#we will make a poll if people are interested!

[questions-about-blorbos]

This request was sent to us and we made a poll in response to it. Send any Blorbo-related question you want to our inbox and we’ll make a poll on which people can vote with their own Blorbos in minds

[iamfuckingsorry]

Hi again everyone! I've been meaning to get back to this and make a more comprehensive summary of the results, but life is kinda meh at the moment, so while I read every single note on this post when the poll was still running I haven't had the energy to actually sit down and summarize the results. I also realized basically the moment I posted this poll that the options are not that good - as clearly shown by the 7.8% in the "other/more nuance" category, comprising some 40% of all the non-English answers. In fact it doesn't even cover all the options for the languages I speak myself! But oh well, it is what it is.

Below is an attempt at summarizing all the comments this post got in one place, with a basic explanation of the linguistic context of each language. I am not a linguist by any means and while I'm vaguely familiar with many European languages by the virtue of speaking languages from several different language groups, I did also make guesses and assumptions and short google searches, so please please do correct me if anything I've written is blatantly incorrect. I am also not familiar with what kind of language non-binary/agender people choose to in basically any country other than the one I currently live in (and to some extent in English, I guess), so again apologies for any inaccuracies and feel free to correct me. And yes, I've taken the liberty to comment on some of the translator's choices, be warned.

With that out of the way, here we go. Ordered by language groups, ish:

-Swedish: uses "hen" - a gender neutral pronoun used exclusively for people and never for things, approximately equivalent to singular they in English. As far as I'm aware it's not quite a traditional pronoun, but also not quite a neopronoun - it was first suggested in the 60s, took off in the early 00s, and was officially codified in 2015, but is not longer that widely used (yay transphobia). For context, Swedish has two grammatical genders but they're common and neuter (so both "gender neutral", kinda), not masculine and feminine. Other than that Swedish isn't a very gendered language, so there's no issues with verb forms etc. Choosing a pronoun exclusively associated with people instead of one of the "it" forms is an interesting choice.

-Danish: Danish is grammatically extremely similar to Swedish, down to the common and neuter grammatical genders and non-gendered verb forms. Danish does also have the gender-neutral pronoun "hen", but it's not used nearly as often as in Swedish. In the translation the translator instead chose to use "den", which is the "it" form for common gender nouns. This is the perfect choice imho.

-Polish: uses "ono/jego" - as far as I'm aware this is a kind of relatively new usage of traditional language forms to convey being outside the gender binary. Polish has 3 main grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) for nouns, normally uses he/she when referring to people, and importantly also changes the forms of verbs depending on the (real or grammatical) gender of the speaker/subject, which makes it hard af to speak ungendered. "Ono" is the neuter pronoun and roughly equivalent to "it", and is normally mainly used to refer to objects. Because of this, the first person verb forms ("I did", "I said" etc) are not traditionally used for this grammatical gender. Many Polish non-binary people however choose to use these forms when speaking about themselves. With regards to ono/jego specifically, some of the words look the same for neuter and masculine forms, and ono/jego enby people (including mb in this translation) use these forms. Some non-binary Polish speakers apparently choose to replace the word forms where masculine and neuter forms are the same with specifically feminine forms instead, and these people would not use ono/jeho as their pronouns but ono/jej. Some people in the comments felt like this wasn't the best choice since the only people using this system are people intentionally choosing to make a statement/choosing to take extra steps to remove themselves from the binary, and as a speaker of a different but similar Slavic language I kinda agree.

-Czech: masculine pronouns etc, used the same way you'd refer to a human man, not the way you'd refer to a masculine-gender object. Czech works basically the same as Polish grammatically, so unfortunately it's basically impossible to find a better option that also reads naturally to your average reader and this is the easy way out. As much as it pains me to say this, I do think this makes the reading experience for an average reader (especially one who hasn't read the original) much better than choosing to use "it" consistently - but of course, it does lose a part of what makes mb so interesting.

-Russian: treated basically the same way as in Czech according to what I was able to find. Though apparently ART's feminine in Russian...

