#this is going under the main tag because racism and similar things are an issue in this fandom and I'm sick of it.

[askthekoopsandjr]

Serious Post.

I don't understand what is wrong with some of you out there to casually interact with/follow a blog and be a disgusting bigot. Racism, queerphobia, ableism, xenophobia, etc. is not okay and never was. I am absolutely appalled and disgusted at the nasty comments and asks that I have received ever since opening this blog by fatuous jerkwads with a few pebbles rattling around in their skulls, and have lost my patience. If you are against a marginalized group of people in any way, shape or form, you are the scum of the Earth and deserve to be ridiculed and shamed. If I ever receive another comment or ask like the one I just saw in my notifications, I will not be nice about it. I don't care if this is "just an ask blog" or "this is the internet", I will not tolerate prejudice and you will find that out the hard way if need be.

My Koopalings are black and queer and have disabilities. Deal with it. Shut up and go punch a brick wall if that upsets you.

[hws-prussia]

On the Iron Cross

I’ve noticed there’s been a decent amount of discourse in the Hetalia fandom about the German Iron Cross and it’s usages/contemporary associations as a (neo-)Nazi dog-whistle. I do not speak on behalf of all Jews, nor on the behalf of all Germans, but I would like to take the opportunity to voice my opinion on the issue, from the perspective of a German Jew. I’m also not trying to speak on behalf of all German Jews either. I don’t speak on behalf of all Jews, I’m not trying to speak on behalf of all Jews, and this is just my opinion on the matter. Feel free to disagree, because it’s also completely understandable to bar the usage of Iron Crosses period, to a certain extent. 

This is a very, very long post, so more under the cut. 

Also: Trigger warning, for the discussion of Nazism and some depictions of common Nazi symbolism. If such images will upset you or cause you any stress, please take precautions accordingly. 

THE HISTORY OF THE IRON CROSS

The Iron Cross (in German, we call it the Schwarzes Kreuz, among other things) is the emblem used by the Prussian Army and the German Armed Forces from 1871 to the present day. Designed during the German campaign of 1813, and commissioned by Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia on his late wife’s birthday (to honour her for her bravery in standing up to Napoleon) as the first military decoration open to all personnel of any rank, including enlisted man, it quickly became a popular symbol for Prussians (and later Germans) as a whole, regardless of rank and and social class. It was put alongside the Black Eagle on the Prussian war flag. Derived from the Black Cross of the Teutonic Order, it’s been important to Prussian symbolism for centuries, and continued to be significant for centuries afterward. 

(Iron Cross 1st Class of the Original Napoleonic Wars)

After the fall of Napoleon, the Iron Cross became a symbol of both peace and victory. It was inserted into the Peace’s laurel wreath, making her the Goddess of Victory in the early 19th century. In 1821 it was a major design element of the National Monument for the Liberation Wars on Kreuzberg, which still stands a hundred years later. 

The Black Cross was used in the naval and combat flags of the German Empire, until 1915, when the simpler Balkenkreuz replaced it. The Reichswehr of the Weimar Republic, the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany and the Bundeswehr also inherited the use of the emblem in various forms. It’s still used, post-unification, to designate German military vehicles and aircraft, though a new blue and silver version of the cross is used for other official contexts. 

The first person to receive the Iron Cross was Karl August Ferdinand von Borcke on 21 April 1813. He was an officer of lower rank, with very few distinguishments before then. This marked a new era in German military history, and by 1817, a told of 670 chevaliers had received the Iron Cross 1st Class. 

(Different varieties of the Iron Cross throughout history.)

King Wilhelm I of Prussia authorized further awards on 19 July 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War. Recipients of the 1870 Iron Cross were still in service in 1895 were authorized to purchase and wear above the cross a Jubilaeumsspange, celebrating twenty-five years since German Unification. 

In WWI, Emperor Wilhelm II reauthorized the production of the Iron Cross on 5 August 1914. It was seen as a generic German decoration, and all classes of the Cross appeared the same, and were worn differently to distinguish them from each other. The Iron Cross 1st Class was pinned onto the left side of the owner’s uniform. The 2nd Class, and the larger Grand Cross, would be displayed using different ribbons; the Grand Cross around the neck, and the 2nd Class on the chest, through the a button hole on the tunic. 

(The Grand Cross of WWI. This is also the version of the Iron Cross that Gilbert and Ludwig are commonly depicted in.)

The Grand Cross was only awarded to the most senior officers of the German military. The Star of the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross, was awarded only twice, to Generalfeldmarschall Gebhard Leberecht von Bluecher in 1813, and then Generalfeldmarschall Paul von Hindenburg in 1918. A third was planned for the most successful officer during WWII, but was scrapped after Germany’s defeat. 

In WWII, Adolf Hitler would again reauthorize the production of the Iron Cross (though he would call it “restoring the German tradition” of the Cross) through the Enactment for the re-introduction of the Iron Cross of 1 September 1939. The WWII variety was divided into three main series of decorations, the Iron Cross being the lowest and the Knight’s Cross (an usurpation of the traditionally Prussian Pour le Merite, created by Frederick the Great). 

(The Nazi version of the Iron Cross.)

ALLIED PROPAGANDA VERSIONS

In 1914, the Allies sold very crude anti-German versions of the Iron Cross in order to raise money for the War effort and provide relief for Belgian refugees. One was inscribed FOR KULTUR in raised letters, another with FOR BRUTALITY. Another listed the names of French and Belgian towns attacked or destroyed during the retreat from Mons on the ends of the upper arms of the Cross. 

POST-WWII 

As modern German law prohibits the production of items containing Nazi insignia, the West German government authorized replacement Iron Crosses in 1957, with an Oak Leaf Cluster in place of the swastika, similar to the Iron Crosses of 1813, 1870, and 1914. This Cross would be gifted to WWII recipients of the Iron Cross as a replacement for their old ones. 

(The Balkenkreuz, used by the modern German Armed Forces.)

A modern campaign for the German Armed Forces to reinstate the Iron Cross would begin after Germany began taking part in active wars, first in Kosovo, and then in Afghanistan. In 2007, a petition to the German parliament to revive the Iron Cross decoration was initiated, a received over 5,000 signatures. 0n 13 December, the Ministry of Defence was allowed to decide on the matter by Parliament. On 6 March 2008, President Horst Koehler approved a proposal by Minister of Defense Franz Josef Jung to institute a new award for bravery. Thus the Ehrenzeichen der Bundeswehr series was instituted on 10 October 2008. However, it has very little in common with the traditional Iron Cross, and more closely resembles the Prussian Military Merit Cross.

(The de-Nazified version of the Iron Cross of WWII, which is the one I’d actually recommend you use. Don’t worry; it’s German government approved.)

In the United States, the Iron Cross was also adopted by outlaw bikers more o signify rebellion and to shock than to signify any nationalist ideology. For reference, the way the swastika had been used during the punk scene in the ‘70s-’80s. Anyways, by the early 2000s, the Iron Cross had spread from bikers, to skateboarders and many extreme sports enthusiasts. It quickly was adopted into the logo of several different clothing companies. 

THE IRON CROSS AS A HATE SYMBOL

According to the German Criminal Code Section 86a, any “use of symbols of unconstitutional organisations” outside the contexts of “art or science, research or teaching” is strictly prohibited. Though it specifies no specific criminal organization, it’s commonly used to outlaw symbols associated with the Nazi Party, the Communist Party and Islamic extremism. There is no specific symbols associated with these laws, and because of this, outlawed groups will often use modified versions of these symbols, or other, more historical symbols. Because the Hakenkreuz swastika is illegal, this has lead many far-right groups in Germany to co-opt the Iron Cross as a part of their symbology. 

(Another photo of the WWII version of the Iron Cross.)

According to German law, the symbols will be taken up in a case by case basis. A far-right protest using the Iron Cross on a poster displaying voelkish ideology will be taken to court. Someone who collects war memorabilia that happens to display swastikas will not be taken to court. 

The Anti-Defamation League in the United States classifies the Iron Cross as a potential nationalist dog-whistle. And while I don’t mean to discredit the ADL at all, because they do a lot of good work in combating anti-semitism and racism, they also classify pit bulls, bowl cuts, Mjoelnir and the acronym ACAB as potential Nazi dog-whistles, so I’d take everything they say with a grain of salt. 

Or do as the Germans do, and look at the context of the situation at hand, before forming your final judgement on the situation (whatever it might end up being). 

The Iron Cross is, however, undoubtedly used by neo-Nazis and skinheads. Due to its complicated history, it’s understandable to be wary of it’s usages, especially when by people you don’t know very well. 

USING THE IRON CROSS IN MY HETALIA STUFF

Onto the reason I made this post, which is the discourse surrounding using the Iron Cross in Hetalia fan-art and cosplay. Is it disrespectful, is it racist, is it a Nazi dog-whistle, and should it be avoided?

And, in my opinion, the answer is: it depends. 

It depends on the context of where you are using it, and why. But, I’m going to be honest with you guys: whatever you’re doing, it’s probably fine. Avoid using the varieties with the swastika in them, and there’s really no problem with it. If you’re really worried about potentially upsetting anyone with it, I’d recommend tagging your work with such, so anyone who would be upset by seeing it can filter it out, or skip past it. 

(Obviously, if you’re doing other things to glorify fascism in your works, aside from putting your character in an Iron Cross, there’s a problem, but the simple act of using an Iron Cross is in no way racist.)

Honestly, as a someone who’s family hails from Prussia, my only real complaint about using an Iron Cross would be wearing it in cosplay, and it’s only that it just seems a bit weird to me. It would be like buying a Medal of Honor and wearing it for an America cosplay. There’s nothing technically wrong with it, but it feels strange to wear something you didn’t earn. 

But also, it’s a costume and I don’t really care that much. Like I said: context matters. 

Honestly, that’s the whole take away here. Context matters. 

But, for anyone who doesn’t want to use the Iron Cross at all, but still keep the general character design, here are two option I’d recommend: 

The Pour le Merite, which was reserved for the highest officers of the Prussian Army, commissioned by Frederick the Great, would be fitting for Gilbert. There’s other variants of the Pour le Merite (the Blue Max) that continue to be used throughout German history. All are acceptable, but I’d still recommend the Old Fritz one. 

The modern Badge of Honour for the German Armed Forces would work for Ludwig. That, ot the Oak Leaves variant commissioned in 1956 (image has already been previously used) if you want it to be less historically anachronistic. I wouldn’t recommend using the Pour le Merite for Ludwig though; there’s no historical way he would’ve earned it, and Prussia was a meritocracy. It would’ve looked very disrespectful for him to wear it, even if Gilbert gives it to him. (He can display one though, if you would like). He can wear the other variants of it though, if you want. 

(He could also earn it as a civilian award, which I actually think would be really cool. However, the use of the Pour le Merite for civilians is post-WWII.)

In that case, I’d recommend the Order of the Red Eagle. 

Thanks for reading, and if you’re opinion differs from mine, I’d love to hear it. Like, genuinely. Just be respectful and courteous to each other (and to myself). Respect each other’s opinions (unless they’re truly a bigot, in which case, ignore them). 

Anyways, you may go back to your regularly scheduled browsing. 

[hello-yue-here]

Yuetara, zukka, and maiko

yuetara

ship

1) its not one of my main ships. i dont rlly read fanfic for them but if i see a cute fanart of them ill enjoy it and i think i first started shipping it because of good fanarts for them.

2) i like yuetara because of how similar they are. theyre both women from the water tribe. they both understand the misogyny that they have faced. and they both said f sexism im gonna be a strong woman. i also love the tui and la parallel. moon spirit and ocean spirit parallel COME ON. YUE IS THE MOON. KATARA IS THE MOST POWERFUL WATERBENDER. THEY ARE THE OCEAN AND THE MOON. the push and pull they could give eachother. that dynamic ftw.

3) i guess if i didnt like something about this ship would be the fact that if i read a fic or see a fanart w yuetara then than means in that particular au i wont get any yuekka and yuekka is probably my second favorite ship. but then again if i get yuetara than i could get a plethora of other sokka ships to go with it so my sadness disappears in like two seconds. gosh shipping is hard sometimes until you remember ‘hey i have like fifty different universes in my head. all ur ships can coexist in ur brain olivia’ other than that i really see no downsides to this ship. maybe i wish it had more content. maybe if it had more content id ship it a lot more but its not one of the more popular ships so the content is kinda few n far between on my feed.

zukka:

SHIPPP

1) my boys. my babies. my loves. i watched this show for the first time when it came out on netflix and when it ended i really didnt ship anything other than kataang. i came onto tumblr to find fun atla content and one of the very first things i saw under the atla tag was zukka content. i was like oh? whats this? zukka? interesting... i was intrigued so i found a list of fic recs and i fell in love with the ship. the rest is history. its probably my number one ship because it was my very first ship here and im nostalgic

2) oh boy there is so much i like about this ship. i relate to a shit ton of characters in atla. but sokka and zuko may be the ones i relate to most. i relate to sokka because i tend to feel second best a lot to my friends. i try to stay positive but things rarely go the way i plan or hope for them too and while im happy for my friends and their achievements i oftentimes find myself thinking why cant that be me? and i see this a lot in sokka especially in sokkas master. i dont feel special a lot and idk seeing sokka feel the same way and then realizing he is special kinda helped me realize that im special too. on the flipside i relate to zuko because i have wild anger issues and difficulty dealing w my emotions a lot as well. i get broody and short tempered and insecure very often and i tend to push people away and i refuse to ask for help (the amount of teachers and adults and therapists who have told me its okay to ask for help ur not any weaker because of it is astounding. do i listen to them? .....im working on it.) and i saw a shit ton of this in zuko. book one and two zuko rarely asks for help as seen in the blue spirit and zuko alone and he pushes away uncle so many times and even when the gaang iffers to help him in i think its the chase he tells them to leave. when he finally has his redemption and joins the gaang and lets them kinda become a better person i was so happy. i want that for myself yk. seeing him finally win the agni kai and overcome his family that always told him he was nothing was such a win. my sister and i get along but when we were children we were very much like zuko and azula. it was extremely competitive all the time and there was so much toxicity and sibling drama to a concerning extent. we get along great now which im very happy about but yeah their sibling relationship hit a lil too on the nose for me. seeing as i relate to these character so much and want them ti be happy i want to live vicariously through them so seeing them together is amazing for me to project into them. i love projecting onto fictional characters and with them i can project onto BOTH so its a winwin. plus so many zukka fics are so well written and heartwarming and heartbreaking and emotional and fluffy anf UGH the talent here us astounding.

3) what do i not like about the ship? again the list is long. oops. mainly the toxic shippers. there are so many toxic zukka stans that sometimes make it hard for me to enjoy this ship but hey! thats what the block button is for:) i despise how often people infantilize zuko and completely ruin his character for the sake of making him a soft weak lil boy who needs protecting. thats just not zuko for me. and ive seen many many accounts even state that this kind of portrayal of zuko is rooted in racist stereotypes about asian men (now i am white so i personally have never experiences racism but i feel the need to bring that up because it is wrong and attention needs to be brought to it because a lot of poc fans have criticised this) and the same for sokka. some ppl rlly skew his character and make him a big strong brute and hypermasculine and once again poc fans have said that this take is rooted in racist stereotypes. again! these are just my opinions! this is my favorite ship! but i think its important to acknowledge some of the bad parts of our ships as well and be critical where criticism is needed :))

maiko

ship

1) I LOVE MAIKO. “i dont hate you” “i dont hate you too” BRUH. my little heart just burst into flames. im sorry guys but maiko is so cute. they hate everything except eachother. BRUH that is one of the cutest tropes. i shipped them the moment i saw them together onscreen and i was so happy when zukos face lit up in the finale when mai came back.

2) “i hate everything but i have a soft spot for you” TAKE MY MONEY I AM A SUCKER FOR THIS. they are so cute together. like zuko is rarely happy in a majority of atla but mai makes him happy and i- 🥺🥺 HE DESERVES IT. and mai is always so supportive of him. when hes stressing out about the war meeting she tries her best to comfort him. and zuko cares about her too. he may not be the best at showing it but oh my god hes TRYING HIS BEST. i think its a very accurate portrayal of teenage relationships because they arent perfect and they do fight but like,, every teenage relationship does that. and even after everything and how he left her in the fire nation she still had his back at boiling rock. she still risked her life against azula to save his butt.

