#unfortunately i cannot say the same for his character’s fanbase | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

favonius-captain · 3 years

Text

𖤐 * ∿ STREAMER AU

𖥻 CHARACTERS

childe, xiao & gn! reader

𖥻 GENRE

fluff. tooth rotting fluff

𖥻 SUMMARY

modern day streamer au with genshin boys

𖥻 LINKS

masterlist

𖥻 NOTES

please like and rb ! it really helps <3

𖥻 FUTURE TIEN NOTES

every day i curse one of my only non kaeya fics for blowing up. i cannot believe this is my top fic by miles

𖥻 CHILDE

his stream name is tartaglia - he used to be unnamed and just kept changing it, but once, his little brother charged on stream and just yelled TARTAGLIA, so it became his name

i feel like he streams very casually, and just plays whatever’s popular

and you’re another popular streamer, who also game surfs

you both pick up genshin when it gets big, but you never do really talk to each other. you tend to stream earlier than he does

you two are in very similar friend groups, but you two have never played together really

in fact, the fact that you’ve never really talked to each other was really weird

to childe, you were like the mysterious boogieman because you just were never on when he was

someone in chat asks if he knows you at one point, and of course he knows of you, but he doesn’t know know you

do you know [streamer name]? a message in his chat asks, once he started his stream.

childe shakes his head. “no, but i hear of them. i’m pretty sure they’re zhongli’s friend.”

they beat your record for the lvl 12 abyss clear.

that makes childe perk up. “they what?”

needless to say, that caught his attention

he made it his goal to beat you

and of course, since you two have similar content and don’t post at the same time, you have a very similar fanbase

so his chat, the little snitches they are, tell you

tartaglia is mad that you beat his record, you read off your chat. it makes you smirk.

you snort. “trust me, he won’t beat my record. no matter how much he whales.”

and then the war begins

you two still never talk, it’s more of like his chat going to your stream to tell you about the things he says and vise versa

but you have started to form a competitive relationship, despite never having talked

like when there’s a new banner, you count how many wishes it takes you to get the featured character

and then you brag about it if you got the featured in less wishes than childe

“okay, chat, we’re at 46 pity. how many wishes did it take for tartaglia to get raiden?”

he lost the 50/50, someone in chat says. but he got her at 56 pity next time.

you snort. “imagine losing a 50/50. i bet i can get raiden in less wishes than him.”

unfortunately, you also end up losing the 50/50. and on top of that, you had to wait until soft pity (75 wishes) to get raiden.

you pretend to play it off, but then you see a twitter notification from tartaglia.

“how does it feel to lose to me (streamer name)?” the tweet says.

you huff, replying to his tweet. you just got lucky.

oh really? guess we should test that thoery. collab?

and of course, you aren’t going to say no

and then the journey begins

you have a collab stream that blows up in an instant

and it’s chaotic. not as unexpected

you know those exploding barrels things

or the terror of inazuma with overload/electrocharge

yeah. that’s you guys

“ugh, it’s my detested rival,” you see, as childe joins the voice call.

“isn’t that a little harsh for someone who lost the 50/50?”

“you lost it too.”

“yeah but i didn’t have to wait for soft pity.”

you guys do those domain run challenges to see who can get the best artifacts

and you two start to stream more and more often together

you become pretty close in your times, but you still maintain the playful competitiveness

once, there’s a big streamer event for genshin, and you two spend the entire time making fun of each other

but despite this, you do meet up in person and get a lot closer

you do one of those big streams meetups where you sit next to each other and like try out different types of candy with each other

and it’s very cute and wholesome and yeah <3

after you start dating

you don’t tell people right away, but it’s kinda obvious

like he doesn’t really make an effort to hide it, especially when you move in

he always posts pictures of you two together, and people just assume it’s platonic

and he doesn’t hide the matching jewerly you two obviously have

it’s not until this one time when you accidentally forget to turn off your stream when you kiss him on the lips, and the entire chat goes fucking wild

after chat finds out, childe doesn’t hold back

he’ll randomly burst into your streams, either asking for attention, or just to sit with you

he always passes you food or gets you water when youre streaming because he knows you forget to eat sometimes when you get really into a game <3

all in all, perfect streamer bf <3

𖥻 XIAO

you’re not a streamer, but instead, his mysterious roommate

you originally saw him around your college campus, and there was this one time that he helped you when you were trying to time crunch a project

and he saw you stressed out in the library, and just silently started to help you cut out the pieces that you needed

and since your college only allowed for one year of dorms, you were trying to find someone to share an apartment with

all your friends laready had roommates; so you asked xiao

he stares at you, for a moment, and you think he’s going to say no. but later, he requests to follow you on instagram, and he messages you that he does need a roommate

and it’s only then do you find out that xiao is a big streamer, named the last yakasha.

at first, he doesn’t really try to make friends with you; you’re just his roommate. he doesn’t come out of his room much, and you’re always out anyways

but there’s this one time that you come home late - like 2am - and you see xiao sitting and eating a bowl of cereal with his earbuds in

at first, you think that he wants to be left alone, but it’s only then do you notice the other filled bowl of cereal next to him

it’s a silent invitation

he knows you haven’t eaten, and it’s late

he was waiting for you to come home. but he will never admit it

since then, you’ve tried to put in more effort in your friendship. mostly because you know he’s too anxious to initiate any friendship

you two go on grocery runs a lot

you also make an effort to have dinner with him every night

and there’s this one time that you walked into his room, asking what he wanted to order for dinner, while he was streaming

he goes completely silent and still, eyeing his camera, knowing full well that you just exposed yourself to thousands of people

his chat is going crazy

you quickly realize your mistake and leave

but the deed has already been done. and xiao only turns more and more red as his chat goes off

when they ask more about you, he just mutters incomprehensible things

when you start dating

sometimes when he does no cam screens, you’ll rest on his shoulder, and just sleep there

he gets really red, and if chat notices how his breath stutters, they dont mention it

sometimes they can hear you clamoring through the mic, and some really hushed laughs and whispers, with the sound of a small kiss

he does shyly ask you to introduce yourself at one point, and you do play this new game genshin together

he likes it because it means he doesn’t have to compete with you <3

his entire chat notices how he smiles more when you arent looking and that he always looks at you with this soft look in his eyes

he’s the kind of guy to set up your pity without you noticing so that you can get a 5* on your first 10 pull

perfect streamer bf (1)

#xiao x reader #childe x reader #genshin x reader #genshin impact x reader #genshin imagines #genshin headcanons #streamer au lives in my brain rent free #xiao #childe #— writing

3K notes · View notes

aminiatureworld · 3 years

Text

Spotlight

Characters: Albedo, Kazuha, Xiao, gn!reader

Word Count: 3,707

Warnings: Swearing

Premise: Modern AU in which the reader’s s/o is famous.

Author’s Note: My first crack at a modern AU and I enjoyed it immensely! My personal media of choice definitely came through in this prompt. I would now kill for Albedo to read Shakespeare. Also streamer Kazuha is an inspired idea, thank you anon for that! Not to mention musician Xiao, truly chef’s kiss.

Albedo

Albedo was a stage actor, both by education and by trade. Starting in high school he began in local productions, before entering into the Mondstadt Theateracademie. After appearing as Estragon in a filmed version of Waiting for Godot, he began to be scouted for various television miniseries, eventually becoming a well-respected film actor.

You arrived somewhere in the middle of his career. Working as a costume assistant at the Academie you had quickly fallen for the inquisitive and deceptively intense soul that exuded every color of emotion onstage, from raging anger to soft sorrow, before stepping into the wings and resuming an aura of utter calm. He had captivated you, both as an actor and as a human being; and when you learned that he had also become slightly infatuated with you, well, it was hard not to feel like you had stepped into a wonderful play, or perhaps simply a wonderful play had been brought to life.

The switch from theatre to screen was certainly a jarring one for both of you. When the first film contract was offered Albedo had stared at it for a long time, rereading it over and over again as the coffee in front of him quickly turned cold.

“Is there something wrong with the contract?” You had asked.

“No, it’s not that. It’s only…”

“Only?”

“Only on stage there is a single audience. You can feel their reactions, can measure their response. There is nothing nebulous about the people around you. But on film you cannot do that. You cannot adjust for time of day, or whether it’s a weekend or a Friday performance. You must let your lines out and hope that they land without even being able to calculate it.”

“It’s not a science experiment my darling,” you had teased.

“Maybe not,” Albedo admitted. Still he continued to read and reread, and it was only until the next afternoon that he had told you his answer.

Still, you had to admit that he made a fantastic actor. The naturally inward part of your partner’s personality, the part that always seemed to jump out the moment he left the stage, worked well to balance with the camera’s need for subtlety, unlike the projection required for stage plays. It was little surprise then that he should grow so popular. Despite all the worries about measuring audience response, there was no doubting the success of Albedo’s acting career.

Being a naturally withdrawn person Albedo mostly stayed off of social media. He had one private Instagram for friends – he didn’t post anything; one private Facebook for family – the only picture was one of you two in the mountains next to a particularly weird looking rock; and WhatsApp – which could barely be counted. Thus when he started blowing up on Twitter – a platform you had a mostly unused account on – the reaction was mostly one of “why are they talking about me?”

Not that Albedo minded fan enthusiasm, indeed when people started showing up in droves at the stage door for him he was always careful to thank everyone collectively and talk to as many people as possible, it just sort of confused him that so many people should take a vested interest in the actor and not just the character.

“It’s because they want to show you how wonderful they think your performances are,” you’d explained.

“I don’t have Twitter,” Albedo deadpanned.

Despite his protests though you sometimes caught him scrolling on your account, face slightly red at all the positive attention. His habit of internal self-deprecation had never truly gone away. That fact became slightly unfortunate in the face of hate comments. It was hard for Albedo not to take things personally. If someone said his acting was shit then you would catch Albedo reading the same line over and over again, as if to achieve mathematical perfection. It was a difficult urge to fight, and you were always careful to give Albedo plenty of reassurance when these things popped up, as well as surreptitiously blocking the trolls that wandered their way onto your dash.

This habit to take things at face value did not apply when you entered the mix. As far as Albedo was concerned you were his partner and no amount of complaining online would make him second guess that or second guess your worth. Even if you thought that you had a better hold on social media assholerly than he did Albedo would still make sure that for every hate comment that floated your way there were at least three compliments on his part. Mentioning you off-handedly in press interviews, saying that he had to go home to his partner, leaving small sketches on post-it notes scattered throughout your apartment, there were no lengths that Albedo wouldn’t go to assure you. And, if you had to admit, these things truly did make you feel better on the days when the small part of your brain said that this wasn’t mindless social media harassment.