-Portuguese: mostly defaults to masculine pronouns since the main noun used for mb, equivalent to "bot", is masculine. Portuguese has masculine and feminine nouns, so "i am your secunit" would use the feminine word "secunit", but they mostly seem to use masculine nouns for mb. Afaik there's no non-gendered "it" in Portuguese, there's different "it" versions for masculine and feminine nouns.

-Spanish: similar to Portuguese from what I can tell.

-Italian: analogous to Portuguese and Spanish, but the default word for mb is grammatically feminine, so mb's mostly referred to using feminine pronouns/adjectives.

-French: uses the gender-neutral neopronoun "iel" as mb's pronoun. For context, French works similarly to Portuguese etc when it comes to grammatical genders. They still have gendered adjectives and I do now know how exactly that works if using gender-neutral pronouns/language - might need to do more digging because I wanna know if they default to masculine adjective forms or if there's a neo gender-neutral version of that too. Murderbot is also translated as "AssaSynth" which is absolutely brilliant and I think y'all need to know about this.

-German: German has three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and some more complicated grammar, but in general the solution is similar to Portuguese/Spanish/Italian - pronouns depend on the noun of choice. Both "unit" (feminine) and "bot" (masculine) are used.

-Japanese: Japanese is a fairly ungendered language in the sense that the word forms generally change based on other status signifiers than pure gender. The translator apparently made up a new pronoun used specifically for mb (and also another one for three). I know very little about Japanese beyond what little I remember from my teens as a weeb, so I'll just leave some links here.

-Turkish: an inherently ungendered language, so mb just uses the same words as everyone else.

So I've recently realized that murderbot's been translated into my native language and it's apparently a he in the translation (which admittedly makes sense, because it's a heavily gendered language and 1. gender-neutral language doesn't really exist in general and 2. "bot" and all the related words - I believe they use "droid" for mb in the translation - are grammatically masculine).

It made me curious how it's been handled in other translations though!

*e.g. being referred to by multiple gendered nouns/pronouns depending on the context, like both "bot" (masculine) and "machine" (feminine).

[patience-knowledge-focus]

Statistics in Discord

I've wanted to write this point for a little while because numbers are my jam, but recently, I've struggled to speak and write and needed help from fellow system members. And I didn't want to put them through the misery, so this post is late, but I like how it turned out.

In the last few weeks, I ran three polls in the system-centric server where I spend much of my time. The results were interesting enough that I wanted to share them (anonymously) with the syscourse/sysconversation community.

A little bit about the server first: it's a server for all systems, with little focus on origin and a strong social component. People there like chatting, gaming, and come from various places around the world.

Here are the server's top five system roles in order of popularity: hosts, littles, caregivers, protectors, and persecutors. Notably, people with created headmates were less likely to vibe with these roles.

When asked about the kinds of headmates people had, the diversity of answers was pleasantly stunning. Most systems had humans and human adjacent members, but almost everyone also reported having deities of some kind. Supernatural beings and therians also received numerous votes. Variety seems to be the normal here rather than an exception.

Finally, we asked about the origins of system members, only to discover that most systems had members of at least three different origins (as defined by the poll). The two most common were trauma and neurodivergence in their many forms. Daydreaming and creating one's fellow headmates came in close second.

One notable result about origins was that they make terrible predictors of a system's struggles and challenges, and tell you nothing about what a system might need to thrive.

These weren't scientific polls by any means, but the data itself was fascinating and spoke to the sheer variety of system experiences and understanding.

And it seems our brain wiring was created from copper sold by Ea-Nasir.

