#thots on fandom and celebrity culture

[itsbinghebitch]

ok so here’s the tea

this is gonna be about build and the whole shitshow of last week. consider it more of a public diary entry on my part.

i want to preface this with saying i really regret my anger outburst. i think it’s a really complicated situation and it lacked a lot of tact on my part to insult other fans no matter how angry i was feeling in that moment. i consider myself a thoughtful person but idk sometimes i deal with severe mood swings that i can’t control which. yeah, that doesn’t excuse attacking other people. and yeah even if i perceived homophobia/bigoted attitudes in the fandom, i recognize that i there are fans who are really going through a hard time right now and painting their moral dilemma as ‘excusing homophobia’ is not helpful. 

i totally get that. i believe there can be productive conversations in this fandom. on the other hand, i don’t believe it was right for people to outright block me and alienate me when i expressed that, as a queer person, i cannot tolerate emerging attitudes in the fandom that excuse what build has said as simply manipulation on poi’s part. it’s a very difficult issue, because on the one hand you have the toxic/abusive relationship he clearly was in, and on the other you have an individual that has an enormous amount of growth to do, and an individual we all don’t know personally at that. it is, at the end of the day, a projection. who you think build is depends on your own experiences and philosophy on abuse, rehabilitation, nature vs nurture... so on and so forth.

it’s really heartbreaking to say, i’ve had so much trouble writing any vegaspete fic for a while now because however much i want to stick to the characters and not the actors, a little voice in my brain always reminds me of the whole build dilemma. and while before there might have been plausible deniability, that build had been wronged on so many fronts, now i can’t help but think of the comments he made on bible’s appearance. like did he think bible was ugly when filming with him. did he have bigoted/homophobic views as he was making vegaspete a reality, etc. 

so that’s where i’m at folks. i might be able to dispassionately discuss this issue, still engage with kpts for its narrative merits, love vegaspete for what it has meant to me for over a year. but at a gut level, i can’t help it. i am an INFJ cancer moon bitch which means i make judgments with my third eye or pussy or something and i believe that’s a feature rather than a moral flaw.

i will always find sympathy for other marginalized people in fandom. i really hope your time here has been a respite, however brief, from the general shittiness of everything (at least that’s what kpts fandom has been for me). but i think the moment fandom subsumes your identity in any way, the moment you start judging emerging fandom topics as ‘us vs. them,’ you really have to take a step back and ask yourself what the real issue is.

is the real underlying issue the fandom or is it the overall lack of transparency from the person we’re debating? is it some rando on the other side of the world in a forum of 200 people or is it celebrity culture, which is opaque by design? is it social media, meant to maintain your interest, endlessly tweet, endlessly consume, keep the money making machine going with just one small nudge? with just a few well-placed hashtags? with its slot game mechanism and gambling level addictiveness and constant abstraction of real people? what is that is *really* making me angry? 

because i don’t believe it’s another fan who, just like me, is trying to make it through today. that’s what i think. and that’s why i choose to step back and redirect my anger to the people with real power in this world. and that’s what i urge everyone to do when the going gets too crazy. 

#thots on fandom and celebrity culture

[bybdolan]

pop culture and especially fandoms ☕️ ur thots on pop culture in general are always 10/10 so

I could write an essay about this hdhbb but I'll try to keep it short. I think fandom in general isn't a bad thing. It gives people a space to talk about something they love, be creative, make friends, etc. It's fun when done right! However, I think a lot of the issues with fandom – especially fandoms of real people – stem from people's desire to be right/their attachment to the very specific way they personally see and perceive the object of affection. Ship wars or fights about song inspirations are based on that most of the time: How dare you not see what I see? I don't think curating a good and healthy fandom experience means eliminating everybody who has different opinions than you do (ESPECIALLY not when it comes to pointing out things about the thing the fandom revolves around or the fandom itself that harm fans – racism and homophobia are issues within fandom spaces that need to be talked about), but it comes down to finding people who don't make you feel like the way you view things is bad and wrong or try to "prove" that their way is the correct way of thinking and you are dumb for not seeing it. That's especially stupid in real people fandoms because literally none of us know the truth <3 And it's incredibly pointless to attach a sense of superiority to something that may very well be untrue. This is the point where I could go on a ramble about how fandom conspiracies such as Johnlock, Larry or Kaylor and the constant empty promise of queer fullfillment harm young queer kids, but Sarah Z has talked about that a lot in her video about the Johnlock conspiracy, so if you are interested in that, you can check that out. (Though one thing I think she doesn't touch upon is the stereotyping of gay people that goes hand in hand with those conspiracies and is disgusting. See: Louis has a rather high-pitched voice, he has to be gay.)