Being an actor Albedo had an incredibly fine-tuned sense of the way that people responded to emotions, as if he were performing some grand sort of scientific experiment to see how many people he could sway with his gift. As of such he was always careful that, regardless of his success, things between you were never upturned. You were with him before he was really famous, and you would be there during and after. Albedo loved you deeply; though he often said that he hated romance plays for how sappy they were in his mind your relationship was the one, glowing exception – regardless of the other happy couples in the world. Though it was slightly idealistic, it was the kind of intensity that comprised Albedo’s personality, was the thing that had garnered him so much success.

Albedo loved you deeply, and no amount of surprise movie contracts would change that.

Kazuha

You had to admit that when you had met Kazuha you had no idea about his double life as a streamer. He was merely one of the many singers that came and went to the recording studios, all people eager to unleash their talent on the world. But unlike the rest of them, Kazuha could make you laugh.

Perhaps then it was unsurprising that Kazuha should be a popular streamer. Though his often florid talking style might seem on paper like it would be too grating for streaming, in reality his soft cadence combined with a dry sense of humor made him wildly popular. He rarely lost his temper, making him palatable to those who wanted to have a fun time without blowing their ears out, and when he did lose it his hyper-specific, often nonsensical insults were the stuff of memes. No, in retrospect it was not all that surprising that Kazuha was a beloved streamer.

At heart though, Kazuha had told you over coffee, the enthusiastic and earnest internet sensation was a poet.

“When you’ve had a life as dissonant as mine, how can you not be?” He’d joked. And indeed perhaps he was right, for Kazuha was as wonderful a poet as you had ever read. He was born to be a writer, you had told him.

You were also an aspiring singer, as well as a friend of the studio owner where you did your recordings. As such you had made it a habit to help around the studio when you weren’t also working or studying. As you and Kazuha were both students with intense side jobs, the good natured complaining of overworked students also made their way into you rapport, a friendship that grew day-by-day. Eventually it sprouted into love.

Though you knew that Kazuha was a streamer when your relationship started, in reality you hadn’t realized how truly popular he had become. The first time you watched one of his streams you were blown away by his popularity. Watching your first livestream only cemented that. It was hard to believe that your down-to-earth, slightly self-effacing, partner could have garnered such a large fanbase. Not that you didn’t think he deserved it. He absolutely did. However after seeing that you admitted you were a bit awestruck.

“Why? Am I not the same person on screen and off?”

“Of course you are! It’s just, well, my partner’s a celebrity!”

“I would go that far,” Kazuha laughed.

“Well you certainly are to me!”

Nevertheless your dynamic didn’t change much afterwards, besides the occasional teasing on both of your parts. Kazuha was after all Kazuha at the end of the day.

At the beginning Kazuha didn’t mention you much on stream, certainly not by name, you had to admit you were a bit intimidated by the idea of being recognizable on the internet, even if it was just by name.

“This is also my partner’s favorite map.” Had been his first mention, during a game of Mario Kart.

Despite this offhanded remark however the chat had almost immediately exploded, followed by the rest of the fanbase. Though there was, of course, some disappointed buzz – isn’t there always – the reaction was immensely positive. Positive, and curious.

After a while Kazuha started mentioning you more often in streams, especially after the two fo you moved in. Sometimes you would hear him as you passed him room – Kazuha liked to keep the door open – other times you would watch it on stream yourself.

“My partner hates this character. Too bad you can’t throw evidence.”

“Nobody tell my partner that I’m afraid of basements. I don’t need them to know that when laundry day rolls around.”

“Hey if you’re watching this dear, I promise that it’s not that much money. You don’t need to look at the bank account. Who am I kidding, this is why we don’t share one.”

“Hey, darling I know you’re watching this. Can you check and make sure I left my keys on the coffee table, they aren’t on my desk. Also can you make tea?”

Despite fans knowing very little about you, you were surprised by the amount of positive comments that flooded the streams. You had to admit that your initial expectations had been “people are going to find me annoying”. Instead funny comics of your voice drifting in from the other room popped up, along with a lot of waving and “tell your partner not to trust you with the keys” after Kazuha fell off a cliff one too many times. It was an odd experience, to be so happy about the comments of faceless people, people to whom you were also faceless.

Eventually Kazuha’s hardwork in singing paid off and his first single was recorded and given a deal. On the evening of the release livestream Kazuha set up in the living room, angling the camera so that you could sit on the chair just out of frame. You had talked about the release for months now, and a few weeks ago Kazuha had brought up the idea of a pseudo-stream reveal.

“I was wondering if you’d like to say hello to the audience or wave when my song is released. I understand that you’re hesitant about those sort of things, and I would never ask of you something that would make you uncomfortable. This relationship is the most precious thing to me, and I wouldn’t want you to feel pressured or exploited in any ways.”

“Thank you for being so considerate Kazuha. I’ll think about it.”

Now you sat in the chair, fidgeting slightly, waiting as the countdown on his laptop reached one. You excitement certainly seemed matched by that of the fans, who were typing wildly in the chat.

Eventually the screen faded to black and the chatting quieted down. The first few notes of a wooden flute emerged, combined with the strumming of a guitar. As the familiar words began to echo through the laptop speaker you found yourself washed away. Kazuha was always enthralling when he sang. At the end of the song was a dedication, and though Kazuha had already alluded to it, the sincerity still took your breath away.

To my dearest partner. My compass and my guiding star throughout this realization of my dream. You are my sun and my stars, and I’m forever devoted to you. Thank you for sharing in this project, and thank you for giving me such love.

Perhaps it was slightly saccharine. Regardless you felt the sudden, uninhibited urge to cry.

“So, what did everyone think?” Kazuha asked into the mic, face reappearing on screen. He was slightly giddy, and you watched as his hand tugged on the fabric of his linen belt.

Immediately the chat exploded, as waves of “that was amazing”, “I’m crying now”, and “the end was so sweet!” flooded the screen.

“Thank you all for the encouragement!” Kazuha let out a laugh, one that you could tell was one of utter euphoria, and no little relief. “There’s someone else I think who would like to thank you.”

Who knew that a small sentence could cause such a splash?

You barely had time to let out a tentative “Hello,” before an immediate wave of excited screaming covered the bottom left of Kazuha’s stream. “Thank you for supporting Kazuha’s song. And thank you for always being nice to me.” With a tentative wave of the hand you collapsed back on your chair, slightly hysterical laughter rising inside you out of the relief that flooded through you upon seeing the enthused fan reaction.

Afterwards your voice became the occasional guest on Kazuha’s streams, always greeted with enthusiasm. Kazuha continued to grow in popularity, and his music continued to capture a larger and larger audience.

All throughout this you never felt a snag in your relationship. Kazuha may have been a big streaming personality, but he was also a kind and considerate partner, the best that one could ask for in a significant other. Kazuha’s love was never in question. And neither was yours.

Xiao

Sometimes you were a little self-conscious about the way that you met Xiao.

Though Xiao had definitely grown a following by the time you met – being the main pianist for a popular singer and a classical pseudo-prodigy in both piano and flute his own right certainly had roped him an enthusiastic fanbase – you had simply known him as “the guy who hogs the practice room”.

“I swear to the gods, how long can that bastard take to practice!” You texted angrily at your friend one day. Qixing Conservatory was the premiere music place in Liyue, but what should’ve been an amazing opportunity was being overshadowed by a practice room partner who appeared to not have a life, one who also had the obnoxious habit of playing the same damn thing over, and over, and over again.

“Playing the same piece as before?”

“Yes! Ugh I don’t even know what it’s called but I’ve heard it enough times to last a lifetime, maybe five!”

“Damn I’m sorry, what time does he usually end?”

“I don’t even know. Some time in the early evening. It’s obviously never gotten through to his brain that other people also need to practice. Or that hearing the same notes over and over while waiting makes me want to chuck my binder against a wall.”

“Lol. I kinda want to hear it now. Can you send a video, will the sound pick up?”

“I don’t know how it wouldn’t.”

“…”

“Holy shit! Okay, I need you to watch this video and tell me if you recognize the pianist.”

Safe to say you nearly fell out of your chair upon figuring out Xiao’s identity. Not that you weren’t already about to out of pure exasperation. Still, there was something much more intimidating about shaming a successful musician, and you no longer had the urge to glare at Xiao every time he left the practice room. Honestly, you would have been perfectly happy keeping your head down and never interacting with him at all.

Fate, however, has a sense of humor.

To be fair, some of it was your fault. You knew that Erlkonig was a massively difficult piece. You knew that you should’ve picked something else, knew that even Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata mvt. Three had to be less painful than the non-vocal arrangement you’d placed in front of your eyes. You were never trusting your music taste with your piece choices again. This was a terrible mistake.

“These stupid fucking running notes!” You let out, a groan of exasperation racing through you. Half slamming (you weren’t crazy) the piano cover down you swung the door of the practice room open. You didn’t want to deal with this anymore. Trying to ignore the embarrassment that rose up seeing Xiao waiting on a chair next to the door you went to walk down the hallway.

“You should work on it with a dotted sixteenth note pattern.”

It was the first time that Xiao had ever spoken to you.

Afterwards a rapport slowly grew between the two of you. Often Xiao said nothing as you passed, rarely you made a gesture of recognition when he finally reappeared from the practice room. However soon the occasional word or phrase of advice grew into longer sentences, later these sentences evolved into pieces of conversation. Soon enough you discovered, to your slight horror, that you found yourself yearning for Xiao’s company.

Almost as soon as you’d finally figured out your feelings you were hit with a wave of denial. You weren’t falling for Xiao? How could you fall for someone who got on your nerves so much? Sure he gave you advice, but what about it? You deserved it after having to hear him over and over again while waiting. Certainly Xiao didn’t seem interested in you, he barely talked to you! Yeah he was getting more talkative, but it’s easier to talk to people when you’re giving them advice. There’s no way you were in love with Xiao. And there was no way he was in love with you.

To say that Xiao’s career as a musician, never mind his genuine technical talent at two instruments, was a barrier would be an understatement. The moment you thought you were making some progress, finally admitting to yourself that this crush was, in fact, real, a wave of anxiety would pass over you. Xiao was too good for you, he was too important. Here was a man who had a successful musical career already up in the air while you banged frustratedly on the keys. Why would someone that successful be interested in you? Not to mention the fact that he didn’t seem interested.

Because, you had to admit, you did like Xiao’s music. Not just his classical repertoire, but his pop music as well. It was slightly jazzy, mellow and playful and utterly unlike the scowling musician behind it – something you secretly thought extremely cute and surprisingly charming. To him you were just a practice roommate, and you were sure he’d find the idea of dating someone who was more familiar with his public persona irritating.

