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#I will never get over the literal two-second scene from the bojack movie on god
tenshindon · 3 years
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I am still thinking of 22nd yamtien what of it
#snap chats#I personally believe tien shoulda been a dick#just a#how you say#lil longer 😩#anyways the tournament timeline makes me violent#the amounta bullshit I woulda churned out if there was maybe an extra day or two#‘snap you can fudge the timelines’ yes but no <3#I like being as accurate as I can when it comes to timelines don’t look at me#there ain’t an ish if you do that by the way I just like to make myself go insane#22nd tien I miss you#you come out once in a blue moon and when you do I Perosnally short circuited#Solely Cause it’s so out of nowhere and I’m just 👁👄👁#eyo is yamcha seein this shit 👀👄👀#I will never get over the literal two-second scene from the bojack movie on god#I HAVE already written a fic for it I HAVE however I just can’t get over it#like what was your business there sir why the FUCK you lookin at him like that#tien can smile at people and not look like we got another motive he can do this he’s done it before#the fuck kinda look was that Literally 🥴 like the fuck is that#SO MUCH SHIT ILL NEVER BE OVER THST I REALLY WANNA DO THINGS WITH BUT DOTN KNOW HOW TO#the fact tien got a fixation on punishment/discipline like what the fuck Certified Freak 😫#can’t even say I did that cause what I did was redemption 😔#I will figure bullshit out I swear I got a lot of ideas#and i don’t know if I wanna draw em or write em I hate it here#also I haven’t even articulated them in my brain yet fuck 😫#I live in a personal hell I’ve curated for myself
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sol1056 · 5 years
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EPs: "we chose Netflix to explore things like sexuality" (nothing was explored or was explicit for even 2 seconds) "when they told us u cant kill Shiro, we knew we could push the reveal 4 later" (so nice of them to admit they stopped our rep just to be able to kill him) "when we found out about byg we knew we coulnt kill Shiro & we thought we'll find rep w another character. Then we learned we could go on w/ Shiro as the rep" (theres ANOTHER REP WE DIDNT GET?? Was it vague then erased? Whatt??)
I think these are two separate issues. One is related to who made VLD, and the other is related to the EPs’ ignorance of characterization. The second overlaps with a bunch of asks I’ve recently gotten about race and representation, so here I’m just keeping it to a general discussion of characterization, with Lance as example. And then about Shiro in particular, how the EPs’ statements reveal their lack of thought.
Behind the cut. 
remember where these people came from
The team behind VLD is almost entirely formerly Nickelodeon. DreamWorks wanted to break into television on a much larger scale, and since they almost always promote from outside the company, they lured over Margie Cohn from her position as a Nick VP. As VP/exec levels tend to do, Cohn brought a bunch of people with her.
One of those was Mark Taylor, who’d been involved in both AtLA and LoK. Taylor, in turn, brought JDS, LM, and I think one or two of the other producers. Taylor also probably brought over Hamilton, Chan, and Hedrick, as known entities with proven track records. 
These are people who — for for the last ten or more years — have swum in Nickelodeon’s considerably more conservative fishbowl. It’s entirely possible (given what people tell me about storylines in HTTYD, and DW’s open support of She-Ra) the former Nickelodeon team automatically downgraded DW’s “go ahead and explore these heavier/darker topics” to mean “maybe kinda mention in passing but don’t be too obvious about it.”  
Now, to be fair, the EPs may have pushed for more LGBT+ rep, and their obstacle might not have been DW, but Taylor. It’d explain how the EPs could praise everyone (read: DreamWorks staff) as supportive, yet allso complain about pushback (read: Taylor’s Nickelodeon-influenced sensibilities). Two different parties were calling the shots. 
It’s also possible what the EPs saw as ‘rep’ was still considerably toned-down from what DW execs (and the VAs) may’ve expected. After all, that one-minute scene in VLD might’ve required an act of god at Nickelodeon. VLD’s staff may have genuinely considered this scene landmark because even that tiny bit was far more than their previous employer would’ve allowed. 
Cue the victory lap and excited chatter, and seeming blindness to Korra being long since surpassed by Steven Universe, Young Justice, Bob’s Burgers, Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, RWBY, Rick and Morty, Clarence, BoJack Horseman, Danger & Eggs, Big Mouth, and Summer Camp Island. Remember, it wasn’t until 2016 that Nickelodeon would have a married gay couple (in The Loud House), and they’re not even central characters. The VLD staff may’ve thought itself bold, and unprepared for the reality of modern (non-Nickelodeon) audience expectations. 
