#i don't know who started this trend of policing how people see your art but it's a little scary tbh | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hexhomos · 9 months

Note

I really don’t want to be rude, but what is the point in having a League blog if all you do is reblog ATSV stuff? Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this to be malicious or anything. I know it’s your blog and you’re allowed to post whatever it is you’d like, and it’s selfish of me to even send something like this in, but genuinely what’s the point? You have a SV sideblog, why not just stick to that one completely for now?

In a previous ask, you spoke about not being interested in the Soul Fighter event & that’s part of your explanation for distancing from League - which is valid because it does suck, but still. Again, I know it’s selfish and it seems like I’m policing your posts and your blog, but it’s genuinely just confusing.

It just sucks, because the number of VikJayce content creators has gone down so much in favor of Spiderdads, which, yeah, that’s just how the Ship Circle of Life goes, but it’s still disappointing to watch happen.

I really, really hope you don’t take this in a negative light, again, I’m not trying to police anything and if it comes off that way, I’m really sorry. It’s 1 in the morning and I’m in my feelings about content for my comfort ship slipping away and being drowned out by a new wave of arc*ne watchers who don’t understand these two characters & keep making OOC content that’s completely unenjoyable

I am reblogging those things because the same people who like my vkjc work may find that they enjoy my different fanwork as well, and that's a win-win situation. I have moved on from interest blogs before without a single nod to my new user and gotten messages from old followers about them missing my stuff, which is why I am actually reblogging now for anyone who wants to keep track of it.

I get that it may be a bummer to see less vkjc art for a while but to anyone reading this ask: You Can Still Make The Art You Want To See. I was pretty much working off fumes and my own individual interest to make fanart here and I'm not special for it, I was just the guy who took initiative. Please make bad art. Make things you're unsatisfied with so long as they speak to your internal interests. Make sort of mid stuff until you start making really good stuff. Don't rely on the whims of anyone else to maybe someday do it for you; that's how good things never come to exist.

I genuinely stopped checking AO3 tags for an entire year+ as soon as fandom trends started bothering me and went to sit on a corner to do my own thing. I did that for so long a bunch of other people ALSO got interested in the game version of these characters! I believe in you. I would really encourage you to distance yourself from the 'ship lifecycle' mindset; vikjayce itself has been around for over 12 years and it still hasn't been nuked off the face of the earth, which should say something about how long niches can last. It does rely on a collective effort to make things happen though, not just one or two guys. You should find the thing you see as most enjoyable and make it happen.

But I'm having fun working on something else at the moment, and that's an equally worthy pursuit!

#hexposts #asks #but i still havent abandoned this blog

20 notes · View notes

awed-frog · 6 years

Note

Hey, I was just wondering do you have any thoughts on Barthes, death of the author? And I guess in extension the return of the author? Also slightly related, have you ever read any of Chris Krause's work? I read I love dick and I'm rather conflicted, I don't like the character but then I identify with her? Anyhow all the best x

Okay, so - as a disclaimer, I never had tons of classes in any of this stuff, so I’m hoping what follows makes some sense? If it doesn’t, it’s 100% my fault.

Anyway: the tl;dr is, I hate it with a vengeance and I never use it. On the contrary, it is very central to my life, and as close a certainty as I have on anything, that whatever we consume we should always ask ourselves: who is saying this? And why? And most of all, cui bono?

Oh, and a second disclaimer is that what I’ll allow *waves a generous hand* is that, like many other extreme, rebellious or wacky theories of the 1960s, it was probably Good and About Bloody Time that someone pushed back against the status quo, because some things back then needed to be broken down - but that doesn’t make those movements rational or right in themselves, you know what I mean? What matters is not the wrecking ball, but the new thing you’re planning to build on the ruins.

So - imo there are two big problems with the concept of ‘death of the author’ - one is the theory itself, and the other is how this theory is understood on tumblr and fandoms (from what I see on my dash, that is).

First of all, Barthes basically says that to understand a text, we shouldn’t go and explore its author (their life and other works, the historical context, what they’ve read and talked about with friends and stuff like that) because the author is born with the text, and the text already contains all that it’s necessary to its full understanding; also, the reader will supply the rest, because, in a way, the reader creates the text - and gives it meaning - just as much as the author.

To be perfectly honest, to me that’s downright bullshit. Knowing who the author was and what was happening around them is paramount to understanding what the hell the text is trying to say, you know? For instance, knowing Orwell took part in the Spanish Civil War makes Homage to Catalonia much more poignant, and the fact Burgess went through the exact same ordeal he describes in A Clockwork Orange (his wife was attacked and brutalized by a group of American soldiers in 1944) will change the way you read the book, as it bloody should, and the same is true of literally everything else, in my opinion. For instance, last week we went to see The Greatest Showman, a biopic of P. T. Barnum that’s horribly inaccurate and almost a parody of itself; but knowing full well what the polical climate is like today means I actually sort of liked the movie despite its many faults, because I recognized it as what it wanted to be: a ‘hymn to freakishness’, an exploration of what it means to be different, and that’s exactly what we’re in dire need of.