So you buried your feelings, or tried to. Unfortunately like sometimes attracts like, and just as Xiao secretly had the emotional understanding of a teaspoon, you weren’t nearly as clever about things as you would like.

“Is there something on my face?” Xiao asked, his voice gruff and slightly reluctant.

“No, why would there be?”

“Because you’re staring at it!”

“Oh, I’m sorry!” You let your head drop, looking intently at the ivories in front of you. Eventually there was a sigh.

“You don’t have to do that. I… I don’t mind.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes! You staring down is weird too. Let’s, let’s just hurry up and do this passage.”

After that you became more aware of your staring habit. You also became more aware of Xiao’s own habit, leaning towards you. Sometimes you swore that you could feel the tips of his hair tickling your neck, light and feathery and stealing all your attention.

“Hey, Xiao, do you need glasses?”

“Why would you asked that!” Xiao flared up, face reddening. By this time you’d become more accustomed to these flareups of grumpiness, and ignoring it you pressed on.

“It’s just, you seem to be leaning forward.”

“I’m not!” Immediately Xiao shifted back, almost stepping away. Without thinking about it you reached to grab his hand.

“I didn’t mean it was a bad thing!” You got out, before becoming aware of your hand grasping Xiao’s. The touch felt electric, and you were suddenly so very aware of everything, yet unable to focus at all.

“Then you shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Xiao grumbled.

Slowly the musician leaned closer to you once more. You had already half stood up and now you found yourself stepping closer to Xiao. The world continued to shrink until you were almost pressed together. Xiao was leaning forward, as were you, and the longer tufts of his hair were tickling your cheek, helped by the fan whirring away in the corner. Your hand was still in his, but all your thoughts appeared to have died away.

“Xiao?”

“Is this, too close?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“Xiao?”

“What?”

“I like your music. I hope that doesn’t bother you.”

“Why would it?”

“I don’t know. I just, I also like you, not just your music. But I also like your music.”

“I also like yours too.”

Perhaps it wasn’t the most romantic of confessions, but at that point you were far too carried away by the moment, or maybe by the fact that was the most sentences Xiao had strung together that weren’t about triplets. Regardless of the fact, you were suddenly seized by incredible happiness, as all appeared to right itself.

Afterwards initially little changed, Xiao was a gruff as ever, you were still itching to play in the practice room more. Nevertheless when you went to a concert of his for the first time and he let out a small, almost imperceptible, smile your way you knew things had changed. They would keep changing perhaps, or maybe they wouldn’t. After all, this moment was beautiful.

So much that you didn’t even mind the hours spent waiting for the practice room.

#genshin impact #albedo x reader #kazuha x reader #xiao x reader #genshin albedo #genshin kazuha #genshin xiao #genshin impact fanfiction #requested #my writing #scenarios

210 notes · View notes

lucemferto · 3 years

Text

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT TECHNOBLADE (or A Narrative Analysis of the Dream SMP Doomsday Event) - Script

Heyo! Per request I am posting the script to my video of the same name here on tumblr. I must warn you that just reading the script will probably not give you the full experience, so I would encourage you to watch the video (linked above).

There might also still be a lot of grammatical errors in the text, because I don’t proofread.

Okay, so! I don’t want this to turn into a reaction channel OR a Dream SMP channel for that matter! I am planning on doing a big dumb, way too long analysis video on the Dream SMP which will – at my current pace – come out in five years. I am already way too late on this one.

Spoiler Alert for the Doomsday Event that took place on the 6th of January in the Dream SMP. Surely the worst thing to take place on the 6th of January 2021 … I’m sorry, what’s this about the Capitol?

In case you don’t watch the SMP and need context: The Dream SMP is a Minecraft Multiplayer Server, that, throughout the last year, has transformed from a normal Let’s Play to an ongoing new-media series streamed by multiple high-profile streamers such as Dream, TommyInnit or Technoblade. It comes complete with script – by which I mean loose bullet points – and story events. It has attracted a large fanbase specifically invested in the story and less so in the actual gameplay content. Like I said before, I will probably do a big video on the Dream SMP at some point in the future.

The storyline is long and complicated and trying to explain it all would take up the majority of the video and there are other channels who have already done a much better job than I could ever hope to do, so give them a watch. I’ll try to summarize all that is pertinent to what I will talk about in this video.

Okay, let’s speedrun this summary. Cue the music!

Major Players here are TommyInnit, a founder of the independent nation of L’Manburg, Technoblade, an anarchist who was deep in conflict with L’Manburg, Tubbo, Tommy’s best friend and current president of L’Manburg, and Dream, the ruler of the Kingdom of the Dream SMP (even though he is not the king, but we’re not going to get into that right now). Tommy had in the past been exiled by Tubbo for endangering L’Manburg’s shaky peace with the Dream SMP. Tommy had then teamed up with Technoblade, who was hellbent on destroying L’Manberg after some prior altercations – more on that later.

Tommy and Tubbo came into conflict during a festival set-up to celebrate the friendship between L’Manburg and the Dream SMP. After punching out their feelings, Tommy came to the realization that his friendship with Tubbo was more important than his vendetta against Dream and those who exiled him. Techno took that change of heart badly and teamed up with Dream to destroy L’Manburg … and that’s exactly what happened.

Techno and Dream, with little to no opposition, obliterated L’Manburg with no hope for recovery leaving its inhabitants stranded hopeless and alone.

… And that’s what you missed on Dream SMP!

Okay. So, usually I just put whatever thought slime drips out of my mouth hole into your subscription box. But then I asked myself: “Am I not taking this a largely improvised nonsense story from a bunch of 16–24-year-olds a little too seriously?”. And then I remembered. I’m a pretentious bitch. I made an 18-minute video explaining why the popular commentary YouTuber memeulous is secretly the time travelling Anti-Christ, REASON HAS NO SWAY OVER ME!

So, like the English Major drop-out that I am, I will present you with two theses, which I will then combine into one … supratheses! That word doesn’t exist, I just coined it, it’s mine! I am very smart!

[I know words, I have the best words!]

Thesis #1: The Fandom focuses too much on Character Analysis in Favour of Narrative Analysis

The Dream SMP is truly something special. It is uniquely singular in how it tells a story of this scope through its chosen medium. While there is an overarching script that lays out the plot points of the future, each of the 30+ streamers on the SMP are their own cameraman, director, writer and actor. You cannot watch “the Dream SMP” – if you attempted that, you would be 80 by the time you caught up to the Doomsday Event. You have to choose whom to watch. You have to choose your focal point character.

Because by the way the story is told and consumed – aka in such a compartmentalized fashion; you watch one streamer and get one character’s perspective – it has sort-of unintentionally conditioned fans to look at the SMP and its characters less as one coherent story with messages and themes and more as sports teams they can root for. You’re Team Techno or Team Tubbo or Team Tommy or Team JackManifoldTV (formerly known as Thunder1408) and every other side is in the wrong! It’s like Twilight for a decade old children’s game about virtual Lego!

Okay, I’m exaggerating, but the amount of discourse perpetuated by and revolving around so-called “apologists” – a terrible term that unfortunately has caught on – is really not something that I think is good for how we interact with the story of the Dream SMP.

The Dream SMP is discussed a lot on character-based level, which is, like I said before, hugely advantaged by the way the story is consumed by its audience. With traditional, visual media such as film for example, the audience can be made more aware of what messages the narrative might try to communicate on a narrative level without the need for an explicit narrator to tell you the moral.

As an example, in a movie you could have a smash-cut from the Butcher Army’s discussions about neutralizing the danger Technoblade poses to Techno being nice around villagers or taking care of animals. This would communicate on an extradiegetic level, that the Butcher Army is in the wrong with their assumptions. Alternatively, you could contrast Techno’s declarations that power corrupts and that Tubbo’s administration is cruel with Tubbo choosing not to punish Ranboo for his association with Techno – thus the narrative would communicate that Techno’s view of Tubbo and by extension the government is one-sided and not true to reality.

Stuff like that helps the viewer understanding a story holistically and manages to communicate stuff like themes and morals without having to solely rely on in-character logic and argumentation, which, as Ghostbur put it so eloquently, is comprised of a bunch of unreliable narrators.

Character analysis is great if we want dive deep, if we really want to give a character flavour and understand their motivations. It helps make the universe feel like it is alive, like it’s real. But – and this might be a shocker for you – it’s not real. It’s written. It is construction – and as such, in its construction, it has messages and themes and morals, intentionally or unintentionally.

By being so focused on specific characters and their individual journeys, viewpoints and motivation we really run the risk of not looking at the bigger picture and fail to see what the overarching narrative is actually communicating. And we may also fail to understand how characters might or might not fit into the overarching narrative.

Speaking of which …

Thesis #2: Technoblade experiences very little Meaningfultm Thematic Conflict

Okay, let’s talk about Technoblade. I’m sure I’m not going to get any hate for this one.

I want to preface by saying that I don’t watch Technoblade’s streams; I catch up though clip channels and summaries. I’m mainly watching Tommy, Tubbo and Quackity – which is honestly already more than I can handle – but I want to be clear that while I’ll try to be as even-handed as possible – like I explained previously – the way I consumed the storylines will undoubtedly leave me with some bias.

Also, needless to say, I’m talking about the character Technoblade, not the actual content creator, unless I specifically say so. That should be obvious.

Now, I’m not doing a Technoblade character analysis, because that would be hypocritical of me – seeing how I just bitched about the overwhelming amounts of character analyses in the fandom – but I’ll try my best to summarize what is necessary.

Technoblade’s interesting in that he is a very static character – at least inwardly – he doesn’t change much. He is very steadfast in his beliefs and ideals and has very little introspection. He doesn’t question himself; he doesn’t waver, he is never in a bind about whether what he’s doing is right or wrong. He is very much a parallel to early TommyInnit – who, of course, famously said “I’m always in the right”.

And I want to emphasize that I mean this in no way as a critique of Techno’s character. A static character provides a nice contrast to more dynamic characters and can balance them out. It can also be utilised by the writing as a character flaw – which is what I hope content creator Techno is going for.

Like Techno doesn’t have a lot of empathy in the sense that he is particularly skilled at or interested in trying to see the viewpoints of others. There is never an attempt to reconcile, for example, the goal of the Pogtopians to reclaim L’Manberg and install another administration with his desire for an anarchist society. This is also compounded with his overreliance on violence as the only tactic for conflict resolution – Techno has a whole thesis statement about violence being the only universal language. I’m sure you’ve heard the quote.