No, I don’t think that absolves them. It just seems the most reasonable explanation. That is, short of seeing the EPs as so utterly cynical they’d pump up the audience for what amounted to a nothingburger in light of what else popular media now delivers. 
and then there’s representation
VLD’s troubles can all be traced to one crucial detail: the EPs don’t understand that characters are the bedrock of stories. And as such, there are no shortcuts.
Ever had the misfortune to catch a home decorating show? Here we have a windowless basement: mock up a mantle from polystyrene, paint the walls gray, put up sconces with flickering lightbulbs… it’s still a basement. It’s just now desperately pretending to be something it isn’t. The bones of the structure are undeniably American Suburbia, not generic castle keep, and those bones are integral to how we experience the space.
The average person isn’t trained to be aware of those bones — the underlying architecture — and its subtle impact on our experience, just as most non-storytellers aren’t trained to see how and where and why characters create plot. I guarantee you, though, you will never mistake a late-century Kmart for the Centre Pompidou or the Forbidden City or Mount Vernon. Just as you would never mistake a beginner’s first novel for Lord of the Rings or Left Hand of Darkness. 
That is, the dressed stone isn’t paint and plaster; it’s a core element informing (even dictating) height, width, and depth of a space. Characterization is the same: it must be structural. In turn, characters inform the breadth and depth of the story. If your characterization is shallow, wild swerves and dramatic reveals can make the story fun, but they will never make it deep. 
I empathize with the (hopefully genuine) intent to avoid making Shiro’s sexuality a ‘reveal.’ The unfortunate truth is: waiting 60+ episodes to even mention in passing makes it a reveal. It wasn’t structural, or viewers would’ve been sensing it from the very beginning. 
This isn’t a haircut or a pair of jeans. It’s a person’s identity, and that has crucial impact on hopes, fears, desires, and needs. It doesn’t start only once the audience is let in on the secret; it was always there. It should’ve informed the character’s actions and reactions all along. 
If Lance is Cuban, and the story takes place in a quasi-future America, then to understand Lance’s perspective, we need to ask questions like: is Cuba still under embargo? Is it a free democracy now, or did Lance’s family flee at some point? Is he part of an exchange program, or is there a lottery that let him come to the US for his education? Did he leave his family behind? How young was he, when he left? What was his childhood like, and how does that differ from what he found in America? What was his parents’ relationship like, and how does that influence his expectations for friends and lovers? 
Was he fluent in English when he arrived, or did he only become fluent later? Does his Spanish have a noticeable accent, and if so, has he felt isolated from other Latinx at school? Or is he the only Latino at the Garrison? Is he proud of his heritage, or ashamed of it? Did he get bullied for being foreign, and how did that change what he says/does? Even if America is joyfully multi-cultural, he’d still be an immigrant or foreigner, and that’s a different experience from a non-white community that’s multi-generation American. What was his impression of his new life? What compared favorably (or not) to his childhood? 
It’s not just, “He’s a boy from Cuba.” You have to think about what it means to be ‘from Cuba’ and how this is different from, say, growing up next door to the Garrison (like Pidge probably did). If you put that much thought into it, if you talk to people who’ve lived that experience, if you push yourself to imagine as deeply as you can how Lance’s life would have shaped him? 
By the time you’re done, Lance would never need to say a word. 
His reactions, his assumptions, maybe a few mannerisms, his humor, a few throwaway comments about his family or things he did as a kid — and there would be Cubans in the audience going, “hey, wait a minute, he’s just like my cousin.” Or brother or uncle or friend. By the time someone asks at a panel? Half the audience would be saying, yeah, we were right, Lance is totally Cuban. 
Or you don’t think about it, and you use stereotypes in hopes that’ll do the work for you. As @sjwwerewolf commented:
Man, I’m ready to rant about Voltron. I’m Cuban. Lance, oh boy, Lance. From season 1 on, he has been written as a huge stereotype. The flirtatious, passionate comic relief character who’s dumb. Like. He’s literally Antman’s sidekick. That character. All you need to make him a full caricature is like, “I have a gangster brother.“ 
The stereotype is a shortcut. It’s slapping on behaviors without thought for a real person’s experiences or perspectives. VLD is, sadly, full of them: the Latino (wannabe) lover, the big guy who likes food (with only the slightest twist to have him actually good at cooking), the boyish-girl who’s a brain and likes computers more than people, etc. 
just pull shiro out of a hat
At some point early on, the EPs said (once again in an interview, not in the story) that VLD is a world without homophobia. The story itself contradicts that ideal, or at least, it emphasizes a certain level of heternormativity over an open embrace of diverse relationships. What’s in our face for six seasons is Lance’s lover-boy stereotype, Allura’s attraction to Lotor, Lotor’s attraction to Allura, Matt’s attraction to Allura, and so on… and the closest we get to anything resembling an alternate attraction is one blush from a servant in a flashback, and Kuron’s startled reaction to Keith’s return. 
