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silver-heller · 1 year
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Huh, there's a letter...🔞
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Read my General Carrd or AU Carrd for info on my F/Os and S/Is. All F/Os can be shared!
My Fanfic Writing // Ao3 // Promo // Lackadaisy AU Timeline
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💘BYF💘
NO MINORS PLEASE, THANK YOU! MY NSFW blog is heatedmetalheart.
Please practice reblog karma! If you reblog a game from me, send something in. It's rude otherwise and you'll end up blocked.
I often self ship with villains or morally grey characters. If this makes you uncomfortable, this may not be the blog for you! I also have very little care for canon. I am a part of a system and may talk about this from time to time. This is a system and plural safe blog!
I also have the shittiest memory in the wild west. So I apologize in advance if I leave a reblog in my drafts, start F/Oing a character and forget a mutual of mine already does and isn't comfortable with that (just block my silly ass), reblog or post something twice, use the wrongs words, and you get the picture. Please be polite over this, I genuinely don't find people poking fun at this amusing.
💘DNI💘
Homophobes, transphobes, racists, bigots of any kind, exclusionists, and those who ship adults with minors, or incest (or support people that do). If you hate self diagnosis, you are not welcome here!
This is a safe place for other systems, however, keep in mind you are not the only one who has to take care of their mental health. No, it is not our responsibility to put up with anything your system puts us through. We sympathize with having difficult headmates, and we don't blame others for what their headmates do. However, refusing or failing to deal with problematic members shows this is not the right space for us, and we will block you to protect our system members. Please understand this is for our own safety. A headmate being abusive towards one of my headmates will be taken as seriously as if the host was abusive to myself, period.
And look, I'm gonna be real with you, there's some parts of fandom culture I loathe and will avoid like the plague. This includes;
Drama/discourse/debates
Headcanon/fanon pushing
The idea of "fandom leaders" that know it all.
Huge media predictions/the creator said this! I want to see it, not hear about it. Especially with F/O deaths, which I am sensitive to.
I pretty much block anyone that makes me uncomfy and to keep track of blogs whose information I read, but didn't want to/couldn't follow. Aka, I do so liberally, so don't take it personally.
💘About Me💘
I'm 21, he/him, and this is an 18+ blog. You can call me Nightmares, if you'd like! In my free time I enjoy fanboying, writing, listening to music, reading, playing video games, and watching YouTube videos. My favorite media is movies and anime, but my favorite genre is probably either horror or romance.
My inbox is always open for general chatting, either about your interests or your F/Os or S/Is. Seriously, feel free to hit me up anytime, I'm shy, but I really do like discussing this stuff with you.
If Discord is preferable, just let me know. I'd prefer to have interacted with you a bit first, though.
[Everything is safe to reblog unless I have turned that feature off. Keep in mind older posts may not have had this in mind.]
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willow-of-stars · 3 years
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XKit is actually a life saver, it’s going to make this site bearable for once
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Morality-Focused Frameworks Of Discussion As Acts of Control
This is a post in response to a larger conversation I’ve been having with @eshusplayground. I have a perspective that I think would be really relevant to the conversation but I also don’t want to derail the specific focus of the following posts she’s been making recently.
(Trigger Warning For Abuse Discussion and Brief Mentions of Rape)
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So I’m in the Hellraiser fandom. More specifically, I’m a Pinhead/Kirsty shipper.
For those of you that don’t know, Pinhead is a demonic torturer from hell who’s design is inspired by the BDSM community. Characters who open a magical puzzle box have unknowingly given themselves away to his violent underworld community of eternal torment and depravity. Hellraiser is a film about romantic and sexual horror, and there’s quite a lot in there about abuse and trauma. Kirsty is a traumatized person, and in my personal opinion, very likely a CSA victim.
And I ship these two characters together.
So the subject matter of my particular fandom is extremely intense and niche and complicated to navigate, although YMMV (I have no trouble with this franchise, but I cannot really handle GOT or American Horror Story, for example). After I grew interested in Hellraiser and integrated into it’s fandom, my perspectives about the way we have conversations about villainous characters started to have a major shift.
I often see people have these intense conversations (and arguments) about where a particular character exists on a moral scale, with the subtext (or outright text) that if they tip too far one way or another, they can be rendered unworthy of their own subgroup of fans within their own fandom. People who love those characters or find them shippable are then subject to moral judgements.
So how does one apply such logic to a psychosexual torture demon?
The answer is you can’t.
The frameworks people online use to have these discussions do not make any sense when talking about my fandom. Hellraiser is a dark horror fairytale presenting disturbing, surreal images and behaviors in order to discuss complex and difficult experiences and perspectives. The monsters within it, like Pinhead, are more metaphor than anything.
Now, my follower count is too low and my fandom is too niche for me to really be on the receiving end of a lot of the cruelty that manifests online about the moral validity of the fiction I enjoy. That said, between the anti-kink TERFS and the younger folks involved in purity culture on this site, I can imagine exactly what it would look like. You know what they would look like.
“You’re an Abuse Apologist!”
“You’re an Abuse Fetishist!”
“You’re reinforcing sexism!”
“he’s an irredeemable torturer, you’re probably okay with literal real world rape lmao uwu”
“This is bad kink representation and you’re complicit in the abuse real men do to women because you like this!”
Now, setting aside the fact that the canon lore context of Pinhead involves him having a human soul brainwashed by a monster god to become what he is, and is also in a roundabout sense “redeemed” in canon, I think most people utilizing this kind of framework would assume that I believe Pinhead can be redeemed in the way online Discourse (tm) means it, because that’s how we talk in fandom about the villains we really like.
I do not want to redeem Pinhead. I don’t think he even needs redeeming. I don’t even see value in that conversation at all. Redemption is not a concept that makes sense for what he is, or what he could become as a character. The framework of Pinhead as a Real-World-Equivalent Human Male Abuser who Cannot Be Redeemed From His Actions would inevitably dominate all conversation, regardless of the fact that it is inherently incorrect and detrimental to real, robust literary analysis of the narrative he exists within and how brilliantly it actually interacts with male on female abuse as a subject. By nature of it’s gross oversimplification and misrepresentation, It ruins the potential for greater, more nuanced and complex conversations.
And that’s the thing: my engagement with this particular story and it’s characters has a lot to do with the potential in the narrative to examine how trauma interacts with love, desire and gender politics. Hellraiser has a very unique way of exploring that kind of subject through a storytelling aesthetic that appeals to me (horror/fairytale, gothic romance, etc).
This is about to get personal, so strap the fuck in.
I am the victim of gendered abuse, in that I had an emotionally abusive step father and sexism was absolutely a factor in why that manifested the way it did. I am also a second hand victim of gendered abuse, in that my biological father was a serial stalker and rapist, and other male abusers (or just self-centered family members) caused severe emotional destabilization in my childhood. I grew up viewing adult men as unstable, selfish children. My family endured a lot, and I came to resent the men in my mother’ life for not taking on the role of protector and nurturer when she needed them most. I had discovered the great lie of traditional masculinity: in the face of real crisis, grown men were not protectors. They did not hold together the domestic space. They abused or faltered and abandoned us. This was a repeated pattern among several men in different roles. I was often left picking up all the pieces, taking on roles as a child that these men could not. I had to have strength they did not.
My experience of desire for romantic intimacy with men and men in roles of stable, nurturing authority now inherently involves a jumbled emotional soup of fear, pain, and a deep longing that comes from a place of feminine vulnerability, a desire to be taken care of instead of being the caretaker.
The narrative of Hellraiser pushes a lot of buttons for me. It speaks to my own trauma experiences in a very specific way. In an effort to further that conversation, I’m trying to create a piece of art (a fic) inspired by the deeply personal feelings this film gives me.
For me, Pinhead represents the Jungian shadow masculine, a simultaneous mix of fear and desire, the potential for suffering and pleasure, and everything in between. These experiences are inherently intertwined for me. And Kirsty’s experiences mirror many of my own.
In other words, in order for me to get out of Hellraiser what I get out of Hellraiser, Pinhead has to be exactly what he is, and everything that he is. Which includes monstrosity. Which includes the potential for change. His place in the narrative must fully, truly embody this conversation I need to have with masculinity, which inherently involves painful, scary things.
Anybody demanding that I either denounce my interest in him as morally offensive because he’s a monster in the full sense of the word (and not just the aesthetic one like what is currently trending in Monster Boyfriend fandom), or force a traditional redemption arc upon him as if he were a real life human person who must repent for his real life sins, are essentially saying that I am not allowed to engage with this work of fiction in a way that is transformative for me. And that’s very unfortunate, because honestly, I think my perspective is so much more dynamic and has so much more to offer.
This is not just about basic catharsis. This is not even a power fantasy about emotionally transforming a powerful (white) dude, or “bad boy” fantasies, both standard arguments for villain stanning that feels like it has never truly represented me or the complexity of my experiences and interests. This is a full-on conversation and act of self expression I want to have through art about the experience of fear and trauma when dealing with men as a woman who desires men.
And I don’t think a person has to be traumatized in order to want to engage with this type of fiction. I want to be clear that my experience is not a justification for my interest (I do not need to justify myself), it is an example of a perspective that gets erased by the framework of these conversations.
To me, the framework of moral validity for enjoying fictional villains and monsters and whatever you please feels incredibly stifling to the complex, dynamic ideas and analysis that I want to engage in, because I, and many people I know, are consistently pressured to structure their thoughts with this framework as the only acceptable baseline of discussion. This is so ubiquitous that when people I’ve known have tried to engage in ways that diverge from that framework, the responses they get are outright confused or direct the conversation right back to the original framework they tried to avoid. Complex conversation gets steamrolled.
Somewhere in the conversation we were all having about acknowledging and discussing abuse and oppression, and acknowledging troubling patterns in media which reinforce the normalization of abuse and opression, some people decided that there was a very serious moral discussion to be had regarding the mere act of liking things which involve dark subject matter and complex, or even monstrous characters. They now argue that there are very clear cut, simple moral frameworks for A) telling stories and B) enjoying stories, and most importantly, that this moral framework is a valid justification for the social treatment and silencing of certain people.
A framework, by the way, which I think is actually not functionally a framework, because like the toxic American fundamentalist christian groups it’s thinking is structured from, it does not account for the vastly diverse moral landscape within it’s own space. There is no objectively consistent body of knowledge anybody is working from, because morals are derived from the human experience, which is inherently subjective.
Interestingly, no where does this have more of an impact than with marginalized people, and people like me, who want to express something deeper and more meaningful in the conversation about abuse and oppression than what this framework really offers us. To be honest, The more I see this kind of conversation making the rounds, the clearer it becomes that it’s a means of control and power game playing. It’s not about morality, but about how morality can be leveraged in order to silence truly diverse and nuanced perspectives and uphold people’s sense of self-comfort. It is a means of supplanting more convenient and easily digestible understandings of these highly complex subjects that require more intensive, thoughtful engagement, especially when it gets challenging. This kind of rhetoric absolves people of making room for complex and diverse experiences, and reinforces an (at face-value) easy to follow set of moral rules of how we are all allowed to think and feel.
The implication of all of this is that if we all adhere to the One True (alleged) Moral Framework of Fandom Engagement, then we will somehow come out on the other side with all the Good People having a Great Time having Squeaky Clean Fun. And I don’t think I should have to tell you at this point how stifling and disturbing the implications of that kind of mentality really are.
 Quite frankly, I think a lot of us are very tired of constantly speaking on other people’s terms.
