#it’s also very funny that someone thinks i’m into purity culture

[luveline]

you watch the bear!!!! that's so cool, i need all ur thoughts now (please, and if you don't want to share that's ok too :D)

I do! apologies my readmore didn't work the first time!

my thoughts are not super organised about it, and just to preface I have no experience working in a kitchen or at a restaurant or anything like that, the closest I’ve come to culinary school was learning the 5 c’s of cooking when I was 12 :O I actually really like the environment being so fast and loud and bitchy, I know it’s not necessarily a healthy one and I’m not saying I want people to actually experience that but I think it is incredibly interesting to get to see that dynamic, watching carmy kind of descend a little bit further each episode into himself, and watching him get punished for pretty much every decision he makes makes for a compelling watch right, kind of like morbid curiosity and a train wreck. I think carmy as a whole is a great character, not in that he’s good but he’s super real, he’s deeply flawed, but he’s also been hurt very badly, and that doesn’t excuse all of the stuff that he does and it doesn’t have to. I think we are approaching a time where people are expected to be very sanitised versions of themselves, where one mistake brands you as a bad person forever in some people’s eyes as kind of a purity culture, and I think it’s being reflected in the TV we watch or maybe protested because the moral ambiguity of characters at least to me seems to be on the rise, nearly every character I’m watching is a bad person in someone’s eyes and as someone who constantly fights extreme feelings of guilt I really like that, seeing people are just as much of a mess as me and seeing them work through it. to me, I think carmy comes across as somebody who ‘fawns’ which is a kind of survival instinct and a way of coping, when he goes to his AA meetings and we hear his monologue (to me this was my favourite bit of the whole show besides seeing tina learn new things) it resonated with me so much I think I watched it three times in a row. I just love him, I love his resolve, I love his spite, I love that he wants to take better care of the poeple around him than he’s actually capable of. And to not stay so heavy, I thought the show was really funny and extremely dynamic(?) in that it didn’t bore your eyes, everything looks interesting. I love when carmy and richie fight, like the hot dog fight, and then again when the health inspector comes. I ALSO love when Sydney and richie fight. I think richie is incredibly dislikable but he creeps up on you anyways, and poor sydney deserves better treatment from just about everyone, the amount of physical and mental labour she is responsible for is insanity. I am so excited for the new season to see where carmys head is, his relationship with sugar, to see if sydney finally gets some of the respect she deserves but also to see if she can relax and actually reach her full potential rather than constantly have to fight to be heard? I would also like though more conversation between her and carmy about the kitchen meltdown episode because I thought there was way more to be said about her fuck up and also her stabbing richie 😭 and carmy being a massive dick lol. I hope this is what you meant when you wanted to hear my thoughts, I’m so sorry if it isn’t

#jade's asks #ily

[winns-stuff]

Hey !I read your "10 pm thoughts" and thought there would be something to add .Ya know it's funny, because when people critique the gender role of women being insanely short/curvey being extremely followed through with in lore olympus, or just the body inclusivity of the characters in general , fans tend to immediately start defending the comic by using athena ,hestia etc as an example, but there's something else that they can't seem to notice, and that's the fact that there is NOT a SINGLULAR ....SIGNIFICANT MALE CHARACTER (comedic one time stand-ins do not count,sorry) that isn't barrel-chested, 8 ft tall with a 600 pack and a jaw line that can cut through the koohinoor diamond,whilst the generally lacking body diversity amongst women can be backed up by a limited number of characters , the diversity for male characters is practically non existent.Where are all the short men? Lanky men?chonky men? Androgynous men? Bearded men?The characters may be gods and therefore expected to fit the "perfect specimen" BUT the artists and sculptors who depicted the gods did portray them differently , Look at apollo ! A queer god(whom rachel also made insanely stereotypically straight ) who's been depicted as feminine/androgynous multiple times!!!! I really wanna see rachel's model sheet reference,because I am CERTAIN she uses the guy from the gigachad meme .

Anyway,Hope life's been treating you well, would like to hear your opinions and take your time while responding:) byyee✌🏻❤

aaaahh!! one of my faves has arrived again <3 but thank you life has been treating me well, I hope it’s the same story for you! I have to agree with you though I hate that there’s no real representation for the guys in this webcomic, I’m tired of them all looking like they hit the gym 24/7 and they’re just copy pastes of each other. I’ve said this before but one thing I absolutely (used to I guess) love about Thanatos was his lanky frame, he stood out so much to me because no one really uses a lot of skinny men or at least the media I consume doesn’t include them at all! but as soon as season 2 came in and they changed him I was so disappointed, I hate that everyone is just fine with the men being changed into a certain way but not the women. can you imagine if someone made Hestia or Athena skinnier and curvier like Persephone?? everyone would be outraged (which is completely understandable cause I would to) but because it’s the guys there isn’t much care for it. after the next season and the seasons after that, all of the mens body types changed and I genuinely felt like it took part of their personality and something that made them so lovable in the first place, they were literally shells of themselves and that upset me greatly. but yeah, we need more representation for all men I’m tired of this weird “the more attractive man has a six pack with a thousand muscles and blah blah blah” because it’s like saying they’re more desirable that way which is a theme for a bunch of characters in this damn comic. but yeah all men are attractive and worthy of being seen so there should be more rep for that. also another thing I’d like to add cause you brought it up briefly is how the fans defend Persephone being short and curvy, a lot of them try and say “short and curvy adults exist” and “i’m short and curvy and I exist” as an argument whenever anyone would critique just how short and over sexualized Persephone was in the early (and still going on now..) seasons and I understand that people like that exist in the world but we’re talking about Rachel making this design so childlike and innocent, “pure” if you will because there’s a bunch of purity culture going on LO, just so she can put that very design that not only resembles a child but acts and thinks like one too in various sexual situations where her boundaries are broken and she’s powerless or not even aware of what’s going on. I feel like the whole thing is really disgusting, mostly because there are times where I see myself in Persephone whether it be mindsets or just casual speaking and interacting and it probably has something to do with her still being 19 which I genuinely believe is barely legal and still scientifically deems you a child, and yet no one bats an eye about it and in fact they encourage it to happen more without any context… the way Rachel decided to make Lore Olympus is more terrifying than what it was supposed to be but there’s never not gonna be a time where I’m not deeply disturbed.

anyways, thank you so much for putting your thoughts I agree with you on everything and I enjoy answering your rants. I hope you enjoyed my take, got a little long there, and I really hope you have a lovely day/night/evening and if you ever want to make more messages and rant you’re completely welcomed to do so <<3

#lo critical #anti lore olympus #anti lo

[honking-up-a-storm]

Love, Sex, Gender

I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships and how my mind works revolving around them. It’s overall confusing and complex and I’m just so frustrated that it is that way. 

Falling in love for me takes a very long time, I really can’t see myself entering a relationship with someone who I don’t know for at least a few years; even then we’d have to be extremely close. Having a partner is something I’ve never actively sought out, when I’m single I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything and hell I almost feel like It’s better riding solo. Though sometimes I fear I’m too independent, yet paradoxically my last two relationships have been extremely co-dependent to a fault. And like, I still experience crushes and like can find celebrities hot or whatever. Like I was really interested in a friend and she was super into me but the soon after we got together it just didn’t feel right, I barely knew anything about her, and she barely knew anything about me it didn’t make sense to me that something like that could happen so fast.

It’s not that I don’t want a partner but I don’t see myself going out of my way to find one either. Idk, It’s like I want it to happen “naturally” in some way, where that line between friends and partners seamlessly transitions. But I feel like that can really fuck me up given that’s a line that should be rather solid. And I’m mad I did attempt to cross that line when I really wasn’t fully sure if it was something I actually wanted. Granted I should have been more open with those feelings but I was really stuck in this state of back and forth where I’d either be frustrated I wasn’t saying how I felt and on the flip side I’d be having days where I was grateful I kept my mouth shut because it wasn’t what I wanted. Even though I did spill in the end, I immediately wanted to take it back because it hit me that it wasn’t what I wanted; of course, I hadda fuck everything up in the process to get to my final conclusion, but I needed that clean break.

Aside from romantic feelings, I’m starting to think I fall somewhere on the ace spectrum sexuality-wise. I haven’t felt attracted to anyone I’ve known in that way since my first boyfriend and even then I don’t think I was all that into him. And I bring this up because like I’m still a virgin and like I'm not sure if it’s just stupid purity culture being bashed into my head, but I would prefer my first time be with someone I really truly love. At the same time, it’s like this idea slams into my head that if I ever do have sex with that “special someone” then the whole relationship from there will be ruined in some way. Which is so strange beacuse I do find sex to be romantic on some level (though if you were to ask a friend they’d say I thought sex was funny as shit for whatever reason which is also true), but yhea to be that close to someone seems really special, how could it possibly ruin things?

