#(aka thinks someone should be tagged as anti)

[weaselbeaselpants]

Legit Bad-take/Bad-Faith Helluvaverse critics you should not trust if you see them

Interpersonal squabbles within the critical tag are irrelevant, sorry. This here is a genuine warning against users you should keep your distance from in regards to any VivziePop drama-discourse because their names may come up and you should know what it is that crossed the line.

Starlatte/Starvader/HonestHazbinCritiques/OhGodDude and Woomycritiques/RaySquid - Serial harasser(s). Long story incoming. Starlatte was/is a Vivcritical who got involved in the fandom back in 2019/2020 when she was a minor and didn't tell anyone. Her blog on tumblr was HonestHazbinCritiques where she made some good points but also managed to find/be a part of everyone else's takes in the critical community. Her relationship with several criticalblogs turned sour when she started lashing out, talking over people, being accused of faking her age, and doing stuff like arguing with irl sexworkers abt how they should feel about Angel Dust. Whatever her age actually was at the time, she was also sending her own rewrite scripts and fanwritten episodes to Spindlehorse in order to 'fix' Hazbin. In 2021 Star returned to Tumblr under the name "Oh-God-Dude" w/o disclosing to new people who she was while also starting shit. When said new ppl found out her past and got mad at her, she proceeded to block-backtalk every one of them.

Woomycritiques (twitter handle: Raysquid) is a critical blogger who stans Star and calls everyone else in the critical community an obsessed stalker while lashing out herself. She accused others of racism (unfounded), her friends of predation just for being proship (not the 'cest and underage is good'-kind, the "I like some problematic stuff in fic-context"-kind), and heckled Dirgentlemen over how much they should hate Helluva, and more.

Regardless of if you believe Woomy and Star are the same person, which ppl do, they are both -by now- adult persons who have been asked to stop and DIDN'T, which is why people don't trust them. Star and Woom were asked to tone it down, stop making accusations and even asked by many criticals to leave and stop talking about Helluvaverse as she/they seem to have nothing good to say about it. To put that into perspective, cuz I know some HH/HB fans are gonna be reading this: the people who've self-styled themselves antis and criticals begged this person to leave cuz she had nothing nice to say and was being a nuisance. I know the stans think that's all of us anyway, so let that sink in.

LincarRox aka ToyTaker - Creep. Nasty jealous stalker freak who got kicked out of Helluvaverse servers and Aminos for saying nasty shit like how he "wants to put a baby" in Viv. No really. He took his shit and grievances to BadWebComics wiki under the name TheToyTaker while also seemingly trying to get work at Spindlehorse in order to have access to Viv directly and to 'fix' her show. He did so by faking his animation portfolio. BWW did eventually catch on and kick him out but yeah....bad. May or may not still be going under his old pseudonyms, but regardless if you see someone talking weirdly sexually abt Viv while saying they were "let go" both by SH and BWW, get out now. That's probably him.

Animation Call-Out - Bigoted shitlord. Twitter user who rags on Vivz' controversies w other people but also hates gays and BIPOCs. Admitted to submitting one of the anonymous reviews against Spindlehorse "for fun" amidst legitimate ex-employees. All of the reviews, even the ones that seem the most validating/believable should be taken with a grain of salt I believe especially since they are coming to us anonymously, but when a racist person admits to def being one of those fake reviews for "Lolz" sake, that's def when shit's hit the fan.

DoodleToons - Also bigoted creeperlooser. Altright white kid who hates BIPOC existing in anything and admits to hating Viv's stuff for their LGBTisms and 'demons'. Yes, there legit are bad-faith critics who are homophobic. Just because Viv and her crew have a way of saying that's EVERY critic of her work doesn't mean there aren't shitty people out there.

#read first paragraph #I'm not putting Lemon or Chai or whoever here just cuz u don't like em #vivziepop critical #helluva boss critical #call out post #call out tw #hazbin hotel critical #spindlehorse critical #critical fandom

[aangarchy]

https://www.tumblr.com/the-badger-mole/728723354757054464/how-would-you-improve-aangs-writing what are your thoughts??

So i'm not gonna keep reading this post bc it is tagged anti aang, anti kataang and a bunch of other tags i have personally blocked bc i do not like seeing posts that are actively hating on my favorite characters. Idk why you chose to send me something that is anti aang, when i am clearly an aang positive blog. Surely you're just trying to antagonize me.

I did read the first paragraph and let me tell you, boy is that blogger wrong. The question they were asked is how would you change the show's writing.

"In a word...accountability.

Aang, despite his own personal losses, never seems to grasp the gravity of the war. Season 1 would be more or less the same, but season 2 would open with him grappling with his part in the siege of the North. He would acknowledge that he was part of the reason a lot of people died that day, and it would lead into him confronting somethings about his duty, and eventually make him take his powers as the Avatar more seriously."

This is verbatim what happens in the show. The literal first episode of season 2, Aang has nightmares about him in the Avatar State. He hates feeling out of control, he's terrified of what he could do, how much damage he could cause. That's why when general Fong offers to help him master the Avatar State, Aang agrees. Fong also manipulated him, showing him wounded soldiers to tap into his empathy and get him to agree. Aang at this point understands the gravity of the war. He saw it first hand at the North Pole. Even at the seige of the north itself, Aang takes accountability for the state of the world before the battle even starts: "I wasn't there when the fire nation attacked the air temples. I'm gonna make a difference this time." Also: "he would acknowledge he was part of the reason a lot of people died that day" what at the battle of the north pole?? If anyone is responsible for the amount of death in that battle (which we don't have actual numbers of bc this is a kid's show, we know of One official death and that's Yue) it's the Fire Nation. Aang was on the defensive and fused with the Ocean Spirit while in the Avatar State. Why would he have to acknowledge or take accountability for that?

The rest of the post i just scanned over, but it was a whole lot of mumbo jumbo about Aang not deserving Katara, changing the writing so Katara would not reciprocate Aang's feelings (lol) and saying Aang should have to "work" for the Lion Turtle, as in like actively trying to find it i guess instead of it showing up like some sort of jesus?

The problem with the whole lion turtle thing is in Aang's time according to the wiki, lion turtles are supposed to be extinct. The one Aang comes across is the last one. There is no way Aang could have known that this 10.000yr old (probably older) creature was alive and willing to grant him the power of energy bending. The lion turtle came to find Aang by itself. It looked for Aang and lured him onto his back, to take Aang to the place of the final battle, and to give him the spiritual guidance he needed. Again idk how lion turtles work, are they creatures are they spirits, some secret third thing maybe (again, jesus? Idk). But they might be able to feel Aang's unrest about his destiny somehow, since the Avatar is half spirit.

Either way, i personally feel like the lion turtle is less of a deus ex machina than people are making it out to be, since the existence of lion turtles was foreshadowed in book 2, and since Aang did still have to "work" to take Ozai's bending, aka the whole "your own energy needs to be unbendable" which was still nearly Aang's undoing. He still had to fight Ozai mentally in order to overtake him, and that showed the real growth in Aang's character.

The entire post that Anon just linked is basically someone saying "i don't wike it" and changing everything up to make it arguably worse lol. Again, i think the goal was to antagonize me but whatever.

#ask dori #anon #atla #avatar the last airbender #avatar #pro aang #aang #avatar aang

[itsclydebitches]

As someone who tags for both “RWDE” and “RWBY,” I think amongst the very valid points being made about fans asking others to take actions that they themselves won’t take (AKA, you need to learn to just ignore the show, but I’m not capable of ignoring your post), people tend to overlook the crucial differences here in size and focus.

“RWDE” is an incredibly small tag with a narrow focus. In contrast, “RWBY” is a very large tag with a comparatively broad focus. “RWDE” gets a couple posts on high traffic days that are specifically centered around critical perspectives. “RWBY” gets a couple posts an hour on light traffic days and is about anything and everything RWBY related. Ergo, a post that’s not meant for the “RWDE” tag has way more of an impact than a post not meant for the “RWBY” tag because an entire sub-community is seeing it and that’s a good chunk of their content for the day. Meanwhile, a “RWBY” browser is one of many and can probably make that post go away by just refreshing the page. And this is, as I’ve mentioned in the past, overlooking the fact that as a broad tag centered around a large franchise, there shouldn’t be any “not meant for ‘RWBY’ posts” because it’s a tag for all things RWBY. Criticism of RWBY is still a RWBY thing, even if you don’t like it.

Posting anti-RWDE in the RWDE tag is the equivalent of slapping a gruesome and highly explicit poster onto the wall of a small cafe that has advertised itself as wholesome and appropriate for all ages. Why would you put that there? You know it doesn’t belong. That’s very overtly not what this space is catering towards and given how tiny we are, yes, it upsets our regular customers to see that bloody, horrifying, clearly out of place decoration when they walk through the door. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the poster, but it’s clearly not meant for this space.

Posting RWDE in the RWBY tag is the equivalent of slapping a gruesome and highly explicit poster onto the wall of a mega store that...  sells posters. Sure, you may not like this particular poster, but we’re in the business of selling posters! At no point during the store’s opening did we advertise as, “Your One-Stop Shop for All Your Poster Needs... Except Horror Films, They Suck.” No one should be confused as to why there’s a poster in the poster store and even if they really hate that poster, it’s easy to look away. There’s another to their left, and to their right, and literally plastered on every wall. People are coming in with new posters every day and the merchandise changes so quickly that by the time you find a salesperson to complain about that one, heinous poster, it’s already lost in the shuffle of the crowd.

Tumblr is a site built around cultivating your own online experience and thus we have (wonderfully) developed a culture in which we try to make that as easy as possible. But there’s a time when accommodation bleeds into absurdity. Ultimately, people can post in whatever tags they want, but I understand the stance of, “It’s really upsetting to see this gruesome poster in our tiny cafe that’s going for the opposite vibe” a whole lot more than I understand, “It’s really upsetting to see this gruesome poster in a poster store filled with a huge variety of posters. What do you mean I should just ignore it? No, every single poster in the poster store needs to be a poster I personally like.”

#rwde #rwby #mymetas

[intersectionalpraxis]

Hello! I would just like to ask you what you mean by the '#all men are trash' tag? I don't mean this out of an anti-feminist standpoint or whatever, in fact, I myself am a Progressive, I am simply curious.

I presume that you use it to mean that, while not literally all men are trash, because of the patriarchal society we live in, Feminist ideals and concepts are shunned if not outright ignored by many, even those who claim to support Feminism but never try to help with the activism and/or furthering the normalization of said concepts.

The only people that have a problem with the 'men are trash,' slogan/sentiment, whether the people saying it are being facetious or serious -is that it is typically misogynists who have the deepest issue with it, or the one's who say 'but I'm a good guy,' rather than seeing that at the heart of it lies systemic issues -and that is that the patriarchy, like many institutions, is harmful to us all.

I have seen MANY men comfortably saying 'it's all men until it's no men,' and 'yes, men are trash,' because a lot of them are still problematic, and by saying such things it's also an acknowledgement, in my opinion, that you aren't taking it personally. And that's the key distinction for me.

