#i really am fundamentally still engaged with this fandom

[thatswhatsushesaid]

psa that the day there are no jgy stans left on tumblr dot com is the day i am dead

but rest assured i'll go to my grave exactly as i lived: obnoxiously proclaiming to everyone within earshot how great lianfang-zun is. narratively, metaphorically, spiritually. sexually, too, like why limit myself. i like to keep my options open

#the spirit of su minshan possessed me for a minute there but like. i'm fine with it #jin guangyao #he did crimes??? good for him 😌 #editing this post to add that while the tone here is clearly joking #i really am fundamentally still engaged with this fandom #and with this book #almost exlcusively because of my enjoyment of jgy #even xiyao is secondary for me like i love it and i'm ride or die for it obvs #but jgy as a character is the main draw for me. and he would have me by the throat even if there was no zewu-jun #(tho i think jgy's life would be more depressing for his absence obviously) #but he is just. /clenches my fists!!! #THE most compelling character in the story and i cannot stop thinking about him!! cannot will not!! #who else in this book has his range? who else can be the doe-eyed idealist AND the spy with blood on his hands who ends a war? #who else is two different greek tragedies and at least two separate shakespearean tragedies rolled into one antagonist #an antagonist who but for the POV of the novel could very easily have been the protagonist #whose moral event horizon is so deeply entwined with his own trauma and abuse that there is no way to meaningfully separate #the violence he does to others from the systemic violence that was done to him for his whole life? #who else in this book manages to get five separate sect leaders utterly obsessed with him no matter how you choose #to interpret that obsession? #no one!!! that's who!! #ain't no one else in the jianghu doing it like lianfang-zun and that's just a goddamn fact

[sequencefairy]

I've started writing this post like, four times already, and I keep discarding the drafts instead of continuing because it's too close, still. But i know i need to unpack this instead of just letting it live inside of me to fester and rot and make me bitter, which will just mean that the haters won, because it's their fault the joy is gone.

Something happened this weekend here on tumblr and elsewhere in other fanspaces and across the wider internet. Something horrible. I've been through fandom implosions before, I was in the trenches with VLD, I walked through the end of Bleach, but this was orders of magnitude worse.

The meanness. The cruelty. The way so many people forgot that the people on their TV, laptop and phone screens are people. That the words they're gleefully typing into their little comment boxes and their posts are being seen by real people, and not just the people at which they are directed.

This fandom has long had a problem with passive, and also less passive, racism. This fandom has long had a problem with boundaries between ourselves and the people we are fans of. I think these two things combined into a horrid creature that was beyond the imagining of anyone.

I slept very little this weekend. I have been more anxious the last three days than I have ever been in my life. I worried every time I opened the tumblr app what thing I might find in my inbox or as a reply on one of my posts. I worried about friends in the fandom, who were dealing not only with the barrage of vitriol not directed at them, but also who were receiving it themselves for daring to be supportive of the general plan.

I am lucky. I have spaces to retreat to. I have friends who are both in and not in this fandom, who have checked in with me to make sure I'm doing okay. My partner has shouldered the bulk of managing the house this weekend because I couldn't. It was too much to think about how to deal with that when all this was going on inside my phone and my laptop. I am also lucky because I am not a person of colour.

Watching folks in this fandom who I know to be folks of colour wade into the fray and knowing that they are seeing the same takes that I was seeing about Steven and about Ryan, makes my heart want to shrivel up in my chest. It hurt me to watch people turn on Watcher this weekend, but I cannot imagine how much it hurt my friends, who might have been watching people they used to trust or enjoy or feel like they knew, spew racist and hateful rhetoric over a business decision they didn't agree with.

I'm not going to litigate whether things could have been done differently, because it really doesn't matter to me, but I am going to say that a level of trust has been shattered here in this fandom space. I can't have fun with people about Watcher content when I have to check and make sure they weren't among the people who were calling for violence against a man whose crime was poorly communicating a business decision to a fandom they used to extoll as kind and generous. If my trust in the wider fandom has been broken then I have to assume our fandom friends of colour's trust has also been shredded.

This has fundamentally changed how I want to engage with and in fandom, and not for the better. I don't have an answer for what this means for me going forward, but I am just so sad. I am so sad that a place of great joy has been sapped of that feeling and I don't know how I'm going to get it back.

I don't know if I want to.

#things jess says #maybe i will have more to say later but like #this weekend has been a lot #and i have finally come all the way down from angry #and all that's left is this despair

[saintsenara]

How are you able to enjoy toxic/unhealthy/“problematic” ships/characters without feeling weird (for lack of a better word) about it?

I ask this because I want to be able to do this myself as it seems like a much more enjoyable way of engaging with fiction to me. I can get over some ships just being toxic and the characters not being good together and still enjoy their dynamic but I have trouble with the other ships that feel morally wrong. I know it’s just fiction but I can’t seem to get over the ick feeling I have when I think about those ships/characters. I feel like I’m being too puritanical about these things but I don’t know how to stop feeling like something is gross when I feel it’s gross…

Do you have any tips to stop jumping to moralizing ships/characters?

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

i'm going to be upfront that this reflexive gross feeling isn't something i've ever really struggled with - both in fic and more broadly. this is due to various personal idiosyncrasies, above all the fact that i've got disengaged boomer parents who didn't police our media consumption [my favourite book when i was eleven? lolita...] and that i'm a doctor, which is a profession which requires you to develop a very high threshold for what you find disgusting. the human body - at all stages of its life-cycle and its cycle of decomposition - produces a lot of different fluids... and it's also the case that [just as if you can think of it, there's porn for it] if an inanimate object exists, somebody somewhere has got it stuck inside them...

and so the situation that i find myself in is that i consider it infinitely less weird that i enjoy the odd bit of hot tomarrymort action than that i actively enjoy cutting through bone with a saw...

but, obviously, "get a medical degree" isn't particularly helpful advice...

i am a ride-or-die fan of the concept of stepping outside of your comfort zone. this is why i'm such an avowed multishipper - i think it's good for us as fandom citizens to examine the potential of our faves in relationships [romantic or otherwise] which are either not their canon endgames or which aren't our preferred pairings, and in situations which don't align with their canon experiences [whether that means making them suffer or giving them full-on fluff]. it draws out the multiple aspects of a character to consider them from these different angles - and it prevents us from getting so stuck in one interpretation of a character or configuration of a ship which means that it puts our backs up to stumble across stories which approach things differently.

