zero self awareness)

as for music, i think he would listen to three days grace in particular (i have listened to exactly ONE three days grace song and that is "i am machine" and all i could think was "he would listen to this /neg" then added it to my own liked songs playlist). he might have stumbled across panic! at the disco and he probably vibed pretty well with a fever you can't sweat out. he would not care for any other panic! at the disco album. he also wouldn't care for ryden so he wouldn't read throam. but i need this guy to somehow read throam because throam!ryan ross is literally him.

he probably heard primadonna girl by marina but didn't care at first. it wasn't until he accidentally stumbled across oh no that he was like "i need to listen to the rest of this". he only ended up caring for the family jewels and electra heart, and electra heart is more feminine than most things he would allow himself to listen to, but this is just his way of going "whoa look i'm a feminist i like women i'm listening to a woman and sings about woman stuff". relates to the persona of electra heart once again because AGAIN. THIS GUY HAS ZERO SELF AWARENESS 😭😭 HE NEVER REALIZES THE ART HE CONNECTS TO IS TELLING HIM THAT HE SHOULD NOT BE THE WAY THAT HE IS 😭😭😭

but yeah. electra heart is his limit to willingly admitting to feminine art but this guy is subconsciously drawn to taylor swift but more like in the sense that he's fascinated with her presence in the cultural zeitgeist. which is a strange form of being a swiftie, but his relationship with famous women is strange considering his relationship with his mother. if his mother got big enough that she worked with americans on american projects, there's a chance that she would talk about/be publicly acquainted with a lot of young famous women for the sake of white feminism yk. he consumes their art just through cultural osmosis but his understanding of their personal drama and stuff is weirdly detailed

also these are all totally definitely absolutely not examples of me projecting 😁😁 because i AM self aware and i am better than michael kaiser in every way possible 😁😁😁

[yusuke-of-valla]

Insane thoughts about non-SEES characters

You've brought up Mamoru before but I just think the fact that he ultimately drops out of high school to go work in a factory would raise a lot of question in Minato's head about what he should do in order to take care of the siblings.

The kids Yuko coaches in her Social Link are about Yusuke's age.

Hamuko misses Minato's summer track/kendo/swim meet because she's in Inaba with the volleyball/tennis team.

Maiko is everyone's friend. She can be pen pals with the younger kids after moving away.

You have the really funny opportunity to have Naoto cross paths with Rise while she's in town for the show that ultimately gets canceled due to the Hermit Shadow.

The Temperance Link is shared but the fact that Hamuko can actually make items during it and Minato can't leads me to believe that he just sucks at sewing. Hamuko makes little dolls and purses for the kids.

Bunkichi and Mitsuko give them even more snacks for the rotating cast of children that they keep bringing to the bookstore.

One of the Culture Club options - and the only option in Reload - is Art Club. Keisuke, Minato, and Fuuka can all be in Art Club. (Keisuke does show up as president of the Photography Club in Junpei's link but can be easily replaced.)

Maiko and Bunkichi are both among the people who get lost in Tartarus.

I knew about Maiko and Bunkichi! I remember thinking that's a really cool way to tie your social links into the main plot

Maiko also ends up friends with Ken I think during the Kyoto trip and while the teens are in summer school they have their own little weird adventure.

Wait hold on we can combine these Maiko getting kidnapped happens during the Kyoto trip and the kids+Koromaru stage a potentially ill-advised rescue trip (they're fine)

I love the implication that Minato just sucks at making things. There's probably a gendered analysis to be made about how Hamuko can cook and sew in her social links but Minato can't but in my heart it's just because Minato's cringe (speaking of, Sumire deserves to be the unofficial third memeber of Fuuka's cooking club)

Speaking of unofficial club members I think Yusuke hears that Minato and Fuuka are in the art club and is just fucking vibrating but doesn't say anything because he doesn't want to impose and then Minato invites him along and he is soooo excited to be able to make art with Minato and half the time no one understands what he's saying because he's been devouring art theory textbooks since he could read but he still takes the first thing Minato drew and gave him and keeps it under his pillow for good luck (idk how much of an Art Nerd Keisuke is but I feel like even without Madarame's influence Yusuke talks like an art history grad student at age 8 so he may or may not be able to follow.)

Club trip to the art museum you have never seen a child more excited outside of a candy store

Kasumi and Sumire train with Yuko even though her kids are a little older because they can keep up and Kasumi really wanted to

Naoto and Rise meeting early on would be so funny I think Naoto should do something incredibly embarassing and after Naoto is a complete badass In Persona 4 because he already has a Persona Rise is like "wait didn't you fall into the fountain at Pawlonia Mall two years ago"

I do think Minato and Hamuko being worried about not doing enough to support their siblings is a part of their arc because. You know basically being in charge at age 8 and having a really unstable home life but I have not narrowed down a vibe I like for both of them. I think Minato seeing Mamoru and thinking maybe he's been too happy to be distant and let the others do their own thing would def be interesting though

[seeingteacupsindragons]

Heyo! Lovely commentary as always :D. Yea no, i didn't mean to criticise when comparing the difference in effort between the science stuff and military stuff. I love this series, and the way I show my love is by picking through all my favourite aspects with a fine tooth comb and seeing how everything ticks, but that's a me problem lmao. The enemy of good is perfect, and this is a good series to me. For example, if Xeno really did go to college at 10, then that explains literally everything about him. Of course his ego is like that, and his ideals got shaped in that way. There is no way to come out of that well-adjusted and unentitled. It also makes his childhood friendship with Stanley even funnier. Poor kid was out here learning about fractions while his best friend was midway through a PhD. Though maybe, following the logic, that means Stanley was doing his first tour around that time. Maybe that was when he put in his Air Force shift. Also, I completely didn't realise that, but yea poor Ukyo! I like to think maybe he and Stan bonded a little bit, after the whole war crimes debacle. Crazy how quick everyone moved past that little detail. Thank you for humouring my ranting btw :)

Hello! Thank you.

Anyway, I am also often (usually) poking at things I like, because I love writing and writing craft so much that picking at how it works and why is almost a default part of my process when liking something. I want to know how they incorporated those themes and made things work! For Dr. STONE particularly, I find the character personalities and themes most interesting; the story structure and plot are functional but not the main draws for me to the series, and also honestly kind of the wonkier bits anyway. Compared to YuuMori, where the structure has me starry-eyed and breathless.

But like, I'm also fascinated in Dr. STONE about how static most of the characters are. A few characters have some arcs (Xeno, for one), but Senku? Not even kind of. He's the protagonist, but he is the same person on the last page as he was on the first without even filing down the edges. And he started as a teenager! And yet!