[milfsmashorpass]

It’s really disrespectful to have Lilith Clawthorne in a poll like this. She is canonically aromantic and asexual with no interest in romance or sex at all.

ok.

first: don't know the show, don't know the character. but yay aroace rep, i support! super valid, makes me happy as an aspec person myself.

second: that does not mean people can't be attracted to her. let's not even talk about that a lot of people use smash-or-pass polls as a popularity contest and treat the options more like "like" and "don't like" - but even if they want to "smash" her in the sexual sense, that's ok. people are allowed to have one-sided attraction. people are allowed to have sexual thoughts about people or characters (because, we are talking about a fictional character here) that would not reciprocate that.

and you are allowed to not like that! that's what the block button is for, and i encourage you to use it. curate your own tumblr experience and all that.

i'm not going to debate the general ethics of blogs like this. you can find it weird, or disrespectful, or gross. ok 🤷 and if you, personally, ever find a poll about yourself here, you can of course message me and ask me to take it down, no question. (fictional characters don't have that option btw, they don't get their feelings hurt by this)

the poll stays up.

[beannary]

HELLO I AM THINKING OF MAKING TLP MERCH!!!!

Hi there! I've been wanting to try my hand at making keychains for a while now so here we go! Here are three different designs that I've come up with for potential tlp keychains.

[diamondkat]

The poll ends with 46.9% of Vox fans also loving Valentino. This number might have been lower if I had tagged it correctly from the start. A point was made by@staticmothhell a few hours into the post that by tagging only staticmoth and none of the other Vox ships, I might not reach the full target sample. Adding other ships saw the number of people who liked both Vox and Valentino immediately begin to decline and drop by about 11%. Yet it can be said that very few Vox fans actually hate Valentino and this is something that I don't think would have changed even if I added all the necessary tags.

I want to say thank you to everyone who participated and left comments on this post. It gave me a lot to think about.

@minimosquitogirl along with a few others pointed out how SA made it harder for people to like Valentino as it tends to hit harder for most people. However, it was @redladydeath's tag that really made me think about how Velvette and Vox's evil doesn't register in the same way for most people. Velevette might help with making the love potion but we don't see her personally use it and she might be verbally abusive to her staff but it is followed by a report of Valentino literally ripping one of her staff members apart. Vox is an obvious stalker who likes to mind-control people and helps enable Valentino but one of the main people he targets is Alastor. His behaviour towards Alastor would likely raise red flags with anyone else but Alastor makes him look ineffectual and harmless. Valentino, on the other hand, has been seen on screen physically and sexually abusing Angel Dust who is completely powerless against him. This makes his evil more real to people than the others. My stance on the matter remains the same as @eggcats who agrees that hating Valentino fans while liking the other Vees just feels ridiculous.

However, it turns out that even those who hate Valentino like @terminallyuncapricious have the understanding that harassment is not acceptable. They also shared some interesting points about their experiences with the matter.

@diffidentphantom was an absolute delight for changing things up by liking Valentino more than Vox. They said, "It’s kind of hard to explain." Yet it makes perfect sense to me. Hazbin Hotel offers a wide selection of villains for villain fans and some villains just call out to you more than others even if they are not the fan favourite.

I was having a chat with someone about all the hate Valentino and his fans get and how it doesn't make sense that Valentino fans get so much hatred when the other Vees, particularly Vox has a lot of fans that don't get the same treatment. This made me wonder if there are Vox fans who also feel that way about Valentino. I am personally of the opinion that if they exist, they would be a tiny minority. It has never made sense to me that villain fans would look down on fellow villain fans. However, opinion isn't the same as reality so I need emprical evidence.

The hate option is for those deeply hate Valentino. If you don't hate the character enough to be constantly wishing for their death and for it being incomprehensible to you why annyone would like them, pick dislike.

[fandomregression]

Possible New AO3 Tags!!

So, I think we all know that the ao3 tag situation is...not ideal. You have basically two choices for tags: Age Regression/De-aging (which is technically meant for physically regressed/de-aged characters, not agere) or Non-sexual Age Play (which is...the wrong thing). Both of these tags are inaccurate for our community, but we have used them because its as close as we can get. It's even gotten to the point where Age Regression/De-aging has wrangled everything under the sun for agere (agere, age regression, regression, and every tag we make complaining about our tag situation). So! I have two possibilities for new tags we can use!

