#we gave up bc she hates water and we weren't getting anywhere

[quicquam-dot-com]

ah but consider this: the outdoor dog residue

if you've ever pet more than a few dogs you'd Know what dog residue is

[itscuppicakes]

This is something I put together bc haha toxic parents go brrrr

Donnie X Reader: Gaslighting parents

TW: emotionally abusive parents, vent, cursing

You sat on your bed, writing whatever thinks came into your mind. Your trash can halfway full of crumbled up papers with run on sentences and imperfect writings.

"You're just looking for things to be mad about!"

Those words flooded your mind, like waves from the oceans trying to fit into a single water bottle.

You always felt like you were overreacting over something that hurt you, but this was different.

You don't know if it was because you've been visiting your sister a lot more, or maybe it's the trama that took away that innocent thought that your mother is always right, making you realize that your feels are vaild.

You were talking to your mom about a character from a story that you liked, and pulling a joke about how you where falling for characters that are not anywhere near your type.

"You DO know that they're fictional, right?" Those words fell out of her mouth and into your ears, and it felt horrible.

Your mother always asked this question when you talked about the characters you admired, and this was the last straw.

"Yes, mom. I promise you, I'm not crazy," I chuckled awkwardly, trying to play it off. That didn't go so well.

"I never said that! Don't put words in my mouth, little girl."

You hated when she called you that, acting like she's always in the right. She's the good guy.

'God f*cking damnit,' You thought.

"Well Mom, that kinda hurt my feelings."

The woman scoffed, "Okay." She uttered, continuing to play her game on her cellphone.

You look over at your stepfather mom's husband, and he chuckled. 'Enjoying the show, A-hole?'

You stood up and headed to your bedroom to blow of some steam in peace. You weren't in the mood today.

"I love you." Those guilt tripping words stung like a bee, but the bee would be paradise compared to this.

"You too." You forced the words out of your mouth and they fell face flat onto the carpet.

"Are you mad at me now?" She asked in a snarky manner. You turned around, and looked at her.

"WELL, Mom. Yes I am, I'm not gonna lie."

"Ugh, you're just looking for things to be mad about!"

"Okay, mom. Whatever." You walked to your bedroom upstair and closed the door.

You grabbed your phone and texted your purple-wearing-turtle boyfriend. Your fingers scattered across the keyboard, trying to put together words that don't come across as rude.

He responded quickly, as usual.

"Ofc. Want me to pick you up?"

"Yes, please."

"Okay,, I'll be there in exactly 8 minutes and 23 seconds."

"Thanks, Dee. Love you, see you in a few💜"

"You too, Babe."

You tried to act as subtle as possible, trying not to make him worry, but Donnie knew something was up.

8 minutes and 23 seconds after you texted him, you heard a knock on your window. You opened it and saw your boyfriend standing on the fire escape with a hoodie on and his hands in his kangaroo pocket.

Snow was everywhere from the snow storm New York had the night before. The cool air was creeping into your bedroom, sending chills down your spine.

"You called?" You sighed. "Hi, Babe," you mumbled as you get your laptop from it's charging port and stuffed it in your dufflebag, which was full of clothes for the night and tomorrow.

"You wanna talk about it or want to wait until we get to the lair?"

You paused for a second and continued packing. "Just get me the f*ck away from this hellhole."

"Okay." Donnie knew when to push and when to not push, and you cussing and face red gave him the idea of what not to do.

He kisses your head to comfort you, grabbed your hand and helped you out of the window so you won't fall.

A few minutes have passed and he had his arm around your shoulders as you two walked the back strets of the city. You played with his digits, lost in thought.

"Did you eat before I got you?" "..Didn't want to down there." "Okay, we'll order something from somewhere and take it home. It's my turn to get dinner anyways."

"I want to never go back there.."

"I know, Babe."

Donnie knew about your situation at home. All of the Mad Dogs did. They really hated your parents for it.

You are the sweetest person and you never want to hurt others that didn't hurt you. But oh god, you counted the days until you could move in with April in the apartment you two are saving up for.

Your boyfriend has been taking you away from your apartment more and more, and it hurts him to see you like this.

"She tried to gaslight me again."

"Why does that not surprise me? What did she say?"

You sighed, recalling the argument. After you tell him, he rubs your small hand that's in his.

"So you were just making friendly conversation and when she said something that offended you, she got mad at you for telling her your feelings?"

"Yep." "She's the crazy person." "What else is new?"

