#yes I’m posting my own tweet I think it’s funny

[clownboybebop]

[qqueenofhades]

I’ve had this feeling for a while, but the last few weeks have made it stronger: I feel like people are just sick of Trump, even people that are solid Republicans. Even aside from the politics and the threat to democracy that he represents, I’m just tired of hearing about him and all the vitriolic buffoonery that comes out of him. He’s a class clown that’s gone from occasionally funny to just annoying. And I’m sure there’s plenty of Republican voters that resent what an absolute cultish embarrassment he’s made of their party. Even if I had no other reason to vote, I would’ve still voted blue in the desperate hope that I might not have to hear about Trump anymore.

I mean... Yeah.

The other day, we had a whole group of Arizona Republicans (otherwise known as one of the most extreme and cultist state GOP parties in the country) coming out as the leaders of a Republicans for Harris taskforce. Republicans for Harris also immediately hit it big on Twitter. Haley Voters For Biden instantly changed their name to Haley Voters For Harris and told Haley herself to hit the bricks when she laughably threatened them with legal action. There were always a few Never Trump Republicans before, but like. Not many. And many of them have ventured like, one criticism and immediately fallen back into line when Trump posted one mean tweet about them, because they have spines like soufflés.

Now mind you, the entire national/establishment GOP is still completely and cravenly beholden to Trump in ways that defy all logical human understanding, but people who have voted Republican all their lives and did so habitually once or even twice for Trump are increasingly hitting breaking point, and that should be noted. If you want to know how much, the goddamn MORMONS are, allegedly, preparing to quit the GOP this election in larger volumes than they have voted for Democrats in at least 60 years. I don't know how much this will end up panning out, and they have always been at least somewhat skeptical of him in comparison to the completely deranged mainstream evangelical fundies, but. The Mormons. THE MORMONS. Voting for a black female Democrat for president? In my wildest fantasies, this makes me think of Blue Utah 2024 like Blue Indiana 2008 (yes, that happened, along with Blue Florida TWICE).

Trump does have and will always have his ever-dwindling base of diehard cultists, but they have not and will never be numerous enough to win a fair democratic election on their own, which is why the GOP has pulled every dirty trick in the book trying to ensure that they don't have to. But yes: there are many more of us than them, and if we finally pull together and quit arguing about dumb shit, we could get rid of Trump once and for all, and god. GOD. I long for that day so bad and I can finally think it might be coming. So let us NOT fucking screw this up, kay? Kay.

[ripplestitchskein]

To be a bit clearer about my issue with the tweet that I talked about in this post as I was posting in the car on the way home (I was not driving but had to do it fast because I get super motion sick) and have had some time to expand a bit:

If we’re talking about the general concept “Stolas set the parameters of the initial sexual transaction thus rooting their relationship in sex from the start and because Blitz is too self loathing and willfully blind to see the desired parameters have changed it is Stolas who made their relationship all about sex in large part because Blitz was never going to be in a healthy enough space to be the one to change it” then yes I agree with the sentiment.

Stolas could have simply said “I’ll let you use the grimoire in exchange for a date” instead of jumping straight to sexual relationship and they could have gotten to know each other first, maybe one date for each Full Moon*. So yes, he did make it this way, he set the terms. At the start of the show.

(*Side note: This would be a super cute fanfic premise tbh and if the show did something like that, where they need to exchange something and say “Hey, how about we make a deal to go on a date on the Full Moon” it would be a really fucking adorable way to reconcile them *starry eyes*. Just think about how much that would slap. The narrative circle of that would be *chef’s kiss*. )

My problem with the framing of “Stolas started it that way in Murder Family, was super over the top horny for a few episodes, now he must suffer the consequences despite the fact that he has been trying to change their dynamic since Blitz expressed how he felt in Ozzie’s” is that, the events of The Circus completely recontextualize the deal we see made and Stolas’s behavior.

We, the audience, didn’t know in S1 that Blitz initiated the whole thing and that Stolas was just mirroring that energy, so I am extremely understanding of this perception pre-S2. Even up until Western Energy, but by Oops we have enough evidence to show Stolas has been trying, Blitz is just refusing. So Stolas didn’t “make it this way” for where the characters are NOW. Not in a “It is Blitz’s fault” taking sides in the divorce way, but in a “This is about character growth or the deliberate lack of it within the story” way.

My big issue with the tweet now, and didn’t learn until I read the tags of a lovely person is that is apparently from an individual who actually works on the show. And that is….kinda concerning to me. A bit.

The idea that Stolas’s efforts count for nothing because he set the initial deal and behaved badly at the start, that we the audience should still see the current dynamic as “Stolas making everything sexual” is a problem 8 episodes into the 2nd season. We have many examples of him not doing that any longer, he has changed, we the audience have been shown that change. Why is it still being framed this way by the actual creative team?

I don’t know how animation production works, so I’m not sure if the people who work as animators are given the whole picture or not. I don’t even know they are fans necessarily, or if they get their individual parts to work on and that’s it. I have zero background info on how these meetings are conducted. I am not coming from a position of authority in this regard.

Setting aside the dismissal of Stolas’s character growth this season. framing it this way undermines the journey Blitz is on too. At this point in the story he is refusing to acknowledge Stolas’s earnest attempts, his willful ignorance is not a funny gag but a reflection of his character and state of mind. It is implied his own trauma and self loathing make him unable to believe what has being explicitly told to him. This confrontation is the tipping point for further development in one direction or another. His choice now is to continue to ignore it and lose Stolas entirely or to try and work through it in some way. By implying Stolas is the one who created thier current situation way back in S1 implies Blitz’s ignorance of Stolas’s feelings is not because of character’s motivations and his own choices to ignore it but simply because it was that way at the start and it is immutable. Stolas said “sex for book please” and “jelly sandwiches” and Blitz was just “I’m just doing what he said he wanted, now he’s coming out of nowhere with this feelings stuff” when a huge part of showing the audience that it is Blitz’s self loathing driving the conflicts in his life is that he refuses to believe the truth of the situation which is it wasn’t Stolas making it all about sex at all. That Stolas has been trying and Blitz keeps shutting it down because of his issues.