🧸Inner Child Therapy🧸

this one is probably the most obvious choice? at least it is to me lol inner child therapy is another, more clinical name for agere, so it would be a good choice. it's also not currently used for anything on ao3 (Healing the Inner Child is a tag, but not currently one with more than i think 3 fics, and it's not a common tag, so it would more than likely get wrangled, but I think it'd be okay)

with this one, we would also have the option to use secondary tags like we use with Age Regression/De-aging currently (think how a lot of fics use "Age Regression Little [Character]" tags, we could use something like "Inner Child Little [Character]" instead)

i think inner child therapy as a term would also help with the stigma around agere because it really...can't be confused with anything else? not as far as i can make out anyway lol

a con toward this would be that not many ppl currently know this as a term, and therefore it would be hard to implement

🖍Crayonfic🖍

i just think this one is cute. like we're all just out here writing our fics in crayon to share with each other hehe

in my head, this would even be able to include a whole tagging system using diff crayon colors to mean different things (when i was thinking of this concept, i was thinking along the lines of pink crayon = fluff, blue = angst, green = whump, purple = romantic, orange = platonic, white = diapers, etc etc etc etc)

it just so cute in my head lol, and it would definitely be easy to separate from the current tags

a con toward this one is just that it could be confusing to try to implement and i could see it getting wildly out of hand and complicated if we aren't careful with it

No matter what, it will absolutely be a struggle to change tags to get away from what we have right now. In order for any sort of new tag, one of these or something else, to work we would all have to agree not to crosstag. When tagging fics, you would *not* be able to tag it with the old tags and one of the new ones because it would more than likely result in the new tag getting wrangled and then we're back to square one. It would have to be a community effort to get it explained *why* things are different, now, and how to find fics. It would also be a struggle to get authors of older works to maybe switch their tags out so that new readers can find them more easily under a new tag.

These are just my ideas, and I'd love to open the discussion up to you guys!! If there's any other ideas for tags, I'd love to hear them!!!

[deoidesign]

Thinks about my next series again... I drew the icon for it!

I'm planning to have it launched within a year! I'm hoping for summer 2025. I want to make a prelaunch page before Time and Time Again ends so people can subscribe if they're interested, but I'm worried the series return would be too early...

[the-oracle-of-the-lost]

banging my head against the wall while i say: "relatability is not the be all end all of writing a character. saying that you don't find a character relatable/you wouldn't have made the same choices does not mean something is poorly written. you actually should go out of your way to engage with media about people who are fundamentally different from you because it helps you learn about others."

[jcogginsa]

I do think it's worth doing some analysis of how story's are typically structured in Dragonball.

As the series protagonists, they tend to become narratives that are very light on screentime for the protagonist, up until the end. Toriyama tends to sideline the main character, usually in a manner that increases their power, and then have them come in to save the day when the stakes are at their highest This is harder to notice in the early portions, the Pre-Z era for lack of a better term, because a lot of that material is tournament ars, where the structured format of the fights mean that Goku doesn't need to get silo'd away from the other leads in order for him to be in reserve. The kernals of the Toriyama formula start being developed in the King Piccolo arc. Goku is off doing his thing, the other characters are off doing theirs. They fail, Goku wins. The difference is that what Goku is doing in that arc is given equal narrative complexity and screen time. He's not just training, he's going around and doing stuff. The True Formula shows up in Z, wherein the Saiyan Saga starts by killing him off, so that he can have the next tier of training. Then when the action starts, he's got to get to the battlefield, which gives the other gcharacters time to do stuff.

We see something similar in the Frieza Saga. Goku is left behind on Earth, so that he can dedicate his own journey there to intense training. There is a bit of a hiccup here, as he gets to pull the "show up and save the day card" against the Ginyus before being sidelined again to build him up for Frieza. The pattern repeats in Cell. Goku is sidelined with the heart virus, and then sidelined with the Hyperbolic Time Chamber training. And then Goku dies at the end, in what was intended to be a torch passing moment. And contrary to popular belief, Gohan at the time was popular enough to pull this off. Contemporary Populairty polls have him in 1st place while Goku is in second. It could have worked.