I don’t know how to properly explain it, but I think that it could partially be because of my gender identity as well. Like I’m non-binary but I’m leaning on the masc side and most days wish my body was that of a cis man’s. Sometimes I feel like if I was born male I wouldn’t have had this wack-ass mindset. I could just date whoever without thinking, have a body count in the hundreds, whatever. Like shit ik the joke where it's like “Oh bro if you watch the guy in porn that means you're gay” Like no bitch I’m picturing myself as the guy. I always have. Looking back I do find myself being mad at em for not listening to me on how I was talking about my body, what I was thinking about, openly considering things like going on T and getting bottom surgery. Dude always preached about people having different experiences but I guess mine was wrong in some way. I’m already teetering on the rope enough, I don’t need you bouncing on the line. I’m saying it so calmly now but every thought about it recently has been screaming “How dare you tell me how I feel about my body, how dare you of all people, of all fucking people try and tell me what I’m feeling, what I fuckin’ want and don’t want.”  Like yhea physically transitioning is gonna be uncomfortable, the body is being forcefed hormones and going through puberty part 2 now with DLC. I’m not fuckin’ stupid, I know it’s not some magical snap of the fingers (we all wish it was tho). But fuck, the dude was starting T themself, you’d think there'd be more of a “yhea it's uncomfortable but I’m way happier despite that” kind of energy about it, ya know some trans to trans fuckin’ support when I was expressing doubt and hesitation. I’m venting now, sorry, but fuck I think that's when my heart gave up on em despite my head still continuing to be all flip-floppy.

Anywaysssssss. For now I will stick with my Pan-Romantic and Pansexual labels since the way I use it is like “I’ll know it when I see it” kinda deal and like it feels right still, but yhea, I feel like there’s still more things I have to try and figure out about myself about all this. Maybe I’ll try jumping into a relationship kinda spontaneously if the oppurtunity presents itself, see what it’s like for the hell of it.

#Thoughts #romance #sexuality #Do we got any micro lables for this shit? #Pan #panromantic #ace #asexual #questioning #Gender Dysphoria #gender #trans #non-binary #love #vent #pansexual #nonbinary

[ms-demeanor]

Some meandering thoughts about jokes about rape and cultural changes in the last decade and a half

Like, don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad we’re in a place now where we DO question rape jokes and it would be much harder to get away with “raping Jonah Hill is incredibly amusing” as the center of a scene the way that you could in 2007-2013 but I do kind of feel like we don’t talk about how sudden that change was enough.

People talk about how you should have always known that awful things are awful but if you’re surrounded by rape jokes and pedophilia jokes all the time and that’s what’s funny to the other kids around you and the adults in your lives and what makes up the jokes in the movies you watch then it’s hard to act like you always knew it was wrong.

Dead baby jokes were a HUGE thing when I was a teen and in my early twenties and sitting around swapping dead baby jokes was just a thing we did, and tossed in among them were things like:

A joke about incest with the punchline “Get off me pa, you’re crushing my smokes.”

This joke about a pedophile murdering a child.

Let’s not turn this rape into a murder.

And hell, look at the activity graph for “soap on a rope” on urban dictionary:

2014 starts a significant taper.

Letterboxd has their “sexual assault against men played for comedy page” and if you sort by release date there’s a downward trend with 2014 as a really stand-out year for rape jokes about men in popular movies:

2010 - 10

2011 - 12

2012 - 14

2013 - 12

2014 - 18 (jesus, which includes a prison rape joke in “Paddington”)

2015 - 9

2016 - 9

2017 - 11

2018 - 15

2019 - 4

2020 - 1

(this is of course with the caveat that this is only what has been documented so far)

Shock porn sites used to be a thing and they used to be a COMMON thing. A thing that would get remixed and have late night hosts make jokes about them and that got parody music videos.

So on the one hand I was really glad that in 2010 the hacker conference WASN’T asking me to make a rape joke on their tee shirt, but since Pool 2 Girl came up at every single “this is what defcon is about” discussion and some of the guys from the con had printed up “lemonparty.org” stickers to slap up around town it wouldn’t have been *surprising* if they’d been asking for that.

If you were a teenager in 2005 would you have known how much of a dick move goatse-ing people was? We didn’t have the same culture of trigger warnings (not that I disapprove of trigger warnings, they are good and I like them) and there was very much an attitude online at the time of “if you can’t handle it log off.”

I think the fappening was the turning point for a lot of this stuff - I think that was a big cultural moment that changed a lot of people’s attitudes really quickly and I’m seeing echos of that with what Chris Evans is dealing with right now: people are a lot faster to say “oh, that sucks, don���t be an asshole, report people for posting the pics” while I remember sitting and arguing in an imgur thread because there were a bunch of people saying “if you don’t like it don’t take nudes” about the celebrities who got caught in the icloud leak.

People look at Shane Dawson’s (admittedly gross and incredibly inappropriate) behavior with a poster of Willow Smith and act like it’s unprecedented***** but as someone who remembers not only Olsen Eighteenth Birthday countdowns but ALSO the jokes about fucking the Olsen twins that came BEFORE they were legal that’s just bizarre. Seeing people my age and older react to James Gunn’s pedophilic twitter jokes like they’re worse than Jay Leno’s jokes about Michael Jackson (which were made on TV! Across America! On a major network!) is just. It’s bizarre.

I’m glad we are where we are now, I’m glad that making rape jokes in public or jokes about incest or pedophilia (or murder or abortion) is less common and less okay (especially in children’s media, jesus fuck) and more likely to get criticized.

But I’m also pretty sure I’m going to get called a rape apologist by *someone* for saying “2010 was a different time, rape jokes were more common and we didn’t realize how shitty it was” when it really was a different time and rape jokes were more common and most people didn’t realize how shitty it was. I sure didn’t. I do now, and I’m glad I do now. But pretending that we should have ALWAYS known this, pretending that this was NEVER acceptable, pretending that it WASN’T a different time is ignoring the fact that for over a decade there was an entire genre of pedophilic rape jokes (that were frequently also racist) centered around one celebrity and that people told these jokes in public and in pop culture *all the time.*

Does that make it right? Fuck, I don’t know, shit is relative. It was still largely acceptable to electrocute gay kids and people tossed around the word “faggot” pretty freely. Mean Girls is full of jokes about how awful it is for people to think you’re a lesbian and Superbad is full of jokes about getting people shitfaced so they’ll sleep with you (so date rape) and there’s an entire “cute comedy” from the 80s starring Kurt Russel and Goldie Hawn that’s an extended rape-by-fraud joke. I think that as a whole we’re better now as people than we were in 2010 and the 90s and the 80s and the 50s and I don’t think that someone who made a sexist joke in the 80s is irredeemably evil and I don’t think people making rape jokes in the 2010s are rape apologists in 2020 and I wish there was a lot more understanding of both history and nuance in these conversations.

*****to be very, very clear Shane Dawson has been filmed kissing underage fans on the mouth and having explicit sexual conversations with his very young cousin - Dawson has done things that go beyond “inappropriate” and fall clearly into “wrong” “bad” “dangerous” “illegal” etc, which is all the more reason that it’s so strange to see people focusing on him fake masturbating on a poster of Willow Smith. YES doing that was gross but why is it even being compared to the way he’s been filmed interacting with fans? The lack of nuance, making “fake masturbating at a poster” and “creating a sexually abused puppet character” the same as “inappropriately touched and kissed minor fans and engaged a young child in explicit sexual conversations” is NOT GOOD. That is a bad thing. Two of those things are tasteless and two of those things are actively harmful and it’s the actively harmful stuff that we should be focusing on and part of why it’s really weird to see shit like “pizzagate conspiracist accuses James Gunn of making inappropriate jokes” like yes Gunn please don’t but can we maybe refocus and talk about the dude who can be pretty significantly assigned blame for a fucking shooting? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/01/james-gunn-alt-right-marvel-film-director-tweets

Actually, you know what, I thought I was done ranting, I’m not.

It’s purity culture.

YES you should attempt to do less harm with your language, YES you should attempt to not use slurs, YES you should try to avoid making rape jokes. But there’s an entire huge group of people who are willing to drag up rape jokes from a decade when rape jokes were REALLY REALLY common in order to say that nothing you say or do today matters.

And that same group is ALSO really interested in expanding the concept of what pedophilia is to include age differences in adults or liking the wrong style of drawing and it’s a purity culture silencing tactic and can we PLEASE stop pretending that gross, tasteless jokes are the same thing as actually sexually abusing people? Can we stop pretending that pointing out “rape jokes were more common fifteen years ago and I feel bad about it but that’s just the way it was and I don’t make jokes like that anymore” is the same as saying “rape isn’t bad and you shouldn’t make a big deal out of it.”

It’s always good to try to be a less shitty human but if you’re only allowed to grow and improve and be less shitty if you never fucked up in the first place then it’s all just calvinist bullshit and none of us could ever really be saved in the first place.

I dunno, dudes. We got so careful about disapproving of the wrong kind of language that we let a white supremacist concern troll Disney into firing a director who caught the attention of the alt right by shit-talking the president.

I think perhaps we need to reexamine some strategy here.

[onelinemanytimes]

To all people who enjoy content:

There is a HUGE issue that needs to be addressed in how people react to things online and how they decide to deal with perceived issues. Specifically, in regards to content creators online, and the content they create.

I want to clarify, this post is talking for the most part about creators who did something multiple years ago that they currently don’t agree with. I’m not talking about people who are CURRENTLY horrible people, but if you want to know please do ask.