but stepping outside of your comfort zone doesn't mean that you have to go enormously far. it may be that a reader decides - having only ever read teen-rated fics where characters' sex lives don't extend beyond hand-holding and forehead kisses - to take the plunge into an explicit piece filled to the brim with watersports and age play. it may be that a reader decides - having only ever read teen-rated fics for one canon pairing - to read a teen-rated fic for a non-canon alternative. both of these are entirely valid approaches.

by which i mean, our comfort levels and our thresholds for discomfort are subjective, they're personal. if there are ships or themes or characters you don't want to read about because they don't feel good... you're not doing something wrong if you avoid them. exposing yourself to fics you expect to make you uncomfortable can be useful - and fiction is certainly a way to explore discomfort which gives you much more control over the experience than encountering it in real life - but it's not something you're obliged to do to be active in fandom.

the thing you are obliged to do to be active in fandom is to be nice to other people, no matter what their tastes in fiction. this means, at its fundamental level, that when you see people who ship pairings or like themes which make you think "ew"... you keep it to yourself/the group chat rather than putting it on the timeline.

but, once this is something you've got the hang of [which takes a bit of time! but practice makes perfect!], something i feel can be a really useful way of overcoming a tendency towards knee-jerk moralising reactions is to just vibe in the vicinity of people you know like the content you instinctively feel is gross.

this doesn't mean you have to read any of this content - but you'll learn just by hanging out near them that the people who do are just... normal. one minute they might reblog a rec for a pairing you think "absolutely not" about, the next they might reblog a cat picture which makes you squeal with delight. you'll like some of their content, but not all. you'll agree with some of it, but not all. you might like progressively more of it as you spend time in their orbit - maybe they'll explain why they like the pairing or character in question and you'll think "huh, i've never looked at it like that" - or you might not. this is absolutely fine.

all of us - at one time or other - have made a black-and-white moralising pronouncement: people who think x are gross; people who like y are fucked-up, you'd never catch me doing z. and these pronouncements are different from our wider, societally-influenced moral codes - which are good things, otherwise we'd live in the purge - in that they're fundamentally ways for us to feel good about ourselves and our families and our friends by defining ourselves as better than a faceless other. we say "you'd never catch me reading that, it's foul" when we know [or think we know] that the friend we're talking to would agree with the statement. we are far less likely to say it if we know that the friend - whom we see as a human being who is beautiful in their imperfection and inherently worthy of love simply by virtue of being alive - was reading and enjoying that just the other day.

and so the best way to train yourself out of reflexively moralising ships or characters or tropes is to put a face to the faceless other who likes them. be intentional in sharing a space with fans of the stuff you feel uncomfortable with and, eventually, it just becomes background noise. you'll scroll on tumblr, say "well there we are, jane's written some more of her sirius/harry piss kink fic - although i'm not interested in clicking on it" and go on with your day.

because the other thing i think it's really useful to do is to train yourself into reframing your disgust as disinterest. there are plenty of things which i don't seek out to read - and some of these topics are completely benign and some are darker [i don't enjoy reading explicit non-con, for example] - but this is because i try to frame it as that i don't think these things would interest me.

this is still the maintenance of a personal comfort zone, but thinking of the content outside this zone as something you are disinterested in turns it into something neutral. when you think of it as something to be disgusted or grossed out by, it naturally provokes a visceral response which makes you look through a moral lens. thinking in terms of disinterest, instead, gives you sufficient detachment from this visceral response to recognise, interrogate, contextualise, and control it.

and - in time - this neutral reframing may result in you feeling more interested in taking the plunge into the ships and characters and stories you currently don't vibe with, once you don't have an instinctive disgust response as a barrier.

or it may not. and this is absolutely fine.

#asks answered #on fandom

[ecoterrorist-katara]

Twitter found your posts about Firelady Katara, and they are being really rude about it. It's super annoying, I'm sorry

Anon, I appreciate the heads up & the nice sentiment! In the future though, I’d prefer not to know about how people react to my posts unless they’re being very nice. I don’t want to engage with negativity & smoothbrain takes, but I am VERY easily tempted lmao. My background in competitive debate / academia / leftist politics means I’m extremely argumentative, but I know nothing good comes out of Internet arguments so I need help ignoring antis. 

Anyway it’s helpful for me to remember that I’m in the Zutara fandom because I love to see people inspiring each other to create things. I’ve read so many wonderful metas, feasted my eyes on incredible fan art and edits, laughed at funny posts, foamed at the mouth over epic fics, and generally have been in awe of what this fandom has produced over the years. I mean…we’ve had colouring books! An EP! Animatics where Dante Basco himself lent his voice! This fandom has been around since before I was allowed to use the family computer and it’s so cool to me that it’s still thriving. By contrast, reacting snarkily to content that other people create is like…the opposite of generative and does nothing to better a community — which is why I fundamentally don’t care for antis and don’t want them to be part of my fandom experience. Anyone can make their half-baked opinion known online, but it takes spirit and dedication to create things you like for your ship. Anyway here’s a reminder that ZK Big Bang signups are still open for one more week! I still haven’t decided which role I want to play in this event but I encourage everyone to sign up! 

#zutara #pro zutara #ily ZK fandom #can i ask you a question?

[sexyleon]

I felt that post of yours about the Dracula fandom and the way it talks about adaptations tbh, like, I'm someone who was very involved in DD last year and I've written critique myself about Dracula adaptations bc I love comparative analysis and really thinking about the choices adaptations make, for good or for ill, but from my personal experience, a lot of fandom commentary on adaptations isn't really thoughtful analysis, and don't get me wrong, I'm a hater sometimes too and enjoying venting, but I noticed that this year, there were so many posts that started out as thoughtful commentary on the book, then launched into bitching about the evils of adaptations out of nowhere, and people can write what they want, but it got tiring after awhile to be in a fandom with so much angry energy, not to mention the divergence in canon vs fanon that was much starker this year that made me feel like I had read a different book.

Also, every time I see people point at re: Dracula to be like, see, it's so easy to do a perfect 1:1 adaptation of the novel, why can't other adaptations do it?, it's like, it's an audiobook, a movie can't be that long, even a television mini-series would have to make cuts. And I might dislike a lot of choices adaptations make, but creatives absolutely have the right to take a public domain work and put their own spin on things beyond book accuracy as the number one goal - and like, do we truly want a 100% accurate adaptation when the novel is still ultimately a xenophobic reverse invasion story? Like, I would hope modern directors would seriously grapple with those aspects of the original story instead of reproducing Victorian bigotry unquestioned.

Hi, thank you for your response! I'm glad that my post resonated with a few people!

