#i think she's treated fine by the book but not so much by the fanbase

[bohemian-nights]

How do Targies unironically praise T@rgaryen blood purity like legit white supremacists and then deny there's any racism there?? Please make it make sense

Honestly liking the Targaryens isn’t the problem(and at this point, I'm pretty sure we all like a Targaryen or two).

Yeah, they undoubtedly have some bad views as a whole, but as long as you acknowledge that their views are an allegory for real issues that’s fine.

We aren’t necessarily defined by the fiction we consume.

However, these fans outright taking on white supremacist talking points about blood supremacy and blood purity with 100% sincerity and then being confused as to why people are calling them racist is a mind trip.

If all you are getting from the books is how special and magical the Targaryen’s are and how they must keep the bloodline pure, how outsiders dirty the blood, and then use that to degrade and mock characters(and harass their fans) who aren’t silver-haired with purple eyes then yeah, you’re a fucking racist.

GRRM is admittedly not the best at handling race(or even certain female characters). He’s an old white man and it shows, but even he didn’t create this universe for you guys to spout out this crap. You are supposed to question things like feudalism and Targaryen exceptionalism not uphold it.

Nettles is a prime example of this, but they want to say she’s Daemon’s kid, or unquestionably Valyrian, and how she’s irrelevant since she’s Black(not to mention deny the racism she faces in the text as well as outside of it) rather than admit that maybe your blood, your gender(she’s a woman too but they always seem to forget that), your social economic status, your race does not define you. You and your actions do.

That all being said, I do think the Targaryen ideology is what attracts people to the house in the first place, but they won’t admit this because that means they have to confront their own biases.

If Targaryen ideology is harmful and you agree with it wholeheartedly what does that make you? How do you view people who are different than you? Who do you view as beneath you? How do you treat people who you view as lesser than you?

Yes this is all fictional, but the language being used is very much based on how they feel about certain groups in real life.

Look I’ve seen people straight up say things like there are too many Black people on HOTD and that the only in-canon Black character should be cut because they’ve met their quota and then cry that they are being (rightfully) called racists.

I’ve seen people say that since Daemon rejected a white woman(Alys) who they view as better than her(Nettles) he would for sure never touch Nettles’ with a ten-foot pole much less love her in a romantic capacity and then cry that they are now being called a racist.

I’ve seen people purposely reduce characters solely down to their race and then cry that they are now being called a racist.

I’ve seen people harass and stalk actual Black fans and then cry and say that they are being bullied when we call them out for it.

I’ve seen people outright use racial slurs then the fanbase brushes that aside to say that the racism is limited to just a few individuals when many of these same people are using the previous arguments and treat real-life fans like crap.

Racism isn't limited to saying I hate n-words and wanting to commit acts of violence upon us.

It’s easier to say you aren’t a racist than to deal with the very real possibility that you are a part of the problem. That you treat people(including fictional characters) who don’t look like you like absolute shit because of something as stupid as the color of their skin. That you view them as so beneath you that we don’t deserve basic respect.

It should be noted that Targaryren fans aren't the only racists in this fandom especially when it comes to Black characters/fans, but they are the most outright hostile to the point where it is utterly ridiculous when they say they aren't racist.

But what do I know? I’m just a crazy hating ass bitch who’s out of her depth and who should shut her trap…

#bnask #bnasks #ASOIAF #I see them trying to hide their hands now but it really is too late #y’all talked too much and showed your whole ass #house of the dragon #hotd #got #ASOIAF fandom #anti asoiaf fandom #fire & blood

[most-mistreated-characters]

TORI VEGA PROPAGANDA: Jesus vs. Tori Vega is, in fact, hilarious, but I believe it's no contest. On the case of Jesus: If we believe that the narrators of the book The Bible are, in fact, reliable narrators, then the entirety of Jesus's existence went according to a divine plan (of course, there are different interpretations of how reliable such narrators are). Jesus suffered, yes, but he did so willingly, for the good of mankind, to fulfill a prophecy. Anything that happened in the text of the Bible is something Jesus chose, and as any masochist will tell you, pain you choose is taken better than pain you don't. If we don't believe the narrators of the Bible are reliable, then maybe all that suffering seems rather pointless and senseless. However, Jesus has a worldwide fan cult of millions of followers. I think he's doing just fine as far as fandom treatment is concerned. Maybe you'll argue that the fact that many modern Christians get so much of Jesus's message wrong is a way that he is a mistreated character. But then I ask you: who are modern Christians generally hurting when they misinterpret Jesus's message? Jesus, or marginalized people? It's the latter. Again, Jesus is doing just fine. Even people who don't believe the Bible is a reliable text often have no issue with Jesus himself. Plenty of non-Christians admire his message. Jesus isn't much of a point of contention as far as his message and his goodness goes. The contention is in regard to his divinity. Jesus himself is an often admired figure. Tori Vega, on the other hand, is largely reviled by her fandom for...(checks notes)...being a teenage girl in a new situation, making mistakes, and having flaws. Finding a Tori Vega defender can be difficult. Her fanbase certainly doesn't number in the millions, she did not choose her suffering, and, frankly, the reasons people hate her tend to be petty and arbitrary. She is generally treated differently than any other character on her show, and I've yet to see a logical reason for this disparity. TL;DR: Jesus has a fandom of millions and many people think he is a god and he is doing just fine. Tori Vega is a teenage girl whose flaws the fandom treats as grievous sins rather than youthful mistakes. VOTE TORI VEGA

This was very well written thank you anon

#propaganda #jesus vs tori vega

[babstheyaga]

Hey it’s me again lurking lol, I just wanted to check up on you, and make sure your doing well. Istg I probably look like a weirdo refreshing your books in my tabs 😭. I do have a question I don’t think people have asked. What would the love interest and idk if it’s also cliffjumper but if he is one, what child (like a boy or girl) would they want to have, and for what interest wether it be for combat or son/daughter Father time together, or whether if it’s to be perfect in Optimus eyes. And how would they deal with discipline?

It's totally alright, I promise. Stop worrying, I love it when I have loyal fans. I'd rather have my 10 loyal followers, (I see every one of you), than the 18k views on FMOD any day, I couldn't have asked for a better fanbase. You're all absolutely amazing.

Optimus would want a boy, he definitely has his reasons, but they're not bad, I promise. He'd make them the perfect angel, he wouldn't accept anything other than an A in school, chores are a must, and a reasonable, but not big, allowance per week for spending fun.

CliffJumper would also want a boy, probably because he'd want someone to teach cars and machines to. He'd basically just become his own dad, just... So happens to be a outlaw and terrorist.

Arcee would want a girl if she were to have any kid, mostly because she would be scared to have a boy and it turn out like Optimus. If she's going to raise a child, she wants them nothing like the people she has to live with.

Jazz wouldn't care if they're a girl or boy, he would treat them the same either way. It doesn't matter the grades, what they do in their down time, so long as they do as they're told and behave, he'd be the fun dad that shows a lot of love.

Mirage also doesn't care either way, someone he loves and he can take care of is fine with him. He'd be pretty strict, he'd be very nosy about everything they do, "Who ya textin?" "What ya watchin?" "Who was that outside you were talkin to?" It's kind of built into him to be obsessive. Not to mention, the extremely high likelihood if the kid is male would be a detector, or a girl and being a type C, he wouldn't be possessive, because he would share everything he knows with them, but he also wouldn't let them out of his sight for more than an hour.

Ratchet would want a girl. He's dealt with kids far too much to know that he doesn't want a boy and have to deal with their aggression during ruts in their teen years, so a girl would be perfect for him. He would keep them very sheltered, raising them in the most responsible way he can manage. He can't leave the Autobots, so he would make sure they get to know everyone and get to know them well. He would tell them who to avoid in terms of annoyance with kids, who is fine to be around in cases of obnoxious cursing, he would be the perfect dad.

BumbleBee would want a girl. He's a softy, he can't help but think about the possibility of getting her into stuff like kick boxing, doing her hair, teaching her sign, being able to cook again -even if he won't eat it- He would make sure she's comfortable meeting the others, Arcee and Jazz would be the first he introduces her to, Aunty Cee and Uncle J-Man. Come on... Like- Come on...

I was fanning my face the whole time writing this. dear lord, just thinking about this makes me smile like a crazy cat woman finding a kitten on the side of the road.

#related to fmod #god i love asks #this was the cutest thing ever #I'm going to pass out and cry in my sleep

[thetimelordbatgirl]

...This post really is the definition off, “Writing your version of events and expecting everyone to believe them.”...which given how dedicated parts of Lily’s fanbase can be, will happen, but just...let’s see:

The whole thing with Rebecca Sugar is not only because of how Lily acted when being critical of the show, but also cause of how even in 2023, Lily still has an ongoing hatred for Rebecca simply cause Lily didn’t like Rebecca’s show and instead of moving on, similar to how she treats Dana Terrace (creator of The Owl House), Lily still drags Rebecca whenever she can, including insulting Rebecca’s talents in music and writing and art and it’s at that point that you start to wonder if its less ‘Rebecca made a show Lily didn’t like’ and more ‘does Lily just have a obsessive hatred for Rebecca?’ And the thing with Big Bang Theory and Harley Quinn was literally people seeing how convenient Lily will call out stuff in Steven Universe but if its shows Lily happens to like? Oh look at that, suddenly its being ignored, as Lily won’t ever dare call out stuff she likes. 

And Lily acting like she has to talk about anime is just...no one’s making her. She’s choosing to talk about it. To the point of starting a whole dubs vs subs discourse where its clear Lily prefers dubs and thinks its okay to censor Japanese culture and even acted like there wasn’t much difference between Japan and America, even implying in her version of history that Japan got destroyed by America and basically colonized their culture and from how Lily spoke, she seemed happy about that idea and seemed to imply you can easily replace Japanese with English and....oh, would you look at that- suddenly it becomes less about ‘oh you just hate I said your favorite anime is bad’ and more people literally have found her being racist towards Japanese people and she wants to try and make it about anime.  Something that adds to her racism when she can only ever discuss Anime when it comes to Japan and yet, thinks its more popular in America then its own home country. 

