#which basically leaves video essay/commentary style videos

[autumnoakes]

i think a large part of it is a) how social media has transitioned over the years which led to b) people who used to use instagram, tiktok, twitter, facebook, etc. who now use tumblr like they would other websites.

admittedly, i've been trying to distance myself from social media as a whole for... years (deactivated two accounts, including my account of almost 10 years, in the past 2 years) mostly because of how i've been treated and how interaction has been.

i've never been someone who got a lot of interaction. even years ago on my old old blog i rarely got asks. i rarely had people asking me about my fics and my projects and even just things about me as a whole. it's what's stopping me from doing youtube for fun. i want to stream games and i want to cook for people and i want to talk about queer rights and gender and sexuality and transitioning and being autistic and ADHD and everything that comes with it but i know i won't have the engagement.

it is true that there should be a level of creating that you do for yourself. especially when it comes to fanfiction and fanart that you do for free and post and expect no income from it. however, when you post something, you're sharing it with others. you're saying "look! i did this! i made this! i'm proud enough of it to share it with you if you want to take a look!" and people do have free will. they have the ability to say "oh yeah, that looks interesting! i'll share it with others!" or "yeah, that looks good, i'll give it a read!" but they also have the ability to not share it or not read it for any specific reason.

i've found with my fics that no one read them. so no one commented on them. i used to be in the GoT fandom (yeah, yeah, i know) years ago, and even though those fics that i wrote weren't very popular, they still got more hits, more kudos, more comments than my LOZ/LU fics. between the lack of interaction and the fact that i started to actually struggle to write anything at all (including essays and assignments for school), i stopped writing so often. i have a few more recent fics on my ao3, including one i tried to make into a long boi, but it kinda felt like people ignored it.

there's a sense of luck to online popularity. all of the big blogs you see tumblr are big for a reason, but there was also an element of luck to it. same with youtubers, and twitch streamers, and influencers. but there is also a certain type of personality that becones popular. on tumblr, it's very different than the type of personality that becomes popular on other sites, but it's still a type.

i interact. i add onto other people's posts. i reblog ask games. i make friends in fandom spaces. but i also feel as if i'm doing everything wrong, and no one will tell me what. i write fics no one wants to read, but i can't tell if it's just disinterest or if my writing is genuinely bad. i'm not a fanartist, and i wish i did music more but i just don't have the energy. i don't have the mental capacity for much of anything else besides school and doing house chores so people don't get mad at me. it's just very disheartening when i put as much as i can give into something and nothing comes out of it

For everyone who’s worried about interacting with people on tumblr I have a pro tip:

Use ask games!! Literally the lowest entry bar.

And if that’s still too much, I got nothing 😂 just please don’t expect creators to come track down everyone who secretly wants to be friends 🫠 I see my mutuals post them pretty often so there’s a good chance you have an in with them at some point.

[semper-legens]

44. Five Nights At Freddy's: The Silver Eyes, by Scott Cawthon and Kira Breed-Wrisley

Owned?: No, library Page count: My summary: Ten years ago, Charlie's friend Michael was killed at the pizzeria that was her father's baby. Now, she's returned to the town where she grew up for the memorial, alongside the friends she's since drifted apart from. But when they break into the abandoned Freddy's, it seems that the disappearances weren't buried with Michael and the other children. The animatronics are alive. And there's a killer on the loose… My rating: 2.5/5 My commentary:

So, Five Nights at Freddy's. That sure is a game. The background to me reading this is that I watched the film with a friend not too long ago, and it was surprisingly good. That, plus an excellent video essay by NezumiVA, got me interested in FNaF lore, and I wanted to take the plunge and see what the books were like for myself. Now, don't get me wrong. FNaF is not necessarily a good game series - it's too bogged down in its own lore and mystery, and the ongoing narrative just becomes more and more convoluted with each installment. Plus, Scott Cawthon himself is a conservative Republican who has donated to the Republican party and is anti-choice. Screw him. Still, I find FNaF in and of itself to be an interesting case of an internet horror series, and the progenitor of the 'twisted children's mascot' style of survival horror game. I'd heard the books went some weird directions, so why not borrow them from the library? So without further ado - it's The Silver Eyes.

And how did I find it? Mostly, bland. To be expected, really. The thing about FNaF is that it does, in fact, work really well in the medium that it is in - that of a jumpscare-heavy suspenseful horror game. All of the lore is backstory and background that gets hinted at through the actual game And I'm talking about the first game here. A common criticism of FNaF as it develops is that it gets bogged down in creating new Twists And Turns and piling lore upon lore upon lore. You can't adapt FNaF as-is into a book; literary jumpscares aren't really a thing. So what we instead have is a standard horror/coming of age story. A seventeen year old returns to her hometown, a place tied up in family history, a place that still holds a lot of mysteries about her past. But surprise! The monster that plagued her childhood is still here, and now she has to defeat it! The narrative doesn't really deviate from this basic premise, which is…alright. Like, it's fine. Paint by numbers horror, but largely inoffensive.

There were three things that greatly annoyed me about this book, however, and I will complain about all of them in turn! One, there were too many characters. Charlie is accompanied by her friends John, Jessica, Carlton, Lamar, Marla, and Marla's little brother Jason. So that's seven characters to get to know, and half of them feel sidelined. I couldn't tell you the first thing about Lamar and Marla, Carlton is mostly just The Snarky One, and Jessica's not that much more fleshed out than John, who gets deuteragonist status by virtue of being Charlie's sort-of love interest. You could cut half of this cast and the narrative would not suffer even the tiniest bit. Add to them the secondary characters like Afton and Carlton's family and Henry Emily, and you've got way too many people to keep track of.

Second, there were so many choices in the story that weren't justified or fall apart with any sort of scrutiny. Charlie had a twin brother who was killed when they were small; somehow, she didn't know about this until now? Nobody mentioned it to her? Carlton's dad refuses to look for him after he goes missing in Freddy's and leaves it a full night on the flimsy premise that Carlton is probably just pulling a prank, which is just an artificial way to create peril that made no sense. But the gold medal for this goes to the killer himself, William Afton. See, in the first game, we don't need to know why Afton murdered a bunch of kids - that part is just backstory to the idea that the animatronics are haunted. But here, we have serial killer Afton who just loves snatching and killing kids…because? There's not even a basic excuse for his behaviour, I guess we're just supposed to understand that he's evil or something and not think any more about it. But at the end, when he kidnaps Carlton, he just puts him in a springlock suit and leaves him there, which of course means that Carlton later escapes. Other people, he just murders, but that day he decides not to? For…some reason? He has no motive, he just does things that are meant to be creepy, and that's it. No nuance. Which, again, can work when it's just backstory for a video game whose whole point is to avoid getting jumpscared. Not so in this sort of prose narrative.

And finally, not all that surprisingly for FNaF, the narrative just takes a left turn into copaganda in the middle. Carlton's dad, a police officer, expresses that they knew that Afton was responsible for the deaths, but they didn't have enough evidence to convict him so he got away with it. Well, specifically they say that they can't convict him without bodies, but there's been murder convictions without bodies before in real life? But anyway, the fact that the narrative validates this sort of opinion by having Afton be an evil murderer who murders evilly feeds into that copaganda viewpoint of 'if only police were allowed to be tougher then those evil murderers would stop walking free'. Basically advocating for a police state. It was baffling, I had to put the book down for a minute when I read it because it felt like Cawthon jumping onto a soapbox just to be conservative for a moment. Gross.

Next up, the life of a godkiller, and those she loves.