Basic synopsis: Purity culture is being used to shame people for their interests and to actively control and manipulate what people are “allowed” to like, which is often harmful and toxic; it is also being used to condemn people for the entire rest of their lives over doing something in their past, with no regards to if an apology was offered- which is harmful to people trying to unlearn toxic mindsets and be better people in the present day.

So, let’s talk about Purity Culture. I don’t know what else to call it, so if someone has a better name for it go ahead and say it- but, essentially, “The idea that every piece of media you consume must itself be good, AND has to have been made by a “good person”,” with no exceptions. This belief means that if a creator is seen as a bad person, or the media itself has a troubling aspect, you are NOT allowed to like it, DO NOT INTERACT, YOU’RE PROBLEMATIC AS HELL TOO IF YOU LIKE IT!!!!

That may sound like an exaggeration, but it’s only mildly so. There is, however, a much more harmful part to this mentality: Judging people for things they did years ago, and not allowing them to apologize and be forgiven, and USING this purity culture ideal against THEM as well. The idea that people can’t be forgiven, can’t change, and have to have been perfect always to be valid is extremely, extremely toxic and harmful, full stop. There are so many underlying issues that can both lead to someone being “problematic,” but that is so much less the issue than the fact doing this discourages real change.

People DO change over time. And if you find out someone did something in their past, you ARE allowed to not forgive them! However; That does NOT mean you should condemn them and everything they do as problematic horrible and unforgivable, and ATTACK other people and make WARNING posts in the tone of them STILL being “””Problematic”””! That is in some cases, BLATANT MISINFORMATION, and in most cases, encouraging the mentality that people don’t change.

Now, who is this a problem for? Because someone saying horrible things about minorities of any kind is legitimately harmful in its own right, and can hurt people who find it, which deserves to be addressed. (Again, YOU are not required to forgive them, and you have the freedom to not engage.) Purity Culture hurts People with RSD (Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria), and people who cannot control what they hyperfixate on. It can ALSO harm people who are struggling to get past toxic mentalities for any reason, and people who are trying to improve themselves and be better., and people who HAVE improved themselves and gotten better after being a person with (arguably) horrible views.

For people who experience RSD, seeing people denounce a piece of media for “””Something problematic””” (creator or otherwise), and in some cases seeing people ATTACK those who enjoy that media, can be physically painful and extremely, extremely stressful. Especially with the prevalence of this mentality right now, it makes engaging with anything a VERY stressful experience, because if what you enjoy isn’t perfect in every way you will be shamed for it, and rejected for it, and actively hated for it, and there is NO compromise on that point.

This is twice as volatile an issue when you ALSO cannot wholly control what your brain hyperfixates on. Hyperfixation (the word) has two main uses; in regards to a single task/activity (in which you’re unable to pull yourself out of said task and cannot switch focus to anything else), and in regards to media consumption (having an intense, very focused interest in media or a character, that can feel very consuming and intense in some cases. This extends even MORE so to special interests).

 Hyperfixations in those who are neurodivergent (don’t think the same as the wider population- such as people with ADHD and Autism, amongst other things) are NOT typically something they can control. Not without exceptional effort and potential detriment- one of the fairly unfortunate coping mechanisms I have for this (speaking, yes, as someone with ADHD) is to Completely ignore new media, wholesale, to avoid gaining a hyperfixation in relation to that media. Even still, I obviously still SEE things because I exist in the world and things are everywhere- and while I can enjoy content normally, it is MUCH different when I see something and feel unable to focus on ANYTHING else for WEEKS on end.

You can hyperfixate on something before learning about “X problematic thing,” and then when you’ve already gotten very attached and deep into the media people will start attacking you with it! And saying “Oh, you like THAT??? That was made by a super problematic person, you can’t like that!!!” It’s EXTREMELY difficult to explain how harmful that is when I A: Can’t control it, B: Didn’t know, and C: Suffer from RSD in the first place. It DOES NOT stop you from engaging with the content, because you are hyperfixated on it and you literally can’t avoid it, but it DOES overwhelm you with guilt and make you withdraw from the people around you because now YOU must be problematic and horrible and you’re a horrible person for liking this media and everyone must HATE you.

The above was not an exaggeration. That is legitimately how it feels.

People are talking about how “Cringe Culture is dead,” but it being replaced by a MUCH more insidious “Purity Culture” that is MUCH MORE toxic, MUCH MORE manipulative, and also inherently flawed to begin with!!! You CAN’T and SHOULDN’T be a perfect person, that is why you CHANGE AND GROW. You should ALSO be judging a piece of media on its OWN merits, NOT on the merits of what’s behind it (not wholesale like people are intent on doing).

Now, all things in moderation. If a piece of media was created with malicious or biased opinions in its core: It IS important to address that, and to acknowledge that this aspect is not something you should support, and something to be mindful of when thinking about the content. It’s also good to be aware of how people currently are when participating in media spaces- you don’t have to be perfect at this, but if you don’t want to engage with things made by people who have horrible current views that is absolutely your choice.

However, this doesn’t excuse constantly shaming and attacking people, ESPECIALLY people who are aware of a media’s flaws and able to both recognize that and amend that in a respectful, understanding way. You can enjoy a story about a murderer without also being a murderer and knowing that murder is wrong. This extends to other actions as well by the way (and the desensitization of people to murder in modern day media is also a wild topic for another day because wow some people really be out here like “yeah literally ending someone’s life in fiction is fine but x is absolutely abhorrent and unforgivable,” like what??). 

The real thing here is, this: If you don’t like content, or you cannot in good conscience enjoy that content knowing about something that happened relating to it: Don’t interact! If you are for some reason, stuck participating in and interacting with something you personally feel is horrible, don’t shame and hurt other people for more honestly enjoying it, especially the good parts. What you CAN do is inform people, respectfully!

And with ALL the details please. Because I see a lot of times, especially with creators: Someone will dig up something the creator said years ago and say, “THIS CREATOR IS (X) YOU CAN’T SUPPORT THEM OR ENJOY WHAT THEY MAKE BECAUSE IT’S PROBLEMATIC!!!” And, actually: They have since apologized for what they said, and actively made efforts to change. “But they did it in the past” Is NOT a valid argument, and honestly?? If you’re the same person you were even two years ago, that’s wild, and I hope you’ll understand that some people can change drastically in that time after being properly informed about issues.

Again: If you don’t want to interact with a piece of media, okie dokie! It’s up to us to respect that, and to tag our stuff and not shove it down your throat, y’know? But maybe, if you don’t like something, you shouldn’t decide to hurt the people who do like it, because I think that’s pretty harmful, and man imagine someone digging into your life 3 years ago and finding one sentence you said to judge your entire life on and force people to hate you with. Haha that’d suck, right?

If you read all this wow thanks, and also I’m well aware most my fellows with ADHD probably skimmed it because yeah it is a lot man whoops- I’ve just been thinking about it for a while because yeah. Yeah. “I do not control the hyperfixation” is not just a funny meme y’all it’s a thing and it’s legitimately exhausting and painful to see everything you enjoy be hated and be told you’re wrong for liking it in any way, shape, or form.

#fnf #Friday Night Funkin #Yes this is about friday night funkin #long post #ADHD #important #if you have a problem with this #I give you permission to send asks and slide into my dms #I would be absolutely willing to have an open respectful conversation w ya #This post is a bit meanly worded sometimes #Sorry about that!

[lilfellasblog]

I tried to choose a question but, I'm pretty interested in answers to all those tbh

You. I like you.

Talk about the first ship you ever had. - Tiencha (Tien Shinhan/ Yamcha), which is why I'm very sympathetic to those also suffering in rarepair hell.

Talk about three of the most important ships throughout your life. Destiel, Tiencha, Analogical

What’s your current OTP? Oof, I think I gotta go Prinxiety! So much potential for angst with hurt/comfort.

What’s your current NOTP? You know, I honestly can't think of any tbh.

Do you have any poly ships? For my OTP question, I originally answered LAMP/CALM, so definitely that!

How do you feel about love triangles? I think they can be intriguing if done well. If there's cheating involved, it would be pretty difficult for me to feel sympathy for the cheater.

How do you feel about RPF? It's fine, do whatever you want. Fanfic has always been for fans, not for creators. Purity culture and entitlement needs to stop. It's like seeing a sign that says "Snapping Turtles", jumping in the pond anyways, then yelling at the people who put up the sign after you lose a couple pounds of flesh.

Have you ever shipped yourself with a character? Tbh, the closest I've gotten is wanting different characters to adopt me and take me from my home. But I don't think I've ever romantically shipped myself with someone.

Do you have many ships that never got together at all? *cries in All Of Them*

Do you ship any characters that have never met? Huh. I don't think so tbh.

Talk about your favorite first kiss. Well in college there was- Oh! You mean fictional characters! :3 I think Virgil's first kiss with Roman in Healing Broken Wings is my favorite.

Have you ever been disappointed when your ship finally got together? *cries in It's Never Happened*

Has a ship ever broken your heart? In fanfic? Yeah, I've read some sad endings before and that's usually not my jam.

How do you feel about will they/won’t they? I'm fine with it so long as it ends in "Yes they will!"