Even though I like it and like participating in it, I also think fandom harms the way we consume content. I talked about this briefly while answering an ask about film a while ago, but there seems to be a trend where people value shippable characters over the actual quality of a movie and are more likely to consume mediocre content that gives them characters to play around with than watching or reading something that presents itself as a whole, closed unit and therefore doesn't give space to further explore OR doesn't care about a big set of characters that much. The Tatort Saarbrücken case is a good example in my opinion, where the chemistry between the gay ship overshadows the (in my opinion lack of) quality of the actual episode. We got interaction between our faves and Therefore It Is Good. In real people fandoms, this manifests in strong attachments to the private lives of the admired celebrity that overshadow their creative accomplishments.

This just scratches the tip of the iceberg, but these are my main thoughts on the topic. I like the fandom space I've curated for myself, but I think it's important to consume media without looking at it through a fandom-lense. Not everything should have a fandom, and it's fine that way. And if you feel like you have grown out of love with a fandom, leave it. It doesn't matter all that much.

send me a ☕ and a random topic and I'll give you my opinion on it!

#sorry i kinda ignored the pop culture aspect but that's such a huge thing that i can't just. give thoughts on it #ask #adamraisedacain #i feel like i forgot something important. anyway.

[eradicatetehnormal]

In The Case Of Shipping. Queer Ships and Straight Ships

A topic I will never shut up about. Before I start I will admit, I am on the queer side of fandom a lot more often than I am on the straight side and I will be speaking from that perspective. If you have another perspective to share with me, please do so respectfully.

Shipping will always be something that gray to me. I like shipping culture and enjoy certain communities around certain ships, but people getting way too defensive about it will always be something to drags me emotionally. It makes me sad especially when it's people who are like me. Fellow queer shippers trying to explain why certain things between two characters can be seen as queer coding and then being called delusional by people who are either willfully ignorant or simply don't understand the point of queer coding. That's not to say queer shippers are without fault, however. We do have a really terrible tendency of calling people who don't like our ship homophobic and ignoring characters from other media that ARE actually written to be queer, in favor of continuing to argue that there are next to no queer characters in the content they like. While they are scarce they are not non-existent. Not to mention, a decent amount of character portrayals do tend to be very extremely sexual and can be found in places that they do not belong.

That being said straight shippers aren't without their faults either. For starters, I don't really see this being brought up, but they also like to portray characters in very sexual ways as well. Particularly, male characters, with a popular means of sexualization being centered around predatorial behavior towards one of the female characters, or being a C H A D. Again, I personally don't have a particular issue with this, but just like queer sexual content, it does not belong where anyone can see it. Straight shippers also have a bad habit of calling queer shippers p*dos and perverts, even for the most inoffensive gay fan content imaginable.

With so much tension heating up between two groups, any interaction can come off as an attack even if that wasn't the intention. We queer shippers tend to get sensitive when someone has the opinion that our ship isn't real. Now sometimes we are justified in getting annoyed with these people as some of them will go out of their way to find joke posts and innocent fan art of a same-sex ship and pull that line, even though that wasn't really the point of the original post. However, even in people's own spaces when they aren't going out of their way to attack us, we still get offended. What gives? So let's take a tweet that's similar to what I'm describing:

(obviously, this is a fake image, I'm just using it to get my point across)

Now on its own, there's nothing wrong with this tweet. In general, there's nothing with this tweet. It's just showing frustration with people making every relationship a romance even if two characters only interacted for a few minutes. That's true. Shippers do enjoy pairing two people together, particularly men, who don't really interact with each other. Here's the thing though. This is an argument that's very popular and one that's been used by some not-so-well-meaning people.

Alright, it's sad people hours now, sorry sis. So for a good amount of queer people who are online or are big fans of fiction, fandom has been a big part of their lives. Shipping, in particular, holds a special place in many queer fans' hearts as, even though it's pathetic, ships were a lot of people's first exposure to genuinely queer content focused around queer characters. It would be through this shipping that a lot of people would find friends who were into the same media and fan content. Some of these people would grow up together and eventually find out that the other was queer. Some of these people would go on to have romantic relationships with each other, and because they meant because of a ship, would go on to continuously celebrate it as if it were real because part of the reason their romance is real is because of that ship. Sometimes people will hold certain ships dear to their heart because they were able to use them to not only find other people like them but explore their own sexual and romantic orientation via fan fiction and fan art.

The attachment to fictional, non-canon relationships would be met with consequences, however. A lot of people would become TOO immersed in their ship and would start to get into debates with straight shippers. Many of which were, unfortunately, homophobic or queerphobic in some way. A lot of the arguments these people would use were a lot of the arguments used today. "Said ship isn't real, you're delusional", "That wasn't the writer's intention", "Stop forcing your ship onto other people", "Two people can't be friends anymore".

