#youre going to ask moral “purity” from fans of *those*??

[tollundwoman]

The funniest thing is seeing the stupid-ass "anti vs pro ship" discourse being applied to the Most Objectionable Stories Ever.

[celestialtarot11]

Your thoughts of Libra rising women? I'm one of them. 💕

Libra Rising Women—

—Beautiful. She radiates an angelic energy, and may have wider rounder eyes. Not limited to, but can have softer features to the face and body. Often times itself their energy that radiates this purity and balance.

—Strong morals and traditions. She knows what her boundaries are when empowered and can have core values and principles. If she grew up in an unwelcoming environment, she will create her own morals and ideals apart from what she faced.

—She believes she upholds standards and it’s important to display this to her younger siblings or friends. She may try to be a role model, and this comes with a sense of pressure, especially if family held her to high standards.

—This is also where perfectionism comes in, because she may believe that in order to be liked and accepted she has to be perfect. Whether its through physicality, not displaying emotions or asking for help.

—As a Libra woman becomes empowered and finds herself she realizes it is within her right to express herself wholly. And nothing less. Those who run from her being vulnerable are truly afraid of themselves.

-Can have lots of opinions and ideas, separate from those around her. When she was younger she crafted a narrative that fit everyone else, because she was younger back then. She could have had people who diminished her personality. But now, she thinks for herself, and allows and accepts others ideas.

—May be afraid of intimacy and works on it. She may struggle with opening up, forming an attachment to those around her. She may prefer solitude as a way to maintain independence, which nothing is wrong with that. I believe these natives are working on finding a balance with relationships and with themselves.

—They do not want to get lost in a relationship and forget themselves.

—Home life, family matters may remain a secret with this native. She may not open up a lot about it, and it takes a lot of time. She can also have traditions she brings up in her friendships/relationship as a way to re-create a better childhood.

—It can be something she loved. Like celebrating thanksgiving and actually going all out and incorporating family. Putting in a lot of effort with cooking, preparing meals, and music!

—Wants a sense of security and stability within the home and tries to create that externally. It fan be why these natives are great at handling money/finances.

--These lovely women are amazing at speaking up for social reforms, advocacy, philosophy or therapy, because they want to make an active change in their communities! They see the best in others and with their work/skills they want to use that knowledge to help others.

—There is an innate need to be seen deeply by those around them and to share their beautiful inner world, but also comes the fear of it all.

—If you really push her buttons she can drop you like you never existed. She grew up in an environment where she had to turn off her emotions, so she knows when someone is trying to hurt her. She will choose herself over anyone at any moment, without needing to explain herself.

—Obtains pleasure and gives pleasure. She engages in an intimate dance with those around her, whether it’s through her flickering eyes, her warm arms embracing, and laughs bubbling in the air. She loves to have a meaningful time.

—Those around her fall for her charm, beauty, and grace. They may underestimate her intelligence, which makes it all the more better for her to surprise those who do.

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

People might be getting carried away blocking all celebrities who haven’t spoken up now. But the original blocklist, that included Harry, was shorter and targeted Zionists or people know to associate with Zionists. I don’t see a problem with that.

Oh boy anon. I'll get into my full political disagreements with #Blockout 2024. But I do need to start with your HUAC inspired willingness to condemn those 'known to associate with Zionists'.

That approach to people and organising is completely fucked. There is no meaningful Palestine solidarity action without people who are 'known to associate with Zionists'. The idea that the only way to moral purity is never to mix with anything bad is all about people's anxiety - and an anathema to useful political organising. It's also a key form of power and control used by cults.

Anyway, leaving that particular monstrosity aside, your ask did make me investigate the #Blockout2024 - and I thought I'd comment on the politics.

It's important to start with the basic point that I'm pro people blocking anyone they want on social media, for any reason or no reason at all. The question isn't about blocking celebrities (absolutely do it if you want to). The question is the politics of #Blockout2024 as presented by its advocates.

I would say I had twotypes of disagreement with the politics of #Blockout2024, the first is that I disagree with their understanding of the world. Then the second is that I disagree with what the impact of their strategy is - based on what we can already see.

To start with the difference in worldview. The Blockout is based on a very particular fan view/fantasy of the nature of celebrity - particularly the idea that celebrity is some kind of democracy decided by fans. Without this assumption nothing about Blockout makes any sense - and ultimately it's not just that I think it's mostly wrong (although like most important obfuscations there is an element of truth). It's that the idea that celebrity is a democracy and fans have the power is a lie that's to legitimise existing power structures.

I believe that one of the most important elements in building a better world is a clear eyed view of current power structures - and so do not believe in any attempt to change that involves spreading and strengthening lies about existing strategies.

The language of most of the advocates of the Blockout was based in charity not solidarity. One thing that was really noticeable to me about the blockout notices that I saw was that they were very much framing Palestinians people who needed charity. The problem was that celebrities weren't doing enough for the poor and needy. It was basically a noblesse oblige worldview. (This is very clear in hte original digital guillotine video)

That's not how I see what's going on. I believe that Palestinian people are struggling for their liberation and need solidarity from everyone - because all our liberation is tied to Palestinians liberation.

The approach of the Blockout wildly overstates the power of celebrities - and in doing so understates our collective power.

A lot of these discussions wildly overstate celebrities power to stop genocide - and in doing so actively misrepresent how power works in our world.

There's this idea that celebrities have far more power to make significant change than the rest of us - and it's not true. Jane Fonda did a lot of good work - but she didn't have the power to end the Vietname War. Partly I think it's generally over-valuing of attention and the idea attention alone changes things (it really doesn't).

But it' also based on understating the impact that we can have collectively. I've seen multiple people give the example about Violet Affleck wearing a Watermelon jersey in a pap picture and that leading to significant sales and people then attributing the money raised to her. She didn't raise that money - many people who care deeply about Palestine learned of a particular way they can express that support and provide financial support. But it was the actions of the many that mattered. And all those people would have found another way to do those exact same things without seeing this one top. Violet Affleck seems great - I'm sure she's done undertaken far more meaningful actions herself that wear something in a pap picture.

The idea that persuading celebrities to act is a worthwhile political action - only makes sense if you deny our collective power.

The other way of looking at this is to look about impact - and what the impact has been already. The Blockout claimed to be about lessening celebrity power. Instead it was about entrenching celebrity culture even further, by pretending it was politics.

I actually believe that some of the people who started putting this forward probably are frustrated wiht celebrity culture and the way they interact with it. But the way to stop participating in celebrity culture is to stop giving it any attention, not to talk a lot about how you're stopping. It was always apparent to me that this was about celebrity culture, but it's really clear now.

Finally, the Blockout could only ever be a distraction. I saw a really depressing video which someone opened 'this could be the most important boycott of our lives' - and I was like - for fucks sake - BDS is the most important boycott of your life. Occupations for divestment are having real impact. Coming up with some a tactic that propogates misinformation about how the world works, when longstanding strategies are building successfully - can be really destructive for movements.

Luckily it was so unsubstantial it won't even be a distraction.

My basic point is people should block whoever they like, for any reason. But if anyone wants to pay less attention to celebrities, they need to do that - not talk about how they're paying less attention to celebrities.

[ragecndybars]

NGL I've been pretty steamed lately over how people feel this need to align every character they like with their own morals.

In broader fandom spaces, I see such widespread refusal to give any character a flaw which contrasts too strongly with the fan's sensibilities. Murderers are fair game, for example, because that's not something which personally impacts the fan, but someone being a little sexist, or needing to have XYZ queer identity explained to them instead of instantly recognizing and understanding the term, or even just asking a slightly insensitive question? That will suddenly get fans all up in arms accusing you of slandering the character in question.

Like, I'll write a fic or do a silly little edit where one character will say something ignorant or insensitive, or even just clearly showing that they're a little confused but they got the spirit (ie. that "His pronouns are they/them!!!" meme), and people will suddenly drop into my replies steaming out the ears because "THAT CHARACTER WOULD NOT SAY THAT!!!" As if I'm personally breaking into their house and calling them transphobic because I said their favorite character would mess up someone's pronouns by accident.

It feels very much related to the trend of taking characters and injecting them with an insane level of emotional maturity, such that they no longer resemble their initial character at all. Much has been said about fanfictions where every character talks like a therapist, but at least in those fics, it's usually just written that way because the author finds it satisfying, not because they think the characters have to be flawless communicators or else they're shitty people. At least, that's the vibe I usually get. But I feel like for at least several years, it's been completely taboo to even imply that a character might have some biases to work through -- even if said biases are clearly evident in the source material!! A character can say some truly horrific homophobic shit in their source material, but if you write a fic where they say "Dude, that's gay" suddenly you're a character assassin.

I dunno. I feel like I could tie this into a larger point about the reemerging obsession with a mythical "moral purity" and frantic disavowal of anything which taints that for fear of being seen as One Of The Bad Guys, but I think the biggest thing is just... acknowledging that characters can have flaws. Flaws that go beyond "a little obnoxious", and into the territory of "genuinely thoughtless in a way which can hurt people". Flaws which may actually make you uncomfortable, because people with those flaws may have been callous, cruel, or even outright abusive to you in real life. Those flaws can exist within fictional characters who are good and kind people, and it doesn't mean the character is being mischaracterized as shitty bigots. Because nice, good people can still have prejudices and biases -- or, hell, just be a little awkward or misspeak! (See again the "his pronouns are they/them" meme -- do we not all agree that the joke there isn't "X character is transphobic", it's "X character is trying so hard to be an ally but has no idea what they're doing"?)

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying you have to be "realistic" by writing characters you like as prejudiced or rude. If you wanna write your characters as completely accepting of every queer thing under the sun, do that! Do it regardless of "realism" or whatever the hell, and fuck anyone who tells you otherwise!!! But if someone else does examine the prejudices or rudeness of those characters, you can NOT be out here taking it personally, or extrapolating from that to decide that the author is prejudiced.

and if you can't stand to see characters you love being written as such?

block the author and move tf on with your life.

[twisted-tales-told]

🔥 ??