That just seems like a crucial part of what we’re doing here? Yes Stolas creates the situation in S1 but he went out of his way to do the opposite in S2.

Obviously this individual’s qualifications for interpretation, being an actual employee, trump my “I’ve watched it a bunch and obsess over it constantly” credentials by a long shot. But my concern is to have a meeting of people responsible for creating the show reflect this sentiment after what we’ve seen in S2 so far is just a little baffling to me?

Either those attempts by Stolas portrayed on screen and the change in his behavior towards Blitz after he realizes his feelings are meaningless in the face of first impressions being everything to both Blitz and the audience. If that is the case I’m not sure why they would be included if the end result interpretation is still “Stolas horny. Made it all about sex. The end.”

Or, I am misreading something, either the tweet itself or the canon text. This is very possible, tweets being an imperfect communication tool and myself being an imperfect person. But as I stated in the original post, if we’re accounting for what is shown on screen as being how we should interpret the characters, Stolas has been trying for months to shift gears and Blitz is the one who continues to frame it as “just sex”. So I just find the tweet completely out of touch with the narrative we’re consuming.

[skania]

AquaKane Masterlist: My AquaKane Posts

It's been a while since I've needed to make one of these 😂

How it started:

Playing myself and not dropping OnK because of Akane

The beginning of the Akane brainrot (back when I didn't ship AquaKane) + 1

How it's going:

In defense of Akane:

Some of the things people say about Akane make me wonder if there’s an alternative version of the manga out there

Akane's Star Eyes (+1)

Akane wasn't a bad influence on Aqua (the manga literally tells us the opposite)

Akane wasn't trying to manipulate Aqua by acting like Ai

Akane wasn't being manipulative when she tells Aqua that he needs to be careful if he wants to date Kana

Was Akane wrong for telling Aqua to make his own choice?

Thoughts on people calling Akane obsessed instead of in love

Is Akane a plot-device?

AquaKane:

In Defense of AquaKane:

Let's talk about Aqua "using" Akane

Akane wasn't just "a tool" to Aqua (and it's an insult to both characters to claim otherwise)

It’s so funny how Aqua talks big about manipulating Akane, yet she ends up being the person he is most honest with in the entire manga

I’ve seen people criticize Akane’s reply to Aqua in Chapter 52, but I think Akane actually said exactly what Aqua needed to hear (+ clarification/follow-up)

I keep seeing people saying “aqua only wanted to date akane because he couldn’t date kana”, but i’m not convinced things are that white-and-black

Aqua, Akane and their relationship during his “freedom” period

Aqua in a nutshell

Could Akane be wrong about Aqua having romantic feelings for Kana? (Yes, she could be)

What I like about AquaKane +1

AquaKane Chapters Meta:

Chapter 42

Chapters 71 & 72

Chapter 78 + Akane's Tears

Aqua & Akane’s phone call in Chapter 97 + French Translation

Aqua, Akane & Chapter 98

Can we please talk about how silly Aqua is? (Chapter 116) +1

Chapter 131

Chapter 148

Chapter 149

Chapter 150

Chapter 152

Chapter 153: The many parallels between Kamiki -> Ai and Aqua -> Akane

Chapter 154: The many parallels between Ai -> Kamiki and Akane -> Aqua

Theories:

What did Aqua mean when he said that Kana helped him figure out his feelings for Akane?

Aqua wants Akane to know he's Goro + Akane has most of the pieces to figure it out

Theory on why Akane's White Star is on when she tells Aqua that she'll always be his ally

Ichigo/Miyako & AquaKane foreshadowing

Replies to the Aqua's Black Star Eyes AquaKane Theory: 1 | 2

Aka treats Akane like an extension of Aqua himself

Tokyo Blade and the narrative

Do you think Aqua and Akane will get back together or stay close friends?

AquaKane Parallels:

you're better off without me

too many to count

do you like this Akane? (aka the moment AquaKane got me)

their development

soon or later, you may end up being a real couple

chapter 131 & chapter 52

this relationship isn't real + french translation

Misc:

Has Akane ever made aqua smile? 

Toxic traits in their relationship? Sure, they’re both self-sacrificial people to a fault (+ 1 ask)

AquaKane Timeline

AquaKane and Unconditional Love

"Akane" vs "Kurokawa Akane" (how the way Aqua addresses her changes through the manga)

AquaKane Highlights Compilation (per arc)

Thoughts on the "Love Triangle"

I'm adding this section despite myself, but since Aka has forced my hand into talking about this more than I'd have liked to, here it goes 😂

Opinion on Aqua and Kana

Thoughts on the Akasaka 2021 tweet about Akane and Kana

I do think that Aqua’s feelings for Kana actually being platonic is the most interesting route

Aqua's "obsession" with Kana

Kana's parallels with Sarina: Kana is everything Aqua idolized Ai to be (aka, honest like Sarina) +1 + Even more parallels and a theory about their purpose

Kana may be meant to be "Everyone's Heroine" just like Fujiwara in Kaguya

Chapters 150 and 151

Revisiting Akane's monologue about relationships & dependency

Extras:

Replies to OnK-related Messages/Asks

Thoughts on the Starry Eyes

Thoughts on OnK's writing

[sparxwrites]