Which is how I ended up with what is like at least a good 30-50% a meta blog. It's basically story vivisection on display for people. There's some older Dr. STONE stuff around here from before I read the manga this spring, most of which holds up but one of which is now very funny and deeply inaccurate because it asked about Senku having a mentor and I was at the time unaware Xeno existed.

Stan's not stupid, either, though, and when Xeno was probably in PhD land, Stan was probably in Precalc or Calc. Like Stan is legitimately brilliant, just not. Whatever Xeno's doing. I think a lot of characterization of those two gets fucky fast because they're so gay and people want to shove them into their pre-determined fun ship roles. It happens a lot with popular shippable characters.

I did actually make a very short post on here about Ukyo and Stan needing to be friends because of being Marine/Navy vets of roughly the same age. They would have a lot to talk about.

But Stan and Xeno fascinate me in a special way because I was born a queer emo goth nerd too smart for hir classes in America the same year they were, and I'm going to be fully honest, my high school friends would dress exactly the same way those two losers do. Like oh, hi, I could have been friends with these two! Which means that I like their characters, but all the unexplained bits are really easy for me to fill in on a cultural level, because, well, I was there.

Frankly, learning that he was born in '93 made me realize "Oh, suddenly everything about him makes. Sense. He hit emo culture and MySpace full in the face."

Also they have probably seen Shrek. Which means nothing but is really weird to think about.

[grandpizzaponypie]

Reality’s of living in a superhero world is all I think about

I just know the nerds in superhero worlds go BRAZY

Trading cards of your favs, omg the prices of signed copies. People handing them decorated like photo cards. Photo cards of your fav 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️ omg image getting saved and asking for a photo so you could make oneeeeeeee

Justice leagues/ averages official merch drops would look like battle fields lawdy

Good imports around the galaxy/supernatural world being to set up port after realzing earth had made it past its arcane stage (aka realized life exist outside of their own)

I know Halloween is so teaaaaaaaasaaaaaaaa, image being a little kid and finally seeing a hero who looked like you and dressing up as them yessssssssss

Which superhero’s you think got a patent on there name, Tony fsssssssssssss. The fanatic four do too

Edits of hero’s in action 😃

Music festivals and Emma frost just chilling with her daughters and the pictures going rival cause we alr know Emma would be a celebrity ⁉️‼️‼️‼️‼️ I know the met gala hate to see the Wayne family cominggggggg

The idea of fan wars expect its genuine villain Stan’s vs superhero Stan’s *insert thread on Twitter of everything victor von doom has done wrong in response to onna his fans shitting on the fanatic 4

The beef between ppl with tec from Queen industry’s and Luthor Corp mirroring iPhone v Android.

Imagine a popular influencer on a brand trip sponsored by lex corp. omg all the think pieces that would come out of that

God tier rage baiting Loki on twitter >>> Rage baiting joker (he’s older so it’s lowkey easy and the danger level would not stop ppl)

At the same time getting rage baited by Loki on twitter I equally as funny

I just know the humanitys majors having a fucking field dayyyyyyyyyy, Thor walking in the flesh on your campus !!!!!!! A living breathing Amazonian teaching you Ancient Greek class

The jokes about working for hockheed and Martin no 🙅🏽‍♀️ jokes about working for Lordtech

Liek China town it’s like Magic town where a bunch of non human people live and all the architecture looks different and it’s bustling for all different culture and markets

Political implications of superhero’s omfg I could go ONNNNNNN FOREVERRRR *cough Wally west republican jokes already exist imagine seeing your fav at a political conference*

Hero/villain fan pages

Following hero’s on social media !!!!!! Johnny storm liking your art of him on your page !!!!! Being able to @ shehulk in your post and she reposts it on her story cause you we sweet and a wonderful conversation ‼️‼️‼️

Magneto/ Bruce Wayne speaking at Jewish events

Black lighting speaking event recognizing black ppls achievements

Forge at a land back event

Ms. Marvel speaking at Muslim events

(I hc cloak and dagger based on the show so I place them in New Orleans)

Cloak speaking at a black history event in New Orleans.

Shang chi speaking at Asian events

(Again I don’t agree much with the aquaman movies but I do like the Pacific Islander change they made so I hc that too)

Aquaman speaking at an event for Pacific Islander

PETA loosing its mind regularly about all the knew mythical creatures it has to keep up with

Seeing someone fitted down in public and learning theyre wearing Atlantian/Wakandan fabrics

Getting the letter in the mail saying you’ve been accepted to go to the Fantastic University founded and partial built by the fanatic four and ofc they will be guest professors on campus

The fda having to hire a whole new department of research for outer planetary/ mythical food

Currency discussions, the boom and resurgence of bartering

Slur discourse/ oppression Olympics being a whole different best

Like tornado chasers there villain fight chasers, researching and trynna plan were to be for the next blow out between a villain and hero.

Sasaeng but for hero’s

Monsterfckers highkey having to fight for legislation to legalize their marriages cause it’s now a very real situation.

All manner of random shit just kinda pops up in random places so now your random middle of nowhere Measum has a genuine demonic artifact/ old suit of a hero

A list celebrity now includes names like — Storm, Hulk, Green arrow, Black panther, wonder women , flash, Batman, Superman , Harley Quin, Black lighting, Captain America, Magneto, Xavier

B list celebrity’s be like — Constantine, Batwomen, Venom, Blue beetle, Bumblebee, Donna Troy. Daredevil, Black cat, Cloak and dagger

Nepo bby talk that ensues about side kicks and heroing

[soyouareandrewdobson]

The hypocrisy of the theoretical bear

Dobson was a bully.

I kinda wanted to make that statement only later in regard of another comic I am already writing about, but when you really boil it down, that is what Dobson genuinely was towards other nerds. Under all the pretense of just trying to talk about feminism and hoping that nerd culture can do better and become more progressive, he was just trying to shame people for enjoying different stuff than him, not sharing his opinions, or being overzealous in ways that were different to him.

Among other things, he would e.g. post this picture in regard of a certain fantheory when it reared its ugly head in season 3 of Miraculous Ladybug…

mocking a specific person for misinterpreting an animation smear for a genuine clue and instead of trying to politely explain it to them, instead shame then on twitter…

And eventually make THIS shitty SYAC strip, shaming the person even more, by making them specifically the butt of a non existing “joke”.

I kinda want to talk about these two instances now, why I think the comics are not funny as well hypocritical and rather dumb in hindsight. But first, the obligatory digression

I unfortunately agree with Dobson partly, that fan theorizing can at times go WAY too far. I myself have no issues with theorizing a little or playing with ideas of how a certain story could play out in the end. But I think there is a difference between looking at some little things, trends and recurring themes in a story and making a throwaway assumption like “oh yeah, that could happen down the line” and making a 40+ minute rant video on perhaps one little background thing blown out of proportion.