3) the thing i hate about maiko isnt even about maiko. its about antis who think mai is toxic and that zuko deserves better. that has got to be the worst take ive ever heard. they had a fight in ember island. that is NORMAL. they are teenagers. they are not perfect. but underneath all the rough edges and things they need to work out they still care about eachother so freaking much. i genuinelt believe that neither of them would do anything to intentionally hurt the other and i think thats what matters the most. if anything mai is the best girlfriend in the entire world because zuko fucked up like,, quite a few times. he got rlly jealous and dumped her thru a letter and ppl always say that mai was toxic for being mad at him for those two things. umm she had every right to be mad at him for both of those. and while zuko is allowed to feel his emotions and be angry sometimes as well sometimes he needs to think things thru and realize that hey maybe some if this jealousy is unfounded. BUT EVEN THEN. HE RESPECTED HER FEELINGS AND DIDNT TOUCH HER WHEN SHE SAID DONT TOUCH ME. HE RESPECTED HER. so i hate toxic maiko takes because they are literally so wrong in my opinion.

again all of these are just my opinions!! feel free to agree or disagree but please be respectful!! i will respect whatever u think as well because this is all just for fun :)

[raayllum]

anyway, i’ve gone on record before that i didn’t want people to block / not interact with callmekatielee (previously thearcadialedger) / lettersfromxadia just because she was crappy towards me. i’m retracting that now. 

tw for transphobia, racism, mentions of suicide, and discussions of emotional manipulation / emotional abuse under the cut

if you have no idea who that user is, katie lee is a user who joined the dragon prince fandom around december 2019. her and i were on friendly terms but it didn’t end well, which i’ve gone into more detail here, if you want to get up to speed. 

but, if you don’t want to read a big long post: when i became more aware of katie’s conservative views i cut ties. this was initially over disagreements over black lives matter protests, in which she didn’t agree with acab. given that she’s a conservative white woman (and other issues in our relationship that i’ll get more into later) i didn’t think concern over the protests being ‘violent’ (rather than people being attacked by police officers) was in good faith. 

then the fact she believed in reverse racism came out

as well as blatant transphobia

when called out for either of these things, she deletes the offending comments - or, on a since deleted post where someone patiently explained that others had blocked her not because of me, but because of her transphobia, she went on a tirade of defending biological sex. keep in mind that as of this time jk rowling’s next book is featuring a male serial killer who dresses like a woman which is the ultimate TERF trope in the book.

lastly, she is emotionally manipulative at best and has exhibited emotionally abusive behaviour towards me and others at worst. this is not something i say lightly whatsoever. but upon me blocking her (for my own personal wellbeing, as i was doing a lot of emotional labour and again, wasn’t going to stick around for shitty political views) her mental state spiralled. 

tw for mentions of suicide and gaslighting from this point onwards

she threatened to commit suicide and blamed me for it. that’s about as textbook emotionally abusive as it gets. she denied that anything about my post was true because i held back on posting screencaps out of respect to a friend caught in the middle of us. she believed that because i have ‘tumblr clout’ that somehow my own boundaries and mental health weren’t worth respecting, or real and valuable. further more, she has continued to blame me for things i had completely no awareness of, much less a hand in.

to say she sees fandom as a popularity contest or hierarchy is an understatement, given this screencap of a deleted post i mentioned earlier (the one with the transphobia)

my right to block her cannot be respected when it is simultaneously shamed and she attempts to guilt trip me for other’s actions. nor is this view of me as a “leader” remotely ingrained in reality. i was astonished to find how much this video, enclosed below from psych2go, described her behaviour / mindset and many of the situations i had found myself in, both before and after cutting ties. i also know i am not the only person who went through similar events.

if you don’t think this counts as emotionally manipulative rhetoric, let me remind you that this was literally over me deciding that i valued being anti racist and my own mental health over being her “friend.”

and again, like i said on my first and previously only post regarding, this is not a list of reasons to go send someone hate.

this is, however, a direct request for people to not engage and to check their followers’ list and notes and to block her accordingly. 

the only reason i am making this post at all is that, unfortunately, she has a habit of posting sometimes very triggering material in the main dragon prince tag without any trigger warnings or notices. (such as threats to commit suicide or previous posts regarding our own ‘drama’).

this is a fandom with a lot of young people and a lot of people who could easily be triggered by such things. no one is going into the main dragon prince tags to see this!! like i said at the beginning: worryingly enough, she is a toxic individual at best with a whole lot of questionable viewpoints. the best way to deal with someone who is a bigot (transphobic, believes in reverse racism, etc.) and who won’t tag properly is to block them. 

that way, if / when this post reaches her circle, we won’t have to see more of the bullshit that will, almost surely, inevitably follow

[capricornsicle]

I have a feeling your ask box and I are going to be familiar. You might be hot-taked out after that killer Satomi discourse. But whenever you’ve got it in you, I’d sure love to hear what you think about Kira and her Jeff-deemed-absolutely-necessary departure.

Oh, definitely. And I do love content, so...

Kira Yukimura was done so dirty by the writers and Jeffrey “I’m not racist I’ll prove it by arguing to poc calling me out for it on twitter” Davis. Her treatment was racist, tokenizing, and it wasn’t even high-brow racism. It was sloppy and lazy. If you’re gonna write all your characters of color off the show, commit to it. She went to the desert like 5 times before she stayed. Cowards.

Kira was only meant to be on the show for the Nogitsune storyline in 3b. However, fans liked her so much that, as with Theo in season 6, she was brought back for more episodes. The difference is that Cody Christian is white-passing and male and Arden Cho is not. Female characters don’t exist on Teen Wolf without a relationship to a male character. Hayden existed for Liam. Tracy existed for Theo. Melissa existed for Scott and Argent. Allison existed for Scott. Lydia, the female character with the most screentime of all of them, spent a lot of her time existing in relationship to Jackson, Stiles, Parrish (shudder), and other male main characters. Women on the show were reduced to love interests and mothers more often than not, and Kira was the same.

I loved her character. I loved her arc. I loved Arden Cho, who in real life is as sweet and kind as her character. I enjoyed her parents, both Noshiko, who’s surprisingly funny and a total badass, and Ken, who’s the most wholesome man in the universe. The only straight man we stan. I love him.

Anyways, Kira was getting a fun arc outside of being Scott’s girlfriend, with her parents and her powers and all, and then wham, white-passing boy shows up and no more main character status for Kira. Guess there wasn’t enough room to keep the only interesting plot line of all the ones happening in s5. Personally, I would have chosen Kira over the Marrish garbage fire of underage relationships, but that’s just me.

Then. The Skinwalkers. I could write a whole essay about them, but this is a Kira post, so I’ll limit it to her. At least Luther got sent to the moon for a reason. Kira got sent to the desert for “rEaSoNs”. There was no indication that her power was out of control, but every indication it wasn’t. She was growing and learning. Then, suddenly, she was “too powerful” so she had to go to the desert and disappear for a few episodes and then go back and forth for a while before they wrapped up sending Theo to the upside down or wherever he went and she could finally go... hang out with the people who we were told could help her control her power but who only threw spears at her and gave her a season finale ex machina. Then back to the desert with you!

You can tell something was going on backstage in her treatment. Arden Cho wasn’t informed she was being cut, she had to be told by fans. Her departure was carried out as swiftly as possible, and not for any real reason. Kira would have been tremendously helpful against the hunters and in a lot of later scenes, against the Ghost Riders (and let me remind everyone that KIRA WAS THE ONE WHO TOLD LYDIA ABOUT THE WILD HUNT), against pretty much anything. Immune to electrocution? Don’t help with the hunters who love electrocuting people. Sloppy writing through and through.

And what’s more is that Kira was cut just in time for the Scalia thing, which was so fucking rushed oh my GOD nothing has ever been less natural- this is a Kira post, calm down capsicle. Anyways, Kira got replaced as Scott’s love interest and not much else by a white girl, no hate on Malia or Shelley but much on the writers. I loved Malia and Kira’s friendship, and if anyone should have gotten with Malia, it should have been Kira. (The first time I saw Malia I wondered if we were getting another ambiguously brown character, actually, but no, just Georgian and well-tanned. But I bet not all my followers knew Tracy was played by a Chinese and Cherokee actor. Or that Nolan was played by a Mexican and Caxcan actor. Or that Theo was played by a Penobscot Native actor. The list goes on of white-passing POC who got to stay marginally longer than Black or brown characters.) The “Scott ends up with a white girl he has no chemistry with” threw me for many loops, especially after I was surprised to find myself liking Scira, even though I’m usually bored by straight relationships because of their one-sided focus and nonexistent chemistry. Kira got to be a character outside of Scott, and I liked their romance better for it, and then desert for a thousand years!

TLDR on the canon end of things is that Kira and Arden were done dirty by a group of powerful white men who wanted to tell a cishet white story.

Now, on the fandom end of things, I’m stepping into the real hot water. It’s safe to say that Kira’s story was sloppy and Arden didn’t deserve that ending, but it’s less safe to say that this fandom doesn’t treat her that well either. Here’s the most popular x Scott ships on Ao3, under the Teen Wolf tag with no other filters.

Scott and Allison. Scott and Stiles. Scott and Isaac. Then Scott and Kira, in dead last. Scott and Malia don’t even make the top ships list, probably because of how rushed and sloppy it was, but I digress.

People love Scott and Allison a lot, and I get that. I liked her too. I was also sad when she died. But, unlike a lot of sentiment I see in this fandom, I don’t think she should have been brought back to fight the beast in season 5 and get back with Scott. Not only do I think bringing characters back to life without very good reason and explanation (which they wouldn’t have, come on) cheapens their death, and that bringing characters back to life is weak storytelling in general, but let’s recall that Scira is still a thing in season 5. They’re still madly in love when Kira leaves. Allison should not have come back and love-triangled so Kira could be written off for a different white girl or so the massive amount of young white girls in the fandom who love Allison would be angry at Kira for breaking up their OTP. That would have been the one thing that could have made season 5 worse. (Well, they could have made Marrish a thing or killed Mason, but Jeff Davis thought about it and a shiver went down his spine because the ghost of Christmas future hears my name in its nightmares.)

Even if people aren’t “bring Allison back” campers, they largely ignore Kira’s entire existence. People who post gifsets and posts about Allison or Lydia don’t give anywhere near the same amount of attention to Kira. I see more Malia posts, actually. And while all of them had more runtime than Kira, none of them paired with Scott quite as perfectly, or had such strong independent storylines. Lydia almost did, but it kept petering out and she kept going back to main plot only. I see lots of appreciation posts for Allison and Lydia and Malia and the men, obviously, but NOTHING for Kira or Arden Cho. We all know what happened backstage because we read the same post in 2016 or whenever and then we all stopped talking about it.

Even the racism in this fandom skips Kira. Scott antis, I’m looking (controversially) at you. I’m glad Kira isn’t the subject of a bunch of obvious racism (as much as “bring Allison back!” makes it subtle), but not because she’s a forgotten side character. Kira made the main credit sequence! She has a sword! What else could you all POSSIBLY want?

And here’s where I burn at the stake: Kira was written off her own damn “look Fun Japanese mythology” storyline half the time so it could center around Stiles. A white boy. There were numerous issues with the mythology before that — “Oni” means demon, not “firefly samurai ninja”, and it refers to a similar mythology as the western “fae”, a large collection of creatures benevolent, malevolent, and in between, with different traits and origins. Kitsunes are meant to be red or white, not gold, and they’re foxes, not cats, animation team. “Nogitsune” refers to the malevolent class of “low” Kitsune, or “wild” Kitsune, who didn’t align themselves with the goddess Inari and do divine and pious work. There are many of them and the most they really do is harass people at shrines, not murder indiscriminately for funsies. They’re only malevolent in that they like doing bad deeds, not that they’re serial killers. And they’re not one of the usual 13 low Kitsune, two of which are bad of their own accord! (Spirit and Air. Google it!) They are meant to be dealt with by Inari-aligned high Kitsune, not your average tricky fox. Among other things.

So Stiles. Outside of the Kira storyline, he’s used in a lot of fandom discourse about racism and sexism. And queerbaiting. Y’all love a scrawny white boy. Anyways, Stiles gets possessed by the Nogitsune (that’s NOT how that works but okay Jeffrey) and suddenly s3 is about him. Kira’s not evil, now let’s look at Stiles being tired and messy and killing people. Dylan #1 did a great job playing that part, no hate on him, but the fact that a white boy became the main character in a Japanese (or Korean, if you’re Jeff, same thing) girl’s storyline is. Hmm. How do you call it? Blatant racism. And erasure. Which is racism. YIKES, Jeff. There is so much wrong with Stiles being the Nogitsune and controlling the Oni and his whole story (and oh my god the other guy who got possessed was also a white boy instead of a Japanese character played by the same actress Jesus fucking Christ). I’m not going into that, because that’s its own essay.

Anyways, because of how much this fandom loves Stiles, it’s easy to ignore how Kira and Japanese characters were treated. People project onto Stiles with glee. He’s white. He’s awkward. He’s (supposedly) not super attractive. (Yikes.) He’s ditzy and bouncy and all that fun stuff, but he also always saves the day. He got written off for most of 6b and he still saved the stupid day. And hey, dark!Stiles (let’s not get into calling him dark instead of Nogitsune that’s just too much wine we’d have to crack open to say it) is a fun trope and people like posting and creating about him. Except that he’s the white boy who took Kira’s storyline. Her independent story about Kitsune and the like was all given over to him, not just by the show, but by the fandom. So now every post about Kitsune is a Stiles post, even if it started with Kira. And because it’s Stiles, and this fandom loves him, and is easily offended by people leaning too hard on the glass house around them and him, Kira gets forgotten and swept aside. Everyone would rather talk about Stiles. Who is incapable of bad. Or cultural appropriation. But if you attack him you’re being ableist because he has ADHD. This is why I relate to Nolan for anxiety feels instead.

TLDR on the fandom end, y’all don’t treat Kira better than the show did. I see a few posts here and there from some dedicated users — typically the same people posting about Boyd, Deaton, Morrell, yeah that’s it I’m the only one posting about Kali. (Un-fun fact: Kali was not played by an Indian actor, but by a half-Black actor. Jeff Davis, when called out on twitter, said “wow ok idiots we tried to find an Indian actress but it was hard actually SUPER hard so shut up and stop telling me how to write MY show”, which is paraphrasing with intent to make fun, but exactly what he said.) Y’all who know about Arden and Kira should diversify your blogs to include more POC, especially ones where the actor AND character were rudely sidelined for vague white people reasons. Post gifs of Kira along with Allison, Lydia, and Malia. Post ship stuff of Scira too. Post about kitsunes, the origin story of the Nogitsune, when you post about the white boy who became the main character of that arc. Call the show out. Call the fandom out. Stop making every bit and piece of her story about Czechoslovakia White Boy. Demand Kira in any future runs of the show, if season 7 or whatever does happen. Include her in your fanfictions, in your headcanons, in your art. You don’t have to love her, but you have to remember that she’s as there as any of the white characters are.

This take is very hot. If I receive racist asks and/or messages about this, I’m going to make fun of each and every sender.

[starsgivemehp]

The Argument Against and Defense of Hetalia

Let me preface this by saying that I have not watched the show or read the manga in a few years now, and thus I am working mostly off of memory and what fan content I see these days, which is not a lot. Also, I am a gentile, and I don’t claim to know a lot about the Jewish community or traditions. I am, however, a writer and I have plenty of practice analyzing and criticizing works of fiction from multiple angles. With that in mind, this essay is an attempt to explain everything that is wrong and not wrong with the show, the comic strips, and the fandom.

I’m putting this under a read more for sheer length, this was 11 pages on Google docs.