This ask game

On a completely unrelated note

Anyone on marauders TikTok at this point I simply do not trust. I don’t like your vibe. Your existence irritates me and I can’t wait for life to knock u off your high horse a bit. Not like a lot, but enough to make you bearable to share the planet with.

People have taken the marauders fandom way too far and way too seriously and I think it should all just burn down.

Erase it all. Give it 5 years to cool off.

Also snape is not that bad?? Yall are fucking CRAZY in your hating him but hyping up Barty. Crazy. Insane. “He bullied children” well your guy tortured Frank and Alice longbottom and fucking killed people for the sake of blood purity. Therefore I challenge you to come up with a legitimate excuse and not some random fictional morale code?? Like why is that the line. Why is that your reason. “He bullied children” for gods sake do you hear yourself??

At least be creative jfc.

I think there’s a lot of nuance to Snapes story, especially with aspects of class, privilege, gender (being a white male vulnerable to extremist ideology due to upbringing and life experiences)

ALSO ITS FICTION

It’s fucking fiction. I say where the story is interesting because it’s MY blog.

Anyways this will probably be my last ever marauders post so I’m going out with a bang.

The reason there’s so many male fics is because creating characters from just a name is hard and not really in the nature of fanfiction and the only marauders era fleshed out characters are Sirius black and Remus Lupin because they’re the only ones in the Harry Potter books.

Like what yall have done creating depth in all these side characters is truly phenomenal but ohmygod the way you attack people so quickly for just writing m/m ships in this space where the only canon fleshed out characters are the men is INSANE. Thats literally what brought them here. You’re the weird one. And be weirder!’ Be weirder enough to write the W/W fanfiction with those little one fact character skeletons. I support you this is the place for that!! Stop being mean to other people and show some initiative or I will fucking fire you. With actual flames.

ALSO let people make fan films, don’t let people make fan films. Maybe it’s a scam, maybe it’s being written by criminals from their prison cells. Maybe it’s just people out here trying to do a group project like this is school. Stop. Caring. It’s none of your business.

I have never cared for cosplay, you do you boo but it’s not my thing. I do think it’s fucked up when you treat them like the character though and mess with their lives as human beings. Maybe try being normal, or pursuing a career in becoming a shitty therapist because you seem to care a whole lot about other peoples business.

Read fics because you like the summery or because you found it at 2 am in a comment section or ao3s page. Dont read fics because it’s “the it fic” right now. That’s bordering way too close to fast fashion trends and that is not allowed here. You are breaking the non-capitalist rules of our weird nerd hub.

You are not going to like the hyped up TikTok book.

Let that philosophy apply here.

Also This is not a book. It is a fanfic. Treat it like someone brought home made cookies to your doorstep. If you bite it and spit it in their face because you forgot to tell them you had a nut allergy or you wanted brownies instead it is your bad. You should have asked about the nuts, and you should say THANK YOU YOU MADE ME COOKIES.

Anyways goodbye forever marauders fandom it was fun I love all you silly little characters. I made lifelong friends, I laughed I cried I puked in my mouth a little (—meg from supernatural) but mostly you made me realize how fucking stupid it all is and fear for our future as a civilization.

[absolutezerotolerance]

When I created this blog, along side my fellow moderator, I was in a very different place, mentally. J//uvia and Gr//uvia made me angry in a way I couldn't get over and by in large I surrounded myself with people who felt the same way. I thought that venting was healthy, and I still do, but not so much in the way we went about it.

There is a difference between having a space where you can voice what you're feeling and thinking for the sake of working through them, and having that space be public. There is a certain level of satisfaction that you can get from reading metas like the ones we posted, agreeing with your side, but to what end?

Over the months we've run this blog, we've received many an-ask about how this blog has been appreciated by other fans who don't enjoy the way the ship is handled by the Fairy Tail series, itself, the sequel or by the fandom at large. And whilst there may or may not be a conversation to be had where J//uvia and Gr//uvia and what they represent are concerned, months ago I came to the conclusion that this blog is not the way to go about it. I will come back to why it took so long between me realizing this and posting this in a moment, but for our followers, I want to pose a question to you.

What conversation does this blog actually influence? That J//uvia is a bad character? That Gr//uvia is a bad ship? Okay, then, to what end? How is this blog different from the recent attacks on archive of our own, or the inter-fandom discourse about purity culture? Is the way we talk about J//uvia and Gr//uvia not in line with the same type of thinking that gets fanfiction archives attacked over hosting gay fanfiction or authors attacked in their own comments over writing about darker subjects?

And even if that were a moot point, how would it be fair to ask fans of the ship and character to have a conversation with a blog like this floating around that is so aggressively opposed to it? How can we ask fans to sit down and have an actual discussion and trust that there is a good faith to be had? Do we have any good faith towards J//uvia or Gr//uvia?

Personally, I have arrived at the answer: no. I didn't have good faith towards either.

When this blog was active, I thought that was a fine position to hold. I still don't like J//uvia or Gr//uvia or the way they are so heavily intertwined with Gray that it is impossible to search for him. But, that's my problem. That's my opinion. I've been in this fandom for just under a decade, I have fanfic authors and fanartists who I like who don't post about those topics, or if they do, I can just rely on the old adage of "don't like, don't read". Disliking J//uvia and Gr//uvia doesn't have to be this big political statement that you need mountains of evidence to justify. It is okay to just not like them. Hell, it is okay to think the ship is toxic. But there are better things to spend my energy on the venting about how much I dislike them, and the people who do like J//uvia and Gr//uvia are not evil pieces of shit for doing so, I don't need to make them into strawman arguments to show why me not liking J//uvia and Gr//uvia is the morally superior stance to hold.

In the months that I have been gone, I have moved on from the Fairy Tail fandom into another one and that above all else is what helped me flip my perspective on this. The Fairy Tail fandom was not a good experience for me, by in large. I adore Gray, and I would not trade the friends I made through Fairy Tail for the world, but those are the exceptions. There are too many ways that Fairy Tail and its fandom have warped my perception of fandom to list, but just being outside it for months was a hell of a shock.

I was so god damn scared of approaching ships and characters and topics in my new fandom because my experience with the Fairy Tail fandom made my first instinct be wariness and caution, because what if. What if the ship's fans are toxic? What if the content of the ship isn't healthy? What if other people care that I ship this in the way I cared if other people shipped Gr//uvia?

In the defense of my younger self, I was 13 when I joined this fandom. And for the majority of the decade it was my only fandom, the only one I was active in for a substantial period of time anyway. I now know that if I found and fell in love with Fairy Tail today that I would have a vaaaastly different opinion of it and its ships and its characters and its fans. I wouldn't care, is the thing. Because why should I when the alternative is having fun with the parts of the fandom that I enjoy?

Ship and let ship, it's a piece of media for fuck's sake, the people who enjoy ships you don't like are not the devil reincarnated, so leave them alone.

To the fans of this blog, I'm glad if this blog was helpful to you in some way. Be that in helping you to articulate why you don't like J//uvia or Gr//uvia or the 100 years sequel, or if the original intention of this being a productive vent space actually had that effect for you.

To the fans of J//uvia and Gr//uvia, I am sorry to have put you in the position that I did, using this blog as a weapon to paint you in a truly awful light. What I think and feel about this ship is my issue, and I shouldn't have pushed it onto you as some grand moral failing on your part.

I will be stepping down from actively running this blog, it is a piece of my fandom history that I don't want to hold onto any longer.

See you around.

[bisluthq]

It is I, the Aussie who has a disdain for the royal family back again lol. So regarding the purpose of the royals, there isn't an official mission statement as such lmao but they are meant to live a life of duty and service to charities, inspire and uplift us peasants, bring nations together, and be beacons of moral purity and virtue because the whole royal grift thing is that they were 'chosen by god' to represent the best of society.

But it's like that episode of South Park where Wendy asks what Paris Hilton did lmao. But anyway, here's what that in action looks like:

- a life of duty - so first you have to understand that the royals operate like a PR business. They want the monarch and the successor to be the most popular, so it's like if you imagine the KarJenners and how different members have been more popular than the others at different times, in the royal family Kim must always be most popular and has 10 Kris Jenners working on keeping her at the top... but Kourtney also has her own 10 Kris Jenners trying to craft her own image to be seen as valuable.

So anyway - the senior royals (the monarch, their children and the children of the member next in line to the throne) are all meant to pick a few causes and work closely with a few of those charities.

Charles was always passionate about bringing different religions together and organic farming, for these reasons he was mocked and labelled a bit of a hippie - but still a very posh one - and it's quite sad, because he wasn't the stoic, stiff upper lip type of royal we were used to. He was sensitive and passionate about the arts (probably still is, but I am not a fan of who he is now lol). He was held back from doing things he wanted to do because it didn't portray 'right image', but he actually had the potential to be a brilliant, gentle leader who could bring people together because he is fascinated by a lot of things, wanted to understand herbal and indigenous medicines and healing modalities - and look at the UK and its colonies, we're multicultural! He could've laid a fantastic foundation for combatting racism, but he wasn't traditional enough so the queen and her team prevented him from working with certain causes and limited his engagements because people thought he was eccentric. Who he was 30+ years ago is the King the royals need, but it was beaten out of him and he's just kind of there now. The monarch is meant to be neutral (the royals aren't allowed to talk politics or vote btw, they imply shit all the time but always need plausible deniability I guess), but it also means once they're monarch they don't really engage with their old charities because they can't single anyone out.

On the other hand Princess Anne has the most engagements/ photo opportunities, but does nothing meaningful. But Liz loved that she'd show up to a mining site and be all 'thank you for your hard work' and then go to a high school that day and say 'education is important ' so apart from her well known love of horses, idk what her passion charity is meant to be? But she isn't controversial so she gets permission to do all the engagements.

William talks about the environment and has for a while. With Harry and Kate they started dialogue on mental health but Liz didn't like talking about feelings so she tried to censor them and not have them tell personal stories. Charles was meant to break this tradition but hasn't.