I also genuinely despise “review” channels such as The Roundtable or Film Theory for making clickbait videos based on dumb fan theories that they try to exploit for views, while actually not contributing anything of substance or of their own to the debate or elaborate on the craft of animation and storytelling. Being more of trend chasers than anything else.

That said, I think fans theorizing about stuff is an integral part of fan culture and can be fun. It can e.g. inspire people to create their own stories/fanwork based on such theories. Such as this actually pretty decent piece of Miraculous Ladybug fanart, that Thomas Astruc even liked and shared on twitter and blows everything Dobson did for the show out of the water.

Plus, even as Dobson kinda admits, some shows and stories are deliberately made to “reward” fans for their theories.

However, already in the way Dobson formulates that, he is making a mistake.

See, these shows aren’t “rewarding” people per se for their theories. They simply confirm that the fans may have successfully cracked completely (or at least partly) an aspect of the story’s integral mystery/plot, at times left intentionally by the show creators themselves.

Just to give an example: Hunter’s nature as a Grimwalker in the Owl House.

Hunter aka “The golden Guard” was first introduced in the last episode of the first season of the Owl House, face still completely covered. Then later episodes not only revealed his face, but also his name and that he was supposedly Belos nephew. Something that already raised a few eyebrows for people, cause Belos was not only confirmed in the show to be at least over 50 years old, but some couldn’t image that a character falling into the classical evil overlord archetype, could really have a “nephew” as young as Hunter. And then in the episode Eclipse Lake, which starts off in Belos secret lab with a shot of some items on the ground, people saw this:

A page of a book, indicating to be an instruction on how to create an artificial human, with mentioning of a creature introduced and seen earlier in the season (in the proper debut episode of the Golden Guard nonetheless) and with the human creatures eyes in the book implied to have the same color as Hunters.

As such, the theory of Hunter being an artificial human was born and later on, got properly confirmed through dialogue and other visual revelations in the story.

Sometimes, storytellers (particularly once who want to craft a decent mystery or overarching narrative) will just leave little clues in their creation, for people to theorize about and to assure they are getting further invested in the story. The reason for that ranging from the author trying to tell a decent mystery without having to pull the revelations completely out of their ass (unlike Dobson in the story with Sam and his dead sister!) or revealing too much all at once, to just having fun with fans and sometimes also simply because they want to add something to the story, even if by that point in time they may not have yet entirely in mind what that something is going to be.

Such as Rebecca Sugar actually throwing the term “Cluster” around in Steven Universe, before even having an idea what it was supposed to mean in context of the story.

So in that regard, fan theories are just attempts to explain stuff the show runners may already have in mind to be important anyway and therefore different from lets say someone obsessing over background colours being symbolic of gay relationships for example

But now back to the two comics. The first one, showing us a weird expy of Bill Cipher with a card exclaiming “Adrien is a Sentimonster”, may be kinda confusing, so here is a bit of context: Dobson tries to poke fun at the “Adrien is a Sentimonster” theory of the Ladybug fandom, by having the “subject” of another, extremely niche fan theory claim it is baseless and wild. That “subject” is Tad Strange. Now if you are only familiar with the show Gravity Falls, you would know that Tad Strange is that guy…

the most average, boring person in all of Gravity Falls, part of an almost Family Guy level cutaway gag in one episode of Gravity Falls. But supposedly (I at least never saw it), when the name was first mentioned somewhere by Hirsch long before the episode introducing Tad properly aired, people came up with the theory that “Tad Strange” may be a secondary villain akin to Bill Cipher, if not even a relative to him. And that is what Dobson tries to mock here. I say “try” cause honestly, who would even get the idea of what sort of joke Dobson tries to tell, if they aren’t familiar with the theory. A theory that was so niche, Dobson would have to explain the intention of the comic somewhere down the line even.

And to quote the Joker…

Furthermore, while the theory of “Adrien is a sentimonster” was kinda wild after only introducing the fact that even humanoid, sentient creatures could be created by the power of the Peacock Miraculous (in the episode simply called “Ladybug”) recently to that comic being made, it wasn’t really that wild when people thought about it.

After all, Ladybug at its core was still a magical girl show. And them doing twists like that (such as Chibiusa being Sailor Moon’s daughter from the future, Galaxia being the original first Sailor Senshi, Witches being corrupted Magical Girls etc) was not necessarily unheard off.

Though Dobson, when told it could still be a possibility, not only would act rather condescending, but furthermore went on to also piss against Ladybug’s leg, by stating “the show’s writing is not good enough to pull that off”. Which okay, he is right, the show is one of the dumbest written magical girl shows I have ever seen, the man behind it is essentially Dobson with a career.

But, two seasons and a few years later….

YOU ARE A SENTIMONSTER

YOU ARE SENTIMONSTERS

WE ALL ARE SENTIMONSTERS!!!!!

At least Adrien is not alone?

Yeah, Dobson can eat a dick in that regard. I mean, I think the reveal and how they played out the mystery wasn’t all that good (in my opinion, Astruc and his team winged it in) but not only was his dismissive behavior insulting to begin with, it also shows that he has very little understanding of how to utilize common tropes in fiction and cartoons in particular, despite consuming them en masse. Plus you know, kinda insulting to Thomas Astruc, who by that token proved to still be at least more succesful than Dobby-dumb-dumb bear

Also, as much as I like Gravity Falls, neither it or Steven Universe had in my opinion quite from the get go an idea where to head with their mysteries. Alex Hirsch having confirmed, that Bill Cipher becoming a character and not just a symbol, was something he came up with only halfway working through the concept phase of season 1. And the Rose is Pink reveal? My memories regarding that show are a bit rusty, but when was that actually hinted on in the show? There were massive hints that Pink Diamond didn’t get killed by the rebellion or that things were more complicated. Not that Pink pulled essentially a Darth Sidious on everyone just to live on earth and have sex with humans. Especially in season 1 to 3.

But really, the picture is just something that to me has just aged poorly.

The comic on the other hand I genuinely want to smack Dobson over the head for.

Again, I myself think that yes, people can go too far at times with looking for clues or making up their theories. But personally, I think there is a difference between making a general statement about it and giving a specific example, like Dobson does here. Sure, he may not show the username of the person who made the video or the comment, but it is still pretty condescending and a dick move, made by a guy who may be 10+ years older than whoever made the video referenced here.

Dobson essentially punches down, instead of punching up. A at the time at least 35/36 year old man acting like a mean school girl online to mock some random person, who just made a dumb theory and then moved on with its life.