Let us start with the list of grievances assembled largely from one post, the majority of which I had to go digging for as the original person in this post who mentioned Hetalia said, and I quote, “i dont feel the need to link a source for [hetalia] because…” and then listed two things, one of which is incorrect entirely. But I digress, I will address each one at a time. The list of grievances is as follows:

It is called ‘Axis Powers’ Hetalia

One of the main characters is a personification of Nazi Germany

The entire point of the series is:

Advocating for eugenics

Racial fetishization

Advocating for fascism

Nazi sympathizing/propaganda

The entire franchise is terrible due to rape jokes, racism, and Holocaust jokes

Hetalia fans are all terrible due to rape jokes and other issues

Death of the author cannot apply to this fandom

There may be more that are in other reblogs of the post in question, and I may add addendums further in this essay, but for the time being, I will address each of these grievances and explain the validity or non-validity of each, from a position understanding of both fans and of non-fans. Thus, in order:

‘Axis Powers’ Hetalia

When people talk about Hetalia, they usually are referring to the anime due to its widespread popularity. However, Hetalia began as a series of strip comics posted on a forum by Hidekaz Himaruya (and I spent a while trying to actually find the original comics, but I can’t, there are links to his blogs there in what I’ve provided). It later was formatted into a manga, and then later became an anime. While it was originally titled Axis Powers: Hetalia and the first two seasons of the show are named as such, it usually is only referred to as Hetalia. The anime seasons after said first two seasons have all been ‘world’ focused: Seasons three and four were titled World Series, season five was titled Beautiful World, season six was titled World Twinkle, and the upcoming season seven is titled World Stars.

For the purposes of tagging everything, I tend to see the tags ‘hetalia’ and ‘hws,’ which is short for Hetalia: World Series. This name of the third and fourth anime seasons is the most widely accepted and used name for the series as a whole. While it is true that, years ago, people referred to it as ‘aph’ for Axis Powers Hetalia, the fans and the series have put that behind them, for good reason. It is understandable, even righteous, to not accept the title ‘Axis Powers.’ It does draw focus to the WW2 era, and place the fascists and nazis as the ‘main characters,’ or even, ‘the good guys,’ which is not the case. Obviously, the Nazis were terrible and the entirety of the Axis Powers did horrible, unspeakable things during the war.

It must be noted, to anybody who has not seen the show or read the manga, that the first one to two seasons do have a ‘focus’ on the WW2 era, per se, but it largely talks about interactions between countries, as they are the personified party, and makes extremely few allusions to the war itself, and none to the Holocaust. I will address that in a later section. For now, the point to make is that after these original two seasons, Hetalia branches out into a much wider worldview, adds several more characters, and focuses more on said characters in individual arcs and offerings of historical facts - as generalized as they may be. Nobody claimed that Hetalia was correct in everything it said, but it aims to play out some historical information in a simplified and humorous way. This is due to the fact that the characters are all singular people meant to personify entire countries, which leads us to point two.

The Personification of Nazi Germany

This is the second complaint of the strand of the post in question that I was presented with, quoted as “one of the main characters is a personification of nazi germany.” This is an entirely incorrect statement. ‘Nazi Germany,’ as people call it, is the state of Germany during the era leading up to and of World War 2. The country is still Germany, the people were still German, the Nazi part comes from the political regime in power, a real world nightmare. In the Hetalia series, the characters are called by their country names, because that is who they personify. This may change at times. For example, the character now known as Turkey was previously called Ottoman Empire. They come to be when civilization starts or a colony is introduced to a place. This can be seen in the strip or episode where China ‘finds’ Japan as a small boy and begins to teach him reading and writing - and Japan thereafter invents hiragana. It can also be seen in the comic where a young child, Iceland, questions who he is and why he knows his people are “different beings” than him. The country that speaks to him (I only have the comic here in my likes in that list, the name isn’t mentioned and it’s been a while, but it might be another of the Scandinavian countries) explains that he is Mr. Iceland, they don’t know why he is Mr. Iceland, but they know he is.

What I am attempting to explain with all of these other examples is that there is no ‘Nazi Germany’ character. There is a character called Germany (or Mr. Germany), and all of his adult life, he has been called Germany. He is never addressed by anything else. He does, however, look remarkably similar to a childhood friend of Italy’s, Holy Roman Empire (or just Holy Rome), but as far as it has been explained in canon, Holy Rome went off somewhere and, later on Germany and Italy met as strangers. The general consensus is, due to the area where the Holy Roman Empire used to be is around-ish Germany, the characters are the same. But never, in any of the comics, anime, or movie, is Germany referred to as Nazi Germany. I don’t believe the word ‘Nazi’ appears at any point in time, even, though I cannot claim I have seen every shred of content, so I may be wrong. But I doubt that very much, as it is not in the nature of the series to do such a thing. Moving on.

Advocating for Eugenics

I will start and end this section by saying that Hetalia was, in the original post, roped in with Attack on Titan, of which (as far as I know) the author advocates for eugenics - or the idea that certain people should not be allowed to produce offspring due to their race or other factors. There is no example of Hetalia content wherein this disgusting opinion is ever mentioned or supported in any way. This is at worst a flat-out lie, and at best lumping Hetalia in with a much worse show that does do this (but I won’t get into that, I have never seen more than a few episodes of Attack on Titan and I don’t care to see any more of it. Throw your opinions or defenses elsewhere, I care 0% about it entirely). I have no more need to prepare a more detailed response to this accusation. It simply is not true.

Racial Fetishization

This particular accusation is a difficult one. Fetishization may be a strong word, as the series is largely a comedy. Everyone gets their turn in the spotlight, so to speak, so I find it hard to plainly state that any one character is fetishized or displayed as the most powerful. There is, of course, Rome, who only appears in small segments as Italy’s grandfather and is, in the series, touted as an amazing empire who had it all. I do not believe this is what the accusation is referring to. This accusation seems to be some sort of insistence that the show and creator believe that white people (or possibly just Germans/Nazis/the Aryan race?) are touted as the most powerful and nobody else can compare. I can confidently say that while that is never said anywhere, there are a few issues. Hetalia, particularly the animated series, had (and may still have) a longstanding issue of whitewashing countries that should not be white. This includes Egypt and Seychelles (who both later got a darker skin tone, probably still not dark enough though) as the worst offenders, and even Spain, Turkey, Greece, and Romano (southern Italy), and so on. Yes, this is a big problem. There is no defense against that. It should not be the case. These characters obviously should have darker skin. I will note, however, that many fans are already completely aware of this, have been complaining about it since the beginning, and tend to draw these characters with more correct skin tones in their fanart. This is a case where yes, the original content is not good, but the fans make their own fixes. If you are angry at Hetalia for whitewashing, good. You should be. But I do not believe this should reflect on the entirety of the content and the fandom (And note that I am not linking any particular fanart here, because I want nobody to go attack any fans).

It is also important to note that yes, a large majority of the series builds upon stereotypes. No, stereotypes are not good. No, you should not assume that the personifications of the countries encompass all citizens of said countries. The entire premise of the show is one person = the embodiment of a country, and that person changes and adapts with the times in terms of uniform and personality. It is extremely hard to do this without stereotyping. Most serious fans are aware of this, and do not in any way believe that these characters represent everyone from these countries. It may be true that much younger fans used to, and it may be true that people do not want to watch the show because stereotypes are, arguably, bad. But do remember that this is a comedy, and every character is picked on. Every one. And it is understandable if this branch of humor is not for you. I, personally, don’t like Family Guy or South Park or any shows like that for their humor. I also don’t attack the people who do. I ignore it.

Advocating for Fascism

This is another area wherein I believe the accuser is simply lumping Hetalia in with the original poster’s subject, Attack on Titan. Again, I will not defend or attack that show, as I do not care about it at all. However, regarding Hetalia, I can confidently say that it does not advocate for fascism. While the first two seasons are (sort of) set in WW2 era, as previously mentioned, the fighting is not really a big part, and nobody is touted as correct - only struggling in the conflict. For example, there is a scene where Germany, post WW1, is shown making cuckoo clocks by hand and lamenting the fact that he has to make so many thousands in order to pay back France. This is by no means painting fascism as a good thing, or explaining anything about how poverty and other struggles lead to the formation and rise of the Nazi party. It is simply a scene where we see a man frustratedly making cuckoo clocks and complaining while France’s big head jeers at him in his imagination. The surrounding scenes and the end of this one are making note of how Italy keeps coming over to his house to try and be friends and Germany keeps kicking him out because Italy is annoying and whiny. The episode further goes on to mention that Germany is attacking France again, and Italy has suddenly become his ally, and he is not happy about it for the aforementioned reasons. Again, this does not in any way paint Germany as being ‘right.’ The purpose of the segment(s) is/are to show him disliking the annoying Italy (whom the show is named for) and trying to get him out of his house before eventually giving up and accepting that they can be friends. Is it all 100% historically accurate? No, not by a long shot. Does it paint him as sympathetic? Sort of, you feel bad for the guy making a thousand cuckoo clocks, but only in the sense that he is one person doing a lot of work, a completely fictional situation. But Italy - and the audience - obviously know that attacking France again is not a good thing, so does it advocate the Nazis or fascism? Also no.

Nazi Sympathizing/Propaganda

I pretty well covered this in the previous section, but I will expand. I have alluded to the first two seasons as “focusing” on WW2, in a way, and also mentioned that this is a generalization of sorts, so here I will attempt to clarify. The first few episodes do, indeed, touch on ‘the way they all met’ in a sense; Germany is starting a war and he reluctantly becomes allies with Italy, and less reluctantly becomes allies with Japan, who examines both of them and decides he is content with this situation. However, none of it is very serious, and these ‘formalities’ give way easily to more humorous personable interactions, such as Italy hugging Japan without warning and the touch-anxious Japan pushing him off and getting flustered, Italy petting a cat and then freaking out when he is licked because a cat’s tongue is rough, the two of them ‘training’ by doing your regular old exercising and jogging and Italy being late, etc etc. Stupid, personable jokes.

On the flip side, the show covers the Allied Powers quite a bit too. A lot of this is the five big ones - America, Britain (/England/UK), France, Russia, and China - all meeting around one table and squabbling about various things. I fondly recall one scene where China arrives late and has a bunch of workers suddenly building a Chinatown in the meeting room because he was hungry and wanted his own food, and the others protesting. They are then offered food and become okay with it, because food. Other such nonsense plays out in other, similar meetings. There is also a segment where the Axis powers are all stranded on an island for… some unknown reason… and they set about attempting to survive via campfire and fishing and such. Twice (three times?) the Allied powers ‘attack’ them on this island via China whacking them each with a wok and, as the three of them are in a sad heap, something interrupts the scene to make the Allies retreat. One time, it is Rome’s sudden and also unexplained entrance across the sky singing a song, and another time, it is England’s preoccupation with a cursed chair. Also, at one point, Austria is playing a piano. Does any of this magic logical, real life sense? No. It’s stupid and funny and has nothing to do with war. These are just personable characters thrown into weird situations so they can be funny, with some extremely mild historical context along the way.

I will note again that WW2 is pretty much completely dropped after these two seasons, with the war hardly addressed at all, and future seasons focus more on other characters. The Scandinavians get to all have fun together, the Baltic trio is mentioned, there is a lot about Switzerland taking care of Liechtenstein (wow I spelled it right after all these years, go me) and being stiff and formal with Austria. There is also plenty about people mistaking Canada for America, and England and France squabbling throughout the years, and Spain finding Romano cute but also very grumpy, etc etc… This series is largely Eurasia-focused, yes, and it can be criticized for not being as diverse as it should be. But boiling it down to ‘Nazi propaganda’ is outright, obliviously false.

I don’t know if this is the best place to put this particular note, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else to place it, so here it will go. I would like to mention that in the series, some characters, like Germany and Russia, express outright fear of their ‘bosses’ in certain points in history. It is important to realize that Germany, Japan, America, etc… these characters are not the actual, real-life humans in charge of these countries, but people of a fictional, separate species than humans who grow up as the nation grows and have lives that are affected by these world leaders (we even watch in the show America shooting up from child to young adult as the colonies expand, and England comments on how quickly he grew up - but not as quickly as his people, of course. We’ll get to Davie later). The president of the United States is America’s ‘boss,’ and naturally, that boss changes every time the president changes. The emperor of China is China’s ‘boss.’ It follows, thusly, that at one point, Hitler was Germany’s ‘boss.’ The terrible person himself was alluded to, as far as I know, exactly one time, not by name, and no face was shown. In a very brief scene, Germany laments that his new boss is scary and he was just ordered to go force Austria to come live with him. Said boss is shown as, I believe, an evilly laughing shadowy figure. That’s it. That’s the scene. There is no other mention of Hitler, nor is there any mention of the Holocaust anywhere. One could argue that the show is then trying to say that the Holocaust didn’t happen, but I think such an accusation is frankly absurd. It’s a comedy, it was always a comedy, and what in the fuck would be comedic about a mass genocide in any way? Nothing. None of it is funny. Of course it is not brought up in a comedy.

Rape Jokes, Racism, and Holocaust Jokes

While I did somewhat address racism already in the section about whitewashing and racial fetishization, I have another clarification to make, especially regarding the jokes. A lot of people complain that there are rape jokes throughout the series, and that there are two Holocaust jokes. I will begin by saying yes, this is all true, those things did happen during the course of the show. However, it is important to note that all of those things happened in the English dub of the animated show, and none of these terrible jokes exist in the Japanese/subbed version, or the original comic strips.

The English dub is, on all accounts, pretty terrible. Everyone has an over exaggerated accent, there are the aforementioned jokes, there are name changes (England referred to as Britain, among them, very confusing), and the voice actors themselves make mention in commentaries that their goal in this job was, to paraphrase because I haven’t listened in a while, ‘to be as offensive as possible to absolutely everyone’ (and one of the English dub voice actors is even a convicted sex offender, but that’s it’s own mess).  Not the most glamorous or noble of goals. One could say ‘at least if it’s everyone, it’s not really racism, is it? Just humor?’ There is a case for that. Many comedians will say that they poke fun at everyone to avoid singling anybody out as inherently superior. It cannot be said to be the best way to make humor, but it cannot be said to be the worst way, also. Overall, I don’t like the English dub, I don’t watch it, I prefer the subs. And yes, the subbed version has a few issues of its own, but I can say that at least, no, it does not make any Holocaust or rape jokes. Are those kinds of jokes excusable? Fuck no. They’re completely inappropriate. Should you judge the whole series and fandom based on the grossness of the English dubs? Also no, the people who did the English dubs have zero to do with the original creator, the animators, and the fans. Screw them.

The Fandom Being Terrible

I must again preface by saying I was never super active in the fandom at large. I had my own little niche of friends and I stuck to them and I didn’t often branch out. I did, however, go to cons back in those days, and saw plenty of cosplayers. The main complaint I see regarding the fandom is that most of the fans are completely rabid, make a bunch of rape jokes, and even dress up as ‘Nazi Germany’ (iron cross and red armband and all) and pretend to shoot up synagogues. Now, I have not seen cosplayers do the nazi solute or do such photoshoots, but I can believe that people have done it. I have seen plenty of rabid fans, and some of the OCs created for Hetalia, especially many interpretations of individual states (or Antarctica), were extremely cringey, racist, and overall just not good. And yes, these things are undeniably bad. They are very bad things! Those people should be ashamed. They should know better, regardless of their ages or anything, for fuck’s sake. The nazi salute is not a thing you do jokingly, pretending to shoot people is not a joke. Everyone is aware of this. The people who did, or maybe even still do, those things need a serious sit-down and to be woken the fuck up, because they are acting terrible.