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bettsfic · 4 years
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do you know anything about like, the development of the purity rhetoric that now seems to be ubiquitous in fandom and how it got there? i used to be on tumblr in like, 2014 and only recently came back to fandom and i remember everyone being generally kind of cool with things like incest ships and morally grey characters (speaking specifically re the frozen fandom and elsa/anna here lmao) whereas now it seems like the conversation about those things has drastically shifted and i am..puzzled by it
this is what i imagine that experience was like for you:
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according to fanlore, purity culture started in the homestuck fandom which. based on what i know of homestuck, that tracks. however i’ve never been in homestuck so i’m not sure what that transformation was like. all i know is my personal experience with the disk horse. afaik there’s no cohesive timeline of events across fandom, and i lack the time and resources to be able to make one myself. if anyone knows of one, or wants to make one, please let me know.
i do know that purity culture is a movement started by very young teenagers, who were maybe 13-15 in 2014 and are now 18-20. they were 8-10 when ao3 was founded, and therefore seem to have a limited knowledge of fan history, censorship, and critical thinking. i’m hoping that since they’re now entering college, they’ll get some insight and broader social awareness, and this movement will finally die out in the next few years. 
on any other platform, at any other time, their toxic rhetoric would not have gained traction. but here and now, on tunglr dot com where anyone can gain a platform, where mob mentality thrives and inciting an anonymous dogpile is as easy as hitting Post, where the brokenness of this place makes it difficult to control the content you’re exposed to -- it’s the perfect storm. we live in an age of hopelessness. young people grow up with social media as an extension of their identities, tethered to devices that hold all the information in the world. i think it’s fair for them to be afraid of their futures, and i can understand the desire to control the online spaces where they have the most agency, where their voices are the loudest. 
that may explain why, but not how. as in, where did they pick up this mentality at all? @freedom-of-fanfic (whose work is a necessity in understanding the disk horse) connected anti-shipping to TERF rhetoric. i’ve linked the fanlore page because it has all of the links and some of the responses. i honestly do believe that the language surrounding purity culture has its ugly roots in TERFdom. at its core, purity culture -- the policing of female and queer sexuality -- is misogyny. 
when i started writing destiel circa 2014, fandom was as you described. wincest was a juggernaut on par with destiel. teen wolf was full of underage and noncon. a/b/o was on the rise. it seemed like fandom was a genre without restraint -- anything you wrote, if it found the right audience, would be celebrated unabashedly. people who have been following me for a long time know that i was addicted to adderall at the time and pounding out all sorts of manic nonsense. i remember living on the validation of comments (and at the time, there were lots of comments. not so much anymore, but that’s another story). i got critical comments only rarely, and they were the type that i admired -- readers without judgment thinking through the story, reacting to it earnestly. i made some of my best friends because they left long, critical comments on my work. sometimes they didn’t like it, sometimes they did, but ultimately, they were engaged, and that’s what counted.
i remember my first policing-type comment, i think at the start of all the purity nonsense. it was a destiel fic, and someone very angrily told me i should tag my bottom!cas because it was triggering. i’ve thought about that comment a lot over the years. top/bottom discourse is nothing new, but to say that bottom castiel is triggering? that was ridiculous. but then i realized -- there was a writer in fandom at the time i won’t name, who was known for being extremely sensitive (for bottom!cas especially, which they found triggering), and their very dedicated following offered fic that was safe for their fave to read. i have nothing against this person at all. they were not part of the purity discourse, they were up front about their sensitive nature, and as far as i knew (i believe i met them at a con once?) they were very kind. 
but that commenter had been clearly influenced by this person and believed that a specific fictional character receiving anal sex from another specific fictional character was actual, real triggering content, and it was my obligation as a writer to tag for it. which i did, because i felt bad, and i was baffled by that request. at the time, i wanted more than anything to be liked, and conformed wherever i could. if i got such a request now, i would ignore it because it was rudely written and honestly kind of bonkers. i’d happily add a tag for something i may have missed, or even something i’d never considered before, but there’s no reason a person can’t make that request politely. 
this situation isn’t about purity discourse proper (the commenter didn’t tell me not to write the fic, and it had nothing to do with morality), but it’s the earliest example i can think of where the process of policing had occurred: a person of influence on tumblr affected their follower’s thinking, and that follower felt entitled to command another writer to conform to that ideology.
i could be completely wrong about making these connections. maybe that commenter truly believed bottom!cas was a legitimate widespread trauma. they did not say the fic was triggering to them, but that it might be to some other people, in the same way purity police say “think of the CHILDREN” when in fact they don’t give a fuck about children at all. 
after destiel i moved to stucky, which was, at the time, a juggernaut ship where anyone could write anything. this was also the time when the term “cinnamon roll” became incredibly popular, circa 2015. it was a fun and seemingly innocuous meme, but it positioned the ideas of “purity” and “wholesomeness” in sharp relief, and cemented these ideas by beginning to give it a distinct vocabulary. “trash” was pitched as its opposite. stucky is where i first came into contact with “antis.” in destiel, there had been ship wars, sure, but it was of a different flavor than antis. destiel vs wincest wasn’t about morality in 2014. it was about everything but.
in stucky in 2015, however, the disk horse was running rampant. the MCU had a sub-section of fandom called HTP (hydra trash party) in which steve and/or bucky have dubious or nonconsensual relations with various or many members of hydra. this is the first time i remember being aware of morality becoming a cornerstone of shipping. HTP was loathed by purity police. by the time i wrote a stucky bdsm au, i’d accumulated multiple nasty anons, rude comments from entitled readers, and other nonsense that all said the same thing: your filth is not welcome here in our space of purity. go away.
but the release of the force awakens is what really turned the tide. TFA offered three major ships: stormpilot (as it was called at the time, now finnpoe), reylo, and kylux. the fandom that developed around the sequels was firmly divided. franzeska wrote an amazing meta about this phenomenon which gives some insight into the seeds of purity policing. in short, stormpilot should have been the primary pairing of the sequels, but instead many of the badwrong writers from other fandoms (and HTP specifically, which was how i entered the fandom) flocked to the blank slate of kylux. 
it took a long time for the ship to gain traction. a friend told me that kylux had started with angry star wars racists who hated that there was diversity in the sequel trilogy. and i told them no, i was there, there were twelve of us and a cornchip, and all we cared about was the dirty/darkly comedic potential of these two ridiculous villain characters in one of the biggest franchises of all time. it wasn’t that complicated. i don’t mean to dismiss the discussion of race in fandom; i think it’s important to acknowledge that racism, as franzeska describes far better than i can, plays a huge part in fandom, particularly in star wars, and it’s an important and ongoing discussion to be having, especially given what kelly marie tran has gone through, and how it affected (presumably) rose tico’s extremely limited presence in TROS.
the early fics of kylux weren’t particularly taboo. they were post-TFA hurt/comfort mostly, then slowly the bdsm and power dynamics crept in. those of us who wanted to get away from purity discourse had finally found a new home. for a while. 2016 was the golden era of kylux. we were all very happy.
i remember talking to a friend about how there were certain things i couldn’t write in certain ships. being from ye olden days of fandom, she was appalled by this idea, and told me i could write anything for any ship i wanted, wasn’t that was the whole point of transformative works? and i agreed! but i tried to explain, if you post badwrong for a fandom of purity police, you’re going to, at best, get dogpiled in your comments/inbox. at worse they will find you, call your employer, and try to ruin your life. people will tell you to kill yourself. they’ll report your tumblr and try to get your blog shut down. there are real-life, harrowing consequences to writing taboo fic, and many who write fic as a hobby don’t have the emotional energy to field these risks.
around this time, discord became popular, which offered a private space for badwrong writers to congregate. i had started grad school and didn’t have much time to write fic. metoo was happening. tromp got elected. kylux was slowly turning mainstream so a lot of us turned our attention to gradence in fantastic beasts. some went on to hannibal and other fandoms that hadn’t yet caught the attention of purity police (but it was, as it is now, just a matter of time). kylux, i feel, was specifically decimated by a single fan creator, who was like a police chief. they would get wind of someone writing underage or noncon and write a call-out post about them, and that writer/artist would get pitchforked. a few times, my comments or posts got screencapped, and posts were written urging people to stop reading my works because of how heinously immoral i was. this happened to several of my friends too. 
the great tumblr tittyban of 2017 happened, which only added fuel to the fire and further legitimized the purity movement. i shifted hesitantly to the 100 fandom, which seemed small in comparison to supernatural, marvel, and star wars. i thought it was a chill place. i was wrong; it was just as toxic as other fandoms. but i also didn’t care anymore, and i appreciated that i was mostly left alone. more importantly, i found a lot of support from other people who were as tired of the purity as i was, and @the100kinkmeme was reborn. 
the state of things is pretty abysmal. there are some really amazing writers out there writing under multiple sock accounts, keeping their fandom identities shattered so as not to call attention to themselves. as much as i understand why writers do that, and i respect that decision, i also think it’s sad. it deprives readers the chance to read that author’s other works. it limits the sense of community and our ability to make friends. it fractures the future of the genre.
what’s most important to acknowledge is that none of this is happening solely in fandom. i went to a writers’ conference where 2 of 3 panels were about the history of moral policing and censorship in art. it is worth noting that of the 40-ish visiting writers on faculty, only one (1) was a woman of color (jaimaica kincaid). naturally, older rich white people who have spent their life in the arts are all about death of the author, separation of art and artist. they’re on the total opposite side of purity police, and they won’t acknowledge at all that racism and sexism are a problem in the creative world. they don’t have any nuance on the discussion, or modern perspectives in light of metoo or popular culture. 
this went on longer than i anticipated. i neglected to mention YFIP (your fave is problematic) an old blog that started the idea of call-out culture by pulling receipts on celebrities, and how call-out culture led to cancel culture, which also aided in the purity disk horse. i think a lot can be said about how some of this stuff is genuinely good (metoo and holding men accountable for their bullshit) while also being profoundly toxic (punishing criminals via mob mentality, ruining their careers and livelihoods through social media, rather than giving them their due process in court. i understand it -- the judicial system is built by the hands of the very predators we seek to condemn, but still. the jury of the internet is never a fair trial). 
if you want to read more, my tag is tsatp (the sacred and the profane). i’m sure i’ve left out a lot, but i can only speak to my experience. i think it would be good if people would share their experience dealing with purity policing, too, so we might get a cohesive timeline in place. feel free to reblog and add your story.
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ok i know you said that reblog didn’t just refer to Rakepick (i’m assuming that’s who you meant by “her” but correct me if not) but i don’t really see how it could refer to her character in the first place?? if you could elaborate that’d be great cos i feel like it’s flying right over my head lmao
Happy to! As I might have predicted, I did get several messages about the post I reblogged so now I’ll try to clarify my feelings on this, as I know it’s been a touchy subject in the past. (This ended up being quite long, so...) @dat-silvers-girl and @heleneplays I thought you might find this interesting.
The original post was talking about shipping and the difference between enjoying character dynamics and actually projecting onto characters to see the relationship style you would want in your own life. I feel like both of these things can happen and that’s okay, but the point was that shipping two characters doesn’t mean you condone any implications that such a relationship would have in real life. Enemies to Lovers is a great example. 
In regards to fiction, I took that mindset a step further and talked about characters in general, notably villains. The same way we shouldn’t assume that people like a certain ship because they want a relationship like that in their own life, I don’t think it says anything about a person if a villain is their favorite character. Very often, villains are the most interesting or fleshed out. They have a unique relationship with the story itself as they are often the driving force or representative of its message. You could say that Harry Potter is a story about love and family...and Voldemort exists as someone who cannot comprehend either, to demonstrate their importance. Anyway, the point is that there’s nothing wrong with liking a villainous character. 
When I was growing up, it didn’t seem like this was a contested idea. It was actually common, particularly for villains who were seen as “cool” and many of them were. You’ll find few people who don’t agree that Darth Vader or Darth Maul look cool. However, in recent years, I’ve noticed that purity culture has spread to the point where liking a villain is considered questionable. It no longer seems to be enough, necessarily, that one is merely enjoying the villain as a character. Just like the idea of shipping two characters now means one must condone that kind of relationship in real life, sometimes it seems as though liking a villain is now tantamount to condoning their actions. 
Then again, there are people who feel sympathy for villains and attempt to justify their actions. Sometimes it’s due to a personal attraction. It’s a meme that people get horny for villains, and there’s probably some overlap there with folks who lean toward the “projection” style of shipping I talked about earlier, but never mind that. Other times, this sympathy can overlap with seeing potential in the character. There is a fine line, of course, between rooting for a redemption for the villain and arguing that they did nothing wrong in the first place, but these days it seems as though rooting for a redemption for the “wrong” kind of villain is something people take as an insult. (Severus Snape comes to mind.) Alternatively, people also seem to take it as an insult if you don’t believe the “right” kind of character deserves redemption. (This happens a lot with Princess Azula.)