I also watched a great video where a woman on a podcast (I can't quite recall the name) talked about how women not liking or fearing men shouldn't be stigmatized because misogyny kills -misandry irritates, and that men are "women's number one predator" -her words, and I wish I could quote her. I'll try to find the tiktok video, but it's deep in my folders.

If you don't like using it, then by all means don't. I usually use the 'it's all men until it's no men' more because we all don't know what men can be like -and women are often disproportionately impacted by DV/and get blamed for being with an abusive partner if they stay or if they 'take too long to leave.' It's similar to how rape culture is reinforced cross-culturally; we see it in 'locker rooms,' on manosphere content, the 'boys will be boys' in our schooling years, in the criminal 'justice' system, in our daily lives, and so on and so forth.

But it speaks volumes to me when someone says they think feminism is 'toxic,' because feminists use this statement or who are 'man hating,' when SO much of the critical feminist theories and studies out there, speak on exactly this -that a lot of cishet men, in particular, don't see feminist issues as real issues or something that concerns them, aka they believe women should deal with them because they're 'women's issues.' And will use this to weaponize their claims that this is why it needs to be questioned or denounced -which is ridiculous.

Also, for context, the hashtag started so women could share their stories about their relationships with awful men. I have also seen incels/'alpha male dating coaches' -all the misogynists create dehumanizing slogans online in podcasts, and have code words on their reddit threads that are literal DANGERS to women... so saying 'men are trash,' is beyond harmless, in my opinion. You can also search on my page, I have maybe used it once or twice (including now)? When it was content specific.

#feminist #feminism #social justice #men are trash #manosphere #incel behavior #misogynistic #misogyny

[aroacemisha]

About Me & The Blog!

Hi! My name is Misha (he/him). I’m a queer Russian artist and writer [art & writing tag: #misha’s creative stuff; original characters/stories tag: #misha’s original stuff]. Born in February 10, 2004. I’m also an atheist and likely neurodivergent.

I also like The Owl House. I have an AU [tag: #retired leaders au]! It’s focused on Belos, Steven (the AU version of Steve), Hunter and Kiki, aka the Wolf Fam, and they’re the characters with the most significant changes. More info about the AU can be found under the #rlau info tag. It’s a good uncle AU btw.

Small summary: The Day of Unity turned out to be a massive disaster, and once Belos finally returned from being stuck in the Human Realm with Hunter and the Hexsquad, he publicly admitted to his lies and resigned. The other highest ranking members of the EC - Hunter, Steven and Kiki - left with him, hence the AU’s name, and the Empire dissolved.

Some more info about the AU can be found in this post. I’ll make a proper, better structured info post eventually.

[Edit]: Since I changed my username, the link in the long thread no longer works. Here is the updated link.

If you’d like to ask anything, whether it’s about me or my content, or if you just want to say something to me, feel free to send an ask!

I have a positivity tag: “#positivity”, and I’ll link it here if you wanna scroll through it.

I’m not really into n$fw content, but some (mostly mild) stuff might show up, mainly in text form or character dialogue. I tag non graphic/less graphic stuff with “#cw: suggestive”, and more graphic stuff with “#nsft stuff”, though I’m not 100% sure on where the line is for me.

(I also try to tag triggers, generally with “#cw: [thing]”, like “cw: flashing” or “cw: blood”, and some are censored like “cw: sui mention” and “cw: sa mention”. If there’s anything you’d like me to tag, send me an ask)

A few more things, in no particular order:

Do not repost/reupload people’s art without permission. If you like an artist’s work and want to have it on your blog, press the “reblog” button (the recycle looking button). If you want to share it on a different platform, just don’t, unless the artist gives you permission. Or just post a link to the work instead of the work itself!

And stop with the “idk who made it, I found it on Google” bs - don’t post the work you found, and if you want to share it, do reverse image search and find the author and share their work the proper way instead of stealing. Have the bare minimum of respect for the creator.

“Do not repost” also applies to downloading someone’s work, tracing or editing it, and then posting that version. It’s fine to trace art as a form of study/learning, but only if you either keep it to yourself and don’t post it, or you get the artist’s permission to post the traced/edited version.

Please tag your ships when you post content with them. It helps people who like it find it, and helps people who dislike it avoid it by filtering the tag. This includes “OC x canon” stuff (tag the specific OC/ship btw, not just “OC x canon”), “s3lf insert x canon”, and I’d say especially “x read3r”, or frankly, any kind of read3r insert stuff, even if it’s not ship.

Pr0shippers will get blocked. “Pr0shippers/anti-antis/c0mship/pr0fic” or whatever you call yourselves, get out. If you treat p3do and inc3st relationships as some kind of “cute/fun tropes”, or you willingly associate with people who do, I want nothing to do with you. This includes people who ship distant relatives (you are still shipping relatives and doing so knowingly)

No, this does not mean I’m some kind of puritan who doesn’t want dark topics to ever be touched on in media, it just means I think they shouldn’t be watered down into a “cute/fun trope” and should be approached with sensitivity.

If you’re an exclusionist, you’re not welcome here. This includes people who tag “queer” as “q slur”, as well as label and pronoun policers. There will be people whose identities you don’t understand, and that’s fine, leave them alone. Stop doing our oppressors’ work for them. Queer discourse also comes and goes every few months and it’s always the same “trust me bro my exclusionism is totally legit this time bro this group of queer people is totally evil and harmful bro just trust me”

“Tme/tma” (transmisogyny exempt/affected), are meaningless labels that do nothing but cause infighting within the trans community about who has it “worse”, or who has “privilege”, when no one does. A violent anti-trans bigot is not going to ask your pronouns before assaulting you if they perceive you as trans (or any kind of queer). Drop the labels if you use them. Also read this post by an intersex person.

If you attack people for criticizing cops, billionaires, large corporations, etc, gtfo. Go lick those boots elsewhere.

Russia/Putin stans/apologists are also not welcome here. Same for those who are “neutral” or think that “both sides are bad” (no they are not). And if you’re one of those people who act like Ukraine has no autonomy and is only resisting because the West is pushing it to do so, sincerely, go fuck yourself.

That’s about it I think. Though remember that you won’t fully know all of my beliefs from a couple sentences or even a couple paragraphs.

(Edit: For TOH fans, filter “#huntl0w negative” if you don’t like seeing negativity towards the ship. I try not to mention it much, but occasionally I voice or reblog criticisms of the writing (it’s pretty bad if it’s meant to be romantic), and some behavior from particularly aggressive fans. Btw in case you’re wondering, no, I don’t like L*nter, they are a canonically familial relationship)

[This post gets updates sometimes]

#misha's text posts #oh look it's misha #thought i'd make an intro post

[lifeofcynch]

hi!! im wondering if you'd be down talking with me about your views around transmedicalism/lgbt exclusion? i scrolled through some of your anti TERF/radfem tag and got curious seeing anti tucute as well, genuinely speaking i usually see those going hand-in-hand? not in bad faith; your profile says "ask me about it!" under transmedicalist and i feel emboldened to do that!!

thanks so much for asking, that’s really refreshing, honestly! a lot of people just immediately decide to judge instead because there’s a lot of misinformation about what transmedicalism actually is. and one of those pieces of misinformation is what you mentioned; radfems/TERFs and transmeds ‘going hand in hand.’ let me assure you that’s not true at all. transmeds dislike radfems as much as any reasonable person. after all, transmedicalism is all about wanting to make sure trans people (people who experience gender dysphoria) are able to be taken seriously in society and get what they need in order to live the lives they want. radfems on the other hand, well… we all know they hate trans people and constantly antagonize them as «a threat to women»🙄 they don’t see trans women as real women, or trans men as real men. transmedicalists do. someone’s biological sex characteristics doesn’t determine someone’s gender. sometimes, a person’s brain develops to be wired in such a way that they feel female instead of male, or male instead of female. so when they look in the mirror and see a body that doesn’t fit the way their brain is, they’ll feel confused, uncomfortable, stressed, depressed… they can feel that it just isn’t right, and that they want to change it. and that’s what gender dysphoria is. transmeds feel that gender dysphoria is innate to transness. and we want everyone in that situation to be able to transition. one misconception about us is that we think you have to transition to be really trans, and that’s not true. we know well that not everyone with gender dysphoria can manage to transition medically or even socially, for many different reasons, like poverty or living somewhere unsafe or physical complications. and it’s not like trans people have always gotten to transition. trans people have existed since we humans evolved the complex brains we have. the majority of trans people throughout history just had to suffer in silence. it’s really great that we live in an age where it’s more possible for these people to not have to suffer like that! the medical world has advanced really far! still, there are many places where it’s just straight up unsafe for trans people to do what can alleviate their gender dysphoria. we want them to be able to access what they need. radfems, or TERFs, don’t want that for them. they think that trans men are misguided women who are ruining their bodies because they’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy and need to be saved, and that trans women are predatory men fetishizing the female body and trying to invade women’s spaces for nefarious reasons. honestly, the way they view trans people is very close to how transphobic conservatives view them, but that’s another discussion. what needs to be focused on here is the fact that transmeds don’t think that way. one of our core beliefs is that trans people should get to transition. we just think it’s important that they need to get diagnosed with gender dysphoria first. if someone who feels no gender dysphoria, AKA a cis person, tries to medically transition, that will in itself make them feel dysphoric. and the sad truth is that it’s not always fully reversible. it’s a big, life-changing decision that one needs to make sure is the right one for themselves, and a good way to figure that out is a diagnosis. (i will be adding more in a reblog because i ran out of writing space…)

#sorry for the rambly wall of text.. this topic is very interesting to me and i’ve been focused on it for about 6-7 years now! #it might actually be a hyperfixation of mine?😅 #long post #transmedicalism #gender dysphoria #anti tucute #anti TERF #anti radfem

[lovedeathalice]

all you gotta do bae is block them. don’t respond to them cuz it only adds gas to the fire. whether you use it as a coping mechanism or not, it’s nobody’s fucking business in the first place. they’re acting like eren yeager is an actual person but he’s not. He as well as ALL fanfics are made up. you’re doing the most you can by adding warnings, tagging the fic and adding a ‘keep reading’ tab with it. It’s not your fault that they choose to ignore warnings. It’s there for a reason.

Another note, nobody is glorifying rape. If you read a non con fanfic and think “hmm, well if it’s like this scenario, I would let it slide” then you should either seek therapy or you’re not old enough to be reading about topics like this. To know that some people think that we think rape is okay is absolutely absurd. We obviously know the fucking difference and would never want that to happen to us irl nor would we wish it upon anyone. And the fact that people are wishing it or implying it is truly appalling.

If dark content bothers you, filter out the tags and block those creators so you NEVER have to come across dark content. We won’t get offended, if you’re uncomfortable with it, it’s all good. I also don’t understand why people are getting mad that we’re calling it dark fanfics? What, do you want us to call it “Eren fluff” or some stupid shit like that?

Point is, nobody is gonna stop writing what they want just because you don’t like it. It may be helping someone mentally. If you were SA and therapy worked for u, congradu-fucking-lations but everyone is different. Tumblr as well as AO3 have nothing in the guidelines that say writing dark content isn’t allowed. Especially cuz Eren’s a fucking anime character lolzz.