However, it is extremely unfair to paint all Hetalia fans in the same light. That is a very stereotypical thing to do, no? As I mentioned earlier, I stuck to my little niche friend group of fans, and while we all had our own flaws and were younger and kinda dumber, we never did things like that. I never did things like that. Rape jokes were never funny, I never liked them, I never accepted them. I have people I still know who still like Hetalia and they never made those kinds of jokes either. I think, as the years have gone by, a lot of the more rabid fans have died out of the fandom. They’ve either grown the fuck up or they’ve went off to pollute some other fandom. Recognize that, especially in the beginning, the anime was low-budget and had a lot of that old and gross queerbaiting and stuff like that, so it was undeniably a magnet for crazy yaoi fans. But the majority of fanart, fanfics, and just overall fan stuff that I see these days are nothing like that. Overall, the fandom has seriously calmed down. A lot of the focus is much more on taking these characters and applying them to other historical events with more accuracy than the show might give. The history in these fanfics and fanarts may also be of questionable accuracy at times. I personally once wrote a fic where I made allusions to the death of Joan d’Arc and, later, the death of Elizabeth I, but did I add much historic fact? No, do I look like a history major spilling all this? The point of the fic was England - the character - maturing through starting to love one of his rulers and recognizing a terrible thing that he did before. It’s not the best piece of work out there, and maybe someone could point out a few things I did wrong with it, but for what it’s meant to be, it’s harmless. Takes on characters not actually in the series, like Ireland, Scotland, etc etc are generally pretty mature from what I see, fanart tends to just be the characters in various poses and styles. The overall love the fandom has, I think, is in the better character designs and in the very concept of the countries as people who laugh and cry and live through war and peace for thousands of years. And here is where I address the final grievance that I personally saw in the notes of the post which started this whole thought process and essay.

The Death of the Author

A lot of people might not fully understand what ‘The Death of the Author’ means. The death of the author is a belief rooted in the 20th century that the personal intentions, beliefs, and prejudices of the authors of certain works can have no bearing on their produced content, because once it is out in the public, every reader may then have their own interpretation and belief system. By publicizing the content, the author ‘dies’ and the reader is born.

There are some scenarios where this cannot apply. One example is JK Rowling, a very special case of a very problematic woman who happens to be so powerful, and so rich, that consuming any type of official (or even unofficial) Harry Potter anything can and will give her that much more power to spread her TERF bullshit. Let me be frank: Any time that consuming a product is allowing a bigoted or problematic person to gain extra money or extra power that they then use for evil, the death of the author cannot apply. You cannot use it as a moral justification. You might perhaps use it as the reason why you struggle to let go of a fandom near and dear to you, as Harry Potter is to so many people, but you absolutely must recognize that purchasing the books, the movies, or any other official content is outright supporting a TERF.

That in mind, there are dozens of other cases where the death of the author absolutely can apply. The easiest, of course, is with authors who are actually dead, such as Lovecraft. Lovecraft was a complete bigot and racist, an overall terrible person, and his works are saturated in that racism. But he is dead, and his work is very popular, and there are ways to take and use his work that do not contribute further to racism and bigotry. All you have to do is slap a non-racist cthulhu on a page. Make that cthulhu eat everyone equally. That’s a good cthulhu right there, a nice, safe cthulhu.

So where does Hetalia fall in this spectrum of can or cannot have death of the author? I believe it leans more to the side of yes, you can apply it. For one thing, you can definitely find the show for free in some places, and watch it without giving Himaruya a single cent. The comics are also available online for free, and while you might be giving your ‘support’ by being a viewer, I think overall, that’s not only negligible, but does not contribute anything bad? The author of Attack on Titan has many charges levied against him in the post which prompted this, and arguably, giving him any money is bad. But as far as I have seen, while Himaruya might have started out with a flawed premise and may have some whitewashing issues, I have seen nowhere that he funds any kind of racist, nationalistic, fascist, etc anything of any kind. This is not like Chick-Fil-A, where offering any kind of patronage is (or maybe used to be) sinking funds into terrible organizations. This is not supporting literal Nazis, as the complaints claim. This is a largely mediocre series with good parts and bad parts and zero ties to horrific organizations or ideals. Consuming good fan content does not make someone a racist or a bigot or a nazi sympathizer. Even rewatching some old favorite scenes or checking out the new season doesn’t make someone that. By all accounts, the show is flawed but not a means to fund nazis.

The Bad Anything Else

I will now take some time to talk about some other problems Hetalia has, because no, it is by no means flawless. I already discussed the whitewashing and stereotypes and the mess of the English dub, but there is more. I made mention of the fact that battles and seriously bad events such as the Holocaust are not mentioned, and this holds true throughout pretty much all of the series. There are certain points where ‘battles’ of a sort are seen, but only flash moments. One scene in particular that I really enjoyed as a tween and can now see the problems with is the whole revolutionary war scene. This was a scene split into two episodes (for some weird reason, even an unrelated episode in between, like, what? Why??) about a particular (unnamed) battle in the American Revolution where England faced down America, they each had a gun with a bayonet, and England charged America and his bayonet deeply scratched America’s gun, and America declared he was no longer England’s little brother, and the whole thing was played out as an extremely emotional scene. England is lost in the past of seeing America as a cute little kid he took care of, who has now grown up and is being reckless and stupid, and America is all righteous and independent and proving he’s a grown up, it’s all very emotional, I cried, other fans cried, there was much fanart.

This scene is problematic in a way. Boiling down an extremely nasty conflict following lots of really bad laws and protests to this one scene doesn’t do history any justice. It says nothing about the struggles of the American colonists, the struggles of the British empire, the awful things the colonists did to the natives, etc etc. It is one small scene and it focuses on these characters as humanoid, with feelings, and completely ignores the complexities of history. And yes, in a way, that is bad. But it is bad in the sense that nobody can - or at least should - take this show to be the end-all be-all of history. It is not. It is not often entirely correct, and it picks and chooses what points in the past several thousand years to play with, and trying to use it as a map for history is a bad idea. However, this focus on the countries as human-like and struggling can also be a good thing.

It is also important to note that there have been other problems. The portrayal of South Korea, for example, is extremely controversial, and while I do not know all of the specifics, I believe that it was banned in Korea due to this, and the character was entirely removed from the anime, among other things. Obviously, a bad take, a bad character. There are also just straight up not great characterizations in certain cases. I don’t, for example, like anything about how Belarus is portrayed as a crazy psycho constantly begging Russia (her big brother) to marry her? I think that that is ridiculous, and I know nothing about Belarus as a country but I am pretty darn sure that that is not how one ought to go about portraying the country. There are a few other examples, but my purpose here was not to pull up a list of every country and explain what is correct or incorrect about each characterization. It is enough to say that some characters were not portrayed perfectly. But with that in mind...

The Good Anything Else

It is the most important to remember that this, all of this, is fiction. This is a silly, silly fantasy series. The countries are not humans, they are some weird semi-immortal species that share a universal language and know they are not human and are referenced by humans as ‘those people.’ They are fictional constructs. But the good out of all of this is that they explore human emotions. The American Revolution scene should not be taken as how the revolution was, and who might have been right or wrong. But it is a very emotional story of a big brother unable to accept that his little brother has grown up and wants to make his own choices. That, right there, is a heartfelt scene that I’m sure plenty of real people can feel something about. And there are plenty of other scenes that really grab you by the heartstrings, especially given how crazy, stupid, and humor-oriented the rest of the show is. And I will take a moment and enthuse about some of the more popular scenes that I think are, in fact, pretty good.

There is one episode in season 5, Beautiful World, where an American woman visits France (the place). This woman, Lisa, is blond and bears a striking resemblance to Joan d’Arc. While visiting some historical place somewhere or another in Paris, France (the person) spots her and rushes up with an odd look. When she questions him, he apologizes and offers to give her a tour of the area, which she accepts. He then proceeds to lead her around and explain some history and show off some beautiful sights, and he mentions some stuff about Joan d’Arc. She butts in and lists off some stuff she knows, he beams and looks proud and says yes, she’s right. The end of the scene has the two of them standing alone somewhere and him commenting how young Joan was when she was killed, and that he always wished she could have had a better, nicer life. He then states that he is very happy that she got it, while giving this American tourist a gentle smile. She looks away for a moment, distracted by something perhaps, and when she looks back to ask just who the heck he really is, talking about a historical figure like he knew her, he is gone. It’s a very emotional scene in a quiet sort of way, because the watcher/reader understands that he took one look at this woman and instantly believed that she was, in fact, Joan d’Arc reincarnated into a totally different and totally average life, and he is so genuinely happy that a woman he saw as a hero gets this chance to live normally. Whether or not you may personally believe in reincarnation, and regardless of how often other times in the show France is shown as an obnoxious sexaholic, this is an extremely tender scene that lots of fans seriously love. It is very ‘human.’ And I feel like this is what the series as a whole strives to offer. These human moments. They may be peppered in a sort of lackadaisical style in the anime, but they are far more prominent in the comic strips, so it is important to realize that that kind of scene is more of what the creator likes to focus on.

Another very popular and touted scene is the Davie scene. I don’t remember if it was put in the anime or not, I read it as a comic. It was a scene set in colonial America, where the man himself was just a very small child. Little baby America was hanging out in a field with a rabbit and sees this boy, who introduces himself as Davie. Davie brings America to his house and opens up a botany book and points out a blue flower (possibly a forget-me-not) that he wants to see but that isn’t in the New World. America assures Davie that he will find him one of those flowers, and goes off to do so. He fails his search and goes back to Davie, who is older now, but Davie looks embarrassed and turns and walks away. Distressed, America runs to England and explains about the flower, and England says the flower is not there, but they do grow at home, and he will bring some the next time he leaves and comes back. America happily waits, and when England returns with a bouquet of the blue flowers, America takes them and runs off to Davie’s house. He is let in by a boy who looks just like Davie and presents the flowers, and the boy then puts them on (or maybe in) a coffin of an elderly man. America, smiling, does not seem to understand what is going on, and hopefully calls the boy Davie.

This entire scene, in the comic, has very few words. Davie’s name is repeated a few times, but most of the rest of the ‘dialogue’ is in images. The flower, England saying it is not there, etc. This makes the scene extremely poignant, and when we reach the end, we, the audience, realize suddenly that while baby America was fixated on finding a special flower for his new friend, years and years went by, and that friend grew up and got married and had children and eventually died, all while America remained looking the exact same age and understanding the exact same things. Look, folks, I don’t know about you, but that is some angsty stuff right there. I cried. We all cried. We all miss Davie. Mention the name to fans and you will get sobs. We love you, Davie.

Which brings me to my penultimate point, that this series is heartfelt and, while it avoids a lot of the bad of history, can be very poignant about what human nature is like. Human lives are long, very long, but also so very short, they fly by. Some lives end in tragedy, others are mostly peaceful, and maybe we get second chances if you believe in reincarnation, maybe not. Maybe it’s good that our lives are so short, maybe the fate of living forever and watching people you connect with die is tragic. Or maybe it would actually be really fun, having friends for thousands of years that you may squabble with at times but ultimately care for. Maybe nothing is simple and life is about finding joy where you can, and everyone needs to sometimes take a step back and realize that everyone is flawed, and there might be good and evil but the vast majority of people are in a grey area, trying to live their own lives and do what good they can for whatever reason they might give. I want to end with one last topic, one I have not yet addressed this whole time. The big white alien in the room, if you will.

Paint it: White!

There is a Hetalia movie, folks, if you didn’t know it, and it’s called Paint It White. This movie has just as many silly parts as any other Hetalia thing, but it also has a plot! In this movie, strange, all-white aliens are starting to invade the Earth. They arrive and anything they touch, they turn into completely identical white humanoid blobs, even the country personifications. With this scary and seemingly-unstoppable threat, the main eight - America, England, Russia, China, France, Japan, Germany, and Italy - all try to infiltrate the alien spaceship in frankly hideous uniforms to find out more and figure out a way to defeat them. Hijinks and disaster ensues, and at the end, each of them is fighting a mob and gradually being defeated. Italy is the last one standing, and as Germany is slowly being transformed into a blob along with the others, he tells Italy to smile. Italy then finds (or has? the plot isn’t great, it’s just there) a black marker and he suddenly starts going around drawing ridiculous faces on everyone. He draws fitting faces on each of his friend blobs, like a stern face on Germany-blob, a deadpan face on Japan-blob, etc etc. The invaders suddenly stop. They look at each other, marker-faced, and start to laugh. Then their leader of sorts comes out and is basically like “wow, we thought you were all stupid and you have wars and stuff, but this? This is beautiful. Wow. We all look exactly identical on our world, and these faces are cool and new and unique. We’ll turn everyone on your planet back if we can have this magical thingie you’re holding.” And of course Italy hands the marker right over, and everyone is put back to normal, and crybaby, scaredy-cat, useless Italy saves the world.

The plot is, obviously, not super great. It’s not going to win anybody any awards. But it has a very poetic premise. The strength of humans is that they are all unique. Every human has a different face, a different body, a different life. Our differences may cause conflict, but they are also something to celebrate. At the end of the day, Hetalia is an okay show that can get you hooked on history and tries its best to teach you that we’re all only human and there might be war and conflict and bad things, but you have to reach for the good things and find yourself good friends and have stupid laughs and enjoy life, however long or short it may be. I think that that’s a pretty decent message to send out to people.

The Bottom Line

In the end, this is a fandom like many others. Hetalia has its flaws and its cringe moments, and it certainly had its fair share of awful fans. But I truly believe that painting it overall as nazi propoganda and one of the most problematic and harmful shows out there is a blatant lie and disregards… just about everything of the actual content. I think it is difficult for someone to concretely say anything is super good or super bad without seeing at least some of it, or doing some research, and this business of blithely going along with what everyone else says just because they use big danger words does not do anybody any favors. Spreading misinformation is, I’m sure, the exact opposite of what most people want to do. And make no mistake, I am definitely not saying that everyone needs to like, or even watch, the show. If you never ever want to watch this show in your life, that is absolutely fine. Go forth and never watch it. But mindlessly following the herd and yelling overgeneralized, unsupported opinions about it is not a good thing. I beg of you, do research on the things you want to form or share an opinion on, think critically, and for the love of God, do not swipe a giant paintbrush to forsake every single individual fan of a show as a terrible, awful person. By all means, hate nazis, they are pieces of shit. Boycott things that support genocide and fascism, yes, fight for equality, yes. But do not go accusing without thinking, and do not overgeneralize. I leave you with the words of my old laptop bag that I bought years ago at a convention:

Make pasta, not war.

Thank you for reading.

[oldtowrs]

ೄྀ࿐ˊˎ- 𝐑𝐔𝐋𝐄𝐒

ˊˎ- general blog rules !

this is an inclusive, hate-free space. I do not tolerate transphobia, homophobia, biphobia, racism, misogyny, anti-semitism, xenophobia, elitism or BIGOTRY OF ANY KIND on my blog. if I catch you commenting, interacting with my followers/mutuals, interacting with me, etc. in a hateful manner, you will be blocked and reported.

this world is hard enough already, and my space on the internet is meant for everyone - everyone except for bigots.

most of my content will be friendly to minors, but IF A POST IS MARKED MDNI - INCLUDING AND ESPECIALLY MY FANFICTION - DO NOT INTERACT. if you are a minor and I catch you, you will also be blocked and reported for my safety and for your mental health. MEDIA CONSUMPTION IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY AND IF YOU CANNOT REGILATE YOURSELF, I WILL.

other than that, please respect each other and me and enjoy my little slice of this hellsite and this world. thanks.

ˊˎ- currently writing for !

obi-wan kenobi, leia organa, kylo ren/ben solo, poe dameron, armitage hux, cassian andor, anakin skywalker, din djarin, boba fett.

mycroft holmes, sherlock holmes, john watson

remus lupin, severus snape, james potter, ron weasley, sirius black, harry potter, draco malfoy, hermione granger, theodore nott

doctors nine, ten, eleven and twelve

thranduil, samwise gamgee

viktor, jayce talis

eddie munson, steve harrington

ˊˎ- what to request !

fluff, angst, hurt/comfort, smut (if you are over 18+)

quote prompt fics, song lyric inspired fics, book quote fics, trope inspired fics, etc.

SOME mental health comfort. if you request mental health comfort fics, i’ll read over your request and see if i’m comfortable writing it. i will usually write comfort fics from depression or anxiety, as i am familiar with them as someone who struggles with them. trigger warnings will be tagged accordingly. DISCLAIMER: i’m not trying to romanticize these mental health issues, but sometimes it’s nice to have a comfort fic for those of us in the fandom that struggle with these things. please keep in mind though that when I write these fics, I am writing them with my experience, and obviously not everyone's mental health experience is the same.

pretty much anything else that does not fit under the NOT to request list below.