Now all that being said, there is absolutely nothing wrong with hating a villain and just wanting them to go to hell and die. Like, that makes perfect sense. There are villains out there that we love to hate, characters who are so despicable that most people would agree they deserve a slow and painful death. Joffrey Baratheon is a great example. (Actually, a lot of Game of Thrones characters would apply here...) If a villain inspires true loathing from you, then paradoxically that also means they’re great, because they’ve been written in such a way that you as an audience can feel the evil. But this can become complicated if they overlap such despicable villains with the ones who have potential to be more interesting. It becomes complicated because of the aforementioned binary that now seems to be prevalent. The idea that everything one likes in fiction reflects what they believe should go on in real life.
Which brings us to Rakepick. 
Wow, we finally got here. I appreciate your patience. Rakepick is that character who has overlap. Whether we like it or not, she was presented as an ally for two years of the game’s story, before her betrayal. She spent a lot of quality time with MC and the other apprentices. We got to know her. It is not at all surprising, I don’t believe, that some of us see that “potential” to be more in Patricia Rakepick. But on the other hand, she sure has gone above and beyond in the effort to be one of those villains you just hate, given what she’s done. Having been part of this discourse, I think what’s going on is that the players who still feel a connection to Rakepick feel attacked by the players who ruthlessly condemn her. The players who condemn her feel insulted by the idea that players still like her after the terrible crimes she’s committed, after what she did to Rowan. No one is wrong here. Rakepick is a fascinating character who’s done unspeakable things. We do not need to fight about her. 
Everyone has different opinions about characters for different reasons. I have villains that I simply love because I see something more in them, or because I just think they’re cool. I also have villains for whom I feel the same contempt people have for Rakepick. Villains who I cannot stand and it makes me cringe to see their actions justified or considered - Cersei Lannister comes to mind. Likewise, there are just as many heroic characters that I love and adore, and some others that I find problematic. Others still that I flat out despise because of what they’ve done, villain or no villain, like Nozomi from SMT. Albus Dumbledore is probably the character I hate the most in fiction, even though he’s one of the good guys. I’m “Anti-Dumbledore” but when it comes to Rakepick, I don’t even like to use the term “Antis” because when a character is unquestionably a villain...isn’t it the default setting to hate them and root against them? 
Here’s the main thing. They’re fictional characters, first and foremost. They aren’t real, so it’s not like they know if we’re defending or condemning them. All of us are part of fandom to enjoy their story and share our enjoyment with each other. I feel like that should come before anything else. No matter if Rakepick is one of those villains you find “cool,” no matter if you love to hate her with how evil she is, no matter if you see more to her and wish she wasn’t considered a villain...or even if, like most of the HPHM fandom, you simply can’t stand her and root for a shallow grave...all of us have these opinions because we like HPHM. That matters more than our specific opinions about characters. Even villains. Even ones who have crossed as many lines as Rakepick.
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pelopides · 3 years
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12, 27, 34, and 35? 🥺
this emoji always gets me!!
12. Tell us about a WIP you’re excited about.
things we lost in the fire. see. originally, fire in the sky was supposed to have been a flashback in that fic showing the sheldon brother that was going to be the bait and switch villain of the fic (the real villain is ptsd and social warfare!) 
and then.... it. ended up being the underpinnings of the entire born to run universe and.... now this thing just grows stronger every ding dong day and i’m excited for it esp bc angela and dallas Do Not Get Along in it, pony’s ptsd is really bad, and i apparently don’t ever want the curtises to have a nice, normal thanksgiving while pony is in college.
27. What’s the nicest comment you’ve ever received? oops i forgot this and the answer is I LOVE THEM ALL THANK YOU
34. Copy and paste an excerpt you’re particularly fond of.
i really love this entire part of this is my body and soul here so here’s a bit of it. the possession horror of it all finally comes out in an uncontrollable way: 
Ponyboy's mouth moves, but no words come out.
Two-Bit decides not to speak again as he finishes, the rags going into the trashcan when he's done. He gnaws at his thumb in nervousness; he wanted to take Ponyboy's shirt off, but with the way he is at the moment, it seems like a bad idea.
Instead, he grasps Ponyboy by the shoulder, leads him to his room. Carefully, he sits Ponyboy on the bed. He looks pale beneath the light, fingers still clutching at his thighs. Two-Bit grasps a blanket, and loops it over Ponyboy's shoulders.
"Can you lay down, Pony?"
Ponyboy's eyes rove, land on him. He blinks for the first time, and a vague sneer shows on his face. It looks odd on his face; he can't really think of a time that he's such an expression on Ponyboy's face. "Two. Twos, two." The words come out strangely, half distorted in a static like way that makes even the hair on his sideburns raise. "Twos."
"That's me, kid," Two-Bit says, trying to roll with it. "Ol' Two-Bit."
A laugh tumbles out of Ponyboy's mouth that sounds grating and harsh, hysterical and altogether otherworldly. He laughs, intertwining, Two, twos. In his gut, Two-Bit feels sick as he watches, listens to him. The sneer on his face feels so familiar, so taunting and so like—
"Pony—" Two-Bit reaches out to seize his wrist, and the contact is the wrong thing to do. Immediately, he gets flashes of lights popping, a tasted of searing rage, and blood seeping into the back of his mouth. At the same time, before he can process it all, Ponyboy seizes up, his arm flinging back and he lands a sucker punch on Two-Bit's mouth.
35. Ramble about any fic-related thing you want!
hello here’s a bunch of thoughts
really hoping for an end to purity culture in fandom soon because i think while some things like fandom racism should be talked about, it gets wildly out of hand fast and people policing others on what they do and do not like just isn’t always the move, esp bc no one really knows exact motivations of people producing what they want -- and acting like we all have to be wholesome biddies is tiring. sometimes the fucked up ness is the point! 
 i really enjoy the verbiage of “my [canon character]” it’s really Good
going from disliking a fic genre to begrudgingly thinking it’s interesting to being all for it made 2020 really fucking interesting with everything in the aboverses i have now. picking and choosing what does and doesn’t work matters in terms of enjoyment.
every time someone says they’ve read fic for an anne rice fandom on here, i have a mini heart attack in terror even tho i wish i could read any of it lmfao. 
ao3 needs a way to properly designate background ships and they also need a queue for weirdos like me who are twenty chapters ahead and just want to shove it all in there and not think about manually posting!!!! 
i also really think you should curate your fandom experience. blocking is good. not engaging in discourse is good. laughing in the face of dumb shit is good. talking to five people and dipping is good. 
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tonyglowheart · 3 years
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This entire thing is a rant, feel free to ignore it, but I saw your post about how destiel fans can’t win in this context, and yeah. So have some rambles.
I’ve been thinking about the fact we (current spn/destiel fans) can’t win all night... I’ve seen so many people talking about how homophobic it is - and while I would very much like to argue, as every point I’ve seen made by a non-spn fan has been wrong so far, if I did everyone inside the fandom would agree and everyone outside would either call me straight or pity me for believing it’s okay.
(Cas wasn’t even sent to hell lmao. He was sent to angel death (the empty), a place he has escaped in the past. Other points, like that meta about spn has been predicting exactly this for months, that Dean ended up sobbing on the floor because he was so upset, like that death means next to nothing on spn, like that there is two episodes left, etc etc. you feel me right? I just don’t want to post wank to other spn blogs atm, we’re getting enough frustration as it is, no need to add to it.
It’s also worth pointing out that the bar is very, very low. Spn is a prominent TV show - not a Netflix show, or indie, or whatever - and it just said “main character in gay love saved the world”. [insert gif of ghostfacers dude saying that gay love can pierce through the veil of death and save the day here]
I just saw someone saying that spn having Naomi try to brainwash Cas out of loving dean makes spn homophobic (it is a conversion therapy parallel). My first response to that is that Naomi was the villain lmao? I guess we can’t write villains doing anything homophobic because having villains do homophobic things makes, uh - checks notes - villains look homophobic, and clearly we can’t have that.
There certainly are legitimate things to criticise spn about, but this isn’t it lol.
Also now some people are unironically trying to cancel Jensen because “his acting was homophobic, and so he’s clearly homophobic”, nevermind that he’s an actor and his character struggles with understanding his emotions (which I think he played excellently, myself. That scene had a very Dean delayed emotional response), nevermind the support he’s given to us queers in the past. Like. Idek man.
We would have been laughed at if we got no destiel, too.
It would have been worse, had the writers pulled a dumbledore. At this point I also trust the writers not to pull a GoT - they have explicitly criticised that ending in spn’s canon.
Spn’s writers did that by making the main villain of this season, Chuck / God, say GoT had a good ending. To reiterate a previous point I had: villains do bad things because they’re bad. And the bad things they do make them bad. For the people out there not still following, if someone does something in a story and it makes them a villain, that is explicitly telling you the story (and probably the writers) thinks that thing is bad. In this case, Chuck likes to write things for him, and we the audience have been shown and told that is bad.
Apparently thinking a gay confession is good in 2020 makes me straight. Seems unlikely, but whatever. Sorry for the length, I guess I went overboard, I’ve been holding it in lol. Anyway, DESTIEL IS CANON 💚💙 hope you have a good night
Helloo supernatural anon I hope you are living your best life right now. Yeah I’m like..... skeptical and leery myself but having lived through some absolute garbage discourse that is general purity wank, as well as the C/QL greater fandom here and on Twitter I find myself... much more wanting to question the “general wisdom” of things esp in terms of negativity, bc a lot of the time I find.... it’s wrong? Like so wrong. Or at least presents such an incomplete picture of the whole situation and also presents it in such a removed context that words that have meaning and are operationalized in a certain way for a reason, no longer have meaningful usage.
Anyway I don’t... know too much about the specifics of Spn but someone I follow is into it and talks a lot about the Gnostic stuff and that all was very fascinating to me, and I also have been grappling a lot with cultural Christianity bc of cmedia and the way ppl just *clenches fist* unthinkingly or uncritically slap some Christian norms on it and call it a day 😩 help I’m Tired. My thing here being... I actually got tired of the uncritical “superhell”s at some pt bc I am, in fact, incredibly exhausted with cultural Christianity, and because it does seem like, even possibly(?) without the Gnostic stuff it’s different from a “hell” or other Protestant-derived afterlife concept, and also yeah that it wasn’t seeded out of nowhere, it was set up to happen, which then... lends credence to the idea that whatever the current era of Spn is doing, the current showrunners are doing it with purpose.
And idk I just... refuse to believe the concept that ALL of the fans of Spn - esp the ones who have been following it still, or got back into it and are following it currently, are acting under delusion or are fooling themselves into liking it or thinking it’s good or whatever. I personally find that kinda infantilizing and patronizing and playing into issues of dismissing things women and/or other marginalized identities like.
Plus I find the concept that (from what I think I’ve been seeing Spn fans say) that the current era of the show is quite actively grappling with itself, its past, its legacy. to be very interesting and compelling; it hearkens back to like an old lore kind of feeling, of a thing that has grown into a nigh undefeatable monster and realizing that, also realizing that the only way to defeat itself is through grappling with its own nature and transforming and transmuting itself into something else. I personally find that more plausible and compelling than “Supernatural has been actively and continuously queerbaiting for 15 homophobic homophobic years., so right now we’re all very sorry for you because this maybe is no longer queerbaiting but it’s still homophobic and it can never be anything different ever.” I’ve been sort of tangentially aware of Spn thru the years and didn’t we agree, around the time of that in-universe play about Spn and with the lil Destiel shoutout, that Spn has come a ways as far as coming to terms with its fandom and working to treat its fans better? Why the sudden regression into “oh no, Supernatural is and forever will be homophobic and a hate crime”? 🤔 
The rest under a cut bc the ask is already long and then my rambling will get longer-
But yeah I mean..... I get that the legacy of Supernatural has been certifiably Rough, but I think people also forget how different of a time 2005 was? Hell, how different of a time 2015 was, even, prior to, say, Obergefell v. Hodges. Now I’m not saying that to blanket-excuse Supernatural, but like, you look at mainstream shows from the era and... there’s a lot of shit lmao. The fact that Supernatural has existed this long seems to me like.... maybe we CAN look at how it’s developed through the years vs just insisting it is what it was 15, 10, hell, 5 years ago. Especially since, to my knowledge, there’s been showrunner changes? Which seems to me like it would... affect things? I mean honestly, I remember back when I got into Spn for a hot second because of Castiel, I remember watching panel, Q&A, etc vids thru the years, and like... I thought we agreed that... it was the fans who were going a bit far pushing the shipping question like literally ALL the time to the actors, who are not in control of the show and.... like at the time.... that could have had personal implications for them? And yes homophobia bad, and people can still be allies despite that, but again like.... I do feel like - from what I’ve seen - that these guys were NOT ready to deal with a lot of that but they’ve (okay Jensen I’m talking about Jensen here) genuinely grown and learned? Also how many years ago was the essay autograph thing that people keep trotting out, like what year was it in and what year of spn was it, and what were the prevailing opinions on LGBT issues and bisexuality then.