Though it isn’t just that one user specifically he is essentially punching down. Here is the text by the author coming with the comic

“You guys should all take a chill pill for getting angry and upset at the creator”

No. No they kinda don’t. I mean, yeah some people can take it way too far with how invested they are in the stuff, but people have every right to also call certain plot twists hack writing, if it is so. Like how the reveal of Rose having been Pink had essentially ruined Rose Quartz and as such also put in question any of the “morals” she supposedly lived by. And considering she was something of the “moral center” for the show and many characters as well as fans, that just immediately made fans feel betrayed about having believed in her in the first place. Don’t get me even started how it essentially confirmed that Pearl is the worst gem of them all, for having always been in love with a version of Space Hitler. Furthermore, Dobson is not really someone to talk about that sort of shit like he has a higher ground, considering how he at times demands of other creators to fall in line with his ideas

If anything, it just feels similar to other comcis he made in his last years about cartoons: Him trying to defend the shitty writing and work put into stuff he likes, because a) how dare people insult something he likes and b) he thinks he and Rebecca Sugar, Thomas Astruc and Alex Hirsch are kinda brothers in arms. Meaning if you insult them, you insult him and the great art he has created and is an expression of his “talents”.

But most importantly about the comic, it is just not funny.

It is simply Dobson “lecturing” in the green void and with emerging shit in the background for which he could be copyright striked into oblivion, how he thinks “x is bad”. And you know, personally I prefer being entertained over being lectured. Or try to do both, which you know, certain people can, cause they have one thing Dobson does not: Talent.

The sad thing about it being, Dobson could have actually managed to make the subject of “overanalyzing via fan theory” funny quite easily. All he had to do was just tell a small “story” about “fan theories” as a plot element, rather than a subject for a lecture.

Here is my idea for a small comic, and if you have input to give or want to adapt it, I would be glad:

Dobson watches some show only to pause when he sees something in the background.

Next thing we know, we have Pam visit Dobson one week later to see if he is doing okay, only to find him unhinged and covering over a bill board with strings regarding his fan theory why these characters are a couple. Insert him either going completely or partly into a “Pepe Silvia” like rant

And yeha, I know the “Charlie’s string board” thing is an overused meme by now in itself, but hot dang is it still funny…

Only for Pam to say “Andy, the next episode dropped yesterday and they are not a couple” Ending the comic with her showing him the episode and Dobson be like “oh… well, at least the resolution was decent”

A comic of that kind would also have the advantage of Dobson actually doing one thing, he certainly haven’t done in years by that point: Make fun of himself too.

See, that is likely another problem with Dobson: He was so preoccupied in using SYAC as a soap box for his opinion, he was completely blind to the fact that he could avoid being conceived as one of the internets biggest douchebags, if he poked genuine fun at himself via his work once in a while. Make the Dobbear the one living by example about what Dobson talks, instead of just ranting about it, you know?

But hey, I am not Dobson.

A guy who tells people to not overanalyze everything via fantheories…

But has absolutely no problem to fawn over some dumb Zelda theory -as long as it is by him- or whine about people not liking HIS theories on Steven Universe, without actually bothering to even explain what his theory is about.

Then again, I take Dobson making dumb theories about shitty cartoons and calart lesbians over him genuinely falling for real world related conspiracy theories, like how 9/11 was staged.

Yeah, that was a thing.

[skyguy675]

Entry 5: 23/10/24 - Why Bela Lugosi is the Scariest Vampire of Film

No this isn’t meant to come across as pretentious. I know the film is old as balls and as such is about as thrilling as a sock puppet opera operated by your nan (which doubles playfully as a description of the effects on display, especially if you’re watching the American one and not the Spanish).

I’m not trying to be snooty about the Draculas that followed, look down at them and proclaim myself as the most cultured dude at the Monster Mash, but Dracula 1931 I think possesses a quality that all following iterations quite lack. 

And this lacking isn’t necessarily a bad thing, they’re just different, and different is good, particularly when it comes to a character as prevalent as our Vlad. It’s why Doctor Who has survived so long. Characters like Dracula, or James Bond or the Joker that seem to transcend the original actors that portrayed them need variety or they’ll straight up wither and  die with the rest of their zeitgeist. Just look at the ragged remains of Indianna Jones: every time they stick Harrison Ford’s haggard jowls onto the poster of another modern foray into that franchise a bit of me just wants to get on my knees and beg for them to put him out of his misery (Indianna Jones, not Harrison, although there is an argument for that if his appearances on recent talk shows are anything to go by).

Moving on…

I goddamn love vampires. Always have. Every aspect, every version - even the stupid shit. From the horror shlock of the Hammer Sequels to the bedazzled luminescence of the tween vampire romance craze. 

It’s funny this, because in terms of media presence I’ve begun to consider them, if not the opposite, then as some sort of bizarro reflection of elves (I mean I defy you to watch Blade or Underworld and tell me those aren’t just alt elves). And whilst my opinion of elves has already been well logged, I find myself regarding vampires with more favour, perhaps because they make no bones about how much they’d be dicks to humanity if they actually existed. Elves would be superior around you, but pretend not to know the reason why; vamps would straight up call you an inferior worm and have you on your knees, and I find something about that oddly… appealing… 

Ahem. Moving on.

And of course, if you like vampires it stands to reason that you’d bloody love Dracula, and if that’s the case, you're spoiled for choice when it comes to varieties. I should know, me and my brother for the past couple of months having been going through as many Universal Monster movies as we could get our mitts on, and naturally that results in quite a helluva lot of Draculas, but the one that has consistently stayed with me throughout is, arguably, the first (sorry Nosferatu, you’re cool but you go out a bit like a nerd).

And the specific thing that stays with me about Dracula 1931’s performance is his inhumanity, or rather the inhumanity subtly hiding behind his delivered humanity. This may seem like an odd thing to comment upon as, given the constraints of film making at the time, he, arguably, is the Dracula version that spends most time as a human, and it seems like all future iterations want to do is emphasise how much a monstrous beast he truly is/has become (Dracula 1958, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Dracula Untold etc,) ergo 1931 has to be the most human seeming Dracula, surely? He’s just a guy, afterall.

I disagree. I think the opposite is true.

And this is a pretty typical result when a creative work is met with constraint - innovation. They couldn’t have him transform into an enormous man-bat thing and clatter a werewolf across a laboratory (Van Helsing), and they couldn’t have him fly about the place, hissing and tearing out throats (Hammer Dracula and Bram Stoker’s Dracula respectively), so what did they do? 

They made his human presence the scariest fucking thing in the world.

