#when do we see female characters who are allowed to be more aggressive; yet we're never supposed to think poorly of them?

[ratstuckinamarble]

See what happened here is that you captured her creature energy too well so the drawing came alive for juust a bit to crumple the paper.

Every time Lagoona growls a part of my soul heals.

[nox-artemis]

One thing that never seems to change about my involvement in the fandom are the amount of entitled and obsessive fans that I deal with.

I met many friends through Berserk and some of us follow each other across different platforms; I also openly shared my social media accounts since I wrote fan fiction and do cosplay (less occasionally of recently). I love doing both because of the expression it allows me to relate to the characters I cherish, as well as allowing me to express my own sexuality.

For those of you who have been following me for years, you may recollect how when I cosplay, I've come across a hand full of fans who have said some... inappropriate stuff when I cosplay as Casca, stuff that clues you in with how they regard her character AND female cosplayers. Even when I was taking a hiatus from Tumblr I had weird guys sending me inappropriate stuff on IG, which to say the least has made me not want to share cosplay stuff as much anymore.

Sadly it seems my fanfiction work isn't much safer. The guy above has followed me across platforms and comes off very strongly, obsessively so. I'm very thankful that I limited my interaction with him early on when he followed me on IG. My friend - whose NSFW fan art he uses as his avatar - also had similar encounters with him and recounted how toxic and aggressive he is.

A few days ago I answered an anonymous headcanon question that, in all truthfulness, made me a bit uncomfortable. Yes, I write NSFW content but I don't really like hardcore/BDSM stuff, and I tried expressing that in my answer. I had a feeling it was the same guy, but in the off chance it wasn't, I answered (and I did want to write something more uplifting). Immediately the guy reblogged my answer and a few minutes later sent me SOME MORE raunchy headcanon stuff. I put two and two together and instead answered on private if he was the same person who sent that last anon... And the rest of the convo is above. I tried giving him the benefit of the doubt since he's been following me everywhere and I didn't want to immediately alienate him but... You can see how he reacted.

It's still kind of astonishing how there are so many (male) fans of Berserk who treat it has scripture and idolize Guts and yet have so much cognitive dissonance. A lot of these fans see me dressed as Casca and write NSFW content and think they can just go all out in order to play out some cringe fantasy of theirs with "real life Casca." Odd because Guts wouldn't treat Casca like that (and at his lowest point he deeply regretted treating her poorly). But as I've stated elsewhere, many fans just read Berserk for the clout and ego boost and not for the actual themes at hand. 🤷🏽‍♀️

I hope this guy doesn't treat anyone else like this. Again, I've met more awesome people through Berserk than awful but interactions like these over the years as drilled into my mind that just because we're both fans of the same media doesn't mean we hold the same values, view the work in the same way, or need to be friends.

Just be careful.