All VLD had to do was have Hunk mention his moms. Or Coran mention his late husband. Or Lance mention his sister’s wife. Something explicit to offset the heterosexual attractions going on. Frankly, for six seasons it was an open question whether homosexuality even existed in VLD: the absence of a negative is not proof of the presence of a positive. 
That absence means we really have no idea how being queer in VLD’s world would affect a character — and it would, have no doubt. Our sexuality affects every single one of us; it’s just that straight people have the benefit of seeing the roadmap of their sexuality played out in a million books, movies, and television shows. If you haven’t given thought to whether this is also true in your world, then you don’t really know how a character could discover, define, and map their sexuality, or how they’d quantify or qualify relationships that overlap their sexual preferences. You don’t understand the structure. 
That lack of thought means, nine times out of ten, the creator has said to themselves, “it’s easier to just say this character’s experience of their sexuality is exactly like the one I, as a straight person, vaguely recall having (that I never actually had to question because it was already mapped out for me, everywhere I looked).” That’s not a queer character. That’s a character with a label slapped on their forehead that says here be a queer character. It’s paint, because the structure underneath is straight person. 
Which means that of course the EPs could consider making someone else “the rep,” because they really seem to believe this is as easy as removing the label from Shiro’s forehead and sticking it on someone else. And it’s not. People don’t work like that. Sexuality is no more a simple paint-job than race, gender, culture, or dis/ability. Each of these things is etched on our bones, literally or metaphorically, and that changes us all the way through. 
The short version, then, is: no, we wouldn’t have gotten any other rep, just as we haven’t truly gotten any rep as VLD was delivered. Shiro has a label on his forehead, but unless and until the canonical story demonstrates this goes all the way down to his bones… he’s just a straight suburban basement with a mediocre paint job and some fake queer columns.
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bughead-fic-request · 6 years
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I would like to thank @leaalda for making these amazing banners.
This is an effort to spread the word about all fan fiction writers in our little fandom. If you would like to be featured or nominate a writer, please contact me. Please reblog this post if you can and check out some of @stillscape work!
1. First things first, if someone wanted to read your stories where can they find them.
All my Riverdale fics are here, on Ao3.
2. Tell us a little about yourself.
I’m on the far side of 30 and I’ve had the same tumblr avatar since 2011. I gave up trying to pretend to be cool in my junior year of college, when I got drunk at a party and spent the rest of the evening yelling at people in iambic pentameter.
3. What do you never leave home without?
Just the usual boring stuff--wallet, keys, phone.
4. Are you an early bird or a night owl?
Kind of both, actually? Which is a problem, because I don’t do well on minimal sleep.
5. If you could live in any fictional world which one would you choose and why?
I suppose Harry Potter, but only because I can’t think of a better answer.
6. Who is the most famous person you’ve ever met?
Anthony Hopkins?
7. What are some of your favorite movies/TV?
Oh my god, so many. TV: Parks and Rec, obviously. Recently: GLOW, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, GoT, Better Call Saul, Fargo, BoJack Horseman...I watch a lot of TV.
8. What are some of your favorite bands/musicians?
I don’t keep up, honestly. My iPod is perpetually full of late ‘60s/early ‘70s rock.
9. Favorite Books?
AS Byatt, Persuasion; Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; Margaret Atwood, Atlas Grace; Hanya Yanagahira, The People in the Trees; this list could go on for pages and pages so I’ll wind it down with my favorites from the Classics Shelf, Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina
10. Favorite Food?
The one thing I’ll almost never turn down is sharp white Cheddar cheese, so we’ll go with that.
11. Biggest pet peeve?
Noisy eaters.
12. What did you want to be when you were little? What do you want to be now?
I wanted to be either Pablo Picasso or an astronaut. Neither of those quite worked out.
13. What are your biggest fears? Do you have any strange fears?
I don’t think I have any strange fears. I’m averse to very large spiders and creepy deep sea creatures, but I’m not exactly afraid of either. I would just prefer to not look at them or be near them.
14. When you are on your deathbed what would be the one thing you’d regret not doing?
I do hope I’ve published a book by the time I die.
Okay… let’s talk about your writing!
15. Which is your favorite of the fics you've written for the Bughead fandom?
I haven’t written all that many, but I’ll say all the roads we have to walk.
16. Which was the hardest to write, in terms of plot?
Same answer. It’s really the only one that has a (long) plot, though.