LGBTQ+ reader but i must be very clear that i will only write f/m, gn!reader, or wlw. this is NOT because i am transphobic/homophobic/etc. this is because i am not trans, nor am i amab, nor do i identify as a guy. i don’t not have experience in these areas and i do not want to misrepresent those in my community in a way that could be harmful. i am a bi, cisgendered woman, and i do not want to put my voice over others — especially when it doesn’t belong.

character x reader fan fics with romantic relationships. ocassionally there will be platonic relationships mixed in, but they will not be the main focus of the story

ˊˎ- what NOT to request !

eating disorders, self harm, suicide, rape/non-con, pregnancy, miscarriage, racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, islamaphobism, or similar themes.

I will write NSFW but I will not write sexual violence or domestic abuse (physical, mental, emotional, etc) or anything that could be interpreted as such.

i will not write for a reader from our world coming into a the fanfic’s universe or a character coming into our world. I'm just not comfortable and I hate the trope.

I will not write for "hey, can I have a reader insert fic where he calls me this specific name, and the reader has (insert specific description here), and they've (insert personal experience here)," sort of things. If you want a fic where the reader is specific to you, that's a commission not a request.

ˊˎ- what to do with my fics !

ask more about them in my inbox or by messaging me !

like, comment & reblog ! show that you like them ! interaction matters!!

i promise you're not going to bother me by showing that you liked my fics, in fact I love the feedback and to hear how much you all like my fics, so comment, reblog, and like away :)

tag in fic recs (with credit to me or a link to my fic or my page or something)

ˊˎ- what NOT to do with my fics !

DO NOT repost my fics on any other platform, or rebrand the exact same story as your own.

I post my writings here under the name darthkenobii, on wattpad as _kenobii, and on ao3 as writingsofa_hobbit. if you see my writing somewhere under a name that is not one of those, please contact me and let me know!

do not expand upon them unless you ask me first and I have given you EXPLICIT permission to do so. I spend hours, days, weeks, months and even years - on certain occasions - crafting each of my fics so to take them is to plagiarize a piece of my art, and I don't appreciate it.

ˊˎ- requests are open !

DISCLAIMER: please keep in mind, i have every right to not write your idea. its not that i don’t like you or your ideas, but sometimes they’re too specific or they aren’t something that is very clear and which raises a lot of questions or i’m really not comfortable writing for your prompt.

ˊˎ- general disclaimer !

I am a college student, and a biochemistry major with a biomedical engineering minor at a rigorous stem school so please realize that, yeah, you may have requested months ago, but chances are I'm still in the process of writing it. I've got 18-24 credits a semester of shit that I am not always good at and I work to pay for my schooling, so please realize my time is more limited than I would like it to be ! thank you for being patient with me <3

updated. july.30.2022

[battlekidx2]

Kipo Season 3 Thoughts and Review

Okay so I just finished binge watching Kipo season 3 and wow that was a ride. They really did save the best for last. I thought the second season was an improvement on the first and I think the third season outdid the second. There was just so much to love. It didn’t fix every problem I had with the first few seasons but it did a really good job at covering as many as it could. The conclusions that the show reached for its world and the individual characters was almost all satisfying across the board. Honestly I feel everyone should watch it and form their own opinion. 

It is a bit cheesy and very optimistic, but I think it’s the kind everyone could use right now. Kipo is a show filled with wonder and possibility and it’s exactly what I needed and I feel a lot of people could use considering everything. It deserves the hype it gets. Now to get into spoilers. Since it just dropped they’ll be under the cut.

Kipo season 3 was fantastic. I know I just said that up above, but I feel like only saying it once is an injustice. I want to start off with the characters since they’re what kept me coming back to the show. Without further ado here we go.

Characters

I think I’ll start off with the titular character, Kipo. I will say she was the character I had the most problems with coming out of the first two seasons, but that’s mostly because of how pronounced her role is so the issues I had were more at the forefront than for anyone else. They didn’t really fix my problems, but I felt they did a fairly good job addressing them. I found her to be a much more compelling lead this season. There was a lot more internal struggle with what she should do than any other season and her optimism was mostly very endearing and needed within the show and with everything that’s been going on in life. They had Kipo become frustrated, make mistakes, almost give up hope, and it felt earned when she came to the conclusion to give everyone a shot. I will say her optimism felt a bit much when she was directing it at Emilia, especially after it was revealed that Emilia killed her own brother to prevent human and mute cohabitation. But her final decision to free Emilia from the mute body was understandable and wholly Kipo, so I liked it. 

Now I want to talk about a duo I really wanted to interact and have screen time this season and was so pleased that they did: Wolf and Scarlemagne. I love both of these characters and thought they would have such great chemistry because of the similarities of their backstories. Both were betrayed by those they thought of as family and left to survive on their own in the mute eat mute world that the surface was. Their interactions this season just proved that I was right to be excited for it. Scarlemagne and Wolf somehow brought out the best in each other (and the worst but that was only for a little bit). It was nice to see them nudge each other in the right direction towards the end and come to have faith in Kipo’s vision for a better future despite their troubled past. That final talk they had before returning to prahm reflecting on their lives and how Kipo changed them was really heartfelt and just the quiet moment before the storm I needed.  “Things could have been so different if I’d stopped hating all humans for the mistakes of a few” and Wolf did the exact same thing with mutes. This line summed up their arcs, individual tragedy, and point of understanding and connection between them. It made the conclusions to their individual arcs that much more powerful. Wolf ends up getting the family that she never thought she could have after the wolves and Scarlemagne sacrifices himself to save his sister, Kipo. His death scene was so heartbreaking. He died in Lio, Song, and Kipo’s arms having gotten the chance to have his family one last time. And finally truly becoming Hugo once again. I don’t know if the found family trope has ever hit me as hard as it did with these two characters (it may be I’m just emotional since I just finished the season less than an hour ago). (as a Scarlemagne stan I do wish he had been able to live out the rest of his life with the Oak family though)

Side note: the king hugo leitmotif playing when Hugo died was so sad and perfect. 

I have a lot of thoughts for Wolf and Scarlemagne after this season. I don’t know which is my favorite character; they are both pretty phenomenal. Wolf was the mvp of season 1 and Scarlemagne was the mvp of season 2. I don’t know if anyone was surprised that Scarlemagne got redeemed this season. I know I wasn’t, but I found how they went about his redemption to be really interesting. It felt like a progression. I wish more time had been spent on it, but I felt that with the screen time it did have they did a good job. I felt his change of heart and with that conversation with Wolf I really did think he had fully come to regret his actions, acknowledge his flaws and wrongdoings, and resolved to do better. With Wolf she has been holding onto the past for so long that she doesn’t know how to let it go. The pain of her first family betraying her hasn’t gone away because she got a new one and has come to (mostly) reconcile her prejudice against mutes. It just became more muted and easier to ignore. Having her confront the wolf, Margot, who’s betrayal hurt her the most, was the first step towards being able to fully let go. Her finally shedding the wolf skin was the final step for her to unburden herself with the past pain and prejudice and putting on the purple and silver cloak for prahm was her letting herself be the hopeful child she was on the inside that Kipo had brought out (albeit still keeping some of the gruffness that she had before). I just love these two characters.

Benson was great this season. I felt they knew what to do with him to a better degree than in the first and second seasons. The story of how he first met Dave was unexpectedly heartwarming and highlights their importance to the series which I felt was a bit too understated in the first two seasons. (Dave was actually useful this season!) I was shocked that the history of Dave and his eventual meeting with Benson was such a unique and great commentary on the idea that violence only begets more violence. That talking things out, like he and Benson did, was what ended the centuries long conflict and ensured that they survived instead of taking each other out like everyone else before them did. It shows the pointlessness and destruction of cyclical violence in a way that many shows have failed to capture. Even much more serious shows that you would think would have less censorship to work around and thus be able to explain better. So often in shows they try to preach that violence isn’t the answer but so many cartoons fail to back up that lesson within their story. Kipo does back it up and more in this last season.

Going back to Benson. They let him play off of a lot of new characters and made him feel a lot more like family within the group. This is best shown when he and Dave tag along with Wolf and Margot to look after Wolf. They aren’t the best bodyguards but they clearly deeply care about Wolf and want her to be happy and supported. His romance with Troy was sweet and I really liked his Prahmposal and when Lio gave him advice on how to prahmpose (I really like dad Lio this season). Benson is just such a fun character and I’m glad a lot of the things I said I would like the show to do with him ended up coming true.

Emilia made for a good obstacle for the main characters to overcome. She wasn’t that interesting of a character though. I liked what they were going for with her in their attempts, I believe, to show the intergenerational aspect of prejudice through her and her father. I did think some things felt off with her. I just didn’t buy that Kipo should try to give her so many chances. When Song revealed what she did to her brother that sealed the deal and made Kipo saying she has to believe Emilia could change ring hollow to me as a story beat. Her belief in others had mostly worked out in her favor so far in the show, but Emilia was given no moment or slight glimpse to give the audience any indication she could change which makes it hard to feel invested in this plot point. I liked that they made Emilia hold her ground and never change because you can’t change everyone’s minds and to change Emilia’s mind Emilia would have to accept that killing her brother, who she loved, was wrong and that just isn’t a step I think she could make. I also think it’s important to show that not everyone can change. In a perfect world that could happen but the world isn’t perfect. I think Emilia was the perfect villain to show that. I still wasn’t a big fan of her character but I think she served her purpose in the show well.

I will say I’m a bit conflicted about this because, while I would like to see more sympathetic villains who don’t get redeemed, I also think that with the racism angle that the show was going for making Emilia unsympathetic worked well. She’s just a xenophobic person who is adamant about staying set in her ways regardless of the reality before her. This does have basis in reality, unfortunately. So I do like it for that. I’m really glad they didn’t give her a mutes killed my brother/family tragic backstory to “justify” her racism. Her racism is at no point justified which I appreciate. 

Plot

The plot of the third season had a big task in front of it. It needed to wrap up the world’s conflict, 2 centuries of mute human conflict, in 10 episodes. Which I was very iffy on whether or not it would be capable of doing. This show had 2 great seasons but the amount of stuff it had to wrap up had me a bit nervous. Those nerves were unfounded though. The third season actually came to a very satisfying conclusion for the world and I bought that the characters we saw were able to bring the conflict to a peaceful end (or as peaceful as it could be). There were a few things I was a bit disappointed in. Two things to be exact, the lack of the use of Song after the episode “Song remix” and the complete disappearance of the vaccine plot point. 

Song and Lio were supposed to create a vaccine to the cure. They even stole all the pieces they needed to make it and then it was never brought up again. I would have been fine with even just a line saying they were still working on it near the end or that they found it wasn’t possible, but it just isn’t brought up after they steal the supplies. It didn’t negatively impact the finale to me, it just felt weird considering they made such a big deal about it earlier in the season. I felt Song deserved more of a role after “song remix” because she had missed so much of her daughter’s life and her daughter seems to have adopted two siblings. It felt like a missed opportunity for family bonding between the group especially since Benson and Wolf have never (to our knowledge) had a loving mom. I love this show’s use of the found family trope so I really wanted to see this. Though Wolf cheering with Kipo saying “Go mom” was a highlight and adorable.

Conclusion

I really loved this show. Dreamworks may be my favorite animation company. They’ve done such a good job with their cartoons as of late and they’ve had a good track record with their recent cartoons with sticking the landing. Not all but most. Kipo is a show I will definitely return to from time to time. It’s just so optimistic and sometimes I think everyone can use the optimism and wonder that Kipo brings to the table. I’m sad to see this show go, it came and went within the same year, but it went out spectacularly. It was strong from start to finish. I had some qualms here and there but they never once deterred me from enjoying the show. I really think this show deserves more attention and praise than it gets. I hope more people decide to watch it because it deserves it.

side note: I love how they finally incorporated the age of wonderbeasts part of the title in the finale.

[battlestar-royco]

updated faq

Round 2! I tried to shorten the answers so as not to be repetitive, and I also added new FAQs for your convenience. My past self who wrote my first FAQ annoys me, and this one is more thorough anyway, so here you go. I still can’t believe you all actually interact with me enough that I have to make one of these.

Questions up here, answers under the cut.

anti sjm basics

1. why are you an anti?

2. why are you specifically anti SJM?

3. do you like anything about SJM’s books?

4. terminology and practices

5. why do you hold SJM to a higher standard than other authors?/why do you focus on criticizing this one woman more harshly than you do men?

6. did you see what xyz stan did?

7. are you an anti for non-SJM stuff?

best of (in my humble opinion)

diversity and sensitivity

8. I have a question about writing and/or how to portray xyz identity...

9. can you please tag...?

10. is it okay if I like [x author]/[y series] even if I know they’re problematic?

11. what are your suggestions for aspiring authors who want to write diversely?

personal

12. is it okay if I message you?

13. why don’t you post about books/shows/movies you actually like?

14. favorites?

15. book suggestions?

16. are you a writer/what are you writing/do you plan on publishing?

17. is it okay if I follow you on other social media?

18. fandom research

19. when did you start your blog?

20. how did you decide your url?

anti SJM basics

1. why are you an anti?

I love thinking critically about the media I consume. Though I wouldn’t say I’m particularly “anti” any text or author, some people classify any criticism as “anti.” To respect people in the main tags, I post in anti tags so they don’t have to see critical posts. Otherwise, I love talking about positive, neutral, and negative aspects of books.

2. why are you specifically anti SJM?

The Anti SJM Manifesto

What made you turn into an anti? x x

Rowan/Rowaelin: x x x

The fandom: x x x x x x

3. do you like anything about SJM’s books?

Yes. I like a lot of SJM’s ideas, but I don’t like how they’re executed at all. I highly enjoyed TAB, TOG-HOF, and the witch storyline of QOS. My favorite TOG characters are Manon, Chaol, Nehemia, and Sorscha. Honorable mention for Lysandra, Kaltain, and Asterin. My favorite ACOTAR characters are Nesta, Lucien, and Tarquin. Additional links: x x x x

If you want my positive thoughts on certain SJM characters, look up: “anti sjm: [character name]” and you’ll find them.

4. terminology and practices:

Anti SJM Glossary. Seeing as many of us have had bad experiences with stans and in one case, authors, we censor names so our posts stay in our own tags.

What is soap dick? From August 2018 x x.

Manongate? when KOA came out, Charlie Bowater’s promotional art (x) depicted Manon as Asian. Here’s more on why that’s a problematic and lazy decision on SJM and Bloomsbury’s part: x x.

5. why do you hold SJM to a higher standard than other authors?/why do you focus on criticizing this one woman more harshly than you do men?

SJM alone out of all the biggest YA authors has yet to make craft improvements or display a social awareness similar to what I’ve seen from her colleagues. I give all authors an equal chance, but SJM’s writing and behavior has significantly decreased in quality compared to other fantasy authors despite her books being lauded as complex and feminist works. However, I’m not perfect, so do feel welcome to send me an ask if you think I’m being unfair.

The anti SJM community is focused on women because we all mainly read women. Critiquing women doesn’t mean we are unaware, dismissive of, or silent about the issues in men’s work. The “anti” movements for the likes of GRRM do exist, but under a different name than “anti”–there are thousands of critical meta blogs, book/TV critics and reviewers, Youtubers, etc out there who discuss his flaws in depth. I also have lengthy anti GRRM, anti GOT, and anti ASOIAF tags. Finally, I personally find critiquing and discussing women’s work a lot more interesting, productive, and empowering than doing the same for men, especially because my blog’s focus is on the YA author/transformative fan community at large.

About Leigh Bardugo: x x x x x x x

About GRRM (and GOT): x x x x x x x

About Tolkien: I've only read The Hobbit and a third of Fellowship of the Ring, and I’ve only watched FotR, so I don’t say much about him at all.

6. did you see what xyz stan did?