And oh god, the racism against black people accusations is far more then what Lily’s trying to paint them as: *She only ever writes black women ocs as nothing but violent and easy to anger, including Aliana whose easy to get pissed and will murder on a whim and throw someone across a room and also proceed to colonize planets and force them to follow Sith culture, while her Harry Potter OC basically used a torture spell on Vernon and it was made to seem cool when anyone whose read Harry Potter, knows who are shown using those spells in the books (hint: not the good guys).  *She also wrote Aliana’s mom as being a slave trafficker and Aliana as a result, being fine with that and even getting mad if someone insults her mom for that.  *When it comes to The Owl House, she has basically fetished the idea of Hunter being black (saying it’d make him interesting) and for some reason, wanted the backgrounder character, Skara, to be more focused on instead of characters like Hunter and Amity, and there’s also how she treats Luz as soon as Luz stopped being the character Lily expected her to be.  And there is likely stuff I’m missing from this, but its less ‘oh i mixed words up’ and actually just again, Lily burying stuff. 

And there’s a-lot of shit to unpack with her clearly proceed to slander someone throughout the rest of the post to try and make them the villain of her narrative, but the whole ‘Lily sends herself asks’ and ‘Lily lied about having cancer’ is literally because: *When one of the NSFW Art website accounts was exposed to be Lily’s, Lily suddenly and conveniently got an ask warning her that ‘someone is pretending to be her on the website’...when not much on that situation had even come out at the time, so basically Lily played herself there, and then there’s asks that Lily gets that basically looks to be Lily’s writing style that also allows Lily to rant or slander or deny anything/anyone she wants to at the time.  *The cancer thing is still on-going but Lily has slipped up constantly in her cancer lying and keeps adding to the lying, all because now her sister has called her (and the twos brother) out for pretty serious allegations including molestation. *And it should be noted that Lily also proceeded to slander her sister in response, trying to paint her sister as this mastermind villain. 

And her calling someone terfy is also ironic, given Lily has gotten into hot water for lore in her Star Wars OC fic where...her OC basically said that only women can become siths, and if they happen to come out as trans male or non-binary while a sith, its okay because...they still considered sith women to their fellow sith.

Yeah uh, suddenly not so much of a hate wagon/wanting to tear Lily down as Lily claims it is, huh? 

#lily orchard #i dont think i have everything here and i could be wrong in areas #so i am welcome to being corrected and such #but this whole post is just.... #lily still trying to paint a narrative that doesnt exist #though her dedicated fans will buy it so

[bookofmirth]

I’ve debated leaving the fandom now since most of the fandom is anti everyone except for tamlin and nesta’s house of wind gang honestly….I like nesta and her new two friends! but since the ones who act like they’re the leads now constantly villainize the entire IC it’s turned me off of supporting the art, stanning the characters and even caring less for cassian just because the fans are immature and toxic (we can say both sides are but I disagree that half of the fandom or more than half twist everything out of context and behave incredibly toxic toward the series) I’m just like I’m good, anyone who are fans of them are usually small minded about anything outside of them. For those who aren’t, you’re amazing. But most are. After acosf this fanbase is incredibly petulant and deny canon at every turn ignoring the intention and reasons behind the IC’s actions. So black and white I’m over it, I’ve blocked so many acosf fans it’s honestly funny and sad at this point. Sjm wrote such a problematic book and it’s brought on…all this nonsense.

Words that trigger the acotar fandom into a frothy rage:

Nesta

Elain

Azriel

Rhysand

Feyre

Morrigan

Amren

Cassian

Lucien

Tamlin

Gwyn

Nuala and Cerridwen lol

Congrats everyone, you've taken the perfectly fine thing we all enjoyed and shit all over it. And if you didn't enjoy it, then just go be antis! I personally cannot stand anti communities, but go for it. Knock yourselves out. Honestly, I think it would be better if people just embraced the anti sjm identity so we could be clear on where we stand. I tend to block antis because... I just think it's pointless and that community has been very rude in the past.

Even I, and I consider myself pretty much fine saying whatever I want, think twice about how I talk about Nesta, Elain, and Rhys 90% of the time because no matter what we say or how carefully we say it, *someone* will get in a rage and accuse people of being misogynist or abuse apologists or whatever.

The irony re: acosf and the fandom pitting the Valkyries against the IC is that it's EXACTLY the unhealthy mindset that Nesta had at the beginning of acosf, and it's EXACTLY the immature mindset that she had to learn to grow out of. Remember how she said that Amren "chose" Feyre? And how Elain "chose" Feyre? Y'all, I have highlights in my ebook from the first time I read commenting on how immature and narrow-minded that was. But somehow the fandom read that and took it for gospel, I guess.

We all have our preferences. I like Mor better than Nesta. I think Amren has always been a cranky old bitch. I like Cassian. Eris annoys the shit out of me. I think Mor and Emerie are going to be great together. But it doesn't have to create a sub-war behind the ship war. Even when I disengage from the ship war, it's World War Nesta vs the IC which ughhhhhh

Everyone, go get a fucking edible or something, my god! It is very black and white, like anon said. I hate to think about how these people treat their friends and family irl, if they are so judgmental about fictional characters who don't actually even matter.

#acotar fandom #ask #anon

[stargirlfeyre]

“Thank you so much for this. Lucien is my favorite, I’m waiting for his book. I get that Feyre felt betrayed by him for not stepping in more, but he was trying. He really did try to steer Tamlin in the right direction, but he was walking a fine line between her and his best friend who was really the only family he had. The mistrust they treat him with in WaR and then Feyre’s ugliness toward him in ACoFaS really made me not like her. This poor guy can’t catch a break.”

“There are many reasons that Feyre is my least favorite character now, but my number one reason is the way she treats poor Lucien. That just sealed the deal for me in this run through. I would never expect for someone I knew for .2 seconds to sacrifice themselves for me after I murdered and skinned their friend, much less get MAD at them for not doing it. Ugh.”

“Omg YES I'm sorry but he experienced horrific trauma, had his friend murdered, risked everything to help Feyre UTM, was tortured for helping, and then was for whatever reason expected to put his life and world at risk to get her away from his best friend?? All for someone he BARELY knew. And now, his whole life is in shambles, he was taken away from the place he knew, and is treated like crap for what? Not sacrificing his life for some a girl he owed nothing to? I'm just over the Lucien mistreatment 😭😭 I wish I didn't reread this bc now I dislike Feyre and Rhys”

“I forgot about the Andras part but that makes it even worse!! He knew Feyre for like 2 seconds before UTM and he STILL tried to help her even tho she killed and skinned one of his friends. Rhys mentioned before how some of his questionable actions were for the sake of his court and people melt over it but for some reason, Lucien can’t do the same. Even when, in my opinion, he hasn’t done anything nearly as bad. It’s just ridiculous how people will absolutely love one character and hate the other when they’re all morally grey. I’m personally not a fan of Feyre or Rhys after SF but I can understand why they did most of the things they did but I will never forgive them for the way they treated and continue to treat Lucien”

“I definitely agree, I made a post a couple days ago about Tamlin because I think even he is treated unfairly by Feyre, Rhys and everyone in the IC. And if I were Lucien, I wouldn't betray the one person who saved my life and took me in for someone I barely knew, for someone who killed my friend and hated everything I was just a couple months ago. Not to mention, he did try to help at one point and got shut down by Tam immediately. Idk why he was expected to give up everything for somebody he wasn't even friends with, let's be real.”

Just a little taste of why I could give 0 fucks about Feycien..His whole fanbase is trash minus the few Tamlin and Feyre stan’s that still simp for him. This is a new post full of comments JUST like these ones. This is a daily thing for Lucien stan’s just like Nesta & Tamlin stan’s Feycien girlies..Like him no matter what but his fans could give two fucks about Feyre

“Feyre’s ugliness toward him in ACoFaS really made me not like her. This poor guy can’t catch a break.”

“but my number one reason is the way she treats poor Lucien.”

“then was for whatever reason expected to put his life and world at risk to get her away from his best friend??”

“I made a post a couple days ago about Tamlin because I think even he is treated unfairly by Feyre, Rhys and everyone in the IC. And if I were Lucien, I wouldn't betray the one person who saved my life and took me in for someone I barely knew, for someone who killed my friend and hated everything I was just a couple months ago.”

Oh these people are fucked in the head. They can’t be serious. For all their talk of “not babying the inner circle because they’re centuries old and they should have been more knowledgeable about how to handle Nesta” they sure do love to blame a 19 year old girl for the actions of centuries old men. These are the same people who say anything Nesta says or does to the inner circle shouldn’t be taken seriously by them because “she’s a 25 year old child🥺”

“Poor Lucien” this nigga isn’t a baby. What’s this obsession with infantilizing him? They say we infantilize Feyre by calling her Nesta and Elain’s “baby sister” (even though she is. Feyre is the youngest making her the baby of the family) but they’re out treating this 300+ year old man like a child who’s been wrong by the world.

“And if I were Lucien, I wouldn't betray the one person who saved my life and took me in for someone I barely knew” do these people realize that they’re admitting that they would sit back and watch someone be physically abused if they’re friend was doing it? They’re seriously it a “betrayal”?

The saddest thing about this is I know a lot of the people behind the accounts saying this are women. Grown ass women at that.

[cleverthylacine]

7. Any worldbuilding you’re particularly proud of?

Once I realised that I was going to have to make canon soup, I think I did a pretty good job of extrapolating different Cybertronian cultures out of the bits of some of the non-IDW canons I particularly like. Vos, Uraya, Kaon and Tarn had indigenous cultures that were nearly destroyed by the Quints, and then the Iaconian theocracy almost finished the job. The Convoys are a travelling people whose original city-state was obliterated.

The Chinese TV production of Three-Body gave me massive amounts of feels about what it must have been like to be a Decepticon during the period when Megatron went off his rocker and the revolution shat itself. I'd read the book but there was something about seeing the environment that Ye Wenjie lived in and how she moved through it that brought stuff home to me that I couldn't pick up from the book.

Right now I'm looking into the effects the Decepticon occupation had on Earth's scientific and cultural progress. I didn't really think about it much in the beginning beyond the fun I was having with Thundercracker's Zoom filters and Glit and Thundercracker both being on OnlyFans, but Thundercracker not really understanding that people don't go to OnlyFans to see what you're gonna do in your next screenplay.

(Glit understands this just fine and has a nice secondary income from his devoted fanbase of furries, robotfuckers, and people who knew that Kiss Players was a propaganda band under Megatron's occupation but still liked the music.)

I had taken the point from Astolat's Victory Condition that if Earth didn't get into space it was going to be doomed, because if Cybertron didn't fuck it up, the Galactic Council was going to.

But I didn't really think about how that would change Earth culture until I started watching For All Mankind, which I really love.

I started writing this because I was furious that Ravage had been killed off and annoyed that the fandom treats this character as a cat meme. About halfway through I realised that I didn't want to go as far with Atrocity Chicken as JRo and the other writers did, mostly because they couldn't decide if the Autobots were Designated Good Guys only in name or not, and that I didn't like that some of the characters I view as part of a team got broken up and put in entirely different cultures, and that the timeline was very heavy on stuff that happened 4 million years ago and stuff that happened in the 1980s-2000s, but largely ignored the intervening 4 million years.

