#whatever my blog my rules

[usedtobethelegendcreator]

Sometimes I stay up at night remembering that there’s an entire artistic era that I’m never going to get to share with anybody because I destroyed all evidence of it myself in my own self-hatred. For example, when I hadn’t even made it to the double digits in age yet, I used to draw a comic called “The Chef”. It was based off my own family, with the titular Chef being my step-dad. It was all stick figures, with the only thing differentiating me from my mother and sister being hair length and size. It was horrible. It was mine. It’s gone now, because I trashed all of my old notebooks.

Along with my own original stories.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually told anyone why I use “TheLegendCreator” as my username for everything. Well, might as well do it now, since I’m on the topic of old times.

The Legend Creator, dubbed TLC by the Beyblade Burst Wattpad community, is the personification of my creativity. I created her when I was 11 years old, while wondering what my pen name would be if I had one. Now, I had no delusions about being a creator of legends. I wasn’t—and probably still am not—a good enough writer for that kind of ego. No, she had her origins in the original story closest to my heart, “The Legends”.

I’ve never talked about that either, have I? It wasn’t my first original story. It wasn’t any good. It was horribly written, was trying too hard, and was everything the writer community at large would despise. My use of words was often clunky, my understanding of seemingly simple concepts was limited (thanks a lot, autism), and I was the quintessential bad writer.

None of that mattered to me. The first five paragraphs of that story were timed, as a test to get into 7th grade. I had ten minutes to write something, and all of those characters I’d been holding on to for years spilled out onto that paper and breathed. It was the first time I’d ever written with purpose.

Back in the day, I primarily wrote on paper. That’s where I wrote the first draft of “The Outlaw” (and the second, and the third, and the fourth…), and “Redtail”. But “The Legends” was written in Pages—y’know, discount Google Docs? By the time I got about a third of the way through the story I wanted to tell, there were over 100 pages.

But most importantly, writing “The Legends” led to what is possibly the most pivotal moment of my life.

I was writing an action climax on paper, in an empty classroom, while waiting to be picked up. I’d written action climaxes before, but this was different. It was like I was there, watching it happen in real time. I heard that character’s voice as he crashed, heard the rocks scattering beneath him. I was writing faster than I’d ever written before, because if I didn’t get everything down on paper right that instant, I was convinced I would forget.

Finishing that scene was the first—and only—time I felt complete and total euphoria. I haven’t felt it since.

I write fanfiction because I want to. Because the characters inspire me. But the reason I’ve been practicing my writing and drawing for all these years? I’m going to rewrite “The Legends” one day, and “The Outlaw” and “Redtail” along with it. And when I do, I intend to make it my masterpiece. I mean, it’s not like I’m the Outlaw Creator, right?

That’s why I’ve decided to go back to stylized art. My main cast doesn’t deserve to be confined by reference photos and rigid poses.

[dollya-robinprotector]

Well, y'know, something something about the patriarchal man gatekeep gaslight manipulative monopolizing confine the only pure light he ever sees - his innocent sister and the experienced old uncle who looks a bit careless and homeless but is actually very gentle and can only look at the prisoned songbird girl from far away…

Ye I'm normal about them I promise-

[maythedreadwolftakeyou]

over the last 3 months i have seen myself called (and sometimes blocked for being assumed to be):

a racist/a bigot

homophobic/queerphobic/transphobic

ace/demi-phobic

a fascist

for expressing opinions such as "I found the characters and background stories in Veilguard weaker and less interesting than previous Dragon Age games" and "i miss the amount of tension and conflict that we used to get to explore with the player character depending on their in-game background and life history" and "i did not feel Lucanis' character and romance arc was fully satisfying while I was playing through it".

and since this all started we now have:

seen the entire DA staff laid off from Bioware

heard many now-former bioware devs talking about how toxic the workplace was during the development of DA4

seen allusions to Bioware/EA executives overriding plot/plans that the Dragon Age writers/devs would have preferred

extracted large amounts of cut content from the games that show things like increased emotional response range for Rook, or alternate endings for companion arcs (NOT concept art content, but actual written and even voice-recorded dialogue in the game files), or increased impact from decisions you could make in the game