And lastly, what really drives this all over the edge, is his all-or-nothing approach when dealing with the enemy – he is not so much eye for an eye as he is – to use another biblical example – you make fun of me for being bald and I’ll sic two bears on you that maul and kill you and 41 other children.

There’s also the open and completely unacknowledged hypocrisy of a self-described anarchist working together with a man that installs and dethrones Kings with his every whim – someone who – and I cannot stress this enough – hits about every box when it comes to the definition of tyrant.

So, what I’m saying is that Technoblade is the Dream SMP equivalent of Dick Chenney. C’mon you know it’s true! He will bomb that freedom into your country whether you want him to or not. That’s some cogent political commentary in the year 2021.

Okay, so now that I’ve outlined his character, what kind of conflicts does Technoblade face. Well, it’s mostly physical or external. He fights a lot whether it’s against Quackity or Sapnap or bodying Karl Jacobs five times in a row. And – with the exception of maybe Sapnap – none of it is challenging. Technoblade is the best PvP-Player on the server – there really isn’t much tension to be had from a purely physical fight.

So, how are these fights supplemented emotionally. Well, internally there is not a lot going on. As I said before, Technoblade isn’t really an introspective character. Even during his shouting match with Tommy there’s not a sense that Technoblade is wavering or unsure of himself in the way that Tommy is. He exposits that one of the reasons, he acts like he does is that he feels dehumanized; that people only use him like a weapon and then discard or even try to neutralize him once he’s no longer useful.

But that is not something that Technoblade has to grapple with – it’s not conflict for him, it’s more conflict for Tommy. Technoblade is self-assured in that he’s a person and not a weapon – it’s almost like there was a character arc there, where Technoblade self-actualizes and breaks away from the people that want to use him. But we didn’t see any of it. Technoblade unleashes the withers; then he goes into retirement because he wants to be, I suppose, and then he returns to violence as a reaction to the Butcher Army. There is a story of vengeance here, but not any conflict about being used. There is never a point where we see Technoblade come to this realization or comes to assert himself.

In season 1 there’s never a push from Pogtopia where the narrative frames them as exploiting Technoblade. He fights with them of his own volition, he gives them weapons and armour of his own volition. Nobody pressured Techno into procuring their inventory for the fight. And in Season 2, he’s the one to approach Tommy about their potential partnership – he is in the position of power here, explicitly not Tommy.

Like, I’m sorry, if this ruffles some feathers, but I really don’t see this arc where Technoblade is being used. There’s a story of misunderstanding and maybe co-dependency – but not of dehumanization. This entire line of thought seems to solely reference that moment, where Tommy says to Sapnap “I have the blade” during one of their wars – which, to base an entire emotional arc around that without any further set-up, is, and I’m sorry to say that, incredibly flimsy.

Okay, so we covered physical and emotional conflict? But what about conflict on the narrative level? Well, that leads me to my suprathesis …

Suprathesis: The Narrative is Unclear on how it treats Technoblade … and that’s Not Good.

Here’s a Hot Take: The narrative of Season 1 treats Technoblade way less sympathetically than that of season 2.

Let me explain. The narrative of Season 1 revolves mostly around Wilbur and Tommy. The emotional fulcrum of the overall narrative is Wilbur’s rise and fall from Grace – and Tommy succeeding him as symbol of L’Manberg’s “special”-ness. Now I will talk about all that more in detail, when I talk about Season 1 of the Dream SMP. So, you’ll just have to go with me on this one for now.

Technoblade, by contrast, doesn’t really have much going on thematically in Season 1. He mostly exists as a sort-of utilitarian character – he is an accessory to make story beats happen. Like him executing Tubbo doesn’t open up any sort of thematic conflict involving him – on a character level it sets up antipathy between him and Tommy and it grants us some insight into how he operates with his violence speech – but on a larger-scale narrative level it really just shows how far Wilbur and Tommy have drifted apart in how they react to the event.

His biggest contribution is during the Season 1 finale, but even there he plays second fiddle to Wilbur. Not just because Wilbur does way more destruction with his explosion than Techno does with his Withers, but also because Wilbur had an emotional and thematic climax to his arc and by extension the entire storyline. Like Techno’s is a cool moment and very epic visual but in terms of thematic relevance, his Theseus-speech is really more set-up for Season 2.

And Season 1 is very unambiguous about L’Manberg being good and Tommy’s ideals ultimately being morally justified – I mean, they have a whole speech about it in the end and it was built-up throughout the entire Season – Techno is cast in a … less than sympathetic light. He is, if not a villain, then definitely an antagonist.

But with Season 2 the narrative is either uninterested in or not very clear on exploring Technoblade’s flaws.

Like ask yourselves: is Technoblade’s character ever consciously challenged by the narrative? Are his actions ultimately shown to not be in the right? Are his beliefs about government and power ever called into question? Are the negative consequences that his actions cause ever shown to be larger than the “good” he does?

I think what exemplifies this the most is how the Butcher Army event played out on December 16th. Now, during that event, the Butcher Army, which was comprised of Tubbo, Quackity, Fundy and Ranboo, managed to apprehend Technoblade, who at that point was living the quiet retirement life, and tried to have him publicly executed – without trial.

Now, smarter people than me have pointed out that the Butcher Army had a bevy of in-character reasons that can justify or explain their actions. And that’s definitely interesting, but as I said before, I want to get away from that and look into how the Butcher Army is treated on a narrative level. Because this is one of the few instances where the otherwise grey-loving Season 2 has some very clear narrative intent when it comes to morality.

The Butcher Army is very deliberately framed as almost cartoonishly corrupt and violent. They very forcefully investigate Philza, mock him and then put him under house arrest – and there’s just no remorse in the script even from normally sympathetic characters like Tubbo.

Compare and contrast with the Tommy-exile scene, which is also an act of moral ambiguity and is treated as such. And things get even worse once the Army arrives at Technoblade’s abode and attack him after he softly tells them that he has left that live behind him. They then proceed to take his horse hostage, mock him and execute him without fair trial – and I haven’t seen it but from live commentary I gathered that Techno really played up the whole softie-schtick before the Butcher Army arrived. I mean, before the big Technoblade vs Quackity fight, Quackity had whole villain monologue for Christ’s sake.

And even afterwards, the Butcher Army really plays up the corrupt angle with Tubbo proposing a festival as a guise to publicly execute someone. And again, I know that on an intradiegetic there’s nuances and it’s not really comparable to the Red Festival, but in combination with what the audience has seen up until that point and with how much it feeds into the already established themes of history repeating itself and becoming like your predecessors, it really does not paint a pretty picture of the Tubbo administration.

You can feel the heavy hand of the script on your shoulder, which is a feat seeing how – as discussed before – that’s not something that can be easily accomplished in this medium.

And that is what I mean when I say that Technoblade is not really challenged by the script and is in this case even emboldened by it. Because after this whole ordeal the thought of Technoblade taking revenge by destroying L’Manberg doesn’t seem like such an extreme response to the viewer – even though in my opinion, it is.

As of right now it is too early to say how the narrative will judge Technoblade’s actions in the future. Will they be framed as extreme but ultimately justified or perpetuating a cycle of ever-escalating vengeance? Will we ever see a government that’s not just at best misguided and at worst completely awful?

Ultimately, I believe and hope that Technoblade will be challenged by the narrative, mostly because a character that cannot, believably, be physically challenged, who doesn’t have any meaningful internal conflict about what he’s doing; and who does come out on the other side having everything he always believed in be proven completely in the right by the narrative, would be incredibly boring. Not just to watch but also to play as.

As it stands now, if the destruction Techno, Phil and Dream inflicted upon L’Manburg is framed as ultimately in the right, I would find it personally a distasteful message to send. I would ultimately say that the “correct” way to counter corruption in government is to completely obliterate the entire country. Like we’re not talking simply disbanding the government – that’s not what Doomsday was – we’re talking complete and utter annihilation. And that would be cynical and depressing. Like, call me a big softie, but even bothsidesing this argument would be bad.

Like, I’m not calling for Technoblade to be transformed into or treated a monster like Dream. But I personally feel like the narrative needs to acknowledge that the Doomsday was something that was taken way too far and that it ultimately brought more harm than good. And Technoblade needs to held accountable by someone who is not a cartoonishly corrupt government-official or who is in conflict with him anyway, like Tommy.

I thought Philza or Ranboo could do that but seeing how their storylines are progressing I don’t believe that will be the case. But who knows, maybe Captain Puffy will come through for us. We stan a Queen.

Conclusion

So, yeah, I made this entire video just to air out my grievances with how one-sided the mode of analysis is in the fandom, because no person actually involved with the production of Dream SMP will ever see this.

But after everything I am cautiously optimistic, that content creator Technoblade knows what he’s doing. He has talked in the past about how his character is a bad guy and he loves his Greek myths. After all what’s more Greek myth than hybris being rewarded with punishment? [Technoblade never dies] That bodes well for him.

Also, this isn’t the video I promised at the end of the last one!

67 notes · View notes

bao3bei4 · 3 years

Text

kpop music videos that gave their fans sexual brainworms

OR accidental fetish pop and its fringe fanbase: meditations on gendered desire

large warning here: i am someone who has been into kpop for the past 10 years. however, i have always been an extremely casual fan. i do write fic, but not rpf. if any of that makes you not want to hear me talk about kpop rpf (or you don’t want to hear about it in general), please keep moving.

anyway, obviously pop is corporate, soulless, and manufactured. but sometimes some truly bizarre shit gets past the committees and destroys a generation. these are their stories.

the video that started this is all is got7’s just right, released july 10th, 2015.

yes that’s all 7 members of got7 (one is out of frame) shrunken down for your viewing pleasure. they live in your room and tell you you’re just right.

this sheer fetish power of this video is nerfed only by how utterly sexless it is.

they’re styled like and dance like this. it’s a totally unironic sendup of the seminal work that preceded it by four years, “what makes you beautiful” by the white kpop group “one direction.” the chaste energy of the whole thing makes you legitimately wonder if the good people at jyp have just never heard of microphilia. (during a dramatic reading of this piece, here a friend interjected seriously, “i think it’s korean culture not to talk about things like this, fetishes in the workplace.”)

it’s for the best, honestly, though because the actress in the music video is lee ja in, who was 11 when the video was shot. considering that the members themselves ranged in age from 18-23 at the time, i think it’s actually very impressive that we only have to cancel one.

you receive absolutely no prizes for guessing that it’s jackson wang we’re sending to social justice prison. why’d he do this? no one asked.

at any rate, got7 fans, or “gans” (they actually call themselves igot7s which is too twee for me), have much to think about here: all 7 very small members of got7 sneaking into their room, possibly weird age play, and jackson wang eating a very large cake.