So I've done a lot of work to make the history more coherent, somewhat less convoluted, and more interesting.

(Also I think it is ridiculous that Unicron should be able to eat planets and Primus is just a little guy. They are both just little guys, otherwise it isn't any fun.)

#VOS worldbuilding

[sidras-tak]

i swear im gonna write a post-canon fic where alys gets treated w/ respect and becomes friends with wylan's mother and they get to be a family, jesper and wylan and his mom and stepmom and baby sibling (and the rest of the crows obviously but i'm focused on the house of Van Eck at the moment)

#sparklepants #i think she's treated fine by the book but not so much by the fanbase #i just love female characters no one else likes tho #shadow and bone

[kingkatsuki]

thinking about a well known romance with erotica author just getting severe writers block. her brain just cant seem to cook up any good story lines. her fans are pretty understanding but now that its been over a year and a half of they’re getting kind of antsy, and a small portion of her fanbase starts getting rude with her about it. ya know the whole “entitled fan” complex. she genuinely feels bad about keeping them waiting for this long, but she refuses to give them half assed books that even she wouldn’t read.

then just a few months later she starts posting cryptic tweets randomly, sometimes it’ll be a thread, others will be a single line. these tweets are very irregular but her fans are eating it up anyway. she’s finally beaten that writers block.

she went to a ten year highschool reunion a few months ago. it sparked an old flame with the current number two hero, bakugo katsuki. they were together for they’re second and third year of highschool. even though she was deeply in love with him, she couldn’t handle being treated like an inconvenience anymore. at this point she felt like he was only with her because deku was with uraraka. so she broke up with him and he was unfazed. he didn’t realize how much he needed her until she was gone.

now ten years later they were both a hell’ve a lot more mature. the feelings that they have had had for each never truly went away. it didn’t take too long for them to start dating, and with a lot of communication officially label their relationship. she did tell him about her career (he already knew he’s read all of her books-) and he was fine with it.

she actually began to feel inspired by they’re relationship, and she asked if she could write her next book loosely very loosely after they’re relationship he agreed. they did set boundaries on what was ok to write about and what wasn’t.

after another year she had her first book of her next series, it was her best seller.

brain rot is killing me ugh.

AHHH! This is a whole ass masterpiece on its own. I would absolutely love a fic like this!

I love those kinds of stories where people split up because maybe they just weren’t together at the right time in their lives but they find each other again because they were truly meant to be? And like they can’t actually imagine themselves with anyone else?

And also imagine being with Pro-hero Bakugou and being one of the best erotica authors? Every story you write of course you’re using Bakugou as your muse, the fans and interviewers constantly asking and pressing about whether you’ve done the things you write about in your stories?

Literally imagine being just a fanfiction author online first, writing fanfics about your favourite Pro Dynamight thinking he’ll never find this niche side of fandom… but he does—

#not mine

[itsclydebitches]

Got 2 questions for you: can you name a series that kills off a major character, brings them back, only to kill them, again? If you answered yes, did this series actually do it well? Some hardcore FNDM said RWBY is such a new and innovative show, that does what other pieces of media hasn’t. I agree with the 2nd part. It certainly has made mistakes even the worst of the worst haven’t made.

I can think of a few examples, yeah. Let’s see...

Spock. He sacrifices himself, is resurrected since he was able to mind-meld with McCoy, and then later dies of natural causes. This works because Spock’s resurrection led to a full life past what he’d already experienced. His final (implied) death, though sad, isn’t unexpected because he was never immortal. It was his time then just like it would be anyone else’s, resurrection or no. 

Barbossa. He dies from Jack’s shot, is later resurrected, and finally sacrifices himself for crew and daughter. The iffy quality of the later films aside (lol), this works because, like Spock, Barbossa was introduced at the beginning of the franchise and died four films later, at the end. I have no idea how much time that was in-world, but it feels fulfilling for the audience because we got Barbossa for (almost) the whole journey. 

Various fantasy series like Dragon Ball Z (which I’ve mentioned before), cartoons like The Simpsons (which I only really know about second-hand, but), and the entire comic book industry. All of these work because the audience understands that death works differently in this story/medium. DBZ has a casual nature with death where characters can die and be wished back numerous times. Cartoon episodes function in little pocket universes where everything resets before the next episode, so Bart can die numerous times across the series and always be fine moving forward. Given their long-running nature, comics have to frequently kill/resurrect characters  — especially with different writers and artists wanting a turn at the story  — so the audience is working with the understanding that most deaths are temporary. It’s fine for a superhero to die, come back, sacrifice themselves, come back evil, be killed by their old teammates, come back mysteriously, and then die again two runs down the line because that’s just how comics work. 

Penny, however, doesn’t work because she doesn’t fulfill any of the above needs. Her death was not a peaceful end to an otherwise fulfilled character, it was a horrifying and arguably insensitive murder/mercy kill. She wasn’t given multiple volumes of enjoyable content that justified bringing her back, she was given two with all of that content focused on being framed, controlled, and nearly killed... only for to actually die in the end. She doesn’t exist in a story where death is treated lightly, nor is RWBY a cartoon or a comic that has the particular medium qualities to pull this cyclical nature off. There is, however, one other example I can think of where a story pulled a pseudo-Penny... 

The Rise of Skywalker. 

Palpatine died a satisfying death (much like how Penny’s death was a satisfying tragedy), was resurrected, only to be killed off in the last movie, for good this time. I don’t think I need to explain how bad most of the fans thought that movie was, which includes that decision. Granted, the frustration comes from different parts of the death-resurrection-death cycle. RWBY fans liked that Penny was brought back because that made sense for her robot character vs. SW fans disliking how Palpatine was brought back because, uh 

...yeah. 

Then both deaths had their problems regarding in-world logic, with another split between “This is stupid because the character deserved better post-resurrection” vs. “This is stupid because the character shouldn’t have been resurrected in the first place.” But in both cases the cycle is clearly not working for the audience. 

So I wouldn’t agree with the fandom that RWBY is innovative. This has been done before but a) it was done better, b) it was done in a story where such a cycle was inevitable, or c) it was done and... people didn’t like it then either. Granted, I’m not an encyclopedia of storytelling. We might be able to find other examples that look very similar to RWBY’s choices that people were receptive to, but that doesn’t mean RWBY did it well. Being a (supposedly) new and shiny writing choice doesn’t automatically make it a good writing choice. Writers experiment in part to see what works for people and, as divisive as the fandom often is, this didn’t work for a lot of the fanbase. 

#rwby #mymetas #Star Wars #SW #Anonymous

[whetstonefires]

Hi Whetstonefire. I have a question about the comic where Nightwing cheats on Starfire with Barbara: What happens directly after that? Does Starfire find out that Nightwing cheated on her? And, if so, how does she react? I've read online that (according to Marv Wolfman) Starfire is the opposite of everything Batman taught Nightwing to be and that Batman taught Nightwing to be repressed and cold. What did Nightwing contribute (emotionally) to the relationship between him and Starfire? (Cont.)

(Cont.) From what I can tell, from online, Nightwing was adamant about standards of mercy and monogamy - how do you think, if Starfire were to be written as her own character and not written around Nightwing and his emotional needs, she would handle and react to that? (This bit is an FYI for other readers: this is just speculation, not hate. Sorry about that.) Sorry about the questions! Have a nice day! 

Okay there are so many separate questions packed in here! I may miss some of them lol and I do not want to put in the hours it would take to produce an orderly response to all this, so this post is going to be a mess.

Initial query and important point: the cheating story was out of continuity. Like, literally, not just by ‘being rejected by the fanbase,’ it was just this weird retcon oneshot that seems to have been some sort of fuck-you to Nightwing or his fans or something. So no, it had no in-setting fallout lol. It, in more ways than most comics, didn't exactly happen.

It was just this weird thing where Dick hooks up with Babs before giving her a wedding invitation, which is both out of character for him in general and out of step with where he was leading up to the wedding--he was desperate to get married so they could have some Normal Stable Adulthood Happiness; the choice to recharacterize him as a fuckboy who regards it as a loss of freedom isn’t congruent, on much more than the level of principle.

As far as how Kori would feel about it, if she had learned...that is very hard to say. Apart from how it would require her to reinterpret everything about where their relationship stood at that point, the data is very unclear, and I don’t even have all of it. Gonna back up to cover some of the rest of the ask, get some context here.

So this actually brings up two of my biggest gripes with Wolfman’s NTT--weird Kori characterization and the weirdly negative interpretation of Batman as parent that backwashed heavily into other titles and influenced the character for the worse, in ways we're very much still dealing with today. 😩

The latter is pretty self-explanatory, though Wolfman’s take that the main thing Bruce taught Dick was repression does shed light on some writing choices and make others funnier. But Kori. Oh my lands.

So, item one, I wouldn't say that Kori is overall opposite Bruce, or even of his philosophy? There are just some very major points of opposition. She isn’t emotionally buttoned-down like at all, especially about positive feelings, although considered realistically with all the bullshit they’ve piled into her backstory she absolutely leans on repression to cope and stay positive, which makes her a lot like Dick actually.

To an extent, she was clearly written around foiling Dick’s Batman-derived traits in the same way that Robin was written to foil Batman, bright and glad and aerial. A Flamebird to his Nightwing in theme if not in name.

You could do some interesting stuff with that, and the bildungsroman aspects of this period of Dick’s life, like he has two roads forward in terms of how he’s going to define ‘adulthood’--does it necessarily require becoming more like his mentor-father, for good and ill, or can he make Kori in part a destination, as it were, and create an adult self that is derived from who he has always been as well as the man he’s modeled himself after?

To an extent I think this even was one of the things going on in ntt but like. Only a little bit.

(Given how much like Bruce Babs is in most of the ways Kori isn’t, especially once she’s Oracle, you could make a case for her as love interest being like. Symbolic of his not being in a rebellious phase? That gets weird and oedipal really fast tho lol.)

Okay stepping down one meta level lol, the thing about answering the 'what would kori' question here is that her character is deeply bound up in her culture, about which we are told and shown a great many contradictory things. Any attempt to read her as an independent character has to tackle not only the gender stuff you allude to and these inconsistencies, but how much of the sheer mess of her is rooted in racism.

'Fantastic' racism, technically, because Tamaraneans aren't real, but the 'taming the savage' narrative that kept surfacing between them and the language used in reference to it is just. The existing racism of presumably the writers, placed in Dick's mouth, and it's super gross. I hate it so much.