The Asshole-Of-The-Internet AU

sparx god. dsmp has internet and comms are iPhones and tommy gets banned from dsmp Twitter so he has to anonpost on dsmp 4chan

hoodie RKJGHRKGHKJGHERHGJHRHGH TOMMY ON 4CHAN OH NO

sparx …………oh no now I have “what if asshole-end-of-the-internet dsmp au” 4chan kiwifarms whatever else

hoodie they try to radicalize him but it doesnt work bc he literally is in exile

sparx SCREAMING okay but au where dream runs 4chan. Wilbur stars as null who fucks up 4chan and then makes kiwifarms when he gets run off the site. tommy is the normie they’re both desperately trying to recruit. Schlatt runs rise of kings or whatever tf the pick-up artist site is called

hoodie OH MY GOD YES

sparx this is perhaps the worst thing ever I have had in my head and I do not say that lightly

hoodie its SO fucking funny tho tommy in the reddit dms with wilbur who is trying so so hard to get him to join his site but tommy just keeps asking how many bitches wilbur gets from kiwifarms and wilbur has to say 'niki left me bc i made the site'

sparx SFAHDJFKGKGLSGSHDKGHRKRL niki left Wilbur and went to found ovarit which i think is like. the radfem site heghghgh

hoodieRJKHRJGHGH wilbur radicalised niki

sparx his dick was so shit it radicalised niki………….. George on 4chan but he just fuckinf sucks at being nasty and keeps messaging dream like “there r people being racist on here :/“

hoodie george on 4chan telling ppl to stop saying slurs

sparx YEAH YEAH u see my vision

hoodie george: idk this is kind of mean :/  dream, typing out smth incredibly evil: its just the internet it doesnt matter

sparx dream has to pretend occasionally he has morals for the sake of the bussy which he still has yet to get him and quackity are moots on some incel website

hoodie hes in it for the long game RJHGH quackity is on an incel website bc sapnap and karl left him

sparx he watches Schlatt’s webinars on negging

hoodie REJGHRJHHG quackity: takes notes so he can use it to win back sapnap quackity is literally the only gay person in a sea of pathetic straight men who are threats to society

sparx diversity win! this homosexual is a pathetic man who’s a threat to society <3 techno bc he is a chad only has a Snapchat that he uses to post gym thirst trap gains pics

hoodie RGJHJGRHGH sapnap is also a chad who only has snapchat he and techno have each other added so they can compare gains quackity hate screenshots all of their posts and jerks off to them in the private of his sad sad studio apartment

sparx HRGHRJGJGKD YES Karl makes Twitter threads so long u gotta use that unroll app for them and refuses to add image descriptions tho george keeps begging him

hoodie RHGERJHGHG why is george the most moral person in this au im crying hes just a normal guy trying to do the right thing

sparx Tubbo runs a parody account of a major political figure, except he’s actually very smart and has a lot of good ideas and the political figure is very stupid and so a) many people think tubbo’s account is actually the real one and news outlets regularly report his tweets as tho they’re fact, and b) he realises slowly that the guy he’s parodying is actually copying his ideas

hoodie ERJGHEGHERJGHKJERHGJGHERJHGJHGERJGHJGHRJGHRGH THATS....OH MY GOD wait what if the political figure is like Eret or smth

sparx Tommy: tubbo they banned me from 4chan :(  Tubbo, typing under his “@scrotus” account: wait a second Tommy I’m trying to influence international trade policy with China

hoodie KJERGHEKJGHJRGHGHRJGRHJGH clingyduo in this au goes so fucking hard also dream violating the rules of his own site to ban tommy is SO funny tommy has to go back to reddit

sparx I do also love the exile implication that it’s possible to get banned from 4chan YEAH

hoodie dream just wants tommy's cringe ass off of 4chan tubbo should honestly be banned from twitter but at this point everyone is convinced hes really eret and eret's actual account gets banned for impersonating a public figure

sparx hrbrhfhfr YEAH eret does not attempt to get unbanned bc at this point he desperately needs tubbo to keep his ratings up

hoodie tubbo is really the only thing keeping the public opinion of him up tubbo is the last bastion of hope for his reelection tommy literally is barely aware of all of this hes too wrapped up in whatever tf is happening with wilbur and dream ranboo has a tumblr

sparx ranboo has a tumblr and has no idea tf is going on out there

hoodie eryn used to have a prank youtube but he went too far and got permabanned JHRGHRJHG ranboo is safe....

sparx he's busy reblogging fanart of the founders of 4chan and kiwifarms kissing

hoodie KJRFHEJKGHJGHRJGH dream considers doxxing ranboo for this crime bc ranboo is the one drawing that fanart

sparx YES YES YES

hoodie wilbur on the other hand turns the fanart into his mousepad and sends pictures of it to dream

sparx tommy: ranboo why are you drawing rpf of my brother  ranboo: wait these are real people  ranboo: ............................wait your brother founded kiwifarms?????

hoodie tommy: yeah  ranboo: ......................tommy im sorry but this has to go in your callout post  tommy: youre making a callout post about me?  ranboo: i have one in my drafts just in case : ( sorry : ( i have one for all of my mutuals

sparx aLJSDKJFHERJGKHERKJGEFKJGHE OFC HE DOES

hoodie this is all said by a guy who has been drawing fanart of kiwifarms founder kissing 4chan founder....hypocrite

sparx the joke’s on ranboo, tubbo has files on all his friends with their addresses phone numbers known aliases known associates family members birthdays social security numbers and photos of the outside of their house

hoodie TJGHERHJGHJERHGHRGHJGEGHHGG tubbo is prepared to drop these if any of them ever cross him even wilbur wont fuck with tubbo and wilbur also has the full doxes on everyone...expect for dream this is part of why dream is wilbur's arch enemy sorry this is the best au of all time

sparx this is a absolutely the best au of all time wilbur is obsessed with getting dream's dox

hoodie wilbur: tommy im not going to help you do your homework, im trying to dox dream

sparx he's like. tommy. tommy i gotta get dream's dox. there's only ONE way to do this.  tommy: stalk hi-  wilbur: seduce him  tommy: ...............aight i'm out

hoodie RKJHGJHH tommy: have fun you fucking freak wilbur: oh i will, i will : ) tommy:

sparx tubbo, absently, scrolling twitter: do you want me to make homosexual sex illegal? i could probably do that  ranboo: my fanfic is coming true?!  tommy: ..................................what the fuck is wrong with both of you

hoodie tommy: why is everyone i know a wrongun??????  ranboo: im not a wrongun...am i?  tommy: you draw fucking art of my brother making out with dream ofc youre a wrongun!!!! tubbo: im going to outlaw rollerskates