let’s see what they actually did.

twitter was actually very tame. the most charged thing i found was (unsurprisingly) from a bts fan (“ban”). i don’t actually know what it means, but i think it means something.

so, of course, i turned to the internet’s last bastion of free speech, where you can say whatever the fuck you want and receive cheers, or as the kids say, “kudos.” that is, i read fanfiction.

for those of you who don’t know your herstory, i started my journey at Asianfanfics.com, where, at the time of writing, there were 12,067 got7 stories. i want to start this by saying that i think feminism won, because someone was paying real human dollars to advertise their irene/wendy fanfiction on a banner ad, which is quite possibly a win for women for everywhere.

anyway, Asianfanfics.com’s search engine sucks ass (i kept on finding stories about different combinations of bts members worrying about their weight and being reassured by another member that were entitled “just right”), so i decided to look through all got7 stories written between july 2015 and december 2015.

but, alas, not a single got7 microphilia fic to be found.

also, some genre commentary while i’m here: i think the stories i respect the most are the “[y/n] is a ordinary girl who’s assigned to be got7’s manager! can she make them into superstars? as sparks begin to fly, can she keep it professional?” like fuck yeah that sounds like a kickass dating sim. it almost definitely already is one. i salute all the teens around the world for buying into the fantasy of dating a boy band member that they themselves sell you.

however, i don’t think i respect the “[member a] and [member b] are mafia/jocks and nerds/college students/high schoolers” concepts. in my opinion, the whole fantasy of boy band member is their personas, their hidden real personalities, their celebrity, and the show business setting. find a different intellectual property if you wanna write about school. i even respect the “yugyeom drank girl juice [not estrogen] and turned into a sexy girl” story more, because at least it knows exactly what it wants, and also because they’re all still boy band members. well, band members. shout out to yugyeom.

so, anyway, i looked elsewhere. at the time of writing, archive of our own only had 11,645 got7 stories, but it does have a better search, so it effectively has more. as an aside, i think it’s so funny, and mildly disorienting at first, that archive of our own separates the “music & bands” section from the “celebrities & real people” section. boy band members aren’t real people.

the first problem i encountered is that only 20 or so stories were written within a year of just right’s release. absolute cringe gans. don’t you care about your boys? there were zero stories tagged “vore” or “microphilia” either. stories containing the word “tiny” that were rated either “explicit” or “mature” were all normal (“normal”) size fetishization rather than, you know, just right.

however, i learned my lesson from twitter. i realized that what had happened was that watching this video had created sleeper agents, just waiting for their activation phrase. that activation phrase? bangtan boys. and yeah, lo and behold, there was one! unfortunately (fortunately?) it had nothing to do with got7, let alone just right, so i’m not going to talk about it.

basically what i learned is that this video may have actually been very normal, and my brain has just been destroyed by being too online at a young age.

however, there are plenty more videos in this genre. i present to you exo wolf, a banger from may 30th, 2013. i say banger, because in a comedic inversion, it’s actually fucking terrible.

this video is pretty self-explanatory in terms of why it might induce certain responses.

let’s get the formalities out of the way. this video, the member who’s getting cancelled is kai. he has braids in this video :/

also skating on thin ice: xiumin and chen. guys what was up with the whole exo-m thing? like, we’re gonna have a cpop subgroup, but it’s going to be part chinese members and part korean members that we’ll give a chinese name? unsurprisingly, the three exo members who have departed from the group are all chinese. they weren’t able to stand the microaggressions probably. but xiumin and chen remain uncancelled as an official chinese apology for five thousand of years of on-and-off invasions of korea. sorry guys that was kinda fucked up. our bad!

anyway, there are basically three avenues for exo fans to take: 1) humans with wolfish characters (usually wolf pack dynamics, which even wolves themselves don’t fucking use so i think all of you should shut up. the real omega here is your brain), 2) werewolves (duh), and 3) wolves with human characteristics (i.e. standard furry fare).

exo themselves let all these possibilities exist at the same time, superimposing them over each other, which is very woke and egalitarian of them. let’s see what the people decided. awoo.

Asianfanfics dot com had many stories in this vein. i feel very validated that this time i was able to correctly predict a fetish. that said, briefly returning to my earlier comment regarding alternate universes: it’s intense psychic whiplash reading about these vampires and werewolves, and going okay okay luhan is a vampire this that whatever, and then seeing the actual real performance photos the author attaches at the bottom of each chapter. bro i forgot these were actual people.... it breaks immersion so bad... i’m sorry, i just can’t believe that any of these dancing boys are having weird vampire sex with wings or whatever.

archive of our own also had many stories in this vein. and i think there are some important difference between the two sites worth talking about.

first of all, i think the higher engagement rate of archive of our own really enables some of the authors to get super bold. it makes Asianfanfics.com seem a little quaint, actually. like the wordcounts are waaay longer, for one. it’s uncommon for a story hosted on Asianfanfics.com to be more than a few thousand words long (most of them could easily be published in the new yorker), whereas some of these archive of our own people have written full length novels about if the members of exo were werewolves. i guess it’s just intensely demoralizing for the aff.com crew to get, like, three comments per story.

the second big difference is that i’m noticing more common themes between the ao3 crew’s writing. like stan intertextuality, or plagiarism, or whatever, but they seem to be implicitly engaging with each other’s characterizations, storylines, and tropes. i think it is because they probably all follow each other on twitter. (i have been active on twitter for three weeks now so i am an expert on fanfiction twitter.)

anyway, like not that i am a particularly big gan (cannot even list all the members), but these people seem to have reached a very specific consensus on how jackson wang, for instance, would react in a variety of situations that really surprises me? if i were to sit down and write a got7 story, i think the fuckboitude, the douchebaggery is a big part of his charm. not to be nationalist or anything, but for god’s sake, he’s from hong kong. but these people have him as very sensitive, lots of protective instincts. not that i understood what anyone on aff.com was doing with his character either, but they did all seem to be doing different things. “kudos” to that, i guess.

but: exo. wolf. i searched the “wolves” tag. this filtered the list down from 33459 stories to 52 stories. and the “wolves” tag was very different from the aff.com “wolf” tag. for the most part, aff.com liked stories where a member was a wolf (usually shapeshifting), feral boy, lots of y/n, lots of y/n dating a feral boy who is secretly a wolf.

ao3 really, really, really likes alpha/beta/omega stories. sorting by the most popular stories, only five on the first page weren’t a/b/o. and one of them was a cis f!baekhyun story, so i think the intended effect was communicated. anyway, let’s talk about some of the themes.

first of all, i’m disappointed. today’s bonus cancellation is of ao3 “wolves” writers. why the fuck are you drawing so heavily from european wolves?? there are wolves in asia!! you don’t need to keep giving their packs and ranks weird latin names. i will kill you. i hate italy. korea literally has a native wolf. i hate all of you!!! if you want to write caucasian wolves go watch that dumbass cw show!!!! my god.

the second theme (the first one was white supremacy) is that no one wants to be a wolf who fucks. i think that we need a sex positivity movement, or something, for omega rights. like, are all of you doing okay? you’re queering misogyny by inventing new genders to oppress. another level to “no one wants to be a wolf...” is the “who fucks” part. there are so many consent issues. and not even in like, a sexy intentional way? in a “i genuinely do not think this author understands how their writing comes off” way. unfortunately i am sensitive to untagged sexual coercion, and there was a lot of that.

at any rate, the aff.com wolves were at peace with being wolves, very self-actualized. the ao3 wolves know that every minute they spend alive on this bitch of an earth is suffering, and also sex.

the third theme is the evolution of y/n. y/n, who, in a startlingly woke move for aff.com, is almost always korean, is a girl main character stumbling into love, boy bands, and wolves (i think it’s because aff.com is oldschool kpop fandom, so therefore heavily asian itself in userbase). but y/n is not the main character in ao3 stories. she is the straight best friend. in what i think is a hilarious move, ao3 authors invert the gay best friend paradigm to give the gay main character a straight girl as best friend. she usually calls him “a gay,” she has lots of thoughts on boys, and she knows his sexuality better than he does and before he does. (sidebar: if all the men are gay, and all the women are straight...)

there’s a really fun twist to this, though, because the main character is always a self-insert in fanfiction. but where older fanfiction like aff.com was at peace with this and literalize it via y/n shenanigans, modern fic writers who haven’t finished distangling their complicated relationship with wanting to be a man who loves other men instead simply imbue their main character with their essence. a little voodoo doll sehun, with a lock of y/n hair.

this creates a deeply ambivalent relationship with gender in these stories. the main character is usually an omega, but one who resents being an omega. their body and its parts is usually described, if at all, as ostensibly intersex (except more offensively), but in practice, these discourses inscribe a trans body. (nb: i think cis writers approach this in a really fucked up fetishizing way, but i hope by this point we know that that goes without saying) it’s incredibly straightforward to read this, and see the underlying desires and fears in a heady cocktail of unfiltered writing that’s deeply confessional. you know when freud had people say whatever the fuck they wanted and figured they’d eventually free associate into releasing their subconscious into reality? yeah.

okay, and while we’re on the topic, let’s talk f(x) nu abo, released on may 4th, 2010.

this is a blitzy, maximalist, amped up dance hit that even has its own applause and cheers built in. it’s so fucking annoying, and i love it.

this song is on here because the second most popular kpop a/b/o story on ao3 is called “nu abo” except it’s about bts. that’s offensive enough in its own right. write something about f(x) (702 works). when will women win the right to have their own self-lubricating holes.

anyway, even though f(x) is probably innocent in all of this, i’m still cancelling amber liu.

for queerbaiting. who told her to look like ruby rose but hot? and for what? i’m also cancelling her for racism, but that wasn’t in this video.

moving on to a double feature: vixx voodoo doll and vixx chained up, released november 19, 2013 and november 9, 2015 respectively. this is because while voodoo doll is more formative, i think the fans who write fanfiction today got into kpop more recently, so we are casting a wide net.

anyway, voodoo doll is jam packed with weird pseudo-medical imagery, blood, vivisection, bondage, puppet shit, femdom, sharps, piercings, asphyxiation, dollification, stabbing/penetration metaphors, and a really sick and catchy dance. god that looks like the list of tags on the a/b/o wolf stories.

for this song, we’re cancelling you, for being way too into this song when you were 13.

vixx voodoo doll made me goth i guess! insert that pic of the your music saved me sign, except it saved me from getting into emo or pop punk probably.

chained up, comparatively, is much more tame. the only thing of note about it is that there are around 10 completely different chokers and choker looks the members wear in this music video. also they’re singing about being chained up, but that seemed a bit obvious.