(I had a faint hope when they cast her for live action it was with a deliberate intent to directly tackle and better that history, but lollllllll nah. At least they didn’t double down in it tho! Can you imagine, with a black actress, in this day and age....)

So to predict and comprehend Kori, you have to make a lot of calls about Tamaran as a civilization. I like to slightly privilege stuff established earlier if there's no good reason not to, so while much is made over time of her inappropriate rage and the violence she was raised to normalize, I think what she says in her first appearance is good to keep in mind: in her culture, kindness is for friends and cruelty is for enemies. She doesn't understand why the Titans seem to have this backwards.

Kori is not a merciless person. She’s very empathetic, as a rule. With people she loves, she is self-destructively forgiving. That's not a trait only Dick benefits from--her family keeps betraying her in new exciting ways, and she keeps letting them.

Her arc of growing away from that habit is however greatly crippled by centering Dick in the narrative and by the awful 'civilizing' overtones that keep coming into it. When she comes back after the 1986 breakup, still married to Karras, she brings with her a commitment to doing things the Earth way--to eschew lethal force as more than a compromise with her friends’ values, but as a deliberate choice.

This deserved a lot more space and time than it got, and the fact that it didn’t get it is only somewhat due to her being subordinated to Dick and to general writing fail; a lot of it’s just the team book problems of everything happening to everybody all at once.

I mean, Dick’s journey later on to deciding he loves her enough to date her even though she’s married and it’s technically against his principles was packed into this absolutely heinous issue where he was inspired by a woman refusing to separate from her husband who’d just threatened to kill her and their kid with a knife, until being stopped by Nightwing. Because he’s apologizing for what he did.

This is his inspiration for accepting Kori’s marital status! It’s supposed to be heartwarming, as far as I can tell! Not heavyhanded messaging that this is a self-destructive terrible choice in which Kori will inevitably harm him somehow! This issue is pro ‘consensual open relationships under certain circumstances’ and also ‘giving abusers another chance’ as expressions of love. Welcome to the 80s ig.

(Notable is that the wife in this issue was black and the husband and son both looked very white, so it’s probably her stepkid and she probably wouldn’t get to keep him if they separated; this is not even vaguely treated as a factor.)

Point is, everyone was getting too little space to actually go through the amount of development they were getting, and it was clumsily handled; it’s not just her.

In an overlapping period Gar processed his issues with his adoptive father with whom he constantly fought and their shared trauma over the rest of their family (the Doom Patrol) having died violently not long ago via a batshit several-issue storyline where Mento went crazy, created supermutants, and abusively mind-controlled them to attack the Titans. It is literally all like this.

Back to the infidelity thing, now. So much to unpack. So like I mentioned above, their first big breakup, while partially driven by Dick’s existing conflicted feelings about their different ideas about things like ‘killing in battle’ and ‘her identity and loyalties being tied up with her home planet,’ is explicitly over different takes on monogamy.

When Dick is breaking up with her, Kori makes it clear she thinks it’s totally reasonable to have both a husband and a love, since Karras also has someone he loves and they’re both fine with it, but the story doesn't really explain how nonmonogamy works on Tamaran, or even if it's practiced outside the context of political marriage. They do do a sort of...soulbond fusion dance...thing, as part of the ceremony, so marriage is definitely serious business. There are so many levels of cultural difference that get poor to no development.

But to return to the weird ooc retcon cheating story: because of this context, no matter what her personal norms are, Dick specifically casually sleeping with someone else would be something for Kori to be mad about, because of the hypocrisy.

Then there’s the Mirage Incident, which I haven’t read through properly and which was very poorly handled by the writers. Kori is upset about Dick having slept with someone impersonating her and there’s a general vibe of this being treated by Dick’s social circle as unfaithfulness even though he was in fact sexually violated by deceit; it famously sucks.

We still don’t learn a lot here about Kori’s ideas about monogamy, from what I have seen, because her focus is mostly on feeling like Dick doesn’t care about her enough or in the right way since he couldn’t tell the difference. Which is an understandable feeling, even if it’s not an appropriate reaction to have at him at this time.

What Nightwing contributed emotionally........hm. This is a mess, honestly; he was all over the map, and not just because of having Brother Blood in his head. I cannot speak definitively on this, it’s too inconsistent.

For most of their relationship, Kori was the more intensely invested one, the one to initiate and the one who was shown at length to be excited to come home at the end of the day to their shared apartment because her boyfriend was there to see and talk to. If we set aside his more egregious white male bullshit, Dick was pretty emotionally available most of the time, though? They were cute.

Since they split up a lot of ink has been spilled making him less into her in retrospect, but he was pretty invested--leaving her coincided with mental breakdowns both times, and it wasn’t even mostly because she was doing his emotional processing for him, because she wasn’t, although it’s fair to say he often fell into using the relationship as an emotional crutch. Kori was definitely doing the same thing though so...it wasn’t the most balanced relationship in fiction history, but apart from slight codependency and the racism, it was decent enough.

She gets more evenhanded development than most superhero love interests, honestly, because she was costarring in a team book. She had her own storylines. She had other friends.

Mostly both of them just needed some space to finish growing up and stop being retraumatized long enough to process some of the existing trauma better, and I think they could have gone on being good for each other for a long time.

#long post #this did in fact take me about two hours #ask #a nonny mouse #dickkori #koriand'r #dick grayson #nightwing #hoc est meum #teen titans #new teen titans #wolfman and perez #sexism #racism #relationships #monogamy #drama #shipping #lol nonny if you're sorry why do it #do you mean sorry to inconvenience me? #do you mean 'sorry to activate your compulsive question answering?'

[bisluthq]

Okay so I’ve been meaning to ask for a while now but I was far too nervous and didn’t want to offend anyone. But, that being said, can I ask why you choose to indulge in RPF? I personally find it super strange, invasive and (maybe this is a stretch) but also low-key dehumanising?

Idk what word to use here and how to eloquently word this but definitely feels like RPF plays into the fetishisation and the ‘disconnect’ of celebrities from people who indulge in it. Like, by writing RPF you’re writing your own version of that person (some people try and stay accurate whilst others invent whole new personalities after) but you don’t know them, not entirely, and for writers to (understandably) fill in the gaps with whatever they like and create fics seems a little disrespectful and voyeuristic, esp because you’re using very real people to fill in the majority of the sexy (or just generally desired) ‘character bar’ whilst headcanoning the rest and publishing it.

Idk, I personally find it kinda disrespectful as to how real human beings are just used almost as props to serve and fulfill a handful of people’s fantasies/desires. At least with fictional characters, it’s not that big a deal if you headcanon, fill in the personality gaps or go ooc because they are fictional. But for RPF, the real people are often treated as jumping off points for whatever build-a-bearfantasy writers have in mind (younger writers/readers are far more likely to do this but I believe it’s a widespread phenomenon amongst everyone who indulges in it)

And I know the people involved are likely never going to read it but it still doesn’t mean they haven’t been disregarded/disrespected as a person already. I’ve personally never liked RPF, writing or reading, but I know some people like it - I just don’t know why?? I know one argument I’ve heard is that celebs are in the public eye and so, they can rightfully be objectified/sexualised by their fanbase, which yes kinda makes sense but idk if it merits/justifies using the shell of the celebrity to fulfill the kinks of everyone in their fanbase.

I’m not sure how much sense I’ve made here. I’m pretty sure I’ve repeated myself the entire time lol but I am curious to what your answer would be. Full disclaimer - it is not my intention to shame you or anyone else - I just want to understand your thought process because it is wildly different to mine and for the most part I like/vibe with this blog a lot because your attitude towards celebs and celeb gossip is so refreshing. When I saw all the joshlie/swiftwyn fics I was a bit lost and further lost when people started actively thirsting, hence the reason behind this ask. Sorry this was so long ✌🏼

Okay so I have a lot of Thoughts™️ on this tbh. Now backstory: I was SUPER pearl clutchy about RPF for like actual years. I somehow missed the After phenomenon in terms of the books, but when the film deal came through I was properly scandalized. I was like, “Good grief imagine being Harry and you’re the basis for a whole ass abusive boyfriend character like what the actual fuck is wrong with these people!?” And then I did more thinking about it especially as I watched the sheer commercial success of this shitshow. 

Now I’m very like theoretically anti capitalism but I’m also a very pragmatic person whose primary love is and always has been and always will be the entertainment industry so we do have to look at what makes money because this shit’s not charity. And what the runaway success of After taught me is... RPF makes money. Like BIG money.

So then I had to relax on the pearl clutching and start asking myself why that is. Why are people into this shit? Well, celebs market themselves as 1) a brand and 2) sexual beings. You’re supposed to want them. That’s how they’re being sold to you. Harry’s not posing fucking stark naked in the Fine Line insert art for his health. Taylor’s not posting National Sock Appreciation Day for you to appreciate her socks. Like these are sexual beings and they’re being marketed to us as sexual fantasy. That’s part of why we’re buying their shit.

Let’s go back to the ‘celebs market themselves as a brand’ - if you look at people inspiring RPF it’s hardly ever people who are like... freaky private. Nobody’s putting out Saoirse Ronan RPF because tbh the average person, even an average fan of hers, doesn’t really know anything about her. She avoids socials and she doesn’t take too much press and she sorta just does her thing. People like Harry and Taylor and tbh Karlie market their personalities. They’re selling a whole package - not just a talented professional, not just a hot person, but a whole ass person who you’re supposed to buy into while also being y’know turned on by them per my previous points. 

So here we get into the RPF of it all. Realistically, these people are going to inspire fantasies. They’re trying to do that. And they’re also selling and marketing their relationships and personalities. Again, this is not an accident, this is a purposeful commercial push.

With that in mind, what’s so wrong about imagining scenarios that they’re kinda like... trying to concoct for us already? Taylor’s been singing about her sex life non stop since 2017. She’s told us these songs are about Joe. Joe’s a public figure who also takes interviews and markets his personality. Is it, therefore, wrong to imagine what that sex is like if they’re both hot and making money off of us? Is she not lowkey trying to get us to do that when she’s, like I say, singing about sex with him on main since 2017?

Now with RPF what we need to remember is this is purely fantasy. It isn’t real, and it’s not like... canon. I’m also not into like AU RPF personally like I don’t really have much imagination for like RPF crackships lmao but I’m also not going to get all huffy over it. For me, if celebrities sell shit using their relationship - as Taylor absolutely fucking does - and sell themselves as sexual and desirable - as Taylor absolutely fucking does - there’s nothing that wrong with fantasizing about what that is like.