Have you ever “shipped at first sight”? Analogical, actually!

Talk about a ship you initially disliked. I think when Remus first appeared, I had a hard time imagining him with anyone because of what a gremlin he is. I've come around to the trash rat tho.

Talk about a pairing you’ve stopped shipping romantically. Destiel.

Talk about a moment which made you question an entire ship. Season 6 of Supernatural. Destiel. >:(

Have you ever shipped something despite yourself? Kind of? I've done spite fics with spite ships.

Talk about a ship you feel alone in shipping. Tiencha, or Tien Shinhan/ Yamcha. They'd be so cute together!

Is there a ship you just don’t get, but have nothing against? Any ships that are part of fandoms I'm not in. I guess maybe Tony Stark/ Steve Rogers? They have such different values and ethics. They literally need a threat to the entire universe to come together.

Which of your ships have the best chemistry? Oh Analogical, easily. Royality too I think.

Which of your ships deserve better writing? Tiencha :(

Do you mostly ship canon pairings? Lmao no.

Have you ever shipped a pairing before you even started watching the show/movie simply because of gifs and graphics or similar? Yes I have! Crowley/ Aziraphale.

Have you noticed a pattern in your shipping? Is there a romantic dynamic you’re more drawn to? Not really, it's kind of all over the map.

Is there a ship you’ve shipped for most of your life? Tiencha.

Does shipping come easily to you? Yes, I am trash.

Do you need to ship something to really enjoy a movie/book/tv show/comic? Definitely not. I was a Potterhead, and I still don't really ship anything there.

Name a couple of fandoms in which you have no ships. Harry Potter, Marvel, DC Comics. I'm not in those fandoms tho.

Talk about one of your favorite headcanons for a ship you love. Roman is playfully protective of Virgil, and Virgil teases him by dramatically swooning.

Share five must-read fics. "Unexpected Destinies" was my first fic that I got into. Destiel fic, very complex and interesting AU. I think it got deleted during a LiveJournal purge tho. I got really into the "Battle Scars" series for a hot minute. Disabled Goku/ disabled Yamcha. "Perfect Attendance" by Periwren is great hurt/comfort starring Roman and Logan. "Welcome to the Neighborhood" by LeFay_Strent is absolutely hysterical. Shenanigans with Remy and Virgil, background Prinxiety, baffled Logan, it's a good time. And "War is Hell (but crushing is way more awkward)" by Jasper01 is incredible in so many ways! Funny, tragic, accurate, romantic, sweet, heartbreaking, all the things!

Name your favorite fanartist(s). So many fanartists have moved away from Sanders Sides, so I'm having a hard time thinking of many. To make sure I cover everyone, if there are any recs please let me know and I'll signal boost!

Share your favorite fanmix for your OTP. *Googles fanmix* It would appear I have none.

Recommend 1-5 shipper blogs. Gosh, so many of the shipping blogs I follow have become inactive in the Sides fandom. So! If any of you shipping blogs would like a shout-out, lmk and I'll signal boost!

Do you create fanmixes/gif sets/fanart/fic/fanvids and so on for you ships? Fic. So much fic.

Do you have a favorite trope and/or AU for your OTP? I mean I'm partial to Healing Broken Wings AU. As for trope, I'm a sucker for angst with hurt/comfort.

Do you like and use ship names? Definitely! Much faster to type.

Is there a fictional relationship you’d really want for yourself? I'm taking the word "fictional" literally here, because there is someone I'm in unrequited love with that I'm working on dealing with and I would really love a relationship with this person even though I know any hope is fiction.

If you could change one thing about your OTP, what would that be? Prinxiety, and that Roman would get some goshdang therapy!

#roman sanders #logan sanders #prinxiety #virgil sanders #patton sanders #supernatural #dragonball z #remy sanders #this took me an hour I think

[icarus-suraki]

Since I seem to enjoy Starting Shit on the Internet today, I'm going to share some thoughts on the OnlyFans debacle.

First: sex work is real work. I said it, I believe it, that settles it.

It seems a lot of people (often young women, I've noticed?) are really celebrating OnlyFans banning all NSFW content. They’re having a great time saying things about how they hope all the (cis) men who liked NSFW OnlyFans content die mad about the NSFW ban and so on. It’s downright gleeful. And it seems like they're celebrating on the grounds of stopping trafficking and protecting minors and so on. And that's a noble thing, ending trafficking and protecting minors--do not misunderstand me: trafficking and abuse of minors is a real and serious issue and I absolutely support ending trafficking, rescuing victims, and protecting minors.

It is my opinion (insert Vine here) that OnlyFans banning NSFW content is going to hurt sex workers and also will do absolutely nothing to protect minors or stop trafficking.

A considerable number of people here in the US lost their jobs during the pandemic. And, among those people, are those who desperately need income. They're of age, they're legally allowed to do these things, and they need some way to survive. And, in the absence of a UBI or even a country that seems to care about the wellbeing of its own citizens, you have to find a way to survive. And a lot of the people who found themselves unemployed discovered that they could earn enough of an income through OnlyFans to actually survive. They could keep the lights on, get food, pay for medication, put gas in their car so they could drive to job interviews. It became a means of self-employment.

Are you thinking of the people on OnlyFans and elsewhere who are doing sex work as actual people? Or are they just a mass, just a concept, onto which you can project your ideals of Purity Culture? You’re giggling gleefully about unhappy men with blue balls, but I feel like you’re forgetting the women who are still stuck in a Capitalist situation.

"But they didn't start doing it willingly!" You can't prove that that's true for everyone on the site. You cannot prove that. You do not speak for everyone. Maybe some people turned to OnlyFans out of desperation, sure. But others may have felt relieved that they had it there. Others may have even felt liberated or enjoyed the work. I don't know. And you don't know either.

"But if you make sex work legal, that makes trafficking easier!" Yes, yes, I've seen the whole "Nordic System" argument. I've read it. My issue with it is that everyone is using it in the wrong way.

Remember when Oregon decriminalized possession of small amounts of most drugs? It was a decision made on the grounds of harm reduction. If you won’t get arrested for having some crack in your pocket, you can feel safer. Look at what the War on Drugs has accomplished: legal slavery and police brutality. It doesn’t work. And it’s an excellent experiment to try something else.

If sex work is declared protected or legal (and banks and credit cards cannot therefore refuse payment made to legal providers of the service), then any sex worker who is threatened, abused, harmed, attacked can make a report without fears of repercussions for doing sex work. Do you know how many sex workers are killed? If only there were some way to report a threat or a risk to the police without repercussions...

Beyond that: if someone is trafficked and they make a report about what's happening to them, it can be taken seriously because sex work is considered a legitimate area and trafficking would be very much outside the laws related to sex work. Same thing with minors in the same situation: it’s outside the laws, so it’s a crime, but someone reporting it would not be held as a criminal themselves. Collateral damage.

To go back to Oregon for a minute: if you decriminalize possession of small amounts of drugs, are you going to stop drug deals altogether? No. Oregon knows that too. But you can assist the people who do use drugs when they come forward with information about, say, murders connected to drug deals. And you can also provide a means for them to leave their situation if they so choose. 

Yes, ACAB, but we can at least provide a measure of protection to people who need assistance. See how this works? If a sex worker knows about minors being abused or trafficking going on and they make a report about it, they themselves don't have to worry about getting caught up and charged for also being engaged in sex work.

More protection for more people.

Lastly, and this might make you mad, you can thank the US Conservatives for a lot of this.

It’s the good ol’ Moral Majority come back from the dead. Again.

Any time someone yells about pedophiles or trafficking, it gets everyone concerned--and rightly so. But the problem is that it immediately becomes "if you're not overtly against it, then you must be tacitly for it, so agree to this bill." And so, anyone who's progressive or vaguely left-leaning signs off on legislations or statements about how sex work is bad and sinful.

But in doing this one thing, the US Conservatives and especially the Conservative Evangelicals of the US, can then convince more and more people to sign off on a longer and longer list of laws or beliefs that the Conservative Evangelicals want to push through. That’s their goal: to push through their ideas of a Good and Wholesome Christian Nation, with all the white supremacy and misogyny and homophobia and transphobia that entails.

So you start off with the existing laws regarding sex work, then you start sliding into "all of these kinds of sex work are illegal" and then "all sex work is illegal" and then "all pornography of all kinds is banned" and then you start slipping into lawmaking like ending access to birth control (because that encourages casual sex) and ending the rights of LGBTQ people (because "perversion"). You've seen it before, you could see it again. (And yet we can't seem to get child marriage completely banned in the US. Funny how that works.)

I don't mean to "slippery slope" this stuff but, trust me, it seems bad now but it can get so much worse. And I hope it doesn’t get worse.

“If you’re a feminist, how can you be in favor of sex work?” Because sex work is work. And, if you look back through history, you’ll find that banning sex work and punishing sex workers didn’t make things better, it drove everything down deeper and made everything worse. Less safety, less security, more risk, more punishment.

It seems like a shallow version of feminism if all you’re doing is sneering at cis men and turning up your nose at sex workers. I think you ought to reexamine your beliefs.