we could argue that voodoo doll is gay while chained up is gay (derogatory); that voodoo doll is queer while chained up is gay; that chained up is a sensitive masterpiece of omega4omega sexuality. but we’re not going to.

we’re going to talk about what voodoo doll fanfiction was and was not. first, Aff.com had plenty of it. however, i was extremely disappointed to see that much of it did not hew to the spirit of vixx voodoo doll. my god, the voodoo doll becoming the one preying upon you disgusts me. the fantasy of the voodoo doll is that of absolute power. the idea that the doll itself has agency? instantly breaks the fantasy. i’m even not into voodoo dolls and i’m offended.

i also don’t think it’s part of the voodoo doll fantasy to release the doll. the only story on there that involved Y/N kidnapping vixx members like in the music video was unavailable because the author deactivated their account. come back qxeen what did you see.

i think this got off track, actually, in that i was mostly wondering why these people imprinted differently onto vixx voodoo doll than i did. like i don’t think you’re supposed to actually like straightforwardly absorb the morals and aesthetics of music videos like it’s propaganda. however, it’s more entertaining if you do. i hope ao3 doesn’t let me down.

out of the then 5932 works in the vixx fandom (the least out of every group so far, excluding f(x) because they’re women), 59 of them included the word “voodoo” somewhere. that’s 1%. i legitimately can’t tell if that’s high or not.

after some more cursory reading through the first page of popular results, my big takeaway is that people watched that video and wanted to be tortured and enslaved? but not, like, in a sexy way where the torturing is the point, the way where the point is to suffer bravely and beautifully, to endure the world’s harms like jesus on the cross, and then to fall into the arms of a beautiful boy who may or may not be the one hurting you in the first place.

there’s a certain predictability to these fantasies. like it’s not even masochism, which would be fun at least, it’s literally just like the desire to be beautiful, even as you suffer. and i do find that a little boring. (but, i mean, you can’t help being a woman!)

sidebar: on chained up. what’s interesting about chained up, is that most of the then 38 “chained up” works (likely because the video has no storyline) are about the members fucking during chained up promotions. no one’s ever actually chained up, but whatever. it’s fine. it’s fine!

anyway, here, more than ever, the nature of desire is stripped bare. i’ve written before [elsewhere in the unreleased tshirt cinematic universe] on how kpop boys are, through fandom, re-formed as white, or more strongly, i guess, blank slates. it’s really interesting to me how so much of this dynamic of projection is enabled by the fact that they’re asian men. they’re infantilized, feminized vessels; they’re seductive, but childlike, oblivious to their own charms, so nonthreatening; they have uncontrollable desires for sex, they’re scared of sex. and above all else, white women submit themselves to them, insert themselves into them. basically kpop fans tend to rework old school yellow peril and emasculation fantasies to reenact their own desires, often white, often cishet on them.

what i am saying is that there’s another thesis about forced feminization and its racialized subtext in here. obviously gender is a racialized construct to begin with, but like it’s fascinating to argue that when white women remake asian men according to their own desires, that is, into themselves, they (hopefully) unintentionally echo these old fears about the sexual order.

it illuminates, it seems, the underlying dynamic in the denigration of asian men, which is of course the fear of miscegenation. now, my breathtaking ability to make everything about me aside, miscegenation is interesting because it presents a racial synthesis, beginning to collapse and trouble the artificial designations of purity. so we make asian men into white women, and end up with an unsettling hybrid. i’m sure this has deep implications for me personally.

but i think we already knew that quite a few of these people had yellow fever, so let’s talk about the gender dialectic at play. basically, the above dynamic, of making men into women (whether literally, in body; or subjectively, in mind; or even relationally, as they are objectified into passive vessels for your desire) coexists with the ostensibly converse dynamic, in which the straight women desires to be a gay man. these aren’t necessarily in conflict: it could easily be that these are different writers writing different stories, that both are ways of expressing discontent with existing in a raced, gendered body, or even that the end product of both is the same.

it’s been a while without a picture. all of you now have the legal right to hunt and kill me for making a d&g joke.

anyway, what i want to talk about is how these two fantasies can coexist. that by making a man into yourself, you can speak on your own desire in a passive way. my normal interest is analyzing forced masc fantasies (albeit in chinese opera lol), and they bear little to no resemblance to this kind of fantasy. this kind offers plausible deniability, of course, because wanting things is embarrassing. but also the fantasy isn’t about wanting to be a man, it’s about having no choice but to be a failed one. the gender pessimism running through these stories is palpable. basically andrea long chu wants what wolf fanfiction writers know: everyone is an omega, and everyone hates it.

at any rate, this racialized dynamic is one that i wasn’t sure how to bring up throughout this piece, mainly because there is no definitive way for me to tell the race of any individual writer, beyond just like the clear and present vibes that i receive. but i think it structures a lot of the fantasies contained in this essay. (i felt more comfortable bringing up the gendered dynamic, because it was fairly trivial to find out the current gender of the person writing each story i was reading.)

obviously we should return to the specter haunting this conversation: the very much alive david eng. i think this sort of argument is familiar to readers of racial castration, especially his chapter on m. butterfly. btw sorry for mentioning that play 2 out of 3 posts on this blog. i have problems.

let’s talk about the parallel imagery between the depiction of gallimard’s final speech and the fanfiction i’ve described above. in it, gallimard makes himself into his own dream woman, dressing in yellowface and robes, the costume of puccini’s original madame butterfly. and he laments his lost love:

there is a vision of the orient that i have. of slender women in chong sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils. who are born and raised to be the perfect women. who take whatever punishment we give them, and bounce back, strengthened by love, unconditionally.

in that, i see the self insert, and i see the sufferer of vixx voodoo fic. the fantasy that gallimard has about asian women is repeated, this time about asian men and a helpless identification with them. and on some level, gallimard’s women do have something very compelling to identify with: they suggest that there’s a way to endure white male violence without sacrifice, and even more potently, to enjoy it on some level.

but onward to the titular racial castration. eng argues that gallimard’s wilful ignorance of song’s true gender is a psychic castration -- song’s masculinity is diminished so that his own can be enhanced within their relationship. this, eng believes, acts out “richard fung’s contention that in western imaginary ‘asian and anus are conflated.’” this process stabilizes the relationship between the asian man and the white woman: they occupy the same place within the sexual dyad.

this is, i think, why some people are addicted to writing from the bottom’s perspective. again -- not implying that irl bottoms don’t exist or that bottoms are psychically castrated lol -- but rather that you can fantasize about this ideal asian man that you can come to embody. in kpop rpf, rather than it being between a white man and an asian man (unless someone’s started writing chad future fic), it’s between two asian men. so this transformation is performed. whiteness is always intruding and so i think eng is helpful here to making it visible again.

this essay isn’t a callout or actual cancellation or anything like that, i do wanna be clear. i guess i just like talking about fantasies, even the embarrassing ones, and where they come from. i think oftentimes in fandom spaces, we write a lot of stories off as idfic, and i think virtually every single one of the stories i referenced to write this fairly uncontroversially fall into that category. but i think calling something an “id” something or the other naturalizes the satisfaction it gives as purely instinctual and unconscious, when i do think there are deeper narratives at play. while i didn’t ever actually reference the base here (sorry), i do think it’s worth talking about how real world power shapes & maintains the superstructure, and thereby our fantasies.

anyway in conclusion, maybe i was the one with sexual brainworms the whole time.

83 notes · View notes

comradekatara · 4 years

Note

Hi! I’m kinda new to atla, and came across some of your anti-zutara posts and Im trying to understand sth, if Zuko & Katara’s friendship itself is not problematic or misogynistic then why would a future romance be? I dont interpret their scenes as romantic exactly but I enjoy their pairing bc they do have a solid bond built on respect, understanding and work well as a team, and there’s potential for this to grow in to a romance with an interesting dynamic, esp after a few years of friendship 1/2

Your main anti-argument is the colonizer argument, but you also actively ship Zukka so I’m not sure how that works? Anyway don’t you find that that argument itself takes away from the point of Zuko’s entire arc, and assumes he wouldn’t dismantle the Fire Nations corrupt system? And there’s no reason to assume he would force Katara in to a role she might not be comfortable with or that Katara won’t have full say in how their relationship progresses or takes place. (oh and I’m not white lol) (2/2)

well, there’s a lot to unpack here.

first of all, platonic chemistry doesn’t automatically translate to romantic chemistry! from the little we’ve seen of their actual friendship, I think zuko and katara have something akin to the dynamic zuko could’ve had with azula had they not been forced at each other’s throats. the significance of katara being there for zuko during the final agni kai while azula is completely alone is thus heightened by this interpretation. if you think they have romantic chemistry, who am I to dissuade you? I personally think their similar intensity and flaws would make for a volatile relationship, but would lead to a friendship built on love and understanding, so that’s the interpretation of their dynamic i prefer. also zuko reads as a staunch kinsey 6 to me, but again, that’s a matter of opinion.

that said, i think that if you interpret any of zuko’s actions in trying to win katara’s respect as being because he has feelings for her, well, that framing is kinda creepy. especially the scene where he saves her from falling rubble and refuses to let go of her body. if you think zuko was intentionally trying to cop a feel here, then why exactly would you want him to be with katara, since he clearly doesn’t respect her. and then don’t even get me started on the people who think that time he tied her to a tree was sexy.... like, framing their relationship as romantic just doesn’t sit well with me for that reason. but anyway.

i think people have either gotten genuinely confused or deliberately obfuscated the distinction between criticizing a ship and criticizing a fanbase. my problem with zvtara in a vacuum is just that i think they’re not compatible romantically (despite having a lot of platonic chemistry and being one of the most compelling dynamics in the show!). I feel the same way about sokka and toph, and it’s just a matter of my preference for sibling dynamics over romance when it comes to these pairings! (i also think the age gap between sokka and toph is creepy even as adults because when you meet someone when they’re twelve there’s always gonna be a power imbalance there and there’s no way sokka isn’t aware of that. but i digress.)

to be clear, the reason i have been so vocal about my dislike for the ship is because it exists solely within the fan imagination, and that imagination is viscerally racist. I have said before i do not think shipping zvtara is inherently racist. I know there are black & brown women who ship it, and i’m not gonna act like their lived experiences matter less than a personal preference, but i think when white people advocate for this relationship, it’s really, really easy to fall into racist tropes. you said you’re new to the atla fandom, which means you haven’t been inundated with racist misogynistic bullshit that treats katara like a fetishized object for years the way i have. I don’t hate zvtara in a vacuum, but stuff like “fire lady katara” and pocahontas aus and whitewashed fanart – that shit takes a toll man. I’ve never seen any of that kind of racist bullshit when it comes to kataang fans, and like…. there is a reason for that!