People look at the Buu Saga, which has Gohan getting knocked out of the plot in order to get a power up, as evidence of some kind of immeadiate back lash against his charater, but it probably isn't. He's just getting the main character treatment. He doesn't gt to be part of the action until the climax. The supporting cast, which now includes Goku, are the ones who get to do things.

But Toriyama does decide that the protagonist switch wasn't working. The stated reason was that he just didn't like writing Gohan as a lead, feeling his personality wasn't suited for the role. And his lack of interest showed through to the audience, as Gohan's popularity dipped back below Goku's. The decision to make Goku the lead again probably happened after he got the traditional main character sideline, and it probably also contributed to Toriyama's decision to end the series. Goku's story was over, but Toriyama didn't think the story could go on without him, so the Story ended. and then we get the continuations, where the Z formula is discarded entirely. Goku is front and center the whole time, because tha marketing team demands it. And this is at least part of why Super's Goku feels like a regression. The plot requires that Goku be less capable because he can't beat the bad guy in the first episode. (the other part being the many ways in which Toei just isn't as good at writing him as Toriyama)

How would you write Majin Boo and Yamcha in the Tournament of Power, instead of Roshi and 17?

Honestly, Buu would be pretty game-breaking. I can't really conceive of any reason why Buu wouldn't absorb Jiren and anticlimactically waste everybody else fighting in the tournament.

As the be-all end-all final villain of Dragon Ball, Buu's ability to just eat whoever's stronger than him and gain their power for himself is completely busted. It makes it very difficult to write him into scenarios where he is a struggling underdog trying to compete with a superior foe.

Which is probably why Super snubs him so much. This is a character who has near limitless regeneration on top of the ability to turn every single fighter in the tournament into candy and he can just absorb everybody who's stronger than him whenever he runs into a brick wall. That's great for an overpowered villain that we need to find some way to beat, but terrible for a protagonist who needs to be challenged.

Like. It cannot be understated how devastating Buu's Candy Beam would be here. He can spread it over a wide area. He could literally step out onto that stage and Gobstopper every fighter from every universe simultaneously.

And sure, some of them would be able to Universe's Strongest Jawbreaker that shit. But it's still kind of purpose-defeating if like 80% of the assembled fighters are KO'd in the first three seconds. Buu just waves his antenna and erases anyone who isn't Power Levels enough to compete with Vegetto? Okay, man. There go all the fun fights for the weaker characters. Buh-bye.

Even then, if they aren't allowed to fly, like... how are they supposed to fight now? Is Gobstopper Jiren just supposed to spend the rest of the arc rolling into other gobstoppers super hard to ping them off the field?

Actually, that sounds amazing. XD

But in an AU capacity, not in a "This is seriously the plot of the show" capacity.

I don't think Toriyama would have kept Buu around if he wasn't planning on closing the book on Dragon Ball shortly after. Buu joining the supporting cast is very much a "Fuck it, we're done anyway" decision that the series is now paying for, and its solution is to just... find ways to conveniently kick him out of the cast over and over again.

Going into the Tournament of Power... Like, right from the get-go, Buu is going to be nerfed by the rules of the tournament. He can't eat people. That would probably be how you get around the "Buu just deletes half the tournament roster" problem.

He's just. He's not allowed to use his powers. Sorry. Buu has to fight with one hand behind his back. Dem's the rules.

I don't know if he would actually abide by that rule. He might just end up disqualified after eating Toppo. Buu is a selfish, impulsive hedonist who reflexively lashes out at authority. He's just gonna do whatever he wants and let the chips fall where they may.

But if Mr. Satan tells him not to eat anyone, he... probably won't eat anyone? Might still Candy Beam them though. Turning them all into marbles and rolling them off the stage would technically be within the terms of a "NO EATING PEOPLE" restriction.

Buu's crowd control options are bad for the narrative integrity of a battle royale. Even right now, I'm trying to figure out how he could be involved and still having to write around his powerset rather than being able to incorporate and challenge it to its fullest.