I definitely also felt a shift in energy with this season of Dracula Daily, and I'm pretty sure it is a direct result of the phenomena that is Re: Dracula. Don't get me wrong, I am a HUGE supporter of RE: Dracula, and I found it to be absolutely delightful specifically because it was a 1:1 adaptation of the book, but I also think that it has skewed the way people engage with all the other adaptations of Dracula. You are so right when you say that Re: Dracula's media as audiobook is what allowed it to be so authentic. Even if it was a long-form series, there would have to be creative liberties taken to account for visualising certain aspects of the text. I am 100% sure someone would be able to do it, but it would undoubtedly be a labour of love and expense.

I think the biggest thing that got lost in translation in my post is that I was speaking specifically on the rhetoric of "bad adaptation = bad media." I don't even like to use the term "bad adaptation" because it feels inaccurate and gives the connotation of being holistically terrible; "failed adaptation" or "inauthentic adaptation" seems more apt when discussing how close an adaptation relates to the source material. I think it is unfair for any adaptation to be written off solely on the fact that it does not strictly adhere to the original text. This can be in way of narrative, characterization, theme, etc. I don't think it's fair to say "x adaptation is bad because it ignores x from the text" because that fundamentally dismisses all the other attributes that contribute to whether or not a piece of media is subjectively good (because honestly that's all it is-- subjectivity). Media, especially film and stage, has so many dynamic and moving parts. There are so many attributes that contribute to the success of any one given thing, especially adaptations (which can claim the title with even the loosest references to the source material). I feel like the black and white thinking when it comes to this doesn't really allow for a dialogue to exist between people who enjoy Dracula adaptations for what they are and, forgive me for saying this, book purists.

Understandably, there is criticism against some adaptations that have claimed to follow the source text closely, but very distinctly did not (Ahum, Cappola). However, I think it does everyone a disservice to deny the impact of a lot of these (mostly) films. Someone in the reblogs of my original post did a good breakdown of the origins of the Dracula genre itself, and I think it goes to show that the story of Dracula has a life of its own outside of the pages of Bram Stoker's book.

The most annoying thing about the responses to my initial post was the refusal to believe that anyone was making these comparisons. I really would not have gone out on a limb to rant about this if I hadn't been consistently seeing vent posts in the main tag with mostly negative responses to a lot of different adaptations of Dracula based on the authenticity of them to the text. I admit I was frustrated when I wrote it, but it really was meant to just address the black and white thinking re: failed adaptations making bad media. This is not to say that criticism of adaptations isn't valid, but I think there should be more nuance to this conversation and that's what I wasn't seeing. It's not fun to dive into the broad Dracula tag and find post after post shitting on your favourite media because it isn't like the book.

Sorry this was a bit long! I am just really passionate about Dracula okay!! And I really really really like all the shitty little shows and movies and plays and comics and all other media that comes out of his name (because YES, a lot of adaptations really make vampire synonymous with Dracula and ROLL WITH IT). Vampires are really neat and the Dracula genre of film has been a huge influence on horror media. I think there is a lot to be said when analysing adaptations, but none of it can come from blanket statements against them.

@spider-xan

#dracula #dracula daily #plz no sexyleon #honestly i lived through the hobbit movies and the book puritism that came out of that and i think it has influenced my opinion on this alo #again because there were some that didnt get it: i am speaking specifically on black and white thinking regarding this #if you don't like cappola's film because of all the shit that happened behind the scenes or because of the narrative itself outside of it's #relation to the original text??? i'm not talking about you

[copperbadge]

I know that it’s been a Very Long Time but do you ever get terribly nostalgic for old/less active fandoms? I confess I recently came back to tumblr and saw that I followed you. I was like, of course Sam storyteller, the Bucky guy. But then I got a hankering for my older and dearer by far love Ianto Jones and went back to reread some of the greatest hits and I remembered. You are not the Loki guy. You are the Ianto guy, to me, and I can’t believe I forgot that. I miss that fandom so much it was so fucking. Toxic. The Gwen bashing, I simply cannot romanticize it in good conscience. But the fic quality and diversity was, dare I say it, nearly unparalleled (in my heart). Like when it hit it really hit you know? A golden age of trashy sci fi indeed. I miss my dead welsh son. Sorry to ramble in your ask box about the dubious old days

Anon, I am so sorry, a bunch of my asks got pushed way down in the inbox and then I forgot they were there, so apologies this is MONTHS late in getting posted.

I, eh, I don't really get nostalgic for old fandoms. Usually I leave them for a reason, but even if I just drift away, my experience of a fandom is pretty fundamentally different from most because of my higher profile. There are things I can't do or say in a fandom that other people could, and there are things that happen to me outside of my control. They're not even necessarily bad things, just stuff like...I'll write a fic in a new fandom, and people from my previous fandom will start engaging with the canon because I did. So often, rather than just falling away from a fandom, I'll leave a fandom and drag a bunch of people with me. They might not even leave the older fandom, but they come along to the new one too.

And often the wanks that pull people in without their consent simply don't touch me because there's a portion of fandom that is either scared of me (or my readers) or just doesn't want anything to do with me. I can't determine which.

Torchwood's a pretty good case in point -- the Gwen bashing was extreme. I wasn't a fan of Gwen but what I saw from the antigwenallies was really, really gross. Still, even though I wrote fic about Gwen and engaged in meta around her presence in the show, I avoided them and thus had exactly one interaction with them ever, which was when they posted up a fic of mine as "anti-Gwen" and I asked them to remove it and never recc anything of mine again. They did, and that was the end of that. Nobody ever came to my posts to attack her or me. Likewise, there was one really, really aggressive anti-Ianto wanker, but she never engaged with me or even as far as I know talked about me, despite the fact I was a huge Ianto fan and wrote a lot of fic about him. I really hated the shit she said, but I also didn't see any value in arguing, so I left her alone and she left me alone. (I won't name her because I checked up on her a few years ago and it turns out she was struggling with serious mental health issues that she'd gotten a lot of help for, and felt really terrible about the things she'd done, so I'm actually quite proud of her. But if you know you know.)

I also just...have a bad memory, so I often don't remember what happened in a fandom, or even sometimes that I was in a fandom. Most of the memories I do have are either vaguely warm and friendly, or "avoid this fandom/person at all costs" based in a negative interaction (which I sometimes don't remember the details of).

So yeah...I mean, Torchwood ended pretty terribly so I don't miss it in part because I try not to think about it. Generally if I have a good time in a fandom and then leave it, it's because I simply said all I had to say there. But I'm usually looking forward, not back, just because the past is a bit of a fog bank for me, most of the time.

