#i don't think I communicated the collectors personality very well? but in all fairness i was watching the season finale post-hoot

[welcometogrouchland]

for the drawing suggestions; maybe hunter with a trans flag or the collector?

[ID: a four panel comic strip featuring Hunter and The Collector from the owl house, set during king's tide. The first panel shows Hunter (with an exaggerated, tearful expression of fear) on the left while the collector floats on the right and smiles. They're both looking straight ahead. Text next to hunter reads "just saw uncle get gooped", while text next to The Collector reads "the one who gooped him". In the next panel, the collector looks at Hunter and says "so, a fellow he/they I see?. The next panel shows The Collector in the Foreground as Hunter looks back at them over his shoulder, before turning around in the next panel and exclaiming "I GUESS?!". The background of each panel is red. End ID]

Magnus, what if I told you that I combined both aspects of your request in the most obtuse way possible, all because this concept would not leave me alone? What then? (Click for quality I made poor choices with this canvas size)

#the owl house #toh #hunter toh #the collector toh #SORRY. SORRY I JUST THOUGHT THIS WAS FUNNY #(in all fairness it is funny i just. didn't do the prompt you actually requested.) #i tried drawing hunter in his lil golden guard cloak but instead of white it was the trans flag #but every sketch turned up like hot garbage and i was viscerally unhappy with posting any of them #im all fairness this took a lot of tries as well but i think it's at least better #i don't think I communicated the collectors personality very well? but in all fairness i was watching the season finale post-hoot #where dana said part of the collectors inspiration was fucked up lil haunted dolls #and that image possesed me when i was drawing his face #it's okay it's fine it's just a little comic it's not biggie #ALRIGHTY reqs have been attended too. they've been attended too a week late but hey. cut me some slack I'm stupid

[dynared]

I'm so glad someone else brought up how insular IDW felt, I thought I was insane for thinking along the lines of a similar thing. To me IDW1 felt like a continuity made by the fandom for the fandom, and despite some of its great writing decisions it often felt flat and hollow in a lot of important aspects. The lack of communication between writers and failure to maintain basic narrative and thematic cohesion as well as characterization reminded me a lot of in-fandom arguments over interpretations and headcanons

It took on too much and stretched itself thin resulting in sidelined characters, bastardized character dynamics/relationships or forgotten plots. People praised IDW1's lore and worldbuilding but personally I don't think there was much of it at all and very little of it was to a good enough standard when you consider how long IDW held the licence. It told us a lot and yet nothing at all, which would have been a genius move had it at all been intentional– something I often found myself saying in relation to IDW1 and content inspired by it, which was around post 2010-ish give or take probably

Like I said, I firmly believe that IDW was essentially made by fandom, for fandom, but a very, very narrow cross-section of such. James Roberts, who was arguably the architect for most of it, was a fanfic writer and someone who wanted to make elements of his fanfics canon. Many of the writers were buddy-buddy with TFWiki moderators and the dingus behind Shortpacked, oftentimes parroting their opinions, which was that if you didn't like what they were making, you were a chud or a creep that wanted the entire brand to be Kiss Players. Especially as romance became more and more of a focus on the series, the idea was not "This is boring, I want to see robots punching each other and blowing things up", but "I don't want to see this because it's gay", which is a far easier position to defend. Even when they lost the license, Kit Harrison of IDW insinuated that the complaints were all homophobic in nature.

As an aside, while I think Kiss Players was terrible, it was literally nothing but a side-story manga and some collector's toys. That would be like me saying all the Western-created Transformers media is garbage because of The Car Wash of Doom, Afterdeath, that scene in Age of Extinction where the guy spells out the Romeo and Juliet Law in detail, the complete waste of Sir Anthony Hopkins that was The Last Knight, The Rebirth, numerous parts of Cyberverse, the WFC Trilogy, etc.

Anyway, because the audience was so narrow, it made sense that the audience that it did cultivate was so passionate about the material, but Greek to any audience outside of it, resulting in low sales and general dismissal from a casual audience. Any similarities to how fanfic is written, especially fanfic that has an active follower community and people addressing the work in progress, were purposeful, because that was the world that the writers came from, and the world that they were used to.

And then there were the attempts to integrate those ideas into shows, as shown by WFC not getting a sequel because Netflix said no, as well as Cyberverse and now Earthspark toys rotting on shelves in your local Ollies or Lot Less.