Sorry for the long message, it’s just so infuriating to see the entitlement of some people. I hope you’re doing okay and don’t let this get to your head. Just block em and they’ll have nothing to bitch about. You can also block an anonymous sender so their ask never reach you.

Love ya, sweet❣️

Tw: SA & rape mention below the cut, & long ass rant

YES YES, EXACTLY EVERY SINGLE THING YOU SAID HERE!!!!!!

I always ignore them best I can, but at that point i literally just lashed out because saying i WANT to be SA'd??? Like are you fucking serious???

I see SO many ppl, aka antis, in every single fandom treating SA as some kind of right & requirement to write noncon & it's insane.

It's a fantasy. As simple as that. It's common, and I sure as hell DON'T want it to happen to me IRL, at ALL. So getting occasional hate wishing that on me is just so mind boggling & disgusting. Like how u gonna get mad at me for what I write then proceed to be a shit human being in the next sentence🤦🏻‍♀️

At the end of the day, this is all FICTION!! Eren Jaeger is not a real man. He's fake. He won't jump out the screen & say "Hey guys I'm uncomfy with being in dark fics😢"💀 LMFAO

And exactly, I literally tag everything, put warnings, and put everything below the cut! I do my part, so do yours by avoiding my fics if you dislike them!!

Being uncomfortable with what I write is understandable, but when you harass me over it, it definitely isn't.

Plus people who write dark content do not always need therapy. Fanfics for me are an outlet. It's as simple as that.

And please don't be sorry for the long message! THANK YOU for sending it!! It really helps me and makes me feel better after getting shitty hate🥺💞 Thank you sm for sending this in, it means so much to me💞

Also i need to know how to block anons?!??! Bc holy shit that would solve all my tumblr problems

#tw sa mention #sa mention #tw noncon #Gina's lovely anons♡ #Gina's inbox ☆

[bubbelpop2]

The difference between antis and pros and why the whole antiship thing is stupid

antis believe harassing people over their tastes in media is okay. And they've accused a lot of people (who aren't even attracted to children, and often times, who don't even read dark fictional stuff about children) of being pedophiles. They've really made it hard to take accusations of abuse seriously on tumblr, and regularly send out suicide baits.

the entire internet used to be “proship” before antiships even existed. people abided by "don't like, don't read" which means, if a content would be triggering to you, then don't read it, and don't harass the creator.

proship means "anti harassment over fictional media". AKA: people are more important than fictional characters.

A LOT of fanfiction websites before the creation of archive of our own banned any "unprofitable" (read: violent, gay, or dark) content, which always ended up making the website unusuable for LGBT and traumatized people.

The thing is, every proshipper understands that fiction affects reality. But every proshipper also understands that fanfic writers who are publishing dark or violent content are not actually affecting anybody except the people who CHOOSE to read the fanfiction.

People's taste in media, either fanfiction or oficcially published media, has absolutely no effect on their morals. At all.

You're right to have critical thinking skills and to think that the anti vs pro stuff is stupid. because antis didn't even use to EXIST. the WHOLE internet was "proship".

which is why there's a new label for people who think anti vs pro is  fucking stupid and just go by the "just don't be an asshole to people you don't know" and "don't like don't read" rules. They're called the Dead Dove: Do not eat or the Dead Dove society.

note: people who post uncensored age and incest art in the main tags of fandoms are inconsiderate ableist pieces of shit

ALL dark media should be censored in a way that makes it impossible for people who do not want to see it  to accidentally stumble on it without their consent. JUST tagging your posts isn’t enough. Not everyone knows how to use tumblr well. Not everyone wants to learn the hard way what the fuck your incest shipping name is. Not everyone wants to learn the hard way what the tags are for dark shipping material. you’re subjecting people to triggering materials without their consent. You MUST have it under a “read me” or censor it in some way so that the only way someone will see it is if they CONSENT to it by clicking on read more or something.

#shut up bubbz

[theangstking]

I posted 16,038 times in 2022

That's 10,640 more posts than 2021!

45 posts created (0%)

15,993 posts reblogged (100%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@amazonprimebox

@ultimate-queen-of-fandoms2

@peridot-the-kitten

@soijusthavetoask

@mxcrowe

I tagged 570 of my posts in 2022

#sky of royals - 23 posts

#the stars' council - 16 posts

#royals interacting - 7 posts

#ddau rp adventures - 6 posts

#!!! - 5 posts

#oh - 5 posts

#i - 4 posts

#nsft - 4 posts

#ceph writes - 4 posts

#pokemon - 4 posts

Longest Tag: 134 characters

#but it's actually relatively recently made and very good and once you realize it's not actually classical it's got this distinct style

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

anyone want Drunz?

focusing on Punz having a bunch of rings, and the stories behind some of them. as well as giving Dream a few rings.

a continuation of our previous fic! can likely be read separately but we highly recommend reading the first part in the series first

link in the replies!

16 notes - Posted September 6, 2022

#4

we will not be reblogging or posting anything more than this about the situation with Technoblade, but I feel it's important to say.

take care of yourself. drink water, eat a snack or a meal when you can. do something comforting for yourself. please avoid what could upset you over this. reach out to friends and loved ones, tell someone you care about them. be there for each other.

note - check the replies for our Discord if you would like someone to talk to.

20 notes - Posted June 30, 2022

#3

I came up with a new pronoun set, and I figured I'd put it out there for those who would like to use them!

they aren't based around any specific existing thing, but they are rather special to us. I've been getting very much so vibes of like, phoenixes and royalty from them.

- phe/phex/phel/phexself -

phe went to the store.

I am friends with phex.

that is phel cat.

I would ask that these pronouns only be used by plural folks, as they are ones I made for our system as a whole, for our collective pronouns, and feel rather personal and connected to our plurality. whether using them as a collective or as an individual alter, if you consider yourself plural, you are allowed to use these pronouns!

DNI if anti-endogenic. do not use these pronouns if you believe that endogenic systems don't exist.

do not screenshot to "cringe"/"faking system" type things.

this post and these pronouns are not a joke.

43 notes - Posted June 1, 2022

#2

anger holders get a lot of stigma surrounding them, so we wanted to make this post.

to all anger holders:

you are loved. you are important.

you play a very important role, that we think you should be proud of. it's okay if you're not proud of it. but we are proud of you.

you are not evil. you are not wrong. you are not a ticking time bomb.

you are valid, you are loved, you are wanted.

you are more than just your role, but your role is still important. an important job, that isn't always easy to handle.

even if you are not proud of yourself, we are proud of you.

it's okay if you don't always handle your anger in the most appropriate or healthy ways. I encourage you to try and learn healthy coping mechanisms, but that's difficult. it's okay and entirely normal to slip up.

you are allowed to be angry. it's healthy.

your role is important.

and you, as an individual, are important.

85 notes - Posted December 8, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

hello! are YOU (or anyone you know) interested in a DSMP AU RP?

our attempt at making an RP that's relatively chill and low stress, with a comfortable environment! as such, the server is "ask to join".

15+, explicitly safe for systems of any origin! (aka - no anti-endos.)

we, the owner, are an active lurker on the Purpled fan side of Tumblr, and lurk in the Dreblr side of Tumblr. we're also being careful about keeping Discourse and negativity OUT of the server.

the server itself focuses on mostly chat based RP, as though all of the characters are in a Discord server of their own! however, there are also RP channels for "physical" settings!

_

as a note, all RP interactions are done using Tupper, so using that bot is a requirement - we apologize if because of this you can't join, but it helps us avoid confusion.

_

this is the current character list, anyone without an account tagged next to them is open to claim! (please check the base post itself if you see a reblog of this that isn't from us, as we will do our best to update this to make sure it properly shows who is taken.)

See the full post

221 notes - Posted July 31, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #sky of royals #this was a PAIN IN THE ASS to find ndhwjsnsns

[buffythechessplayer]

What do you think of @buffysummers response to your tags 😬😬😬

I quite enjoyed the original post (I wouldn’t have rbed it otherwise) and there’s a reason why I posted tags and not a comment/response. I don’t really create any content of my own BtVs or otherwise so this is just a place for me to document my fandom journey (aka reblog things i find interesting and through that and my occasional tags see my own feelings about BtVs change. This is like, the 2nd ask I’ve ever received).

I didn’t write a comment/response to it because it’s not like I feel that passionately about this small detail that OP very cleverly pointed out. For me, tags feel insignificant as it was just a way of putting my own thoughts into words, alas in a very quick, jumbled not coherent way (because I wasn’t supporting or creating an argument against one ship or another, just quickly writing my thoughts out). It was a messy word salad that just reflected my immediate thoughts to that particular aspect of the Buffyverse.

I tagged it Anti Bangel because some people may have filtered that tag out, not as a “down with Bangel” kind of thing. I myself occasionally like Bangel, with a slight preference for Spuffy and I was careful not to make any mention of Spuffy since I felt like it was out of place and comparing Bangel to Spuffy ultimately leads to a huge debate that no one seems to get to the bottom off.

The tags for me and me only. I didn’t write them for people to praise me or hate me because they are obviously unstructured. It was a quick, instinctive response to a post, hence why I didn’t bother making my own. Also, imagine how that have gone:

“Hey i saw this post (linking to OP) today and I couldn’t help but think that … blah blah blah”. Don’t you think that would feel worse and outright malicious? As if I’m directly attacking someone on their ship in a significantly more public and upfront way?

@buffysummers I’m sorry if you feel like I did not treat your post the way it should have been but I also think you became unnecessarily hostile upon encountering someone with a different opinion on fandom than you. If you’d like to have a peaceful discussion feel free to dm me. If not and you wish to block me that’s alright too.

#ask tag

[kingkatsuki]

can i aka how people can propery tag their headcannons. I just want to do it right but like lets says its multiple characters should we not put character x reader or yes? Like how can we tag it properly!

I think first and foremost you need to ask yourself why am I posting this? If it’s because it’s actual content you think others will enjoy then I would say please tag, if it’s for attention and brings no value to the tags, use your own tags.

For example, a post with “I want to ride Bakugou’s perky nipples” does not need to be tagged with:

Is it smut? No. Does it belong in these tags? No.

Do I also want to ride Bakugou’s perky nipples? Yes.

So what tag would I use for this? My own personal tag (mine is #jo talks, but obviously yours may be different), potentially #bakugou thirst but honestly you’re on thin fucking ice if you do this… but at least you’re not saturating the x reader/smut tags and making it difficult to find actual fanfiction.

Also the fact that the tags #bnha #mha #bakugo and #katsuki will mean this appears in the main fandom tags, not just fanfiction tags. So you’re potentially bringing a slew of antis/minors/DNI criteria to your blog.

The other posts that people generally make with multiple characters are this style of post:

There is absolutely no reason why this post would need more than 3/4 main tags if you really wanted it in the main tags. But people will make these posts to deliberately tag them with every single character individually.

Now. If you wanted to make the same post as above but include why they enjoy drinking their cum from a sippy cup or straight from the source, I’d say tag it x reader or multiple characters because at least then you’re bringing some value to the tags. You’re providing content that people can actually read and enjoy, not just shoving names in a line because you want to make it into as many tags as possible (or cross tag fandoms to reach more people).