Kate has assigned herself 'kids issues' but she spent "SEVERAL YEARS" working with experts to come to the conclusion that "a child's early years can have an impact on their future" and had a whole fucking gala with a PowerPoint to say things that THE GOVERNMENT was already funding. Smh. Like yes it's important but she made it sound like she had a solution or something when promoting the event lol.

Anyway that got long, but they're meant to promote charities but don't actually do anything. They might pour some cups of tea at a shelter or sit and speak with people at a rehab centre, but they don't give much of their personal wealth, they encourage the public to donate, they don't go and *work*... This is why I'm so disgusted by how they treated Meghan - she had ideas and like went and asked women for recipes and put it into a cookbook with all proceed going towards their charity, she contacted British stores and designers to create a capsule collection of clothing for women who needed clothes for a job interview and it was a 'for each sale, we will donate the same item' model - it sold out so fast! Harry started the Invictus games... It was actually DOING something more than a photo op!

They have this idea that whoever is being spoken about or papped is bringing attention to their charities, but they've been a newspaper version of real housewives for like 50 years now lol so they're delusional lol.

✨ inspire and uplift✨

So yeah maybe 70 years ago and even as recent as the thatcher years there were times when the royals being the face of the nation/ commonwealth, them stepping out and giving a speech about hope or something did inspire people and bring people together. And the weddings and big events were a big deal because so many world leaders were invited and it was like a political summit but glamorous. But the royals have been in their Flop era for at least 10 years, had a few hits, but tiktokers are outselling, so they no longer are needed to fill that void.

Bring nations together - basically the same as above and we have a mini Olympics, the commonwealth games. Sport brings people together (when it's not causing a huge increase in domestic violence) but yeah, the games give the same vibe as the Olympics and there's also a sense of security and comradery with other commonwealth nations as our allies. but that's like giving all the credit of what the Olympics do for people to the Greeks - they started it, but we've all shaped it, yk?

✨ uphold morals ✨

LMAO. The church of England/ Anglican church only exists cause a monarch wanted divorce and the bible said no. William will be the next head of the CoE and doesn't even attend all the big services. They sure don't practise a 'what would Jesus do' life - fucking around on their spouses, taking bribes, trading stories about their family to bury their own scandals and shame their family, hoard wealth, etc. Etc. So yeah, LOL.

People say they bring in tourist dollars, but people get pics outside the colloseum and Buckingham palace for the same reason - cool, historical buildings... Not because of who lives there now (mostly staff btw) and fuck eras tour brought in about 75% of what the royals are said to bring in to the economy! It costs on average, the cost of a pint for every person in the UK to keep the royals, but if they redirected that money into affordable housing, turned the numerous estates into luxury hotels and golf courses or other attractions on the grounds, the people of the UK would be much better off imo.

I'm sorry, this was very long and I have become biased against them because I think they operate a cruel, outdated business and hoard assets that could help people. Idk what a republic of Australia would look like, but ugh at them.

I mean Australia gets 0 benefit from them. Not even the tourism. Y’all need to abolish the fuck out of that.

[carniferous]

oh, if you rarely leave your fandom circle then it makes sense that you haven’t noticed a change in general perception of sirius? i think it mostly happens on tiktok, among the new fans and this part i can’t understand. to be clear, this is not me bashing any sirius characterization, i believe in freedom of interpretation and adaptation of any character to their surrounding circumstances, what i’m referring to is how one particular group of people, mostly teenagers, consciously choose to view canon sirius and his actions through a black and white lens. i’ll try to explain this!

for example, sirius was born into the wealthiest and definitely the most privileged family that firmly believed in blood-purity and while sirius’ entire arc was about him making his own choices, that doesn’t mean he knew from the birth he was fundamentally good person and the rest of his family wasn’t, but there’s a shift, a need? to believe he was good from the age zero, before he learnt to speak, he knew all along that his family was bigoted and he needed to escape and he never loved his mother or his father and his brother and he never wanted to be loved by them, because he knew they’re bad people and he wasn’t, he never used the black heir privileges, he never said the word mudblood, even accidentally and he never meant to tell snape about remus, it slipped out also accidentally. now i just sound like i want to make him a bad person, but it isn’t my intention at all 🫠 as a matter of fact, i see him as a good person, who made mistakes because he wanted to prove he was good and what i meant to say is i don’t understand why there’s a growing tendency to take layers out of characters and make them dull. it’s like saying anthy was bad person and deserved everything that happened to her because she was manipulative, but the opposite. hopefully you get what i mean :(

yeah i think there’s a tendency especially amongst young teens to moralize the fiction they enjoy. i’ve definitely been there! for me it came from a place of repression/shame and once i grew out of that the Moralistic Disease went away… generally i assume the same will happen for those people!! personally i just don’t read fics that i believe flatten my faves or even just characterize them in a way i find mildly distasteful

you are about to be so disappointed though anon bc i’m about to derail the fuck out of this ask. what you said about anthy literally activated smth in my brain and now i’m only going to be thinking about that. idk if anyone here as been following me for this long but veryyy early on into carniferous dot com i was ALWAYS going on about how r/s is utenanthy-coded …. me when the cycles of patriarchal violence are reproduced and repackaged in the form of love but genuine love is what dismantles the system. me when remus and sirius were on the fucked up gay repressed bed together…..

[archer3-13]

Thank you all for all the asks, I encourage people incidentally to ask away if they like. I might not always have a good response but I try to generally have a response.

anyways im gonna answer ya annons together though cause theres enough of you all on generally the same subject that its simpler this way.

its the perpetual curse of the player avatar character in the fe format really.

They're about as into it as humans are really: generally not seen as okay/a societal taboo but some people are just really into it/Blaise enough about it regardless.

as for the point of the dlc, my best guess would be its there for much the same reason cindered shadows is in three houses: someone in management demanded the game have a dlc campaign/they started working on dlc as part of the usual development cycles these days but didn't want to make something directly tied to the main campaign for whatever reason. So, welcome to alt fanfic filler arc land where the stakes simultaneously dont matter/matter way too fucking much and can be conveniently ignored in the main campaign/story with ease. With that said from a story angle I do like fell xenologue more then cindered shadows anyways, but then I have a soft spot for mirror dimensions in fiction. the fell xenologue isn't as good as it could be even by those standards though.

I needed to parse the whole thing a couple a times to take the wall of text all in, but dont worry about it. what your saying is generally sound and its always interesting to hear how different fandoms approach the same thing in different or similar ways.

I knew people liked tsubaki and selena but I didn't know that one was the ship considered most cannon of fe14 selenas ships. Which as ya point out does make how she gives birth to her mothers identitcal [visually anyways] clone kinda funny in that context.

Honestly I just think its an issue of how fandom has so much purity wank going on in it these days, not even anything specific to fe. Its not enough that the blorbo is your favorite, your blorbo has to be a MORALLY GOOD PERSON too regardless of if the original text outright states that they arent a good person or not. Hence the oddly puritanical standards everyone holds characters too these days, like we had suddenly warped right back into the 1950's in terms of how mercilessly hard your judging your neighbour for having an unkempt lawn for.

I haven't engaged with the dlc characters as much compared to the main cast, so this isn't gonna be a 100% definitive answer sorry.

madelines a hard classic general, gregorys your inverse sage res tank unit with meh spd, zelestia is high on spd but average across the board otherwise, and nels the myrmidon to rafals mercenary. What ya see with their base stats is what your gonna get for them as units really. if your asking whos gonna be your most helpful, id say zelestia so long as you do the dlc early enough as their levels dont scale from what i understand.

zelestias got some chonky speed, and shes otherwise a mage knight on a flying dragon in her unique class with soulblade her class unique skill presenting some interesting avenues of exploitation in taking the average of an enemies def/res in damage calculations for swords. Give her some investment and I imagine

given the game was supposed to be released a lot sonner then it was, its not entirely surprising that the dlc came out so quick. I wouldn't quite say its 'era' is over yet mind, that simply depends on what comes out next and when.

With all that said, considering how fast it all came out I wouldn't actually be surprised if they announced a second pack of dlc if the first pack and engage as a whole does well enough. its not a sure thing but not impossible either.

I kinda wanna get a hint as to whats gonna come next though. Which is one of my bigger frustrations with is and fe really, i wish they communicated what they're plannin with the fans more.

I dont even think its ideas they're lacking in, its just a seeming reluctance on the koei assisted titles to release the additional maps the 3ds dlc ones did. all of the games since awakening have had an additional dlc campaign of sorts for instance, but in both three houses and engage they dont bother to include any of the gold or exp or weapon dlc grinding maps the 3ds games had, or try their hands at anything equivalent to the robust selections of weird dlc maps the 3ds games often hand like the festival things. engage i feel does better in this regard through the additional dlc emblem trials and campaign over three houses sitting with a dlc campaign alone but still.

i dont think your wrong.

given the trend of the mirror elyos having characters with opposing traits or aspects to their main counterparts, you could certainly head cannon that xeno sombron actually does come from his world compared to main sombron. I dont think theres any specific confirmation either way.

[qqueenofhades]

Hi. I’m curious. What did you mean by “women who read fiction might get Bad Ideas!!!” has just reached its latest and stupidest form via tumblr purity culture.? I haven’t seen any of this but I’m new to tumblr.

Oh man. You really want to get me into trouble on, like, my first day back, don’t you?

Pretty much all of this has been explained elsewhere by people much smarter than me, so this isn’t necessarily going to say anything new, but I’ll do my best to synthesize and summarize it. As ever, it comes with the caveat that it is my personal interpretation, and is not intended as the be-all, end-all. You’ll definitely run across it if you spend any time on Tumblr (or social media in general, including Twitter, and any other fandom-related spaces). This will get long.