It's when you look at it through this lens:

That the fake tweet above starts to look like it was trying to say something a bit different:

Now is this what the tweet is actually saying? Probably not. TityMaster69 might be someone who has faced harrasment from shippers innocently trying to vent out their feelings, but because many people with malicous intentions have said the exact same things and used it as an excuse to speak ill of queer people in fandom, it FEELS a lot more mean-spirited than it might actually be. To add to that, many malicious people have used the reactions of queer shippers as a means of giving a pass to genuine queerphobia inside fandom outside of shipping:

The screenshot ARE real this time and in are relation to this btw:

https://twitter.com/samelCamelCase/status/1382846776806412290

Now to be fair StarVolt358 did apologize to the person who retweeted the post, but the fact that they even brought it up at such an inappropriate time does still prove my point because, in a way, they did bring it up to draw less attention to the queerphobia in the KH fandom.

Stuff like this has led to queer shippers being berated and attacked by straight shippers in the community, even though in some cases they can do more damage than the people they're calling out. Let's not forget when Reylo fans doxxed and harrassed the actors because they didn't like whatever happened in the Rise of Skywalker, or when Sokai fans harrassed the voice actor SpuukyLIVE on Twitter for joking that the scene in kh2 when Sora sees Riku again was gay.

As I do not have a lot of energy, there are a lot of nuances I've missed, like many people who like queer m/m ships being straight teen girls and not actual queer people or queer people who like straight ships. This was, however, just a post to get my full thots out there. I'll shut up now.

#queer ships #ships #shipping #fandom #fandom stuff #fandom culture #fandom critique #fandom shipping

[hildorien]

I am in the minority but I’d love to know more about the pre-noldor elvish edain culture, history, and just life. 

I wanna know more about men in the context of men, I wanna see history through human eyes without the elvish perspective. 

I wanna know the full experiences of all humans in middle earth not the ones the elves interacted with. And if you have to have elves, I wanna hear about what humans thought of elves that isnt ‘oh they are so perfect and amazing and beautiful uwu’, because that’s kind of boring and we can all agree first age elves? on the whole? pretty shitty. (I love em but they have one brain cell to share among them and fuck up on the regular). 

I wanna see Humans who were born into a dumpster fire that is the world of arda, these are a people who didn’t get Orome leading them to heaven on earth, they got Morgoth. These are a people who lived in Morgoth’s land for centuries who probably experienced horror and oppression from basically their species infancy. Unlike the elves of valinor, or even the Sindarin protected by Melian, horror and despair would have not been their abnormal, it would be their everyday.  But they aren’t broken, they survive. They make families, connections, lives in this wasteland. They adapt and change, because I think in some ways that is the race of men’s true advantage over elves. That we don’t have a gap on our ‘greatness’ persay, humanity’s ambitions get’s mutated into greed a lot (I mean numenor is a dumspter fire for a reason) but I think that human ambition is a strength because it means we don’t accept our circumstances. The Edian sure didn’t. 

The edain, the Boerians, the people of haleth, and the hadorians, all marched themselves out of morgoth’s land hoping for something better, with NO GUARANTEE they find anything better.  But they still did it. And while we are here, let’s talk about how the race of men has not guarantee of anything, like elves (and dwarves) kind of know where they end up. They go to Mandos and get reborn, they go to aule, respectively. Men...don’t have that. Men really didn’t get anything (but Morgoth and suffering). They leave this world forever, thats what they know. Thats what they are told. 

But no one knows what the means. (Personally, I think its like a good place situation kind of. Eru is just michael and turin is janet) 

But anyway back to the POINT, (if there ever was one) the edain end up finding beleriand but beleriand isn’t the paradise they wanted. But hey, its not morgoth so let’s celebrate said the beorians before promptly getting found by finrod. And look elves did a lot of good for humans, but I also think there is this really bad dynamic of elves holding all the power and men just being in it for the ride. 

Ive made the joke that the elves of the first age are kind of like the edian’s sugar daddies but it’s kind of true. They give them land and like ‘wisdom’ (whatever the fuck that means) and in return men give them their ever increasing numbers. The Silm is a very elven story we don’t really get a lot of human, but when we do I think it’s pretty interesting. Because the relationship between Elves and Men is really uneven in the first age...and all ages even though in later ages forces of men like numenor at their height could I think easily sweep the floor with the elves of the second age combined. I think culturally Elves give a lot more, like men end up picking up their language, though im one hundred percent sure human languages didn’t die out and never do, humans must have shit talked elves a LOT in taliska (oh yes, that is the name of at least the language spoken by the hadorians and beorians, the people of haleth spoke a different dialect) and I think a lot of humans give more in resources (aka men, power, infantry). I mean personally if I was having at a guess I don’t think (as the latecomers) men got very many places to actually farm and have good land and relied on elvish goods to survive. I think this unevenness kind of spurred this idea that ‘elvishness = superior’, so to make this full circle I think a lot of pre edain culture was lost to make place for diet pepsi version of elf culture that we see human cultures like numenor and gondor have, because that’s better than their orn because elves are SPECIal BETTER AND DON’T DIE LIKE US BROKEN AND FALLEN PEOPLE.  ((screams)) 