Something like this:

Credit: Cum headcanons by @/touyaspeach.

There is actual content here. This is when it would be acceptable to tag multiple characters, but only the characters that appear in the post.

Yes, it is annoying that more people would see your random thoughts and interact with you and we don’t like it when our posts don’t get attention. But the bigger picture is when you do this you’re effectively blocking people who spend hours and sometimes days/weeks from appearing near the top of the tags.

Also. If your post is just:

This does not belong in main tags, you’re literally hindering writers when you do this. Imagine if someone scrolled past a fic you’d poured your heart and soul into because they were trying to skim quickly, or your fic got buried under tens of posts like this? Or people have stopped going through the tags because of posts like this… Because that’s genuinely what the character tags are like right now.

Tumblr tags are already flawed, and when you abuse them like this you’re just making it worse. Their search system is nowhere near as comprehensive as a site like ao3 or even Lunaescence. It’s so much harder to find fanfics on this site and after speaking to friends a lot of them no longer use the main tag search because of the people that abuse it.

Please think about what you’re tagging before you tag it, it’s not a cute quick way to get popular, it’s a nuisance for authors who crave those great comments/reblogs on their hard work.

#jo talks #psa xxx #long post

[nattikay]

(whispers) that’s not what furries arrrrrrrrrre

lol I was gonna put this in the tags but figured it might get long so w/e

anyways just really tired of seeing people hate on “furries” when their definition of furry isn’t even correct.

A furry is just someone who likes the concept of anthropomorphic animals. That’s literally it. That’s the whole definition. 

“fURriEs aRe seXUaL deGeNERaTeS” Except no. Are there sexual degenerates who also happen to be furries? Of course. But being furries--aka, thinking talking animals are cool--is not what makes them degenerate. 

The definition of furry is not “people who have sex in animal costumes”.

The definition of furry is not “people who have a fetish for fur/animals/animal costumes etc”.

The definition of furry is not “zoophiles”. 

The definition of furry is not “someone who gets sexually aroused by animals (cartoon or otherwise)”.

“But I saw a furry account posting about those things!!1!” Are there some individual furries who engage in such behavior? Yes. Is such behavior degenerate to varying degrees? Yeah. I agree, a lot of that is pretty gross. 

But just because SOME people-who-like-the-concept-of-anthro-animals engage in such behavior DOES NOT MEAN that ALL people-who-like-the-concept-of-anthro-animals do so, nor does it mean that liking-the-concept-of-anthro-animals should automatically be assumed to be tangled up in all that crap.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m under no delusion that the furry “community” is a 100% wholesome sfw utopia; I have my share of issues with the community culture.

I’m just really really tired of again and again hearing people bash “furries” when what they’re actually thinking of are murrsuiters or zoophiles or even just weird porn addicts (though that last one’s an issue for another post and is much more of a “society at large” problem than a specifically furry problem). 

I consider myself a furry because I like drawing cartoon animals, making animal OCs, going to cons, and yes even fursuiting (no, not banging in it). Those are things that I find fun. 

And I’m sooooooo sick of getting accused of/being assumed to participate in the above misconceptions because of it.

sincerely,

a sfw anti-porn furry who just wants to draw cute animals and is Tired™

#sorry just been seeing more of this than usual lately #it's fine if furries aren't your cup o' tea #it's much less cool if your bashing is on false pretenses #for example: if u wanna argue that you don't like furries because the concept if childish then ok #*is #i don't quite agree but that's fair #BUT if u wanna argue that you don't like furries because they're a ''weird sex cult'' #then congration sir u have no clue what you're talking about #oh look at that i did a read-more to avoid tag rants but wound up ranting in the tags anyways #whoopsie #ah well #just a pet peeve i guess #ugh

[rynnaaurelius]

Character Continuity, #MenWritingWomen, & Healthy Relationships: The Tragedy of Annabeth Chase

[Tagging @evergardenwall and @thein273 real quick because they wanted to see this meta. Lord knows why]

I saw Annabeth Chase discourse on my dashboard, so, well. . .

This will be me breaking down Annabeth Chase's characterization and Rick Riordan's continued nonsense, in an attempt to square my many thoughts on her, for both my reference and maybe others'.

Also, bear in mind that a lot of this meta is less about Annabeth Chase as it is my breaking down what makes Annabeth Chase, because I do believe that she really stands out in how her background does and should shape who she is—and how often that gets ignored, both in canon and in fandom.

Disclaimer/Warnings: Extensive, non-graphic discussion of emotional/physical abuse and neglect, extensive discussion of sexism/internalized misogyny.

If you think I owe credit/should link to someone else, message me/leave me an ask.

In addition: My apologies in advance, but I cite directly from the books multiple times in this post, and the PDFs I use lack page numbers, so I do it by chapter.

Also, this post is long. Ridiculously long and hopefully thorough.

NOTE: Same rodeo rules as my Solangelo post:

I don't like bashing. Everyone can and should leave each other alone if they've got nothing nice to say. Block who you need to for a nice time on this fair hellsite.

While I'm not about to beat up on a ship/characters themselves—because they're hardly writing themselves—I'm about to take their characterization and Rick Riordan to the cleaners.

If that's not what you want to see, blacklist the tags 'anti percabeth', 'rr crit', 'riordan critical', and get on with your day, please.

Fandom isn't activism, but it can be hella racist, sexist, ableist, and queerphobic. We need to fight that.

Now, on with the show—

I. Fandom Context

I'm queer, got a small list of mental illnesses, and write Riordanverse fanfiction. I write a lot of Annabeth Chase's character/POV, too.

The character in question, Annabeth Chase, is a deuteragonist in Percy Jackson and the Olympians (PJO), and co-protagonist in its sequel series, Heroes of Olympus (HoO). She's popular in fandom, too.

As of 08/25/2021, she's in the third highest number of fanfictions in the Archive of Our Own (AO3) Percy Jackson and the Olympians - All Media Types fandom tag, behind only Percy Jackson and Nico di Angelo.

[Click on image details in the corner for description]

Of course, it's worth mentioning that this probably has a lot to do with:

A. Her long-time major presence in canon. Annabeth was introduced in The Lightning Thief (TLT), the first book of the original PJO series.

B. The dominance of the Percy Jackson/Annabeth Chase ship, AKA Percabeth, within the fandom, which was formally canonized in The Last Olympian (TLO).

The latter is backed up by both anecdotal accounts and when looking at relationship rankings by fic number in AO3:

[Click on image details in the corner for description]

Annabeth and Percy's romantic relationship wins out at 8,412, with Nico di Angelo/Will Solace (AKA Solangelo) handily coming in second at 7,936. But Annabeth doesn't appear again, romantic or platonic, until the last placement, where her and Percy's platonic dynamic makes an appearance.

(Congrats on achieving Satan's favorite number for Percy and Annabeth's gen dynamic, by the way)

Anyway. Just to look at romantic rankings for thoroughness, I excluded Annabeth & Percy, and what d'you know:

[Click on image details in the corner for description]

Congrats to the Nico/Leo shippers, I remember when that ship was huge in the Riordanverse fandom.

But from this, I think it's safe to say that Annabeth's popularity, is at least partly wrapped up in the popularity of shipping her with Percy Jackson, despite her long-time tenure as a leading hero in the Riordanverse, particularly considering characters in her stratosphere of popularity (Percy, Nico), and those one step below (Jason Grace, Leo Valdez), feature multiple times within the most written-about romantic relationships.

So this is also a Percabeth analysis, which I'm sure will piss absolutely no one off. Wonderful.

(But we'll get there)

II. The Retconned, Pathetic, Half-Dead Clusterfuck We Call Annabeth's Timeline And Backstory

Rick Riordan can't do math or continuity with a gun to his head and it drives me insane, so that's what we're calling this section lmao

To keep me from going insane and keep confusion to a minimum, we'll be recounting what I call hard canon: Confirmed events, dates, and actions.

We're ignoring for a second the emotional and psychological fallout of choices, or soft canon, since—particularly for pre-canon events, which form the goddamn backbone of Annabeth's original series arc—there's a lot more there to interpret and argue over. Especially with regards to Annabeth's family and personal trauma, which gets Jossed repeatedly.

We're also ignoring my personal headcanons/fixed timeline that I use for writing fanfiction for a second, so if you read my shit. . .this ain't that Annabeth. Or the other one.

This is going to be pretty spare, since a lot of important things are left up for debate, and Riordan is fundamentally uninterested in the psychology of the mortal parents in his books.

1. When Annabeth is "born", her father asks Athena to take her back. She discusses this with Percy in TLT, Ch. 13: I Plunge To My Death:

"My dad’s resented me since the day I was born, Percy," she said. "He never wanted a baby. When he got me, he asked Athena to take me back and raise me on Olympus because he was too busy with his work. She wasn’t happy about that. She told him heroes had to be raised by their mortal parent."

2. In the same canon conversation, she tells Percy that she "took the hint. [She] wasn't wanted. . ." and ran away when she was seven, after what she recounts as inadvertent neglect due to her demigod status at best, and purposeful emotional neglect/abuse at worse.

She reaches camp before she turned eight with Grover Underwood, Thalia Grace, and Luke Castellan, with an army of monsters trying to kill them.

2A. Two summers before Percy Jackson arrives at Camp Half-Blood, when Annabeth is ten, she receives a letter from her father, asking for her to come home so they can try again. He gives her his Harvard college ring, which she still keeps.

"My dad sent it to me folded up in a letter, two summers ago. The ring was, like, his main keepsake from Athena. . .Anyway, he said he wanted me to have it. He apologized for being a jerk, said he loved me and missed me. He wanted me to come home and live with him."

This ends horribly, because of course.

"I tried to go home for that school year, but my stepmom was the same as ever. She didn’t want her kids put in danger by living with a freak. Monsters attacked. We argued. Monsters attacked. We argued. I didn’t even make it through winter break. I called Chiron and came right back to Camp Half-Blood."

[Both quotes above from TLT, Ch. 16: We Take A Zebra To Vegas]

3. With Thalia turned into a tree by her father, Zeus, to save her life, Annabeth remained at Camp Half-Blood for the next five years, as proven by the five beads on her camp necklace that she shows to Percy in TLT, Ch. 7: My Dinner Goes Up In Smoke:

Annabeth nodded. From under the collar of her T-shirt she pulled a leather necklace with five clay beads of different colors. It was just like Luke’s, except Annabeth’s also had a big gold ring strung on it, like a college ring.

"I’ve been here since I was seven," she said.

3A. Worth noting this makes Annabeth and Percy's official birth year of 1993 wrong. Percy is already twelve years old in June 2005, and Annabeth, while never stated outright to also be already twelve, they are heavily implied to be the same age multiple times throughout the original series.

We also get this in MoA, Ch. II: Annabeth:

She’d secretly had a crush on him since they were twelve years old.

So, they're born in 1992. This isn't all that important but I am petty and this has driven me batshit while working out timelines in the past.

4. At the end of the summer of TLT, Annabeth writes her father and asks to come home for the year (TLT, Ch. 22: The Prophecy Comes True):

"I wrote him a letter when we got back,’ Annabeth said. ‘Just like you suggested. I told him... I was sorry. I’d come home for the school year if he still wanted me. He wrote back immediately. We decided... we’d give it another try."