sparx DSKJFSHHKGJ tubbo's just casually running a country

hoodie tubbo is basically the president at this point shockingly a positive thing when we compare it to dsmp canon that was not so positive for tubbo karl makes a thread about how tubbo isnt actually the real president but tubbo just responds saying 'yeah im a parody account' and literally no one believes him

sparx everyone's like, oh, our eret, so witty! so funny! look how down and hip with the kids he is

hoodie RGJGHRJGH

hoodie also im watching a schlatt video rn and honestly schlatt needs to be in this au more i think he should be the third person trying and failing to radicalise tommy

sparx OKAY BUT THIS AU IMPLIES SCHLATT MANAGES TO LIKE. TAKE KIWIFARMS FROM WILBUR front page news that's like "I'M THE EMPEROR NOW BITCH"

hoodie HE SHOULD ERKJGHJRHGHGHG he fucking stages a coup

sparx jannies lockout

hoodie RJKGRJGHGH wilbur is literally flipping things in the other room HIS GLORIOUS SITE....HIS KIWIFARMS.... his unfinished symphony

sparx UNFINISHED SYMPHONY OF KIWIFARMS

hoodie JRHGH schlatt perma bans wilbur and tommy's accounts and also doxxes wilbur then hes like 'if i find out any of the users here are female im banning them too' this is how wilbur and niki eventually end up teaming up bc he convinces her that schlatt is the true evil

sparx HOWLING HE WOULD

hoodie 'this is a manly site for men ONLY'

sparx niki: wilbur i will work with you if you publicly record a video saying ur dick is tiny and ur head game sucks  wilbur: ........... :( ok

hoodie wilbur: anything to get my site back.............

sparx ranboo: so that new video from wilbur..... uhh. anyone else think it was kinda....... 😳 tommy: ranboo. my brother. i am going to kill you.

hoodie tommy: ranboo you have one last chance to apologize or i will end your life right here and now  ranboo: sorry for being gay 😔 tommy: not sorry enough!!!!!!

sparx SORRY FOR BEING GAY im gonna shit

hoodie RJGHGGHGH ranboo is sorry for being gay for your brother, tommy

sparx hmmmm who have we forgotten in this au

hoodie hmmmmm tina fundy fundy is a scorned kiwifarms mod who thought he was wilbur's fav

sparx JSHDFKJDFHG fundy: i was your SON wilbur  wilbur: fundy. you're 19. i am 21.  fundy: your SON

hoodie fundy: you ABANDONED ME  wilbur: i was literally kicked off of my own site

sparx fundy: i'm gonna kill myself now  wilbur: lmao. -wait NO DON'T

hoodie TJKGHRGHRGJH wilbur: wait bro are you joking?  wilbur three days later: i think he actually did it  fundy, not dead: taught him a lesson lol

sparx skdjfjsdkjghdfkjghdfkj

hoodie this au is a blessing

sparx it's Something!!!!

[oldfangirl81]

thank you for your post! i saw the tweet and felt a bit bad because yes i did start the show because of the kiss, i wouldn’t have otherwise thinking that i was just gonna get too hopeful and crushed again (*cough* spn *cough*)

but now i’m watching, and i love every single character and their stories, and knowing that it’s headed somewhere good makes it a lovely experience

sorry for my random ramble haha hope you have a good day ❤️

Okay, so this made me a little verklempt. And I'm sorry if anyone is making you feel unwelcomed just because the kiss got you to watch.

Back in '07 I had never heard of Doctor Who. I saw a picture of Jack Harkness and Ianto Jones kissing in S1Ep13 of Torchwood. So I immediately started looking into it. Because queer and sci-fi, oh yes please. After finding out it was a spin-off I started with the first episode of Christopher Eccleston and was hooked. In the years since I went to two Gallifrey conventions in LA, I've done a Master cosplay, I've done photo ops with 3 Doctors and numerous companions, I've written fic and collected merch. All started because I saw a photo of this moment.

And funny enough actually my very first convention was a Supernatural one in San Francisco '11.

So again in my own rambling way welcome to the fandom. Please enjoy our ridiculous show. And I'm sorry if anyone ever makes you feel bad for getting into fandom late.

[maiverie]

moot game idea what if u put your moots (and you or maybe their bias) in a prompt generator && rate the likelihoods ^^

hi anon so sorry this took so long to reply to AAA

here r a few quick ones ( + me & heeseung cos it’s MY blog and i’m allowed to be delulu too 🤭) hope u liked this anon i actually had sm w these they’re so cute 😭

solid 9/10 i think heeseung lowkey this type of guy 😭 posting his gfs pictures everywhere and commenting on all her posts to assert his dominance 🤩 flirting w her in the comments 😀 but anyway i docked a point to keep myself in check n make sure i dont go full delusional lmfaooo

@ctrlemis 10/10 SOOBIN RESPECTFUL BOY AWARDDDD 🤭 i can see him being very attentive toward cultural customs and open to learning 🥹💞 CUTIE He deserves a smooch

@flwrshee -8374939/10 nahh fuck this i’m jealous I DIDNT GET THIS ONE W HEESEUNG WHAT THE FUCK WHY IS THIS SOSOSOOSOSS CUTE FUCKYOOOUUUUUUUY????????( 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 this is bsssss heeseung doesn’t even own a phone 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

@chiyuv 197392/10 THIS IS CRAZYYYYYYY i can def picture user chiyuv having that kind of rizz 🤓 THE OUTWARD FLIRTING is so real i’m pre sure i once saw cael tweet about wanting to meet heeseung so she can aggressively tell him he has pretty eyes 😭😭

@reivrze 100/10 HAHEJWJDJWKSJHAJA THIS MADE ME LAYGH LIKE WHY CAN I PICTURE HOON GOING VIRAL FOR A MEME SAURRRYYYY he just has a memeable face idk😭😭😭 i can def picture miyu/hoon having that goofy friends to lovers dynamic

@shinsou-rii 10/10 THIS IS SO CUTE N FUNNY SO ROMCOM I CAN DEF PICTURE THIS ??? like ri would definitely beat ts out of childhood bf!sunghoon 😭😭😭 I CAN JUST IMAGINE IT HAJDJSJS AND UR LIL SISTERS JOINING IN ON THE SNOW FIGHT TOO??? so cute i love this prompt