It’s obviously not real. It shouldn’t be treated as real. But as an exercise in imagination, I don’t see what’s so wrong with it.

Also many of us have fantasies all the time even if we don’t write and publish them. We have sex dreams and weird fantasies about people we know/crushes and of course we fantasize about celebs. I think putting that down in formal words isn’t worth getting all up in arms about. I think it’s just having a bit of fun.

Finally, back to After: this is a HUGE commercial market. We can see that. And like I don’t see it as that unethical when I examine it closely because these people are also making money off of it. It’s like we can say “oh celeb gossip is so terrible” but it makes the people involved huge money. And considering at the end of the day entertainment shit does come down to the bottom line... ehhhh I’m okay with it.

Hope this kinda gives my take and it’s a conversation I’m very interested in so if y’all would like to keep having with takes and countertakes I’m all for it.

#nat talks fandom culture #Anonymous

[lamiahypnosia]

Top Five NPCs of The Outer Worlds

I don’t feel like the Outer Worlds gets enough recognition for how excellent the character writing is. Sure, we love the companions but I’m talking about the rest of the cast. The characters that help build the world of Halcyon.

So in true internet countdown fashion -and written because I’m too dumb to use editing software- I’m counting down the Top Five NPCs in The Outer Worlds.

Spoilers ahead! Let’s begin.

5. Martin Callahan

Mad scientists, swearing vicars, space pirates and what have you, Martin Callahan somehow became the fandom’s darling. People cry out on social media for DLC to help Martin out of his helmet and possibly make him a companion. It’s actually kind of charming that players want to go out of their way to help this guy. He’s not a quest giver, he’s not essential to the plot, he’s just some guy who works for Spacer’s Choice slowly going mad inside a mascot helmet. His resignation to his fate utterly encompasses the tone of the game universe.

Maybe it’s his dry tone while selling quality Spacer’s Choice goods or the mystery behind the mask- the poor soul stuck in the Moon Man helmet shackled to his little Spacer’s Choice stall on Groundbreaker is without a doubt the ensemble dark horse of The Outer Worlds.

4. Minister Aloysius Clarke

Though he technically has a huge role in the future of Halcyon I put him pretty low on the list since after your initial meeting with him during Phineas’ storyline you don’t talk to him much. Aloysius Clarke is the Minister of Earth who should be touring the colony but he’s placed under house arrest by Chairman Rockwell. The interesting thing is you see his face everywhere before you ever meet him and likely assume he’s a Board lackey.

But happily Clarke isn’t bending to the corporate lies and money grubbing and recruits the Captain to send a message to Earth to enlist for aid.

When you finally meet him Clarke takes you for a sycophant and is kind of a jerk until you’re a jerk right back. He’s so pleased to find someone who responds to his sarcasm and isn’t brainwashed to perfect obedience.

Clarke becomes a bit of a fanboy of the Captain if you express the desire to screw over the Board. You can also learn he loves comic books, especially Dissident Hunter, a series that is essentially propaganda against free thinkers.

The Outer Worlds already has a pretty refreshing human character design that features many characters that are people of color. I thought it was neat that Clarke is almost certainly biracial that goes to show what a true melting pot the Halcyon Colony is. Also he has on a beautiful suit and rocks some fingerless gloves. Well dressed comic sarcastic comic book geek. The Minister of Earth. I can’t help but love this guy.

3. Sanjar Nandi & Celia Robbins

This is kind of cheating but I put these two together since they’re pretty much two halves of a whole character. When I first walked into Stellar Bay I expected them to do the ‘woman behind the man’ schtick where Sanjar is an incompetent jerk and Celia does all the work and gets treated like crap. Thank the Grand Architect that this awful trope is dead.

Sanjar Nandi is the CEO of Monarch Industries and Celia Robbins is his assistant. And that’s all we get out of these two. We don’t know anything about their families or friends or how they ended up working together but what little we know is that they have a good deal of respect for one another. It’s not Sanjar has a stupid idea Celia shoots down, it’s Sanjar has a good idea and Celia helps him fine tune it. Sanjar has a good eye for detail and Celia helps him see the bigger picture. She helps him with his plans, he pays her well and treats her with respect.

Individually they're still fun. Sanjar’s dorky excitement over paperwork and crush on the Captain -regardless of gender- is weirdly charming. So is Celia’s shyness regarding the guy she likes and her gentle encouragement of Sanjar is actually very sweet.

I got the sense that Sanjar overworks himself and only Celia can convince him to rest now and then.. Honestly, if everyone on the Board worked as well as these two maybe there is hope for Halcyon.

2. Anton Crane

Where do I begin with this guy? Anton is another deceitful bugger. You think he’s a Board bootlicker but as you peel away the layers you get that he’s a decent man even if he has blinders on. Anton Crane is a scientist that works for Auntie Cleo developing new products, specifically toothpaste. In Halcyon, an individual who creates a product that sells well can earn a place in Byzantium where the idle rich dwell and Anton Crane aims to do just that.

In his own personal quest for fame and fortune Anton tends to push the workers below him too hard including his protégé Jameson but at least seems to dial it back when he realizes Jameson is starting to resent him. Also once you read his terminal entries he still pushes against the corporate mandates, refusing to okay a product that has a possible side effect of blindness even when he’s told to ignore it and work on taste instead. (I don’t know how a toothpaste could cause blindness. Only in Halcyon, right?)

Anton starts off as a pompous coward only bent on his own goal to join the Byzantium elite but the more I read into him I find him to be a complex and interesting character. He’s also got this posh manner of speech to make him seem elegant that you don’t hear any other characters use except for in Byzantium. So it’s like he’s practicing being a goldblood. Anton Crane- ambitious corporate lackey or well meaning idiot? You decide.

1. Chairman Cha- jk, it’s Phineas Welles.

Yeah you didn't see that coming a mile away. Maybe I just have a soft spot for old men of science but the more I played The Outer Worlds the more Phineas became my favorite character. Straight away players fell in love with Phineas. Between his cartoony movements, love of science, introverted nature or patience with the player character it’s probably safe to say he’s nearly if not absolutely universally loved by the fanbase.

Phineas is a mad scientist yet when you wipe off the black comedy and satire you find a broken man.  At first Phineas forcibly recruits the player character in hopes that they’ll be obliged to help him. He comes across as trying to hide his desperation for you to cooperate and constantly has to correct himself ‘help me- I mean help us’. He genuinely wants to help Halcyon but if only to heal his own guilt. As it turns out before his success with reviving the player character he failed- multiple times- at the cost of several lives. And he carries that with him. If you read his notes toward the end of the game the ‘liquefaction’ Phineas jokes about in the introduction is a problem he faced. When he tried before to thaw the colonists they died horrifically in front of him, screaming in agony often for over a minute and a half.

On top of that his notes in the Hope’s terminal indicate Phineas has post traumatic stress disorder because of it.  Law, somebody give this man a hug.

Through it all Phineas is chipper and trusts the Captain. Phineas is endearing as a grandfatherly type. He puts a ton of faith in you but he’s never cross or impatient with you even if your character has low intelligence. Even if his motives aren’t altogether selfless- in the end he’s still trying to stick it to the Board and that’s not even that bad. He trusts in science and not the status quo. Phineas risks his life and sanity for the greater good.   Thirty five years in exile is a very long time. It’s never stated what happened to his family or anything else that he left behind. Him calling the Captain ‘friend’ at the end certainly isn’t said lightly. He could have easily lived in luxury for the rest of his days but decided ultimately to forego his needs- for the needs of the many. Phineas Welles- the best character in The Outer Worlds.

#the outer worlds #spoilers

[ranibell]

Disney Fairies Shipping Rant

(Warning: unpopular opinions ahead. You may disagree, but I’ll defend my opinions! I don’t mean offense to any of the people who like certain pairings in this series--what you like isn’t a reflection of you as a person, or your intelligence or heart, it’s that simple--I just have a hard time understanding why it is some of these are as popular as they are.)

I marked 4 “NOTPs” on that shipping meme, and...let’s talk about it, I guess!

I’ll start simple. Tink/Bobble:

This was particularly big back in the day with the first couple of TB movies before the majority latched onto Tink/Vidia. I never really “got it” but for the most part I wouldn’t have ever had reason to dislike them as a ship if it hadn’t been for the shippers themselves...

I liked Terence as a character, as well as his relationship with Tink, and the Bobble/Tink fans were very vocal about disparaging Terence in favor of Bobble, when that’s really unnecessary. It’s possible to like an underrated character without the need to bash a popular one just because you’re personally not interested in them.

I basically won’t go into it any more than I have in the past--after I did a two-part video reading of comments on this one Tink/Bobble fan art piece, I wrote up my feelings here and it still stands up. Basically the sight of the ship leaves a bad taste in my mouth not because of the characters involved themselves, but by the attitude the ship seemed to be entirely based on.

The only thing I would add is that I ship Bobble/Clank and to me, they’re as good as an old married couple that just wasn’t confirmed because it’s Disney :(

Clarion/Milori:

What can I even say? I’ve ranted extensively on my old blog, but to rehash, here’s the deal: There was no reason Milori’s character needed to be invented in the first place. The major plot holes and inconsistencies in The Secret of the Wings seemed to have prompted his becoming a character, but I think more importantly it was for the cliche, forced “forbidden romance” sub-plot between him and Clarion.

They didn’t need to replace the female Minister of Winter from her position to bring in this Lord of Winter, his role and existence wasn’t properly set up, and his backstory + relationship with Queen Clarion wasn’t developed at all, they just relied on the fact that having a tragically star-crossed love interest who’s attractive is enough for people to accept at face value.

And they were right, I guess... 🙄

So again, for me it’s not that the pairing of these two characters in inherently a bad thing, but it has never tracked for me that such an underdeveloped, boring pairing is one of the most popular in the fanbase, like most people just accepted it because it was canon and I’m like “we’re allowed to....NOT ship canon pairings, if they add nothing to the characters and story...you don’t have to just accept it”

Zarina/James:

This is another one that is a majorly popular ship in the fanbase, and to me it’s similar to shipping Anna with Hans, but possibly even worse. He manipulated her and tried to get away with murdering her. In James’ case, he emotionally/psychologically manipulated Zarina for A YEAR before betraying her and then tossing her into the sea to die.

There are a lot of people who think Hans should be able to have a redemption plotline, and I’ll make no comment about that, but the big difference between him and James is that we KNOW Hook will never be redeemed. We know he has never and will never feel remorse about his actions or treatment of Z.