Now - what is true is that we’ll never be able to pin down exactly ‘what the author intended’, because authors may not know themselves and that’s just the world we live in and the kind of creatures we are. I met writers who’re extremely smart, attentive people completely dedicated to their craft, and all of them said there’s always this moment when some reader goes, I liked how that detail with the dead bird was a direct reference to Clara’s illness or something and it’s a light-bulb moment for them, and I mean - they wrote the damn thing, but still didn’t notice that detail was there and why it was important. It probably just sounded right, because that’s what happens when you’re good at something and do it daily: sometimes things just click and work and you don’t even stop to consider the whys and wherefores. But the fact that we don’t have a complete insight into our own minds doesn’t mean we should give up completely on interpreting art and literature, right? What would be the point of that? Because I always perceived Barthes’ theory as a kind of giving up, myself, a kind of Fuck, Le Grand Robert lists 100K words and I’ll never be able to learn all of them, I might as well stop my French classes, you know? And, like, no? You can speak and understand a language with 500 words - and whatever, your glimpse into that world won’t be perfect (and there’s no such thing as perfect, btw), but still better than nothing, right? So, anyway, I don’t much like this theory in itself.

As to its application to fandom life, well, here is where things get even worse. From what I see on tumblr, people generally think that ‘death of the author’ means their interpretation of what they see is always valid, and also that there is no right or wrong way to understand a story. And this bothers me a lot, because I see it as a direct consequence of a) capitalism doing its best to tailor its products to everyone by leaving out as many details as possible so that, Sure, Luke Skywalker can totally be gay, why not, and here is your Funko pop toy and your stickers and thanks for shopping with us and b) the age-old myth that science, now, that’s a hard and unforgiving discipline where there’s truths and untruths, but in the liberal arts, everyone’s opinion just counts the same (because you don’t need a degree to watch a movie and also the author is dead, so there). But, well - as the people who actually produce the content we enjoy know perfectly well, the author is not dead. There is a message in stories, and there is a right and a wrong way of reading them - if not on all the details, then on the main point of them; and, frankly, it’s weird how on the one hand we celebrate the triumph of this ‘everyone’s opinion is valid’ society we’re building (thus not simply killing the author, but bludgeoning the dead body with a blunt axe) and then on the other we loudly demand a world where artists are ‘unproblematic’ in their private lives (one example: the recent furore over Balthus’ painting in the Met). It looks like truly, this may be the era of the Schrödinger’s Author.

(And let me be clear: of course you’re allowed to like or dislike whatever you want based on your personal experiences and bias, but that’s your opinion, not any kind of truth. Like, a thing I found quite interesting in my personal life was a discussion I had with a woman from New Zealand about Thor: Ragnarok, a movie I mostly hated. One of the reasons for my disappointment in it was how Valkyrie had been represented: to me, her laddish drunkenness represented yet another attempt to insert women in a story while making them behave like men, a trend I profoundly despise. But, as that woman was kind enough to explain to me, from her perspective (and probably Waititi’s, since he’s from New Zealand and has explored the same subject in other movies) Valkyrie’s loss of focus and alcohol problems were there to evoke the plight of the Māori people, who, like other aboriginal communities, were forced into alcoholism and excised from their traditions when the ‘civilizing’ might of the the White Man showed up on their shores. This to say that I still don’t like the movie, but since Waititi was talking to a different audience, and they got the message, I’m wrong and he’s right, because I’m free to have an opinion on anything, but at the end of the day, he’s the goddamn author, alive and kicking.)

As for Chris Kraus, I don’t know her at all. I heard good things about the TV adapation of I love Dick? And as for what you say - fiction often reveals deeper truths about ourselves. I’d say that if you feel close to a character you don’t like, well, that’s a good starting point to understand (and change, or maybe learn to love) what it is that you don’t like about yourself? Anyway - sorry for the novel - I wish you a good afternoon/evening/whatever it is where you are!

17 notes · View notes

silima · 6 years

Note

I'll blacklist the tag but I don't know why you have to be so rude about it? I really am from the country with the biggest Muslim population in sub Saharan Africa/ has sharia law in half the country (if you care you can look up but I doubt you do). I'm going to stop after this last message but I think it's super mean that you would just brush me off as a bigoted white person when I just wanted to communicate your art caused me genuine distress and trauma.

sorry dude but this is tumblr, and like i said in my last post, there are a large amount of people on this site who do in fact making shit up so that they can have an excuse to say rude things. that is not an uncommon occurrence in the slightest on this website. it is especially easy for people who communicate through anon to do this kind of thing–instead of making an entire account based on a lie, they can just lie in an ask. it is not at all difficult and it is, like i said, very common. so i am sorry, but unless you are willing to message me with your actual account, i have no way of verifying anything that you say about who you are or where you are from.

what you communicated to me in your first ask was that you wanted me to stop drawing a headcanon that is, as it happens, pretty popular amongst the Muslim vld fans that i know. i’m pretty sure that the trend actually started with a Muslim fan who decided to make some pretty cool edits. so when you approached me to tell me that drawing a woman in hijab is anti-feminist, that is simply not true and it’s also, uh, pretty bad. furthermore, i do not think it is reasonable for you to just… start telling me what i can’t draw. like, that is what you communicated to me with that ask: a request to stop drawing a headcanon.

if a piece of art causes you personal distress, then you shouldn’t have to see it, but it isn’t up to you to police what content i can put out with my art, especially when it’s something as innocent as drawing a favorite character in a popular headcanon. instead of telling me what i can and cannot draw, it is important that you are given tools to regulate what content you see, and i thought that by giving you an explanation on how to do that, i would be able to solve the problem for you. i don’t really see what’s wrong, now.

sorry for long message, but i’m glad this will be the last message, because i feel bad for my followers who have to deal with all these long things (sorry!). i won’t answer any more asks anyway, so if you want to talk this out any further, please message me, or come off anon so i can answer privately.

#long post #sorry guys i swear this is the last one i'll answer.... i know these long ass replies are probably getting annoying #discourse #kinda lol it's just me

1 note · View note