#fandom #meta

[chaifootsteps]

I am one of those people who did not want to call Miss Medrano a terrible person. Yes, we have a bunch of different material in our hands about her attitude towards others, how she constantly sees herself as a victim, what a narcissist she is, but I WANTED to believe that things were taken out of context, that in real life she might not actually an angel in the flesh, but at least a pleasant person to talk to (and still a terrible creator. For me personally, she has become an image of the WORST things I can see in modern animation). However, everything has a limit. And the situation with Salem and Viv's recent tweet has already pissed me off.

We need to listen to victims of violence, but if they talk about Viv or someone from her team, like that fucking pervert Raph, then everything they say is a lie, provocation and hate? And if you also support victims of violence or simply do not throw rotten tomatoes at them, then you are also a hater and a bastard who DARE to think badly of Medrano? And, of course, we should just close our eyes to the bunch of screenshots, rumors and stories that have been accumulating around Vivienne for YEARS. And I may say something stupid, but there cannot be so many scandals surrounding an innocent person. I can still believe that some stories are embellished or exaggerated, but once is an accident, two times is a coincidence, and the third time is a pattern.

And I have a question for Viv and her team. They, of course, won’t see this or will simply not care, but still: aren’t you ashamed of your behavior? You constantly make excuses, engage in outright self-admiration (Viv's recent like about the success of TADC, for example), outright lie, shit on others and allow your crazy fan base to harass, insult and threaten ANYONE who even slightly disagrees with you . Do you really like that the Hellaverse fanbase is despised and hated by everyone around you? And no, I'm not exaggerating. In many other fandoms, it is Vivienne's fandom that is considered crap and the most glaring example of what the audience is a mirror of their favorite artists.

And these people are followed by millions? Are they an example for someone? These pathetic narcissists who just happened to be popular? I really don't want to belittle other people's achievements (especially poor animators), but after all these behind-the-scenes stories, I no longer have any sympathy or respect for them.

That's one of the crazy, awful things about it, isn't it? So many people really did do everything in their power to give Vivzie the benefit of the doubt -- hell, I even did it for a long time -- and then there comes a moment when you realize no, she really is that bad. She's worse.

She's got her nutcase fanbase, but she also hijacks something fundamentally good in people, the part that wants to believe in underdog success stories (also a lie on Vivzie's part, she was always rich as hell) and defend those who are being kicked around. And that's so fucked up.

#Anonymous #vivziepop critical #actual blog post

[ahyesmygoodomenssideblog]

Hey, I wanted to thank you for writing those metas, I love reading them !

I watched good omens only recently and when I initially went through the good omens meta tag I felt kind of frustrated, since there is a lot of the "Crowley really has to learn to stop running away at the slightest problem" and stuff like that going around.

There was also a lot of "why are there so many people hating on aziraphale" but honestly I have trouble even finding a little criticism of him, so I don't understand why people are defending him, since there isn't even a threat? Or is there a tag for Aziraphale criticism I don't know of? ^^'

I'm a bit of tired of treating him, as if he isn't part of the oldest beings in the universe and didn't have time to challenge his thought process or learn how to, especially on earth with Crowley trying to help with that. When I was watching, Aziraphales well meaning behaviour hurt and his ignorance stung. He really is kind of delusional and I don't even know where I am going with these thoughts.

I hope dumping this wall of text in your askbox was okay. Are there any more metas planned? Thank you again, I hope you have a nice week!

Hi anon, thank you so much for the message! Sorry for the late reply. I 100% agree with you. Pretty much all I've seen on Tumblr is people defending Aziraphale or trying to reframe it so that Crowley and Aziraphale are equally at fault. I did see people talking about hate Aziraphale was getting on Twitter, but I don't use Twitter so I don't know what anyone might be saying over there.

Aziraphale is definitely woobified by the fandom, and it gets incredibly frustrating. Like, yes, Aziraphale has a lot of religious trauma. But so does Crowley. The opening scene of season 2 establishes that they've had this fundamental difference in views from the start, even before the fall, so I don't get why Aziraphale still gets so much leeway after refusing to change or grow for 6000+ years. He knows the complexities of humanity better than any other angel, but he keeps doubling down on his flawed belief system.

And season 2 really emphasized that Aziraphale's well-meaning ignorance is legitimately harmful. Like he got Morag killed by applying his overly simplistic worldview to a morally gray situation. And then there's the ball scene? The way Aziraphale dragged others into his rose-colored fantasy world was disturbing, especially with how freaked-out Nina was by it. Then Crowley shows up terrified and asking for help, and Aziraphale dismisses his concerns out of hand. He refuses to let Crowley’s worries put a damper on this Jane Austen ball nobody signed up for.

And Crowley was right. Like he was trying to raise the alarm about the very real danger that everyone was in. I’ve seen it framed a lot like Aziraphale is just an optimist and Crowley is a pessimist, but it goes farther than that. Crowley consistently has a more realistic view of Heaven, Hell, and humanity than Aziraphale does. Aziraphale's inability to engage with reality causes actual harm to both humans and to Crowley. It contributed to the world almost ending in season 1, because Aziraphale wasted a lot of time trying to reach the "right people" in Heaven instead of accepting that Heaven is as bad as Hell and trusting the one person that’s been trying to save the world with him for years.

And it's like, yes, Aziraphale is sympathetic. He’ll be very conflicted, and distressed about how conflicted he is, and then he’ll come around and do the right thing in the end. But it's frustrating to watch Aziraphale seeming to grow and then immediately backsliding. Like, he was ready to fall to protect Job's kids. But he didn't, and he went right back to his beliefs. He didn't lose his faith in Heaven despite the Flood, and Job, and Jesus, and the apocalypse.

He also has this superiority complex, where he's the nice one while Crowley is stuck doing the dirty work. "I am a great deal holier-than-thou" and all that. Aziraphale's belief system makes him "good" by definition. He dismisses and overrides Crowley's opinions instead of changing his own because, on some level or another, he thinks he's better than Crowley by design.

So it’s at the point where Aziraphale needs to do some serious self-reflection. He needs to be the one to make the choice to change fundamental beliefs he’s clung onto since the beginning of time. I think he's capable of changing, and I’m looking forward to how it plays out in s3, but I don’t think we’ll be getting a lot of good fix-its from the fandom any time soon. Most of what I've seen is still fans insisting that since they're both flawed they are both at fault, and their relationship can be fixed by just having them both apologize to each other. If people are looking at it beyond that, I don't know where they're discussing it.

#good omens season 2 #good omens meta #aziraphale critical

[lkwritesthings]

I last wrote a pinned post in June of 2022. A lot has changed since then, yet not as much as I'd like.