5. So, towards this point, we, as readers figures that Annabeth's family has been. . .not great, towards her, at minimum. A lot of things are left ambiguous, but it's clear that there's been a lot of misunderstandings and A+ Parenting going on. Which makes it very interesting when we reach The Titan's Curse (TTC), finally meet Frederick Chase, Annabeth's dad, and Helen Chase, her stepmother, and this is what we see (TTC, Ch. 16: We Meet The Dragon Of Eternal Bad Breath):

After hearing Annabeth gripe about her dad for two years, I was expecting him to have devil horns and fangs. I was not expecting him to be wearing an old-fashioned aviator’s cap and goggles. He looked so weird, with his eyes bugging out through the glasses, that we all took a step back on the front porch.

"Hello," he said in a friendly voice. "Are you delivering my aeroplanes?"

Thalia, Zoë and I looked at each other warily.

"Um, no, sir," I said.

"Drat," he said. "I need three more Sopwith Camels."

"Right," I said, though I had no clue what he was talking about. "We’re friends of Annabeth."

"Annabeth?" He straightened as if I’d just given him an electric shock. "Is she all right? Has something happened?"

Followed up shortly by Helen's—who Annabeth has expressed a lot of vitriol towards—first on-page appearance:

We introduced ourselves a little uneasily, but Mrs Chase seemed really nice. She asked if we were hungry. We admitted we were, and she told us she’d bring us some cookies and sandwiches and sodas.

"Dear," Dr Chase said. "They came about Annabeth."

I half expected Mrs Chase to turn into a raving lunatic at the mention of her stepdaughter, but she just pursed her lips and looked concerned.

"All right. Go on up to the study and I’ll bring you some food." She smiled at me. "Nice meeting you, Percy. I’ve heard a lot about you."

Effectively, after two books and change's worth of talking up Annabeth's difficult childhood and past and the borderline hate she's expressed for her father's choices and stepmother's treatment of her, both when she was seven and when she was ten, they're de-fanged within the narrative pretty quickly, with Percy repeatedly wondering if these are actually Annabeth's relatives.

6. This, of course, not to say that people can't change or improve for the better. It would be more than easy enough to mention how Annabeth's parents have read Parenting A Demigod For Dummies or similar since she's last seen them.

Instead, we get this conversation as our follow-up in TTC, Ch. 18: A Friend Says Goodbye:

Annabeth and I flew along side by side.

"Your dad seems cool," I told her.

It was too dark to see her expression. She looked back, even though California was far behind us now.

"I guess so," she said. "We’ve been arguing for so many years."

"Yeah, you said."

"You think I was lying about that?" It sounded like a challenge, but a pretty half-hearted one, like she was asking it of herself.

"I didn’t say you were lying. It’s just... he seems okay. Your stepmom, too. Maybe they’ve, uh, got cooler since you saw them last."

She hesitated.

And. . .there are interesting implications here, about Annabeth's perception of her parents when she was younger. I'm going to put a pin in this for the next section. They're not, necessarily, bad implications, considering Annabeth's character and how much is left ambiguous as of TTC about what exactly happened to make her run away beyond monsters and arguing with her parents.

7. For now, Annabeth's relationship with her mortal relatives seems fixed. Battle of the Labyrinth (BotL) and TLO happen, her mortal family remains off-screen, and we don't hear about them until the third book of HoO: The Mark of Athena (MoA), Ch. XX: Annabeth:

[This is a long passage, but I think it's important to include it in full]

Terror plunged her into memories. She was seven years old again, alone in her bedroom in Richmond, Virginia. The spiders came at night. They crawled in waves from her closet and waited in the shadows. She yelled for her father, but her father was away for work. He always seemed to be away for work.

Her stepmother came instead.

I don’t mind being the bad cop, she had once told Annabeth’s father, when she didn’t think Annabeth could hear.

It’s only your imagination, her stepmother said about the spiders. You’re scaring your baby brothers.

They’re not my brothers, Annabeth argued, which made her stepmother’s expression harden. Her eyes were almost as scary as the spiders.

Eventually she fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. She woke up in the morning, freckled with bites, cobwebs covering her eyes, her mouth, and nose. The bites faded before she even got dressed, so she had nothing to show her stepmother except cobwebs, which her stepmother thought was some sort of clever trick.

No more talk of spiders, her stepmother said firmly. You’re a big girl now. The second night, the spiders came again. Her stepmother continued to be the bad cop. Annabeth wasn’t allowed to call her father and bother him with this nonsense. No, he would not come home early.

The third night, Annabeth ran away from home.

It's worth remembering that A) Annabeth is still seven years old and a child, B) Night terrors are not unheard-of in children, and C) A child screaming their head off every night and begging just to call their father is not something that you ignore and tell them to grow up with.

So. We now have two relationships for Annabeth and her mortal parents, because for as much as we get of her POV in HoO, we don't actually get very many details about what was, at minimum, a very messy complicated relationship. Either:

A. Despite being unprepared for a demigod child to raise, Annabeth's mortal parents did their best and Annabeth tricked herself into think they were both awful and gaslighted herself into believing they hated her and she had plenty of cause to run away from home.

B. Annabeth's mortal parents were woefully unprepared for a demigod child to raise, blamed the child for the monsters brought down upon them, and gaslighted the child about part of their godly heritage until said child—a daughter of Athena, who presumably is good at risk-reward calculations—decided they would rather take their chances on the run then stay home.

Pick your lane, Riordan.

III. Bringing Up Daisy A Demigod

Please note: This section is about to get into speculation and headcanon. I do my best to clearly delineate the line between my theories, insulting Riordan, and confirmed canon. Sorry if I fuck it up.

So, the case of Annabeth's father and stepmother is actually pretty curious in canon. Obviously, it's incredibly difficult to raise a demigod child, and I think sometimes that non-Sally Jackson parents don't get enough credit for the jobs they do.

Riordan tends to divide parents into two categories: parents that do such a wonderful job they're borderline canonized as saints (Sally Jackson, Esperanza Valdez, Maria di Angelo), and parents who utterly fail at parenting (Beryl Grace, May Castellan, Marie Levesque).

Mind you, this is also how he and the narrative paint them and their actions. I could write whole essays on Riordan's treatment of mothers and my feelings about that, but we're focusing on Annabeth's mortal parents here.

And they're. . .weird. I think the closest parent to them is Tristan McLean, but he nopes out of facing Piper's demigod heritage in canon for his own mental health.

Frederick—because ultimately, this all comes down to Frederick—is, ultimately, given a "passing" grade in demigod parenting in canon, with the giant asterisk of Annabeth running away because she believed he and Helen didn't care about her.

But—still just going off of what's confirmed in canon—I'm disinclined to disagree with this (Bear in mind I love Frederick's mad scientist/historian schtick; I like him. I don't think he's a great parent).

So, he and Athena have a whole whirlwind romance. Athena gives him their brainchild as a symbol of their intellectual love. Frederick doesn't want said child, knowing who Athena is.

But obviously, he gets with the program and raises Annabeth, clearly informing Annabeth of who her mother is and what she is from a young age. Which works, to a point.

The problem is the monsters. And the spiders. And the godly heritage. And—look, integrating families is difficult enough when all the children involved are mortal.

Telling Annabeth Chase that her mother is a freaking goddess, but also, her father is in love again and re-marrying, is not going to go over well. Not when Annabeth's a small child and, admittedly, a prideful little shit on the best of days.

But regardless of how difficult she's being, she's still a child and Frederick's responsibility, since he either owned up, or is still refusing responsibility (Which would be a huge yikes).

I think to not inform her stepmother, the person taking care of her while Frederick is away, traveling wherever he is for his job, that Annabeth's a demigod and there may be consequences from that, is parental malpractice.

Because. . .look. Pre-MoA, it's very easy to make a case that Annabeth was determined to think the worst of her mortal parents, and any and all mistakes/arguments they had were magnified tenfold in her mind—and then once she meets Thalia, Luke, and their parental horrorshows, it's very easy to put together something in her mind that matches what her new family went through.

But the spiders happened. The supernatural night terrors happened.

And her parents not only did nothing, but those two nights of night terrors left Annabeth Chase, daughter of the goddess of wisdom and battle strategy, convinced that she was better off running away from home, alone.

She was also clearly still of the belief that her father could fix everything, and judging from the state of Frederick and Helen's marriage in TTC as well as Bad Cop conversation, "don't let Annabeth call her father for 'attention' while he's on a work trip" is likely a mutual decision between the two of them.

(It's also worth questioning the consequences of how Frederick is implied to be clear-sighted, since he's able to see the Pegasi Blackjack, Guido, and Porkpie in TTC without problems, but Helen is not)

She meets Thalia Grace and Luke Castellan and things get. . .even more fascinating, frankly. Because those two very angry, very violent teenagers—not without reason, don't get me wrong—essentially then spend a pretty important time in Annabeth's life acting as the closest thing to parents she has.

So, believing her parents either can't or won't acknowledge what's happening to her, and, like her parents, blaming herself for the monsters said to have been attacking their home in Richmond, VA, Annabeth runs away from home.

[Edit, 12/5/2021: I dunno how many people will ever actually see this, but I think an oversight I made in this post is mentioning that abusers appearing perfectly charming and normal and nothing like their victims mentioned is really common in real life, and Riordan playing it straight via Percy's POV is, uh, really fucked up? It's increasingly my suspicion that this also really contributes to fandom perception of Annabeth's trauma, too.

Anyway. As you were.]

She's assuming her demigod heritage and modeling herself after her heroes, by her own admission: Luke and Thalia.

Then Annabeth loses Thalia. She then only has Luke and Camp Half-Blood to take care of her through a pretty formative time in her life, where she's taught the only possible way she can hold onto anything is being smarter and better at violence then anyone else.

Which, well. Annabeth Chase is pretty good at that.

IV. Character Construction: Growth and Flaws

One of my most red-hot takes in Riordanverse fandom coming right up. Ready?

Annabeth Chase has no character arc in the original PJO series or HoO.

(Percy doesn't have much of one either, but that's for another essay)

It's really obvious and depressing with Annabeth, however, because she is perfectly set up for some really fascinating characterization. And Riordan draws attention to it! Attachment issues, hubris, just generally. . .Annabeth learning how to healthily deal with people outside of immediate life-or-death situations, because my god, she's got hang-ups.

(Not unreasonably so, all things considered. But still)

But nothing is ever meaningfully done with this. In TLT, there are signs of growth���Annabeth looks like she's coming to respect Percy and view him as a friend (Wanting him on her team for Capture The Flag, talking about her family with him, looking after him when he's attacked by the pit scorpion, etc), we see her both put her own intelligence to work and work with Grover and Percy (fighting the Furies, Medusa, dog-training Cerberus, fighting Ares, etc).

There are still flaws and signals of recurring issues over the rest of the series (Annabeth's attachment issues acting up with Rachel) along with signs of Annabeth's own inherent strengths and abilities (Such as fighting the Hydra), and her ability to still learn from mistakes when faced with them (Tellingly, they usually require her to face physical consequences because of her own belief in her intelligence).