IN ADDITION to what we ALREADY knew about how many times the game changed direction/leadership changed/the mid-process layoffs, etc.

so can we maybe not keep putting "people who come into the Dragon Age universe from a place of love and were ultimately disappointed with the latest installment" in the same trash bucket as "dudes on twitter who were mad there were trans/nonbinary characters in their AAA game". can we FUCKING as a community acknowledge that there are many reasons someone might not jive with a change in direction other than jumping to "they disagree with me so they must obviously be horrible people, whose opinions shouldn't be counted anyway" (<-if this is your first impulse maybe examine that also).

i am so tired and i am never gonna get an apology for any of it but NOW that a lot of the people who were posting/reblogging these sentiments are hearing/seeing all these other things add up. it's like suddenly now it's "acceptable" to have problems with aspect of Veilguard or want more from it, because the writers/devs have shown they probably did too during it's creation. whereas when I said these things right off the bat (because the only thing we had was the game we got. not the game we can pretend they wanted to make instead) it WASN'T because apparently expressing opinions on my personal tumblr counts as "being mean to/harassing devs who worked hard on the game" or, again, assumed I am a racist/bigot/facist/queerphobic.

you're allowed to still like Veilguard. it's fine i promise. you can love the game if you love it and my not loving it has nothing to do with your own relationship to this piece of media. i am happy there are people who truly can enjoy it without massive Caveats. but i am still seeing like 3-5 posts Per Week express those opinions and it is really destroying my love for the community i once enjoyed.

[saturnaous]

fucked up. I want to play pool but instead I’m drawing them playing pool. what the fuck.

[psychopomp-namine]

cheng weimin and shao yuanyuan abandoning cheng xiaoshi at the tender age of 8 years old gets even more fucked up when you think about how they know about the photo diving ability and that bahati is a school related to abilities

like okay listen. one of you has the ability to go back in time by clapping your hands while looking at a photo. presumably you know that abilities are passed on to children. they can activate at any time, perhaps during traumatic moments like with the twins. one of you went to teach at a school for superpowered kids so presumably you know how this works.

and you think you can just abandon a kid with unactivated powers?? leave him with trauma ripe for awakening abilities? what if it wasn't the bridon photo that triggered it huh? what if cheng xiaoshi, at the tender age of 8, cried so hard wondering about his parents and then he accidentally claps himself into a random photo (IN A PHOTO STUDIO! A SHOP ABOUT PHOTOS!! WHERE HE LIVES!!!) with no one to guide him? what if he gets stuck there??? as a kid???

like okay yeah lu guang discovered his ability at 7 years old but apparently someone was there to help him. and also his ability doesn't like, harm him physically. he's not possessing someone or anything. so we're all just lucky cheng xiaoshi never discovered his powers until he was an adult because like. if he discovered that as a kid, lonely as he was?? he'd be so fucked. oh my god. just thinking about it gets me heated like what the fuck cheng weimin. shao yuanyuan. what the fuck. what if your 8 year old kid with abandonment issues got stuck possessing some random person and he doesn't know what's happening. he doesn't know anything. his parents left him and he's not even himself anymore and he's not home and how does he fix this, how does he go back. the horror of it all.

[doggerell]

[read-write-thrive]

the dead boy detective agency main four are a polycule on various points of the aromantic/asexual spectrum (in addition to their various sexualities), with the various side characters playing the roles of parental figures or talking stages. thank you for coming to my ted talk

[askorensprunki]

We kidnapped your girlfriend, you have 2 weeks to find her. Try funny business and she gets killed. :)

-🎩🖤

“Wha… who are you? What do you… what do you mean by that?”

“Hey. HEY! DON’T JUST LEAVE!”

“WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY GIRL?!”

.

.

.

“I have to find Pinki.”