And no it’s not the scariest thing in terms of like shock horror, but cerebrally, it chills me to the bone. The Dracula in Dracula 1931 is an inhuman monster, put on this earth to do little more than feed on the blood of humans. He has no ulterior motive, no reincarnated love, no tragic backstory, just all the powers of the night, a preference for O negative and a one track mindset - feed.

I’m reminded of two things when I see him: Rob Zombie’s Halloween and John Carpenter’s The Thing (crazy, I know). The former comes from the little speech Dr Loomis gives when talking about Micheal Miers (the er, killer, not Shrek, unless some serious revelations come to light about the Shrek one, in which case, both) in where he says: “These eyes do not see what you and I can see. Behind these eyes, one finds only blackness, the absence of light. These are the eyes of a psychopath.”

That is the most fitting description I can come up with when it comes to Bela Lugosi’s performance. There is nothing behind those eyes. They’re not even bestial, they’re just empty. All that dialogue, all those interactions, all those little touches - fake. 

And this comes in quite beautifully with my comparison with the Thing, because the Thing is a creature of near perfect mimicry, down to the cell, down to the personality, and I just find the concept of a creature as soulless and hollow as either the Thing or Dracula being able to so effectively mimic human behaviour without possessing even a glimmer of humanity themselves so god damn unnerving. 

It’s a lure, an angler fish’s lamp, aggressive mimicry directed specifically at humans. And it makes you wonder. If whatever Dracula presents himself as is fake, what is he really like? We’re given no other possibilities, so we’re left having to just assume there’s nothing. 

I just find something so inherently terrifying about this concept, the harsh simplicity to Dracula 1931's existence. All the other Draculas have some aspect of them that's recognisable as being human, be it wrath, pride, lust, happiness and so forth. A descent into beasthood still comes from a human place, and even when they morph into some ungodly puppet or cg beast, there's still something in that we, as humans - living, breathing, thinking, sentient creatures - can understand. Contemplating the higher brain functions of Dracula 1931 is like trying to contemplate the structure of the void.

To bring in a third movie comparison: insect politics. The associated vampiric creature with our Vlad shouldn’t ever have been a bat, or a wolf - it should have been a spider.

There is no love, no compassion, no mercy, no soul, no person. Behind those eyes, there are no thoughts, save for the instincts of an ambush predator.

That is all there is: the prey, the predator, the latter’s dark, endless hunger and whatever means through which it might be able to sate it. 

Ruairi

P.S: I know Bela Lugosi wasn’t the first on screen Dracula either, but like… he’s first anyone cares about so like shut up.

[cookiekitkat8484]

dipper hcs

This is super long, like 2000 words super long because i have a huge hyperfixation and cringe culture is dead. he reminds me of me and my friends/family so i have a million ideas. split into topics for reading convenience

low 20s, autistic, bi + demi with a preference for women, ftm. I totally understand people disliking ftm dipper because of stan and mabel making fun of his masculinity and it would be shitty in canon but this is my post so i make the rules bitch and am pretending that never happened. None of this is ship stuff. I imagine him to basically look like the lovley art in this post.  

shares an apartment with mabel in portland, completely full of nerd memorabilia, stacks of boardgames, mabels diys, a conspiracy corkboard, and arts & crafts materials 

works in a bar/arcade where wendy bartends, calls soos and fidds when he needs help fixing machines

pet ferret called pippin

started his own journal 

pacificas plus one to her prissy rich person events, sit in the corner and shit talk

carries around fidget toys, was too embarrassed till mabel convinced him (partially because his pens kept exploding everywhere)

has protective runes tattooed 

mabel talks about astrology to be annoying, is baited into getting mad and rambling about how modern astrology is fake and a scam every single time

nervous driver, doesnt have a car but is sometimes driven by mabel in her heavily adorned funmobile; worries about her "enthusiastic" driving

helps mabel dye her hair after a three am hair emergency, got really good and started bleaching pacificas till she decided to chop it and grow it out natural (refused money from her parents after moving out), which used to be the ultimate gossip sessions

joint problems and pain, god awful posture

one sided beef with all of mabels partners till they “prove themselves”

doesnt believe in cooking like he (mainly) used to not believe in laundry

punched someone for making fun of mabel, got beat up so mabel kicked their asses (thank you stan and wendy for her "training")

only social media is reddit, an instagram account made and run by pacifica, youtube, and a tumblr on nerd/mystery stuff 

only has tumblr bc candy convinced him in like 2014 then he succumbed to the brain rott, they're mutuals and make weird references no one else gets, personalises blog extensively via html/css, had a brief superwholock phase in 2015 (fight me)

coded mabels laptop into a custom 2000s esc blinged out hellscape she made in graphic design class, got her rgb stuff bc she likes rainbows and he thinks its funny

occasionally clashes with mabel bc shes sensory seeking and he gets sensory overload

pacifica takes him clothes shopping bc otherwise he will literally never buy new clothes, sometimes go thrifting with mabel the thrift god

mildly dyslexic and in denial

needs glasses but usually wears contacts because he finds them annoying then forgets to take them out

wears glasses when he misses the grunkles

Sugar addict like mabel and their pantry shows it 

Best nerd shirt collection, like, that's all he wears

Gets into online arguments way too much for no reason 

Mabel makes like ten different protective friendship bracelets with unicorn hair so he could have options, just wears all of them at once

uni

journalism major with a minor in computer science 

takes history, pure maths, and film units as electives 

member/helps run the clubs for DnD [DD&MD], MTG, Warhammer, and scifi & fantasy appreciation

founder and president of the uni cryptozoology, supernatural, aliens, and occult society (CSACS)

gets ford to proof read his writing/math and fidds his code

attends lectures for units hes not even enrolled in for fun

has gotten into multiple arguments with professors, including ones that dont even teach him 

has read theory (all people who’ve read theory are annoying including myself)

hobbies

goes to cons with mabel, she helps with (/mainly makes for him) matching cosplays to fill the trick or treating void

once met spock and kirks actors and got so excited he passed out so mabel took pics of him on the floor next to them and she thinks its the funniest thing to ever exist