[adorpheus]

on fujoshi and fetishization

Lately, more and more, both here on tumblr and on other sites, I keep seeing people spew unfiltered hatred at fujoshi - that is, women who like mlm content such as gay fanfic and fanart featuring men with other men. And I don’t mean like a specific type of fujoshi, like the ones who are genuinely being weird about it, but just like a general hatred for girls (but especially straight identifying girls) who express love for gay romance.

I hate to break this to you all, but women (including straight women!) actually are allowed to like mlm fanfiction and fanart, even enthusiastically so. A woman simply expressing her love of gay fanfic, even if it is in kind of a cringey way or a way that you personally don’t like, is NOT automatically fetishization.

I’ve been on the receiving end of fetishization for my entire life, from a very young age, as many black and brown folx have, so I consider myself pretty well acquainted with how it works. Fetishization isn’t just like, being really into drawings of boys kissing, or whatever the fuck y’all are trying to imply on this god forsaken site. 

Fetishization is complicated imo, and can encompass a lot of things, such as (but not limited to):

1 - dehumanization, e.g. viewing a group of people as sexual objects who exist purely for entertainment purposes, rather than acknowledging them as actual people who deserve respect and rights

and

2 - projecting certain assumptions onto said people based on their race/sexuality/whatever is being fetishized. These assumptions are often, but not always, sexual in nature (like the idea that black people in general are more sexual than other races, etc etc etc).

I’m going to use myself as an example to illustrate my point. Please note this isn’t the best or most nuanced example, but it is the most simplistic. A white person finding me attractive and respectfully appreciating my black features as part of what makes me beautiful is not, on its own, fetishization. A white person finding me attractive solely or mostly because I’m a PoC is now in fetishization territory. Similarly, assuming I’m dominant because of my blackness (like saying “step on me mommy” and shit like that) is hella fetishistic. 

That being said, theres definitely a difference between how fetishization works in real life with real people, and how it shows up in fandom. 

Fetishization manifests in many different ways in fandom, but most commonly on the mlm side of things, I personally see it appear as conservative (or centrist) women who love the idea of two men together, but don’t actually like gay people, and don’t necessarily think LGBT+ people deserve rights (or “special treatment” as its sometimes dog whistled). These women view queer men as sexual objects for entertainment rather than an actual group of people who deserve to be protected from systemic oppression. I’ve noticed that they often don’t even think of the men they “ship” together as actually being gay, and may even express disgust at the idea of a character in an mlm ship being headcanon’d gay. In case its not obvious, this is pretty much exactly the same way a lot of cishet men fetishize lesbians (they see “lesbian” as a porn category, rather than like, what actual LGBT people think of when we read the word lesbian). There’s a pretty popular viral tweet thread going around where someone explains seeing this trend of conservative women who like mlm stuff, and I have also personally witnessed this phenomenon myself in more than one fandom. 

The funny thing is, maybe its just me buuuut.... The place I see this particular kind of fetishization happen most is not in the anime/BL fandom, from which the term fujoshi originates - I actually see these type of women way way more in western fandom spaces like Supernatural, Harry Potter, and Hannibal. I can’t stress this enough, there’s a shocking amount of people who are like, straight up trump supporters in these fandoms. If you want to experience it, try joining a Hannigram or Destiel group on facebook and you will probably encounter one eventually especially if you happen to be living through a major historical event. Like these women probably wouldn’t even be considered “fujoshi”, because that term doesn’t really apply to them given they aren’t in the BL/anime fandom, yet they’re the ones I personally see actually doing the most harm.

Of course this isn’t the ONLY kind of fetishizing woman in the mlm/BL world, there are other ways fetishization shows up, but this is the most toxic kind that I see.

A girl just being really into BL or whatever may be “cringe” to you, or she may be expressing her love for BL in a “cringey” way, but a straight woman really enjoying BL is not, on its own, somehow inherently fetishization. Yes, sometimes teenage girls act kind of cringe about how much they like BL and that might be annoying to you, but its not necessarily ~problematic~. 

That being said, IT NEEDS BE REMARKED that a lot of the “fujoshi” that you all hate so deeply, are actually closeted trans men or nonbinary people who haven’t yet come to terms with their gender identity, or are otherwise just NOT cishet. I know because I was one of these closeted people for years, and I honestly think tumblr and the cultural obsession around purity is one of the many reasons I was closeted so deeply for so long. STORYTIME LOL!!! In my early adolescence, I was a sort of proto “fujoshi”. I identified as a bi girl who was mostly attracted to men, or as most (biphobic) people called it, “practically straight”. I wrote and read “slash” fanfic and looked at as well as drew my own fanart. We didn’t use the term fujoshi back then, but that’s definitely how I could have been described. I was obsessed with yaoi, BL, whatever you want to call it, to a cringe-inducing degree. I really struggled to relate to most het romances, so when I first discovered yaoi fanfics (as we called them at the time), I fell in love and felt like I finally found the type of romance content that was made for me. I didn’t know exactly why, I just knew it hit different. LGBT+ fanart and fanfiction brought me an immense amount of joy, and I didn’t really think too hard about why.

At some point, in my early 20s, after reading lots of discourse™ here on tumblr and other places like twitter, I started to get the sinking feeling that my passion for gay fanfiction was ~problematic~. I had always felt a sense of guilt for being into mlm content, because literally anyone who found out I liked BL (especially the men I dated) shamed me for liking it all the fucking time (which btw is literally just homophobic, like can we talk about that?). In addition to THAT bullshit, now I’m seeing posts telling me that girls who like BL are cringey gross fetishists who inspire rage and should go die? 

Let me tell you, I internalized the fuck out of messages like this. I desperately wanted to avoid being ~problematic~. At the time, I thought being problematic was like the worst thing you could be. I was terrified of being “cancelled”, before canceling was even really a thing. I thought to myself, “oh my god, I’m gross for liking this stuff? I should stop.” I beat myself up over this. I wanted so badly to be accepted, and to be deemed a Good Person by the internet and society at large.

I tried to shape up and become a good ally (lmfao). I stopped writing fanfic and deleted all the ones I was working on at the time. I made a concerted effort to assimilate into cishet culture, including trying to indulge myself more deeply in the few fandoms I could find that had het content I did enjoy (Buffy, True Blood, Pretty Little Liars, etc). I would occasionally look at BL/fanfic/etc in private, but then I would repress my interest in it and not look for a while. Instead I would look at women in straight relationships, and create extremely heterosexual Couple Goals pinterest boards, and try to figure out how I could become more like these women, so I, too, could be loved someday. 

This cycle of repression lasted like eight years. Throughout it all, I was performing womanhood to the best of my ability and trying to become a woman that was worthy of being in a relationship. I went in and out of several “straight” relationships, wondering why they didn’t make me feel the way reading fanfic did. Most of all, I couldn’t figure out why straight intimacy didn’t work for me. I just didn’t enjoy it. I always preferred looking at or making gay fanfiction/fanart over actual intimacy with men in real life. 

Eventually, I stumbled upon a trans coming out video that someone I was following posted online, my egg started to crack, and to make an extremely long story short, after like 3 years of introspection and many gender panic attacks that I still experience to this day, I realized that I’m uh... MAYBE... NOT CIS..!? :|

I truly believe if I had just been ALLOWED TO LIKE GAY STUFF WITHOUT BEING SHAMED FOR IT, I probably would have realized I was trans way way sooner. Because for me, indulging in my love of gay romance and writing gay fanfic wasn’t me being a weirdo fetishist, it was actually me exploring my own gender identity. It is what helped me come to terms with being a nonbinary trans boy.

Not everyone realizes they are trans at age 2 or whatever the fuck. Sometimes you have to go through a cringey fujoshi phase and multiple existential crises to realize how fucking gay you are AND THATS FINE.

And one more thing - can we just be real here? 

A lot of anti-fujoshi sentiment is literally just misogyny. omg please realize this. Its “women aren’t allowed to enjoy things” but, like... with gay fanfics. Some of the anti-fujoshi posts I see come across my dash are clearly ppl projecting a caricature they invented in their head of a demonic fujoshi fetishist onto any woman who expresses what they consider to be a little too much enthusiasm for gay content and then using their perception of that individual as an excuse to justify their disdain for any women, especially straight women, ‘invading’ their ~oh so exclusive~ queer fandom spaces.

 god get over yrselfs this is gatekeeping by another name

idk why i spent so long writing this no one is even going to read it, does anyone even still use this site

*EDIT: HOLY SHIT WHEN DOING RESEARCH FOR THIS POST I FOUND OUT THAT Y-GALLERY IS BACK OMG!!! 

#rant #fujoshi #I SAID WHAT I SAID #personal #gender stuff

[gilded-green]

In celebration of the 10th anniversary, I’ll probably reread GG and send updates/highlight areas and as for commentary. Probably XD

But first. What aspect of Gilded Green was your favorite? What was something you put in a lot of world building for but never got to show either in fic or on tumblr. Who is your favorite character and why, what makes them special in your eyes? Which character has turned into a completely different one as soon as you started writing them? Which part of the fic did you like most when you finished it, do you still like it? Similarly, which part do you dislike most?

Lasty, anything about gg2’s story you want to share/talk about/rant?