But nothing's ever made of it. There's no culminating moment.

Things get. . .weird. Repeatedly weird, throughout the original series. In Sea of Monsters (SoM), we have the fatal flaw discussion (Ch. 13: Annabeth Tries To Swim Home):

"You feel that way?"

She looked down. "Don’t you ever feel like, what if the world really is messed up? What if we could do it all over again from scratch? No more war. Nobody homeless. No more summer reading homework."

And this is genuinely interesting stuff! You can see how Luke would try to exploit that to try and get her on his side in the future! This is what Kronos is claiming he offers to the demigods.

Annabeth's belief in her ideals, combined with her conviction in her intelligence and ability to get this right, can make for a dangerous combination.

This also combines pretty beautifully with her relationship with Luke, which is. . .a mess.

(We're going to ignore any romantic overtones from that scene in TLO from Luke towards Annabeth. He loved her like a little sister/daughter, she adored him and had a helluva crush on him for a while. End. Of. Story.

. . .Riordan really doesn't remember what age differences as a teenager were like, huh)

Anyway. With Thalia as a pine tree and her relationship with her mortal parents still up in the air, Luke was the only family Annabeth had and the person she had convinced herself that she could depend on for anything. Luke, in turn, kept losing family to the gods and their apparent whims: First his mother to the Oracle, then Thalia to the Great Prophecy, and now he has watch his siblings and Annabeth grow up and wait for them to die.

They absolutely bring out the worst and most irrationally emotional parts in each other and it's been established many—

"Travelling with a Cyclops," Luke chided. "Talk about dishonouring Thalia’s memory! I’m surprised at you, Annabeth. You of all people—"

"Stop it!" she shouted.

I didn’t know what Luke was talking about, but Annabeth buried her head in her hands like she was about to cry.

[SoM, Ch. 9: I Have The Worst Family Reunion Ever]

—many—

I knew immediately that Annabeth had designed it all. She was the architect for a whole new world. She had reunited her parents. She had saved Luke. She had done everything she’d ever wanted.

[SoM, Ch. 13: Annabeth Tries To Swim Home]

—many—

“Luke!” Annabeth yelled. “Stop this. Let us go!”

[BotL, Ch. 14: My Brother Duels Me To The Death]

—many—

He did just what I expected. He said, “Antaeus is dead. His oath dies with him. But since I’m feeling merciful today, I’ll have you killed quickly.”

[BotL, Ch. 14: My Brother Duels Me To The Death]

—many—

"YOU!" Annabeth turned on Luke. "To think that I—that I thought—"

She drew her knife.

"Annabeth, don’t." I tried to take her arm, but she shook me off.

She attacked Kronos, and his smug smile faded. Perhaps some part of Luke remembered that he used to like this girl, used to take care of her when she was little. . .I yanked her back as Kronos swung his scythe, slicing the air where she’d been standing.

She fought me and screamed, "I HATE you!" I wasn’t sure who she was talking to—me or Luke or Kronos.

[TLO, Ch. 18: My Parents Go Commando]

—many times.

Yes, my other red-hot take is that Annabeth should've had a corruption arc at some point. Nobody will convince me otherwise.

But back to the point, which is not what I think should've happened with Annabeth, but rather how we never really see her struggle with actual weak points in her personality and/or past.

In BotL, when she's in a rather one-sided pissing match with Rachel Elizabeth Dare over Percy's affections because. . .girls, I guess, it's pretty obvious that it's not—or, at least, shouldn't be—over Percy's romantic affections.

It's over the fact that Rachel offers Percy something that Annabeth never can, and in doing so, threatens Annabeth's place in Percy's life as his Most Important Friend.

(Rachel de facto also threatens Grover's place in Percy's life as his best friend, but Grover, to the best of our knowledge, doesn't have endless attachment issues.)

Rachel, while being clear-sighted, is still a mortal. She—pre-becoming the Oracle of Delphi—leads a pretty normal life. When she and Percy hang out, it's outside demigod things. It's Percy, for the first time in a long while that he gets to experience normal things that are good things. It's not having to cope with Smelly Gabe, or try and not fail out of mortal high school, or worry over his mom.

When he hangs out with Rachel, he's completely himself, not fighting for his life, and gets to hang out with some he likes. This is really fucking rare in Percy's life.

Hell, in TLO (Ch. 1: I Go Cruising With Explosives):

Technically I wasn't supposed to be driving because I wouldn't turn sixteen for another week, but my mom and my stepdad, Paul, took my friend Rachel and me to this private stretch of beach on the South Shore, and Paul let us borrow his Prius for a short spin.

You could switch out names of people and places, and this could be just about any summer coming-of-age teen romcom. Percy "my life as a half-blood sucks shit beyond even the normal half-blood experience" Jackson never gets this.

Rachel even knows and respects the fact that he's a demigod and will always be sucked back into that. Bonus points.

(. . .I might be spreading the Rachel/Percy agenda here. Maybe)

Anyway. Annabeth knows this. She really knows this. Annabeth, who has, at some point or another, lost nearly everyone in her life because of either too much demigod or too much mortal, who has survived by fully assuming her demigod identity year-round, can't offer Percy something like this.

We should see Annabeth struggling with this. Struggling with the idea that Percy can go, have nice things in the mortal world, still do demigods things, and not completely lose him like she has Thalia, Luke, or her father.

But nope.

So, Rachel,” Annabeth said, “where are you from, exactly?”

[BotL, Ch. 14: My Brother Duels Me To The Death]

Bearing Annabeth's attachment, abandonment, and losing-people issues in mind, i think this also puts quite a different spin on this moment from BotL, Ch. 13: We Hire A New Guide:

Annabeth glared at me. “You are the single most annoying person I have ever met!” And she stormed out of the room.

Less "jealousy" and more "I spent two weeks convinced you were dead and just realized you are not only not dead, but instead spent two weeks with a beautiful immortal goddess who asked you to stay with her and because of my unprocessed relationship issues and the number of emotions I'm dealing with right now, I can't really process that properly."

If I'm allowed to fully editorialize for a second: I find jealousy subplots, ninety percent of the time, to be extremely tedious and pointless, including here. Percy doesn't fully clue into the fact that Annabeth's jealous of Rachel for whatever reason, Annabeth doesn't learn how to let go of her friends and not be so possessive, and nothing is learned by anyone.

All that's achieved is Annabeth looks much worse as a person than before, and is eventually rewarded with a kiss on Percy's sixteenth birthday and her "romantic competition" being sworn to eternal celibacy.

No growth. No change. Nothing.

And there could've been, I repeat, something, a lot of something, to be learned here, especially with Annabeth fully and completely losing Luke to Kronos in the same book, as he takes on the Titan's spirit. With her learning to emotionally let go and move on in healthy ways.

And it's really emblematic of Annabeth's problems growing as a character, at the end of the day. She has enough truly great traits and strengths to remain a protagonist—Annabeth, for all that Riordan rarely gives her a chance to shine, is still brilliant as hell, doesn't know how to surrender without stabbing her enemy in the back, is stubborn as a pig, and sticks to her guns, and I love her for it—but the flaws. . .man, her flaws.

Riordan never actually picks at her true flaws beyond waving vaguely in their general direction, and instead chooses weaknesses that have either never been particularly relevant to her as a character, or things that, if anything, were shored up in the original series.

Case in point:

What did Annabeth have? A bronze dagger that did nothing special, and a cursed silver coin. She had her backpack with Daedalus’s laptop, a water bottle, a few pieces of ambrosia for emergencies, and a box of matches—probably useless, but her dad had drilled into her head that she should always have a way to make fire. She had no amazing powers. Even her one true magic item, her New York Yankees cap of invisibility, had stopped working, and was still back in her cabin on the Argo II.

[MoA, Ch. XXXIII: Annabeth]

Two perceived weaknesses for her to overcome here: The lack of her divine mother helping her out, and no big shiny weapons or special powers.

Two weaknesses that Annabeth has been dealing with her entire life. Hell, Annabeth is the one who gives Percy the "your godly parents aren't ever around" speech in TLT. She knows this.

And the lack of special powers isn't new. If we were to salvage that, it would be the fact that for a rare time in her life, Annabeth is alone.

(Cue: My angry speech about how MoA is where we should have gotten what went down in TTC while Annabeth was kidnapped, and how that should've been interesting as fuck.

And even then, she had Luke and Artemis)

Annabeth gets less character development than Percy in HoO and that is saying something.

But what do I know, compared to the guy who makes his stand-in for any sexism less blatant than a literal ancient dude ghost thinking women shouldn't be warriors to be blonde hair?

V. Notes on Demigod Children and Inherited Traits

Okay, this section is going to be short and sweet due to obvious reasons, but I feel that I should include it for the sake of completeness. It wouldn't be a meta essay about Annabeth Chase if I didn't address The Blonde ThingTM.

*Clears Throat* Ahem.

The Blonde Thing is beyond stupid and peak #MenWritingWomen. I have spoken.

I am blond. The only people I have ever met who even made blond jokes even semi-seriously were preteen boys, who knew that it would get a rise out of their female blonde agemates with short tempers.

. . .which lines right up with Rick Riordan, now that I think about it.

I do suspect the blonde hair was meant to function as a stand-in for the systematic misogyny Annabeth would face as a female genius in a male-dominated field, when her social skills are already not fantastic.

And, like, that's interesting, but it also requires you to have a more nuanced understanding of feminism than the late aughts-celebrity tabloids. Or any idea of how to actually write women and girls.

Lastly: Having the godly inherited traits of the goddess of wisdom being blonde hair and grey eyes is racist as hell and I despise it. Fuck off, Riordan. I get you want a resemblance of some kind, but THIS:

Annabeth sat at table six with a bunch of serious-looking athletic kids, all with her grey eyes and honey-blonde hair.

[TLT, Ch. 7: My Dinner Goes Up In Smoke]

This isn't it.

The last thing I remember is collapsing on a wooden porch, looking up at a ceiling fan circling above me, moths flying around a yellow light and the stern faces of a familiar-looking bearded man and a pretty girl, her blonde hair curled like Cinderella’s.

[TLT, Ch. 4: My Mother Teaches Me Bullfighting]

Tell me you don't understand how white women's hair normally works without telling me you don't understand how white women's hair normally works.

Either Annabeth's hair is a thick rat's nest and Percy's just being poetic, which is absolutely fair, knowing that boy, or Annabeth actually enjoys curling her hair and taking excellent care of it. You can't have her Not Like Other Girls it and give her fabulous loose curls, Riordan.

*For reference, here's what the infamous and oft-used "princess blond curls", a descriptor used by multiple characters, actually look like IRL:

VI. Perseus Jackson

This section is going to make everyone angry. I apologize in advance.

So, Annabeth Chase and Percy Jackson. Probably one of the more iconic canon romantic relationships of fantasy of the last twenty years. There's a reason for that.

Before I tear it apart, let's get a couple things straight:

A. They do have chemistry for days. There's a reason, beyond the relatively young age of the Riordanverse fandom, that they're so pervasively shipped.