I’ve been seeing some murmurings of identity politicsing surrounding ppl who enjoy Supernatural, and I’m sorry that that’s happening to you, it really fucking sucks and it’s also the dumbest way to “make” or “win” an argument because it shouldn’t ever be a final determiner, just factors to consider when considering what life experiences might have informed someone else’s PoV and views as well as maybe how you can better communicate with them. Instead of it being a “weapon” or “tool” to either dismiss someone or de facto validate an argument.
Also yeah I get it that you don’t want to send discourse to spn blogs bc I imagine you guys ARE actively grappling with all the bs rn and it’s a lot. Even just from like, the stuff I see around, I’m like tired of it. I’m genuinely having more fun with ppl who are having a good time with Supernatural than the ppl who are hating on it, even in this sort of backhanded “oh we’re not clowning YOU we’re clowning the writers and showrunners who think you should be satisfied with this,” when... yeah? the people who HAVE been watching the show and therefore... know what’s up.. DO seem to be? And all this based on *fake gasp* context. And that’s where the backhandedness becomes kind of poisonous to me, because it implies that it IS bad, and that you SHOULDN’T be satisfied, but poor little you are but don’t worry, we’re not making fun of YOU for liking garbage, you’re just the hapless victim who is consuming the garbage bc... idk, whatever reasons ppl are coming up with ig.
idk man it’s 2020. Fandom isn’t activism, performative or otherwise, it’s okay to let people enjoy things even if you think they’re “objectively” bad, and like... I don’t know if people can call something bad when they’re not even working with the whole context and instead are dealing with rumor and reputation. 
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microsuedemouse · 3 years
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hhhhhhhhhhhhhwoof I hate fandom/ship drama
anyway I’ve been thinking about how. there is nothing, inherently wrong,, with being interested in exploring ships (or even non-romantic/non-sexual character dynamics!) that are unhealthy in-universe.
here’s something: there is value in recognising that a ship is unhealthy or toxic or abusive or whichever other descriptor you feel fits best. (I am going to be using ‘unhealthy’ as my umbrella word in this post; obviously it’s an understatement to call an abusive relationship ‘unhealthy’ but it’s still accurate and it encompasses the variety of things I’m talking about.) there is value in taking that as fact and acknowledging such in whatever exploratory work you may choose to create or engage in.
I wanna take a second here to clarify part of what I mean: it is not inherently wrong to enjoy an unhealthy ship, and you are not required to defend a ship as healthy/‘not abusive’ in order to justify your interest in it. this is a very weird result, imo, of purity culture and virtue signalling. when you have a healthy understanding of the difference between fiction and reality, and a recognition of what’s acceptable in reality and what’s compelling in fiction, it’s actually very worth exploring what interests and engages you about Fictional Bad Things.
you know that phenomenon where people love villains? a lot of discourse around purity culture naturally leads to the conclusion: “it is wrong to like villains.” most of us are capable of recognising that this... doesn’t make sense. because obviously, we aren’t - or at least, the great majority of us aren’t - claiming that we would like and support this person in reality, or that we would be entirely comfortable with the deeds they commit if those deeds took place in reality. we’re saying that the character appeals to and compels us for some reason, within fiction. that’s a different thing - and it’s usually a sign of good writing! it’s very worth exploring that experience: what about this villain makes you like them so much? what about them makes them relatable to you, or sympathetic to you, or perhaps even cathartic to you? these kinds of questions can offer both entertainment value and, possibly, some new insights into yourself as a person. those insights might turn out to be interesting and meaningless, or they might provide you with new ways to express yourself, or they might even offer you a new avenue for growth.
(moral purity often also extends to the conclusion ‘you shouldn’t enjoy stories in which the main character suffers, because it’s wrong to enjoy someone’s pain.’ we all know this makes no sense, because that includes most stories. a major reason human beings tell stories is to share in the emotional journey of a protagonist ultimately overcoming great obstacles. but anyway, this is a whole other issue, really.)
what I’m getting at is - the same can apply to ships. there are a few approaches to unhealthy ships, and I wouldn’t go so far as to say they stand on equal moral ground, but there are a variety of ways you might be able to explore them without it making you an inherently evil person, or whatever. it’s also worth noting that while, obviously, I’m expressing here what aligns with my moral position and encouraging you to think similarly - but, I also encourage you to think critically about your own moral positions. decide what is comfortable for you, and what feels right to engage with. it’s fine and it’s normal to draw your own lines in the sand and say, this is where the range of acceptable ends for me. I won’t support or engage with what’s on the other side.
to give a quick overview of some approaches I’m not as comfortable with: sometimes you’ll find a writer/artist/other fan who likes to depict a ship as totally healthy in a way that can only be described as out-of-character. sometimes this seems to be a denial of the actuality of the ship; I don’t like that so much because it’s often a refusal to acknowledge that their canonical behaviour/dynamic is bad. other times this is depicted as a sort of AU; this doesn’t bother me quite as much personally (often depending on what the writer’s overall attitudes seem to be) but it’s also often less interesting to me. in my experience, this is usually very self-indulgent work and has a lot more to do with the writer’s own experiences than with canon itself. which is fair, honestly. sometimes that’s cathartic for the writer and that’s enough - I don’t have to be into it personally to respect it.
another thing that crops up that’s kind of worrisome, imo, is when a writer/artist/etc. depicts the ship as in-character but denies that it’s unhealthy. now, in fairness, if you’re simply reading a fic or looking at a piece of fanart or something, you cannot always tell exactly how the creator thinks the ship actually operates. not everyone is always going to include a disclaimer that says ‘hey I don’t think this is actually Good.’ so try not to immediately ascribe intent to the writer/etc. unless you’ve seen them state outright somewhere: this isn’t abuse, it’s just cute! (or whatever it is they’re seeing.) at that point it is worth being concerned about what this person thinks constitutes a healthy relationship, and if you don’t feel good about supporting their work that’s entirely fair.
HOWEVER. there are also other approaches. two in particular stand out to me that I think are worth discussing. one is simply exploring the possibilities of an unhealthy relationship, with total acknowledgement of its flaws. one unhealthy dynamic that I admittedly find really engaging a lot of the time? ‘these two characters are Very obsessed with each other, and it sure ain’t healthy psychologically, but it’s definitely mutual.’ I love that shit. gimme a couple of unhinged, incredibly codependent pieces of shit, and you have my full attention. particularly if they’re on equal footing - if they’re damaging one another, it’s reciprocal, or at very least they’re both getting exactly what they want out of the relationship. obviously this would not be a dynamic I could support in real life! that’s terrible and I don’t want anyone to go through it! but in fictional characters it can be fascinating to explore. and if the content is going to upset or trigger certain fans: that’s why we use tags and warnings. AO3, where many of us go for a huge amount of our fan content, literally has a whole system in place for precisely this purpose: so we can let each other know what’s inside, and make informed choices about what we want to consume.
the other common approach is the redemption arc. it’s always gonna be up to you which characters you consider redeemable and which ones you don’t - that’s okay. again, it’s your choice what content to engage and what to pass over. but as people we’re traditionally very fond of the redemption arc story, and as fans we love to create the redemption arcs our favourite characters don’t get to live out in canon. because we love something about the character and want to explore them further. like I said earlier, that in itself is worth giving some thought to. sometimes we’ll even end up writing partial redemptions: this character goes from totally reprehensible to kind of appealingly awful. the ship goes from abusive to a much more regular level of fucked up. that can definitely be an interesting story in itself, and it’s okay if you want to explore it.
the main thing is that you always exercise your ability to think critically about what you’re consuming and why you like it - which, honestly, you should be trying to do all of the time, anyway. be clear about what you do and don’t endorse, about what your actual values are, about where you draw the line. (as both an example and a disclaimer, since I know I still have followers from A Certain Fandom where this cropped up a lot before I mostly dipped: one line that I personally draw, and always will, is at ships involving an adult and a literal child. I am not comfortable with exploring this even in the hypothetical space of fan content. it is too objectionable to be compelling.)
go forth. explore your unhealthy ships and shitty favourite characters. experiment and learn why they compel you. write properly-labelled fanfic about them hurting each other and loving it. just remember that everyone has different boundaries, and that fiction and reality are very separate spaces. acknowledge that what you’re enjoying is not inherently right or acceptable in real life just because you enjoy it in a story, and it doesn’t have to be. if you’re a content creator, consider portraying these things in such a way that your audience is well aware of your position on the matter, in order to help them also understand what is and isn’t healthy. be a ruthless writer and a kind person, and you’ll do just fine.
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tumblunni · 5 years
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Hottest and worst take I have ever seen: "asking people to tag their nsfw is denying people's fundamental agency as a human"
????
"Antis don't see children as fully human, they don't give them the choice to make their own decisions"
That's exactly what YOU are doing when you don't tag your shit! This is taking things to a ridiculous extreme where nothing is allowed to be regulated or even goddamn organized like a library because "free will somehow"...
If a thing is tagged nsfw and put away on an nsfw site and a kid clicks on it, then it's not the writer/artist's fault that it happened. There is no way to physically stop children from making mistakes.
But if you post extreme gory porn kink stuff out there in the open in a children's fandom and do nothing to keep it restricted to its target audience and not kids, then HEY YES ITS YOUR FAULT
And if you make this weird attitude of encouraging kids to want to be more adult, encouraging them to look at this stuff, and telling them they are wrong and toxic if they don't like it, then that's predatory and gross.
I feel like this discourse has gone to nonsensical extremes!
People are called horrible prudes who want to ban all non pure content if they just say "don't show child porn to children". And people act like the only solution is to do nothing at all to keep child porn away from children.
And then you have people who act like having any form of kink whatsoever is the same as making child porn, or even just writing "problematic" stuff like sympathising with a villain or whatever. And the solution is to ban everything just like tumblr's stupid attempt that failed entirely at making the site safer and only made it worse for perfectly non-harmful n/s/f/w artists....
AND THEN you have people assuming that all "antis" are like that, thus it's a justification to go back to the first extreme and say no safety precautions whatsoever because all safety precautions are oppressive and everyone who ever asks for them must have the motivation of hating LGBT people or something...
And you also have people jumping to this conclusion about any criticism of any content whatsoever. Someone merely says that a ship dynamic is abusive and you get the screeching "this means you totally support CENSORSHIP and want NOBODY TO CREATE ANY ART EVER AGAIN".
Like sometimes people just mean "because this ship is abusive and is not being aknowledged as abusive by the writer or tagged as darkfic, it could have a negative effect on an audience who's led to believe this is a desirable goal for a relationship". And it's just.. words criticizing it. People are allowed to not like it. Not every "I dislike it" is "it should be censored". The only time anyone should actually be talking about censoring stuff is if it's happening in a mainstream publication not a fandom space. Like there is legit conversation to be had about how the mainstream female-aimed romance genre has a lot of abusive sexist stuff normalized as desirable. If Twilight was actually marketed as some sort of darkfic that's intended to appeal to dark kinks, it wouldn't have been such a big problem.
Basically just.. put things in the right box.
That's my entire "anti" stance.
Put the thing where it's not so easy for kids to see it, give it the same degree of rules and regulations as any other fic that's potentially extreme. It's just like slapping warnings on a game box, yknow? If a kid tries to illegally buy an M-rated game then the makers of the game shouldn't be punished for something they took every measure to prevent. And if a parent buys an M-rated game for their young kid then they're being negligent and the responsibility is all on them. But also it's still messed up that there's a culture in children's friend groups to be all "do the grownup thing you don't like that might traumatise you, to be cool like us". And it's worth looking into whether adults have in any way contributed to this and how we can maybe help kids navigate this stage of their life more safely. Like is it possible that just calling stuff bad and not explaining WHY could be making it seem appealing and harmless? Like the tendancy to be a prude about giving kids proper sex education can lead to them being frustrated and seeking out stuff that's way too extreme for them because they don't know it's too extreme. Especially the complete absence of any education or positivity for LGBT kids in particular, theyre way more vulnerable to falling in with abuser's and manipulators because they don't have a parent to talk to about healthy relationships and puberty frustrations without fearing they'd be ostracized for their sexuality. And also honestly there are sometimes just really irresponsible/stupid/even abusive older siblings who will link young kids to stuff like goatse "as a joke"....