@haerinz 19372/10 this is gen so FUCKINGcute AND SO REAL LIKE YES ??? JUNGWON WOULD LROBABLY BE GETTING UP EARLY TO GO DANCE PRACTIce or smth and then feel bad for making noises in the kitchen 😭😭 FAE WOULD STUMBLE OUT THE ROOM IN CONFUSION 😭😭 jungwon would probably kiss her on the forehead as an apology 😭😭 ok i need to stop herE

[skewbforty]

Story time

2020, although not the worst year of my life, definitely ranks at least top 5. But it didn't suck harder for me than it did in July, when at my most vulnerable, someone who ran the community that I at the time called my family, had everyone gang up on me and made me feel as betrayed as possible. I won't go into the details, but long story short, I eventually got better. Slightly.

But 3 things became my beacon of hope in those times. 1 was my own server which I had established soon afterwards, which turned out to be a huge success, 1 was my now girlfriend who stuck with me and gave me support, but 1 was a slightly less likely source.

It was an Animal Crossing parody account on Twitter which back then, as a site, wasn't 180% pure anger and hatred. There was still salvageable material on the website at that point in its life.

That's not to say there weren't angry people tho, and boy did they fuck that account over.

I'm not gonna say the account's name to protect my own ass, but what happened one day not long after I had found it, was the account had said something slightly stupid, either knowingly or unknowingly, that could be seen as slightly racially insensitive. All of a sudden, they got absolutely lynched by people for that tweet, wave after wave after wave of hatred, threats and toxicity which broke them to the point where they deleted that account.

Now, I am NOT saying what the parody account did was right. I do think they should maybe have thought a bit more about what they said, especially in an age like this. But it's not like they said any slurs, or direct attacks, or anything any government would consider hate speech. And yet they got absolutely flooded with hate with whatever they said (which btw, I don't even remember what it was, go figure)

I've been victim of this too. On one of my old accounts on this website I talked briefly about why I thought Sasha (which funnily enough is also an Animal Crossing character) was not transmasculine. I tried to remain as inclusive as I possibly could about trans people, and I even went out of my way to say "I could be wrong, if you disagree, that's perfectly fine, and you could be right". In the end, it's all a game and it was just a ramble in good fun in the spirit of the game. Didn't work. That post got so much hate. Not nearly as much as the parody Twitter account got, but I was called "cis scum" left and right. (I find it painfully fortuitous that people in defence of trans people called a trans person who wasn't 100% perfect in their wording "cis scum" >.>) but that's the kind of place we live in atm. Yes, the haters out there are just trying to do the right thing, but some are trying too hard. And ultimately doing the opposite of what they sought out to do in their extremity.

I will miss that parody account. Not for their one dumb tweet they made, but for their other thousands of delightfully funny tweets. And it's not like the only one. I just found another account that's similar in style only on this site, and for Minecraft instead of Animal crossing. So I’m glad I was able to find some humour in this chaotic world again. Because the show must go on.

[lligkv]

a responsibly equivocal stance

Max Norman's review of Diane Arbus's work in The Drift brings together some questions I've wrestled with lately, as I always wrestle with them: the questions of having a position on an artist and having complex assessments of art. Some of this is triggered by the experience of watching some friends of mine process the Oscars and the sweep made by Everything Everywhere All at Once—a therapeutic millennial movie that seems to want to palliate viewers' childhood wounds by using larger-than-life spectacle as a vehicle for overly simplified sentiment, and is being disproportionately rewarded considering its ultimate lameness (the natural product of excessive spectacle for those who don't find that charming) and conservatism. (The case for the conservatism is laid out quite well by Kieran McLean, here.) Versus the kind of artwork that tries to be several things at once, say TAR.

Which everyone online seems to be kind of stupid about? Much of this is likely shaped by Twitter's particular economy of terse opinions, quote tweeting, and dunking. Versus, say, an ecosystem of alt-weeklies or blogs issuing comparatively considered pieces (written by critics of whatever stripe, and not Twitter-posting Substackers, each hanging out their own little shingle, subjected to the demands and incentives and scale of those platforms), which people then reflected on via comments in comment sections—which is not to glamorize blogs or comment sections, just to say that what we've got now might be worse than what we had then. With TAR, it feels like a film that was designed to be ambiguous enough to evoke multiplicity in its interpretations just got such flat reads from people whose tastes I normally trust. It was a portrayal of an abuser in cancel culture being justly punished for her arrogance. Or it was a portrayal of an abuser being unjustly punished, because according to Todd Field, Lydia Tar's genius, or her age and socialization to older mores, or the perceived stupidity of her antagonists in the culture—for all that I don’t think the student she argues with, in a moment that goes viral and begins her fall, Max, is actually meant to be seen as stupid—ought to have excused her bad behavior.

To my mind, the film seemed to want to do both these things—or, as the memes would have it, a secret third thing, some hybrid of the two.

It seemed Field wanted to show a person whose character has been dessicated by the pursuit of fame experiencing the destruction of all her ties to the world that satisfied her desire — perhaps even to get back in touch with some new form of creation both degraded and genuine. Yes, Tar, at the end of the film, is in an objectively worse position than when she began. And she's not exactly saved. She may not be capable of any reckoning with herself more concrete than the atavistic, overwhelming stab of feeling that makes her vomit when she's confronted by a reminder of the women she worked to manipulate, like Krista and Olga, in the form of the girls in the spa she visits, lined up like a banquet for her delectation. She's also conducting in a meaningful way, absorbed in the act of it, in a way she has not been up to that point. And she is so because now, she has no other choice...

All this is to say: maybe Field wanted to create an object that could meaningfully be taken several ways. Maybe he meant us to go back and forth on whether Tar is right or Max is right, or to what degree; maybe he meant us to like Tar in some ways, or to find her charismatic or funny in fucked-up ways, and to disapprove of or hate her in other ways, to find her blinkered and odious and sad in her attempts to aggrandize herself. All this is so very basic to say, and I don't mean to imply I'm being radical here, but I have had this thought: maybe we're fucking up by being so insistent with how we feel about this movie and what we think it's saying About The Culture We're In. Artists shouldn’t be expected to have a single stance on something, a single intention that each work exists just to express. An artist can, should, be working through something...