I don't know. It's honestly difficult to incorporate him in a way that would be respectful and utilize him in interesting ways without letting him dominate and break the plot.

I think he could work as the villain of another universe's story. Have Buu take the field as the threat that's gonna carry us to victory until fighters from another universe find a way to team up and take him down.

But for the life of me, I can't get around, "Why doesn't he just Candy Beam the entire arena?"

...

As for Yamcha, I probably wouldn't write him into the Tournament of Power. Yamcha quit during the Cell arc and I'm entirely happy to let him. If I was writing Yamcha in Super, probably the only thing I'd do with him is properly introduce his new girlfriend from the end of the Cell Games.

Put an actual name and a face to her, so the fandom can stop ignoring her existence when they complain that Bulma condemned Yamcha to die alone and unloved.

I mean, I'd pick Yamcha over Roshi, to be sure. I feel like the series has forgotten that the Muten-Roshi isn't Goku's "One True Master" or anything like that. Goku has a lot of respect for the man who set him on his path, and he wears the Kame-senryu dogi out of that respect. But he learned everything Roshi had to teach him and left him in the dust long ago, a fact that made Roshi proud.

That story is over. The Muten-Roshi is a 300-year-old man who just wants to enjoy his retirement. Stop trying to make him relevant again! And also just. In general. Stop trying to make "Goku the wide-eyed pupil" happen again. It's done. He's a master now. Let him be a master.

Lotta beefs with DBS.

But yeah, while I agree with the criticism of "Why Roshi and not Yamcha", it's only to the extent that going with Yamcha is still kicking the can down the road. I cannot conceive of a single way that Yamcha's character or the story would be enriched by the Tournament of Power, that wouldn't just feel like hollow fanservice.

"Yamcha got to WIN A FIGHT AGAINST SOMEONE. This one's for you, Yamcha stans! Okay, he's done, someone punt this dipshit off the stage."

Which. To be fair. A lot of the ToP is hollow fanservice. I... did not like that arc very much. Or DBS as a whole, for that matter. So I'm probably not the guy to figure out the best way to utilize characters in it.

But for me, I'd be more interested in a proper Yamcha epilogue that closes out his character on a satisfying note and sends him off, than in desperately trying to drag Yamcha back into the game and shackling him into a status quo he already respectfully bowed out of.

[stormyoceans]

LINE READING SO DEVASTATING I NEED TO DIE ABOUT IT

[vincentspork]

I keep seeing posts abt lesbophobia enacted by bi women that I broadly agree with until op slides in some implication that bi women wield societal power over lesbians and then I'm like. Well

[cathodic-clairvoyant]

There's a lot about discussion of hdwr that baffles me (not all discussion to be clear, because i do think there's a lot of good discussion about hdwr. But equally so are there the ones that make you wonder if you're reading the same story) and I think one that is especially annoying is the constant infantilization of miwa as this passive eternal victim. It drives me up a wall because this is quite literally an issue she's struggled with within the text of the story! She had an arc about how she dislikes how people treat her this way like towards the beginning of the story! And like even ignoring that, this story is about like nuanced and realistic portrayals of being in relationships and learning how to navigate them and so it's like what's the point if you're going to immediately reduce the characters to "the victim" and "the victimizers?" Is that even interesting? Is that a useful lens to look at interpersonal relationships?

[wanderer-clarisse]

yes I will draw whichever option wins this one! (although I have sketches for some of them already and I'm still gonna post them anyway :D)

go wild in the tags! let us know all the hyper specific details from your imagination!

[unopenablebox]

look. most people on tumblr, like most people everywhere, are just kind of innumerate, at least in slightly unexpected cases theyre asked to discuss on polls. they can't demonstrate an understanding of probability and they also don't understand compound interest. this is bad, but we can't fix it by explaining on the polls at length why they are wrong, because people on tumblr, in a specific manner but also still pretty much like people everywhere, think you are a fun-ruining evil stemlord who automatically loses the argument and should be put to death as the oppressor if you try to explain math to them