"I'm so f*cking tired of all this bullsh*t, Donnie. I'm so stressed because I have exams tomorrow, and the past two weeks have drained me. I'm tired, I have bags under my eyes and I'm not eating properly. Hell, I'll be lucky if I get a glass of water in me."

He hated seeing you like this. He wanted to help you, but he can't just tell your parents off. He's a turtle and they don't even know that you a boyfriend.

"Have you called your sister?" "She said I can come over next week." "Good."

Once you two ordered the food for everyone, you started to walk in the sewers.

"Hey, Y/n?" "Hm," you hummed as you eat the mcflurry Donnie and you are sharing. "Do you know one of the things I love about you," He asked as he ate a fry covered in ice cream at the end. "Don't get sappy with me, Purple." "Shut up, I'm giving you a compliment." He said in his monotone voice, ignoring your annoyance. "It's that you keep fighting through this. You go through the bullsh*t they put you through eveyday and yet you're still here. You're a fighter."

You blushed and looked at you turtle boyfriend. "I do that because you and the guys are there for me. And plus the day I move out, I plan on giving my mom and her husband an earful." Donnie chuckled.

He lifted your chin and kissed you. He never really kissed you in public place, let alone the entrance of the lair.

He didn't care if his brothers saw. You needed it.

"I love you, Babe." "Love you too, Dee."

[sol1056]

Do you think they couldn't make other characters queer cause of copyright? As far as my knowledge goes (correct me if i'm wrong bc I'm confused) Shiro belongs to the first itineration of Voltron, Go Lion! and Koplars are the owners of the American version. The post-s8 tea on Twitter said they weren't given permission of changing last names, what if was the same with sexualities? Koplar's Shiro, Sven was coupled with Romelle but I think Go Lion's Shiro didn't have anyone, so it was an easy pick?

That’s not really the way copyright works. 

Shiro belongs to DreamWorks, full stop, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. The same goes for Allura, Pidge, Hunk, Keith, Lance, Coran, Kolivan, Krolia, Zarkon, Lotor, Haggar/Honerva, and any other iteration of the characters as they are presented in DreamWork’s version. 

Note: I’m not saying that Shiro wasn’t a character in GoLion. I’m saying that the Shiro-of-GoLion is a character copyrighted by Toei Animation; Shiro-of-VLD is a character copyrighted by DreamWorks; Shiro of… well, any other iteration would be copyrighted by whomever created that iteration. 

It’s a complicated and heavily-legislated area of the law, but here’s the core idea boiled down into a single statement: your creation is copyrighted the instant you “fix it in a tangible medium of expression”.   

That is, you cannot copyright an idea; you can only copyright a distinct implementation. Furthermore, copyright is always owned — automatically upon creation — by the person or company who did the work of setting that idea into its concrete state. 

Behind the cut: copyrighting characters, withholding character information, cultural hot buttons, and where do we go from here. 

note #1: there is one exception, known as “work-for-hire,” where employees create something on behalf of an employer. This must known beforehand and made explicit via some kind of agreement. If you read the fine print, there’ll be a work-for-hire clause in most employee or contractor agreements.

note #2: yes, this does mean you could create a mecha series where the robots are all big lions, or a mecha series where animal-based mecha combine. It would probably end up in court anyway ‘cause companies get prickly about protecting their IPs, but afaik the court’s decision would hinge on whether your implementation is different enough.

(this is why I scoff so much at the EPs being so open about where they steal ideas from: there’s a reason writers talk about filing off the serial numbers. it’s not because we don’t want you to think we get ideas from everywhere. it’s because distinct is also a necessary ingredient for plausible deniability of plagiarism.) 

copyrighting characters

The ‘no last name’ claims are frankly a lot of hot air. 

First, you cannot copyright a character name; you can only copyright the specific and fully-developed character as a whole. (A Meg Murry who’s a South Asian marathon runner? Not a violation of L’Engle.) You could trademark a character name, but only if that name appears in the title; frex, Indiana Jones was able to be trademarked because his name is part of a series of works that all begin with “Indiana Jones.” 

WEP could trademark Voltron (as the mecha’s name), but doesn’t look like WEP chose to do so. Recent research seems to indicate WEP actually embraces and supports non-media products (that is, things that are obviously not their adaptation-of-an-anime) using the name, possibly on the theory this wide usage increases the name’s recognition and cultural cachet.

Second, consider Devil’s Due Publishing (DDP), which gave every character a full name, new biography, age, height, and family history. It retains its copyright over those characters, but only as whole characters. You could make your Keith Kogane an orphan in his mid-20s who’s distinctly anti-social, and you’d probably be fine, because that description is still more of a stereotype than a distinct/unique character. 