First, what's stayed the same:

I am (was?) an author of fanfiction. I primarily write for the 'Boku no Hero Academia' fandom (a shounen manga) and my work generally focuses on the romantic relationship between Izuku 'Deku' Midoriya and Ochako 'Uravity' Uraraka, two teenage superheroes. As of writing this post, I have published 1.5 million words of fanfiction and the vast majority is about these two beans. Most of my work is finished, although not all. You can find my work principally on AO3, where it is hosted for free. I do not take commissions or requests.

As of October 2023, my work is only hosted legitimately on AO3. If you see my work elsewhere, please do let me know.

You can find me on other social media sites here.

I am responsible for two AO3 collections. The one probably most relevant to you is The IzuOcha Fic Collection, a project meant to help with how people are fundamentally incapable of tagging their work on AO3 properly, especially when it comes to secondary ships/ship bashing work. This one doesn't discriminate based on content, other than that fics submitted must be about IzuOcha, although it has a preference towards content that are not dark/triggering for ease of use.

That is to say, while this blog is SFW, some of my work, and some of what is in these collections, may not be. Read tags before engaging with any fic. There are rules/guidelines for submission on this collection, should you be an interested author.

I also have a recommendation list, which just functions as 'IzuOcha fic that I think is good and worth experiencing, often as a starting point.' I'm no longer as current on IzuOcha fandom as I was at the start of 2022, so I can no longer be certain I've read 'all of the good IzuOcha fic' as I was at the time, but I think this list will serve nicely for anyone new to the fandom.

Now, for what's different:

My life has changed a lot since that magical summer of 2020 when I fell into this endless rabbit hole of MHA content. I'm no longer enamored with the manga like I was then, I have largely lost interest in the fandom because of its toxicity, and I personally have changed. If you're curious, I am in my late 20s, I am married, I live in the United States, and as of writing this post (mid-August 2023), I will be returning to university to finish my degrees.

I do still desire to write. If not fanfiction, then some of the ideas I've had for more conventional novels. If I'm ever actually published, I'm sure I will make it known here.

In real life, I am also a storyteller. My actual intended profession is in history education. I have a lot of mixed feelings about my time as a fanfiction author. I feel many days like I made no impact on a fandom I contributed an enormous amount of work to. I don't associate positive feelings anymore with a series that really, truly changed my life. At the same time, I still smile whenever I see Deku and Ochako together, and maybe that's enough.

I can't promise I'll finish all the stories I posted, even though I'd like to. For that, I'm sorry. I no longer have the same drive to write, nor the same free time. Things are just different now, as they always become. But if you read some of my work and you liked it, I'm glad. I hope you let me know, and why, so that I can thank you.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you are able to experience the kind of joy I did from MHA, Deku, and Ochako for almost two years.

Have a blessed day.

#my work

[humanheartharmonia]

To all fictives, factives, and introjects...

If you struggle with discomfort with doubles who are different from you, or with your source being different, that is an understandable reaction - someone who looks like you, has the same name, maybe even acts like you, having such fundamental differences can be startling, and if you have had issues with your identity, it may even feel threatening to you.

That being said, it is very unpleasant, especially if your system is active in your source's fandom or if you've been looking for sourcemates. It can also be very inconvenient. I really struggle with this. I avoid the "me" side of fandom, and I mute servers that have doubles in them, even though I feel I really ought to be more comfortable with them.

With all this in mind, here are some things that may help you.

You are you, and nobody else can change that.

If your existence is spiritual/metaphysical in nature, remember that there are infinite universes in which anything can happen.

If your existence is psychological in nature, different systems have different interpretations of characters, and that absolutely can affect what traits they were introjected with.

While I do not agree with 'you are not your source, you are a psychological construct made for [x] purpose', I do think it is healthy to have some degree of source separation, if possible. If it does not work for you, then it does not work for you, but I think it helps to be able to look at your source character/person and say "That is not exactly me, but I am a lot like them." Perhaps even, "That is the template from which I was created".

Most importantly: you are you, and nobody else can change that.

The most useful part of the post is over, but I have included some personal anecdotes below the cut if anybody is interested.

Let us look at two cases of this from our system - Hunter and myself.

Hunter is sourced from The Owl House. He is very strongly aroace and was incredibly uncomfortable when a new popular ship involving him and another character arose. It quickly became one of the "default" ships of the fandom, almost as popular as Lumity. He stayed around, but did not go anywhere near front very often. Recently, though, we have been able to contact him in our headspace. He now has antlers, and is now living his life as a forest elf, instead of what he was before. In his case, he found it helpful to distance himself strongly from canon. He is who he is, and he embraced new aspects of himself so he could feel more like himself. Because of how extreme his reaction was, we have stopped watching the Owl House and stopped engaging with the fandom, but we are still taking steps to help him distance himself. He seems to be doing quite well now!

Now, for myself. In canon, my source character is a presumably cisgender man using he/him pronouns. The way I am was actually affected by fandom - I am fairly sure that the amount of nonbinary headcanons influenced my gender as I formed. There are a great deal of headcanons and ships involving my source character, most of which I do not follow. I am a human, not a Zoroark, and I did not have any romantic relationships. I have found it hard to accept that just as character interpretations influenced my gender, different character interpretations have influenced other aspects of those with the same source character. There is a primal negative reaction when I see someone who looks like me, and has the same name as me, with similar aesthetics, who is very much not me despite everything. It is something I hope to lessen, and eventually get over. (In all honesty, I am mostly writing this post for my own sake.)

Separation is hard, and does not come naturally to us. We, as fictives of Team Sieben, are not the types who can read fanfiction and headcanons while feeling fine and unthreatened by other people perceiving us in a way we do not control. I wrote this post in hopes to build that skill. Maybe I will never be able to post art of myself and label it as 'fanart' without feeling nervous and wrong, but I hope I will at least be able to engage with fictives who are different interpretations and different versions of my source character.

#fictive #factive #introject #pluralgang #plurality #plural system #endo safe #traumageninclusive #plural #actually plural

[nikialexx]

(slightly long and personal post, which was initially meant to be me explaining/apologizing for the delay in responding to my comments on ao3, but turned into... this... instead. It's under the cut for anyone who wants to read :)

recently (and by 'recently' i mean it's been over a year) it's been very very hard for me to summon the motivation to do... anything. Even the things I used to love, such as reading, writing, engaging in fandom, baking, playing the sims, occasionally watching a show or a movie... it's all been so unbearably hard. There were some real-life situations that contributed to this, most of which are thankfully in the past now, but the state of nothingness that I've found myself in has yet to fully fade away. I'm doing better (i read a book! an entire book! i can't remember the last time i did that!!) but there are still days where it just feels hard.