Probably not, especially if what they did was off Tumblr. I don’t look at stan accounts unless someone informs me that my posts or I have come up in conversation on their blog. Any specific stan urls in asks will be redacted both for their privacy and my own well-being. Stans have doxxed, harassed, and discriminated against antis, including myself, so I’d rather save us all the trouble.

7. are you an anti for non-SJM stuff?

I most often talk about SJM’s books, but I’ve also been very critical of GOT/ASOIAF. Following GRRM, several other YA authors have appeared in positive, neutral, and critical lights. On the more critical side we have Cassandra Clare and JK Rowling, and a very little bit about Victoria Aveyard, John Green, Maggie Stiefvater, Stephenie Meyer, and Veronica Roth. Otherwise, I’ve talked about Susan Dennard, Rick Riordan, Leigh Bardugo, and Marie Rutkoski. Check out my YA critical tag for more. I’m also down to discuss franchises like Star Wars, Fantastic Beasts, MCU, etc, as well as TV shows. Basically anything big in genre fiction media, there’s a good chance I’ve read/watched it and I have opinions!

best of

anti SJM

Are the Illyrians MOC?

Moral Ambiguity Series

Anti Nessian

Lucien or Rhysand?

Chaol or Rowan?

misc.

why are period dramas like... that

White Feminism

a beginner’s guide to fandom racism

diversity and sensitivity

8. I have a question about writing and/or how to portray xyz identity...

First and foremost, check my “writing advice” and “writing advice: poc” tags to see if the question has already been answered.

I am black cis girl with a dual degree in women’s/gender studies and creative writing. I will best be able to answer questions regarding black characters, women, racial oppression and identity as a whole, and most questions about queer characters. There’s a chance I can provide a basic answer to questions about demographics outside of these, but I’ll most likely advise you to ask another blogger or seek out sensitivity readers.

9. can you please tag...?

Yes. Just send an ask and I’ll tag anything. I’ve turned off all Tumblr notifications for this account so I probably won’t see tag requests in comments unless you comment within a day or so of the post.

10. is it okay if I like [x author]/[y series] even if I know they’re problematic?

Absolutely. I’m not the liking-things police and I can’t control whether you like something or not. There’s no such thing as an unproblematic author or unproblematic series, so you just have to like what you like at your own discretion and with a critical eye. As long as you’re aware of the issues and not denying or ignoring them, maybe even seeking out other people whose opinions add to the conversation, you’re good. It’s exhausting to be 100% critical but harmful to be 100% uncritical, so you have to seek out critics you like and figure out how to maintain a dialogue with the text and/or the author. The balance is different for everyone but once you find it, it gets easier to keep up!

11. what are your suggestions for aspiring authors who want to write diversely?

Concepts to be aware of and tropes to avoid: male gaze, the Bechdel test, the Mako Mori test, the sexy lamp test, fridging, Orientalism, xenoface (called “the Gamora Phenomenon” on my blog), black best friend, Spicy Latina, Dragon Lady, bury your gays, disability narratives, queerbaiting.

What not to do when creating a culture.

My advice about writing POC.

Check out these blogs if you like: x x x.

Follow as diversely as possible. Follow multiple blogs, especially writing- or fandom-themed blogs, run by POC (especially women and LGBTQ+), bloggers from religiously marginalized groups, bloggers with disabilities, older bloggers, younger bloggers, international bloggers, plus size bloggers, etc. Everyone has different perspectives and opinions, so it’s best to read from multiple sources.

Magnify marginalized voices in conversations about diversity, and LISTEN to what they are telling you.

Read diversely! Read genre fiction written by marginalized people. Maybe even read some gender, queer, race, or disability theory if you like. I’m personally a fan of Audre Lorde, Anne McClintock, and Sara Ahmed, but I like a lot more.

Seek out multiple sensitivity readers for the specific identity you are trying to represent (ie if you are trying to write a Muslim woman, ask a Muslim woman to sensitivity read for you. Experiences are not interchangeable so don’t treat them as such).

Don’t let the research stop here. This is just the beginning. There are plenty of awesome and accessible resources out there if you want to know more. I started learning about this stuff on sites like Tumblr, Goodreads, and Youtube. The Goodreads review sections, especially for YA books, are so entertaining and full of commentators coming at texts with feminist, queer, and POC lenses if you look in the right spots. There are also podcasts and Youtube videos about feminism, history of queerbaiting, and such. Happy reading/listening/writing!

personal

12. is it okay if I message you?

If we’ve been mutuals and/or we’ve interacted for a while (at least a few weeks or so), absolutely. When it comes to questions about writing or diversity advice in WIPs, I prefer asks (off or on anon is fine; if you’d like to be off anon but answered privately, you can indicate that in the ask). That way, other people with similar questions can join the discussion and I’m less likely to repeat myself. That said, I’m not opposed to messages; I just get shy around people I don’t know :). Regardless of ask or message, please try to ask the full question as clearly as possible so I can answer it to my best ability. Generally, you can expect an answer to your message or ask within a few days to a week of sending.

If you’re looking for a fight and/or if you start using condescending, rude, or discriminatory language, you will be ignored.

13. why don’t you post about books/shows/movies you actually like?

I do! :)

14. favorites?

books: Harry Potter; The Hunger Games; Six of Crows; Percy Jackson; The Winner’s Trilogy; Angelfall; The Secret History; Othello; Jane Eyre; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe/The Magician’s Nephew; A Storm of Swords.

movies: Alien, Blade Runner 2049, Harry Potter, Wonder Woman, Black Panther, Annihilation, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Terminator 2, The Breakfast Club, The Lion King, Moonlight dir. Barry Jenkins, Sleeping Beauty, Mulan, Tangled.

tv series: Sense8, Battlestar Galactica (2004-2008), Black Mirror, The X Files, The 100, Westworld (season 1 only), Watchmen, Homeland (seasons 1-4 only), Orphan Black, Breaking Bad, The Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, New Girl, Fleabag.

15. book suggestions?

Book recs!

Maxine, did you read/watch...?

16. are you a writer/what are you writing/do you plan on publishing?

I hope to publish, yes! I write mostly YA fantasy, but I also love sci fi, crime drama, and certain elements of horror so I have works in or influenced by all of those genres. I want to get my foot in the YA fantasy door first and foremost :). Check out “polysorscha writes things” if you want to know more specifics.

17. is it okay if I follow you on other social media?

As of now I keep my blog disconnected from my personal life, so I don’t share my other socials but feel free to follow me over on my main blog @ripley-stark if you like! It’s just pretty gifs and photos of my favorite movies and shows, social justice, meta reblogs here and there, and rambling in the tags. Don’t feel like you have to follow if you don’t want to; I say a lot more on here.

That being said, I have given my Goodreads to a handful of people who ask, so if you want to track what I’m reading, private message me and I’ll send you the link. In the case that I share the link with you, please respect my privacy and do not repost or share the link anywhere else unless you see me share it on my blog publicly.

18. fandom research:

In March to May 2019, I conducted a survey on my blog in an attempt to gather information about fandom through a social justice–specifically, intersectional feminist–lens. Here are the results and my analysis of the survey x. The purpose for this data collection was to write my final undergraduate research paper in one of my two majors, women’s and gender studies (the other is creative writing!), which focused on diversity and inclusion in genre fiction media and fandom. The final paper is about 11k words. I haven’t publicly published it, but message me if you’re interested in reading it! I also plan on doing more similar surveys to gather information about what audiences want to see in future media, so if anyone is interested, please send messages, asks, comments etc about what YOU want to see and/or ideas about how we can spread the info to creators. This is much bigger than just me and I can’t do it without your help. I love hearing from diverse voices and amplifying them as much as I can. Everyone’s perspective is meaningful!

19. when did you start your blog?

No earlier than the end of April or beginning of May 2018.

20. how did you decide your url?

I wish the Celaena/Dorian/Chaol love triangle resolved in a polyamorous relationship, and that Nehemia and Sorscha were thriving. Seeing as I am black, Sorscha is one of two characters in T0G who represents me. Thus, polyamorous + Sorscha. :)

[royallaegis]

GUIDELINES.

Est. December 2019. Call me CARO, pronouns she/her or they/them. I’m well over legal age and work full-time for a living. English is not my first language — it’s Spanish.

This is a sideblog. Follows back from main blog @goldenornstein.

The character Velstadt the Royal Aegis, plus anything pertaining the Dark Souls series, are property of FromSoftware. I own nothing here, but my own writing and ideas.

First and foremost:  I encourage my writing partners to take all the time they need to reply, to drop threads and leave IMs/asks unanswered, if they feel like it.

I’M A SLOW ROLE PLAYER MYSELF WHO DROPS THINGS OFTEN AND FOR VARIOUS REASONS. In any case, we can always start new threads.

You can always send in random asks and memes, even if we haven’t interacted yet, or if we have other things going on.

This blog is selective, private and non-exclusive: I don’t always follow back, I’ll only interact with mutuals, I’ll role play with multiple versions of the same character without becoming ‘exclusive’ or ‘mains’ with anyone.

I absolutely LOVE AUs and crossovers! Always feel free to suggest that kind of interactions and plots.

If you’re going to send a message to start plotting, please present an idea or verse to work with — aka NOT just ‘wanna rp?’ or small talk.

I have a strong preference for plotted threads, but I will write improvised things too, including casual one liners.

I tend to drop most introduction and first meeting threads.

I won’t do any IM or Discord role playing, even though both channels are always available for plotting and random chatting, on ooc and ic things.

Character ≠ Writer aka the golden rule of role playing. I will not interact with people who over-identify with their muses, romanticize and/or condone their problematic aspects from a personal point of view, or just show any signs of blurred lines between OOC and IC.

I portrait Velstadt as an individual with great virtues, terrible flaws and lots of moral greyness in between. Nevertheless, I won’t accept interactions or plots that use him as a prompt to make other muses look sympathetic, righteous or powerful.

Role play is a two way street. Your muse shouldn’t be a support character for mine. My muse shouldn’t be a support character for yours. If there’s no mutual interest and development, then I’ll probably drop all interaction and unfollow.

Don’t god-mode, especially by forcing fanon or your own headcanon on my muse. When in doubt, just ask.

I like to keep my prose, formatting and graphics plain and simple, but I don’t care about what others do — so long as the text is legible.  Just a couple of basic things: please don’t reblog asks directly and don’t use large gifs when writing with me.

I’ll role play without icons, simply because I can’t really find a FC with enough resources.

Original Characters are more than welcome. However, I won’t acknowledge any OCs meant to be Velstadt’s blood relatives or lovers, unless there’s a plot beforehand.

This blog does feature plenty of potentially disturbing themes like horror, gore, fictional racism, mental illness and trauma, which will be tagged accordingly (e.g. horror cw).

Explicit sexual content will only happen in a highly selective fashion, always tagged as NSFW and never involving any writers under the age of 18.

I refuse to write any content associated to pedophilia. I won’t write explicit rape or dubious consent either.

I might consider writing abusive relationships and other similar topics, albeit in a limited fashion, and only IF  there’s a previously discussed plot, plus proper portrayal of those issues.

HIGHLY SELECTIVE ABOUT SHIPPING. I have exactly zero interest in writing romance just for the sake of it — there must be chemistry and a plot.

All potential romantic relationships take place in their own completely separated realities/verses, unless I explicitly agree to plot and play a particular ship in some other way — which isn’t something I’ll usually do. Hence, never get my muse involved in romantic dynamics you might have with other RP partners to force a love triangle, cheating or even polyships.

Platonic and non-romantic relationships, of any kind, are always welcome and highly encouraged.

[bi-dazai]

Hey! You! Yes, you!

Do you like fantasy stories? Of course you do. 

Do you enjoy stories of teenagers trying to deal with the typical emotional hardships of being a teenager while also handling a revolution that involves swords, magic, occasional gods chiming in to help, and the power of friendship and learning to be confident in yourself? 

And do you like the promise of not one but several endgame gay pairings? Fantasy gay pairings?! Of course you do!

Then my new online serial is for you!

Priyana is the story of three teenagers - Nik, Rada, and Kane - who find their “fate on fast forward” when the most annoying yet strangely likable character I’ve ever written cruel Prince Leander arrives in their small town. After the prince captures Amarandos (the man who raised the trio), burns their home down, and vows to destroy the escaped three kids, our trio find themselves thrust abruptly into the destiny which they thought they would be following much later on. Vowing to rescue Amarandos and reclaim the throne from Prince Leander and the evil King Olbert, they venture across the land of Priyana, learning about the true, hidden history of their country and their family, and making friends, enemies, and mending a scarred populace on the way. 

The first book, Soul, follows the trio as they attempt to recapture Amarandos and struggle with the strange new existence they have been thrown headfirst into. With nothing but each other, they must learn to work as a team and not just as three moody teenagers raised by the same man. They journey to the mountain-enshrouded city of Nahvsenn, where they encounter a passionate, well-established underground rebellion simply awaiting the moment to finally take their city back from the evil King Olbert’s reign. Could our trio be the herald of that moment?

Priyana takes strong inspiration from Avatar: The Last Airbender in terms of the exploration of themes, worldbuilding style, our main characters’ relationships with the history of the land, and character development. It is written by a bisexual non-binary with an adoration for fantasy, the written word, and using fiction to criticise the ills of the society we live in.

A recommended minimum reader age would be approximately 10-12 years old, as the work contains some death, minor violence, and minor strong language.

Priyana will be published as an online serial, with the first 4 chapters published on the 12th January, 2019, the 5th chapter published on the 19th January, and the rest of the 19 total chapters of Book One: Soul being published fortnightly (every two weeks) from the 2nd February. It will be available as a PDF with occasional sketches for the series on a Google Drive (I will post the link to the folder on my Twitter and on this blog each time it is updated) and as a text-only version in the Original Work tag on Archive Of Our Own.

Chapters range between 2000-10,000 words, so it will only take 10-20 minutes out of your day to read a chapter. Sweet! And even better - it’s totally free. That’s right. A cool fantasy story, easy to read, not to long and overbearing, for free! *Keanu Reeves voice* Whoa.

And good news! If you are just so hyped for this series that you find yourself at the edge of your seat in anticipation for mid-January, well guess what! The first chapter is currently available as a sneak-peek preview! Nice! 

Check out the first chapter here! It will only take you about 10-15 minutes to read, and even less time to reblog and share the news! Because this is the only form of advertising this thing has! 

Even more information available under the cut:

I’ve been working on this almost exclusively over the last two years. Everything is so insanely thought-out and I’m sure I must have gone over everything over a million times now. So to say this means a lot to me is an understatement.

Certain tropes in this story are criticisms and deconstructions of common fantasy tropes, particularly tropes rooted in misogyny, racism, and xenophobia. Certain character beats are familiar to character beats in other stories that I wasn’t entirely happy with - for example, in Book 2A, there’s a character beat in Rada’s arc which is remarkably similar to a character beat in Sakura’s (from Naruto) early episodes. However, I never liked how Sakura’s character change from that beat (hint: when her hair gets chopped off) was so minimal, and often she would be acting like she would when she was first introduced. Rada is probably the best example of me using different character beats and subtly implementing them in hers to, at least in my opinion, show would could be instead done with said character beats.

So yeah, this story is in essence, a lot to me. If you’ve read and shared the news, it means the world to me. Each person that reads it I am eternally thankful for. Each person that shares it and recommends it even more so. 

This isn’t my first major writing project - I’ve been writing long-form chapter books all throughout my teens, with my first chapter book having been written when I was 10 years old (sidenote - that one is a preteen mess in which I introduce vampires out of absolutely nowhere and include a wizard called Carrot-Eye). However, this is the first project I’ve written with the intent of being seen by eyes other than those in my close community of friends and family, and instead being published for those all over the world.

I struggled for a while with whether or not I would charge for this work. I’ve spent so much time and effort on it, and every day has been spent buried in Priyana, that it almost feels unfair to myself to release it for free. But as my first work, and as a poor person with few industry contacts and no industry contacts that could help me in this format, I realised it would be unwise for me to charge for it, and would make it accessible to other poor people like me. Free stories, yall!