-love, the dai li fangirl

Haha, no pressure! But at the same time yes if you do feel free to send me passages for commentary here! <3

What aspect was my favorite? Hmmm. *thinking face* I think, when I first came up with it, I was just thrilled to have these two small things - minor character Lu Ten, overlooked villain organization Dai Li - that I was able to combine into something so big. That was pretty nifty!

As I started developing the story, I think what really caught my attention was the fact that “Wow, all these characters are awful people!” Like. The Dai Li aren’t good.The Fire Nation aren’t good. Lu Ten is a victim but also an oppressor. All off these people have extremely different beliefs and worldviews - Fire supremacist, police state enforcers, classist academic gatekeepers - and all of them think THEY’RE in the right here and none of them are. I think Tien and Hoang might be the only people with a decent, non-oppressive worldview in the story so far. XD I was growing out of the storytelling trope of black-and-white morality at the time, so it was really fun to start experimenting with writing awful people as enjoyable, sympathetic characters.

World building? Hmm. I was just learning how to use my worldbuilding muscles back then. I seem to remember reading up a lot on how brainwashing actually works in the real world and going “I don’t think this is compatible with what we have in ATLA” and just kinda tossing that whole thing out. XD I also recall looking up a lot of stuff for the bits about Jouin, some of which - kalua pig! - has since shown up again in WFFD. I also recall someone on FFdotnet at the time saying “All this chapter did was tell us more about a dead character than the living one” and I was just kinda like -_- yes because he is DEAD and this is your chance to feel sorry about that, we’ll get plenty more of the living one later on account of him still being, y’know, alive. XD

Oh, and Shirong’s personal side projects. I finally got into that a bit in A Meeting of Minds, but the dude DOES have his own stuff going on, which Delun so rudely interrupted to drag him off to see Long Feng about brainwashing a Firebender.

I also did a bunch of research for the birthday party interlude, I think. Mostly appropriate alcohol for such an occasion? And....okay, this’ll sound funny, but.....food containers. I wanted Fen to pack up leftovers for Suyin and Shirong. That’s what my Italian family does after get-togethers, and I assumed that a Chinese family/friend group would do the same! But I also had, like, zero exposure to everyday Chinese life, let alone everyday Chinese life in the 1800s, and I just didn’t have the...idk, cultural osmosis? to figure it out. Like, if you asked me how Victorians would transfer food I’d probably come up with “Idk, wrap it in cloth and stuff it in a basket?” and I assumed people living in modern China would also be able to explain what their people did for food storage/transport 150 years ago but I didn’t have that cultural background, now, did I??? Also this was 10-12 years ago I was looking this up, mind you, the internet was still very different, there was plenty of information on Chinese historical events but not on everyday life objects, CDramas weren’t easy to find if they were translated at all and I certainly didn’t know they existed, and no one was posting beautiful aesthetic videos of life in a rural Chinese mountain village to youtube yet. Eventually I learned that bamboo baskets were a thing, but there wasn’t much info on THOSE either and I wasn’t sure how to describe them, so I just tentatively typed “basket” and called it a day. XD

YOU CANNOT ASK ME TO CHOOSE MY FAVORITE CHARACTER THAT’S LIKE ASKING ME TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MY CHILDREN!!! *shoves Yong off a cliff*

I’m very fond of the Dai family, along with the Trungs and Sais. I’m very proud of how Tuan turned out. I adore Yuan, who you’ve barely met, and Xun, who you haven’t. Huang and Wu Sheng are also definite faves and I can’t wait for y’all to get to know them better.

Characters do usually behave for me in terms of personality development. They surprise me, but they never really turn out to be the complete OPPOSITE of what I was expecting? They just kinda develop organically. Huang and Wu Sheng surprised me, tho, those boys got deep. I knew they had the potential, but developing their backstory actually caused Stingrae and I to develop Ba Sing Se’s socio-political backstory and Long Feng’s rise to power, all because of an inkling I had. That was a very satisfying few years of worldbuilding and story development.

Um, favorite part of the fic....idk, I’m very fond of the final scene, with Azula and her wall chunk from Lu Ten. I’m doubly fond of it because of how it always resonates with readers. Heck, during Azula week last year, I used that chunk of rock as an ongoing theme in Sandstone, and someone commented like “I DIDN’T REALIZE YOU’RE THE ONE WHO WROTE GILDED GREEN” and that made me really happy!

Lu Ten’s time stuck underground - I used the seven stages of grief to get through that one and it was very helpful in structuring that part of the story, and I figured it was deep or something because PSYCHOLOGY.

I’m also proud of myself for getting through the dark brainwashing scenes. So, like, FYI, fanfiction could get...very dark, back in the 00s. People love to play purity police these days and complain about how nasty people get can, but listen. Listen. Do you have any idea how dark FFdotnet got back in the day? Legolas And Aragorn Get Captured By Orcs And Brutally Tortured was an entire genre. I feel like torture fic was actually a lot more common back then, and darkfic in general - I’m sure someone could write a whole thesis on why it’s not so prevalent anymore, I’m gonna guess the fact that fandom is less-insulated and more public now could be part of it, maybe also the fact that the internet is more social media/influencer culture based so people care about their image, and also the purity police which is its own kettle of worms, but I also think that the Bush Administration had something to do with it? You have all these kids who were pre-teens when 9/11 happened, growing up during the Iraq War with an awful presidential administration while everyone was scared and conservative Christianity started to realize that their control over the nation’s “morality” might be slipping and reacted accordingly......yeah there was a lot of darkfic back then.

And I read a lot of darkfic too, but, uh....well, statistically speaking, a lot of writing is bad, okay? A lot of those fics were just weird; you could see where the writer had this idea, and also where they failed to execute it in a way that resonated or made sense. And whatever, writers were young and just wanted to pound out some catharsis, it’s cool, but it still just felt narratively awkward when you could tell how the writer was more focused on LET’S MAKE THIS AS DARK AS POSSIBLE instead of “Let’s tell this as well as possible.”

So the first several attempts at writing the brainwashing scenes, I was nervous because I didn’t want to get TOO dark, and when I finally decided “eff it” and said to Stingrae “I think I need to let this be as dark as it needs to be” I was still nervous because I didn’t want it to end up WEIRD. Idk if that makes sense, but anyway I seem to have done a decent job at it!

As for parts I dislike the most, uhhhhh Iroh’s retreat (I didn’t care, I just wanted to get it over with), Enlai might’ve been promoted too fast? idk, the fact that I came up with Nanyue AFTER I finished publishing GG so I couldn’t work that into the Quy bits, the fact that I was young and innocent and didn’t understand sexual slang or innuendo and randomly chose Dong as the name of the court physician which could lead to some awful puns except no one ever seemed to pick up on that and maybe I’ll regret pointing it out but the man IS going to appear again so I might as well get the first shot in myself. XD

I might have GG2 stuff to talk about but not sure, if I do I’ll make another post on that!

<3

#GG tumblr escapades #GG 10th anniversary

[bettsfic]

socknography: the importance of preserving fan creator biographical data

i wrote earlier on utilizing collections and bookmarks to boost the archival power of ao3, and in that post mentioned how i wish authors would fill out their bios so we can preserve fanauthor information as well as we preserve the fics themselves. so, here is my rant about WHY WE ARE SO IMPORTANT.

for my masters thesis i wrote about the layered pseudonymity of fanfiction authors, and after doing a ton of research, i find myself still thinking of the pseudonymous/anonymous divide as it pertains to fic. we have authors we consider “famous” and ones whose followings eclipse that of traditionally published authors, but unlike traditionally published authors, we don’t put a handy bio at the end of our fics. in fact, if you want to find out about the author, you have to hope they’ve linked somewhere to their tumblr or twitter or dreamwidth, or they have consistent pseuds across platforms. and from there, you have to hope they have an ‘about me.’ but most, myself included, don’t.

unlike traditional publication -- where amazon and goodreads and even the back of the book contains biographical info -- and even unlike the rest of fandom archival etiquette -- which, despite having virtually no committed rules still maintains its organizational structure -- there is no standard etiquette on fanauthor biographical data. 

i speculate the reasons fanauthors are hesitant to write their own biographies is very complicated: 

there is no “ask” for it or existing standard. when i publish stories under my real name, i’m required to provide my bio, which contains my accomplishments, where i got my degree, where else i’m published, and my website. all literary author bios follow this formula, so they’re pretty easy to write. other than this post, i have never seen a request for fanauthor bios. so without an editor demanding it, and without a standard formula or platform to draw from, a total lack of information becomes the norm, and almost any info other than the standard “name. age. pronouns. ao3 name. list of fandoms and/or pithy one-liner” of tumblr or occasional ask game is seen as a deviation from the norm. even ask games get a bad rep sometimes, and they’re transitory, a post you see as you’re scrolling through to somewhere else, not static, like a dedicated profile page.

pseudonymity veers too close to anonymity. an anonymous author cannot have a biography. a pseudonymous author can, but biographies may be seen as defeating the purpose of writing under a pseudonym, or multiple pseuds. a sock account is a sock for a reason -- you don’t want it associated with your main. moreover, i believe fandom creates an environment in which to acknowledge your accomplishments and promote your own content is seen as narcissistic. fanfiction can sometimes be seen as a genre of selflessness, donating time and energy into a community centered around a shared canon, not personal gain. to acknowledge the self publicly is to invite attention, and attention is contradictory to anonymity.