And It's like... I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but the process of getting through the tunnel is so dark and painful and lonely.

This entire post was inspired by me feeling guilty about not responding to my ao3 comments. i used to love responding to my ao3 comments. but now, whenever i even think about opening the website for any reason, i just feel... anxious. I can't even open the website to read the comments on there- I read them in my email instead because that feels less daunting.

I'm still writing, although some days (most days) it's harder than it used to be, a constant uphill battle where it used to be the easiest thing in the world for me to do. But I'm not writing nearly as much as I used to, which means I'm not posting as much as I used to or would like to. And it feels awful. For me, writing was always my *thing*. it was coming home. it was my favorite thing about myself. and not having that (or atleast, not having it in the way that I used to) has been really hard, and it's felt like a piece of me is literally gone. Like I'm missing some fundamental aspect of who I am as a person. Some days (most days) i feel like a shell of who I used to be.

And, to reiterate, I am getting better. It's just happening very slowly. And while I can look at the overall picture and say 'yeah... things are good', there are still the in-between moments of silence and darkness where I just don't know what to do with myself.

This is all very dramatic, but really, I just wanted to get my thoughts down (and also apologize, in the most melodramatic way possible, for not responding to my comments).

I spent a good chunk of the past year pretending I was okay, and refusing to even acknowledge that I was depressed because that felt like such a big, self-important word. But admitting it and accepting it is what led to me being able to work on getting through it. And now I'm doing better. So. Just wanted to share. If you happen to be feeling the same way, you're not alone :)

(also i will respond to my ao3 comments eventually. i promise i will. and thank you for leaving them. I read them all and I love them <3)

#i'm thinking of this stage as the reformation of my personality #i told one of my friends the other day that i simply don't know who i am anymore #so i wrote down a list of all the things i *want* to be. and i'm slowly working towards that #it's going okay so far #did i mention i read a book? ☺️ as you can tell i am very proud of myself for that haha #but yeah i'm doing okay #getting better and all that #<3 #in all honesty i have no idea what the overlap is between ppl who follow me on here and people who read my fics #but here's to hoping this finds those people 😅

[addictedtostorytelling]

i’ve been rewatching csi from the beginning (because i’ve never been able to make it past season 9 without grissom) and i’m finally up to the end of season 7… i have like 3 episodes left and i’m SAD. this team dynamic is so special to me and i feel this slow crawl of devastation that i’m (again) witnessing the end of what has been for 7 seasons. soon sara won’t be her usually cute and passionate self (in love too) that we get see in season 7, and she’ll leave, and then warrick is going to die, and grissom will leave… and nothing will ever be the same on this show. i don’t know how to get over it. how did you do it? how do i move on? how do i mourn this team dynamic that i’ve loved for so long and get used to new variations of the team? god, i wish grissom came back for a proper full ep earlier than the freaking series finale and the new show. i’m just… not sure how to enjoy without them all 😭

hi, anon!

yours is a very heartfelt question, and, unfortunately, i am probably the wrong person to answer it, because i never really "got over" the changes to the show post-s7, either.

not gonna lie to you: i have only watched the s10-s15 era of the show once through in its entirety.

the s8 and s9 angst i can deal with in order to get to the happy gsr ending in episode 09x10 "one to go." however, i hate all later seasons of the show beyond that point with all the salt that is in me, not only because of the cast turnover but also because the writing and production values of the show changed so much as to make the series (and the remaining characters) unrecognizable.

most of the time, i just straight-up ignore the fact that those seasons exist, preferring to imagine my own canon-divergent au version of the show (starting from the end of s7) instead.

i really do not engage with them unless someone sends me an ask.

that so, i can't exactly tell you how to learn to accept the new team or get comfortable in that altered narrative landscape. i never did, on either count.

instead, my advice is this: keep in mind you're not obligated to finish watching csi if doing so isn't enjoyable to you. you fell in love with a particular group of characters, story universe, and cast dynamic, and if those things went away or ship of theseus'd themselves into a production that is fundamentally different from the one you fell in love with in every way save name, you don't have to stick around anymore.

remember: you're watching this show as a hobby, not a job.

the #1 rule of fandom is to follow your bliss, so if you're not naturally motivated to finish the series—and especially if the thought of doing so is actively causing you dread—then you don't have to force the issue.

give yourself permission to say, "for me, the series ends with episode 08x01 'dead doll' or episode 09x10 'one to go' (or wherever you want to draw your line in the sand)" and then walk away.

if you need closure, write your own au version of what happens after that point or else find some fanfic author whose vision aligns with your own. keep living blissfully in your s1-s7 happy place with the original team graveyard, where grissom is the boss and sara stays in vegas and warrick doesn't die and they all keep solving cases together until retirement.

and then don't sweat it.

you're not being a "bad fan" or letting anyone down, and there's still plenty of material in the early seasons for you to engage with.

now.

if you absolutely feel you must finish the show (for whatever reason), i guess one thing i might suggest is to engage with work from fans who genuinely enjoy the later seasons. i know there are some folks in this fandom who adore the new characters and team graveyard version 2.0. they write meta and fic and make gifsets about it, and they have a total blast doing so. hanging around their blogs might help you to find things to appreciate.

another thing you might do is give yourself permission to "cherry-pick." watch just to see what happens. if there's stuff you like, go ahead and incorporate it into your conception of the show. the rest, discard. as i said above, you're not obligated to enjoy the show in a certain way and especially not "across the board." so if you like the fact sara has mother-in-law drama but hate the fact she gets divorced? then keep the first thing and toss out the second. if canon makes a stupid-ass decision, you can elect to ignore it.

and regardless of whether you ultimately decide to finish out your watch-through or not, don't forget: the beginning of the story—i.e., those seven golden seasons you so love—will always be there, and you can return to them as often as you want. the beauty of a story is that it exists in perpetuity. grissom, catherine, warrick, nick, sara, and greg will all still be there waiting for you, and you can continue to enjoy their dynamics however you best prefer them.

good luck, anon! if you choose to continue your watch, i hope you enjoy yourself. if not, then i hope you have fun mentally setting up shop in the early seasons.

i certainly do!

thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.

#answered #anon #asks: csi #let's talk shop #csiverse #later seasons

[waheelawhisperer]

do you have a ship/pairing that you feel is widely misunderstood?

Disclaimer: I'm not super invested in shipping at the moment, but I'll do my best to give you a good response that isn't just bitching about my frustrations regardless.