That being said, if this project reaches a certain level of success, I’ll happily open up a Patreon, Ko-Fi and maybe a few other routes of donation. It’s my dream to be a full-time writer, and I’ve poured so much of my heart into this project already that I’m fully sure this is what I want to spend the rest of my life doing. I want to make people think with my stories, but I also want them to enjoy them and escape from real life. I want people to fall in love with my characters, to experience their emotions and to connect with my work. I hope I can do that for as many people as possible.

I’m going to now set some promises, as this series is going to be published for many years to come and my promised gay pairings are, as I mentioned, endgame, so they will be happening later on. So the following things, I promise here and now, to uphold in this series:

- there will be both a WLW and a MLM pairing with major characters

- there will be time spent exploring the dynamic and romance of said pairings

- there will be a trans girl  (hint, hint: sister girl) major character with a major character as her love interest

- there is a nonbinary character from the first chapter, who although starts as a villain, undergoes a long arc in which they eventually decide to redeem themselves on their own terms

- i promise not to demonise the gender, ethnicity, race, or customs of any minority or minority-coded characters

- at least two major characters are mixed race, with issues of race, immigration, generalisation, and xenophobia explored from the perspective of racial minorities

- issues such as the above are explored with a mindset of long, long hours and days of research into real life scholars of race, gender, sociology, etc, and especially their perspectives on fantasy and allegory

Thank you for reading this, and if you did, thank you for reading that chapter and sharing!

-Natalya

[analyzen]

Bringing in the usual Italian perspective (LOL).

TL;DR – During the years, our main fanfic archive has banned anything that antis find problematic. Problematic things keep existing and the ban actually makes it harder to avoid them.

In Italy, we have a website called EFP. It was created in 2001 and has been, since then, the go-to Italian website for amateur writing, be it fanfic, original fiction or even poetry.

It is also a highly regulated archive, with rules such as:

no RPF of Italian celebrities (because they might see it);

no explicit incest scenes;

no underage sex (no minor/adult sex scenes, no characters under the age of 14);

no explicit sadomasochism (but bondage is kinda okay);

no stories that are “excessively vulgar”;

… and so on. You can find some of the rules translated here. TL;DR – this website has banned basically everything that antis want to ban from AO3.

Were the guidelines always this strict? No.

In 2004, the website was open to anything and anyone.

Regarding the type of content that could be posted, the webmistress pointed out that anything was fair game “except for fanfics that are exceptionally vulgar… but I’m not too strict about it”. This sentence is actually extremely important because what exceptionally vulgar meant was never clarified until years later.

Still, in 2004, you could access explicit stories (tagged as “NC-17”) even if you were a minor because there was nothing in the code that stopped minors from reading said stories.

In fact, the guidelines at the time were extremely informal and pretty lax. Under the description of the ratings (G, PG, PG13, R, NC-17) there was a comment from the webmistress saying:

More than being a warning for people who might be too young to read certain things (other than the NC-17 rating ^^), these ratings are helpful to understand what type of fanfic you’ll be reading… far be it from me to give you a puritanical restriction from reading some fics just because the registry office says you’re too young. I actually think that with fanfic […] a kid can learn in a less traumatic way that there are also ugly things in this world.

Anyway… flashforward to 2006.

The guidelines become stricter and more formal. To access stories tagged as NC-17 you now have to have an account that specifically confirms you are an adult. You can lie about it, but that’s on you and if they discover you, they can ban and delete your account.

There’s also a rule saying that you can’t post anything that’s “prohibited by the laws of the State. That means no child pornography, no glorification of racism, etc.” And you still can’t post “texts that are exceptionally vulgar (which, for their content, could only be allowed on an adult-only website).” This basically meant straight up pornography, although that definition was also pretty hazy.

Actually, it was so hazy that the archive had various issues during the years, like this one time when people were debating if a (translation of a Harry Potter) fic that contained incest, rape and bestiality was too vulgar to be allowed on the site.

The replies are split between a) people who thought that the story was, sure, dark and hard to swallow, but it had the right warnings and wasn’t vulgar; and b) people who thought that the story was obscene, both because of the themes and the way it was written.

It came down to Group A telling Group B not to be a bigot, “this is f-i-c-t-i-o-n!”, and Group B telling Group A that bestiality and incest were clearly Bad Things, also because the readers found the story to be too similar to some disturbing true-crime things that had been happening in some Italian prisons, and so if you couldn’t see anything wrong with the fic, then you had some issues.

At which point the webmistress stepped in, said that the story wasn’t actually vulgar, but “for the sake of consistency, a story with incest, rape and bestiality definitely isn’t in line with the type of content that I believe can be hosted on this archive.”

It’s important to notice that, at the time, EFP didn’t ban fics with bestiality, rape and incest—only stories that were “exceptionally vulgar”. There was no clear definition of “exceptionally vulgar”, it went on a case-by-case basis and it depended on what the webmistress thought was okay or not.

One year later the guidelines updated once again. This time, the archive actually described what “exceptionally vulgar” meant by giving some examples:

Stories with bondage-sadomasochism/bestiality

Stories with descriptions of explicit incestuous sex scenes

Lemon/hentai stories with characters who are minors and adults that are a lot older than them

What happened there? A bunch of things:

It appears that someone kept reposting a fic called Hermione Sadomaso (TL: “Sadomasochistic Hermione”), even after the webmistress took it down. The person also used the wrong ratings, tagging the fic as G (instead of NC-17) for trolling purposes. This + other “sadomasochistic content” (probably whump mixed in with sexual and/or noncon scenes) brought the webmistress to ban sadomasochism as a whole, but only if described graphically. Mentions of non-graphic details are alright. (In the current guidelines, bondage is allowed if there is no explicit sadomasochism.)

Parents started complaining because their children were reading sexually explicit and transgressive stories online. It might also be interesting to notice that at some point the website had to start relying on ads to pay for website hosting.

In 2006, a new Italian law against child pornography became effective, which prompted the webmistress to ban fics with adult/minor relationships and sexually explicit scenes between minors under the age of 14.

It also appears that the incest stories were banned mostly because they were extremely popular in RPF fandoms (Tokyo Hotel, anyone?). Because the archive was becoming so popular and around the world there had been some cases of bloggers and website owners getting prosecuted for defamation while hosting these kind of stories, the webmistress decided ban incestuous content altogether. (It isn’t clear if these trials for defamation actually happened under these circumstances because no examples were given, but this is the specific explaination given by the webmistress on why she decided to ban incestuous content.)

So now we have this extremely huge archive—the most popular in Italy—which bans basically anything that’s even a bit transgressive and sexually explicit. What do people do?

They keep writing and posting said content without adding any warning.

That’s because 1) people never fucking read the guidelines and 2) when they read them and find them annoying, they just keep posting anyway. There’s also a third group of people who don’t have any other place to go, so they decide that breaking the rules is not that bad, especially if no one’s gonna report them anyway.

So avoiding disturbing content became so much more difficult because you’d click on a fic expecting it to be super vanilla—because that’s all that was allowed by the guidelines—and instead there you went, reading an untagged rapefic. Or an untagged lolicon fic. Or an untagged incest scene.

You could then send an email to the mods and get the story taken down, but how many people would stumble on it before then? I clearly remember a case that happened when EFP was at its peak, during the One Direction era, when someone posted an untagged NSFW fanfic with, like, a 6-years-old main character in the One Direction RPF section, which was CHOCK-FULL of young fans who’d read anything they could get their hands on. It all (obviously! and rightly so!) ended up in a general meltdown because so many people clicked on the fic before the webmistress took it down. (It also didn’t help that when someone found the fic they screenshotted it, shared it around, getting other people to read it to show just how bad that fic was. Which, you know. Why would you.)

So… getting back to the original question.

What would happen if antis actually managed to create an archive with strict rules?

The rules would be vague. Vague enough that anything that’s possibly disturbing can be taken down any time, without a warning, and without an explanation, making it basically impossibile to understand what “disturbing” even means, which brings to more people posting disturbing content because they don’t know what’s allowed or not…

… so rules would need to keep changing and adjusting to new content, which means they’d become stricter and stricter and stricter…

… but that wouldn’t stop people from posting “problematic” things without tagging them…

… which would then bring to people leaving the archive because at some point it just becomes unbearable, both as a creator and as a reader. Because, mind you, when the rules keep changing, sooner or later will come a rule that bans what you like. And then you get tired of the archive as a whole.

Keep in mind that EFP has lasted this long simply because there are no other Italian-only archives. In the early 2000s there were other smaller options, but they were so small that people would crosspost anyway. Until 2015 you’d either post on EFP or you needed to create your own community, which was complicated because a “small Italian community” means 10-20 people from wildly different fandoms who share a taste for something they can’t post on other archives. It simply isn’t enough to keep a community going for long.

Around 2013-2015, some Italian people started to move to AO3 and Wattpad. In 2018 EFP had become pretty much deserted compared to earlier years, with most people posting mostly (or also) on AO3 or Wattpad. But these websites also have their issues.

Wattpad is… Wattpad. People use it but they’re not happy about it.

AO3 is a predominantly English platform, which means that people either abandon Italian as a language and switch to reading and writing in English, or they just keep getting depressed because their Italian fanworks get buried under the waterfall of English fics.

So what happens is that EFP is still the most popular Italian hub for amateur writers, even if it has been functionally dead since ~2016.

People stay on there because they’re used to it and because they have no other place where they can find fans that speak the same language and share the same taste for fandoms, characters, and ships. When weighting the pros and cons, people often choose the desire for a community and give up on BDSM/incest/“problematic” stories—also because, again, the website is functionally dead so even if there are sadomasochistic/incestuous/“problematic” fics on there, who’s gonna know? Other fans who share the same taste and won’t tell the mods? The mod, singular, that keeps this sinking boat up by taking 3 months minimum to reply to content abuse reports?

English-speaking fans don’t have to give up on anything because AO3 exists and it’s possibly the most popular international fanfic archive. The moment a smaller archive becomes a little too small they can just go back to AO3—which they probably never abandoned anyway.

Which brings us to another thing. In this day and age, when we’re so used to having our fandom needs so centralized (on a website, like Twitter, or on an archive, like AO3) you wouldn’t really be able to attract fans to other platforms. Either fandom moves en masse after some fandom-traumatic event (like the Tumblr NSFW ban in 2018), or it doesn’t move at all. You might be able to create some communities here and there (there are some fandoms that have a small but lively hub on a non-Twitter, non-AO3 platform), but nothing big enough to rival AO3, especially not with strict guidelines that will change over time to become even stricter.

So people will keep on using AO3 like they’re doing now, because, really, how many antis have stopped using AO3? They don’t consider the content on AO3 vile enough for them to give up the convenience of being able to find fics that they’ll like without perusing 19 different archives and 23 different blogs.

And regarding minors reading NSFW works: you really can’t stop them unless you do something like Youtube did and have people punch in their IDs or give their credit card numbers, which I really don’t think is a good idea on an amateur writing archive.

Is there any precedence with a censored archive? I mean, censored-from-the-start since most of the major ones weren't intended. I'm super curious what'll happen if fantis did make an archive with super restricted rules (with many super active mods) and sat down and actually defined what is inappropriate, plus any logistics (How are you gonna age-restrict underage ships without it being a privacy nightmare? Underaged people are still gonna press 'continue' on a nsfw warning)

--

There have been shittons of archives with strict policies about Bad Content or about quality standards, up to and including ones where the mods read and edit every entry before allowing it to be posted.

What typically happens is that people either joke about how boring and samey their content is (Passion and Perfection and the like) or they're only active for a couple of years before fizzling due to insecure, bored, or irritated authors.

Archives that only have X ship or quality above Y or that don't allow kink Z have been the norm, not the exception.

AO3 started out as yet another few thousand users type of space...

Its lenient policies are probably why that transformed into it being a default space with literal millions of users.

[knightofbalance-13]

Actually...

http://dudeblade.tumblr.com/post/165589953048/lets-be-real-and-agree-on-something

No we are not agreeing to this.

RVVBY is an amalgam of multiple tropes, cliches, and concepts from other media that did it much better.

As we will soon see: The examples are either way too general, RWBY does too differently for a comparison or RWBY actually does it BETTER.

Faunus as a stand-in for minorities. X-Men did it first, did it better, and has better justification for it. Some mutants are dangerous, and have abilities that could level a building with little effort. The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants are just a separate branch of mutants that humans use to justify their discrimination, and sentinels are extermination bots. There’s literally “Mutant Camps” In the Days of Future Past movie that are analogous to concentration camps. Whilst being a mutant has since evolved into an analogy for being part of the LGBT+ community, it started as an allegory for racism. And it was much MUCH better at it. Last I checked, Inhumans are now the new racism allegory, and even then, they’re still a better analogy than faunus. The reason why both of these are all more effective is because they don’t replace all racial minorities by being their stand-in. There are African Mutant (Storm), Native American Mutants (Moonstar), and even biracial Mutants (Darwin). So, Mutants are a multi-cultural fictional race that acts as a stand-in for a minority group in the Marvel Universe. See, this is what happens when you have good writers who are open to criticism.

Except the racism is UNDERSTANDABLE in X-Men since mutants ARE more dangerous than humans and some of the (like Rogue) can’t control their powers and thus are a danger no matter how you slice it whereas the Fanaus aren’t any dangerous than humans because they don’t significant enough advantages to overcome the human dominance so it’s just like racism here in our world: Stupid and irrational. So you’re basically saying it’s more rational to hate an innocent group of animal people that people who can control the weather, kill on touch or mindfuck everyone. COngrats, you have shown you have a bias against RWBY so your opinions mean jack shit.

Final Fantasy did the idea of dust better. It was called Materia, and it had a better explanation as to how it’s applied. Much like dust, it’s mined. Unlike dust, it’s explicitly stated to be magical in nature rather than the vague explanation we got for dust. dust is also weird in the sense that it’s kinda elemental. Materia also has a simpler categorization by just giving it five subcategories. Dust has to be classified under fire, ice, gravity, electric, stone, whatever Yang’s standard buckshots are, and so much more. It’s starting to get to the point that I wouldn’t be surprised if they started to be more direct in their rip-off and make Summon Dust. And it’s hard to even argue this because Monty Oum (God Rest His Soul) is a Final Fantasy fanboy (See: Dead Fantasy), so there’s no doubt that there would be some FF references every now and then. But the idea of Dust is too similar to be a coincidence. Even the claim of how similar the show is to Advent Children is rather hard to see any other way. Advent Children had very little plot to it, but had spectacular action scenes - sound familiar?

Yeah, of course it’s a rip off here! ...And in Storm Hawks...and Kingdom Hearts...And Pokémon-

Almost like this is a COMMON TROPE. Can’t really call it a rip off when everyone is doing it. Almost like you don’t know how tropes work.  Also, you don’t mention how Final Fantasy does it better: you just say they do. Probably because FInal Fanatsy=Not RWBy ergo better.

Legend of Korra did the whole “Girl Power” thing better. Considering that they also managed to portray PTSD in a much more realistic way, and didn’t romanticize it like RVVBY did. Korra had hallucinations, was clearly sleep-deprived, and struggled to keep up with even a few non-benders because of the trauma. Sure, LoK had its own issues (Like trying to keep up with its predecessor), but it still managed to hold its own. What does RVVBY do? - only ONE on-screen nightmare, and only ONE on-screen panic attack. The worst part is that we didn’t even NEED it to be on-screen. Just show Yang not wanting to sleep, or her waking up from nightmares. Even offhandedly mentioning that she’s having nightmares would have been better than nothing. But we get that nothing. Because making Yang get back to doing badass fighting moves is more important than giving her a good recovery arc.

OH Ho ho ho ho!

This is a fucking GOLD MINE!

A. RWBY was never touted as a Girl Power show: It just had female protagonists. Men were just as capable as women and it was clear from the first episode so this comparison doesn’t even count.