He goes on to become the most fearsome pirate of all time, murdering without second thought--and still goes on to manipulate Tink and capture her in a lantern, because, I quote, “a jealous female can be tricked into anything.” His line in TPF mirrors this attitude (“Fairies are such gullible creatures”) so like....he is and will always be a misogynist who never held respect for Z or Tink or any fairy/female.

Also, The Pirate Fairy was as poorly written as SotW if not more so, and Z herself wasn’t a well-developed character, so I should say “to each their own” for anyone who wanted to believe there was chemistry between Z + James and ship them, but it’s gross and disgusting and wrong. (no offense)

Tink/Vidia:

Back to something much less sinful, but even more heretical within this fanbase. Vidia is one of THE most popular fairies from the movies, and Tink/Vidia is one of the most popular ships. That’s fine. My stance happens to be different, because I guess I don’t view things the exact same way.

Vidia was cruel to Tink at first--and she’s nowhere near as bad as James; she’d never seriously want to hurt/kill somebody. But even after she is redeemed from her antagonist position....she’s honestly still pretty b*tchy to her so-called “friends.” I won’t be forgetting the scene in Legend of the Neverbeast anytime soon when Gruff sneezes/gets snot on them, Rosetta says “ew, my mouth was open!” and Vidia replies “It’s always open.” Like, there’s just no need for that, ever, it’s mean-spirited and didn’t need to be said, it didn’t help anything.

People seem to love sarcastic characters with a secret heart of gold, but I just can’t dig the way Vidia is treated like this amazing character just because she didn’t turn out to be genuinely evil, no matter how her attitude stayed. In the books, her character is more interesting to me--and she’s portrayed as a mean person, but also she knows it and the narrative doesn’t treat her like one of the girls who, oh, it’s just okay that she treats her friends poorly!

So yeah, Tink/Vidia never sat right with me. Also, within the books, they actually hate each other, not even like a sassy frenemy relationship, they can’t stand each other. Tink does NOT have a lot of patience--she would never stand for Vidia’s nasty attitude and just not call her out on it every time. They would never work in a relationship.

So, the reason people will hate me for having this opinion is because many seem to embrace Vidia as this lesbian icon (like those posts about how if she was your favorite fairy growing up, you’re gay) and Tink/Vidia as this natural pairing to come from their interaction in the movies. Lots of people automatically ship it, and I can see the distaste toward Tink/Terence as if it’s the boring, straight ship with no merit besides being basically canon.

Nobody has to ship Tink/Terence if it’s not their thing--I happen to like them, but they objectively have a LOT of development throughout the books, films and other media. More so than any of the canon ships like Clarion/Milori which people ATE UP even though they had NO development. If you ship Clarion/Milori and think Tink/Terence is boring, ya basic and hypocritical, but I digress.

What I mean to say is that if you’re not into Tink/Terence or basic, overhyped “straight” ships in general, your other option is not immediately Tink/Vidia. I’m bisexual myself, so it’s not like I’m anti-Vidibell because of homophobia or something. I really enjoy and appreciate f/f and m/m ships as well, and there are so many amazing fairies to ship Tink with who would have a more healthy and beautiful dynamic--which I think...good representation is better? Just me??

Tink had a lot of chemistry with Silvermist, in fact, someone who is genuinely kind and caring for Tink and vice versa. Tink/Sil is probably the most beautiful and natural pairing in the whole movie series, and it’s like no one has ever even CONSIDERED it because it’s so much more entertaining to have an enemies-to-lovers dynamic with the fairy who was mean to Tink, rather than the one who objectively cared the MOST.

Also, Tink and Zarina--they had a helluva dynamic in TPF. Stay hydrated with a drinking water game every time there’s a potential moment to read into wrt shipping them in that film. But then people want to ship Zarina with a man who tried to kill her instead.

So that’s the thing--I’m not mad at Tink/Bobble and Tink/Vidia because they go against Tink/Terence, but because of the attitude about it when arguably there are way better options than the ones people promote and those ones get entirely ignored and overlooked. It just grinds my gears. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you ship these pairing, I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings by calling them out like they’re these awful things--tbh the only one of these that I genuinely think is entirely and inherently bad in concept, is James/Z and I have no remorse if I offend anyone who ships that. Unfollow me, nasty.

To explain that in practice: if a picture of Clarion/Milori, Tink/Vidia or Tink/Bobble is cute, I’m still gonna reblog it and even tag it for those who enjoy the ships, because it doesn’t hurt me or anyone even if it’s not my taste. If J/Z is ever even implied I’m blocking people XD

#rant #anti ships #dont hate me for speaking my truth please #if you disagree feel free to state your case #im not the end all be all of whats good and not good #but ill go to my grave hating j/z particularly so its best not to touch that one okay?

[weaselbeaselpants]

Hazbin Hotel Review part 2: Mistakes were made please don’t kill me

This pilot is polarizing at the moment. In between the two sides of the anti-fanbase (ppl crying “if you like HH you’re homophobic”, or the BWW with it’s cringey politics), you have lots of fans who are falling over themselves about how good this is. If you love Hazbin unconditionally that’s fine, but here’s the thing:

I like it too.

I’m the kind of person who’s naturally critical, pokes harmless fun at what I like, and is always rewriting and reimagining things within the fandoms I like. I want to be a ‘Hazbin’ fan but I don’t know if I’m allowed to since the fanbase can be so staunchly overprotective and Viv herself has said she doesn’t like criticism, no matter how valid or done in good faith.

Tbh, that’s why the drama revolving around @frootrollup1​ upsets me: the fandom is fine with lumping all criticism or redesign stuff in the realm of ignorant hate, when redesign, rewrites, revamps and other fan dribble are kind of a labor of love onto itself in other fandoms. Guess that’s a talk for later though.

With all this in mind, let me go over my thoughts:

There’s no PROPER establishment of Hell as a place, setting, world, or proper establishment of the characters.

The armor-piercing question Hazbin needs to be asked is this:

“is this a generic version of Hell we should all be familiar with and need no introduction to, OR is this a unique take that requires it’s own rules?”

^ It feels like the latter but we don’t get a good rundown of said rules. Besides that, characters are one note and serve either no purpose or become flies on the wall to other characters’ purpose.

Things were said and places were shown but we honestly don’t get a good idea of Hell by the end of the pilot. It’s a ritzy(?) place where souls of the damned literally become demons and then get purged. I THINK. I THINK, that’s what the writer’s were going for here. TBH, it feels like they’re skipping ahead and thinking of the show as a finished, fully realized product with developed characters and plots already, and not an introduction to a series/standalone piece.

If I didn’t have some inkling or the lore prior to watching it, I wouldn’t have known that the demons sans-Charlie were once human. Angel says in passing in the car that he’s already dead, but really references to the fact that they were once human are rare.

Now I’m a simple woman - I ain’t picky with mah demonology - But, call me crazy, when I think Hell I don’t think of the people who end up there turning into demons, I think of people going there to be tortured. That’s the hell I’m used to seeing and is prevelant in like every religion that has a hell. Taking a spin on that and making demons the souls of sinners trapped in hell? A-okay, but I NEED MORE. Instead of talking in a car or spending time on this lolsofuny demon turf war, we really needed more time given to the fact that Vaggie, Angel, and others were once human. No, I don’t want a full flashback, but it would give us a better grasp of the mechanics of sin in this world if these two characters told a little bit more themselves than just having some lines offhandedly explaining how everything works. 

EX- How to do revamp of a familiar setting right while still leaving certain details vague? One Word: Hadestown. 

Hadestown doesn’t need to give you all the details of it’s setting cause that’s not the point. You don’t need to know if the workers of Hadestown are literally dead, metaphorically dead, or both or where other gods live. Those aren’t the things we need to know for the musical to progress. What we need to know is Hades’ underworld is a mining colony of doom, that Hades buys peoples souls so the workers can never leave, that Persephone and Hades are on the rocks which is messing up the seasons, and that oop! Eurydice had to go back. Between the commonplace to complex knowledge westerners have of Greek mythology and the revamped Prohibition-era setting, all is explained that we the audience need explained.

I have the feeling Hazbin Hotel wanted the same thing: explain what needs to be explained for the currant plot and leave bits and pieces in the dark. It just didn’t really work.

The flow of the narrative was bad.

So apparently on the PizzaPartyPodcast Vivziepop admitted there were things that were moved around or turned out rushed.

Fair enough but even with that excuse can someone please tell me why they thought it was a good idea to start the story after Angel has already been made a patron of the hotel?

Getting to know not only how the world works first and foremost, but who our main character (Charlie) is and what she is doing (the hotel), would be the easiest way to drop us into the action of the story and get the ball rolling. But instead we start off with an intro song that sort of shows us what this world is like but doesn’t explain anything about who or what we’re seeing until the newscasters come in. Angel’s introduced in this time and the build up and execution of this character is poor, rushed, and feels more like writers fudging around with a character they like than giving us, the audience, a proper introduction*.

After that, I’m sorry to say the spots where the story picks up, drifts off, lulls about, or comes around all kind of melt into this big slurry the characters are drowning in, without any real care for telling a story. BUT THIS IS A STORY!!!

This is not a little menagerie of random characters ala the Pastoral Symphony from Fantasia. This is not a collection of little things just for the fun of it to get to to know these people (it does a bad job at getting you to know these guys). This is a three act structure. I can tell where the intro, rising action, climax, and falling action are SUPPOSED to be, but they don’t stand out, don’t do their job, and melt into the fluff in a way that makes the emotional impact we’re supposed to feel null somehow...

The pacing was bad. 

While some scenes go by far too quickly others go on for faaaaaaar too long. These are the bits that don’t surprise me when I hear this pilot was changed around, cut down, or fudged with a bit.

Scenes like this include Charlie’s back and forth with Katie Killjoy before and after her song, Charlie and Vaggie’s fight in the car, Alastor explaining himself to Charlie and Vaggie trying to talk him out of it, ALL of the Ser Pentious/Cherry Bomb terf fight bits.

Oddly, it feels like these parts are trying REALLY hard to get a point across but they end up being more of a hindrance to this otherwise snappy dialogue and supposedly simple set up. This pilot is 20+ minutes, but the bits we need to endear ourselves to our main cast are squandered on what the writers thought was “fun to write” at the time.

Too many characters, even in a 20 minute pilot. 

Instead of getting a good idea of our leads, everyone is treated with the same level of importance or interest in a world that hasn’t even been fully introduced yet.

