#vaguing about twt discourse again ^-^

[bisexualwintermoon]

“obi-wan was the best father the twins had” does bail organa mean nothing to you????

[ki-flor]

the truth is that the tag has become toxic overall and if it keeps going more ppl just gonna start blocking each other or fighting or having the same fight-discussions over and over again without any merit, ppl vague-ing each other and just starting the same discourse without any change. byler tumblr has started to become worse each day even if its still not as worse as the twt byler.

Literally. Like people talk about about vague posts like "well I didn't mention anyone" yeah but people can assume it's about them being shaded by you. That's why it's called shade it's not explicitly stated. All this is easily settled in a private message I think but other people react differently. It's starting to be clear that there's people here who don't like certain blogs or the other and it's a very obvious divide because well they aren't very subtle about it really. So what's really the truth for some of them?

I don't care what others say, think or do in their private blogs as long as the fiasco doesn't spill into the tag. Which the tag has been guilty of today.

[aemiron-main]

You’re aware that finalboysbyers does not, at all, ship HenWill? They’re an anti and they blocked me because I ship them. And the Twitter account you think is then is not them at all. It’s my mutual who has another Tumblr account. Just leave us alone. Just because you have beef with a Tumblr user who doesn’t even like HenWill doesn’t mean you can just go stalk us when we didn’t do anything. We’re just living in our bubbles shipping calmly in our corner and now there’s drama over nothing…

Are you sure that’s not their twitter, anon? I didn’t make that post, as I’ve only recently been made aware of their twt, but looking through it, the evidence is certainly stacked against them.

It’s funny to me that you don’t actually name the twitter account in question, and instead, just say “the twitter account you think is them,” and it’s funny because until, like, TODAY, in a reply & not even in a proper post, I haven’t named the twitter account in question- and the fact that you didn’t name it either tells me that this ask is a load of shit and that you’re more than likely finalboybyers/someone close to them who’s trying to cover their ass but can only use “the twitter account you think is them” because you don’t know what twitter account I think it is.

And if the account in question doesn’t belong to finalb*ybyers, then why did the twt account block me the other day right after I started having discourse with FBB? Despite me never having mentioned the twitter account by name at that point, nor having ever interacted with it on twt (and it blocked both my art account and my st account)- if that twt is just your innocent bystander friend, then why’d they suddenly go out of their way to block me (somebody who would be a random stranger to them) once I started mentioning FBB’s twitter? Is it all just a Big Coincidence??

It’s your mutual who has another tumblr account huh, anon?? Did you meet them the same way that you met your Girlfriend Who Goes To Another School? Like, cmon, you can’t name the twt account in question or the supposed other tumblr account, and I’m supposed to take you seriously?

Also, STALKING??? Again, this whole thing reads poorly like FBB or one of their buddies trying to cover for them, because they’ve been constantly accusing me of stalking when in reality, I only found out that FBB’s tumblr even existed because they were shittalking me/bitching about my posts/stalking me. They’d shittalked me repeatedly & constantly vagued my posts by the time I even found out they existed- so how does that make me the stalker?

At the end of the day, anon, I just want to be left alone. Like, I genuinely don’t have any desire or energy to start drama with henwill shippers, and the henwill shipping was only brought up because it’s a.) imo, a testament of them not understanding Henry’s character and b.) the fact that they were accusing me and James of being weird/embarrassing for posting Edward theories, and yet they’re out here posting extra-weird stuff on twt. Hell, I wouldnt have even known about their henwill stuff/their twt if a mutual hadnt mentioned it to me.

And hell, I don’t even have any desire to continue having issues with finalboybyers. I literally just want them to leave me alone, which is what I’ve said repeatedly. They’ve been the one constantly shittalking and stalking and insulting me, and hell, it’s their blog they can do what they want, but it’s not like I was the one that started conflict with them, THEY started it with ME/like I said, my ideal would be for them to simply stop with the absolutely constant hateposting about me & stop spreading outright lies about me.

Again, quit acting like I’m out here on some witchhunt for henwill shippers (as much as I don’t like henwill, I tend to Mind My Business/not go around chasing random people down for it because I just don’t have that time or energy) because the reality is that I just want this FBB person to a.) leave me alone and b.) quit being a hypocrite. I didn’t start anything with them, they had SUCH an issue with my posts before I even knew they existed & seemingly have been stalking me ever since they found my page.