In short: in the nineteenth century, when Gothic/romantic literature became popular and women were increasingly able to read these kinds of novels for fun, there was an attendant moral panic over whether they, with their weak female brains, would be able to distinguish fiction from reality, and that they might start making immoral or inappropriate choices in their real life as a result. Obviously, there was a huge sexist and misogynistic component to this, and it would be nice to write it off entirely as just hysterical Victorian pearl-clutching, but that feeds into the “lol people in the past were all much stupider than we are today” kind of historical fallacy that I often and vigorously shut down. (Honestly, I’m not sure how anyone can ever write the “omg medieval people believed such weird things about medicine!” nonsense again after what we’ve gone through with COVID, but that is a whole other rant.) The thinking ran that women shouldn’t read novels for fear of corrupting their impressionable brains, or if they had to read novels at all, they should only be the Right Ones: i.e., those that came with a side of heavy-handed and explicit moralizing so that they wouldn’t be tempted to transgress. Of course, books trying to hammer their readers over the head with their Moral Point aren’t often much fun to read, and that’s not the point of fiction anyway. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

Fast-forward to today, and the entire generation of young, otherwise well-meaning people who have come to believe that being a moral person involves only consuming the “right” kind of fictional content, and being outrageously mean to strangers on the internet who do not agree with that choice. There are a lot of factors contributing to this. First, the advent of social media and being subject to the judgment of people across the world at all times has made it imperative that you demonstrate the “right” opinions to fit in with your peer-group, and on fandom websites, that often falls into a twisted, hyper-critical, so-called “progressivism” that diligently knows all the social justice buzzwords, but has trouble applying them in nuance, context, and complicated real life. To some extent, this obviously is not a bad thing. People need to be critical of the media they engage with, to know what narratives the creator(s) are promoting, the tropes they are using, the conclusions that they are supporting, and to be able to recognize and push back against genuinely harmful content when it is produced – and this distinction is critical – by professional mainstream creators. Amateur, individual fan content is another kettle of fish. There is a difference between critiquing a professional creator (though social media has also made it incredibly easy to atrociously abuse them) and attacking your fellow fan and peer, who is on the exact same footing as you as a consumer of that content.

Obviously, again, this doesn’t mean that you can’t call out people who are engaging in actually toxic or abusive behavior, fans or otherwise. But certain segments of Tumblr culture have drained both those words (along with “gaslighting”) of almost all critical meaning, until they’re applied indiscriminately to “any fictional content that I don’t like, don’t agree with, or which doesn’t seem to model healthy behavior in real life” and “anyone who likes or engages with this content.” Somewhere along the line, a reactionary mindset has been formed in which the only fictional narratives or relationships are those which would be “acceptable” in real life, to which I say…. what? If I only wanted real life, I would watch the news and only read non-fiction. Once again, the underlying fear, even if it’s framed in different terms, is that the people (often women) enjoying this content can’t be trusted to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and if they like “problematic” fictional content, they will proceed to seek it out in their real life and personal relationships. And this is just… not true.

As I said above, critical media studies and thoughtful consumption of entertainment are both great things! There have been some great metas written on, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how it is increasingly relying on villains who have outwardly admirable motives (see: the Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) who are then stigmatized by their anti-social, violent behavior and attacks on innocent people, which is bad even as the heroes also rely on violence to achieve their ends. This is a clever way to acknowledge social anxieties – to say that people who identify with the Flag Smashers are right, to an extent, but then the instant they cross the line into violence, they’re upsetting the status quo and need to be put down by the heroes. I watched TFATWS and obviously enjoyed it. I have gone on a Marvel re-watching binge recently as well. I like the MCU! I like the characters and the madcap sci-fi adventures! But I can also recognize it as a flawed piece of media that I don’t have to accept whole-cloth, and to be able to criticize some of the ancillary messages that come with it. It doesn’t have to be black and white.

When it comes to shipping, moreover, the toxic culture of “my ship is better than your ship because it’s Better in Real Life” ™ is both well-known and in my opinion, exhausting and pointless. As also noted, the whole point of fiction is that it allows us to create and experience realities that we don’t always want in real life. I certainly enjoy plenty of things in fiction that I would definitely not want in reality: apocalyptic space operas, violent adventures, and yes, garbage men. A large number of my ships over the years have been labeled “unhealthy” for one reason or another, presumably because they don’t adhere to the stereotype of the coffee-shop AU where there’s no tension and nobody ever makes mistakes or is allowed to have serious flaws. And I’m not even bagging on coffee-shop AUs! Some people want to remove characters from a violent situation and give them that fluff and release from the nonstop trauma that TV writers merrily inflict on them without ever thinking about the consequences. Fanfiction often focuses on the psychology and healing of characters who have been through too much, and since that’s something we can all relate to right now, it’s a very powerful exercise. As a transformative and interpretive tool, fanfic is pretty awesome.

The problem, again, comes when people think that fic/fandom can only be used in this way, and that going the other direction, and exploring darker or complicated or messy dynamics and relationships, is morally bad. As has been said before: shipping is not activism. You don’t get brownie points for only having “healthy” ships (and just my personal opinion as a queer person, these often tend to be heterosexual white ships engaging in notably heteronormative behavior) and only supporting behavior in fiction that you think is acceptable in real life. As we’ve said, there is a systematic problem in identifying what that is. Ironically, for people worried about Women Getting Ideas by confusing fiction and reality, they’re doing the same thing, and treating fiction like reality. Fiction is fiction. Nobody actually dies. Nobody actually gets hurt. These people are not real. We need to normalize the idea of characters as figments of a creator’s imagination, not actual people with their own agency. They exist as they are written, and by the choice of people whose motives can be scrutinized and questioned, but they themselves are not real. Nor do characters reflect the author’s personal views. Period.

This feeds into the fact that the internet, and fandom culture, is not intended as a “safe space” in the sense that no questionable or triggering content can ever be posted. Archive of Our Own, with its reams of scrupulous tagging and requests for you to explicitly click and confirm that you are of age to see M or E-rated content, is a constant target of the purity cultists for hosting fictional material that they see as “immoral.” But it repeatedly, unmistakably, directly asks you for your consent to see this material, and if you then act unfairly victimized, well… that’s on you. You agreed to look at this, and there are very few cases where you didn’t know what it entailed. Fandom involves adults creating contents for adults, and while teenagers and younger people can and do participate, they need to understand this fact, rather than expecting everything to be a PG Disney movie.

When I do write my “dark” ships with garbage men, moreover, they always involve a lot of the man being an idiot, being bluntly called out for an idiot, and learning healthier patterns of behavior, which is one of the fundamental patterns of romance novels. But they also involve an element of the woman realizing that societal standards are, in fact, bullshit, and she can go feral every so often, as a treat. But even if I wrote them another way, that would still be okay! There are plenty of ships and dynamics that I don’t care for and don’t express in my fic and fandom writing, but that doesn’t mean I seek out the people who do like them and reprimand them for it. I know plenty of people who use fiction, including dark fiction, in a cathartic way to process real-life trauma, and that’s exactly the role – one of them, at least – that fiction needs to be able to fulfill. It would be terribly boring and limited if we were only ever allowed to write about Real Life and nothing else. It needs to be complicated, dark, escapist, unreal, twisted, and whatever else. This means absolutely zilch about what the consumers of this fiction believe, act, or do in their real lives.

Once more, I do note the misogyny underlying this. Nobody, after all, seems to care what kind of books or fictional narratives men read, and there’s no reflection on whether this is teaching them unhealthy patterns of behavior, or whether it predicts how they’ll act in real life. (There was some of that with the “do video games cause mass shootings?”, but it was a straw man to distract from the actual issues of toxic masculinity and gun culture.) Certain kinds of fiction, especially historical fiction, romance novels, and fanfic, are intensely gendered and viewed as being “women’s fiction” and therefore hyper-criticized, while nobody’s asking if all the macho-man potboiler military-intrigue tough-guy stereotypical “men’s fiction” is teaching them bad things. So the panic about whether your average woman on the internet is reading dark fanfic with an Unhealthy Ship (zomgz) is, in my opinion, misguided at best, and actively destructive at worst.

[fandom-space-princess]

ooohhh would you mind sharing the reasons you don't like booktok? i have some reasons of my own but im really interested in the opinion who actually has to deal with the consequences of it all more directly. only if you want of course!

Oh goodness, grab your beach towel anon. Usually you'd have to go to the sea for this much salt.

(Prefacing this with the fact that this is just my opinion, not meant to be emblematic of like... booksellers as a whole, or my employer, or anything. It's also anecdata; nothing here is backed up by anything more than personal observation. I'm just a guy with a keyboard and an attitude. This also isn't meant to be a dig at anybody's taste in books/stories. I'm a supernatural blog, I have no legs to stand on in that regard.)

The things I most dislike about booktok, in no particular order:

1). The tendency toward quick consumption of stories without deeper or more lasting investment is an issue I have with a lot of media (see: Netflix dropping an entire series of something that everyone has watched, and then moved on from, in a week), but I think the problems inherent to that model of engagement become acute when the media in question is books. Novels are long-form storytelling by design; you're meant to sit with them for a while. Books in a series can take years, even decades, between publication. It's hard to convince people to engage with stories on that kind of timescale when we're constantly having our attention spans whittled away under a neverending barrage of buy-the-next-thing consumerism.

2). Tiktok is not only a principal motivator for this kind of behavior, it literally could not exist without it. Booktok doesn't encourage people to sit with books for a long time. It encourages you to *constantly* be consuming something new, *constantly* be pushing your friends to do the same, *constantly* be gaming the algorithm if you want to have any kind of significant presence. The environment does not encourage deep-dives; it leaves no time for contemplation. If you're participating in the culture as designed, you move through books very quickly.

From a business perspective (i.e. the capitalistic one), this is great. From the perspective of an indie bookseller, this is a pain in the ass on so many levels. Have you ever worked a retail Christmas rush? Where something you'd normally sell maybe three of in a year is suddenly The Hot Item, and the public demands you have 9000 of them in stock overnight?

It's unpleasant, is what I'm saying.

2b). The other thing this encourages? Stories that do not challenge people. Again, this is not to slander anyone's personal tastes. But ask yourself: what plays well to the greatest audience? What is most likely to draw customers, gain views, boost engagement? It isn't nuance. It isn't subtlety, isn't grappling with complex morality. All of those are things which I personally find intensely valuable about the experience of reading, and which I find pretty uniformly lacking in booktok's thing-of-the-week. This has an interesting overlap with the resurgence of censorship and purity culture that I think is worth examining, and maybe I'll rant about that some other time. As it stands, I find the trend toward Marvel-ification of fiction (simpler! louder! less nuance! more buzzwords!) to be obnoxious.