The truly important supporting characters to Charlie, Vaggie, Angel, and Alastor are Husk, Katie, and Nifty. Katie provides conflict to the first half of Charlie’s story, while Husk and Nifty are hires by Alastor for the hotel; they establish his power over other demons and his influence on the hotel and it’s success. Sir Pentious and Cherry Bomb needed to be cameos. Their characters should be glorified plot contrivances/resolutions, No More. I ain’t gonna care about a cast of billions from the start. We gotta start small first. Not only do we have four mains, we also have a bunch of little guys who need to eat up screen time...except they absolutely don’t need to and should be simple background cameos for now.

Sir Pentious and Cherry Bomb get as much character time as the four mains even though Angel is underdeveloped and Alastor is overdeveloped. When it comes to storytelling - unconventional or otherwise - priorities, is what this pilot needs.

Angel basically does nothing after Alastor is introduced. 

Of all the characters in Hazbin to get left in the dust (lol) and be underdeveloped, Angel Dust would be my last guess. He’s popular with his creator and with the fandom but because of how the pilot is set up, his character falls to the back-burners and is kind of unnecessary: (Charlie uses him as an experiment to see if she can reform a sinner but he doesn’t hold up, so when Alastor comes into play the focus of Charlie’s plan switches almost entirely to Alastor and Angel is unneeded). If this were two episodes of a series; one about Charlie getting to know and trying to “fix” Angel, and another about Alastor coming in and taking over, that’d be fine. But this is a pilot so the plot and character development is kinda crushed in and neither Angel nor his existence amounts to much of anything.

I honestly forgot Angel was even in the latter half of the pilot. The poor demon-spider whore dies on the way to his home planet.

Not to fan-blurb here but I think it’d be more interesting if the conflict in the latter half wasn’t Vaggie trying to warn Charlie away from Alastor but Angel feeling shown up by Alastor and him being the one protesting to Alastor’s take-over of the hotel. It would have given Angel more to do and would cement him as one of our four leads.

Alastor gets a backstory because he is A) not the character I thought they were going for, or B), they’re jumping the gun on him. Alastor is a maddening character in my book because if he’s the character I thought he was supposed to be - our main villain - then they royally messed up a good villain by explaining his story. If he ISN’T the main villain, than color me confused on what he’s supposed to be. 

It goes without saying that a good villain should remain somewhat mysterious throughout the rising action, which is what the pilot is building up to (I think?). Alastor’s personality makes him an absolutely wonderful villain and probably the most outwardly “demon”-like of anyone in Hell. Him being a rogue demon that scares the inhabitants of Hell should be alluded to, not stated.

Vaggie and Angel get passing “we dead” bg but our villain gets a backstory dumped on him? For the standalone pilot this episode is, his backstory doesn’t do anything for the plot. For the rest of the series, this feels like a big waste to reveal this guy’s history over anyone else. The rest of the HH cast are sorta small stereotypes and cliches that the writers want to endear to us because of what they do and what they go through, though since there’s too many of them they end up just being there. Alastor, on the other hand, is where they hit gold and really have a character who oozes personality and the feel of their show...but they kind of taint him by giving him an unneeded (at this point) history.

Big problem with him not only being explained but him outright stating his intentions with the hotel.

Maybe I’m wrong and Alastor is not the bigbadvillain in a cast of villains...in which case I don’t know what the pilot wants us to think of him or where the show’s going with him. Is he a demonic version of Harold Hill who learns to care about ppl and gets redeemed? Maybe that will change with future episodes....

Hazbin is confusing as a person not privy to the franchise/development prior ,and feels disappointing from the pov of someone getting hyped for these characters. As a follower of the project it feels like a let down to the respective characters and plots we’ve been anticipating. While, as newcomer, it’s hard to care about anyone. My sister, who had far less info on the pilot than me, was watching it the whole time going “who are you?” and by the end said “why should I care?” Really good summary from this IMDB review here:

Little harsh but my thoughts exactly.

TL;DR: The writers need to really rethink how to introduce their world to newcomers AND fans alike. -

There’s so much passion in Hazbin Hotel but I feel it’s misaimed and a prime example of why “write/draw what you like and what sounds ‘fun’!!!!” isn’t a good idea for storytelling.

There’s technically a story in Hazbin Hotel, but because of the bad pacing and lackluster approach to world and character development, for the kind of project that it is, it’s not very good. 

-

Again, for the people in the back: if you think I’m a bully because I happen to be harsh with my criticism, sorry but harsh critique isn’t the same thing as bad faith criticism (CinemaSins, NC, Bad Webcomics Wiki) and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t lump me in with those turds because I don’t love every second of this. I may not be the best writer, but storytelling is my passion and I think this dropped the ball. IT DOESN’T MEAN I HATE IT. - Alternatively, if you love Hazbin unconditionally or disagree with me on these things: great! Like what you like as long as everything’s safe, which it is. Stuff is problematic but hey so is everything look at the stuff I like. Also, if you’re one of those people who unironically says “if you like HH than I’m blocking you teehee unfollow me”, you fittingly have a very special seat in hell set up for you. Don’t threaten my friends cause you don’t like something they like. =)

#hazbin hotel critique #vivziepop #hazbin hotel

[teaveetamer]

My Issues With TFioS (and Other Elements of John Green)

Alright I’m just going to preface this with two things.

It’s been about six years since I’ve read the entire thing through, so my points are probably not going to be as detailed or precise as they were when I first read it.

If you enjoyed the book, identify with the fanbase, or like John Green in any capacity... Great! You might want to skip this one. This is definitely not the post for you. I’m going to put all of my more controversial thoughts under the cut so if you don’t want to see them you can just move on.

I brought up the book in that other post because I felt it had relevance to the discussion of “authors using characters as a mouthpiece”, but that’s only a small part of my issue with the book itself. I suppose I could have used a fanfiction example, since there’s more than enough fodder there, but I brought up The Fault in our Stars specifically because I feel comfortable criticizing a book in a way that I don’t feel comfortable criticizing fan works. John Green is a public figure that produced a paid product, made money, and does this professionally, while most fanfic authors are amateurs that provide free entertainment and just do it for fun.

Now with that said, we move on to the meat of the post.

Some Background

Perhaps this is not a little known fact, but I absolutely adore love stories. I don’t have incredibly high standards for them by any means, and in fact I actively enjoy them even when they aren’t the deepest, most thought provoking pieces. Someone got me a copy of Red, White, and Royal Blue for my birthday this year and I read the entire thing cover to cover in a day (and I seriously recommend if you’re looking for a pretty easy read with a lot of gay).

The only thing I love more than love stories? Tragic love stories, of course. If anyone has followed my fanfiction or main blog for any amount of time then you know that I love a little bit of tragedy. Usually with a happy ending, but not always. So when one of my friends shoved (and I mean literally shoved) The Fault in Our Stars  into my hands and billed it as a “tragic but heartwarming love story” I thought it would be perfect for me.

I was sixteen at the time, the target age demographic, and I was always looking for books with smart, well written teen characters. At this point in my life I’d never heard of John Green or his fanbase before. I tell you this because I disliked the book as I read it, but I think John Green and his fanbase are a major factor in why I disliked it so much I’m willing to sit down and write a blog post about it six years later. Granted, that’s not all on the book, but it is a factor.

Needless to say, I was not all that impressed by it. At some points I was downright infuriated, really.

My Issues With the Book

In summary, it feels very meh and overly pretentious. After about two chapters I just wanted to put it down, and the only reason I pushed through is because my friend insisted that it got better. She said it was funny, relatable, and intelligent, but I found it to be none of these things.

The impression I got was that the author, whoever he was, fancied himself terribly clever and he wanted everyone to know it. You know the type, the kinds of people that go around and assure everyone of how smart they are? It feels like it was made for haughty teens to brag about how intelligent they were because they read a “deep” book.  The book itself, despite being a surface level of “witty”, didn’t really have anything to say. In the end it reads like a thirty-something year old man bragging about how smart he is and waxing philosophical about the nature of life (and... Breakfast food..?) and using a fictional teenage girl to do it.

That’s why I brought up the “mouthpiece” thing. I didn’t want to read a book about a thirty-something dressing up his thoughts as a teenage girl. I wanted to read a book about a teenage girl.

Speaking of Hazel Grace… I don’t know if this is a common experience, but can anyone else tell when a man writes a female character? I find that I usually can. Men have a particular voice when they write, and especially when they write women. Every single page hammered me over the head with the fact that this was a man who was trying (and, in my opinion, failing miserably) to write a relatable teenage girl. And, in my opinion, he parroted a lot of very upsetting, dangerous mentalities for young women.

There were quite a few “I’m not like other girls, and not just because of the cancer!” moments (a mentality that I find wholly problematic coming from other women, let alone a man writing for a woman) that just had me rolling my eyes straight out of their sockets. She doesn’t care about shoes, see! She reads books! Isn’t that awesome and unique? Because, apparently, women are not allowed to do both.

These problematic mentalities extend into the book’s romance plot, too. Augustus is, frankly, one of the creepiest motherfuckers I’ve ever had the displeasure to read about. Not only is his aggressive creepiness portrayed as romantic, but Hazel reacts exactly how men wish women would react to their advances. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of the book in front of me so you won’t get much in the way of direct quotes, but some examples include:

He stares at her, completely unblinking, for the duration of their cancer kids support group meeting… before they’ve even so much as spoken a word to each other. Which also features this gem of a quote: "A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well." which just perpetuates the disgusting misconception that women are okay with being creeped on as long as a guy is attractive. Spoiler alert: We fucking aren’t.

He repeatedly refers to Hazel as “Hazel Grace”, despite her introducing herself as “Hazel” and asking him to just call her “Hazel”. And not only does he ask for her full name, he demands she give it to him. This rings all kinds of alarm bells for me, because you know who else does that kind of shit? Christian Grey. And it’s manipulative, disrespectful, and downright rude. It is essentially saying “I hear your desires, but I would prefer to address you how I want to address you, not how you would like to be addressed, because my ego is more important than your comfort”.

Hazel is perfectly fine with getting into a complete stranger’s car and spending time at his house mere minutes after meeting with him and after all of the questionable shit he just pulled.

Continuing this book’s litany of problems with women, let’s talk about Isaac’s (ex)girlfriend. The book treats their breakup as this massive betrayal, then even goes on to justify vandalizing her property because of it.

I’m sorry, but no.

You, as an autonomous human being, have the right to end a relationship with someone else whenever, wherever, and for whatever reasons you designate, regardless of previously expressed emotions or promises. How and when she did it was not the most ideal, but she’s an emotionally immature teenager, and there’s never going to be a good time to do something like this. What was she supposed to do, keep pity dating him because she felt sorry for him? Wait until someone invented technology to cure blindness? Assuming she did actually break up with him because of his disability… Are her reasons shitty? Sure. But she’s allowed to have them.