Which brings me back to the Arbus piece. I appreciate Norman's calling out the position taken by curator John Szarkowski and critic Sebastian Smee that Arbus meant to humanize her subjects. I don't think Arbus's intent was to rehabilitate, to "show," as Szarkowski has it "that all of us—the most ordinary and the most exotic of us—are on closer scrutiny remarkable"; that would be banal, and perhaps as instrumentalizing of the subjects as work made to emphasize their strangeness. "Does Arbus’s photograph ["A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C., 1968"] send him up, or support him?” Norman asks, “Or is the real joke on the viewer who insists on one interpretation or another?" I don't think it's a joke played on the viewer who insists on one interpretation or the other; I do think that viewer ought to be capable of acknowledging multiple possibilities... Maybe—to state another basic point—artists, whether Diane Arbus or Todd Field, don't have answers, but questions, and they chose to do something felt as well as thought to represent them... And I think artists should be allowed to look bad, to have complicated feelings, to encounter a desire to gawk or objectify and portray that desire with a degree of honesty and interrogation so that those of us who, obeying certain limits that collective life justly(!) places, won't cop to it can confront it in some form...

I do want to be clear that interrogating the ethics of Arbus's relationship to her subjects, so many of whom were marginalized as she was not, feels useful and necessary. I also don't think we can do that with much precision if the only question we ask is Did Arbus have a right to do what she did? And while none of this is new, it does feel like Norman's piece opens a way to that more precise interrogation of the ethics of Arbus's work by pushing us past the simple binary of "the work is good" or "the work is bad"—a binary that feels particularly ubiquitous now, and undignified in the overheated discourse about art that it often fuels. Ultimately, if the Smee/Szarkowski take on Arbus is, as Norman writes, one in which "Arbus's biography, which testifies to her own 'inner mysteries,' is used to help straighten out the problem of a privileged white woman on the prowl for weirdos—a woman who once compared taking pictures to being a butterfly collector," I don't want to discount the "butterfly collector" bit. But what if what’s so often seen as a problem could once again become fact... As Norman puts it, we so often take positionality as key to understanding works of art. And how much has that uncovered for us that a responsibly equivocal stance toward an artwork—a stance that acknowledges possibilities good and bad and makes no final judgments, or doesn't rush to translate a first impression, a take, into a summary judgment—could not more effectively do?

Time, I guess, to page Sontag for those erotics of art; we might need them again...

Ironically, Sontag appears in Norman's piece as another critic determined to reduce Arbus, specifically by critique of her privilege and the perceived amorality of her voyeurism rather than by praise for some arguable desire she had to humanize her subjects. Maybe by the time Against Photography came out, Sontag too had forgotten her own edict. Or more likely, the demands of nascent image culture—and the nature of photography, versus those technologies of art that are less automatic on the part of the artist, and less readily assimilated into a media economy that goes on to inform a country's politics—had overwhelmed it.

To be clear, Sontag's take on Arbus in "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly" is clearly the product of intense engagement with the work and Arbus's own writings on it. But I resent the harshness of the judgments—their fixity. When Sontag writes the line

What happens to people's feelings on first exposure to today's neighborhood pornographic film or to tonight's televised atrocity is not so different form what happens when they first look at Arbus's photographs.

I think: is Arbus's work about inuring us to what is terrible? Are the subjects "necessarily ahistorical," is her view "always from the outside"? Perhaps Arbus's work is "reactive—reactive against gentility, against what is approved" to some degree; is that all it is? Sontag takes Arbus to task for not being ethical with her photographs, as a journalist might be ethical, but can't the creation of a dramatic confrontation with one's own instinct to be a voyeur be a meaningful exercise; meaningful in an ethical sense, for a viewer—particularly viewers in the same wealthy and sheltered position as Arbus—if still something for which the artist should be held to account? As Norman writes, "Looking through Arbus’s lens only makes the encounter more demanding." I suppose the point is this: There's rigor and even beauty in an unequivocal stance, but also the risk of a shrillness, an antagonism, a hostility not unlike the hostility people brought to TAR—and I'm increasingly tired of assuming a hostile, suspicious, exclusively hermaneutic relationship to art...

Right as I was writing this post, I was tipped off to the publication of an essay by Garth Greenwell in The Yale Review in which he talks about an apophatic theory of the relation between art and morality: "a theory that would allow us to explore the moral work of art without limiting or prescribing that work, as certain theologians attempt to develop ways to think about God without defining God in a manner that would violate God’s freedom." Which puts precisely the words to what I'm searching for; the relation to art I would like to return to. Marked by generosity, an understanding of an artwork as necessarily multifaceted, the taking of time in the consideration of it, an assumption of good faith. There's also a line in Ben Lerner's book The Lichtenberg Figures that comes to mind: "a great work takes up the question of its origins / and lets it drop..." Maybe I'd tweak that line now: A great work takes up the question of its ultimate meaning and lets it drop...

[chrisevansonly]

“someone who has one of the kindest smiles i’ve ever seen” Yet you say nasty things about his girlfriend. You’re a fucking fat joke. Chris doesn’t deserves your support. If his girlfriend is racist like you claim she is all because of her friends actions in which she cannot control, He is one. He literally has racist friends. You’re so embarrassing. No wonder no one wants you.

Hi anon☺️

So obviously you follow me and decided to be a lil nasty today and usually I would delete but I have time and feel like someone as disrespectful as you should hear this. I haven’t said anything horrendous or rude about Alba at all. I admit I got mixed up in a few not great tweets, which I’m not proud of and I have owned up to that. In the end it’s not my place and Chris is a grown man, he can do what he wishes.

Coming and making fun of my body and calling me fat and a joke, is extremely uncalled for and you’re lucky I’m okay enough to know you’re just projecting.