DMs multiple online DnD [DD&MD] and ttrpgs groups, 3.5e truther

competes in MTG tournaments 

does karaoke night with mabel and the gals atleast once a month, sometimes brings pacifica 

goes to the renaissance fair with the squad where him, mabel, ford, and soos all dress up and get super into character with melony; wendy and stan take shrooms and go to watch the sword fighting 

listens to DnD podcasts 

ex band kid and still plays Sousaphone, often to mabels dismay 

obsessed with boardgames and hosts boardgame nights, always makes everyone play super overcomplicated ones then has to play monopoly when its stan and mabels choice

almost always wins boardgames and knows how every mechanic works, has only occasionally lost to ford (who is a sore loser lol)

has had risk games last multiple days after its only him and ford left

bonds with mabel and soos painting figures (warhammer, dnd, the usual) and embraces her covering hers in glitter and gems

goes ghost hunting, has a shit tone of real gear from ford and fidds and sometimes vlogs, quotes buzzfeed unsolved

secret AO3 account, caught grunkle stan writing dutches approves fics but both have sworn an oath of secrecy 

wendy taught him skateboarding, doesnt do tricks (uncoordinated as shit) but uses it as transport

broke bc he cant resist collectables 

made his own pc from scratch using parts he bought and custom ones made by fidds

goes to local band concerts with wendy and her gang including watching wendy play drums

Did debate in highschool, usually gets nervous doing public speaking but gets so invested he forgets; is second speaker

tech guy for productions mabel is in

games 

loves all strategy and puzzle games

fav games include fallout 1&2, nethack, xcom, civ, FTL, and dwarf fortress

ford and fidds play games they used to play before the portal accident with him eg. zork, MUD1, rouge, star trek, colossal cave adventure, and mystery house

plays portal 2 with ford and sometimes mabel

plays baldurs gate with mabel and she spent five hours doing character customisation, he plays wizard and she plays bard and both are total stereotypes

played lethal company and phasmophobia with mabel, soos, wendy, grenda, and candy (goes as expected) (lots of screaming)

BDG unravelled fan and grew up on matpat but cant play fnaf or ddlc bc giffany 

had a breakdown playing dark souls and started crying at 2am so mabel banned it permanently

spectacularly bad at rhythm games but will play with mabel anyway and she completely sweeps, esp in arcades and just dance

plays bishi bashi with the gang and have broken the machine multiple times

really good at retro arcade games, shares strats with soos and remembers all the combos for everything; helps kids beat levels at work

gets ford to help optimise game stats/teams/strats with the POWER OF MATHS !!!, has on occasion coded algorithms to assist 

forced everyone to play among us constantly for like three months straight

member of mabel, candy, and grendas chaotic nightmare of a minecraft server, usually offline and generally regrets it when he joins; more of a terraria guy

undertale kid

ports/emulates games himself, esp retro console stuff like old fire emblem, Zelda, earthbound

in the ace attorney fandom  

runs a server for online friends he plays games with

shows/movies

does annual lotr (extended edition) marathons with ford, mabel drifts in and out of watching because snacks and that legolas and arwin are both a “total smash” (elf apreciator)

loves all scifi, including classics like star trek, star wars, ext.

watches doctor who with mabel (shes a david tennant enjoyer) including the super old stuff, replies with one of the classic who doctors when people ask his fav and confuse them 

goes to old scifi/horror/fantasy rerun marathons, wendy joins depending on the films

watches scifi and mecha anime with soos and fidds, sometimes ford joins

loves evangelion, knows cruel angels thesis in japanese, lowkey a shinji kinnie and is bullied ruthlessly 

watches candys exquisite curation of 90s shoujo with her, mabel, and grenda; wont admit he gets super into it but has been caught doing sailor moon magical girl transformation poses 

watched madoka magica with the gals and was kuybey hater #1 from the start

never shuts the fuck up about theories and guesses the end of movies unless mabel smothers him with a pillow

hate watches conspiracy theory/ghost hunting shows with wendy bc theyre either laughably wrong or so close and totally missing the obvious, except this one random guy who was somehow spot on (like doug forcett in the good place) 

Made to watch all of twilight at a girls night because mabel (mostly) watched lotr, cant stop overthinking the insane lore implications which somehow get worse with every book fact mabel tells him (because what the fuck ???? the world building is batshit), him and candy keep periodically saying effervescent and bursting into hysterics to the others confusion

still quotes star wars bad lip readings with mabel

books

favs include hitchikers guide to the galaxy, discworld, lotr, do androids dream of electric sheep, earthsea, dune, and HP lovecraft esp cuthullu 

him and ford have both read the salmirilion and make it everyones problem

likes classic scifi and early cyberpunk, esp spec fic thats wacky or raises ethical questions to ponder with ford

loves sherlock homes and agatha christie, big who dunnit story fan

read good omens bc mabel likes the show (again, david tennant enjoyer) and its terry pratchet + neil gaiman, tries to get her to read the book for ages and eventually she listens to the audiobook

music

likes lemon demon, TWERP, starbomb, NSP, tally hall, will wood, and other nerd bands 

they might be giants and potusa enjoyer

owns spirit phone on vinyl, made ford listen once and accidentally gave him flashbacks

can and will recite the entirety of the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny at the drop of a hat

went through a midwest emo phase, still listens to csh

listens to vocaloid with candy; went to a concert with the gals and everyone learnt the dances, mabel decorated their light sticks 

always ends up belting [B]ABBA when drunk

Fav [B]ABBA songs are disco girl and under attack 

weezer defender, bullied by mabel and wendy

listens to math rock with ford while stan complains the time signatures and polyrhythms (though he’d never bother to learn the terms) give him a headache 

listens to game OSTs and chiptune stuff

mabel got him into musicals, knows the words to hamilton, bmc, and dear evan hansen, sing duets together

trans 

once forgot to take off a too small binder for like two days and fainted, mabel made him a custom one

short king, used to have hight dysphoria

mabel alters his pants bc mens trousers are evil for the transmasc gang

didnt shave ever when he first got his wiskers till pacifica staged an intervention 

forgot to tell stan he was trans till he got body hair and stan joked it was his genetics to thank, dipper responded he was lucky the T was actually effective

drinking/drugs

cant smoke weed or he gets suuuuper paranoid, only smoked once w wendy and tried to smoke more to calm down but just ended up greening hard

drinks alcoholic ginger beer and indie APIs wendy recommends, though shes more of a whisky and scotch

super low alcohol tolerance, doesnt drink often

drinks mabels own recipe cocktail monstrosities when she convinces him they wont get shitfaced, always ends up shitfaced because theyre 100% alcohol + sugar and mabels tolerance is like double his; always eventually ends with him trying to explain lotr poorly

once drank so much caffeine he started hallucinating 

tripsits mabel (LSD legend) and sometimes wendy (totally does shrooms), again is neurotic and should under no circumstances take hallucinogens 

sometimes smokes cigs when stressed, tries to hide it but is laughably bad, will ocasionally bum a cig off wendy

[kwiyoshi]

彡✎ Unpacking Politics, One Meme at a Time

(Do memes (as it is popular in Malaysian politics) provide a useful way of understanding politics?)

Politics: the only arena where you'll find more plot twists, backstabbing, and unexpected surprises than a season finale of your favorite TV show.