shame and humility. the more information you have on the internet, the easier you are to find. very few fanauthors use their real names, or feel comfortable connecting their fan identity to their real one. i hear pretty constantly how often fanauthors hide their fannishness from their coworkers and loved ones, how only the people closest to them know they write/read fanfic. moreover, you might think “my most popular fic only has 10 kudos and 1 comment, nobody wants to know about me” (which is so not true, but i’ll get to that in a minute).

fandom is constantly changing. with a central archive for fanfiction in place, it’s easier now to be in multiple fandoms at once than it ever has been. if you want to read all sugar daddy fics, there’s a tag for that, and if you’re not picky about canon, you have an entire buffet of fandoms to choose from. communities are growing and shifting and changing shape. i move fandoms, and i keep my friends and readers from previous fandoms. i get dragged to new fandoms frequently. my interests and inspirations change, but i don’t erase my history or identity every time i move, i only add to it. i am always betts whether i’m in star wars or the 100 or game of thrones. but if you only read my fic, you don’t know the stories behind it. many people don’t know i entered fandom in the brony convention community in 2012, or that i was sadrobots before i was betty days before i was betts, or how fandom changed my life and led me through a path of personal trauma recovery, or that i co-founded wayward daughters, or ran the fanauthor workshop, or all these other things about fanfic that is not fanfic itself. 

if you are a fan creator, your fannish personal narrative matters. telling your story helps preserve the metatextual history of our genre.

i think constantly about what our genre will look like in 30 or 50 years, if it will be like other genres that began as subversions of the mainstream: comic books, beat literature, science fiction. genres that, at the time involved groups of friends creating stories for each other, bouncing ideas off of one another, experimenting with or distorting other genres, and which became, over time, well-regarded forms with rich histories. 

maybe one day, like the MCU, we’ll have a dedicated production company that churns out adaptations of longform coffee shop aus written between 2009 and 2015. maybe “BNFs” will be read in high school literature curriculums. maybe our work will end up on the real or virtual shelves of our great grandchildren. and if that happens, if fanfic goes entirely mainstream, how will fanfic authorship be perceived? how will fanpeople in 2080, if humanity is still around by then, interact with the lexicon we’ve created and preserved? what would you do if you found out Jane Austen wrote under five different sock accounts across three platforms over the span of twenty years? how would you, a fan of Pride & Prejudice, even begin to find all of her work?

we have so many social constraints pushing against us. there’s purity culture, which encourages further division of identity -- fanauthors may write fluff on their main and have various sock accounts for underage/noncon fics. if you’re a scarecrow, you’re much harder for a mob to attack. there’s misogyny, which dictates women/queer ppl shouldn’t be writing about or indulging in or exploring their sexuality at all. there’s intellectual property and a history of DMCAs, which, although kept at bay by the OTW, may still have influence on the “illegal” mentality of our work. with social armies against us, it’s easier to exist in the shadows, on the fringe. we change URLs based on our moving interests, and split our identities a million different ways, and keep sarcastic “me” tags full of self-deprecating text posts. we are difficult beasts to catch, because we have not been allowed to exist.

i spent a lot of time today googling the word for “pseudonymous biography” and came up empty-handed (if someone knows of an existing word, pls let me know. “pseudography” is apparently a fancy word for a typo; “pseudobiography” is a fake biography), so for lack of anything better, i’ve come up with the term “socknography” because 1) it’s funny and doesn’t sound intimidating, and 2) it encapsulates the sensitive and complicated way fanauthor identifying conventions work. and also i think “fanauthor biography,” “bibliography,” and “profile” just doesn’t cut it for the actual work of these pieces. they don’t necessarily include IRL biographical data, they include more historical/community context than a bibliography, and the words “profile” and “about me” don’t really inspire interaction, or acknowledge the archival importance of this work.

astolat’s fanlore page is my go-to example. astolat writes under multiple pseuds and has major influence in the history of fandom. she’s also a traditionally published author, but you notice, her ofic novels are not mentioned, nor any other real-life identifying information. fanlore has a really good policy on this in place, for those concerned about doxxing. 

(moreover, i am not suggesting you centralize your socks. they’re socks for a reason. but most everyone has a main, and that main identity has a story.)

there are 2 existing spaces to preserve socknographies. 

fanlore, a wiki owned by the OTW, you can make an account and create a user page (which is different than a “person” page) using a user profile template

ao3′s “profile” page, which is a big blank box in which anything goes

(i’m not including tumblr on this list because i don’t think it’s a stable platform.) 

fanlore’s template is straight to the point and minimal, which doesn’t really invite narrative the same way a literary bio would. ao3′s big blank box leaves us with the question -- wtf do i say about myself? how do i say it? how much is too much? and because of that, most profiles are either blank or only include a policy on translations/podfic/fanart, and maybe links to tumblr and twitter. but let me tell you, if i have read your fic and taken the time to move over to your profile, you better believe i am a fan. and as a fan, i want to Know Things.

here are the things i want to know, or

a potential template:

introduction (name/alias, age, location, pronouns, occupation)

accomplishments (degrees, personal history)

fan history (fandoms you’ve been in, timeline as a fan, how you were introduced to fandom/fanfiction, what does fandom mean to you -- this is where your fan narrative goes)

fandom participation (popular fics/posts, involvement in fan events/communities, side blogs, interviews, etc. 3 & 4 might be one and the same for you)

spotlight (which of your fics are most important to you/would you like others to read and why? what are the stories behind your favorite fics you’ve written?)

find me elsewhere* (links to tumblr, twitter, insta, etc.)

policies on fanart, fanfic of fic, podfics, and translations

*you cannot link to ko-fi, paypal, patreon, or amazon on ao3/fanlore per the non-commercial terms of service

i’ll be working on filling this out for my own profile as an example, but you can also see how my @fanauthorworkshop participants filled out their fanauthor spotlights, and the information they provided. obviously, you should only share that which you feel comfortable sharing, and as your fandom life changes, your narrative will change too. it’s not much different than updating a CV or resume.

tl;dr the goal is to provide a self-narrative of your fan life/identity for posterity. who are you and why are you a fanperson? why do you create fan content? what are you proud of and what do you want to highlight to others? who are you in this space?

#socknography #fanfiction #ao3 #otw

[sebastianshaw]

And I’m sure Snowbird getting a happy ending had nothing to do with her being a blonde white woman and Haven being a dark skinned woc

I don’t think it was THE reason, but I would not rule it out as a contributing factor.

The major reason is that Snowbird is a hero and a major character, whereas Haven was an extremely minor character and a villain. So it’s pretty standard in that regard for Snowbird to get a happy ending, and Haven not to. Especially considering that, while Snowbird was not a character that “belonged” to anyone in particuliar, Haven was the creation of DeMatteis and when he left the book, so did she. That’s why her story just ENDS so abruptly after her confrontation with Charles, even though it seems like it should just be getting starting---her creator took off, and the new writer wasn’t interested in her.

She pops back up in the annual a year or two later to die, and I strongly suspect this was due to readers writing in and asking what happened to her; I can’t confirm this for fact, but TV Tropes claimed that fans actually refused to root against her because she was so sympathetic and benevolent, so I imagine a lot of them wanted to know where she went and this was to get them to shut up.

(It kind of reminds me of when this webcomic writer wrote a character he meant as despicable and twisted, and she was, but she was also way more deep and interesting than the 2D mouthpieces the protagonists were, so fans kept asking when she’d come back. He got so fed up he drew her dying in a gross and humiliating way. So yeah, if people were indeed asking “what happened to Haven and her evil possessed fetus?” and writing her dying in the mud giving birth while a goddess victim-blames her was the response...yeah. Again I cannot be for sure this is what happened, it’s just a GUESS.)

But yeah the big reason is Snowbird is a heroine and important, Haven was a flash-in-the-pan villain that only one writer wanted to write and had to be gotten out of the way when someone new came in. Nothing deeper than that. But the WAY that Haven’s story played out, especially compared to Snowbird’s...that’s got a lot of sexism and quite potentially racism there, yeah. So um, let’s get into that. Under a cut for length because I doubt people following a Shaw blog for Shaw want to see a bunch of non-Shaw rambling.