I do not comment on Alba and Chris, I don’t post about them, and I continued to say if he’s happy i’m happy! He deserves to feel loved and appreciated no matter what, I will always stand by that, so you must be mixed up.

Funny enough he doesn’t deserve the support of someone like you who gets off on harassing and bullying others online, so maybe you should also take a look in the mirror.

She has had a moment where she appropriates a culture in a video, and yes the actions of her friends are not hers, but actions I find so disgusting towards the people it affects. I’m sure Chris also has racist friends and look at you, you said it yourself that makes Chris racist, so you’re proving both of us right.

I don’t think i’m embarrassing, what I think is embarrassing is you coming to bully someone you don’t know on anonymous because you can hide behind a screen and project just how miserable you are. I’m so sorry for anything you’re going through that’s causing you to lash out and hurt others.

Funny you say no one wants me when I’ve got an amazing group of friends, family and people who support me no matter what.

Next time please refrain from harassing others on the internet. I hope you can allow yourself to heal and find happiness someday 💛

[floraleevee]

One of my closest friends has a brother, let’s call him Chase, who is so very obviously bi but deeply in the closet. Which is wild because his sibling is openly bi and nonbinary with mostly queer friends, so you’d think he’d come out to her at the very least.

But instead he just likes tweets about being a bisexual guy, and since his likes are viewable and my friend likes to see what their sibling is up to, they end up sending me screenshots of his likes, usually with an accompanying thought along the lines of, “dude I know everyone works on their own time. But come on. It’s been years of this. He knows I can see these.” This is off topic, but sets the scene for how we all know he’s bi but he won’t come out so we all pretend he’s straight in his presence.

Anyways a couple months ago he was going through a really rough time. Post-surgery blues, gf left him for a dude that lives in a van, moving back to his hometown because his internship ended, etc etc. We were all at my friend’s place when he turns to me and goes, “Fen, I’m thinking of bleaching my hair blond. Thoughts?”

To which I sat in stunned silence for a beat before gathering my thoughts and choosing my words cautiously. “Huh. Um..well I don’t know how it is for straight guys, Chase, but…so it’s a well-known phenomenon among gay men that if someone bleaches their hair then they’re almost certainly Going Through It. Like, it’s a very common stereotype that gays’ll joke about: the bleach-blond twink who’s mentally unwell. And I say that as someone who was once that twink who was very mentally unstable and bleached their hair platinum-blond. So I gotta ask, you doin’ alright bud?”

Which led to a flustered response from him and all of us nodding along that yes he’s straight and it must be so different if a straight guy does it blah blah blah. There’s no real point to this story. Just a funny little bloop on a recurring topic in this friend group. Very much a “breaking the fourth wall to look at the camera” moment, to which my friend had to leave the room because they knew if we made eye contact neither of us would be able to hold back a smile.

“Just make sure you do it professionally. And talk to the stylist at least two weeks beforehand about if you should change your shampoo/conditioner routine leading up to it”

[kaleidoscopicvariegated-blog]

ON FASHION.

ON MY OWN FASHION.

There’s a saying that I come across often which says fashion is just drag. Or something along those lines.

Anyway, I went to the fashion accounts series at Museum Africa and it’s a fashion museum documenting South African fashion through the years pre/post-colonialism and it’s so funny, I wouldn’t consider myself the most fashionably expressive person. Yes I’m stylish, my clothes look good, the fits are always giving but it’s nothing avant garde or camp. I’ve learnt how to sew but I’m doing nothing with that skill atm BUT I consume so much about fashion and fashion history.

Something that stood out to me at the museum was the question beauty or trauma. And I think beauty is trauma. If we think of thinness and how western society has imposed that as the standard and what the rise of ozempix has caused then BEAUTY IS TRAUMA. If we think beauty treatments and the price to undergo them, botched BBLs and other beauty enhancements. AGAIN BEAUTY IS TRAUMA. I enjoyed the museum so much, we asked questions, we pondered, we admired.

My fave thing about being a student of life is that there’s never enough information or knowledge. There’s always something to learn. This museum was a reminder that our stories and culture and the most interesting and intricate parts of who we are was stripped by colonialists and is now again being admired by the same people. Not the same but you get the message.

There’s a tweet I saw earlier that said the world would be so boring without all the different cultures. Which brings me to something we were conversing about which is, where does our history of clothing originate from? Because some of the images we see are almost always from the Nguni lens. And when they are from the Nguni lens, where are the images and adaptations of the bangs people and the Sotho tswana pedi people?? But also, does this not mean that we are one people? Who are also different?? Again two things can be true at the same time. We can be the same but different, take human beings for example.

I love fashion. I love experimenting with it, I love learning about it I love seeing it. I think in my past life I was highly involved with fashion in one way or another.

The museum date reminded me so much of the clothes kinder podcast by Khensani. As well as my very many interest.

Good night

[peppermintbuttlemon]

it is slang for vagina 😭 sorry i didn’t feel like being crass and saying pussy like he did, & think coco is funny as hell from that one keery tweet, my bad. i can guarantee you that i’m 100% not who that anon thinks that i am LOL. i have zero presence on anything to do w this man. i literally just lurk and wanted to add my opinion bc i haven’t participated in some good discourse since i got off stan twitter and missed the rage. i don’t even post on my tumblr and have a burner twitter with like 8 followers and they’re all my friends irl besides like two ppl.

and yes unfortunately steroids LMAO this one in specific was in 2021 & he was a huge gym rat. literally worked where he lived and when he moved out, there was all the stuff from it that he left behind.

howeverrrrrrrrrrr no scottish experience sadly 💔 just the british & irish

I quite like saying pussy. This is a pro pussy space. You can call it whatever you want though I don’t care.

Gonna have to find out about that Scottish strange on my own I guess. Unless anyone else has gotten some from the Scots?

[alagaisia]

I think next year for Thanksgiving we should go with a direct-to-leftovers release

[trainsinanime]

@sayse told me to post my overly-long, not-actually-that-funny hot take about Marinette’s hair color after all, so here it is:

This may be an unpopular opinion, but: I think it’s okay to say that Marinette’s hair is blue. Especially when it’s funny to do so.