[fellamarsh]

RELATED to my last post i think we should kill the notion that you have to keep your writing or art or whatever kind of themed blog strictly On Theme. because of professionalism or whatever

like you are the artist (or curator). you are inextricably linked to that which you create. you are inherently on theme. also i like to hear about the weird thing your sister said or the really bangin sandwich you ate

[noirshitsuji]

every once in a while I will see this take in the bb fandom that like 'nothing has felt like Black Butler since X arc' (usually Noah's Arc Circus) which I find. very interesting. I think the implication is usually that nothing has felt as like serious or gritty or psychological thriller-y or devastating, or that somehow the vibe has gone weird. and like, this is not to diss anyone's interpretation. but also.

this is a story where one moment the main boy character is wearing a dress and being accosted by a pedophile nobleman and the next he's nearly been human trafficked. and then it turns out his aunt is jack the ripper and she dies at the hand of her grim reaper ally who decides to turn on her for being unable to kill her nephew. cue flashback to the extremely tragic life she's had and the complicated feelings she has about said nephew as a result, although ultimately her love for her sister, that she seems in him, means that she cannot slaughter him as she has so many others.

and then next arc, the culmination of an indian prince's coming of age where he's processing his loneliness and neglected upbringing comes during a contest where people are trying to obtain the royal warrant for curry. and the main character wins it by inventing the curry bun, a japanese dish, in Victorian England, after the elderly queen rides in on a horse wearing sunglasses and declares him a winner.

like. idk what to tell you, like yes the Circus Arc was very dark and all but are we really going to pretend that the boy band thing during the blue cult arc was out of left field??? for the person that did pride and prejudice and zombies on the titanic?? like this has always been the type of story this is wdym-

[wackywatchdotcom]

thinking about. this show

[hermitcraftx]

just got a dm abt one of my posts and y'all please don't try and show the hermits (or any minecraft youtuber or content creator for that matter) my posts, i'm uncomfortable with it and don't want any of my posts shown to a cc. if they stumble upon it naturally that's unfortunate but i can live with it since i do maintag a lot (something i REALLY need to stop doing tbh i already know i need to make a tagging system just for my blog that wont clog results) but going out of ur way to show a cc is entirely different and something i am not comfortable with.

no hate to the person at all but even if i wasn't a little silly and weird with it sometimes i wouldn't be comfortable with it, i want my blog to be a purely fandom only space with none of the creators involved <3 please respect this

[cdroloisms]

I just came across your post about vagueposting and I think I agree with it, but the situation you most likely wrote it about is hardly a "vagueposting" because you could say who it was about after reading it literally one time and that person got jumped and insulted in the anon ask anyway so discussing it in person could be safer...

I'm reeeally sorry for bring up a past situation, but I don't think it's a good idea to write nasty things about another person and specific details about how they interact with the fandom and their post, say things that will help to easily identify a person and at the same time insult them or say how you think they feel about the characters or the story based on your feelings about their one take that you didn't like and then call it's "vague" because there is no name in the post. I mean, It can lead to bad consequences, it literally did in that situation.

And yes, I do think people have the right to discuss bad takes or takes they don't like, but there's a way to do it without giving away every detail about the post and the person who wrote it so everyone knows who you're talking about, and if you're not good at being vague, just discuss it in a private chat.

this ask is old but i was busy last week, so forgive me for the late response. i was debating answering it at all, but i dont want myself to be misunderstood, so just. to clarify under the cut.

i'll agree with you that the post/situation in question wasn't vagueing. now, i don't know exactly the difference between the number of followers i have and the number of followers that the blogger in question has, and when it comes to the number of active dsmp followers i think both of us have even less of a clue. that being said, both of us frequent much of the same circles, so i think it's fair to say that many of my posts will end up being exposed to a very similar audience to his, and so therefore this response about the situation you're talking about will be just about as clearly traceable to a specific person as the post he made that started the situation in question. just as a general observation.