Haven’s story, as I have written about MANY times on her blog, is REALLY UNCOMFY in its sexism, racism, and xenophobia. Let me say, I do not think DeMatteis intended this. He writes Haven as a very kind, well-intentioned person even at her worst, and I happen to know he has a genuine real-life interest in Indian spirituality, which I think is definitely what inspired her. Unfortunately, these good intentions didn’t stop Unfortunate Implications galore: - Our first Indian/Hindu/Zoroastrian character is not only a villain, her “evil” philosophy is taken directly from real-world Hindu beliefs - She is opposed by a team comprised ENTIRELY of white people who work for the US government who scoff at those beliefs and refer to them as “New Age” (aka a white hippie movement that appropriated a lot of actual Hindu ideas but certainly did not invent it!) - The US government says she’s a terrorist. Polaris raises doubts, because Haven’s actions at that point have been nothing but benevolent (she saved Polaris) whereas the same government making these accusations has been malevolent (the people trying to kill/capture Polaris were US agents, despite Polaris working for the government, who attacked her because she had the same energy signal as Magneto) When they go to see Haven in person, she’s preaching peace between humans and mutants. Havok opens fire on her---so basically, a law enforcement officer shooting without warning at an unarmed WOC who isn’t doing anything threatening and they don’t even know has superpowers yet--and Haven has to hit the deck. Despite her own great power that we later learn she has, she never retaliates. But we find out that yes, actually, everything the government said about her is true, she’s leading a terrorist death-cult, and so it’s a-okay that our white government cop FIRED A FUCKING PLASMA BURST AT HER WHEN SHE WAS JUST STANDING THERE. The moral of her story is seriously “this brown woman with a funny religion is a terrorist because the government said so, no matter how nice and gentle she seems, and thus any excessive force against her was definitely justified even if we didn’t know that at the time” like it’s CHILLING. - Haven herself actually has very questionable agency in all this. She’s actually been pregnant for twenty years; her unborn child is permanently in the first trimester and possessed by the powerful demon known as The Adversary (which doesn’t make sense timeline-wise, but I have no doubt this thing can time travel, its entire point is to fuck the rules of universal order) We don’t know exactly how much it can influence her or perhaps even control her, but we do know it’s been talking in her head from 20 years and came on at a time she was REALLY messed up and vulnerable, and manipulated her at the least. I personally think it probably was controlling or influencing her at a very deep subtle level, but that’s just my interpretation. At the least though, again, talking in her head for 20 years, that’s the supernatural equivalent of schizophrenia and we wouldn’t blame her for THAT, right? - Oh, and about it appearing when she was at her lowest, most vulnerable point? Know why she was at her lowest, most vulnerable point just when she happened to be pregnant? Haven’s story is she was born extremely rich but was so passionate about using her privilege to help the poor that she ran away from her parents---philanthropists themselves, but who wanted to protect her from the outside world too---to go work directly in the streets, bathing lepers and cradling dying babies. She got her name “Haven” because she used her wealth to renovate a children’s hospital of the same name, I’m serious. She was literally a fucking SAINT. And then she fell in love with a man, and he used her, knocked her up, and ran off. She was DEEPLY ashamed and berated herself not only for her loss of “purity” but also for being “selfish” and forgetting the children. This is...so sad, and so DEEPLY entrenched in how women, ESPECIALLY women of color in a colonized culture, are considered “selfish” and “evil” if they don’t utterly sacrifice themselves 24/7 to care for others and dare have wants/needs of their own. So she fell into this deep despair and that’s when her fetus starts talking to her and filling her head with twisted lies that preyed on both her devout spirituality and her desire to help others.

There is no more sympathetic villain setup POSSIBLE, you’d think Haven would be a SHOE-IN for a redemption arc or at least being saved from her own “child”, but she gets neither. She dies alone in the mud, having only now realized as the birth is coming just what it is she’s about the bring into the world. Roma, the Omniversal Guardian Goddess and eternal foe of the Adversary, appears to watch. Haven begs her, not to save her own life but to stop the Adversary from the terrible things it’s going to do to the world. To her last breath, her concern is others. And Roma tells her “I would weep for you, but you brought this on yourself.” So basically, Haven, who is the most wonderful person in the world and who VERY much fits expected gender roles (gentle, maternal, loving, non-violent even when attacked, long hair, pink and purple flowing clothes, literally SPARKLES) has sex ONE TIME and she’s punished for it in the worst fucking way while the guy who impregnated her gets off scott-free. It’s just...it’s the worst narrative, in terms of sexism AND racism AND just in general. That’s not even getting into, say, the really uncomfy way her meeting with Xavier is handled, eesh. Compare, Snowbird. She’s actually far LESS the “perfect” woman than Haven is, she’s very cold and aloof and she even contemplates LETTING HER SON DIE so that her ties with mortality will be severed and she can join her divine family in paradise. But she had that son within the confines of MARRIAGE to a mortal man, and she only got married after her duties were done, unlike Haven on both counts. And her loss, and the loss of her child, are deeply mourned by those around her, she has a very dignified and beautiful funeral with Snow White style glass coffins, and we see the spirits of herself, her husband, and her child all ascend to the Inua paradise together, the gods having decided to let them in even though mortals have never been allowed before. She gets divine exception, Haven gets divine condemnation. She gets a beautiful funeral surrounded by loved ones, Haven’s corpse is probably still rotting in the jungle and her brother likely still has no idea what happened to her. To be clear I in no way resent Snowbird for her better treatment in a similiar story, I like Snowbird, but it is very disparate in how differently these seemingly similar situations---possessed baby and such---were handled, and the specific ways in which Haven’s were handled so badly ARE very much the product of bigotry that Snowbird didn’t suffer in part due to her being a white or white-coded character (in addition to being, again, a heroine and a major character, which helped her a lot too) Also, is it just me or is Marvel like...weird around childbirth/babies/motherhood and mixing that with demons/evil spirits/possession? Because in that same vein we’ve also got Madelyne Pryor and Wanda Maximoff who also go through demonic possession that’s related in some way to being mothers of babies. That’s a very strange pattern to have and something’s going on there.   As a note, it bugs me that Snowbird’s human disguise as “Anne McKenzie” is a BLONDE WHITE WOMAN. Like, yes, her human father was white, but her mother Nelvanna is one of the Inua, the ancient gods of Canada from LONG before white people showed up and WHO LOOK LIKE FIRST NATIONS PEOPLE, Snowbird herself is constantly emphasized as a child of these lands, she is literally magically BOUND to these lands and can’t leave them without weakening and dying, she was raised by an indigenous shaman, and she can only turn into animals that are INDIGENOUS to Canada. She is very unsubtly the embodiment of pre-colonial Canada, so it’s just...asinine to me her human form is that of a colonizer. I get they probably didn’t think further than “let’s give her human form blonde hair so it’s recognizably her” but like, that’s the problem, they didn’t THINK. Also I feel like her being mixed would really thematically fit her, since a strong part of her story was struggling between her divine and human heritage and being forced to try to “pick a side” which is something I’ve heard (I’m white) that a lot of irl mixed people deal with. It just would make more SENSE.

#out of shirt #snowbird #haven #radha dastoor

[thetaoofbetty]

I left twitter, because I get tired of see people fighting about what couple have better kisses ( the 4°17 isnt even so good, the 4°15 either. Just a biased opinion) but the "troll" anons are getting annoying and I don't understand come here to left out their frustration with people that don't deserve it and don't care about their ship. The way that the veggie still in s3 get more hype than the barchies ones (they put 3 ba stills and put a trailer just with ba it's kinda obvious what they did

Hello lovely! 

I mean, I think the phrase “hit dogs holler” applies here? I don’t keep up with what twitter does, tbh, but I know they’re either trolling because they’re immature and think it’s funny or because they genuinely can’t figure out that enjoying what they love is supposed to be why they’re in fandom. 

But, I’ve been through this before with Star Wars. And those antis were much better at espousing their purity culture nonsense and making it seem like they had the moral highroad when, in the end, all they had was the embarrassing timeline of proving they don’t know how to read or interpret text. I mean, they’re still assholes, don’t get me wrong, they were (and are) very angry and almost violent and that’s...concerning because space wizards aren’t real but whatever, that’s a them problem they need to work on. 

(you know, some people just really don’t get sex as metaphors and have no real understanding of how story telling works and i can’t tell if it’s a cultural echo chamber of minors growing up telling each other that they’re always right or if it’s how they think the world should be catered to them and being vaguely uncomfortable at any given time for any given reason in media means something is Bad™ instead of maybe realizing that they don’t own the spaces they decide they own and not everyone enjoys everything that exists? i don’t know but it all reeks of entitlement) 

They want people to watch to make sure their faves end up together, they haven’t quite gotten the memo (why is media 10 years behind everyone else? i am going to assume a bunch of old white guys behind every decision might have something to do with it) that yeah, drama sells but well written drama sells better. 

Which is why we need younger, fresher, more diverse voices in the writers room and beyond. How much money do they need to lose before someone figures it out? Because, man, they really need to catch up. Also, who even trusts anything Riverdale says or does? Especially when you’ve been used for bait for so long? That’s a rough lesson to ignore, yikes. Also, I still like veggie and feel that ship was underutilized completely. 

I really don’t know why people come here to bother me, I am chilling in my lane. I’m just sitting here, thinking about shoes and marshmallows, writing bughead kissing each other and trying to have a good time. Do they want more people to ship b/archie? If so, their recruitment methods need work. I imagine their behavior even makes multi-shippers shy away from them. Badly worded, condescending messages about how much something I enjoy sucks just reminds me of trumpers and wow, that’s not a group I’d want to be associated with so yeah, here’s to hoping they learn to act more like people in the future.  

Thanks for the ask, doll!💜

#besos! #long post #anti-barchie #i still can't believe that anon admitted they're the loud ones on twitter #what a spectacular self own #bbbbuuuugggghead