#this management is clearly out of touch with the userbase

[what-breaks-my-heart]

My one year of ad-free browsing courtesy of a gift from anon has expired today.

I still remember the RAGE I had when staff chose to introduce blazed posts in our dash without consideration of the contents we choose not to see (tags, word filters) and after YEARS of curating our dash so we can live in peace on this circus of tumblr dot com.

And I remember my surprise when I received the gift, shielding me from the nonsense I was so mad about.

I want to subscribe but the fee being standardised across the globe and my currency (and our national mean and median salary) being low af means it is not affordable, especially when it only offers ad-free browsing with no other extra benefits.

I willingly pay for YouTube Premium because it offers much more than ad-free experience; the features have proven to be useful for me personally.

I have personally written to @support (in their feedback form) suggesting a two-tier subscription with base subscription offering only ad-free browsing at a lower fee and a premium subscription tier which offers a bit of extra benefits, e.g., one crab per month, and pricing the two tiers strategically so that users who can afford the premium tier would choose to pay more, but at the same time tapping into users from lower income/currency countries.

In order to figure out suitable fees for both tiers, targeted market survey is one tool to obtain meaningful feedback, and I would be more than willing to participate if @staff do perform such survey.

At the end of the day, any offering of paid services should be deemed as value for money, and who else is better to give input on what value is in this case if not us who are chronically on tumblr.

[onyourowndaisymae]

𝒃𝒍𝒐𝒈 𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒔𝒆𝒌𝒆𝒆𝒑𝒊𝒏𝒈 - 𝒖𝒑𝒅𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒔, 𝒏𝒆𝒘 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒎𝒆 & 𝒓𝒖𝒍𝒆𝒔, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒎𝒚 𝒖𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒅 𝒉𝒊𝒂𝒕𝒖𝒔

hello!

i'm alive. yay! it's certainly been a minute since i've posted anything substantial, and i'm here to rectify that. this post is long. very long. i talk about a lot here-- my absence, my thoughts on obey me nowadays, what i've experienced as a writer on this platform, and updates i'm making to the way this blog looks and runs.if you're interested in catching up but don't have the time or motivation to read all of this, feel free to scroll down to the closing remarks.

☆ 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐬 ☆

so, i will say this unintentional hiatus was caused by three things: my health, my shaky relationship with the obey me franchise, and the growing difficulties of participating in fandom. i'll address all three in that order.

★ 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡 - my health has been shaky practically all of my adult life. i'm getting better about managing it, but even now, being twenty two years old and unable to keep up with my peers is... so exhausting. on my worst days, i am stuck in bed and distracting myself from the pain. the american healthcare system is a doozy that gives me a headache, but just know that i'm working towards proper diagnoses and treatment as fast as i can. i know that pushing myself to write for the sake of a regular posting schedule is ridiculous, so i have no intentions to do that. i will roll with the punches of my shitty health and hope i don't get knock on my ass again, lol.

★ 𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐲 𝐦𝐞 - okay. hater time. i don't really like nightbringer.

i know! i know! hold your rotten tomatoes and let me make these stocks my soapbox for just a minute while i explain! i promise i'm not being a thoughtless critic!

i think the writing for the franchise has been slowly going down in quality for awhile. i'm never going to act like this is the best writing i've ever seen in a video game, but obviously season 1 of the og game was good enough to get us all hooked. the conflicts felt real, the relationships felt earned, and the lore was really interesting. season 2 of the og game has a special place in my heart. the franchise used to be romantic! dark! horny! complex! it feels like in recent months, the game has become so sanitized that it's alienating the same userbase that gave such an odd concept a chance in the first place. season 2 opened with an aphrodesiac plotline, and now we can hardly get a kiss from our love interests. i'm not saying everything needs to be graphic smut, but come on! it's a romance game, damnit! with as many competitors solmare has in the otome market right now, i don't know why they wouldn't be focusing on dynamic and interesting romance.

nightbringer itself is. whooo. a dual-edged sword. on one hand, it turned me into a solomon simp, and clearly i can't get enough of this man. it also had some really touching character moments. asmo's arc about falling and missing how things used to be was fantastic. satan's early development and issues bonding with his brothers were handled really well. but at the same time... these characters have also struggled with flat and rushed writing in this game. satan almost exclusively is just "cat guy with a temper" now. barbatos' character, while nice to finally have romantic storylines, has been butchered for the sake of making sure every romanceable character is marketable early on. characters are saying "i love you" ENTIRELY too fast. i get that this is not the og game and things will obviously be different in this timeline, but at the very least, i expect the writers to handle this stuff with care. i'm disappointed by how one-note everything feels now.

also, while i'm up here on my soapbox, i will also say: i think the events are abysmal nowadays. fucking hell. i am disappointed every time i click on a story portion and read three lines before the screen fades out and it's over! the events used to be low-stakes, interesting ways to explore the characters, but now it's just. disappointing. i think something similar has happened to the devilgrams and the romance that used to be in them, although it's nowhere near as bad.

for all of my bitching and moaning, i still clearly like this game franchise. i'm still going to write for it. but i think it's important to discuss these failings as a community. it helps people feel less alone when their passion begins to wane for something they once loved for seemingly no reason. maybe we can prevent the series from falling apart before its bitter end. it does not make you a "bad fan" to be able to critique something you love-- it means you love it enough to know when it's not at its best.