We get it – politics can sometimes feel like a maze of jargon and complex issues. However, with the rise of meme culture and its integration into politics, could memes be used to further understand politics and its complexity? (probably).

Behind the Laughs

Before answering the main question, let me hit y'all with some nerd facts about how memes came about. A meme is a cultural informational unit that spreads by imitation. The term, which comes from the Greek word mimema (meaning "imitated"), was coined by a British biologist named Richard Dawkins in 1976 from his work titled "The Selfish Gene" (Rogers 2023). Memes come in a variety of format that ranges from videos to still images.

From LOL to Legislation

In today's day and age of the Internet, memes can be found on all sorts of social media platforms that we use on a daily basis. Whether it be viral videos or yet another funny cat or dog picture like the doge meme. Nowadays, there seems to be an ongoing trend of memes being used in politics. I'm not particularly sure how it is being used, but most of the memes I see about politics are just to poke fun at a specific person or political party.

Now for the million-dollar (or in this case ringgit) question, how did memes suddenly become a thing in the political world? The earliest instance of memes and politics I could find is from the year 2000 during a presidential debate in the United States about then-candidate George W. Bush where he mispronounced the word "internet" as "internets." Four years later, he made the same mistake during a debate with John Kerry when he said, "I hear here’s rumors on the, uh, internets that we’re going to have a draft". After the whole conundrum, the response from netizens was eventful. Thus, making Bush one of the first few political internet memes (Klein 2019).

It seems that after George W. Bush became a trending meme in politics in the United States, I guess you could say he sort of paved the way for birthing memes in politics as we know it today. As far as I know, there are a lot of memes about our politics here in Malaysia that I've come across and it gets pretty entertaining considering how our politics here are.

Meme-laysia

As someone that currently lives in Malaysia, I would say that there are a handful of memes that circulates throughout social media when it is nearing elections or when someone that is part of a political party (or one of our ministers) screws up yet again. The political scene here is quite eventful, to say the least, but that does not mean we cannot laugh about it.

One of the most popular political memes in Malaysia is during 2021 when our then Prime Minister of Malaysia, Muhyiddin Yassin suddenly resigned from his position after only being the Prime Minister for one-and-a-half years. As good of a plot twist as this is, Malaysians took to social media to express their confusion and reaction to this news (Lee 2021).

Here is one of the example:

Upon resigning as Prime Minister, Muhyiddin Yassin will assume the role of interim Prime Minister until a new leader, who commands the majority, is identified (Lee 2021).

Humor and Power

Phew. We're finally getting to the most anticipated part. Do memes provide a useful way of understanding politics? My answer to that is, definitely. Based on research conducted by Kasirye (2019), it is found that political memes do have an effect on providing information about politics.

The study also reveals that political parties employ memes to promote, oppose, and criticize various political issues among the populace. Since the majority of messages are created by political parties and actors to further their objectives, memes are spread through social media to reach the targeted political groups.

Due to memes having a visual nature and their ability to grab people's attention, memes are a good foundation to start understanding politics. Thus, memes are a great method for political engagement that appeals to people's cognitive and extrasensory faculties in order to interact with them and shape their opinions. Humor and sarcasm, on the other hand, are used as persuasive strategies in this awareness-raising technique (Kasirye 2019, p. 51).

Final Thoughts and Prayers

Overall, I do think that memes play a part in politics in terms of understanding what is going on or providing useful information. Memes are funny and people like memes due to the fact that they can be on different social media platforms, whether it be in video or picture format.

References

Kasirye, F 2019, 'THE EFFECTIVENESS OF POLITICAL MEMES AS A FORM OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION AMONGST MILLENNIALS IN UGANDA', Journal of Education and Social Sciences, vol. 13, issue 1, pp. 50 - 51, viewed 8 October 2023, <https://www.jesoc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/KC13_032.pdf>.

Klein, O 2019, The evolution of political internet memes, Kennedy School Review, viewed 8 October 2023, <https://ksr.hkspublications.org/2019/03/11/the-evolution-of-political-internet-memes/>.

Lee, J 2021, Confused Malaysians make sense of country's political crisis through memes, Mashable, viewed 8 October 2023, <https://sea.mashable.com/culture/17175/confused-malaysians-make-sense-of-countrys-political-crisis-through-memes>.

Rogers, K n.d., meme, Britannica, viewed 7 October 2023, <https://www.britannica.com/topic/meme>.

[beyondthisdarkhouse]

God, this part...

But I feel like an asteroid. I feel like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. I was very, very guilty for years. I had to go to extensive therapy because I was like, “oh my god, I, Lochlan O'Neil, single-handedly destroyed fandom culture?”

She didn't she didn't she didn't. That wasn't it. She wasn't an asteroid.

She was the first skater that fell through the ice of Web 2.0.

I was also a teenager who found an amazing world, and My People, and friends I'd still talk to every day, on the internet. I spent years getting my mother to let me go to conventions and meet friends in distant cities. I started ambitious internet communities I didn't have the experience or skills to bring to fruition. I don't think there was a lot of difference between us, in a lot of ways. It's not that I was somehow smart or skilled or suave and she wasn't. She didn't have some awful planet-killing stink or velocity that she brought to the show.

The difference was this:

In 1994, when the Endless September began and the Internet felt perpetually full of stupid newbies, there were 20 million people online.

In 2001, when I got my first LiveJournal account, there were 500 million.

In 2012, when she joined Tumblr, there were 2.43 billion.

When I started out, and you joined a new messageboard or chatroom or mailing list, you had to introduce yourself to the community. Except in the biggest of websites, people expected to log onto the internet, read through all the new things that had been posted to their local bit of it, and then log off again. Older members took it upon themselves to greet the newbies and answer any questions they might have, directing them to the relevant community FAQs. People would say things like, "Oh yes, I remember you. This is only your second Thursday with us, right? I hope you have fun!"

I joined an Internet full of adults who got online through their jobs or their universities, one of the first wave of kids allowed to roam free. And the proportion of adults to kids kept steadily changing, but until DashCon, I don't think people understood how much. I remember a discussion that happened in early 2000s slash fandom, where the very true observation was made that in particular artistic ways, we had all agreed to suspend shame, which created a unique kind of space. As a community we could all admit that we were there to be embarrassingly enthusiastic in unusual ways about absolute nerd shit, and we understood that it wasn't life or death, it wasn't rocket surgery, but it also wasn't going to get broadcast onto the clouds and our bosses didn't know who we were. Everyone was (willing to act like) an adult, and we could hold the circle and create safety there.