SO YEAH
ITS ALL FUCKIN COMPLICATED
And Tumblr is awful cos every goddamn argument turns into some weird war of two exaggerated extremes that no sane person would actually believe, with the original argument completely forgotten.
I just think that the fact that it's complicated as fuck should mean hey maybe we should help kids with it being complicated as fuck, not go "it's somehow denying kids their personhood to think they need the slightest bit of extra help navigating something even adults find complicated"
Also seriously TAG YOUR SHIT
And if someone is tagging their shit, then they're not part of the problem.
If someone with a super dark kink is tagging their shit, keeping their shit away from kids,and acknowledging that their shit is super dark and potentially traumatizing and giving 100% of all possible warnings, then they're not part of the problem.
Doesn't mean I'm gonna like that stuff, but me personally being squicked out doesn't mean that person is some sort of latent serial murderer just for having weird turn-ons.
If thing is not harming children = not bad
If thing is harming children = remove from children
People who should be in charge of keeping stuff safe from children = adults
If children choose to view a forbidden thing anyway despite all your best efforts = not your fault, you did all you could do
Doesn't prove the evilness of having a kink, or whatever. But also "nobody is allowed to ever criticize anything about kinks" is also wrong. Like.. having a kink isn't wrong but how you keep it tagged can be wrong.
It's very goddamn simple and I wish we could all just agree to it, why is this whole damn discourse SO EXAGGERATED AND RIDICULOUS NOWADAYS
Put the thing in the box for the thing, THATS IT! That should be the beginning and end of the conversation.
Fuckin "putting tags on things is somehow limiting kids's free will", Jesus Christ...
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emperorren · 5 years
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"But they came when the concept of Reylo was already normalized. Not necessarily accepted, but normalized and somewhat understandable even from a mainstream perspective. It hasn’t always been that way. Heck, it was categorically Not Like This in the old days." Can I ask how it was like in the old days, like why it was so strongly hated? And how it became more normalized and acceptable in the mainstream? Was it a gradual process after the initial outrage or just TLJ creating a sea change?
why it was so strongly hated?
eh, I feel like I've talked about this a million times, but TLDR: aversion to female-gaze romantic narratives on the fanbro side (”ewwwww space Twilight??? In MY star war?”), peak sjw discourse on the tumblr antis side (blah blah blah normalizes abuse, blah blah rape analogy, blah blah bad role model for little girls, You’re Erasing Finn So You’re A White Supremacist, etc). The an/ti reylo phenomenon is such a bizarre and complex conflation of bad takes, ubiquitous fandom trends and arbitrary projections that it’s not possible to analyze all the reasons in one single post. 
(Why Reylo in particular, you might want to know? Because the sequel trilogy was hailed as the chance of a lifetime to build a “healthy” and “progressive” fandom from scratch, almost surgically, with no bad ships, no racism, no misogyny, just rainbows and unicorns and unanimous condemnation of them angry white men who are the root of everything wrong with society (real or fictional). Reylo was the nasty virus inexplicably spreading in this artificially created, perfectly sanitized utopia—a whitey white ship built on super heteronormative regressive sexist tropes? a glorification of the loathed combo Woobie Villain + Victimized Female Character Doing Emotional Labour For His Redemption? The horror!!—so it needed to be eradicated. And when it wasn’t met with full blown hatred, it was considered absurd and a long shot and generally just an icky Female Fantasy. The heroine and the villain falling in love? what? how? that literally never happened in the history of all media!)
And how it became more normalized and acceptable in the mainstream? Was it a gradual process after the initial outrage or just TLJ creating a sea change?
Both, I’d say? Part of it was a gradual process—spoilers piled up, awesome meta was produced, encouraging commentary was released, “neutral” fans (redditors, clickbait youtubers etc) started picking up on Reylo theories and recycling them to their followers, anti culture began to be questioned and challenged on a wider scale on tumblr and so on—but it all culminated with TLJ, which radically changed the status quo.
But when I say “normalized, not accepted” I mean that people are starting to get used to it as a concept. Liked or hated, it’s started to become an ordinary and fairly familiar part of fannish culture, if not of pop culture in general. Everyone has seen TLJ at least once, and the fact that Rey and Kylo did, in fact, share a couple of key scenes is… hard to miss, lmao. So we’re slowly moving past “why the hell would you ship something so absurd???” towards “ah, yes, Reylo…” [proceeds to explain why reylo is Okay or Not Okay, but you’re no longer met with genuine incomprehension or aghast horror at the idea that there are people who want these two characters to smooch]
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Text
ya know... i GoT thoughts
This post is my summarized thoughts and feelings on episodes 4, 5 and 6 in season 8. I’m putting it in a read more because... long
In short: -Missandei in e4, why it’s stupid and what should have been done differently -Varys discourse -Cersei -Daenerys -morals? in MY game of thrones? -”magic who” said everyone at HBO -opinions on the end
Me @ game of thrones: Don't ever talk to me or my son ever again
At the end of episode 4 I was having serious flashbacks to Katniss' expression at the end of Catching Fire, and I was violently reminded that even though I did not like some of the things she did I am with Daenerys. And if she burns the entire world, I am with her.
So... episode 4. What a disaster.
I've been thinking of Missandei's death and that it could easily have been something better, something that impacts the last two episodes more than just another emotional blow at Daenerys. (Like Rhaegal was bad enough? Her son died? Why double the pain and take her best friend?) (Rhaegal owns my life and That Scene killed me and I’m not okay)
The plot could have easily been changed so that either Jaime or Brienne or both of them were on that ship with Tyrion, Grey Worm and Missandei. Really, they ended up going to King’s Landing anyway. And then, instead of Missandei, either Tyrion, or Jaime, or Brienne could have been captured and then killed at the end of the episode. Don’t look at me, it’s not like any of them did anything for the plot or the story later. And Tyrion telling Jon to kill Daenerys doesn’t count because it was stupid.
If it were Tyrion, standing chained on the city wall, we'd have Jaime standing next to Daenerys and in front of his sister. We’d have an emotional show down between them, the physical distance and the different sides they’re on can be a metaphor for their love life. OR if it were Jaime who was captured, we'd have a Jaime and Euron confrontation an episode earlier, and a Jaime and Cersei confrrontation, before Jaime dies in front of Tyrion by their sister's hand. Cruel, but hey, so was Missandei’s death. OR if it were Brienne, captured and chained, then Jaime and Cersei would stare into each others eyes all emotionally, and Brienne would die for love, and when Jaime and Cersei would meet in private an episode later, maybe it would be different.
Game of Thrones would have: a very emotional audience, very emotional characters AND an actual reason for Sansa and Arya to leave Winterfell (vengeance).
Game of Thrones would not have: killed off the only major black character, and given the white men another reason to think Daenerys is being "emotional" and therefore somehow unfit for the throne.
Now... Varys. What an idiot.
To understand my point, watch this video where Varys and Littlefinger discuss chaos. Littlefinger claims chaos to be a ladder, and the higher you climb the greater your power, while Varys calls chaos a gaping pit. Varys claims to acting “for the realm,” which is what he says in season 8 when justifying his betrayal. I think he’s afraid. I think that Varys only just noticed that he can’t influence Daenerys like he could all the kings he served before, and he sees chaos in Daenerys’s power, a gaping pit that he thinks will swallow his precious realm. Varys hasn’t realised that his idea of a realm is the wheel Dany wishes to break.
Like, Varys wasn't there when she went through flames, he wasn't there when she freed the slaves or united the khals. He wasn’t there when she locked her dragons underground when they killed a child, he wasn’t with her during her desperate attempts to bring peace.
And when did we forget that not only Unsollied and Dothraki followed Daenerys? She promised a home to those who followed her, warrior or not. She had many families following her ever since her dragons were born, and from all the cities she went through there were people who followed her. For a better world. Where are they when Daenerys goes to Westeros?
Moving on to the major bullshit in episode 5.
Or wait, first some sibling bonding. Jaime and Cersei. I suppose lots of people liked Jaime breaking up with Cersei, but I quite liked the fact that in the end he was at her side (I kinda expected him to stab Cersei the same way Jon stabs Daenerys later, but now I think they probably attempted to not be repetitive). I like that Tyrion helped him be there. Families are important to Westerosi culture. It’s sad that the Lannisers got more heartfelt sibling bonding than the Starks though (Alexa, play the Rains of Castamere).
Things get soupier. Both Cersei and Daenerys have three children that lived, and they’d do anything for them. Then throughout the season, we see Cersei standing around, looking badass, plotting the death of her enemies, all that. But that’s all she does, She’s painted as a villain, when she is only a woman who wants to rule.
Now the bullshit: Cersei is the villain in episodes 4 and 5, and then there’s a seamless change to Daenerys as the villain in episodes 5 and 6. And that’s fucked up. Other posts talk about the sexism (and racism, with Missandei killed for... shock value? tears? fuck knows) in this season better than I could.
The to Cersei’s disappointment nonexistent elephants in the room when discussing my favourite dragon lady is the moral question. The entirety of tumblr fandom likes to have their characters and storytelling labeled neatly as “good” or “irredeemably bad.” It’s one of those things and never both. But Game of Thrones doesn’t work like that, and if you think it does, please, please read the books, or rewatch everything.
Despite that, if you had one (1) functional brain cell, you’d know that Daenerys wouldn’t burn the entire city. She’s never kiiled innocent people on purpose. Why would she start now? But okay, she did that. About half of the other major players would have done the same. Maybe Robert Baratheon wouldn’t, but only because he was the rebel and he needed public opinion of him to be somehwat positive. Renly idk, but Stannis would have. To Margaery it probably wouldn’t occur, but both Littlefinger and Cersei wouldn’t hesitate, just as Cersei didn’t hesitate when blowing up the sept.
Game of Thrones has never been so much about good and evil, it has been about a bunch of people who want things. All of them did morally black things, but suddenly we have Jon, a character who wants to do the “right” thing? Ned Stark died for this kinda mindset. (Not to mention it’s out of character. Jon has always been Ned Stark’s son, but even Jon broke his oaths.)
And hell, that’s why the story works so well. There’s no moral initiative, no “good” or “bad,” and while yeah, the Night King and the Lord of Light drama is pretty dark/light storytelling (not to mention all the comparisons to the real world and climate change), that’s in the background. A subplot.
Because what we care about are the characters, the very real motivations they have, how they deal with life, how they get what they want, the fucking game of thrones. And there’s no good and evil people, there’s people, and you disagree with some of them. Just like Captain America and Ironman disagreed in Civil War, maybe a bit like T’Challa and Killmonger disagreed in Black Panther, and definitely like some people like cats and others like dogs.
(Vanilla vs. Chocolate discourse, anyone?)
Moving on to episode 6.
I cried a lot, and to be honest, I wanted both Jon and Tyrion to be dragon food. But okay, they’re both nice guys, I can deal with them being alive, and after all Jon’s ending with the wildlings is good for him. But.
Jon killing Daenerys is the stupidest thing ever. I get that it’s somehow like some Shakespearean Drama, and Daenerys is the tragic hero, but like??
Sometimes show writers have no idea who they’re writing and it shows. Because Jon loved Ygritte, and he wasn’t able to kill her when they were on opposite sides of a battlefield. And Jon loved Daenerys. ???????
Additionally, I’m not saying I hate all of what they did with the magic and the Lord of Light and the Night King, the Children of the Forest and Azor Ahai lore. But they didn’t do enough of it. There are so many lose threads on the magic in this series, I can’t. And it hurts, because it could have been so beautiful. Those scenes where Daenerys walks through fire and doesn’t die, those scenes beyond the wall with the three eyed raven, and the beautiful, majestetic, perfect dragons? They are what I love about A Song of Ice and Fire.
Last but not least, the end. Like, I have many opinions, and I’m not going to attempt to list all of them. Game of Thrones has many strong women characters, and I’d like to give another thought to Yara of House Greyjoy. Both she and Sansa deserved more. I love that Sansa became Queen in the North, but I hate that apparently she planned Daenerys’s downfall by telling Tyrion about Jon’s parents. Why can’t strong ladies be friends?