3). Speaking of buzzwords, the trend toward marketing new fiction using only a half-assed combination of tropes and comps drives me up a wall. I can't tell you how many ARCs I've seen in the last few months with bare-bones summaries and blurbs to the effect of "for fans of enemies-to-lovers and Game of Thrones, an endearing story of found family and the power of love!" Ok?? Fine in moderation, I guess, but even if I liked all of those things, what is in this book? Did the publisher not bother... asking the writer? Did they not leave them time to write a proper summary? Did they just not care, and hope replace a genuine marketing strategy with SEO?

Idk, maybe there's a benefit to this I can't see. Drives me absolutely bonkers, though.

4). The tags for my original post mentioned Colleen Hoover, who is the target of my ire at the moment because I've been pulling books for her fans all week, per point (2). No offense intended to Ms. Hoover, who I know nothing about but I'm sure is a perfectly normal author looking to get paid for her work, or even to her books, which are not my kind of thing but clearly are somebody's. FULL offense to Hachette for those books, though. They are everything I hate in paperback form: boring, ugly cover after boring, ugly cover. Really REALLY cheaply printed; about 1 in 3 arrive with some kind of damage, because they're so badly made that they don't hold up to even light jarring during shipping. The binding is... sad. Like. Even very bad books deserve better than this. But does the publisher care? Are they motivated to craft a higher quality product? Like hell they are! Because every booktok-er will buy them anyway. They're not interested in a product that will last; they're not looking for an object to cherish for life, a book to pick up and read over and over and over and over again until the spine cracks and the pages start falling out. That'll happen to these goddamn things by the second reread, but how many of them will get that reread is debatable, because by then I'll be selling that crowd The Next New Big Thing.

Anyway. I'll stop there. Thank you, anon, for your ask, and giving me a chance to vent a little bit. Wishing you a hot tea and a good, well-crafted story to liven up your day <3

[khiphop-discussions]

What are your thoughts on cancel culture and “moral purity”? Is there truly anything that is unproblematic in the media that we consume?

I have a lot of thoughts on it. I've made a short video on it before in response to an ask but A) I lost that ask B) I think my views have probably developed since that video anyway.

To answer the last question: No. Nothing is unproblematic.

This was a longer post (as expected) so I'll put a "keep reading".

As far as "cancel culture", to me it really doesn't exist in the way people who "seriously" use the term "cancel culture" think it does. Why? Cause nobody ever truly gets "cancelled" (well at least most people USUALLY don't actually get cancelled. More on that later though). What happens is people get yelled at, "roasted", and cursed out on the internet. To me, that's not a true "cancelling". That's just backlash.

Cancelling was initially (from my observations and in my opinion) supposed to be something like a boycott. Basically, until you do better we aren't gonna financially support you and as a result you will lose revenue if not straight up go broke/bankrupt and lose your career altogether.

In order for something to be "cancelled" it has to be greenlit in the first place. You can't "cancel" a series that no network ever picked up, right? That show was never on air to begin with. It was making no money. It was never a thing. So "cancelling" it doesn't actually hurt anything.

The problem with "cancel culture". The people MOST likely to "truly" cancel someone are the people who never were fans in the first place. So they never actually offered any financial support. Their internet rantings and ravings don't actually mean much if people will still pay for a certain thing. So there's VERY few people (in my opinion) who have ever truly been cancelled. Those people don't have the financial backing to pull for it to truly be a "cancelling". Most people forgive them after a period of time or after an apology and this is long before they ever start to lose huge amounts of revenue for the most part.

Right now, I feel like Kanye is being "cancelled" for real. Why? Because people with REAL money (aka not people but corporations like Adidas and Chase) have dropped him and stopped doing business with him. So because of that he's lost (or at least WILL lose over a period of time) millions if not billions of dollars. Nick Cannon was another because he lost his show with MTV/VH-1 for a period of time. Bill Cosby as well especially since he also was held accountable (at least for a time) by the legal system. Same with Harvey Weinstein. Same with R.Kelly. Azelia Banks as well (not legally cause nothing she said or did was technically illegal). She has a career still technically but it PALES in comparison to what she had. HUGE festivals kicked her off so she lost a lot of money.

So personally I think a lot of the criticisms of "cancel culture" actually turn out to be quite moot. It's really a lot of people just not liking how mean the internet is to be who do things many on the internet deem to be bad.

As far as moral purity, I also don't think that's what people expect. Reason being is that a lot of people are forgiven VERY easily after their scandals. All it really takes is an apology and most of the time MULTIPLE instances of scandals are tolerated evne without apologies. Sometimes they are even allowed to DOUBLE DOWN without losing fans. They might get yelled at but, again, people go back to supporting them very soon after the transgressions. So I disagree with the notion of the internet or "cancel culture" expecting moral purity. I genuinely think that's a cop-out. (this isn't directed at the person sending this anon, it's more about in general how I've seen people discuss cancel culture and moral purity as concepts).

[star-anise]

An ask I got, from someone who wants to remain anonymous:

“Hello! I have a friend who's currently getting really worked up about liking "problematic" content bc their online friend groups are telling them about things like people who like villains in media are bad people and all that other purity fandom stuff, how can I tell them that what you like doesn't equal what you are?”

I can do that!

My first concern for your friend, honestly, is that they’re at a high risk of being in abusive friendships. Fandom purity police are not known for their tendency to go, “Well, I see the issue this way, and have chosen to take these steps, but I understand that other people can have different perspectives and still be acting from a valid and moral place.”  Instead, they’re very likely to trample mental and emotional boundaries to insist everyone agree with them, and to use verbally abusive tactics to make that happen.

So I think it helps to back up and look at the issue from a broader perspective: From “my friend has some opinions I don’t think will help them” to “I’m afraid my friend may be in a potentially abusive friend group who are subjecting them to a lot of pressure to act and think a certain way (which I don’t think will help them).”

In my experience, people who get sucked into purity policing social groups have a hard time getting back out of them because those groups exert isolation and control. 

Isolation: People are heavily pressured to cut contact with anyone who doesn’t agree with the group. This means losing contact with outside friends who think differently--and it also means that they know that if they step out of line, they’ll lose all their purity-policing friends (who are also now their only friends). It is way, way easier to leave an abusive situation if you know you have somewhere safe to land--so denying people that lifeline is part of how these groups retain membership.

Control: People are pressured to think, behave, and see the world in really specific ways. Especially, they are pressured to think that how the group sees social justice issues like abuse, racism, or homophobia are the only possible correct ways to see it. They create an “us vs them” mentality where anyone who is not “us” is a “them”. For example, anyone who doesn’t agree with purity policers about hating villains must condone abuse. The world is now scarily filled with tons of people who think abuse is super fun and totally fine. The only way to fight this is to be part of the group and do what they say! There’s absolutely no freedom to think that you could oppose abuse, and yet find some antagonists sympathetic or likeable. 

So in some ways, my advice for you is to follow standard advice for someone whose friend is in a potentially abusive relationship:

State your concerns, in private, gently but clearly. (eg. ”I’m worried that your friends have a really narrow worldview that in reality isn’t the only way to see things, that they engage in really unhealthy behaviour, and that if you ever find yourself disagreeing with them, they’ll turn on you and it’ll be really bad for you”)

Make the issue about your friend and their decisions instead of attempting to control them. (”I think it’s important that you really think these things through and come to your own conclusions. It’s up to you whether you agree with them or not.”)

Try to help them understand their alternatives and to keep their options open—encourage them to maintain healthy relationships apart from this group, to find different sources of information about social justice and media consimption, and to remember that you can be a moral person without doing or believing everything this group says. 

Take care of yourself and set your own boundaries. Watching someone fall down this rabbit hole can be worrying, frightening, and exhausting--and that’s not even counting if your friend absorbs the group’s abusive tactics and starts using them on you! Remember that it’s not your job to save them, and you can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved. You can be a friend who’s a counterweight to their new friends, but it’s not your job to pull them out all by yourself.

So, that said, on to the actual debate about how moral people can consume problematic fiction or enjoy problematic things, and still be moral. Honestly, so much has been written on this, I couldn’t possibly cover it all. I’ll throw up some links to introductory primers:

Your Favourite Media is Problematic - Here’s How to Deal (And What Not to Do)

How to Be a Fan of Problematic Things

It’s Okay to Like Problematic Things

You might notice, the common thread through all of these is developing individual critical awareness. That is, not assuming that you will be mindlessly controlled by the media you consume, but actively taking control of what you think about it and owning your responsibility not to let it affect you in super negative ways. This is another aspect of encouraging your friend not to cede all their decision-making to the group and let them decide which opinions are good and which are bad. 

Sometimes knowing about social justice and caring about a better world does mean having a negative opinion of a work of media, or not being able to enjoy it. That’s not actually bad. Fandom purity police wouldn’t get so far if they didn’t have a grain of truth in there. Where they go awry is deciding only one interpretation and set of actions are moral or valid. The best antidote is, therefore, encouraging people to break out of the lockstep and begin to think for themselves. 

[anthemxix]

So... how far did Cia go exactly? I haven’t played hw but I’ve read several fics, and she’s always very... extreme.

hi anon! thank you for your ask!

by “extreme,” i’m thinking you mean stories where she’s a psycho who tortures link or forces unwanted sexual advances on him. which makes for fantastic angst! but that characterization of cia has never felt quite authentic to me.

in the game, she has a roomful of his portraits, like a shrine. that’s extreme. she technically starts a war because of him, which is very extreme, but i don’t think that’s about lusting after him, as people often joke. she says some off-putting stuff, and you could infer that she behaves in an inappropriately “seductive” way, but. she doesn’t really. do anything, like fics might imply. she’s creepy and lewd. i’m sure she makes him uncomfortable as hell. but as for what she does, the extremeness in fics is mostly fan extrapolation.

that’s my short answer! but i kinda got carried away while responding to this, and. um. wrote a lengthy character analysis of cia? XD i thought about not including it, but i spent so much time thinking about/writing this that i’ll go ahead and share.

in my opinion, hw does not present a clear picture of cia, and it skews fan interpretation of her.