To quote the legal encyclopedia:

Judge Learned Hand of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit established the standard for character protection in a case called Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp., 45 F.2d 119 (2d Cir. 1930), when he stated that, “the less developed the characters, the less they can be copyrighted; that is the penalty an author must bear for marking them too indistinctly.”

For example, alien characters stranded on Earth is a popular and recurring theme as portrayed in My Favorite Martian, Starman, Alien Nation, Transformers, District 9, Predators, and The Man Who Fell to Earth. The idea of a stranded alien character, without embellishment, is not protectable.

[…] once a stranded alien character acquires more distinctive features or aspects—for example, a big-headed, long-necked alien with a glowing finger who murmurs “Phone home”—it becomes distinct enough to merit protection and its owners can prevent others from using the character’s image and expression.

If you make your misanthropic orphan named Keith also a former Marine, and an expert in hand-to-hand combat, and grieving a dead fiancee… He’s no longer a stereotype, but a character with a unique combination of features. DDP probably would have grounds to send you a cease-and-desist. 

However, if you say Keith Kogane is a lonely kid from Texas with an alien mom and a fireman dad, who’s the best damn pilot of his generation, and is generally awkward and whose silence hides a whip-smart intellect… again, a unique combination that fleshes out generic ‘Keith’ into a very specific and distinct Keith. Who is not, it should be noted, a carbon-copy of DDP’s Keith.

And the real nail in the coffin: if you’re going to argue that it’s a copyright violation to use Keith’s or Lance’s or Hunk’s last names, then why wouldn’t the same apply to using their first names? Or using names like Daibazaal, Sincline, Lotor, Honerva, Haggar, Alfor, Yurak, etc. Pretty sure ‘Zarkon’ isn’t a name you see everyday. I mean, it’s not, say, ‘Bob.’ 

withholding information

I’ve seen staff from another DW project say they can’t specify character ages until marketing decides. Which is… truly bizarre. If DW really is having marketing make such creative decisions, it’s not just putting the cart before the horse, it’s putting the cart in the jewelry store and the horse in the attic. 

If marketing or PR is anywhere in the mix, perhaps that’s because someone with social media savvy has realized topics like ethnicity and age will bring out the vitriolic teeny meanies of the Fandom Purity Police Brigade. Thing is, that doesn’t hold water, either: Trollhunters gave us ages and grade-in-school.

There could be another layer, too. The EPs I saw in those earliest interviews clearly had little firsthand experience with fandom, and seemed startled to hear fans actually care about those details. Two years of their interviews, and I have the strong sense they don’t like losing what they see as a battle of wills, no matter who their opponent is. Fandom cries out for surnames? Fandom will never get it. Fandom likes this couple over that one? Fandom is heading for severe disappointment. And so on. 

That’s ignoring the praise the EPs enjoyed for fandom’s conflation of a Korean-American VA and a Korean studio’s aesthetics, to see Keith himself as non-white. The EPs got representation points, and didn’t have to do a thing; the fandom did it for them. Why mess with that?

But no, copyright has nothing to do with that. 

cultural hot buttons

Sexuality, gender, and ethnicity are three places that a franchisee could run into problems, because these are hot buttons in the US. If the franchise owner feels a particular tangible form (this specific character in this specific iteration) violates the franchise’s ‘family-friendly’ aspect of their brand… I’d bet the contract between the parties does give the franchise owner some right of refusal or revision. 

Set aside what you think of VLD’s beginning, middle, or end. For all LM’s other faults, that sketch she did so long ago highlights all three: gender (Pidge), race (Keith and Allura), and sexuality (Shiro). We may’ve had to wait for an unfortunately tacked-on epilogue to get explicit confirmation*, but in the end, VLD was a significant break from previous Voltron iterations. 

Where, exactly, is anyone getting the impression that WEP is so terribly upset about its princess no longer being white, one of its pilots no longer being male, or another pilot no longer being straight? Whatever Bob Koplar might think of VLD’s end, his statement on the day of S8′s release made clear WEP is eager to continue their partnership with DW. 

Sounds to me like WEP is okay with DW’s creative and cultural approach. Otherwise, why go back for more? 

* edited to clarify, per @inklingdancer‘s tag

moving right along

It ultimately doesn’t matter what a previous iteration did. So long as DW’s creation is fully its own, copyright is neither barrier nor impetus to providing (or withholding) any information about that creation. 

What DW creates, DW owns. Which means DW is free to tell us last names, middle names, heights, ages, family history, race, gender, sexuality, love interest, even most hated food or favorite color — or nothing at all.