The end to such a successful story can’t please everyone, so if you feel like it you can join me and my son, Drogon, in a pile of blankets where we pretend GoT ended with episode 3 and it was simply too dark to see what exactly happened. Did Melisandre bring Viserion back from the dead? Did Bran do some cool magic? Did Missandei marry Grey Worm and sail home to Naath? Guess we’ll never know...
But seriously, the thing with the book was so cheesy and stupid what the fuck?? Can we rename the series to “The Rise and Fall of Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen”?
You know what I missed in season 8? The Stark siblings. They interacted like,, 2 times in 6 episodes. They were all finally united again, well, those who didn’t die, and then they part ways? Um? No?
@ game of thrones: don’t talk to me or my son, Drogon, ever again. You know what you did.
And I'm salty that Daenerys and Sansa aren't best friends. Like, enemies to lovers is fine but what about enemies to friends to lovers -
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mittensmorgul · 6 years
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Bubble Theory
To a certain extent, we all live in our own self-made echo chambers. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. It’s just a reality of being a human being, and not an omniscient deity. Being aware of this simple fact makes life more pleasant all around. But maybe especially in fandom, or on social media in general.
Even if we actively and regularly step across the edge of our own bubbles and peek in at what else is going on in other bubbles, we’re still experiencing that foreign bubble from an outsider perspective, and viewing information and conversations going on there without the context of everything surrounding that conversation.
The only time this causes conflict is when someone fully steps into a different echo chamber where they don't know what's really going on, where they don’t know the history or the etiquette, or the backgrounds and motivations of the people they’re now interacting with, and simply assume the entire awareness and discourse inside that “other bubble” is on a level with their own echo chamber, and react in a manner that everyone in the “invaded” bubble is baffled by, or offended by, or worse.
So I mostly stay out of the bitter discourse, because it’s not my place to tell other people how to feel, without personally understanding WHY they feel that way. That’s just... Not Cool.
I do try to at least keep an eye on other fandom echo chambers, despite spending most of my time in my carefully curated corner of this fandom. Because this IS where I come for “fun and relaxation,” and not to engage in discourse heavier than the pineapple on pizza or “is Cas now a ginger” nonsense or whatever.
The danger is in letting your personal echo chamber inform your understanding or opinion of an entire fandom.
I think that’s at least part of what causes the conflicts between "factions." Whether it be shipping factions, character stan factions, meta factions, or even the different culture and etiquette and conversations happening on twitter versus tumblr. These communities all have their own accepted understanding and mutual etiquette that holds them together within the larger fandom, and by that very nature can lead very quickly to misunderstandings among people outside those particular bubbles, and often what’s perceived by the “invaded bubble residents” as horrifically offensive behavior. Instead of understanding other points of view and other interpretations, and other's motivations for engaging with the show the way they do, it just becomes inter-fandom wank.
And heck... to put a Supernatural meta spin on this, "miscommunication is the worst villain" in real life too.
Here on Tumblr, I often see people who venture into “fandom Twitter” report back about how absolutely, horribly toxic it is over there; and when I have personally ventured into Fandom Twitter, I’ve seen comments about how glad the participants there are not on Tumblr, because gosh Tumblr fandom is a trash fire. I think a lot of this interpretation of “the other fandom bubble” comes directly from this lack of understanding about the different culture, expectations, and etiquette inherent in these two very different social media platforms.
(not even touching on the fact that how “toxic” any of your experiences on ANY social media site is directly informed by the people you choose to follow and interact with, and your experience can become instantly less toxic by not engaging with toxic people in general.)
We all know the way our own echo chamber communicates, but not necessarily how the others do, or even what they talk about on the other side of the bubble. Barging in to another bubble armed with the assumption that we know and understand the discourse you’re bringing with you is bound to fail.
It’s a larger fandom disconnect, just like when certain factions latched on to the vegetable water post and judged all destiel shippers as morons who think cucumbers make you gay, or that wearing a certain type of plaid makes you gay, rather than understanding these as essentially crack posts that we all pointed and laughed at, because they functioned like a meme that validated everything we’ve written about Performing Dean. And everyone INSIDE our bubble knew this, because we’d already HAD the discussion (and it’s conveniently available on all our blogs, in painful detail, for anyone outside the bubble who actually cares to educate themselves on why we’re making crack posts about pie vs cake, or dean in shorts, or whatever). It's that level of disconnect.
Looking at the surface-layer of what crosses the bubble (i.e. the sorts of posts that “go viral” and therefore escape the bubble they were intended for), and making broad general assumptions about the motive, intent, understanding, and personal investment of the person who created that content based on your own experience inside a different bubble is just... ignorant.
I really can’t abide ignorance. Especially when that ignorance is used to directly hurt, insult, offend, or shame other human beings. Also, Not Cool.
And it’s not just over the matter of shipping where these disconnects are happening. It can result from misunderstanding ANYTHING from outside your personal bubble. Because NONE of us have completely shattered our own bubbles, you know? NONE OF US know everything, NONE OF US should even be EXPECTED to know everything, and NONE OF US should EVER barge into a bubble they self-admittedly have very little knowledge of and behave like assholes in someone else’s bubble.
Not everything that conflicts with your experience inside your own bubble is automatically “hate,” or “ignorant,” or “gross.” Everything outside your own bubble is not inherently malicious, or intended to be malicious. Not everyone engages with fandom in general in the same way you might be accustomed to. That does NOT give anyone the right to wander into another bubble where they CLEARLY do not understand the background, context, and the very real human beings on the other end of a tumblr post, and spew shaming vitriolic assumptions all over the place.
This goes for the residents of EVERY fandom bubble.
(I can’t believe we have to have this conversation as ostensible adult citizens of the internet, but here we are. The golden rule still applies, even when you think you know better than the person you’re trying to “educate.” Also: “sorry your feelings were hurt” is not actually an apology.)
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utopianparadoxist · 7 years
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This “Soft Dirk” bullshit being treated as people wanting to soften and Woobify Dirk is hilarious or it would be if it wasn’t heartbreaking
@swamp-wizard @kidgecko that’s p much it i either can’t remember or am blocked by everyone else.
Allow me to clarify the situation with Soft dirks and this whole discourse because a lot of you are profoundly misunderstanding it in your responses and I’m pretty tired of it. 
None of this is about making Dirk “soft” or “cute” and you don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on if you think otherwise. It’s not about weabooifying Dirk and stripping him of all flaws, either. 
Dirk still has severe issues in the “Soft Dirk” reading you’re claiming is about woobifying him. Dirk is still mentally ill, Dirk’s mistakes still hurt people (often WITHOUT his say in the matter which is the critical difference y’all keep ignoring), Dirk is still prone to hyper-isolating and closing himself off in unhealthy ways. 
This isn’t about making Dirk a hot anime boy, either! It has nothing the fuck to do with how pretty he is, the aesthetics of this branch of fanon are thoroughly secondary. I would personally fucking love greasy troll dissasociating Dirk if it’s your flavor, I want every brand of Dirk under the sun. 
Where you lose me is making Dirk malicious and elitist, superior-minded and holding friends to high standards. You lose me there because that Dirk doesn’t fucking exist in the story and he’s a fake lump of bullshit you assembled out of stray pieces of the AR and a couple of Brain Ghost Dirk lines--who is JAKE’S BRAIN, not Dirk himself. 
(You also lose me at the implication Dirk isn’t desperately, irreplaceably in love with Jake and vice versa which is well established and executed in the canon story we all claim to be fans of but w.e, I wouldn’t mind Dirkjohn if fandom at large actually understood and valued Dirkjake for what it is, a ship isn’t the problem here.)
The fucking perfect example of this is someone responding to the asshole STEM Dirk thing by saying Jade wouldn’t have been an asshole about STEM stuff because she would “tutor her friends” instead. You know who tutors his friends in the goddamn story we’re talking about? 
Literally Dirk, is who. 
Dirk, who accepts Jake’s adventurer persona but never even acknowledges Jake thinking he’s dumb except to compliment him all the while giving him length intellectual diatribes he knows Jake will understand. 
Dirk, who practically does a backflip when Jane so much as MENTIONS an apprenticeship even as he talks about how serious and important he’s sure she considers her own craft. 
THIS is what this fandom divide is, and this is why people are pissed about this asshole iteration of Dirk in fanon. It’s so prominent it drowns out the fandom’s ability to perceive Dirk as he ACTUALLY EXISTS IN THE COMIC, and the fact that it’s so pervasive is a problem for mlm people like me whether it’s convenient to your view or not. 
And yeah, you’re all being fucking assholes trying to reduce all of that to just people wanting Dirk to be a Sexy Pure Woobie. That’s not what anyone in this section of the culture is going for, and it’s reductive and boring to imply it is. 
People in your corner have literally called me--an mlm who relates deeply to Dirkjake as a queer narrative and hopes only that other queer mlm teens can find it as empowering as I do myself-- names like this is fucking highschool for trying to point out that maybe this overly harsh interpretation of Dirk isn’t sourced in the canon but in a bunch of hyper-moralizing that self-generated years ago and mixed with a bunch of homophobic sentiment. 
Yes, that is villainizing. Yes, that is homophobia. The implications here are that Dirk is malicious and/or demanding (and thus a more acceptable target for violence and mockery, like with that particular piece of art where Jake likens him to a trash can and symbolically sets him on fire for example). 
The implications here are ALSO that Dirk is disattached enough from his emotions that he would be untouched by being treated cruelly or with mockery anyway. This literally leads to dehumanizing a gay character by removing his emotions and desire for acceptance from his peers, which are oh...just the core elements his entire character arc revolves around. 
Not even to get into how detrimental the whole air is to Dirkjake as one of the canon ships in the comic, or the perception of Hussie’s handling of lgbt relationships at large. 
I’m tagging every single person who’s been contributing to this particular train of discourse. Please for the love of god if you have a retort to this just reblog it or send me an ask. Don’t vague me. Don’t come back with another post out of nowhere that clearly answers sentiments I’ve been spreading but doesn’t give me an opening to respond. 
@ me or something I’m right here and perfectly willing to have a conversation and even if I HAD the follower count to sic on anyone I don’t think anyone is being fundamentally cruel or Problematic here, that just plain old is not where I’m coming from. What on earth do you have to lose? 
Either have a conversation with me about this like I’ve been begging for for months or do me a favor and stop talking over a queer dude about this depiction of queer dudes and mlm ships in fanon. ESPECIALLY if you’re wlw. I have a niche in this fandom too, and I don’t think it’s too much to ask that it be respected.
@swamp-wizard @kidgecko there’s a bunch of other people but I either don’t remember their names right or they have different mains or w.e cause I can’t @ them. Maybe I’m blocked by a few? Who the hell knows.
Wish I knew how to get this to the rest of the people I’ve interacted with about this. Information seems to get around in this circle of fandom so do me a favor and spread it around, I’m interested in hearing from everyone, including the people who have called me a geek. I really don’t care, I just want the conversation around Dirk in this fandom to evolve. 
Hoping to hear from you. I’m going to be reblogging posts from other people in this Dirk movement that will shed additional light on where we’re coming from. Maybe  you will actually read them, I hope? 
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janiedean · 7 years
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marrecarandgi ha risposto al tuo post
“marrecarandgi ha risposto al tuo post “remember when oscar isaac was...”
What are you arguing here? That Finn doesn't face racism or faces less than Poe? It's simply not true. In this fandom and in all others. If you don't believe me, you have Google at your disposal, I can't fit the countless examples here anyway. So, when POC notice racist and specifically anti black tendencies, that a whitepassing (only "Europeans", who "don't see race" claim that Poe is "white for them, not actual critics) character is treated better than a black coc, you probably should try to listen to them instead of playing the victim of the fandom not being nice enough space. Because, honestly, if I had time or desire, I could've explained to you how each and every one of your point is bs.
... have you even read what I wrote? oh good lord I don’t have the patience any more
let’s go over it again
I’m saying people talk about finn less than ****kylo ren**** because people are generally more interested in the antagonist rather than the good side heroes when it comes to star wars. vader is more popular than just about everyone and the dark side generally gets more attention. idg it because I personally don’t care for the dark side but it’s not **racism** per se, it’s how fandom goes. every time. people care more about loki than thor because loki is the kind of tormented antagonist that interests people and thor is the good guy who doesn’t as much, not because loki has black hair and thor is blonde and no one likes blondes.