That felt like a lot of geek spaces, then. Anime conventions, science fiction conventions, furry conventions, videogame stores, D&D meetups. Images were bulky and pixelated, video incredibly hard to move. When you got to a con, it was like a brief oasis of Weird that sheltered you and screened you from view, and you ended up volunteering because the weary, cynical, intelligent, kind people in the con ops office looked like you were throwing yourself in front of a bullet just for offering to run a clipboard down to the other end of the hotel for them.

The ice was thick enough to skate on. The circle was strong enough to let you be brave and funny and silly and free, and you could buckle down with some friends and clean all the trash out of the ballroom by 11am on Sunday, and you'd see everyone next year.

The bubble was going to burst, but nobody seemed to worry about it.

Things were changing fast for fans, all kinds of fans, in the early 2010s. Conventions that used to get news coverage like "Local Freaks Weird Out Hotel Employees: This Weekend Only" to "#Cosplay: The Hottest New Trend" and from Geocities sites that shut down if you exceeded your page visits for the month to AO3 getting 10 million pageviews a week.

It was great. We could conquer the world together. We could stay safe and together and the circle would hold.

And then the ice broke open and Lochlan fell through. Right through the bottom of that goddamn ballpit into freezing arctic sea. Right into years of people sorting through the churned ice of the wreck, taking years to come to the realization that there really had not been ANY goddamn adults in the room making sure things were okay. The community had not actually failed so much as never been formed in the first place.

Because as it turns out, group-bonding techniques that work for 100 or 1000 people do not work for 10,000. Or 100,000. Or one million. Or one billion.

That line about agreement to suspend shame sticks with me all these years after because the defining feature of post-Dashcon Tumblr has been shame. And scorn, contempt, derision, and hatred. Cringe, in short, and kys. Exactly the kind of bullshit I saw every day in junior high school, and ran to the Internet and fan conventions to get away from.

I got the kind of community and mentorship and support that have made fandom a refuge and a resource my whole life. Lochlan O'Neill didn't. Not because there was anything worse or dumber or less experienced about her.

Because a system built in the 1990s was incapable of bearing the stress of a load fifty times bigger than what was already "way too full."

Just because I'm from one generation, and she's from another.

It was not her fault.

[freakiwildi]

WEEK 9: Game Live Streamers Expanding Themselves. They Play with Skills? No, They Play with Their Personality.

From Niche Nerds to Global Icons

Once upon a time, in the pixelated dawn of the digital world, "live streaming" was just a humble act—gamers broadcasting their gameplay in real-time to small, tightly-knit communities who shared the same passion (Pellicone, 2017). It was raw. It was niche. It was a subculture that belonged to the few who resonated with it.

But time has a funny way of flipping the script. What was once a quiet gathering of enthusiasts turned into a phenomenon. Enter PewDiePie, the OG of game streaming—a man who did not just play games but rewrote the blueprint of online influence (Burgess & Green, 2018). Felix Kjellberg was not the best at gaming, but did that ever matter? No. What made him a titan was his personality—his chaotic humor, his iconic reactions, his ability to create a space where millions felt connected (Zhao et al., 2019). He was the first individual YouTube creator to shatter the 100 million subscriber ceiling, not because of god-tier gameplay, but because he turned his presence into the main event.

Streaming Is Not Just Gaming Anymore—It’s a Show

Fast forward to now, game streaming is not about games anymore—it’s about entertainment. The evolution of the digital era has rebranded game streamers into full-fledged entertainers, influencers, and celebrities (Partin 2020). Their communities are no longer just gamers. They are fans. They’re spectators. They’re thirsty, entertained, and loyal.

Social media has supercharged this shift. The rise of TikTok, short-form edits, and viral trends changed everything which satisfies the users desire, imagination, and interest (Yang 2020). No one needs to sit through a 3-hour stream to get hooked on a creator anymore. A single cut video, a well-timed edit, a perfectly chosen sound bite—that is all it takes. These clips can be hilarious, absurd, or straight-up thirst traps. And the industry knows this.

Take Kai Cenat and Hasan Piker, two Twitch giants who have mastered the game—not the game they play, but the game of attention.

Kai Cenat does not just stream—he creates internet moments. His audience is not just gamers; it is everyone. His humor, his wild energy, and his high-profile collabs with Drake, Kevin Hart, and Nicki Minaj have launched him beyond Twitch. The viral and meme-worthy clips, Kai has turned streaming into a form of digital entertainment that appeals to a far broader audience.

Then there’s Hasan Piker, whose growth as a game streamer has been strategic and multifaceted. His content isn’t limited to gaming; it’s political commentary, pop culture analysis, and—whether intentionally or not—a masterclass in social media appeal. His thirst-trap edits? A naturally calculated move to attract a different kind of audience, especially the gays and straight women. He’s expanded from Twitch to TikTok and other platforms with diverse types of content - A way to ensure he stays relevant across multiple online spaces.

The Reality: Game Streaming Is a Hustle

The days when streamers could just "be good at games" are over. Personality sells. Looks sell. Clips sell. Game streamers have transformed into digital performers, working tirelessly to maintain their empire. Some are funny, some are hot, some are chaotic—but all of them are hustling.

At the end of the day, the reality is this: not all streamers are great gamers, but all successful streamers are great entertainers. That’s the game now.

References:

Burgess, J & Green, J 2018, ‘YouTube’, Google Books, viewed 24 March 2025, <https://books.google.com.vn/books?hl=en&lr=&id=mg1rDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT5&dq=Pewdiepie+who+is+a+pioneer+of+streamer+with+his+impressive+legacy+left+on+the+media+subculture+shaping+the+part+of+online+word+&ots=RDrISEg7rO&sig=16_P5j_WX8Lz0aryOC3lvv_Vcdg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false>.

Partin, WC 2020, ‘Bit by (Twitch) Bit: “Platform Capture” and the Evolution of Digital Platforms’, Social Media + Society, vol. 6, no. 3, p. 205630512093398.

Pellicone, AJ 2017, ‘Performing Play: Cultural Production on Twitch.tv - ProQuest’, Proquest.com, viewed 24 March 2025, <https://www.proquest.com/openview/73d60cac7a5d36ae00dd12c8de772eb5/1?cbl=18750&pq-origsite=gscholar>.

Yang, Y 2020, Understanding Young Adults’ TikTok Usage -----Real People, Creative Videos that Makes Your Day, viewed <https://communication.ucsd.edu/_files/undergrad/yang-yuxin-understanding-young-adults-tiktok-usage.pdf>.

Zhao, K, Hu, Y, Hong, Y & Westland, JC 2019, ‘Understanding Characteristics of Popular Streamers on Live Streaming Platforms: Evidence from Twitch.tv’, papers.ssrn.com, Rochester, NY, viewed <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3388949>.