Literally like. As long as finalboybyers starts leaving me alone, I’ll leave them alone. Hell, I havent even argued back with them NEARLY as much as they’ve bitched about me. Like. I straight up just want them to leave me alone, I didn’t have a damn thing to say about them until they started shittalking me.

[viralarcadian]

i saw Discourse on twt about the new wow patch and people being mad about night elves again

all im gonna say is that it feels like no one at blizzard at any point even in vanilla really knew what they wanted to do w night elves in the present of the game. they'd make all sorts of cool as hell lore about them but as far as the game went theyve always been kind of treated weird.

they started out as a wombo combo dark elf/wood elf race to act as a counterpoint to the already existing high elves, but then the dark elf stuff (the nasty, violent parts) got filed down in wow for reasons i don't know and im p sure most of the vanilla writers don't even remember bc it was nearly 20 years ago. and. idk it feels like there's been an internal struggle to appease both the people who knew them from the RTS and people who only ever knew them from wow, and it didn't always work.

and like. yeah it feels like someone or multiple someones on the writing team has it very specifically out for the night elves because of that and the whole war of thorns things and ive even seen names being thrown around as to who it is, but ultimately we just. don't know why certain narrative decisions were made beyond vague "setting up for future expacs" unless someone with that specific inside knowledge actually says why, and there might be a bunch of reasons why they can't do that.

[thesingingrevolution]

your uh post about the debuts being celebrated, who was that about? if you don't mind me asking, who's uh debut wasn't/isn't being celebrated?

no it’s okay you can ask ! i usually leave it vague when i’m kinda mad i feel like it’s become a habit 😭

also im sorry it took forever for me to get back to you but i wanted to answer you properly and also my phone decided it wanted to die so i wasn’t able to answer earlier :(((

my post is about winwin from nct! (he’s my fav i’m so protective over him hhhhhhhhh)

idk how familiar you are with nct or the mess that it is lol but basically one of its subunits debuted on july 7th, 2016 (7 years ago today) and winwin was one of the original 7 members. his first group is called nct 127 and the 127 represents the longitude of seoul, but there’s also a theory/cute little thing saying that it also represents the number of members and how they were added:

7 + 2 + 1 = 10.

he was kind of phased out/removed from the group at the end of 2018, and there was never any announcement saying he left officially so the group has 10 members on paper but only 9 active members

a lot of fans have accepted he probably isn't coming back :( but the issue is the group got more popular after he left so to a lot of people he isn't super important especially cause solo/single unit stanning is really common in this fandom. also because he was neglected by the company he never really had a lot of lines/center parts/screen time so it's easier to "forget/ignore" him as horrible as it sounds :(

and it's unfortunate but a lot of people don't treat him well, and what baffles me is that he wasn't removed cause he did something wrong ;-; most of the time people dont like past members cause they were removed for problematic/illegal behavior but that's not the reason why (the reason is mostly political, since he is chinese and went to promote in the chinese unit wayv starting in jan. 2019, and to my understanding china occasionally has kpop bans it's easier to get around them if none of the members are in an explicitly kpop group such as nct 127. this is a whole complicated issue in itself and there's some discourse on twt rn about it (read the qrts if you want but be ready for drama lol))

a lot of his fans and wayv stans are much happier with how he is now, because he really opened up as a person and grew as an artist following his departure from the group. he was definitely limited before due to the neglect and also cause he occasionally got boxed in as being the cute guy everyone likes and dotes on but never really an artist or even person in his own right. also he struggled with korean sometimes so he got to express himself much better when surrounded by his chinese bandmates

(though it is really important to note that people push a narrative that he hated being in nct 127 and didn't really love the members which i think is very untrue, you can tell he really worked hard and enjoyed their music, he notably has a strong bond with many people in the group)

i love him in nct 127 and i think he was a very special addition to the group, i would welcome him back anytime <3 but i am happy to see him where he is now, more successful than ever before.

but here is the issue:

since most 127 stans see the group as 9, they celebrate the debut of nct 127 and its 9 active members (which is kinda ironic cause winwin debuted on 160707 but most of the active lineup (literally everyone except yuta and haechan) did not but i digress). due to the nature of nct, he debuted again in 2018 (nct u) and in 2019 (wayv). but his first debut, the day he became an idol, is july 7th, 2016. and what hurts is because when people celebrate the debut of the current 9 member group, they overlook the debut of an original member of the group. which is why later yesterday night i also praised a big fanacc for posting ot10 pics and videos. i dont mind people wanting the focus on the 9 active members more, but i think its weird to call youself a fan of the group or an nctzen and ignore the debut of a member so blatantly :( there are random journalists who were posting articles but someone who claims to be ot20 or ot22 or ot23 or ot25 ot ot26 or whatever u people are this week to not say anything is kind of weird. and it's also why i dont like this other big fanacc because they post throwbacks but always ignore him, how can you be a throwback acc and not post a PAST member ;-; like i said if he was horrible and dishonorably discharged (lol) from the group its a dif story but this is just ridiculous.