B. Oh korra. The one with a protagonist who was one trait away from being a full blown Mary Sue who disobeyed orders, stole food, caused property damaged, nearly committed murder, committed police assault and resisting arrest who gets off t6eh hook and is treated as in the right for doing all that. And that’s just the first episode, shall I go on to explain how Korra essentially harassed a guy and acting like an obsessive stalker despite him saying that he has a girlfriend and then kisses him despite this, hurting his innocent brother and gets rewarded for it, or how Korra barely practices Air bending (the ONE element she doesn’t aut know) but can magically airbend without using airbending techniques and having her bending TAKEN AWAY. Or how about Korra flipping outa t Mako, May Lin trying to arrest Tenzien’s wife and wrecking Airbending Island for getting dumped and that one Psycho girlfriend Waterbender is all treated as humerous and okay? Or that Asami was just basically eye candy in the first and second seasons? Or how the one main female villain seen as redeemable is the one who refused orders, forcibly recruited people, took advantage of the spirits, tried to kill her fiancé, sent people who didn’t agree with her to “reprogramming” camps, threatens the lives of her subordinates and tried to kill an entire city. It wasn't Amon who was implied to have severe hatred against benders due to his dad’s abuse. It couldn’t even be the fucking Red Lotus, the most human villians in the Avatar franchise since ZUKO: It was the female earthbender whose actions numerous times mirrored fucking Hitler.

Bottom Line: Even without TRYING to be a Girl Power show, RWBY is a BETTER Girl Power show than Korra.

C. The PTSD arc is the ONE thing Korra has above RWBY and it SHOULD be better because Korra has more time, more experience, more money, more people and in a medium that is more forgiving than RWBY’s. And even then, it’s BARELY better in terms of actual writing because it tries portraying Korra’s PTSD as an outside force, uses her Avatar State self as the representation when it makes no sense, she gets over it by herself despite her lesson being not to lock other people out, it came back with no indication, uses Zaheer out of nowhere and brings up smaller events that never eluded to extend the arc. It could have been fixed so easily by just having an imaginary Zaheer attacking her with kora being hesitant of airbending. I fucking fixed and I’m an inexperienced fanfic writer. All RWBY needs to do to be better is acknowledge it again: Something VERY likely due to RT’s history.

So far: We have one example that is out right wrong, one example that is too broad to do anything and doesn’t show jack shit and one example that is so wrong it helps ME absolutely.

SO what’s next?

And since it probably wouldn’t be me if I didn’t include this, here’s the one that some people are probably waiting for:

So you’re outright acknowledging bias against RWBY and for Storm Hawks because Nostalgia huh? Fine, I’ll cut you down HERE too.

Storm Hawks did the small amount of habitable land that needs to be protected by various teams of heroes first and better. Energy attacks have better justification for their appearance, and the fact that both Crystals and Dust are both gemstones with elemental properties that need to be mined and are integral to powering weapons and vehicles. Both shows have amazing transforming weapons, teams made up of various people with different skills, and incredible action scenes. They even had a spectacular superpower that manifested in one of their main characters after they were put in a tough situation. See my chart below for more detail.

Sky Knights : Huntsmen/Huntresses

Crystals : Dust

Squadrons : Huntsman Teams.

Atmos : Remnant

Talons/Raptors/Murk Raiders/Beasts : Grimm/WF

The Binding : Silver Eyes

... (points to the Final Fantasy point above)

So it’s perfectly okay for Storm Hawks to “rip off” Final Fanatsy but RWBY is bad for doing it?

Because these are all elements from Final Fantasy.

Not to mention since you DON’T explain why Storm Hawks does it better, all I have to do is point to the fact that Storm Hawks is canceled early and RWBY is a worldwide phenomon. Storm Hawks is at 7.2  whereas RWBY is at 8.3 , Storm Hawks had more time, more experience, more money, more people and the backing of Cartoon Network where RWBY doesn’t.

Dudeblade, this is why you go unnoticed by the writers, why all of you in RWDE tag go unnoticed: you do ANYTHING to tear down the show, whether or not it’s true. That and you suck so bad, I can do a better job than you.

Here, let me:

Harry Potter does the “school for special people” better because the school stays in focus for most of the show where we grow more and more attached to the setting and characters there and since the enemy is gradually shown more and more: he gain slightly more and more fear in a very smooth and natural way. And since the books take time with the enemies, we can keep track of the numerous characters easily. All unlike RWBy

Kill La Kill does the Girl Power aspect of the show better as the main cast is female, the show is driven by females and each character has their own unique set of strengths and weakness along with flaws they must overcome and deal with. It also tackles the idea of women being objectified and encourages women to take pride in who and what they are, ignoring how society sees them and think ofr themselves. Again, unlike RWBY would be.

Dragon Ball does the “Writing by the seat of your pants” style better than RWBY because Akira Toriyama was used to writing tis way and thus had more experience and even had a talent for writing this way which also made the series more suspenseful. Once more, unlike the CRWBY.

When I can do your job better and in less time: Might want to rethink what you are doing.

[meansevika]

okay, correct me if i'm wrong on this, but what you're saying now is that fandom arguments aren't important because it's not a real issue? (i repeat, correct me if wrong. it's not my first language so i could get ur wording wrong). which is a bit idk i think it's importat to adress problems like these in fandom spaces. interacting with fandom is something i do in my freetime, it's a hobby, and just like everywhere else i would love a space where people are more aware of the things they do and say they wouldn't usually consider racist - until they are confronted with it.

and just like everywhere else people don't. or they don't listen to poc speaking out. belittling their experiences to something along "get over it", "its just a game/show/movie", "why does everything have to be about social justice now" or even going as far as saying people want to start race wars in something that's to other people apparently perfectly fine. (since people seem to think fandoms are free from racism.) which i assume you as a person of color are very much aware of.

and just like everywhere else white people tend do listen more to white people than non white people. which is something i'm not very happy about either, but i'm glad that there are white people speaking up at all and not just swiping it under the rug or pretending everything is fine like most people in fandoms do. there are already very little people (rightfully) critcising the game and it's fandom.

and since i've spoken about similar things in the past something just doesn't sit right with me when you say politicial issues are used to have a moral high ground in something like a "ship war". i don't see how racism equals a policital issue? could you explain that one to me? racism isn't political to me. racism is something that can be found in every single aspect of our lives. even in something as "small" as fandom or fandom arguments. i also don't see how i would gain a moral high ground when trying to make people aware of the reasons why they might be supporting one ship but refusing another ships right to exist. (i'm just using the ship example because this is what's been the main topic in the tags.) mostly because people won't listen to what one has to say anyway. they will try to defend - in this example - their ship and that they could never possibly be racist. i don't get anything out of this other than hate. most of the time. and it’s not even about this ship being better than that (which is what i think about when you use the words ship wars) it’s about calling out double standards and white favoritism.

these things might seem trivial to you but they are important to others and part of the reason i couldn't enjoy most fandoms. something i do for fun in my freetime. once again ruined by the treatment of certain characters, ships and dynamics. and/or by the silence of white people calling themselves allies but never talking about certain topics or reblogging/boosting posts by poc addressing those things.

i honestly don't care about which ship is the best or the healthiest or whatever. everyone should ship what they like and be happy with it. what i care about is that people realize that there's a reason why they are interacting with certain ships while spewing hate about others. that they might look at past ships or characters they supported or despised. that they look for patterns and might recognize that there is one - and that it’s not a good one. so for me personally this doesn’t seem like a “pissing contest” to gain whatever moral high ground (if we’re talking about the same posts). sure, i don’t know the intentions behind posts. i can never know. maybe it’s for personal gain. but i’m just glad this is something that has been adressed in this fandom at all. for me this is a topic that’s been long overdue.  the way people treat fictional characters and ships does have an effect and - at least for me - it’s not that easy to overlook.

also btw i'm the person who's sick of calling racism related discourse in the apex fandom drama :) and i'm very much not white or trying to be policitally correct :) (i mean i’m obviously trying to be politically correct but what i mean is that’s not the reason why i made that post) and i would very much like it if you would refrain from telling me i’m using racism to further any “drama” thanks :)

hi, i’m black and i think white favoritism and racism in this fandom are very much real and should be called out. don’t talk about “we” and people talking over “us” when there are clearly non-white people who say it’s racist, just because you don’t agree. what seems like unnecessary arguing to some might be reason enough for others to overthink their behaviour and sense patterns in the way they interact with media. which is partly what i’m hoping for when talking about things like this. and to my white and non-black apex followers: i’m glad you speak out about topics like this. (we know some people have a tendency to not listen to non white people, so using your voice is appreciated.)

[shancebigbang]

Welcome To The Shance Big Bang

The Shance Big Bang is a fandom event dedicated to celebrating the relationship between Shiro and Lance from Voltron Legendary Defender!

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a big bang? A Big Bang is a challenge focused on the collaboration between writers and artists where writers create fic and artists create art to go with those fics. It is a time when writers and artists come together and collaborate for a relatively short period of time, and at the end, all the works are posted in a big celebration of the artists and writers of the fandom! You’ve probably seen a few others around the fandom including the Voltron Big Bang, the Sheith Big Bang, and the Shiro Big Bang! Who’s running this event? Our current moderators are Mod O (Ze-roren) & Mod A (InterdictedKai). Depending how big this event gets, we may take on extra moderators! How do I sign up? Writer sign-ups will be open from April 28 - May 21. Artist sign-ups will be open from April 28 - May 28. Links to the google docs for sign-ups will be posted at http://shancebigbang.tumblr.com/signups. Beta reader & pinch hitter sign-ups will be included in the artist & writer sign-up forms but if for some reason you would like to ONLY sign up as a beta reader or pinch hitter, send us an ask! Can I sign up to make both art and fic? Certainly! The more the merrier! :) What is the minimum word count & art requirement? More on this below but the minimum word count is 8,000 words and the minimum art requirement is two finished pieces! Is there any specific theme? Shance! All that matters is that shance is the main ship. Fics can be of any rating, genre, or theme. We do require that you abide by the mandatory tags list. Is NSFW content okay? Yes! However, you can only create NSFW content for this event if you are over the age of 18. It doesn’t matter if your country has a lower age of consent. It is not a matter of whether an individual is mature for their age. It’s about the legality of the issue. This is not up for discussion. Attempting to submit NSFW content if you are under the age of 18 will result in a ban from this event as well as any future events hosted by the mods. If your work contains NSFW content, this content must be placed under a cut for your work to be reblogged to this blog. Are there any restrictions? Is (blank) content allowed? The Shance Big Bang is open to every theme, genre, & rating. We have decided to allow for it because as long as it is well-tagged and clearly states that it contains such material, no one will happen upon it accidentally, and no one will be forced to create or view it. Please read and abide by the mandatory tags list. Unfortunately, no matter how much we’d like to please everyone, there’s nothing we can do to accommodate everyone. We highly encourage all characters to be depicted as 18 or older if they engage in sexual contact but will allow characters depicted as 16 or older. If you’re unsure if something’s okay, feel free to ask! What we ARE prohibiting is: We will not allow bashing any other ships or characters. The intention of the bang is to create for a ship, not hate on any other. Glorification and normalization of sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, xenophobia, and any other discrimination with regard to sexuality, gender, race, religion, etc are also not allowed. Nor will we allow NSFW work involving characters depicted as below age 16. If your work contains NSFW content, this content must be placed under a cut for your work to be reblogged to this blog.

WRITERS

What is the minimum word count? Minimum word count is 8,000 words. There is no upper limit. You are allowed to collaborate or co-author with other writers, but for each collaborator, you need an additional 5,000 words minimum. (A story with two writers needs 13k, a story with three writers needs 18k, etc.) Can I use a WIP I’ve already started? You can! As long as it hasn’t been posted anywhere. WIP fics that have been posted already are NOT eligible. Are sequels allowed? Yes! Sequels of your own work are fine! Just include a link to the original fic in your author’s notes. Sequels to works by other authors must be discussed between you and that author and you must obtain their permission Can I write more than one fic? Of course! But each fic must meet the 8k minimum. Can I post previews on twitter/tumblr/etc? Sure! Feel free! But please don’t post anything too-revealing before your post date. Try to keep excerpts limited to 500 words or less. Do I need a beta? Yes, please get your fics read over by at least one other person prior to posting. If you need a beta reader, we’ll have a list of available betas you can contact. What happens if my fic doesn’t get claimed? We hope this won’t happen! But in the event of a fic not getting claimed, we will assign it to an artist who either hasn’t claimed a fic or who has claimed a fic of a similar genre/theme. My word count falls just under the minimum, can I still submit? Please try to reach the minimum word count of 8k. The goal of the minimum is to ensure that artists have enough content to create art from. That said, this word count can be slightly flexible. No one’s going to chew out your 7700 word piece, don’t worry!

ARTISTS

What kind of art is accepted? Traditional or digital art. Artwork should be completed to the best of your ability. If traditional, please scan or take a high-quality photo of your art. CamScanner is an app on both iOS & Android that can help you with this! How many pieces do I need to create? Artists are required to create at least two fully completed pieces for the fic they’re working with. They’re welcome to also create a banner or header for the fic but these do not count towards the two-piece minimum. How big should my piece be? All art created for this project should be at least 500px x 500px. The exception is if you’re making a banner or header for the fic. Banners and headers do not count towards the two-piece minimum. Can I post previews/WIPs on twitter/tumblr/etc? Sure! Feel free! But please don’t post anything too-revealing before your post date. Try to keep previews cropped!

EVERYONE

I’m a beginner Artist/Writer and don’t think I’m very talented, or not as talented as others, should I still sign up? YES! We’d love to have you! All artists and writers are welcome here! This isn’t about whether you have a lot of followers or if you’re “good”, this is about celebrating shance, Voltron: Legendary Defender, and the wonderful people of this fandom! How do claims & pairing work? Writers have until June 18th to submit their summary, an excerpt of their fic, & any applicable warnings. These summaries will be posted anonymously (ID’d by number). Artists will then choose their top 5-10 fic choices based on the summaries. Claims are first come, first serve. Pairings will be emailed after each artist has made their claims. If, for some unfortunate reason, all your choices were claimed previously, we will ask you to choose one that hasn’t been claimed yet. On June 28 we will be contacting all artists & writers to let them know who they’ll be working with!   What happens if there aren’t enough artists/writers to have equal pairings? As we won’t be capping signups, we may end up with an uneven number of artists and writers. If we have more writers than we have artists (unlikely), then artists (if they would like to) will be given the option to create for two fics. If we have more artists than writers, then some fics will just end up with two artists. What happens if I lose contact with my writer/artist? Please let us know as soon as possible and we will try to help contact them. If they don’t respond, artists will be assigned to another fic and writers will be assigned another artist or pinch-hitter. What if I need to drop out? We understand if things come up and you won’t be able to reach the deadline. Please let us (and your partner) know as soon as possible so that you can either get an extension or your partner can get reassigned. How will the check-ins work? We will be emailing all participants a link to a google form to fill out for each check-in. The aim of the check-ins is to make sure that pairings are still in contact, progress is being made, you’re still participating, word count, etc. Nothing too serious, but just to make sure we know what’s going on. How will posting work? Posting will begin on October 6 & go through October 15. All writer/artist pairs will be given a date to post so that each fic/art can get attention rather than posting all at once. Writers: post your works in their entirety to AO3 on the post date. For multi-chapter fics you may take up to ONE week from your post date to post all chapters (so if your post date is the 6th, your work must be completely posted by the 13th). Make a tumblr post (link to the art in your post) so that it can be reblogged here. Artists: please post your art on tumblr and link to the fic in your description, preferably with your writer’s fic summary. If your art is NSFW, please post a preview image only with the full piece either under a cut or linked to a separate post. Artists & Writers: Please tag your posts with “#shancebigbang” (no spaces) as one of the first five tags so that we can find and reblog them. You must also use any applicable tags from the mandatory tags list. Anonymity: If you’re not comfortable posting your piece on your tumblr account, we will be opening our submissions box during the posting period and are willing to post your work directly to the Shance Big Bang account. Other Sites: If you would like to post your art/fic on twitter too, please do so! Tag with #shancebigbang and we will reblog it to the Shance Big Bang twitter. Any other questions? Feel free to leave an ask here, tweet @shancebigbang on twitter, or email shancebigbang (at) gmail (dot) com if you have any other questions or concerns! We will update this FAQ routinely to avoid spamming the blog, so check it often!