(putting this under a cut because it got long 😅)

the story the game gives at the start is straightforward. there's a "guardian of time" (whatever that means) who watches over everything but never interferes. she admires the purity of the hero's spirit. she comes to love the heroes, then to want them. she's lonely. she doesn't want to just watch anymore. she wants to experience love.

gradually her desires become something darker. she doesn't only want the companionship, she wants to possess.

ganon sees this darkness in her heart and causes a split. the darkness separates from her, becomes its own person (a la dark link). the "good" part is lana, the "bad" part is cia.

for ganon, this is all part of a larger plan. in hw, his spirit is divided into four fragments that have been sealed away in different eras. he manipulates cia and gets her to open time gates so he can gather all the fragments together. a key fact: one of the fragments has been sealed away by the master sword, so ganon needs a hero to draw the sword.

cia willingly allows herself to be ganon's pawn because in so doing, in starting a war to force the hero to emerge, she thinks she'll get what she wants. throughout the story, she gives more and more of herself to ganon, fracturing her own spirit further and further, because she is so desperate to claim the hero for herself, to own him. lana repeatedly warns her to stop before she does irreparable damage to herself, but she doesn't listen, and ultimately she...well, dies, i guess. fades from existence. (that's how the original hw ending goes. they added stuff on later that changed this.)

ok, so. we have some interesting stuff going on here. arguably, cia is a tragic figure. a victim even. her underlying motivation is loneliness. viewing it through this lens, the story becomes an exploration of what isolation does to a person. how desperate it can make us. how we become willing to sacrifice anything for love--and i mean "love" broadly, not in a romantic sense. how it makes us vulnerable to manipulation and abuse.

let's also not forget the whole reason she focuses on the hero's spirit to begin with. after witnessing all the atrocities of history, she admires the purity and goodness and self-sacrifice of the hero. it has nothing to do with link being attractive. in her temple (the temple of souls), she has statues of different heroes from different eras, including wolf link and oot/mm link. she is certainly not lusting after an animal or a child, i assure you.

so why does she have frickin portraits of hw link, specifically, (not any other hero's spirit incarnations) plastered all over her walls, if not for lusty purposes? why does she dress so damn seductively? i'm not claiming lust isn't part of it, but i think there's more. she wants to feel surrounded by him, you know? she wants to feel like he's looking at her the same way that she looks at him--with desire. it's delusion.

and holy hell, she's nothing if not deluded. some examples of her actual in-game dialogue: "no matter what betrayals I may suffer, at least I know the hero will always love and protect me." and [to herself, as she's losing a fight] "the hero is still by my side... the hero is still by my side..."

and it's sad. she pretends that he loves her, that he will protect her, because she doesn't have any real love in her life. she doesn't have anyone.

and what's even sadder is that she's condemned to all these feelings and delusions because that's who she is. she is corruption and darkness personified! she's doomed to this lonely hell, to being ganon's servant, to self-destruction.

that's how tragedy, and tragic figures, are defined: hubris. characters that have an innate flaw that inevitably leads to their downfall. that's what a traditional tragedy is.

don't get me wrong here. i'm not saying she had no choice, or that she had to start a war. she can be tragic and we can sympathize with her while also accepting the fact that she's corrupted beyond redemption. morality isn't black-and-white. our understanding of characters, or of real people, isn't black-and-white.

...but. BUT. there is a major "but" here. the game sabotages its own character and its own story. the game opts for the path of least resistance. screw grey areas of morality, screw the tragedy of loneliness, screw exploring vulnerability and abuse and hubris... they sensationalize. cia is a joke.

have you seen her frickin outfit? her character design? she's an uber-sexualized caricature. all those portraits of link in her temple can easily be viewed as a joke, too. "lol, look at this crazy, horny bitch." hell, they even have her say innuendos about the master sword, like, “come show me what your sword can do” or something to that effect. 🙄

it's all very surface level. they don't go deep at all with cia. they give us no substance, only these little bread crumbs of information that i've laid out for you. and not only that, they set this up so that it feeds into old stereotypes. the salient details easily allow us to interpret cia, consciously or not, as an embodiment of feminine hysteria, a woman guided by irrational emotion and obsession, fixated on winning the ultimate prize of a man's love.

so koei tecmo's own confused presentation of this character muddles up fan interpretation and has us falling back on the familiar stereotypes we know and understand. that’s the basis for these depictions of cia as extreme. that’s what fans are extrapolating from when they try to imagine how she might act or what she might say. so in the end, she isn’t really depicted with accuracy. she’s like a caricature of a caricature at that point.

…or at least, that’s my opinion. 🥴

[firelxdykatara]

not gonna lie I would love to hear more about the drama and infighting that went on in The Vampire Diaries fandom if you have the time (and also want to use that time to give your experience with the fandom, which from the snippets you've told sounds Not Fun so I get it if you don't want to lol)

oh god, there was like, SO MUCH, i just

i really feel like tvd is one of those fandoms that is so hard to describe without a lot of ‘you’d have to have been there’, but it really felt like this huge and all-consuming beast for about five years until the show finally imploded and the fandom basically turned on it en masse. (you ever see that post going around that’s like ‘if you ever want to know what true regret feels like, ask someone who once called tvd their favorite show’? still a mood, all these years later. basically the entire fandom thought the show should have just bowed out with whatever shreds of dignity it had left at the end of season 6, and became more of a hatedom than a fandom for the last two seasons. when you have an entire fandom cheering news of your show’s cancellation, i think that’s a sign you done fucked up, julie.)

first and most infamous, of course, are the ship wars. which are pretty much inevitable in any teen-centered drama, and i really think the CW fucking thrives on them, but it was particularly egregious in TVD’s case because not only was the base premise of the show a love triangle, but the two main romantic leads were brothers that the show constantly pit against one another--in pursuit of elena’s affections, but also because it kept up this insistence on the ‘good brother/bad brother’ dichotomy which stopped making sense after about season 2 (by which time we have found out that the good brother was never as good as he appeared, and the bad brother has been growing and isn’t nearly as bad as he pretends to be)--and the question of which brother ‘deserved’ elena (and no, what elena wanted very rarely factored into these discussions, especially in the team stefan camp because they turned on her when what she wanted was no longer The Good Brother, but i’ll get to that in a bit) was hotly contested.

i’m not kidding when i say the shipping wars were vicious. i started watching tvd shortly after it began to air, which was late 2009, and kept up with it fairly sporadically over the years. i didn’t come onto tumblr until 2011/2012, and by then, the fandom was already pretty much a garbagefire. there were anti ship and anti character blogs, any time something bad happened for one ship the rival ship would invade the tags to gloat about it (seasons 3 and 4 were especially rough, and i’m not gonna pretend delena fans weren’t just as bad about tag invasion and shit, but as that was my side of the road i saw a lot more of the stelena shippers being assholes, which soured my opinion on the ship a long time before i started rewatching and realized the red flags were there from the start), confessions blogs were popular also toxic as fuck (so much fighting happened in the notes of those posts, good gods), and this was right around when twitter’s popularity was on the rise and the line between Celebrity and Fan was thinning, so the fandom was absolutely atrocious to much of the tvd cast and crew.

(some of them deserved a lot of the later backlash, but in the early years a lot of it was ‘how dare you write the story in a way i dont like, you terrible fucking person’, and gods don’t get me started on the dobsley vs nian Thing)

i think what really encapsulates my feelings on the tvd fandom as a whole, though, is the way they (to this DAY) treated elena gilbert, which can be summed up in one meme that gained a lot of traction around season 3 if i remember right: that gif of pam from true blood, with the text altered to read “i’m so OVER elena and her precious doppelganger vagina!”

i swear at one time i had over half the active tvd fan accounts on tumblr blocked, because i got to a point where i would no longer tolerate elena hate, and she was (and still is, in what remains of the fandom; you’ll see a lot of ‘elena was one of the worst things about the show’ takes from ex-fans, too) one of the most widely despised characters in the entire fandom. because she -checks smudged writing on hand- was a traumatized teenage girl who -reads off a crumpled notecard- couldn’t always perfectly sort out her own feelings and -squints at the ceiling- sometimes made mistakes or bad decisions. (except a lot of the fandom also insisted that she was a mary sue who had no character traits or flaws or faults and it was like....make up your fucking minds???? is she a calculating conniving bitch whose somehow manipulating these centuries old vampires to tie them around her little finger or is she a boring flat character with no depth and no flaws??? jfc)

there was this massive double standard, too--like, stefan and damon could fuck whoever they wanted and that was fine, but elena was constantly raked over the coals for the crime of developing romantic feelings for the two men who had become constants in her life and whom she cared for deeply, and oh my GOD the slut shaming that happened when elena slept with damon was fucking wild. (and also happened in canon lmfao. like the show had one of elena’s best friends basically call her diseased on screen for falling in love with someone other than stefan. it was gross and ridiculous and the friend in question was also being a giant hypocrite at the time since she was happily flirting with someone who was directly responsible for the deaths of like four of elena’s loved ones and her own boyfriend’s mother but that’s beside the point) but like elena was called a slut and a bitch and a whore for ‘cheating’ on stefan (she hadn’t, and she had in fact broken up with him on screen the episode earlier) and ‘immediately’ jumping into bed with damon, even though none of them said fucking boo when stefan had one night stands or damon had fuckbuddies or whatever.

shit, caroline didn’t get any of this treatment when she started falling for tyler while dating matt! which isn’t to say i think she should have, just that i think it’s fucking ridiculous that elena was absolutely demonized by the fandom for daring to have feelings for two guys at once and eventually acting on them--despite the fact that the entire premise of the show was a love triangle. it’s not a love triangle if both sides don’t eventually get explored, and the crew had been pretty explicit about the fact that delena was going to happen at some point--but when it did, a huge chunk of the fandom absolutely threw a fit.