★ 𝐟𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐨𝐦 - at some point, i found i got really intimidated by posting on my own blog. i began to psych myself out with every post, every like, every thing i got excited about. "is this good enough? do i want people to see this?" it's one thing to want to put your best foot forward, but another entirely to try to make every single thing you post perfect in an ill-fated attempt to fend of criticism from yourself of others. it's why i never took up art or music to any serious degree-- why put so much effort into something that's doomed to fail?

and then came the worry about notes and reblogs and followers. fandom should never be a numbers game, and for a lot of people it isn't. but it became a legitimate worry of mine that people would be disappointed if i didn't put out something with universal appeal, and thus, i'd be disappointed myself that i didn't live up to some unspoken expectation. i wanted to start posting for a new fandom, but then i became really worried people would feel "cheated" for following me when they expected one thing and got another.

obviously, this is not a healthy mindset. i needed to take a step back.

how did i resolve this? why didn't i just quit? well, for starters, i took some time to remember why i started posting. i have been writing fanfiction all of my life, usually shared with only a singular person and obsessed about until all of the dopamine was wrung dry from it. bringing it online was a deliberate choice. at first, it was because i was desperate for content for a small fandom (collar x malice, my beloved!) and thought "if nobody's gonna post this, i will!". but then i got into obey me, a much bigger fandom. through posting, i found a larger community of people who loved this piece of media just as fervently as i did. so many people of amazing talents dedicating their time and effort into expressing their love for this hobby. as i did the same, i began to gain a small following. one of my series blew up and gained me praise from some of my absolute favorite people in the fandom-- now, they're my friends who i adore. i began to grow proud of my writing. i'd never been proud like that before. posting on tumblr has proven to me that i'm capable of stepping out of my comfort zone and take the risk to do something, even if i'll fail. that is something i am so thankful for and can never replace.

i won't pretend fandom doesn't have its faults. every time i log on, i can scroll long enough to find something that absolutely exhausts me. labors of love are, at the end of the day, still labor, and work without appreciation is demoralizing. fandom is run by passion, but when there's a drought of people willing to put themselves out there it becomes hard to invest your energy into.

i don't have a perfect solution for this. all i know is that i can also scroll long enough to find a piece of writing or art so breathtaking that it invigorates my creative spirit. or i'll check my notifications and find a comment or reblog that absolutely makes my day. and isn't that worth sticking around a bit longer?

in the future, i'll try to be better about announcing my breaks and also just... pacing myself better. sometimes it'll be a bit until you hear from me. i hope that's okay. know i'll never log off for good without an explanation. i'd like to keep posting my silly little stories for a long time.

☆ 𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐠 𝐮𝐩𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 ☆

jesus. that previous section was waaaaay too long. okay. time to lock in.

★ i have a new theme! i used to have a sort of vague space-y theme, but i'm committing to the stars. do you like them? i hope so :3

★ i'm gonna get a bit weirder with the content. part of what has inspired me to keep writing is people coming up with the most off-the-wall, random, interesting ideas that i come back to consistently. that will include some dark content and the themes surrounding it like violence, horror, etc. things here will ALWAYS be tagged as thoroughly as i can. if you're not interested in reading that, no worries! hopefully something else i've written will catch your eye. (and obviously, minors, do not interact with this content. you shouldn't be in here-- my "byf" page has indicated this page is 18+ since the beginning).

★ as a general rule, i've decided that i'm no longer going to take requests. i love the enthusiasm and hearing people's ideas, but ultimately, i never end up doing them. instead, my ask box is always open for post suggestions, conversations, etc. i just don't want the sort of obligation that requests come with hanging out in the background anymore. this is, however, subject to change for special events, like that trick or treat event i did in the past and the fics for gaza event i'm doing currently, so stay tuned!

★ ... despite my in-depth obey me ramblings above, this is a multi-fandom page, lol. i will forever and always give my flowers to collar x malice. i am interested in posting occasional fics here for other fandoms in the general otome genre, so keep an eye out for those.

★ the above rule has been broken by my beloved, twisted wonderland. remember above where i mentioned wanting to post about a new fandom? yeah, it's this one. it became too much of an obsession. the new blog is centered around making night raven college an actual college, as well as just other twst content as well. the username is @daisystwistedgarden. give it a follow if you like that content! i probably won't discuss it much here, as i want the writing to stand on its own, but the pages have very similar layouts. that's me on a sideblog, don't worry :)

★ the masterlists are getting an entire overhaul and will now be organized by character. i procrastinated the hell out of these-- make overhauling the masterlists reason 3.5 for the hiatus. i will queue those up to post overnight sometime this week, so expect those sometime soon.

☆ 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 + 𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐬 ☆

if you're here, i want to say thank you. this blog, which originally started on a whim, has really done a lot for me. i love writing (even if i hate all the boring administrative parts of running a blog) and the fact that you people spare the time to read my silly little posts is insane to me. while i was gone, we hit the 2k follower mark (and the 2.1k follower mark, too!) and i'm just. baffled. thank you.

i'm back, i'm ready to write, and i'm excited to see where this takes me. give me a couple of days to fully replace all the old posts with new ones and make everything look right, but after that, i'll be posting again like normal. if you're interested in my twisted wonderland content, follow @daisystwistedgarden, and if you want to support my writing and gaza at the same time, consider donating to my "sponsor a WIP" page here.

once again, thank you for reading, for liking, for reblogging, for following, for hanging out in my ask box-- all of it. it means the world to me that i get to enjoy this slice of the internet with such wonderful people.

talk soon. (for real this time). xx