The easy answer is "all of them" because fandoms have a tendency to condense interesting, multifaceted characters down into components of a ship and ignore any aspect of their characterization that doesn't immediately lend itself to common shipping memes and scenarios and it's fucking annoying, but if I had to pick a specific option, I'd probably go with Dragonslayer for RWBY (inasmuch as I still ship that) and Texas x Lappland for Arknights. I'd like to have given you an answer for Baldur's Gate 3, but I still haven't found the time to finish that game.

For Dragonslayer, there's a bizarre segment of the RWBY fanbase that really likes portraying Jaune as some kind of ultra-Chadly chick magnet, which is not accurate to his canon portrayal despite him being the writing team's clear favorite. Like, sweetie, Dragonslayer is not a ship where Jaune is the dominant alpha male partner. That boy gets pegged. Yang pounds his prostate. She wears the pants in that relationship. He does not decide what to eat for breakfast in the morning without asking her and he is happy to have things that way.

(I'm exaggerating a bit for comedic effect but Yang would run roughshod over Jaune and no argument on Earth can convince me otherwise)

As for TexLapp, a lot of people don't bother really looking at the characters as individuals instead of treating them as "uwu cute violence lesbians who have fantastic bloody hatesex" and thus don't bother to engage with their trauma or any of their personality traits that don't lend themselves to stabbing each other with swords or stabbing each other with penises real or artificial (in fairness, Arknights dropped hints about their dynamic and then took ages to develop it, so like... hard to blame people for filling in the blanks). Also, I am sick and fucking tired of people acting like Lappland is a perpetual lunatic who acts unhinged at all times and can't be trusted to navigate any interaction that doesn't involve violence when that's literally not true and the proof is found directly in her files, a resource that has been available since launch.

(I, on the other hand, understand both these characters perfectly, a state of enlightenment that led to me unleashing a thesis about Lappland having a breeding kink and wanting a polycule upon a few of my unsuspecting mutuals. It's hard being as smart as I am sometimes.)

I'll close this out with a couple ships I don't like: almost every piece of NearlPlat and BlemiPlat content I've seen fundamentally misunderstands or willfully misinterprets their dynamic and characterization as it exists in canon in favor of shaving off anything that could possibly get in the way of "kyaaaa enemies to lovers so kyuuuteeeee uwu!!!" and I fucking hate it so much. It takes ships I already despise and strips them of anything that could be remotely unique or compelling. This shit is the McDonalds of Arknights ships: boring as hell, tastes like cardboard, and does nothing to differentiate itself from its competitors in a positive manner

Meanwhile for Bumbleby the fucking writers don't understand the ship dynamic or the characters involved, so I can't even get annoyed when the fanbase doesn't either

[aces-to-apples]

It's in fact very salient to bring up the issue of queerness and homophobia in these interactions and your behavior because they are clearly a root cause. I am a queer person, making queer content, and you explicitly attack myself and others for that queer content. You compulsively bring up Roche "not being gay"—as if that matters to fandom creation and as if gay is the only option in the queer spectrum that could lead to him being potentially attracted to men—and him being attracted to women, specifically the blonde woman you constantly bring up despite me not knowing her, in these tirades you go on. You attack and insult queer fans for our queerness, specifically and deliberately and relentlessly, because our existence upsets you. That is homophobia at its basics. You don't have to call me a tranny faggot in order to reveal yourself as homophobic, because your insistence on bringing up straightness as a default and denigrating any mild interpretation of queerness does that already. You're a homophobe, you're a bigot, and again, it's fine because it's hardly noticeable amongst the cyberstalking and verbal abuse and harassment and constant unprovoked invective that you inflict on random strangers who are just minding their own business making content that makes them happy.

I actually don't demand love and respect for myself or any ship—I haven't demanded anything, not even for you to fuck off, although I wish you would—because you don't have to care about it any more than anyone else has to care about yours. That's just you projecting: you are so transparently desperate for validation of your preferred ship, and pathetically vitriolic towards anyone who doesn't fawn over it, that you routinely engage in harassment campaigns of strangers just to make yourself feel better. You flood the inboxes of people who don't want to talk to you, evading the boundaries set up by those people to try to get away from you, with such intensely hateful rhetoric that you've chased off all but the most oblivious of people who could have been interested in your ship, had you not insisted on being an asshole to everyone.

I don't know your ship. I don't know that woman, I don't know that game, and I don't care to, because I have my own that I already enjoy.

My ship is stupid because it's queer, your ship is stupid because you make it so in the eyes of everyone you harass, and everyone else's ships are stupid because it's fandom. Fandom is the place to be stupid and have fun with it, without being bogged down by the constraints of canon. I'd say I'm sorry that you're not having fun, but you're not having fun because you're too busy wallowing in your own toxicity. That sucks, but it's fundamentally something that you're doing to yourself.

Again, you should really speak to a mental health professional about how upsetting this all is to you and how to better manage your feelings so that you aren't constantly being cruel and hurtful to people you don't know. Maybe bring up the possibility of having OCD or something similarly obsessive and compulsive. You may be a dick, but you're still a person and you deserve help with whatever it is you're going through.

Now I'm going to go play Fable 3, feel free to keep having your breakdown but I'm not going to respond again until I feel like it.

#the unhinged witcher anon aka marina #fandom harassment #fandom homophobia #fandom slapfight #anon asks #anon hate #answered asks #by apples

[brehaaorgana]

The thing is, websites being slowly destroyed because of capitalist greed is bad in general for many reasons, but I would like to point out that one of those reasons is that not every social website is built to handle the same kinds of engagement in the same ways, and this destroys spaces that can't simply be ported elsewhere because they are symbiotic to their origins.

You destroy specific kinds of communities and communication styles that rely on the uniqueness of individual platforms. You can't move that to somewhere else with a different structure without fundamentally changing something.

This has always been true, but I feel like not everyone is fully...aware or familiar with how this happens. It's not even entirely a Gen Z thing either - there are plenty of Millennials/Xers and older generations who did not have a ton of internet access in the early-mid 2000's and so don't necessarily have familiarity with what vanished. Internet access has only recently been "expected," for more people across the class spectrum.

As a Millennial(TM) who has been connected to the internet basically since infancy (my dad did IT/software engineer management stuff and would literally sit me on his lap while he was on the computer as a baby), I am keenly aware of a) the fact that there are entire internet social communities which I didn't engage with but are now gone and b) that there are ones I did engage in and are lost or no longer really the same because of capitalism.