I know a lot of people will immediately point out the tweet where Thomas Astruc said that it was supposed to be black with blue highlights, and so “it’s supposed to be black”. And that’s true! It definitely makes way more sense, because there’s no in-universe explanation for why Marinette’s hair (and the hair of everybody with the same hair type, notably Kagami) is blue. Adrien called her hair black in his poem. There are times when the show really sells the “black, with a bit of blue as a stylistic thing” approach, e.g. in the Shanghai special.

But at the end of they day, you know, her hair is… blue. Just look at it! 

[Image description: Screenshot from Monsieur Pigeon 72, where Marinette is hugging Kagami, both with very obviously blue hair.]

The stylistic thing requires tight control of colours and lighting, and that’s not something the show can always do. Among other things, it works way better at night, where the blue highlights reflect the night sky; but the vast majority of scenes need to be set during the day for story reasons. Regardless of which studio animates things, in the end, her hair is usually noticeable blueish, and often it just becomes incredibly blue. It is basically always bluer than any other black object on screen, like Chat Noir’s suit, Ladybug’s own spots, or Juleka’s hair.

[Image description: Screenshot from Guiltrip, where Ladybug has bluish-grey hair, and hands the magical thing to Juleka, who has black hair that is partially died purple. Juleka’s outfit and Marinette’s spots are all black.]

There’s a point where something stops being an animation error and just becomes part of the show, and for Marinette’s hair color, that was like three episodes in at the latest.

At this point, it has essentially become canonically blue. In everything that isn’t the 3D animated show, the hair is always clearly, indisputably blue. Look at Miraculous Chibi.

(Honestly I’m not the biggest fan of that spin-off show, but it still proves my point). Look at the plush doll in the Zag store. Don’t look at the official licensed comics, they’re terrible, but even there: Blue hair, no two ways about it.

Even the show itself has tacitly admitted as much in later seasons. The biggest example is Cosmobug:

Yes, you can pretend that her light blue hair is just a design element that comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with her normal hair color, but I mean, come on, seriously.

The hair was intended to be black, yes. But sometimes things don’t come out the way we intend. Sometimes they come out blue.

I see this question mostly crop up around fanfics; people generally accept Marinette with blue hair in fan art. But for fanfic I’ve seen a lot of people say “I don’t like fanfic that says Marinette has blue hair” or similar.

Now, I would advise against calling Marinette “the bluenette”, “ravenette”, “midnightette”, “tumblrbackgroundette” or “marinetteshaircolorette” unless you want to deliberately annoy your readers. Note that it’s perfectly okay to deliberately annoy your readers, just don’t do it by accident.

But I think we should be more willing to play around with it. Have Adrien and Alya (or Chloé or whoever) get into heated arguments what Marinette’s hair color actually is. Have characters insist that Marinette and Kagami have completely different hair colors. Reveal that Plagg thinks her hair is orange.

I think Marinette’s hair color is inherently funny, and we as a fandom aren’t doing enough with that.

[latineslytherin]

Making my own post about this because OP deleted my response proving them wrong and offering my side as an actual person of color from the notes of their post. How funny they remove contrary evidence. They only want replies that validate their bigotted views against multiracial people and experiences.

\User the-slytherin-snape-hater writes:

Snape Apologists need to shut up with that “he was just reclaiming a slur that he can use!” bullshit!

Firstly, Half-bloods are not mistreated the way that Muggleborns are, and the slur Mudblood is only used against Muggleborns, not Half-bloods.  Therefore, Snape can’t “reclaim” it just because he’s Half-Muggle.

Secondly, even if he could reclaim it, what he did to Lily isn’t “reclaiming a slur”!  “Reclaiming a slur” doesn’t mean “I can now use it to hurt people the same way oppressor groups do, and throw it at people who are hurt by it when I’m upset, and it’s totally ok and consequence-free!”!  Anyone who thinks so is a bigoted asshole and has clearly never been in a marginalized group that has slurs used against them!

“Reclaiming a slur” means “I can use it, but only around/to people who are ok with it, and only as a joke and/or identifier, not as a slur and insult the way the oppressors use it” and only  “I can use it, but only around/to people who are ok with it, and only as a joke and/or identifier, not as a slur and insult the way the oppressors use it”!

So quit using this disgusting excuse to defend your precious little wizard racist asshole hurling a slur at his marginalized friend!

User the-slytherin-snape-hater later changed "Snape Apologist to Snape Stans at request from a fellow Snater.

I responded with

Ding dong you are wrong.

JK Rowling responding to Tweet: @jk_rowling just come back from a pub quiz, one question was "in H. Potter what terms is given to a witch/wizard with one non-magical parent and one magical parent" our answer - half blood! The quiz master bottled it and gave a point for ppl who answered mudblood, can you confirm?

JK Rowling responded with: Unfair question in my view, because it would depend who was speaking. Non-bigots in the wizarding world would say half-blood. Pure-blood supremacists would say mudblood. In my view you should have got the point.

Pureblood Supremacist do not differentiate between muggleborn or halfblood. If you have a muggle parent, you are a mudblood.

Secondly a slur comes off differently when it’s said by someone within the marginalized party vs those from the oppressor party. Hence why when Draco says it, it carries more offensive weight because Draco is pureblood. Where as when Snape says it, it does not carry the same connotations because he is also a mudblood. I.E., I can call my fellow latines a spic, but white people and especially Spainards, cannot because they are the oppressors and us Latines (yes including multiracial latines) were the ones oppressed. It is reclaiming a word they applied to us and using it for OUR purposes. And yes including as an insult. For instance we call someone a spic when they are behaving like they are too good for their own people, or behaving like they aren’t also latine.

So quit trying to write off the nuance and intricacies of people of multiracial backgrounds and the way they use languages applied to them by bigots who don’t see the difference. You come across just as bigoted as them by trying to erase the multiracial experience and deny they also experience the same prejudice as their fellows of the marginalized group.