if i'm understanding your ask correctly, while vagueing a take is fine, the vague shouldn't be clearly identifiable if you're going to speak badly about it or disagree heavily. to which i have to ask what, specifically, is defined as clearly identifiable? i think most takes in this fandom can be pretty easily traced to a person, even if that person is not the only person that believes in that take--just as an example, c!tommy as a butterfly pinned behind glass was a take in response to the c!sam and c!dream stream after techno escaped, and grew to be a pretty prominent theme to the point of a zine being modeled after it, but i can also trace it to a pretty specific tumblr post with a name attached. i also think that that same statement probably isn't true for many fans who maybe joined later on in the fandom. i mean, i'm aware that i'm being pedantic here, i'm aware that the situation in question created conflict specifically due to it being within dreblr and in a space where multiple people would've seen both posts and felt ensuing awkwardness bc they know both people either on a personal or acquaintance level, but i mean the same applied ages ago whenever strategist-interpretation and trauma-interpretation c!dream apologists felt like going at it again on the dash.

in this scenario specifically, what made the situation clearly identifiable was the nature of the take that was being discussed. the main identifying detail was the take that the asker was asked about, imo, and i mean ... yeah i mean. most takes that haven't blown up pretty heavily do end up being tied to one or two people? i mean, staged finale is a take that can be tied to three people who argued in favor of it the most before the rest of dreblr got on board only in late 2021. i simply don't think that a take that maybe only one person has argued for (which, i dont remember the statistics of the take in this situation, so i dont remember how many notes it had or how many people in total may have expressed public agreement towards it, honestly) is exempt from discussion when it is posted in a meta or analysis space as an analytical piece, which i do think applies to this take from what i remember about it and how it was tagged.

and back to the discussion of what's acceptable as far as directly responding versus vagueing, i mean, a lot of the discussion i've had on my blog (abt discourse etiquette in General in meta spaces on dreblr moreso than this specific situation, largely bc i did want to avoid commenting on a situation that 1) i really had no business in and 2) i have reason to be biased about. the main reason why i'm talking abt it now is bc hopefully enough time has passed for feelings to be less fraught and bc i want to make certain thoughts of mine clear, in case they weren't clear enough in my original posts abt dreblr and whatever) revolves around both direct responses and vagueing having their reasons as well as pros and cons, and both will likely continue to exist in analysis spaces and generally i don't think it's productive to really comment on what people can or can't do on their own blogs. in this scenario, i don't think "vagueing about one specific person in a way that may be clearly identifiable to parts of their audience" is uniquely unacceptable? a direct response very clearly would make the person in question identifiable -- outside of how it's kind of impossible to make a post vagueing someone in a way where No One has Any Idea who you might be talking about without making the post like, incoherent inherently, if vagueing (not identifiable) is okay and directly responding (identifiable) is okay, then why is vagueing (identifiable) not okay?

now, i understand that any situation where the person in question might be identifiable, some people may take the open disagreement as permission to harass them. and obviously, harassment sucks. part of the whole point of opening up this conversation on my blog was bc i worry, with the way that a single conflict between dsmp opinions has kind of rippled through dreblr recently and the responses to this "situation," that an environment is being created with too much of a forced global consensus that punishes people for stepping out of the status quo in both opinions and behavior, which is obviously bad for the whole community, and was looking to voice some of that and have a conversation on solutions. and i understand that in this situation, a lot of your problem with the blogger has to do with his general attitude in discussing the take and his statements on the person who made it. now, i think you have every right to find his statements offensive and disagreeable and to unfollow and/or block him. that being said, i am not exactly a PR agent, and i want to reiterate that what people do on their own blogs isn't my business and i don't think it should be my business. or uh, anyone's business, for that matter. i don't think that everyone "in dreblr" is beholden to keeping to a certain person's standard for "acceptable" disagreement and "acceptable" sharing of their own opinions on their own blog as long as they're not inciting harassment, which entails, like, actively encouraging harm to happen yk. i mean, you can think that the blogger was being rude or an asshole and prefer to never see him again, that's fine. that's your prerogative. but i mean, i'm not gonna tell the guy how to interact with the fandom on his own blog, haha.