I’m also saying that people talk less about poe because he has relatively little screentime in comparison to finn and rey. he was in there for twenty minutes total maybe thirty if we stretch it.
I’m not saying finn doesn’t face racism especially from people who are in fandom but don’t write fanfic or do fanart or whatever and I especially mean those assholes who said you couldn’t have a black lead in SW, I’m saying that when it comes to fandom’s treatment of finn vs kylo or vs poe or vs whoever else a lot of the things that people deem problematic are common to every other fandom in existence and to the type of character finn is. the things I hate most about fanon finn’s characterization are the same things I hate about fanon bucky characterizations, and what do they have in common? they’re two people who come from being employed against their will by the villain side of the story who are actually good people and don’t want to fight for that side and who have gone through types of brainwashing to a different degree (finn because he was brought up to be a stormtrooper without identity and bucky because they literally erased it form him) from people who saw them as weapons and not people. it’s a trope. in a lot of fic where they’re in it, they’re characterized as if they need someone to hold their hand every other moment, which I frankly dislike a lot, and it’s the same for a lot of characters coming from that context. in some cases it can be racism, in others it’s just that finn is that type of character and he’s black, but I’ve been in fandom since 2003 and I saw that way of writing abused characters back then. address that if you think it’s an address-able problem, but it happening to finn has more to do with his background than his skin color. then if you’re talking about other things idk because as stated I stopped engaging other than checking the ao3 finnp0e tag after I read that if you shipped it you were objectifying nonwhite people because I ship people for their relationship, but that was the state of the discourse when I noped out.
‘only "Europeans", who "don't see race" claim that Poe is "white for them, not actual critics’ > er, actually most latin-americans I know would argue that poe is *not* a POC and that they don’t even abide to that definition and that people across latin america come in all shades so making the white/poc distinction makes no sense because they don’t think of themselves as such. but okay.
also: idk if you wanna be edgy by putting “don’t see race” in brackets, but I’m gonna tell you a thing: us europeans who *don’t see race* have studied WWII in school for a long time. I studied WWII since I was nine. now, you know what’s the basics of nazi race theory? that races exist and some races are more worthy than others and that you can count how much of a race you are by tracing back your grandparents, so idk if you have one black grandparent and three white ones you’re still considered *impure* same as if you have a jewish grandparent and so on. the drop of blood rule to us sounds like nazi theory 101 and honestly that’s why to a lot of us Europeans just the fact that here on tumblr ‘race’ is used as an actual thing that exist is skin-crawling worthy. what I learned in school is that the human race is just one and then you have different ethnicities within it but that at the bottom if it we’re the same, because if you admit that then saying you’re inherently better than a black person because you’re *different* or another race entirely isn’t that easy anymore. which doesn’t mean we don’t see ethnicity or culture - I’d never say that a chinese person is the same as a french or a south-african or canadian because I know they have different background and different experiences and different ethnicities, but I would not say they’re a different RACE than I am, because to me it would sound like something out of mein kampf. I can’t conceive the prospect that me and a black person are different RACES. we’re both human. then they’re obviously different ethnicity and culture and I see and recognize it. like, can you all stop twisting it like we think everyone is the same and there’s no difference at all? also, here, the moment someone says black people are an inferior race or a race at all, they get labeled FASCIST RACIST 101 STAY AWAY FROM ME. anyway, I do understand that on tumblr the discourse is american so I just scroll by over the use of the term race, but for me your definition is something I could never use. because cultural relativism. and ‘white passing’ for me is just the proof that poc as a term only works in the US and badly at that because why the fuck you need a term to say that some people who aren’t white look white is beyond me when you could just use their damned ethnicities to call them and be done with it, but never mind.
also idk where you gathered that I said poe was white. I said that according to some people it seems that he’s not when he’s shipped with finn but he is when he’s shipped with rey. and that makes no fucking sense. if oscar is a poc and poe is a poc (according to your definition) then both finnp0e and reyp0e are interracial couples. period. you can’t change the meaning of a word or someone’s ethnicity based on who the fuck you ship him with. and that’s a thing that happens in this fandom. period.
‘you probably should try to listen to them instead of playing the victim of the fandom not being nice enough space’ > man, I don’t think you understood my point. I’m not playing victim. I’m in fandom because I want to have fun and not because I want to run a politics campaign. now, I don’t care for fandom being a nice space, even if like, since it’s escapism, I’d like it if it was about fandom and not US politics cropping up everywhere. the point is that some of us are in fandom for shipping. I like finn and poe together. I wanna write finn and poe together. I want to do it best as I can and admittedly the one time I did it and posted it on tumblr I got more notes than I do for.... four fics for my main fandom combined. I had fun. I wrote them the way I saw them. I made sure to write them as IC as I could. I kinda wanna do it again. but the idea of going into a fandom where there’s discourse at every corner makes me want to shoot myself in the head. if people complain about ky*lux getting more traffic now, it’s because there’s less discourse over there for whichever reason you wanna pinpoint (problematic faves? problematic ship so no one judges others?). are there wankers over there? sure thing, but nowhere near as much as a corner of the fandom where every other day you can’t ship anything because it’s somehow -ist. and some of us want to, like, have fun. and produce content. and we don’t. because it’s not fun. and like, you can make it a welcoming space or not, idc because I’m not in it, but if then your discourse makes people run off to ship kylo and hux then don’t complain that you used to have more traffic when the movie was out and everyone was excited about things and the discourse wasn’t a thing. like. I don’t even engage in fandom exactly because I don’t want discourse, so I’m already doing what you’re telling me to. sometimes I rant about it on my blog.... in...... untagged posts like the one you replied to which I didn’t tag EXACTLY BECAUSE I DIDN’T WANT DISCOURSE, so.
‘Because, honestly, if I had time or desire, I could've explained to you how each and every one of your point is bs.’ > yeah, but you didn’t. (always the same thing I hear. ‘I could tell you why you’re wrong but I won’t’) and honestly, given that I’m not gonna touch this fandom properly with a ten foot pole for the foreseeable future, I also can live without it.
anyway, I was just arguing that tfa fandom is unlivable if you’re not here for the discourse (which is true and it’s one’s prerogative since again fandom is escapism or a hobby unless you’re a youtuber or you made a job out of it), that people can and will ship what they want and they should be able to (and if you think this point is bullshit then we don’t have any more to discuss because the moment you tell me that people shouldn’t ship ANYTHING because it’s not morally fine according to you I’m out), that a person can’t fucking be white and not white at the same time (which is just basic logic) and that accusing people of -isms based just on their shipping preferences is bullshit (because rl and fiction aren’t the same thing and most of us know that, and again if you think this is bs you can spare yourself a reply I’m not even gonna bother because it’s a point I can’t really gloss over and we’d have a basic disagreement). idk what you thought I was saying or when I said poe was white (btw whiteness in europe =/= whiteness in the US) or when I said fandom wasn’t racist towards finn or whatever but feel free to put words into my mouth ad libitum, I’m really done.
(and this is still why I’m not touching this fandom ever)
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arielmagicesi · 7 years
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Hi, sorry. So I am new to the st/efvater world, and I've only read one of her books (raven boys), and like I see you posting stuff about her a lot, but only like little bits and pieces, and I feel like I'm missing something and don't understand what's going on cause I'm not really in the fandom; I've just read one book, and don't really know anything about her. I'm sorry, this is rambling mess, but if you could enlighten me a little bit I would appreciate it.
OK I took a while to respond and I’m gonna try to be objective and polite but there isn’t a whole lot of objective politeness in this soul of mine, but I will try.
Maggie St/efvater (I only spell it that way so it doesn’t show up in her tag and annoy people, I’ll just call her Maggie for the rest of this post) is this fairly popular YA author, and she wrote the Wolves of Mercy Falls series, the Scorpio Races, and the Raven Cycle. Her writing is very good (I have some bones to pick about it as a writer but mostly it’s pretty good) and the Raven Cycle in particular has gained a big fandom because it’s an excellent series. I guess you would know cause you’ve read TRB- the concept is unique, it has cool magic stuff, there’s fascinating character concepts, and the teenagers do a lot of realistic teenager stuff like being annoying and cursing and either doing their homework or not, etc. And if I haven’t made it abundantly clear with my posts, a lot of us in the fandom fell in love with the main characters for many reasons, but especially because they represent parts of ourselves that aren’t often represented. Abuse victims who don’t react in a Good Abuse Victim way, poor teenagers who scrape and claw to get out of their shitty towns, mentally ill kids who have ugly unpleasant symptoms, girls who are feminists but whose feminism is a little messy because they grow up in a terrible small town, etc.
Unfortunately, the development of the Raven Cycle fandom online, like the development of ANY goddamn fandom on the accursed Internet, led to some gross pockets of fandom. In the second book, an abusive character called Ka/vinsky shows up, and some heavy subtext suggests that he’s gay and into one of the main characters, Ronan. He’s absolutely awful and monstrous to Ronan and the others, but you know how fandom is, they started shipping it and being like “Ka/vinsky’s just a misunderstood cinnamon roll uwu” and generally being the worst about it. Additionally, some parts of fandom started hating on the two lower-class characters, Adam and Blue, for not always being sweet and nice about the class privilege of all their wealthy friends, and for reacting "badly” to literal abuse and sexism.  so the fandom is a mess, yeah
In the second and third books, also, (spoiler alert I guess? I mean if you follow my blog you can’t avoid knowing this haha) it’s suggested and then made all but direct canon, that Ronan is gay and has a crush on Adam. So, like, everyone shipped it because they’re a great ship and it was pretty obvious it was gonna be made canon in book four.
But Maggie interacts a lot with the fandom online, and obviously the clashing of fandom issues like this with any author would lead to some mess, but the way she treated it was....... terrible. She would make jokes about Ronan being Gansey’s “dog” and things like that. She milked the whole “writing a gay character” thing for all it was worth, and would never really say “hey, Adam and Ronan are a romantic thing” but would hint at it constantly, which, if you don’t know, is agonizing to watch when you’re desperate for any representation of your identity. She eventually said “I realize you guys are used to being baited, so don’t worry, the ‘other kiss’ will be between the people you hope it’ll be between” or something like that. And she would talk about Ronan being gay, but never address whether Adam was bi, and god forbid those words were used in the books. In the fourth book, although they do actually kiss and presumably get together, they don’t talk about it, and they never use the words “gay” or “bisexual.” Her excuse was that she’s writing for a world without labels. Leaving aside that that’s bullshit and a straight* woman doesn’t get to say that when we are out here in a homophobic world and saying our labels out loud is a sign of pride, she actually didn’t write a world without labels. The aforementioned Ka/vinsky is constantly using homophobic slurs to describe Ronan, boys at the private school make homophobic jokes, Adam’s dad makes lowkey homophobic remarks, etc. So labels are OK if they’re nasty and negative and used against you, but you’re never allowed to say who you are out loud.
When she gets called out on this whole mess- or a number of other things**- her response is to block people, tell people “if you are hostile one more time you’ll be blocked,” to reply to private posts by teenagers, to sic her army of clueless fans on young LGBT mentally ill readers, to claim that she’s being bullied and attacked, to make vague posts talking about “callout culture” and how it’s mature to avoid “discourse,” etc. I talked a while back about how I’ve made several fully thought-out posts critiquing her, but when I sent her a polite ask about her next book, she replied linking me to one of my own joke posts about “hating” her, making it clear that she apparently has me down on some sort of list of haters or something. And at least she responded privately, so that her other fans didn’t attack me, which has happened to other younger fans before.
She claims to be an ally, but she only really wants the ally points. She’ll talk your ear off about how brave she is for “writing an on-page queer relationship” as a straight woman, but when actual queer teenagers critique her for the way she writes it, she throws a fit and absolutely refuses to listen. She doesn’t want to do the work.
Additionally, she is writing a follow-up series called “the dreamer trilogy” which she drops constant hints about on her social media. It will center on Ronan (naturally, because she’s admitted Ronan is her self-insert and has butchered his character development for the sake of giving him a life identical to hers and fulfilling her fantasies of driving fast cars 24/7 and being an asshole with no consequences) and she’s making it increasingly obvious that none of the other characters we all fell in love with will feature at all. And basically any plotllines we enjoyed, she scraps (often out of spite?), and any plotlines we hate, she makes sure to write tons about (I’m talking about the magical artifact community. No one cares. We started reading for the house of psychics and Glendower and Gwenllian, not the fucking Greenmantles and their haunted doll babies or whatever).