17. How do you come up with the ideas for your fic(s)? Do you people watch? Listen to music? Get inspired by TV/movies?
They usually just arrive in my brain. all the roads came from my desire to read a fic of Jughead also being at Betty’s internship, and I couldn’t find one, so I started writing it--but before I got to the starting point of that one, I wanted a detailed prequel that I couldn’t find, so I wrote that too.
18. Idea that you always wanted to write but could never make work?
I’ve been able to make most of my ideas work eventually. It just takes time and effort.
19. Least favorite plot point/chapter/moment you’ve written?
Hmm. There are a few moments I wish I’d written a little differently, but more in the sense that I didn’t choose the right words. I’m sticking by all the plot points I’ve written.
20. Favorite plot point/chapter/moment you’ve written?
For Riverdale, I think it’s the New Year’s Eve video call at the end of chapter 3 of for the life of me.
21.Favorite character to write?
All-time, it’s probably Ben Wyatt. But for this fandom, I enjoy Betty and Jughead equally. I feel like my favorite other character to write is Veronica, but I’ve barely written any Veronica--so Cheryl, maybe? Jughead’s mom has been a fun exercise, but since we haven’t actually seen her on the show, she feels almost like an OC to me.
22. Favorite line or lines of dialogue that you've written?
This is my favorite passage, I think, which is from Chapter 4 of for the life of me:
One day towards the end of January, as they stand up to leave the cafeteria after lunch, Betty Cooper fixes her eyes on him, squints, and tilts her head.
“Mustard?” he asks. He resists swiping at his face only because he’s holding a plastic tray of flabbergasting detritus.
(He hasn’t eaten anything with mustard on it.)
“No.”
“Then what?”
(Ketchup, crumbs, giant hole in his shirt, he’s bleeding profusely from an unknown orifice, he’s developed a second head?)
“I think you got taller,” she says, thoughtfully.
Huh.
“What, like since we sat down?”
Betty makes the noise he’s noticed her making a lot lately. It’s a little laugh that’s somewhere between a snort and a chuckle but is definitely neither one of those things, and he cannot figure out a single word to describe it.
“See you in English, Jug.”
She’s right, he realizes later. He’s only about two inches shorter than Archie now, instead of four.
And that’s all it is in the end. He’s not a black hole collapsing in on himself while consuming every object within his gravitational pull. He’s just having one cosmic-joke-level inconveniently timed growth spurt.
(Which Betty Cooper noticed before he did.)
But my favorite single line is this, from Kevin trying to convince Betty to buy a more adventurous wardrobe: “Fine.” He throws up his hands. “Be that way. Keep dressing like a permanent tribute to the 2012 J. Crew Easter collection.”
23. Best comment/review you’ve ever received?
I always appreciate when people say something I’ve written has personally resonated with them, or given them all the feels, that kind of thing. I also love when someone points out a subtle detail that I wasn’t sure anyone was going to notice, since I generally try to live by the show-don’t-tell rule of storytelling. Or “I just found this and stayed up all night to binge the whole thing.”
24. How do you handle bad reviews or comments?
I don’t know that I’ve ever really gotten any. Sometimes I’ll get a comment and I can’t tell whether the author actually liked what I wrote, to which I usually just thank them for reading.
25. If you could change anything in any of your stories, what would it be?
Listen, literally every time I read anything over, I find at least three sentences I could have written better.
26. What is your favorite story you’ve ever written? Any fandom?
Well, this is going to make me sound like a crazy person, but I once wrote a fairly epic one-shot RPF of the Parks and Rec fandom pulling off a jewel heist. It had about 30 people/characters (because Andy Dwyer and a few characters from VEEP also showed up), and it was completely insane, and I don’t think I’ll ever hit that level of magic again.
27. What are you reading right now? Both fan fiction and general fiction?
General fiction: I just started Octavia Butler’s Seed novels. Fan fiction: I’m living for @lessoleilscouchants’ (my youth ain’t) tangled up in bad decisions, @onceuponamirror’s Heart Rise Above, @christah88’s Don’t Drink the (Maple) Water, and @cooperjones2020 Second City (as of this writing, I’m behind on reviewing those last three! I promise I will once I finish my chapter draft!)
28. Do you have an advice for writers that want to get into this fandom but might be scared?
Just do it! But before you do it, do your very very best to have your spelling, grammar, and formatting tip-top, because getting those things wrong are often turnoffs for readers.
If you’re nervous about posting or getting constructive criticism, ask someone to beta for you. Most writers, me included, are honored to be asked to beta and will do it when we have the time.
Be involved in the fandom. Leave comments on other people’s stories. Leave friendly messages in other people’s tumblr inboxes! Write meta commentary for scenes or characters and post that.
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