My conclusion remains the same. IDW was overly insular, fanfic-style writing, for people who liked that, and they could not care one iota about anyone outside of that little circle. Especially if you were a fan of super robots, humans that weren't complete jerks, or the mystic elements of the Transformers mythos. And this is why now even Duke's miniseries pretty much outsells anything that IDW published. (To be fair, Duke's miniseries is pretty good).

#transformers #transformers idw #idw publishing #skybound #transformers skybound #energon universe

[greys-dawn-archive]

TGCE shenanigans

this is not a callout. we aren't interested in making callouts. you can do with this information what you want and what you will. if that means including it in your own callouts, so be it- we just won't be making one ourselves

that said, this is a collection of things that we've dealt with regarding TGCE (aka the-gender-collector-emself, aka Alex J Brimmer, aka Stormy&). we've been pretty quiet about it bc we knew ey were a large part of the mogai community and we didn't want to get harassed, nor ruin anyone's fun. however, now that more issues are coming up and others are coming forward sharing issues they've had with em, we've decided we may as well come forward about it

important sidenote: i will probably fuck up eir pronouns. this isn't on purpose, nor is it meant to be disrespectful- i use neopronouns myself! however, i'm used to thinking of people as being plural (which, TGCE is) and thus use plural they/them by accident a lot, even for folks who use different pronouns. i apologize in advance and will correct any mistakes i find, if there are any left after posting

also note that all of this is from 2019, so it's rather old news (but it's clear that nothing's changed since then, so it's still technically relevant). a lot of screenshots will also be from a discord conversation we had with someone else on December 1st, 2019

some background

TGCE was following us last year, mostly back in September. I'm actually not sure how long ey were following us before ey started sending us anons and angry replies on our posts, and we have em blocked so I don't think we can check

At some point we were also a mod in a server of eirs. I don't remember much that happened in that server itself, though, and we don't have any screenshots from it as far as I know. Just know that we were "close" enough to em that we modded a place ey owned before all this hit the fan

veganism stuff

note: veganism isn't inherently a bad thing. we aren't saying that. however, vegans who are extreme in their activism are. that was the point of posts we were making at the time

the first instance of anything regarding this that we can remember is probably back around september. we can't get the exact timestamps anymore due to a blog purge/shift, but i think that's about when things went down

we reblogged something criticising vegans, tagging it as "anti-vegan" specifically for others' tag blacklists. in the tags we also explicitly mentioned a negative view on extremists. this is the post in question:

shortly after this, we received an anon ask that we're pretty sure was from TGCE. here's that:

we didn't end up finding that other reply, unfortunately, and because of the blog purge + blocking it's likely long gone

-

below is another thing we have saved regarding veganism. the "us leaving" part is a reference to us leaving the server of eirs that we were modding for em, because we didn't feel comfortable being there anymore

unfortunately, this isn't all of it. we have multiple friends who received similar harassment, including one person who owned a server that TGCE was in at the time. TGCE directly told them to unfollow/not to interact- which is pretty hard, when they owned a server ey were in. to be fair i don't think ey made the connection due to the difference in platforms, but that doesn't really help much

(if we get permission to add things from our friends then we will. we have at least one screenshot regarding the above on hand)

misc stuff

we have near exact proof of em sending us an angry anon over one post. it was about a girl nearly dying over eating something spicy, with a chain of people making fun of her underneath it. some people spoke up about it, and the bottom comment (not from us) criticized the fact that people wouldn't be doing the same thing to a person of color. it wasn't a great post and i'll admit that- but eir response to it wasn't great either

here's the bottom of the post and the timestamp on it:

TGCE then commented on the post itself:

when we didn't say anything about it (likely due to not actually seeing it at the time), ey sent us an anon over it:

i guess we're "all lives matter" because of one post that we didn't even actually comment on, huh

-

other than that, we've also got this post from after we left eir server:

when asked about it i'm pretty sure ey made up some excuse for it and claimed it was because of something else, but it was very coincidental timing at best

we also got a string of other anons after all of that:

which, surprisingly... looks very familiar to more recent asks we've gotten

even though the anons from before were blocked. hmm

---

i think that's about all we've got right now, though we do have some things saved from other people's blogs. this isn't the first time ey've been accused of harassing others (including minors, which we weren't at the time but had friends who were) and it likely won't be the last, unfortunately :/

#drama #psa #α¹