And you know what? He’s allowed to be mad about it. His anger might be completely understandable, if not totally justified. But you know what else? That does not give him the right to take revenge on her by vandalizing her property.

I would have no problem with this scene if it were honest about what it was: a bunch of teenagers with under-developed frontal lobes that are angry and feeling vindictive. But it’s not that. It’s depicted as not only completely justified, but heroic. I’m sorry, no. You are never heroic for harassing another human being.

And Augustus’s dumb little speech to her mom is such garbage. You really expect me to believe that a grown woman was so pwned by some jerk teenager’s super witty justification for destroying her property that she just went inside and, idk, watched TV? Didn’t call the police to report the crime that he and his friends were actively committing against her? Bullshit.

Speaking of bullshit, that scene is pretty egregious, but that doesn’t even begin to cover my issues with this book’s pretentious dialogue. If you told me that they ran every word in this book through Thesaurus.com then I would believe you without hesitation. The one hook, the draw, the thing that kept me reading was supposed to be the relatable characters, but they just aren’t relatable. They’re not realistic in the slightest. Seriously, go read any line of this book out loud and tell me how ridiculous you feel. I kept expecting Augustus to pull off his skinsuit and reveal that he was secretly a robot trying to imitate human speech the entire time.

I’m not sure how far I can go into this point without giving you direct quotes, but half the stuff that comes out of these characters mouths is pseudo-intellectual nonsense. “Put the killing thing between your teeth so it can’t kill you”?

It’s not a metaphor.

Putting an unlit cigarette in your mouth is still stupid. I guess it won’t give you lung cancer, but really? It’s still not a great idea.

Augustus has to go buy these cigarettes, which means he’s actively going out and giving money to an industry that has been funding pseudoscience and suppressing health initiatives that would prevent people from suffering what he did (i.e. fucking cancer).

Here’s a clue: Tobacco companies don’t actually care about what you do with the cigarettes. Their transaction stops as soon as you put the money in their hands. I could purchase a hundred packs and throw them in the garbage, and the only thing they know is that they got about $600 from me. Way to “stick it to the man”, asshole. You’re not clever.

With the exception of the Isaac’s-girlfriend thing, all of that is in chapters 1-4, by the way. This book turned me off so thoroughly that early.

So by the time the Amsterdam trip rolled around I was already not enjoying this book, but then this thing happened and it was just the final nail in the coffin for me. You probably know what I’m talking about already, but if you don’t… The Anne Frank Museum kiss.

I honestly cannot even articulate how incredibly tasteless and disrespectful I find the entire thing, and not only does that happen, but it’s followed by an r/ThatHappened “and then everybody stood up and clapped!” Seriously?

There are smarter, more well-versed people than me that have covered this topic, so I’ll leave the analysis for why that’s all kinds of wrong to them.

Those are really my big gripes, though there’s a few smaller ones (like Augustus throwing a pre-funeral like are you a psychopath? Why would you put the people you love through that???) that I’m not going to touch on because they weren’t all that instrumental in putting me off. Instead I’ll move on to the external factors.

The Fanbase

So I finished the book, a little miffed at having just wasted my time, and immediately told my friend that I didn’t like it much, and that I would be returning her copy the next day. Feeling pretty meh-to-slightly-negative about it, but whatever, it happens.

I was essentially met with “wow I can’t believe you didn’t get it.” and “Oh well maybe you’ll finally understand how deep it is when you’re older” from my friend. Which is really just one step away from the wow can’t you read?! BS that I’ve been seeing more and more frequently these days. So immediately I was pissed. All that aside, I was sixteen, the target age demographic? If I didn’t ‘get it’ then John Green was doing a pretty piss poor job of conveying what it is.

So I went online seeking something. Either validation that I wasn’t wrong and that I didn’t miss the point, the book just wasn’t great, or an explanation of what this it was that I’d missed. And let me tell you... Spotting a negative opinion of this book was like looking for a unicorn. There were a few, and many of them were met with the same kind of thing I had experienced. Vitriol, insistence that they were stupid or that they didn’t get it (again, with no explanation of what it was), and, apparently, a lot of harassment and threats.

I discovered that John Green’s target audience had a tendency to be… A bit obsessive. Lots of young, impressionable teenagers that were willing to jump on an opposing opinion with zealous outrage. If I had any interest in pursuing any of John Green’s other works or John Green as an internet personality any further, then it died in that moment. Absolutely nothing turns me off like a rabid, spiteful fanbase.

Now by this point I was already in the rabbit hole, and I began encountering a lot of criticisms of John Green and the things he’s said and done in the past. I did not like what I found.

John Green Himself

To be extremely blunt, the guy put such a bad taste in my mouth that it retroactively soured my opinion of The Fault in Our Stars even more. Since this is a post about my opinions on the book, I’m only going to be discussing things that affected my view at the time I read it. These are all things that happened six years ago, and I have no idea what this man has been up to or what he’s said about any of these topics since.

Let’s just get this out of the way… John Green writes the same book over and over. There’s always a quirky, nerdy white boy that is invariably cisgendered, and almost always straight. He is always an outcast with only a few friends, though apparently never directly bullied. He always meets an edgy girl that he falls in love with the idea of. Usually there is a road trip somewhere in there too.

The Fault in our Stars admittedly doesn’t follow the exact same framework, but it’s close enough in a lot of ways. Instead of the Quirky, Too-Smart-For-His-Own-Good cisboi being the PoV character, it’s the love interest (Hazel also fits this description, albeit a female version). Hazel and Augustus are both still outcasts. Hazel is attracted to Augustus because he’s Deep and Edgy and A Little Larger Than Life. The road trip is a flight to Amsterdam.

Looking at the man... Yeah the entire premise starts to come off as some weird self-insert fanfiction. I can feel the “I was a quirky, bullied teen and I wish this is how my high school life had been!” energy coming through absolutely every pore and every molecule of ink. Every character reads like John Green. John Green has written book after book and the main character always appears to be John Green in a slightly different teenage skinsuit.

And that’s fine, I guess. A little lazy, but I guess it’s working for him since he’s making hella bank? It’s certainly not enough to put me off the guy, just not something I’m interested in reading, and not something I find compelling.

What put me off for good were some of his comments. Dude skeeves me the fuck out. I’ll just go over some of the highlights I found at the time, and why they upset me so much when I heard them.

“Nerd girls are the world's most underutilized romantic resource.”

As a nerdy girl that has been stalked and harassed by men because I’m “good girlfriend material” (aka I like video games and traditionally masculine stuff and I’m pretty! I must be a unicorn!), this statement is disgusting.

I don’t care if it was a joke. I don’t care if he wasn’t being serious. This is the kind of shit that men think is a compliment because they think it makes “quirky” girls feel “unique” and “special”, but that “complement” is also an insult. You know why? Because it makes female interests all about how men perceive their sexual or romantic viability.

John Green’s penchant for writing “special” and “unique” girls (while simultaneously shaming “typical” girls, but I’ll get to that in the next point) and depicting them as the ideal woman just reaffirms my feelings about this quote. I think, on some level, John Green has no idea why this is such a bad take. And that’s not even getting into the fact that he called human beings resources. Women are not objects that exist to be a plot device or for your gratification. Fuck right off with that shit.

“She was incredibly hot, in that popular-girl-with-bleached-teeth-and-anorexia kind of way, which was Colin’s least favourite way of being hot”

This is just one quote of many that shames people with eating disorders and weight problems (on both ends of the spectrum, “too fat” and “too skinny”. Another fun one being: “there’s the weird culturally-constructed definition of hot, which means ‘that individual is malnourished, and has probably had plastic bags inserted into her breasts.’")

Know what this line is? It’s called “negging”, and it’s a popular tactic of incels because it works. You make someone seek your approval by intentionally giving them backhanded compliments to undermine their self esteem. The idea is that the more you insult them, the harder they’ll work to try and impress you. It doesn’t work on everyone, but you know who it does tend to work on? Insecure younger people (usually girls). You know who John Green’s target audience is? Insecure teenage girls.

As for the actual substance of the quote… I hate it. He’s shaming a woman for the choices she makes over her appearance. Which are, fun fact, none of his damn business. Also the idea that “skinny” and “anorexic” somehow need to go hand in hand is just wrong, insulting women for a mental health disorder they have no control over is offensive, and using a serious mental health disorder (did you know that anorexia is the most deadly mental health condition?) as an insult is disgusting.

Coming back to my earlier point about shaming “normal” girls, this quote is just the tip of the iceberg. He repeatedly shames women in his books for looking or behaving “typically”, while quirky girls are lauded as the ideal. Quirky girls are “weird and interesting” and normal girls are “boring”. If this was intended as a compliment, it’s a shitty one. If you have to shame one group to make another feel better, it is not a compliment. You are lowering all women when you pull that shit. You teach them that in order to feel good about themselves another group has to be made to feel worse.

And hey, maybe the pretty girl likes her teeth bleached because it makes her feel confident? Why can’t bleached teeth girl and anime t-shirt girl both be beautiful and unique and confident in their own right? Why is it “powerful” for anime t-shirt girl to wear her nerdy clothes, but scorn-worthy for bleached teeth girl to like bleaching her teeth?

What John Green is doing is simply replacing one ideal (skinny pretty girl) with another (quirky cute girl), and then he pretends like his version is somehow “woke” because it’s not based on physical appearance (though all of the women in his books are also physically attractive. Hmmm. Guess “nerd girls” are only “viable resources” when they aren’t hard to look at?).

And trust me, I’ve been down this path. I’ve been taken in by guys who try to make me feel ~special~ by putting down other women, and it leads to absolutely nothing good. It doesn’t make you feel better. It just makes you feel angry and resentful, and that’s not a place you want to be in. In fact, this was a mentality I had recently escaped from around the time I picked up this book. Seeing someone with as much influence as John Green parroting this specific brand of toxic shit to exactly the audience that would be most likely to feed into it? I was never going to be able to like the guy, sorry.

I know some people are able to “separate the art from the artist”, and I might have been willing to do that had the book actually been good… but it wasn’t. So in the end the book just looked worse for all of the author’s shortcomings.

So yeah, in summary: The book was mediocre at best, the author pushed all of my angry feminist buttons, and elements of the fanbase were annoying, condescending, and spiteful. I didn’t like the book in the first place due to the myriad of problems plaguing it, but everything else just made it look so much worse in hindsight.

Anyways, this probably got kind of ranty, but it was cathartic and I did make this blog to vent about dumb stuff. I think this qualifies.

#Personal stuff #TFioS Opinion Piece #Sorry it took so long #I had a lot to say #A little ranty