B. They can, in the right hands, do a pretty good opposites complement each other, instead of opposites attract.

C. They hit a lot of the tropes in canon that people really enjoy, and, for the most part the story (if not the writing), is a good one; you've got friends to lovers, mild Romeo & Juliet vibes due to their parents, they're pretty badass together, lots of genuine attraction that isn't just the usual compulsory heteronormativity, etc.

D. They genuinely possess a lot of legwork and time put into their relationship, with plenty nice moments. I believe they have a strong relationship with romantic potential/realized romance.

E. Annabeth Chase is not Satan. She is a traumatized, brilliant demigod with attachment issues, who has been repeatedly failed by the adults and people acting in loco parentis around her. This doesn't rob her of all agency or blame for what we're about to discuss.

F. (Those attachment and mistrust issues are part of the reason she and Percy "I never met a friend I wouldn't burn the world for" Jackson work, but that doesn't excuse. . .well)

There is, however, one and a half problems. Very big ones. I say half because I'm of the opinion that one feeds off the half, but not entirely, so it still counts.

1. So, remember how we just finished discussing all of Annabeth's many issues, that Riordan never really addresses in any meaningful capacity? As well as how he so drastically missed the point with Annabeth's jealousy towards Rachel? I sort of lied in saying Riordan never really addresses them.

He does. He romanticizes a lot of Annabeth's more trauma-related and problematic traits where Percy/Annabeth is concerned.

We're going to largely study the big one, because it's the infamous one, and also. . .it really sort of encapsulates Annabeth's issues, how they're channeled into her and Percy's relationship, proves Riordan is aware of them, but then. . .nothing is ever done about it.

[PLEASE NOTE: If discussion/breakdown of an abusive action/patterns of potential abusive or toxic actions are triggering for you, skip to 1.5, marked with asterisks and in bigger text.]

From MoA, Ch. II, Annabeth:

Annabeth grabbed his wrist and flipped him over her shoulder. He slammed into the stone pavement. Romans cried out. Some surged forward, but Reyna shouted, “Hold! Stand down!”

Annabeth put her knee on Percy’s chest. She pushed her forearm against his throat. She didn’t care what the Romans thought. A white-hot lump of anger expanded in her chest—a tumor of worry and bitterness that she’d been carrying around since last autumn.

“If you ever leave me again,” she said, her eyes stinging, “I swear to all the gods—”

There's a lot going down here. We're going to break it down.

-First off, we've got the immediate violence. This isn't something I'm going to excuse because you shouldn't judo flip your boyfriends, no matter how terrifying the last couple weeks have been for you, but it's certainly. . .explainable (re: Annabeth has been repeatedly taught via traumatic experience that the best way to handle losing people and re-assert control over the situation is action of some kind, usually violent).

-I'm also going to say it outright, because I think it's only responsible of me to say: It is an abusive action. Men can be abused by their partners, including if said partner is a woman.

-It's not an inherently bad place for the narrative to go, but it, like many other places in these books, is an excellent time for Annabeth to realize that her trauma is hurting others, including her boyfriend.

-So. Next up. Obviously, we have the reaction of the Romans, Reyna telling them to stand down until they get a better idea of what just happened, since presumably, Percy has been singing Annabeth's praises since he got his memory back.

-Then we have the next big thing, which tells me that Annabeth's. . .lack of self-awareness, at times, when she lacks a degree of separation from the situation at hand, is in place, when she says, "If you ever leave me again. . ."

-Obviously, Percy didn't have a choice in the matter, which leaves me inclined to believe this is the shitty writing acting up again, because for whatever reasons, Riordan decided in the back half of HoO that he had it out for Percy (But that's another essay), or—it is, once again, after what's probably been an awful couple months for Annabeth, a lot of very old, scarring stuff is acting up in victim-blaming Percy for his kidnapping in that moment.

-The thing that kills me is this isn't a bad moment, but a very good one, if we treat it for what it is: a wake-up call that Annabeth's trauma has exaggerated her worst personality traits until she's now hurting the people she loves.

*1.5*

A lot of Problem #1 featured my making sense of the canon given us, so I think I've earned the right to quickly go off on a few things out of diegesis real quick, so here we go:

Richard Riordan sucks at writing female characters and I will fucking fight him in a Denny's parking lot at 3AM over it.

Annabeth Chase, in the original series, suffers from a lot of tropes of late aughts/early teens pop culture feminism: She's aggressive, SmartTM, dismissive of boys, Pretty Without Trying, suffers from the ever-infamous I'm Not Like Other Girls Syndrome, in which Annabeth seems to almost actively avoid or even hate being perceived as a normal girl her age—something that, interestingly, Riordan almost seems to try and rectify with writing Annabeth and Piper into a close friendship off-page between The Lost Hero (TLH) and MoA.

Admittedly, while I like the idea of Annabeth and Piper bonding, there's certainly something to be said for Riordan choosing Piper, who gets a narrative where she gets to prove to her half-sister, Drew Tanaka, an embodiment of "what Aphrodite stands for" and extremely traditionally feminine, that she is That Much Better than Drew.

In addition to be extremely annoying to sift through for a real character, it also betrays a real lack of thought of Riordan into what Annabeth's non-Percy life looks like, which carries over into HoO in the form of a fairly popular complaint: Annabeth and Percy spend way too much time being a cutesy endgame couple.

If Annabeth's closest friend pre-Percy's arrival is Luke, who's much older than her and pre-occupied with trying to bring down Olympus, and Grover, who by all accounts hasn't been that close to her since the loss of Thalia, that's going to leave a mark.

It's certainly a reasonable enough scenario: Annabeth's terrified of opening up again after bonding to the point of co-dependency with Thalia and Luke, while Percy befriends her against her will.

But we don't get that. We don't get tales of Annabeth actively avoiding becoming too close with her siblings, or telling Clarisse and Silena and her other age-mates to go away, she doesn't need them. Or her learning to open up again.

Annabeth Chase, for all that she gets a lot of time on-screen, never gets clear turning points of growth in her character because she's too busy struggling for the purpose of the men in her life.

She's never afforded the complexity necessary for growth, unless it's in service of the plot, or furthering the character of Percy Jackson or Luke Castellan.

She explains her background and fatal flaws to Percy so he can learn. She struggles with her relationship with Luke so that Luke can have angst over being the bad guy—or because making Luke/Thalia canon is too much moral ambiguity for Rick Riordan.

Hell, even in TLT, when she's struggling with returning to her family, Percy Jackson is encouraging her to return to the family she tells him didn't want her, and is very eager to make excuses for them:

. . .He got a “regular” mortal wife, and had two “regular” mortal kids, and tried to pretend I didn’t exist."

I stared out the train window. The lights of a sleeping town were drifting by. I wanted to make Annabeth feel better, but I didn’t know how.

"My mom married a really awful guy," I told her. "Grover said she did it to protect me, to hide me in the scent of a human family. Maybe that’s what your dad was thinking."

[TLT, Ch. 13: I Plunge To My Death]

As well as this wonderfully uncomfortable bit, after Annabeth informs Percy that whenever she visits her family, monsters attack, she's blamed for everything, and she gets into endless arguments until she decides it's better off at camp:

"You think you’ll ever try living with your dad again?"

She wouldn’t meet my eyes. "Please. I’m not into self-inflicted pain."

"You shouldn’t give up," I told her. ‘You should write him a letter or something."

"Thanks for the advice," she said coldly, "but my father’s made his choice about who he wants to live with."

[TLT, Ch. 16: We Take A Zebra To Vegas]

Of course, as we've previously well-established, Riordan either can't quite decide the narrative that he wants for Annabeth's backstory, or he has a very complicated one in mind that he refuses to devote the needed legwork to. So the veracity of some of what Percy is told can be left up in the air.

And Percy is, of course, still pretty optimistic, seeing as far as he's concerned, Sally is nothing but wonderful—to say nothing of how weird Riordan can get with biological relatives and the need to have them in your life.

But all things considered, with Percy is able to push that with an ease that I find mildly discomforting. Annabeth's life is given a simplicity and ease that I find discomforting, all things considered.

She's held in captivity and what amounts to torture as she's tricked by her oldest living friend into holding up the sky during TTC, with few apparent consequences. Assuming she's gained friends at some point, we don't see much of her grief or worry in BotL or TLO.

Percy is a limited narrator, but very little is given of Annabeth that revolves around Annabeth. Even Annabeth lashing out after Percy's return about Ogygia is back to Percy. Not her own emotions or mental state after the immediate fact.

In TLO, the closest Annabeth gets past Love-Interest-In-Waiting (re: Rachel) and Plot-Device-For-Percy's-Badassery-And-Manpain (Being Percy's anchor and taking Ethan's knife for him), is her moments with Luke as they struggle towards the finale, when we finally get, "Family, Luke. You promised."

It's about Annabeth and Luke's relationship and Annabeth finally letting him go! It's great!

But even that is turned back around in service of Luke and Percy with this:

"Did you . . ." Luke coughed and his lips glistened red. "Did you love me?"

[TLO, Ch. 19: We Trash The Eternal City]

(We're ignoring any romantic overtones that aren't between Annabeth and Percy in this scene or about Annabeth's one-sided crush on Luke. Ignoring them, damn it}

It's all in service of Luke and Percy's angst in completing the Final Prophecy. Which I would possibly give a pass for because adrenaline and final battle and story pacing if Luke were brought up at all in HoO.

Beyond Percy's thinking about him for 0.5 seconds in MoA, of course.

For all that Annabeth has a lot of POV time in The Mark of Athena and The House of Hades (HoO), she's not afforded much depth in her narrative.

We don't learn anything new about her, we don't hear much about her mortal family, whom she is presumably at least on speaking terms with these days, and—most infuriatingly enough, in my opinion—she doesn't spend much time thinking about her own life beyond, well, her boyfriend.

And. . .look. In a lot of ways, the original PJO series really reflect the environment and time they were written in. Including and perhaps especially in the treatment of Annabeth.

There are a lot of things in there can be forgiven, however, with good writing in HoO that's reflective of greater attention in writing female characters and affording them complex inner lives that don't either revolve around the plot at hand or their love interest.

This. . .doesn't happen. TLH!Annabeth Chase being singularly obsessed with finding her missing boyfriend speaks for itself, I've already discussed MoA quite a lot, and I think HoH really speaks for itself with this:

"I can’t see!" She touched her face, looking around wildly. Her eyes were pure white.

[HoH, Ch. XXIX: Percy]

This is all good and cool; it's a sweet callback to both SoM and THe Odyssey, actually centered around Annabeth's own deeds.

"Percy!" Annabeth’s voice cracked. "Why did you leave me?"

[HoH, CH. XXX: Percy]

This isn't inherently bad, per se, but considering Percy's already coping with Bob/Iapetus finding out he's responsible for the memory wipe and didn't tell him, combined with both past and future events in the Tartarus sequence, it's really. . .low, I think.

To have Annabeth's pain still be centered around Percy and her relationship with him (As well, I think, to be equally low for Calypso, who portrayed no visible bitterness in BotL, to curse Annabeth anyway, then add in the pointless feud between Percy and Leo over Calypso in the next book).

This entire scene isn't about Annabeth's abandonment issues, or it would have been in her POV. It's about torturing Percy and furthering the manpain.