and a lot of these elena haters were alleged stelena stans, and i say alleged because they hated her so much for not wanting stefan’s dick anymore that it was clear they were really stefan stans and only wanted stelena to be endgame because they wanted stefan to ‘win’ at the end of the day, because ‘he’s the good brother’ so he deserved elena more.

it was all very gross and very misogynistic and very sex shaming (apparently delena was a ‘shallow’ and ‘superficial’ relationship because they had sex after two years of unrequited feelings slowly becoming requited and then pining for ages on both sides, and because they had a lot of on screen chemistry that the show capitalized on for years so of course they did a lot of making out and shit but it’s not like stelena didn’t have its fair share of making out and sex scenes, stefan was just too much of a coward to let elena top i’d apologize for that joke but i’m really not sorry because it’s true), and when i say it was egged on by the crew, that’s because they refused to let the love triangle die back in season 4 when it should have.

they insisted on stringing stelena fans along, dropping little bread crumbs to keep them invested, like dreams of a future where they were married and revealing that stefan was also a doppelganger and he and elena were descended from a pair of star-crossed lovers (a plot that ultimately went nowhere, to no one’s great surprise), and then fucking like. julie plec turned around and threw nina under the bus after she chose not to extend her contract and pretended that stelena might have happened again if she hadn’t left the show, which....i mean frankly i wouldn’t put it past her, but it would have been shitty writing. then again, she thought having a vampire pregnancy where a uterus was magically transplanted from a witch into a vampire that could somehow......carry the babies to term.... made sense and was a good way to accomodate candice’s RL pregnancy rather than like literally ANYTHING else, soooooo. but anyway julie saying that around like, end of s6 sparked off a new wave of nina hate and elena hate and ship wars bc they SEers took it as ‘confirmation’ that stelena was REALLY meant to be endgame and it was all just a hot fucking mess

another thing is that, while tvd was in its prime before the anti/purity culture shit started picking up any real steam, there was still this pervasive attitude throughout the fandom that if you liked Damon, you were A Bad Person. liking damon was apparently grounds for insults and harassment, and apparently he was The Worst Person on the Show even though literally nothing he does on screen is any worse than shit we know stefan has done (and frankly every other vampire too, but i mention stefan specifically because he was always held up--in the show but especially in the fandom--as the Good Brother while damon was the Bad One, and if you liked damon more then that had to mean your morals were dodgy and you clearly couldn’t appreciate what a heroic and saintly figure dear stefan was and....oops, i’m sorry, my salt keeps leaking -cough-).

meanwhile klaus quickly became a fandom darling despite not even really having much of a redemption arc (on tvd anyway, he just became more ‘affably evil’ as the show went on and more inclined to work with the main characters rather than try to kill them; i have no idea what went on over on his show, though), and like i can 100% appreciate liking villains and not caring that they do dodgy villainous shit, even just liking them bc they’re hot and wanting them to kiss a main character bc they have insanely good chemistry (yes i ship klaroline, no i won’t apologize for it, they could have been Really Great), it’s just really the double standard that gets me.

and all of this, incidentally, required ignoring some truly gross shit stefan was responsible for wrt his relationship with elena, that frankly it has always bothered me never really got addressed in the show. i get why elena herself would never be able to actually call him on it, but the fact is that he stalked her for months after he first saw her and thought she was katherine (meanwhile it only took damon .5 seconds to realize she was someone else entirely, but that’s another topic entirely), and then he deliberately inserted himself into her life because, in his words, ‘i have to know her’. he never gave a thought to how his presence in her life might affect her (or rather, he did, and tormented himself about it in his internal monologue, but never let this actually dissuade him from disrupting her life), and elena would wind up blaming herself for every tragedy that befell her friends and loved ones as a result of getting mixed up in vampire bullshit even though none of it was her fault--she literally blamed herself for existing but most of the fandom didn’t give a fuck about that lmfao--and stefan did shit like find out that she was adopted and then withhold this information from her until she got pissed about another secret he was keeping (her resemblence to katherine) and drop it on her to try and distract her from her very reasonable anger, and like... i should stop before this becomes a whole rant about how much i hate stefan fucking salvatore, but the point is, he did a lot of really sketchy shit he never answered for and elena never really took him to task for, and the fandom just kept eating up his insistence that he was the Good Brother and therefore he deserved to have elena, and if she didn’t want him anymore it was because she was a heinous bitch who didn’t deserve him.

uh.....i think i got off track there. and there’s probably a lot of shit i missed, like i think i was incandescent with rage for most of seasons 5 and 6 so i missed a lot of the interfandom shit cause i was too busy being increasingly pissed off at the show itself, but if nothing else this should give you an idea of how much of a goddamn cesspit the fandom was while the show as in its prime. there’s a reason both the show and the fandom have such a lousy reputation lmfao.

[waywardrose]

On Babbushka

There is a group of well-known writers in the fandom who have been discouraged and put down by one of their own, Zannah - @babbushka​. It happens behind the scenes in DMs. It happens in posts and tags.

In DMs, she has started conversations with seemingly innocent questions. When she doesn't receive the response she was aiming for, she diverts the conversation to criticizing and humiliating the person. She has attacked writers for tagging—or not tagging—a post in a way she deems appropriate. She has gotten into arguments over how characters were portrayed and then tried to claim victimization when the other person wouldn't knuckle under.

She will appeal to her following to attack any fan or creator who has an opinion that differs from her own. She will encourage friends to send rude anons. Those same friends will also DM the target with rude remarks.

Several creators have stopped writing altogether because of their interactions with her.

We are tired of being discouraged. We are tired of being talked down to. We are tired of being bullied. Enough is enough. Under the cut we share our stories, let the chips fall where they may. It's up to you, the reader, to decide whether to support her.

We can only warn up-and-coming writers, artists, fans, and supporters of her behavior.

-

Hope - @callmehopeless

The Australian bushfires of the 2019-2020 season were nightmarish—for those living through it and those witnessing. As the season went on, cries for help increased. Joaquin Phoenix used the time during his Best-Actor acceptance speech at the Golden Globes to call for unity, action, and accountability. Regardless of what we may think of him, it was a thoughtful speech.

Hope, who is an Australian, found Mr. Phoenix's message encouraging and reblogged a gifset of his speech.

That morning, Zannah made a post about Mr. Phoenix's shady past and his association with a known sexual predator. The main reason wasn't because his speech was inappropriate or not timely, but because she didn't think he should be the one to get the attention over other actors who had spoken of the bushfires during the Golden Globes.

While Hope confessed she was scared of the bushfires, scared for her loved ones, Zannah was more concerned with purity. To Zannah it was about the face of the message, not the message itself. It didn't matter that Mr. Phoenix was amplifying support for Australia, what did matter was that he had done bad things.

It was virtue signaling on Zannah's part.

Still, this remains a complicated argument. Can a person who has done bad things actually have something positive to add to a cause? Should we listen to a problematic person if they share an insight? Does it reflect poorly on us to agree with their isolated statement? Will we be canceled, too? What about the bigger picture?

In this case, the bigger picture was hundreds of homes were destroyed in the bushfires and families were displaced. People died, thousands of animals died. And it was because of climate change. Mr. Phoenix called for his rich peers to examine their respective lifestyles and to give back.

Yes, Mr. Phoenix has done bad things. Yes, he has associated with people who have done bad things. His words resonated with people on Tumblr, and they reblogged part of his speech. He said something that gave Hope hope.

Hope was asked by a third party how they could help. She came back with a resource guide for those who wanted to send aid to Australians.

When it became obvious Zannah wouldn't silence Hope, Zannah decided to sub-post about the interaction. There, she accused Hope of being a rape apologist for reblogging a gifset and finding a little comfort in it. Zannah placed her ego before someone who was facing a very real danger.

Side-eying an actor is one thing, shaming a person you know for finding solace during a scary time is another. Hope isn't responsible for which voice got picked up. The only "colors" being shown here are Zannah's. She put her own concerns about being perceived as morally pure above actually supporting a friend.

I'll keep this brief - I knew Zannah for many years. And on one of the lowest weeks of my life, when my suburb was burning down and I feared for my family: she convinced me I was a rape apologist for sharing Joaquin Phoenix's speech asking for action on bushfires. In all my life, I never felt more alone. To add insult to injury, she then posted memes mocking me - something that has stuck with me to this day.

I've had dear friends quit the fandom because of her kinkshaming. I've had people I love message me distraught over what she's said.

Enough is enough.

— @callmehopeless

-

Rose - @the-wayward-rose​

This PM exchange started after I tagged my reblog of Zannah's fic Feast (Cameron Bistle x Reader) with cw: white reader. I had been on her taglist, and I wanted to show support because I liked the fic overall. For context, the reason for my tag is because of this sentence:

"But then you're blushing so pretty and squeezing his hand affectionately and reaching for the handle to the passenger side of his car, and then you're laughing when he swats your hand away to open it for you, and then you're beckoning him down as if to ask a question – only to place a chaste kiss to his lips instead."

This is from Cameron's point of view.

She asked the reason for the tag, and I explained it was because of the use of "blush" to describe Reader's appearance.

She misunderstood my premise. I did not mean only white people blush.

According to Merriam-Webster, blush means "a reddening of the face especially from shame, modesty, or confusion" or "a red or rosy tint."

It is an autonomic response, though. It happens in all humans for body cooling and nonverbal communication. The main problem with using it universally is that melanin obscures the appearance of said autonomic response.

Here's an example of three runners:

The two pale women, left and center, are pink in the face. They are blushing. The woman of color on the right is likely blushing, too. However, the melanin in her skin obscures the blood in her cheeks. She is not pink.

That's the pitfall of the word "blush." The observer can't always see it. We know what it feels like. We all do it. The face and/or neck gets hot. The use of "blush" is shorthand in narrative, and I understand that. Nevertheless, when writing to cater to a reader-insert audience of unknown heritage, writers need to consider describing with universal terms.