for what it’s worth, if anyone thinks i’ve not been critical of people who ship zvkka falling into similar racist territory, then they must be deliberately turning a blind eye because i complain about zvkka as it exists in the fan imagination constantly. there are certainly racist zvkka fans, but something you need to keep in mind is how few there were until recently. before a couple months ago, when netflix decided to ruin my fucking life, only a handful of people watched atla through anything resembling a queer lens. when the show first aired, the idea that zuko could be interpreted as gay would’ve been absurd to 98% of the fanbase. so i wasn’t inundated with racism from zvkka fans because there were no zvkka fans. now, people on this cursed website watch everything through a gay lens, and it’s a nightmare. because they don’t even care about the characters, they just want an excuse to ship two teenage boys, and it’s deeply obnoxious and kind of concerning. anyway, i could talk all day about zvkka tropes i’ve seen that infuriate me, but that’s not this post.

like i’ve said in the past: I don’t think zvtara is ...inherently racist. what i do think is racist is the way it’s interpreted a majority of the time. if not for the stream of evil bullshit i’ve been inadvertently exposed to regarding this pairing over the years, i would simply say, “eh it’s not for me,” and move the fuck on! but unfortunately, i cannot do that, because i feel a responsibility to condemn racism when i see it??? I know you’re not trying to be deliberately obtuse, but please keep context in mind when it comes to questions like this, instead of getting defensive. I couldn’t care less about anyone’s personal tastes, as long as they’re not promoting things i’m morally opposed to, such as racism or misogyny. it’s possible to enjoy a thing and simultaneously be critical of it & the discussion surrounding it. that’s kind of the whole point of this blog.

#whew.#zvtara #asks #endlesstangents

208 notes · View notes

wherevermyway · 3 years

Text

the FiVE:RACHA project (1/7) // black mirror AU // 18+

chapter one: freedom series navigation: [desktop] [mobile]

⚠ POTENTIAL TW: READ WITH CAUTION! ⚠ pairings: lee minho x kim seungmin | hwang hyunjin x lee felix x yang jeongin | bang chan x seo changbin x han jisung rating: explicit! 18+ warnings/tags: creator chose not to use archive warnings, descent into madness, horror, thriller, technological implants, blood and gore, alcohol abuse, some sexual content in later chapters but it’s not, like, smut. word count: 3,101 also on AO3

PS: i made a carrd for this. check it out if you’re interested!

originally posted: 26 december 2020

Several years ago, five men created a website for South Korea's international rap sensation, 3RACHA. The website, The FiVE:RACHA Project, was almost as popular as the group themselves. About two years after the website went live, FiVE:RACHA had the opportunity to meet 3RACHA.

Immediately after they meet, the members of FiVE:RACHA and 3RACHA go missing. The FiVE:RACHA Project website is down. Their Twitter account has been deactivated, and 3RACHA stops posting. A few months after their meetup, it was announced that 3RACHA had disbanded. Nobody knows what happened to either group.

Nobody knows, until now.

For some, modern day fame comes at a price that is too high to pay.

disclaimer: this is a work of fiction! any reference to persons in this work of fiction are purely coincidental. the characters referenced from Stray Kids are interpretations loosely based on their personalities in the group and do not represent the real people behind the personas. if this, or any of the content included in the warnings above make you uncomfortable, please stop reading now.

// note: with other darker stuff i post, i’m not totally sure i’ll post the entirety of this fic on tumblr. if not, i’ll do a little notice post for people interested to keep following it on AO3.

...Do you wish to proceed? To learn the truth of FiVE:RACHA and 3RACHA?

What is the true price of fame?

A Foreword:

Several years ago, there was a fan site, The FiVE:RACHA Project, dedicated to South Korea’s most famous rap group, 3RACHA. One day, it went down without notice. The site, as well as their Twitter account with over four million followers, was almost as well-known as the rap group itself.

3RACHA mysteriously disbanded several months after FiVE:RACHA went down. Nobody has seen or heard from the members of either group since the disbandment. There are several theories and myths surrounding the disappearances of both groups, but most of them are incorrect.

Be aware that, no, FiVE:RACHA did not go down because the site moderators were bored of 3RACHA. No, 3RACHA did not disband because Supreme Entertainment was about to collapse due to widespread fraud and their political scandals within the Korean government.

The stories of FiVE:RACHA and 3RACHA are very much deeply intertwined within each other, and the truth is uncomfortable to witness.

This novel’s authors, comprised of some of the most loyal fans of both groups, will remain anonymous and stay in hiding due to fear of being caught by the one responsible for the disappearances. An individual outside of our group found a Shinyu of someone involved in this, someone discarded in the Han River many years ago. How the implant survived with no living host for so long is beyond remarkable.

In case the Shinyu is defunct or replaced by the time you’re reading this, allow us to explain. The name comes from “close friend” in Japanese, likely as a play on words for how close the implant gets to its host, both physically and socially. The Shinyu was created in Tokyo in 2025; it is a small technological implant embedded under the skin of the right side of everyone’s temples.

Everyone has one placed at thirteen, and it encodes all of our visual, tactile, and auditory data, syncing it to our phones and uploading it to personal servers in the cloud. The data is encrypted, and requires access from both the Shinyu and the phone to decipher. It allows us to integrate technology into our daily lives, records our memories and important moments, but there is a price we all pay for this. Critics have been outspoken about this since its inception, but the governments never listened.

Alas, we digress. The Shinyu is vital to uncovering so much information that has been hidden and speculated on after all this time. Regardless of our personal opinions regarding the ethics of the device, we are grateful that we were able to obtain one of the implants. It has been vital to connect a lot of the missing pieces of the greater picture.

The authors have spent years decoding the information from this implant. Thanks to an anonymous source, we were able to obtain the personal computer of someone in FiVE:RACHA, personal cell phones of both groups, access to the database of Supreme Entertainment and its defunct myIdol data, some declassified legal information, and archives of both FiVE:RACHA and 3RACHA’s Twitter accounts.

Why have we chosen to extrapolate all of this data in the form of a novel? Perhaps we would like it to serve as a modern day parable for the plights of technology being so intricately interwoven between us all now. We, as humans, are now one with technology. Technology is literally embedded into us. It is astounding that technology allows us to interact so closely with famed idols now, beyond some barriers that critics have denounced for being inappropriate or unhealthy.

Some of us may pay the ultimate price for this.

Some of us, unfortunately, already have.

However interconnected we are with technology and how close we can get to those of which we idolize in society, though, humans will still crave entertainment. That is why this was written almost as a work of fiction. Those that pay attention to the story will be rewarded. Maybe not immediately, and maybe only after self-reflection, but readers will be rewarded. That much can be promised.

Above all else, we cannot stress enough that modern day fame and convenience comes at a price that is too high for some to pay. Stay safe, err on the side of caution. Disconnect from your Shinyu if you choose to proceed any further, because you never know who is watching.

— Curators of The FiVE:RACHA Project

One: Freedom

Nobody really knows who exactly manages FiVE:RACHA, just that it’s a group of five fans that run a fansite for the popular rap group 3RACHA. Their website is the most well-known and widely used out of the millions of fans that are out there. It always has live updates for the members: Bang Chan, Seo Changbin, and Han Jisung. There are daily paparazzi photos of at least one of them slapped up on the front page, embedded social media posts from each of the members updated as soon as they post, and hard-to-find facts about each of them.

Hell, one of the FiVE:RACHA members went through and coded up a section of the site dedicated to decoding natal charts for each of the members. Again, like most things about FiVE:RACHA, the source of this information was a mystery. Nobody’s sure exactly how they obtained 3RACHA’s birth times and locations. Some had speculated that it happened the same day the government had announced that there was a security breach of some of their databases, because the timing was oddly convenient.

To most casual fans, it sometimes felt really fucking weird to have so much information on idols readily available at their fingertips. However, to 3RACHA’s most dedicated, most obsessed fans, it was perfect. Exactly what they wanted. Their work seemed well-appreciated by the broader community, since the amount of Twitter followers FiVE:RACHA had was comparable to 3RACHA’s following, nearly half of their total count: 4,100,000 to 8,500,000.

There was nothing else that could compare to the controlled insanity that The FiVE:RACHA Project had to offer.

The FiVE:RACHA website was an international sensation, known to most 3RACHA fans, even those that opposed it. There was even a small, but growing, fanbase for the members of FiVE:RACHA, something that was slightly worrisome to them, but they had remained anonymous for so long, they weren’t really overtly concerned over it.

“This article is bullshit, man. ‘Controlled insanity’? None of this is controlled, it’s just insanity.”

Idle hums and trills of various electronics thrum in a dark room. Two young men stare at several computer monitors in a daze, lost in their own worlds as a ticker tape-like feed of coding and statistics flew past them on screen.“Let ‘em talk, dude,” the younger-looking man with blue hair scoots away from his computer and sighs. “Fuckin’ gossip rags. Anyway, I can’t stare at this CSS anymore. I can’t figure out why the embedded feeds are busted. Can you take over on this, Seung?”

The slightly older man with short, shaggy black hair rolls his neck, snapping some joints, not bothering to look away from his screens. “Yeah, yeah,” he stops poring over the article written about them on one screen, tabbing away to another. He cracks the knuckles in his fingers, and waves his hand in the air as he taps a couple of keys on his keyboard. “Go take a break, Jeongin. Hyunjin was looking for you, anyways. Probably got something good from a source of his, since he’s in one of his giddy moods.”

As Seungmin settles into his work, Jeongin chuckles as he stands up and stretches. He takes a couple steps over to the other computer desk and pats the older man on the back. “Thanks, dude,” he says with a smile and walks out of the server room, out into the hallway that leads into the open living room of their flat. The ambient humming of the room stops as he shuts the door, now replaced by the sound of his feet shuffling, the muffled noises echoing against the hardwood floor.

Five men all lived and worked in this large apartment together: Yang Jeongin, Kim Seungmin, Hwang Hyunjin, Lee Felix, and Lee Minho. Collectively, this was where they lived and breathed The FiVE:RACHA Project. Running the largest, most extensive fansite for South Korea’s most famous rap group, 3RACHA, was more than a full-time job. They all equally poured their hearts and souls into maintaining the website and their Twitter account. It proved to be almost too much for five people alone to handle as their shifts sometimes went from twelve hours and bled into sixteen, sometimes twenty-four hour shifts.