And then Blood of Olympus (BoO) happens, neither Percy or Annabeth are meaningfully involved at all, Annabeth has to be rescued multiple times, Percy has to be rescued by the son of Jupiter from Percy's own half-sister in the sea, and Riordan writes Percy and Annabeth's dynamic like they're thirteen years old again and still trying to figure out how to be friends.

So. . .why was Annabeth in the Seven? If the Mark of Athena was purposefully a solo quest with the line of "Wisdom's daughter stands alone" and she gives no meaningful contribution to defeating Gaea in BoO that another demigod handy with a sword could've filled.

If anything, to be frank, she could've seen a much more interesting and meaningful story if Reyna had been in the Seven and Annabeth had accompanied the Athena Parthenos back home with Nico, forcing the Romans to confront their crimes again Athena/Minerva in the form of the statue and the goddess's favored living daughter.

Percy/Annabeth is a fun ship and, to a certain extent, deserves it's large fandom, thanks to the character chemistry and nice canon moments on their own.

But the shoddy writing around Annabeth's personality, trauma, personal story, and Riordan's inability to write mature romantic relationships with fierce partners that don't feature genuine threats of violence issues that need to be acknowledged and critiqued in work.

The misogyny in being incapable of writing a complex, brilliant, and flawed female character without writing abusive tendencies and romanticizing that bullshit is truly breathtaking.

(And yes. I've seen what he's done with Magnus Chase and Alex Fierro)

VII. Fandom Treatment

I figure, as always, it's worth making a note about the two treatments of Annabeth that I've seen in how fandom and fanon treat her because as always, none of us are off the hook:

1. The people who romanticize Percy/Annabeth in its full canon form to within an inch of its life, think Annabeth has done nothing wrong ever, and think the judo flip is the peak of romance. This is the majority of y'all and I can't say I wasn't once one of you and really annoying about it, because we were all young and stupid, but we all have to grow up at some point.

(And listen, listen. If you want ships that aren't necessarily that healthy because you want that fantasy or you want Percy/Annabeth as a not-fully-healthy ship in a fic, I have both suggestions and fully encourage you.

Just tag properly and be aware of what you're writing. Abuse and toxicity are no joke, including and especially if a woman is an abuser)

2. This is much more the minority, but they exist because I've seen y'all on my dash: People who despise Percy/Annabeth because they can't take the shit in canon, which is absolutely more than fair and I love you all, and think that Annabeth, is, well. . .Satan.

Also I swear if I see one more person sexualizing Annabeth by claiming that she's, I dunno, "fucking her way to the top," I will. . .probably block you and get on with my life. Because I am an adult. Despite certain appearances. But still. Stop it.

Annabeth's twelve and that's a goddamn misogynistic trope used in the workplace against women and in media. It's gross.

She's a flawed character. You can dislike her. She's certainly not the most likeable girl in the world.

I think learning to realize and remember that there's always an author behind your favorite character or least favorite character's actions, and that you can disagree with the writing choice (before getting on with your life and leaving the creator the fuck alone), is an important lesson in fandom. Allows for some clear-headedness.

VIII. Conclusions

I gotta be honest: Annabeth's my girl.

At least within the original series, she's coded pretty hard as autistic and actually ADHD, in a way I find intensely relatable. She's smart as hell, not afraid of it, and has a thing for competency. She's so, so brave.

When she's not got the abusive tendencies creeping in, she also fiercely adores her friends, knows how to make her enemies regret it, and doesn't say die. She met the one person in the world who should've been her enemy and decided yes, this is my new friend. I'm going to get hurt again with him.

She's also got abandonment issues, a possessive streak, a desperate need for therapy, and a nasty temper. Again, I. . .well, I relate to a lot of that.

It's buried under a lot of shit, but Annabeth is unapologetically flawed in a way that's refreshing and rare for female characters, still. I latched on hard when I was young and never quite let go.

I wrote this meta because, despite it all, I love Annabeth Chase, I hate what Riordan warps her into, and I hate the indifference she's treated with when Percy's romance with her isn't being furthered.

I. . .I dunno, what I'm trying to convince y'all of, with this meta. I just hope it's coherent, at this point.

"So if the gods fight," I said, "will things line up the way they did with the Trojan War? Will it be Athena versus Poseidon?"

She put her head against the backpack Ares had given us, and closed her eyes. "I don't know what my mom will do. I just know I'll fight next to you."

"Why?"

"Because you're my friend, Seaweed Brain. Any more stupid questions?"

[TLT, Ch. 16: We Take A Zebra To Vegas]

If you or someone you know is in an abusive situation, HERE is a link to resources for victims and survivors of domestic violence. It includes a phone number to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, National Dating Abuse Hotline, National Child Abuse Hotline, and other relevant resources (If in the USA).

Please, please get the help you need and deserve.

#pjo #percy jackson and the olympians #pjo meta #annabeth chase #percy jackson #annabeth chase meta #percabeth meta #percabeth #frederick chase #helen chase #abuse tw #neglect tw #sexism tw #rr crit #riordan critical #anti rick riordan #long post #discourse because i love fighting 12 year olds

[sailorbuckley]

i didn’t mean to waste my time on these people anymore, but they insist on being in billy’s tag so i came across a few very disturbing posts the other day and it’s been bugging me since then, so.

be very careful what you say about max this season. think twice before posting something on the internet and if that’s not enough then think again. we’re dealing with real life matters and if you can’t handle it in a respectful way then this show and these characters aren’t meant for you. you don’t have to like the person she’s grieving for, nobody gives a shit that you don’t like billy, but please respect her pain instead of dismissing it just because you aren’t sad or just because you’re a stuck up who can’t take a step back and like the character for who she is, aka someone with way more emotional intelligence and critical thinking than you apparently. again, miss me with your anti billy discourse because this isn’t about him, this is about max and her pain. if your opinion sounds like “i know the grieving process is different for everyone, BUT” then you’re already wrong. you sound like the classic “i’m not a bigot, but”. you have no right to speak on how people should feel when it comes to this. so in conclusion, i know most of you are barely teenagers or people who have never experienced loss in your life, but please realize your words carry weight so stop minimizing her pain in favor of focusing on your own feelings and if you don’t have anything kind to say about this topic they’re narrating, then just shut the fuck up. very easy to do.

#there’s literally so much going on in the trailer and yet that’s what they decided to comment on #just a heads up: #anti billy hargrove #⬅️ you STILL appear in billy’s tag when you use that #so maybe stop esp if you have to talk shit about someone who’s grieving for everyone to see. #stranger things #stranger things 4 #max mayfield #my post

[literatikoo]

Pro/Con of each Rory boyfriend

Okay, I'm gonna keep this as objective as possible but each boyfriend will be criticised a fair bit. I am not tagging this post as anti-anything but if you're uncomfortable at the thought of any of these men being criticised DO NOT READ!!!

Dean- pros

Genuinely loved Rory

Got along with Rory's family

Went as Rory's escort to all her high society functions with minimal complaints

Tall

Nice hair in Season 1

Is very sweet to Rory when they first started dating

Is the only one of the three boyfriends who seems to know how a relationship works

Can keep up with the Gilmore's quirks

Tries to read big books for Rory

Dean- cons

Loved Rory to the point of infatuation

Got along so well with Lorelai that he started confiding in her about his relationship with Rory

Extremely possessive, has threatened bodily harm on two guys who Rory saw as friends

Got jealous of Harvard

Misogynistic, does not understand unusual family structures

Yells a lot

So tall that looming in shadows and being intimidating comes easy to him

Still seemed to think he had enough of a say in Rory's relationship with Jess to sucker punch Jess even though he had no idea why Rory and Jess fought

Got married to Lindsey while he loved Rory

Lied to Rory to get her to sleep with him (this is also in the grey area of consent btw)

Was not planning to end his marriage to Lindsey until she found out about the affair

Broke up with Rory twice, in public, by yelling at her

Blames her for both times, when really he just couldn't handle being inferior to her

Jess- pros

Genuinely loved (loves?) Rory

Has everything in common with Rory

Doesn’t care what anyone has to say about him or their relationship

Pushes Rory to fight for herself

Takes Luke's and Lorelai's feedback into account to be a better boyfriend

Though he didn't make the greatest impression on Emily the first time, he was ready to go back and fix it

Does not get jealous

Does not yell at Rory for being friends with guys

Instead tries to tell her that he doesn't want her to feel like she needs to lie to him or keep secrets from him

Slowly becomes friends with Lane and Hep Alien

Tries to be nicer to Lorelai because Rory asked him too

He "made sure she was okay"

Great hair

"Why did you drop out of Yale" "You should write a book"

Gets his shit together, writes a book and has a steady income by the age of 21 (is the only boyfriend to do this)

Jess- cons

Loving her was not enough for him to stay

Has some deep seated issues that stopped him from trusting anyone

Loses all impulse control when he's emotional

Kyle's bedroom (again, in the grey area of consent)

Asked Rory to go with him to New York after he left her twice

Did not take her to prom

Said "I love you" and ran away

Did NOT know how to be a boyfriend

Could be a bit pretentious

Was rude to Lorelai and Emily

Took his anger out on Rory in Keg!Max!

Didn't tell her he was leaving

Logan- pros

Genuinely loved Rory

Made an effort to get along with Lorelai that actually stuck

Gives Rory a place to stay after Paris kicks her out

Is the only one of the three boyfriends who seems to understand consent (SERIOUSLY the threshold is so low)

Gives brilliant gifts

Knows his authors and books

His and Rory's relationship lasted two years pretty steadily which is good for someone's first try at a relationship

Tries to communicate his problems with Rory

Had the entire adult relationship thing down

Was ready to change for Rory

Gave Rory new experiences such as the LDB

Knows how to have a good time

Gets along well with the Gilmores

Good at high society events

Supported most of Rory's career

Also supported Rory's... non career (aka yacht)

Logan- cons

Did not love Rory enough to support her choosing her career over their marriage

Broke up with Rory at her graduation

Cheated on Rory with his sisters entire bridal procession

Manipulative: twists Rory's words into something they aren't multiple times

Rude to people of lower social class (Marty, Jess)

Also known for getting jealous (Marty, Jess) (Though I would like to add that he was in the right about telling Lucy the truth)

Spoiled

Loses a million dollars in a business deal and then goes to LA to blow off more money

Has too much fun

Is a part of the Huntzberger dynasty

Introduced Rory to the Huntzberger dynasty

Tries to rebel against his dad by constantly flaunting his privilege

Rory forgives Logan for cheating after he jumps off a cliff in Costa Rica and severely harms himself

Supported Rory's non career (yacht)

Gatsby levels of pretentiousness

Doesn't go with Rory to SH events that matter to her (Lane's baby shower, Lane's wedding)

Still acting like a petulant child at his big age of 25

In conclusion, all three of them had a great deal of growing up to do and they all made their mistakes. But they were important for Rory's growth at that stage.

#gilmore girls #rory gilmore #logan Huntzberger #dean forester #jess mariano #lorelai gilmore #deanrory #literati #rogan #maybe a little of my bias shows hmm #this does not mean tristan or marty would've been good boyfriends either #if you have anything to add go for it <3