anyway i hope that going forward we can love all members of nct and celebrate all of them <3

[hunxi-after-hours]

Hunxi ive a question please. Re: your twt book vaguing post tags-using diacritcs for transliterated Chinese names is bad. i fully accept that as you said its Othering and for sure we need to not do that. But like for they help give an idea of pronunciation so im wondering if theres something else i should be doing for that now....like how exactly should i work out how things should sound instead??

hey anon! sorry, should clarify — I'm not against the use of diacritics to denote pronunciation of Mandarin characters at all! I was specifically whinging about the use of diacritics for a Chinese name in an English novel that never otherwise 1) brought up any other Chinese names or 2) used diacritics or any other foreign language markers/scripts elsewhere in the (checks notes) 300+ pages despite its ostensibly "international" scope (I mean there was some French in there but there are so many English loanwords from French that a ç really doesn't count okay)

my particular beef with the use of diacritics to denote names in Chinese emerges wholly from the context I usually see it in: predominantly, a text where the language surrounding the transliterated diacritics is uncritically in English. it's like. So why are you putting diacritics on the obviously Chinese name? What authenticity do you think it lends you? Who are you performing it for? Not a native Chinese speaker, that's for sure — for starters, most native Chinese speakers don't bother with diacritics in script (in fact, much of fan/internet culture deliberately leans on the ambiguity of meaning by using homophonously interchangeable words, or the pinyin without any sort of identifying markers beyond just context). secondly, diacritics are plain annoying to type, so most bilingual speakers I've seen who want to denote tone just place a number after the pinyin, like 妈 ma1 麻 ma2 马 ma3 骂 ma4

and heck, I spent a few years in the Anglophone side of Sinology, and it's not even academic standard to use diacritics when rendering the pinyin of relevant Chinese characters, so like. what is a dark academia fantasy novel that otherwise never brings up anything remotely Chinese trying to prove with its usage of diacritics, beyond accidentally but undeniably participating in the ongoing practice of othering Chinese language, culture, and bodies?

because I feel like it must be said, I have nothing against AO3's tagging system that occasionally uses diacritics in character names/tags on Chinese-language fandoms. those diacritics are there and remain there for reasons beyond what I'm complaining about in this post, including but not limited to site infrastructure and fandom linguistic drift. this post is NOT about that particular corner of AO3 discourse, and please don't take it as such

I guess I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to engage with Chinese as a language and Chinese-ness as a nebulous element in English-language fiction and fanwork. for example, we can look at fandom's increasing vocabulary of untranslated, transliterated Chinese terms. people often leave honorifics like 宗主 zongzhu / sect leader or 公子 gongzi / young master untranslated now, which was most certainly not the case, hm, two years ago. heck, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I had a direct hand in increasing the proliferation of casual untranslated/transliterated Chinese in Anglophone fandom. at the same time, I do wonder about the motives of style and when/why certain terms are chosen to remain untranslated. for me, it's always been a matter of language and rhythm — again, I watch all of these shows in Chinese with Chinese subs, so quite frankly I don't even know what an English translation should sound like until I scribble one out. the sounds and rhythms of the language are so fundamental to how I engage with these texts that I occasionally find myself writing fic or dialogue or even meta bilingually, to get the cadence and tone of what I'm trying to say right in my head, before I go back and re-translate those words, phrases, even entire sentences into English

this is not to say that the rhythms and sounds of voice and language are unimportant to the viewer who isn't fluent in Chinese — they certainly are, which is precisely why watching these shows can be such a powerful language-learning supplement. but the fact remains that a Chinese-fluent viewer engages with the linguistic fabric of these texts in a different manner than a non-fluent viewer. this isn't a flex, or judgment, or a bid for superiority — merely a critical acknowledgement of a difference in perspectives

where it gets really interesting and thorny, though, is the production of non-Chinese fanwork for a Chinese text. I'm thinking primarily of the points brought up in this phenomenally thoughtful meta on chinoiserie and international MXTX fan production that I'll never forgive for beating me to the punch of using chinoiserie as a theoretical framework for engaging with contemporary Chinese media BUT I'm getting distracted. these are the lines that feel particularly relevant:

... as we talk about the structure of english-language fandom, what does it mean to create chinese cultural products without chinese people?

as white people take ownership over their versions of stories, do we lose something? what narratives about engagement with cnovels might exist outside of the form of classic fandom?

and of course, the line that haunts my most liminal, linguistically-porous hours:

at what point does mxtx fic cease to be chinese?

neither I nor the author of this meta intend for our posts to be call-outs for Anglophone fandom, but both of us are definitely interested in how and why Anglophone creators engage with the essentially Chinese elements of these texts. I think about the many months during which people asked me to come up with personal names, courtesy names, titles, alternate names for at least half the cast of CQL. it was, I concede, fun at first — like a scavenger hunt, a logic puzzle, and trivia rolled into one. how could I leverage my proficiency in language and paltry knowledge of literature (and somewhat better knowledge of literary databases on the internet) to scheme my way into a richly-textured name based on a specific set of circumstances laid down by an anonymous ask in my inbox? but as time went on, the whole process felt more tedious and exploitative than anything, so I stopped doing it. even now, I still take emotional/psychic damage from whenever someone, even a friend, especially a friend, asks me to help them with Chinese naming. if your fanfiction is written in English, and is intended for an English-speaking audience, what does it matter if this title or courtesy name or personal name has an actual, translated equivalent in Chinese? how and why has this name-based ornamentalism become the unspoken standard for a nebulous kind of 'authenticity' in Anglophone fanfiction?

perhaps it is because language, with our electronic dictionaries and language-learning apps and the ever-present Google Translate, often ends up becoming the most accessible aspect of Chineseness — easier to look up a word or several than it is to try and track down a Real Live Chinese Person who can answer questions about cultural norms and etiquettes, histories and values. at the same time, when a writer’s research begins and ends at this superficial level, I can’t help but read it as tokenization, as ornamentalism, a way of telegraphing an authenticity that nevertheless feels cheap and flimsy in my hands

and that’s another crucial aspect of it — in my hands. I, as a person who operates at the particular nexus of privileges, experiences, and expertise that I do, have particular standards. as a reader, I cannot be mollified or hoodwinked by a cursory paragraph generalizing the principles of “Eastern thought” (I’m back to vagueing this book again), because I know this shit and I absolutely will be the reader to point out the fact that this erases the plethora and diversity of the manifold schools of Chinese thought alone, which doesn’t even get into Japanese philosophy or the mind-bending acrobatics of Buddhist reception, and this paragraph leaned on the most basic, essentialized, Orientalized understanding of a singular principle of something that one might be able to identify as Daoism, if all one knew about Daoism was the yin-yang symbol. what I’m TRYING to say in this already overlong post is that I recognize that I am a single, subjective person with extremely personal preferences, and I hardly believe that my preferences should be generalized outwards into fandom norms or cultural practices. I mean, it’d be neat if they were, but I don’t pretend I’m infallible enough for that to occur unproblematically. I just think that we could all stand to think about the complex crosscurrents of modernity and history, (neo)imperialism and (post/de)colonialism, language and engagement, fandom and fan production, ornamentalism and Orientalism

I've wandered very, very far afield from where this post started, which was vagueing a book that has little to nothing to do with cnovel/cdrama fandom, but tl;dr anon there's absolutely nothing wrong with diacritics in language learning, I just get real touchy when I suspect the usage of diacritics as an exoticized linguistic ornament in Anglophone texts

[benzeneteen]

ok heres my take on 2021 mcr predictions

frank gets cancelled on twt for liking the misfits

everyone forgets about it for a month and then he gets cancelled again for joining cameo

ray drops a hair care line

gerard grows his beard out and dyes it rainbow. it sparks discussion on gerard’s lgbt labels. he mostly ignores it but posts some vague instagram caption implying that he uses one label or another. insanity ensues

mikey wears full glam during one show on the tour and never again. he makes no further comment on it

mcr does an interview together but they act like they aren’t actually a band and just introduce themselves as if they were being interviewed for their solo projects

franks ep gets delayed a month but he drops merch for it anyway. capitalism discourse ensues

bexless is revealed to actually be a member of mcr’s stage crew from back in revenge era