The fandom obviously responded with like “ooh! more Pynch!” because like, fandoms like ships, but ALSO BECAUSE some of us are goddamn LGBT teenagers who are starving for representation and we want to see that “on page queer relationship” she brags about. And yet, at every opportunity, she makes remarks like, “This won’t be a romance. It won’t be the cuddle trilogy. It won’t have relationship drama, that doesn’t interest me. It won’t be fanservice. It won’t be lovey dovey, it won’t be cute, etc.” No, I don’t want fanservice or drama or the cuddle trilogy. But given her history, when Maggie says shit like that, I get worried, as someone who’s been baited a thousand times before. Doesn’t anyone see how awful it is to dangle representation like this? To say “ooh, look, someone who has the same identity as you? Juuuust kidding I’m not writing about it?” She can’t just say what we want to hear, which is “Adam will be there. I’ll say the word gay. I’ll say the word bisexual. Their relationship will be treated as real as Blue and Gansey’s or as any other relationship I write. Not the main focus of the plot, but THERE.” Because she’s not GOING to do any of those things, because writing actual gay relationships makes her uncomfortable. But she can’t say that or she’ll lose her sales.
And when she says all this bullshit about “I won’t write a romance” she gets so much FUCKING praise from her straight readers who think she’s the sun and fucking stars because their shit brand of feminism thinks all romances are equal and romance is insipid drivel and that a feminist book, apparently, is one token white girl who has a pink switchblade being sort-of in the background of a bunch of rich boys fucking around. I’m not saying I didn’t like that very book and that I don’t love that girl and her switchblade, but Maggie has to actually LEARN and IMPROVE and not go backwards. If she wants all this credit for gay representation, she has to actually write gay representation. And if not, I’m not congratulating her for “not writing relationship drama!!!!” because all that says to me is “yuck, I’m not writing gay stuff.” She says “relationship drama doesn’t interest me” and yet she wrote pages upon pages of Blue’s mother making out with a hit man. Relationship drama sure does seem to interest her. This isn’t her taking a Stand against romance, it’s her finding a way to make homophobia seem cool and progressive.
So yeah. That’s why she pisses me off.
*I know I know, “she’s never said her sexuality! How can you call her straight?” On the off chance she’s bisexual (she’s married to a man with kids), that doesn’t excuse her homophobic bullshit. She’s acting like an asshole straight person so yeah I’m gonna call her straight.
**Here are some other problems she’s been called out for and her bullshit reactions:
-Blue is basically the only female character and has no female friends or anything. Maggie says “well none of them had friends!” OK so why isn’t there another girl in the group? Why is her family the only other women who have page time besides villains and other relatives of main characters?
-Gansey gives Adam a lot of grief for not being fond of Gansey’s wealth, but Adam never makes Gansey apologize for blaming Adam for the abuse he endured? Maggie doesn’t have a comment on this, I don’t think.
-In book four, Ronan and Adam make racist jokes at the expense of the One (1) character of color, Henry Cheng. Maggie didn’t address this outright because “spoilers” but made a post about it saying that it wasn’t meant to be a racist joke, it was a throwback to some random joke from book one, and any good reader would know that.
-Blue isn’t a very intersectional feminist, which is fine, but it’s never really addressed, apparently because “all the characters are damn fools!” Who never get any character development except for Adam whose development essentially consists of “I stopped being prejudiced against the rich!” (and lots of other personal things but still)
Yeah, that’s about all I can think of. This didn’t end up being very neutral but I have class in 10 minutes and yeah this is hella long I just wanted to get it all out. I hope I don’t get shit for this, but you know what, anons? Go ahead, send me stuff saying I’m a nasty bitch and should stay away from fandom for criticizing poor Maggie. I don’t even care.
OH AND THEBROKENBREAKINGSEAS: THANK YOU FOR YOUR QUESTION. I know I answered in a horrifically mean tone but that ISN’T directed towards you, you were just asking! Don’t take my words at face value, I’m super biased. If you’re interested, you can go read Maggie’s blog and Twitter account, or other fans’ essays on this, etc. I’m glad you asked! And thanks for still following me after all this stuff haha. I’m normally... nicer? I think? Thanks again.
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springbender-blog · 7 years
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RULES: Always post the rules. Answer the questions asked, then write 11 new ones. Tag 11 people to answer your questions, as well as the person who tagged you.
I was tagged to do this FMA-centered tag by both @greedoda and @ladywiltshire, thank you soooooooo much!!
I kinda don’t want to do this twice though, so I’m going to take my favorite 5 questions from each of yours and answer those - I hope that’s okay! There are also two questions you both had that were the same so I’ll do those too - a total of 12! You lucky nuggets.
Okay, so, the questions under a read more!.......I WROTE WAY TOO MUCH and there’s a lot of analysis....I got really really carried away. :B
Greedoda’s questions:
1. Which two characters do you think have the best dynamic in the series?
Personally, I have to say I love Ed and Ling’s dynamic? They make a great team and they’re such dorks! The couple of episodes where they’re stuck together in Gluttony’s stomach are two of my favorite episodes. As well as just, how they go from Ling pissing Ed off monumentally (I mean, he does set his “goons” and/or “lackeys” on Ed during their first meeting XD) to being just the closest bros, looking out for each other to the end (which I guess definitely includes Greed as well)! It’s a dynamic I wish we saw more of in the show, if I’m being totally honest. They’re two of my favorite characters, and all of their interactions were hysterical.
2. Would ed like milkshakes?
Actually I think it’s canon that he does!! During the episode where he’s trying to get Scar’s attention by going around and fixing things with alchemy, he’s shown afterwards drinking a milkshake with Al and laughing about how he’s “pretty sure everyone in Central knows his name by now”.
3. Favorite character development?
SCAR’S. OKAY??? SCAR’S. Don’t even get me started, holy shit. We, as the audience, start by thinking of him as just this cold blooded murderer, then we realize he’s Ishvalan, which gives him motive, but we still don’t particularly like him, you know? But that’s only in episode five! 
Throughout the whole show we learn more and more about him, we watch him falter for killing Ed when he throws himself in front of Winry, remembering his own brother doing that for him. We see him bring along Yoki, for apparently no reason at all?? Like, Yoki just runs after him and he could kill him, especially since Yoki caused him trouble! But, he doesn’t? And then May comes along and you can see him accepting her and starting to care about her and listening to her and making sure she’s safe. You see him fight alongside Ed and Al because he HAS to, You see him bring along Marcoh despite all the things Marcoh had done to his people - despite Marcoh begging him to kill him. You see how Winry’s binding of his wound (though not forgiving him) affects him because he doesn’t think he deserves it. You see how his attitude is changed further by Miles, until, by the end, he’s honestly one of Ed and Al’s strongest allies. He rallies a group of Ishvalans to help during the Promised Day. And then joins Miles in trying to reform Amestrian’s view of his culture - HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE SCAR I DON’T EVEN. !!!!???
4. Favorite villain?
Okay, I’m honestly not sure if Greed counts, so other than him, definitely Envy. I just love that good-for-nothing garbage lizard. *shaking head* They’re so complex!! I think a lot of has to do with their attitude - the sarcasm and condescending yet cheery tone of voice they always sport makes them oddly endearing and funny, despite how much a terrible person they are. And then to find out all of this hides tons of insecurities because they’re jealous of humans. They pretend to be so much and so powerful and unstoppable but they feel like the most inferior worm (and they are - literally). I just...yeah I love their character!
5. What fma merch do you want, or wish existed?
I REALLY WANT AN FMA BLANKET. Like, just something simple, like red with the main crest on it, or something. I know they exist! I also really want a poster!
And now for the Lady’s:
1. Do you remember your first time watching or reading Fullmetal Alchemist? What was your first impression? 
I remember the first time I ever saw it (not watched), I was passing my sister on our home computer. I distinctly remember seeing a young girl in pink with a lot of braids and a tiny panda bear making something glow like blue lighting (*choking noises*) and I asked my sister what it was and she said “Fullmetal Alchemist” and I was like “Oh” and brushed it off because she’d talked about it before but I wasn’t interested? (wtf was my problem??). But maybe a few months later my friend watched it and at that point I just had to. The hype was real when I finally started, and the hype was even bigger for Brotherhood. I remember being halfway through 03 and watching the first FMAB opening and just getting chills, I couldn’t wait to get to it, and boy did it live up to my expectations and more from episode one.
2. Tell me about a scene that really touched your or made you realize something about yourself.
My first thought is immediately the episode “Interlude Party”. I mean, I know that episode is pretty much just a summary of what’s happened so far, but the bits in between with Hohenheim talking to Pinako, to baby Trisha, to especially the part with Hohenheim getting overwhelmed by Father, who stands there laughing at the “puny foolish humans” who live only to die, so they may as well use them - and we can see the shadows of the dancing morphing and turning into something...else - followed by Trisha interrupting this train of thought by that’s what makes humans strong. The fact that we die. The fact that we change. And the fact that that’s what makes us so undefeatable, because we don’t give up. And this is followed up later with Envy being jealous of humans, because of this very same reason - our resilience and determination against all the forces against us, including ourselves. 
And I think that that’s so true. And that gives me strength to keep going.
3. Funniest headcanon you’ve ever seen. Go!
Okay this is definitely a tie. The first is the one where huge rumors sprout up about Ed after the Promised Day and everyone bombarding Fuhrer Mustang about all these far fetched things until Mustang finally says something like “Edward Elric is a 30-something-year-old-man living in Resembool teaching his daughter how to make apple pies” or something like that. The other is the one where Ed is in Xingese history books as “the man who fed the emperor a shoe”, for obvious reasons. That’s just. GREAT.
4. What spurred you to join the fandom?
Actually, it was totally on accident! There was a long, long part of me and my tumblr experience that believed FMAB was NOT my favorite anime. And then I started realizing, I posted a lot of it on my blog? Like, instead of random FMAB between the multifandom mash of cringe and zero tagging systems, it started to become FMA that I saw the most of on my dash and blog. And I realized, like someone had flicked me in the face, that wtf, this show is actually so important to me and where would I be without it??? 
5. Have a fandom meltdown here and tell me why you love your fandom or show/comic so much!
AAAHHH everyone here is SO nice and I’ve managed to keep my dash (mostly) discourse free! Everyone is so supportive of each other and have the same passion as I do for this show. There are SO MANY talented artists, including musical artists, which is amazing, and SO MANY funny things and funny memes that come from this fandom. I’m honestly so glad I’m a part of it, even if I don’t contribute much myself other than screeching in my tags!
And here, the two you both asked!!
1. OTPs! Who are they? Edwin is top of the list!! I’ve shipped them all the way from the beginning, and to see them come together in canon - and in such a NERD WAY - I just love them so much. I also ship Lingfan, Almei, and Royai!
2. Favorite opening/ending number and why?
My favorite opening is Opening 3, Golden Time Lover, for a L O T of reasons. The way it goes from the soft melody in the background to the much harsher tones above just convey all my feelings for it, because this opening is both soft, and rough and to me it just perfectly conveys the stories’ struggle, and the journey forward. The elements of the zooming in and out, the sweeping camera angles, and the sudden changes in the action between teasingly slow and choppily fast. There is SO much contrast in this song, and in the animation to match it. Literally, this opening is a masterpiece and thinking about it makes my heart race.
My favorite ending is Ending 2, Let It All Out. GOD THIS SONG. Wow. It just, tears at my heartstrings a little. A lot. First of all the animation is stunning. Secondly, the lyrics are just, amazing. “There’s no need to pretend you’re so strong” and “Let’s turn our pain and tears into stars”??? Jesus christ, how lovely is that?! And how it changes from half screen to full screen with the climax of the chorus. The emphasis on Ling, Lan Fan, and Fu, and  then on May, as well as Ed and Al and Winry. The way it STARTS with Winry. It just symbolizes strength in such a simple way - through the fear of what living has done, what it could do, and still being able to move forward. It’s a very powerful song to me.
OKAY! And since that took me over an hour to answer (I regret nothing and thank you both so much for giving me the opportunity to gush without restraint...) I’m not going to tag anyone or make new questions myself. Frankly, I’m too tired and my imagination is spent. XD 
I hope you all enjoyed reading this! Thanks again! Love you all!
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