Like...forums are just not as popular anymore as they used to be. They still exist, but it's harder to find them and they usually see way less activity than other platforms. And we lose so much knowledge/advice/engagement without them. Things like: I turned around one day and found a digital art forum I used to lurk on was totally gone, along with all the inspiration, tutorials, and tips. I remember one thread was this one guy wanting to learn to draw, and it was basically just his progress journal of learning to draw. It went over the course of YEARS of progress from like, stick figures to beautifully rendered art. Shit inspired me so much, and I think it just...vanished?

But then there's things like, entire social norms, jokes, and kinds of engagement that also vanishes or becomes a graveyard. Forums usually have karma systems (which reddit apes, sort of) and that could tell you a lot about an account lol.

Look at the slow death of livejournal! Dreamwidth sort of...tried to fill the gap but there's so many platform specific expectations and experiences that Livejournal had:

Icons that you change based on: interests, content or intent of your post/comment, that you can create and have others use and which change often.

Related: icons and graphics communities.

CAPSLOCK COMMUNITIES WHERE YOU DON'T LAPSLOCK EVER!! EVERYONE TALKS LIKE THIS

Locked communities (especially age based!) Or dedicated communities with moderation and agreed upon rules unique to that comm. Tumblr literally can't recreate that. It doesn't port to how Tumblr specifically works.

Comms like ONTD, stupid_free, or comedy shit like weepingcock, - or even like, scanlations comms. Shit that just doesn't translate to tumblr's style, especially without optional anonymous engagement and nested conversations. There's no such thing as FFAF on Tumblr. It doesn't work. You don't break the internet here the same way ONTD did when Michael Jackson died.

Dedicated fandom/ship comms. As someone who was quite literally harassed on Tumblr for years because I didn't like a specific non-canon ship between a literal teenaged child and an adult and talked about it without tagging it (and even censored it when just words suddenly showed in tags!) I miss dedicated fandom comms so much. Because I had way more control over who engaged with me on my personal LJ and NEVER would've bothered people on a comm about a ship I hated because it's shitty behavior and because people who do that got banned! Shared communities with moderation and better blocking settings were benefits I didn't have on Tumblr.

Just...it doesn't translate to Tumblr and now it's just a tiny space on DW and the zombie of LJ.

Similarly I don't think AITA translates very well to Tumblr because Tumblr doesn't:

Have nested comments/comment threads that can be collected all on one central page

Have easy to make throwaway accounts

Allow for anon responses to posts directly (it's only asks! They can't reblog anonymously!)

Have an upvote system

Have a "sort by most popular" or "sort by oldest."

Have autoretention/bot capture of the original submission.

A way to click through to someone's comments in other communities, or see what their responses to the thread as the op easily.

A collection of moderators and standardized community rules and community ability to report trolling/spam/fiction/shit posts.

Call me a killjoy but AITA won't fully translate to Tumblr for the same reason why ONTD isn't translated to Tumblr, and even a similar concept to ONTD looks totally different on reddit (see: deuxmoi). It will look different, it won't have the same community or feel simply because the platform itself is different enough that it inherently changes how we engage, what that engagement looks like, and what can even feasibly be done.

When a website dies, the unique communities and communication styles of that platform also start to die.

[incarnateirony]

I've had to do a lot of thinking lately. Like, for one, I had six years fighting for this show, most of it unpaid. Just because of what was right, even when people didn't believe the truth guiding those decision and those fights, holding tight market testing and other truths to protect sources while trying to get In Between and help however stupid little way I could, with how I knew how to navigate these systems.

But like. I got married in this fandom--I don't know if you remember the gish pop the question event, and misha boosting the engagement ring. Like that was a whole setup, a whole investment in my life that happened here, with gish and misha's help.

And I got divorced in this fandom, as she became less and less of the person she started as.

I've made friends, lost friends--whether to fights or death. And like, this is a long, long time to be involved in this.

In a way, I fundamentally understand why, say, Kelios et al are having such a bad time letting go. They invested even longer, but they invested themselves on the wrong side of history. They were enemies to creatives, especially but not exclusively queer creatives. Admitting that and letting go can't be easy.

Me, like, I can take comfort in what I did being right. I can take comfort in knowing, I have made changes in this universe that have led to a better world where even a few, much less a few million, people are happier. But they don't have that, and don't get to share that happiness.

Either way it's something I've been sort of staring into. Some folks know about the 3 year Great Work as well, on the spoopier side of things. Between real world connections and errands, other investments and efforts were put into this, and I finally understand what the concept of a Black Brother is in Thelema, because if I hadn't gotten rid of that stone, gotten rid of my fuckaround roommate, and cut my ties from this place, I'd still be leaking my presence out. Hell, in a way I still am, but at least this way I'm not shooting it in with an injector.

But when sitting and finally doing restorative meditation, my back should not be instantly improving, my ability to sit and breathe, and so on. Meditation and healing shouldn't be fixing that, literally, but it is. So it's not just my normal health that's been causing this acceleration. And that's another thing to snap into perspective here.

Like I said before. The Adeptus crosses the Abyss to become the magister, but only after rebirthing, if one lets themselves, but I can't if I let this fandom leech on me.

And that's where this post comes in--really understanding how I let this place change me for the worst. For a while there I got outright obsessed with arguing the truth, because I was so tired of grifters like 2po intentionally lying and breaking people's spirits. But in time, those who wanted the truth sorted it out, figured it out, and people's minds were set. Everything else was me wasting energy on people that didn't WANT truth. And if my karma is going to keep burning for this Magnetic Moment, I don't need to give it a hand by wasting my energy on these little shitheads that fight for their right TO live in their lies.

So that said, I'm going to be working on that part, I can feel it pulling together, but I gotta say that atop nerve damage this makes my passouts and the time periods they happened during even more alarming, that IS a line I need to cut and leave to the new administrators of the new aeon, if you will.

They wanna call it a cult, due to their fear of the unknown and groups they're not involved with, that's fine. I'll put it in "cult" terms for them while still breaking down my shit on my own wall. Cuz the thing is, jealous shitheads will always find something to corrupt and throw hands about, that's the big secret. I could be mother teresa, but in outnavigating Max, max would spend their life screaming that mother theresa is a child predator or some shit, because catholics, or some shit, and it's whatever. People will always be angry when you're more successful, especially in things they share interests in.

In the very least once the box started Literally Exploding we got rid of it but I still feel like that shit's gonna drain me forever if I don't reconfigure, closed circle or not. A few towns may have been literally evacuated in the ridding of the jar and a few dams shattered but it's fine, we're fine. Ish. RIP the eight dead, my bad. I just need to get this magic monkey off my back.