Okay let’s talk about the death thing. Human and Mortal and Men all mean the same thing, humans die is not a statement that should be up for debate. But the humans of edain, at least from what we see of Andreth is that this was not how it always was. Humans were once immortal like the elves until they were bad and listened to morgoth and then they became mortal and all sick and ew. 

yeahhhh, I don’t think thats true. I think in-universe its a great myth. I love finrod ah andreth for this reason (also andreth is tolkien’s best female character he ever created and the fact that she’s not in the published silm is why we are in the bad timeline) , but I think humans...always were mortal. 

And thats okay. 

We talked about human ambition above, I think that is fueled by the fact that we all die. We have a timer, so we have to do things now, and that’s not a bad mindset to have. I think it gets humjans into trouble but also, imagine your a human in beleriand, you have children, a family, they might have children someday you want to do what you need to do to make sure THEY have a chance. 

(also lets talk about the fucked up fact that humans are punished for lsitening to morgoth in the first place like im sorry that humans didnt have any other valar looking for them, there was no orome, no fucking chance that they could have met anyone else because no valar came for them only morgoth with his lies so yes humans are bad for listening to the only god like entity that seemed like he wanted to help them, the elves did that too but they had nice gods so they are wise while humans who have illness and sickness and death over their heads listen to a guy with power okay jirt i see your double fuckig stnarad and its STUPID) 

And you can’t wait for that chance, so you leap. I think this is best illustrated by Turin of all people. Turin gets called elvish a lot in looks but in actions, he, like most of his family, are allllllllll human. The bridge in nargothrand even though it’s stupid and ends up horribly kind of reminds me of this. Turin doesn’t have time to wait like Gwindor, and Orodreth, etc do. his people have already been fucking disomated, he’s lost his father, his mother is trapped in enemy territory.  He wants to help. 

Sure it blows up in his face, but yknow...the want to do good is there. 

I think on the whole humans get a bad rep...like they’re called stupid and dumb and ugly by both fandom and in universe elves alike. But I don’t think that’s the case. Humans have a lot more balls and have collectively been through more trauma as a species than I think all of the elves (especially valinorian) elves combined. I think when humans fuck up, whether it be turin or numenor, it’s proof of their incompetence, that their inante (eru-given ability) to have ambition to seek beyond the world they live in for something better for something more is evil and they should be more like the elves, stagnant, already at the height of ‘perfection’, never changing....instead of being humans. Like look at these fools trying to act like than can be GOOD at something, sit down and let these elves be best at everything obviously. How many of you would look at me funny if I said, maybe the race of men was BETTER THAN THE ELVES AT SOMETHING? A lot of you im sure, and someone would have a rebuttle for how I was wrong and how this elf was considered the best. 

(like that post going around how could turin actually be #that pretty to thot his way through all of beleriand? Maybe he just Was like that, sure he may have a little elvish ness but honestly I think that be a funny thing elves say to cover up the fact some elves found a icky human was actually just that fucking hot, because obviously humans could never be that actually hot ever, not to intangle a sindarin mast of a guard, a NOLDORIAN VANYAR-DESSCENT PRINCESS, ect) 

Also just to go back to numenor, ever want an example of why it doesnt work for men to act like elves...look at numenor, early numenor was as elvish as humans could produce....but then they got bored. And then numneor became an empire and everyone eventually had so much of a bad time, eru reshaped the fucking world just to wipe the valar’s ‘humans but better’ ocs off the face of the planet. Like just to stray off topic I personally think men can’t go to valinor 1) because the two trees are actually nuclear, and the whole damn island is chernobyl instant death right there and thats why the valinor elves are like #that (they GLOW for gods shake) 2) the monotonous never changing perfection of valinor while amazing in the short term for humans would eventually drive them crazy. Not to say that the race of men doesn’t like some peace and quite or even humans (like myself) can be obverse to change, even I can admit doing the same thing ever day would drive me crazy. 

This got super rambly, but its been a lot of thoughts Ive been having for a long ass time. Basically, I just want people to talk to me about the atani, edian, race of men, whatever you want to call them. They deserve a lot better and a lot more respect than just playing a supporting role to the elves. 

They didn’t kill all those dragons to be ignored like this. 

#silmarillion #race of men #what ye do in the dark #tea with milk #not undercut because I want you people to READ this #please validate meeee #silm #edain #atani #i have a lot of feeling about humans in an elf world....