Again, she misunderstood my premise. I clarified by asking how Cameron sees the Reader blush under an abundance of melanin:

She sidestepped the physiological explanation to go straight for justification. She tried to legitimize "blush" as "perhaps [this]" or "perhaps [that]" when I stated earlier that blush by definition is pink or is to redden. That's the logic. A noncommittal, covering-all-the-bases, complicated defense diluted the conversation.

With her earlier "I have friends of color, hence I can't be exclusionary" statement, I wasn't sure she would get my point. I take full responsibility for not explaining, too. I should've asked for some time to gather my thoughts, but I didn't. Truthfully, I was unprepared, because I didn't think my insignificant tag would be an issue.

Also, I was confused why she was trying to police my blog.

Her replies came rapidly—before I could mention my confusion—and felt aggressive in the moment. Maybe that wasn't her intention, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

That doesn't take away from the fact that words have meaning. It's why we use specific words. It's not understood in the narrative that her use of "blush" could mean a bunch of things. If I had known, I wouldn't have tagged as I did. How is a reader of color supposed to know that? How does Cameron see Reader's blush if she has darker skin?

As writers, we don't know who is reading. Someone could be very pale or very dark. A person with medium-toned skin can turn a shade of pink or red. A person with darker-toned skin will not. We can't assume all readers are medium to pale. We need to develop better writing skills. We have to include everyone.

Readers of color > White-writer feelings

When I stood my ground, she doubled down, stating I made no sense in my tagging and that I lacked the ability to learn from her. She then diverted the argument, attacking a ficlet I wrote a few days beforehand—which had nothing to do with this argument. The Christian imagery in that ficlet was upsetting to her and "in such poor taste" because she headcanons Flip Zimmerman (BlacKkKlansman) is 100% culturally and ethnically Jewish.

Flip stated in the movie:

"I'm Jewish, but I wasn't raised to be. It wasn't part of my life. I never thought much about being Jewish. Nobody around me was Jewish. I wasn't going to a bunch of Bar Mitzvahs. I didn't have a Bar Mitzvah. I was just another white kid. And now I'm in some basement denying it out loud[...] I never thought much about it. Now I'm thinking about it all the time. About rituals and heritage. Is that passing? Well then, I have been passing."

By his own admission, Flip is ethnically Jewish, but not culturally. These are two separate things, and that should be recognized. While Judaism is ethnically and culturally entwined in ways that other religions are not, one does not equate the other. You can be one and not the other.

At the time, I didn't want her to sic her 3000+ followers on me. I wasn't going to argue further. I asked myself if the ficlet was important and worth anon-hate and realized, no, it wasn't. It was a throw-away.

And since I'm not culturally Jewish, maybe I had misstepped. And since Zannah is both culturally and ethnically Jewish, I asked for her guidance.

She flatly refused my request. I don't know how I was supposed to learn from her if she wouldn't teach me.

It sounded as if she wanted me to delete the whole fic. Like none of it was worth saving because it hadn't been Zannah-approved. I had gone against her headcanon, and the fic was too offensive to fix.

The last sentence was supposed to cover her back from criticism, and it placed all the responsibility on me. Obviously, she was above such petty concerns as someone else's blog or writing. Never mind that she had just attempted to get me to change my tagging system and rewrite my ficlet. On my blog.

Later, I figured out she was only criticizing and not offering a constructive critique. Her argument was not in good faith. It was retaliation for not giving her the obedience she thought she was owed.

This is the passage that offended her:

"It’s because of the way he fucks you. Like it’s confession—though he’s never been much of a church-going man. Every touch, every thrust, is a truth between you. Even when it’s rough and greedy. It feels like flagellation when you claw his back. He wears the sin proudly."

This is what I edited it to:

"It’s because of the way he fucks you. Every touch, every thrust, is a truth between you. Even when it’s rough and greedy. It feels like flagellation when you claw his back. He wears your marks proudly."

Yeah, I'm not pleased with the revised passage. It's lost its teeth, but I keep it.

The anonymous message(s) she mentioned weren't very anonymous, either. Unfortunately, I've since deleted the two messages. I had apologized to Anon for disappointing them. I said that if the fic was too much, they should unfollow and block me. I meant that in a self-care way. At the same time, I did not—and do not—owe anyone discourse. I don't have to explain my art when it doesn't hurt anyone. And no one was hurt by some purportedly misplaced religious imagery.

I have been silent about this since late January/early February. I was embarrassed. I had been bullied into changing my blog and my fic by someone who proclaims to never do anything of the sort. I had been a fool. Since this conversation with her, I have been blocked/blacklisted by third-parties, most likely at her behest, when none of this exchange had been necessary.

-

Kassanovella - @kylorengarbagedump​​

Zannah's followers have asked her about Kassanovella’s Fix Your Attitude. For context, it's currently one of the most kudo-ed fics for Kylo Ren x Reader on AO3. It had a bit of a renaissance earlier in 2020 because a TikToker wrote a song for it.

There is nothing wrong with not wanting to read a fic. If the subject matter doesn't work for a reader, they don't have to partake. Easy as that. So, these tags aren't a problem.

However, it led to this...

She lashed out, calling Kassanovella's fic a joke. A joke.

She implied her fics should be as popular as Kassanovella's because she works really hard on them. She admitted she's tied to the metrics. She implied she wouldn't be writing fic if not for the external validation.

Here's the thing about fanfic: readers like what they like. They don't care about a writer's effort. They only know what works for them. They comment and give kudos, reblog and like what they connect with. That is not under the writer's control. All a writer can do is try their best and concentrate on what they're passionate about.

To bash another writer's fic because it's popular is disrespectful. This whole bitter rant drips of entitlement and is an affront to Kassanovella.

Some time later, an incident happened in a chatroom during a streaming event for veterans by Arts In the Armed Forces (Adam Driver's organization). At least one fan brought up Fix Your Attitude while waiting for Mr. Driver to make an appearance. They were also disrespectful towards the other presenters by demanding to see Mr. Driver. It caused a big stink within the fandom, and Zannah had some choice words.

While mentioning the fic during the livestream was inappropriate, it was also inappropriate to throw all fans of the fic under the bus as she did in her tag. Sweeping generalizations and incriminations of a subset of fans certainly reads as if she resents those fans for a perceived slight.

Next, Zannah made an earlier disparaging comment about Kassanovella's fic, Little Bird. Unfortunately, that comment is lost. However, the messages supporting the comment remain. (For context, Little Bird is a Kylo Ren x Reader The Handmaid's Tale AU. It has been well received in the fandom, earning thousands of kudos on AO3.)

What an author wants to write about and sexualize is their business. Fantasizing about being dominated by Kylo Ren isn't cringe. It's a sexual fantasy. Some sexual fantasies can be disturbing to those who do not share the same kink.

Sexual fantasies are like ice cream. There's a reason why there are different flavors.

Also, "I will never ever be a person that tells an author what to do or not do" is an absolute lie. As evident in this post, Zannah most definitely tells authors what to do or not do.

Again, she bashes Kassanovella, claiming her writing isn't good. Her motivation for bashing Kassanovella can only be speculation. With Zannah's previously stated opinion of Fix Your Attitude, though, it indicates a certain level of negative emotions.

-

Anonymous

An anonymous person came forward with a case of Zannah policing their blog. Anon has a sideblog for their personal AU with Flip Zimmerman. They reblog gifsets and post headcanons. They were an enthusiastic fan of Zannah's and reblogged a few of the gifset she made. Anon tagged their reactions, and Zannah blocked them for it.

Anon went to Zannah and asked why they were blocked, because all they wanted to do was have fun and support fellow Flip lovers.

Anon was under the impression that because they were shipping themselves, and not Zannah, with Flip, she blocked them. Their personal AU doesn't align with Zannah's headcanon that she alone is married to this character and has his children.

While Zannah's reply may sound innocent, and perhaps it is, it also speaks to someone who has set herself up as the owner of Flip Zimmerman. (Wait until Spike Lee or the real Ron Stallworth hears about that...) It appears that if a fan does not comply with the Zannah-approved headcanon, where only she is married to Flip, that fan shall be blocked. If a fan uses tags on their blog that she does not approve of, that fan will be blocked.

Zannah's policing is disturbing. Going into a blog to look for something as a reason to block is disturbing. Any fan is allowed to use any tag on their blog how they wish. If the OP has said their post can be reblogged, how a reblogger tags is beyond the OP's control. To punish that reblogger for not behaving in a way she finds acceptable is uncalled for and unjust.

-

Anonymous

Backstory: Zannah does not view Ben Solo's arc in the Star Wars sequel trilogy as acceptable canon. However, she does view the story she created for Flip Zimmerman in BlacKkKlansman as completely canon.

This is not the first time she has been asked to clarify her position. Nor is it the first time she has avoided giving an on-topic response. A question asked in good faith should be responded to in kind.

If a creator doesn't want to address the issue, they can state that they don't. Deflecting from the question only muddies the waters. Fans feel dismissed. The creator feels hounded, and comes across as irritated and unapproachable. No one has a positive fandom experience.

There is nothing wrong with having a headcanon. What is wrong is Zannah mandating her headcanon for Flip on the whole fandom. As evident in this post, if a fan does not comply with her headcanon, they will be summarily blocked.

Also, there is nothing wrong with rejecting canon. Writers of transformative works have always done this. The problem is shaming fans who have accepted canon while not offering justification for that shaming. A creator saying they "can't help them" is the creator washing their hands of responsibility from articulating their thoughts when they themselves began criticizing the canon in the first place.

Again, this is a bad-faith argument. Creators can't ask for discussion and attention and then get mad when their viewpoints are challenged. Just because a discussion isn't going a creator's way doesn't mean it's an attack, either. It means people want clarification, and if one criticizes, they should be able to back up their criticisms.

-

While sharing our stories has been freeing, it's not our aim as fellow fans to cancel Zannah. We would hope she would take the opportunity to reflect on the damage she has done to the fandom. We hope we all can move forward with a more approachable and supportive scene.

No one person speaks for our fandom. The actions of one fan do not represent the entire fandom. Whether creator or consumer, you are welcome here.

[posted July 25, 2020]