to be clear, im not telling you what you can or can't do on your own blog either. if you wanna make a post about how his posts contain harmful rhetoric, how he's an idiot, or how he's rude bc you disagree with his public posts on this situation or on the dsmp as a whole, i mean, i'm not gonna handwring over it and tell you that you're not allowed to do that. it's none of my business, and i like to think i'm not that hypocritical. and honestly, i think that in a space where we're talking about analysis, commenting on harmful rhetoric happens often and should happen often when it happens -- literally anyone can make an analysis post that has harmful rhetoric, and sure it's fiction and no one has to answer to the analysis police for making a bad analysis post, but i've also been in this space and seen enough truly mind-boggling amounts of parroting takes about torture that make people sound like CIA psyops to go "well saying that someone's analysis post contains harmful rhetoric is really rude" pfft. again, i'm not saying i'm immune to hypocrisy, but i've certainly malded enough times in public about the shit people have said in this fandom to take issue with that. now, getting a little less into the strictly-analysis side of things, i understand that insults like calling someone an idiot may not sit right with everyone, to which i say. block to your heart's content. but c'mon man i've called people idiots before i'm no saint 😭😅

anyway. i hope this clarified some things, anon. take issue with whatever and whoever you like, honestly, whether that's me, the person that i just not-vagued for the last however many words, etc etc -- again, your prerogative. and i agree, it's a shame the situation devolved into stuff like insults in both bloggers' inboxes when it really didn't have to be like that like. at all.

[camelspit]

guys.. why do we need so many confessions blogs..

[riftwalker-limbro]

coming in hot with my fresh Old Quest takes but i want to give my drifter excuses for being a non-capable mess which means i need to have multiple tenno with multiple drifters in my new war storyline nonsense

so. i present. my thesis/take on this enormous, beautiful mess of a quest.

start of the new war, right. the tenno ally with the grineer and the corpus to face the threat of ballas having allied with sentients and the sentients having proceeded to attack the everliving shit out of everything else (motivation for this??)

the grineer can't stand against them, the corpus can't stand against them, ballas has Space Mom, but the tenno aren't used to fighting as a cohesive larger-than-four-person unit, so eventually, the tenno also cannot stand against him. they're special ops, even though overpowered as hell, they're not an army. the lotus gets her arm cut off and thrown into the void, and squad after squad that gets sent in against ballas after one another (because they don't know any other way and run out of numbers by the time they realise and can organise properly) meets the same fate. some tenno just go into hiding.

there's one lotus arm that went into the void. however, the void is very fucky, powerful, and always slightly more sapient than we want/expect it to be, so lots of lotus arms end up in different but specific pocket dimensions acting as prisons for various versions of tenno.

because, right, if you think about it, it is entirely possible that the drifter(s) didn't even exist until the lotus' arm + tenno got yote into the void portal by ballas. and the fun part is, because of the very nature of that statement, it doesn't even matter either. so i choose to believe that something specific (or pure chance) picked a bunch of very specific subtimelines out of the infinite vastness of eternalism for this to happen to. bonus points for one tenno with multiple drifters.

and over the next several months/years, as ballas works to subjugate the entire origin system, every now and then, a new drifter pops up somewhere. and they're gathered up until finally they're big enough a force on their own that also the lotus pops out of the void again, and they take care of her. and then they go kick ballas' horribly scrungled ass.

and THAT is when roach also pops out of the void, freshly escaped from the horrors that was duviri. and some tenno ping kelth on galactic discord like hey uh we found your cringefail adult version & they tried to bite us. please come get them

[waytooinvested]

Me: I've decided to be the kind of person who doesn't over think my fandom participation and just comments on/replies to/generally engages with content and creators. I LOVE it when people do that with my stuff! There are hundreds of posts out there about how much everyone else also loves it when people do that on their stuff! I'll be spreading the joy!

Also me: ohnowhatifI'mbeingreallyannoyingisitweirdthatIjustdidthatmaybethatpersonthinksI'mcreepynowarghistworepliestoomuchit'stoomuchisn'titIshouldprobablybackoffnow

... What the hell brain? 🙄