Minho, the leader, didn’t trust anyone but the original five to the project, however. Jeongin could hear the oldest man’s airy voice echo in his ears: “I trusted the four of you with this. Now, it’s devolved into something I don’t even recognize. There’s no way anyone deserves to see what we’ve done. Imagine if it got out that we were the ones in charge of this monstrosity?”

Jeongin glided into the kitchen, and pulled his phone out of his back pocket, eyeing the time. 13:36. He had another hour left of his shift, and he was exhausted after yesterday’s all-nighter. 33 hours of work, with only a small nap in between was rough on anyone, and he was starting to feel it, physically. His Shinyu Implant would ping him once every hour that he was very low on sleep, reminding him that it was unhealthy to go without sleep for so long and that he would not be able to drive. As he slinked his way to the fridge, he shoved his phone back into his pocket and yawned. He opened the fridge, the contents in the shelves of the door clattering as they abruptly shifted around.

The first thing he saw was a bottle of unsweetened coffee and, while he knew he shouldn’t drink caffeine within a few hours of hopeful sleep, Jeongin went against his instincts and reached for the bottle anyways. As he opened it, the cracking of the seal reverberated against all of the hard surfaces and sounded much louder than it should have, startling the man awake a bit.

He hated unsweetened coffee, but there was no way he would make it through another hour or so of coding maintenance without it. Jeongin polished off the entire bottle within seconds, grimacing in disgust the entire time. He tapped his right temple twice, and grumbled. “Set reminder, after work: grocery shopping. Have Hyunjin drive. Add to list: energy drinks. The good kind, none of that berry-flavoured shit.” A very faint, nearly inaudible ding responds after he’s done speaking, and Jeongin moves to discard the bottle into the recycling bin.

“Innie?” Almost as if the devil himself heard Jeongin’s request, a familiar voice rounded the corner of the kitchen. “Oh, good, I thought that was you. Anyway, you won’t believe the content I got from Yeji at Seoul Scoop, dude,” the lanky, beacon-like blond grins wildly at Jeongin, walking into the kitchen. “I actually got a photo of Chan and Changbin looking awfully close at KNECT’s backstage event a couple days ago. Think they were celebrating their recent win a little too hard.”

Hyunjin proudly slaps a grainy photo down on the countertop, where Changbin is sitting in Chan’s lap, arms wrapped around the older man’s neck. Sure, it could easily be explained away as friendly closeness, since everyone knew that all of the guys were very close friends, and the area was cramped. The photo, however, would cause a lot of panic within the community.

Jeongin smirked as he eyed the photo, taking it into his fingers and bringing it up close to his face. “The shippers are going to have a field day over this, you know.”

“I know,” Hyunjin shakes some of his hair out of his face as he arrogantly places a hand on his hip, shifting his weight to one side. “It’ll be great traffic for the site. I’ll have Seungmin put it on the front page later.” He takes a couple of steps closer to Jeongin and pulls the younger man to his chest, stroking his hair down. “I love you, but you look like shit. Why not call it a little early today?”

Jeongin shook his head, burying his nose into the older man’s shoulder, letting his eyes flutter shut with a sigh. “Seungmin and I are trying to fix a string of broken code that’s causing the social media feed to bug out a little bit. Definitely wanna have that fixed before we upload this.”

A clattering of keys startles both of the younger men, causing them to look behind Hyunjin. “Don’t worry about it, Jeongin,” a third voice speaks from the entrance of the kitchen. “Seriously, you worked really hard yesterday, and I’m sure we’ll manage. I’ll be sure to wake up Felix a little earlier and we’ll fix the coding.”

“You’re home early, Minho,” Jeongin chuckles once as he nods. “Figured you’d be stuck in the office for a few more hours.”

“Nah,” Minho dismissively waves his hand in the air as he walks over to the sink, rinsing his hands. “Seungmin called me earlier and said you were nodding off at your desk, asked me to come home early.”

A look of guilt washed over Jeongin’s face. “Shit, my bad.”

“Don’t apologize,” Minho smiles as he towels off his hands. “I appreciate all of the work you did yesterday; completely revamping the social media section was hard. But I can’t have you possibly miscode something and have it break the site because you’re running low on sleep. You’ve started getting pings, haven’t you?”

Jeongin sheepishly nods his head and mumbles an affirmation.

Hyunjin rolls his eyes and elbows the young man in the side. “I thought I told you to take a nap, dude?”

“I did!” Jeongin whines. “It was, like, a half-hour, though.”

Both Hyunjin and Minho roll their eyes at Jeongin. “Get out of here,” Minho scoffs, walking towards the server room. “Go to bed. I don’t wanna see you back in the server room until tomorrow morning.”

Jeongin opens his mouth to protest, but Hyunjin drags him away, up the stairs towards their bedroom. A ping comes from his implant, a transparent box popping up in the lower right-hand corner of his vision. The soft voice of the AI reverberates against his skull, allowing him to hear it as if it were a real voice whispering into his ear. It reads off the notification from his display.

“Movement away from workplace detected. Reminder: grocery shopping later, have Hyunjin drive. Would you like me to pull up your list?”

“No.” A low grumble comes up from Jeongin’s throat as he taps his temple twice to dismiss the notification. “Hyunjin,” he sighs, “we’ve gotta go grocery shopping.”

“You’re too tired,” Hyunjin shakes his finger without turning to look at Jeongin. “The grocery store will still be there tomorrow.”

“I’m out of my energy drinks, though,” the younger man protests.

Hyunjin smiles, opening the door to their bedroom and whispers. “I’ll be sure to get some for you. Go cuddle up with Felix and get some sleep.”

“Hyunjin, I—” Jeongin is cut off as the older man grabs his wrist, pulling him into his chest. They share a brief kiss before Hyunjin guides him into the bedroom.

“Shh, Lixie is sleeping.”

There’s a shuffling that comes from the bedsheets, and a sleepy voice grumbles. “Not anymore.”

“Aw, mornin’, babe,” Hyunjin says with a smile. “Sorry to wake you. Minho’s probably gonna come ask for you in a bit, anyways, though.”

Felix rolls over, sitting upright as he runs his hands through his brassy blond hair. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,” Jeongin sighs as he makes his way over to the bed, bringing an arm up to the blond and wrapping him in a lazy hug as he pulls them down to the bed.

The blond lets out a soft laugh. “Don’t worry about it, man,” he turns his head to face the bluenette and offers him a quick peck on the lips. “I couldn’t sleep much, anyways. Finding out about that myIdol rumour yesterday had my brain going kind of wild.”

“You heard about it too, huh?” Hyunjin says, colliding down onto the bed opposite of Felix. “Someone at Seoul Scoop told me about it this morning. It lets fans connect with their idols, like they’re actually directly messaging them.”

“That’s weird,” the bluenette sleepily grumbles into Felix’s shoulder.

“I think so, too.” Felix says with a frown as he nuzzles his head against Jeongin’s forehead, staring up into the ceiling.

Hyunjin shrugs with indifference. “I dunno, I think it’s pretty interesting.”

Jeongin lifts his head and stares down Hyunjin with a smirk. “You just want to pretend like Changbin cares about you.”

The older blond frowns as he flips off Jeongin. “Like you wouldn’t want Jisung to send you a ‘Have a wonderful day, bestie!’ message?”

The youngest member flops back down onto the bed. “Okay, that’s fair. It’s still weird, though. Seems so artificial and fake, I guess.”

“Well,” Hyunjin sits up, offering a hand out to Felix, “I’ll have more information on it tomorrow, probably. Why don’t you let yourself sleep for a while?” Felix takes the hand offered to him, and both men stand up. “Lixie and I will go out and get some groceries and get you those nasty energy drinks you like so much.”

Jeongin grumbles as he wiggles his way up to the pillows, half-asleep and irritated from the loss of warmth from Felix. “Just not the berry ones, okay?”

“I’ll see what we can do,” Hyunjin says with a smirk before he spins on his heel and walks out of the room. “Love you, Innie!”

“Don’t worry,” Felix leans down to kiss Jeongin’s forehead, “I’ll make sure he doesn’t get the kinds you hate. Let yourself actually sleep, too. We’ll make it all work out, okay?”

Jeongin mutters some sort of incoherent affirmation as he lets his heavy eyelids flutter shut. Seungmin would be able to fix the CSS by himself, he figured, trying not to worry too much about how broken small parts of the site were. He heard Felix say something else as he quickly faded off into sleep, but it didn’t register fully as he sank into the abyss.

There were a lot of sleepless nights ahead of them, whether FiVE:RACHA felt it coming or not.

#the fiveracha project #the five:racha project #skz fics #black mirror au #horror #technological horror #i'm not tagging the ships because they're not really important #wherevermyway

14 notes · View notes

maxwell-grant · 3 years

Note

I hope you don't mind me dropping asks on you every day? Anyways, a general question on modern-day attempts at using existing Pulp Heroes; do you think there is value in setting such tales in the modern day, rather than being period pieces? And if one does do so, do you think the best approach is to go full setting update, or to somehow translate the characters into the modern day, or to go the Legacy route?

I eagerly look forward to answering all kinds of questions, so don’t hesitate to send any my way!. Any feedback or excuse I get to go off on a subject is extremely appreciated.

Okay so on to your question:

...Man, that really seems like the billion dollar question when it comes to the pulp heroes, isn’t it? The one at least that every conversation regarding adapting these characters, giving them reboots or new stories, seems to inevitably get stuck on: Should these characters be left as is, or modernized? Is there any point to trying to modernize them when often, at least in the public view, the only thing that separates them from being diet superheroes is their time period? Can these characters even survive as anything other than historical footnotes if they don’t move past the trappings of time holding them back? I’ve been very firmly on both sides of the question at different points and I think every answer inevitably brings up solutions and problems of it’s own.

For the moment, I’m going to start by saying that it’s something of a case by case basis. For example, The Scarlet Pimpernel is a timeless archetype, but one who’s specific characterization and history is so tied up to it’s time period that it’s far better to just reimagine the Pimpernel into a different character set in a different time, than to try and remove the Blakeneys from their time period, likewise with characters who cross into historical fantasy like Conan or western characters, where they have such strongly defined settings and playgrounds that you’d be losing much by removing them from it.

But on the other hand, you have characters like The Phantom, or The Avenger, who very clearly could exist at just about any point in time and don’t have any specific complications holding them to the 30s (in fact The Phantom was arguably designed for this, being he kickstarted the whole legacy superhero concept). A lot of the times, people seem to think or insist that certain pulp characters cannot be separated from their time periods, even when they were well on their way to doing so before some unfortunate cancellation. The Shadow, for example. Gibson had no problems updating the character’s adventures to the 60s for the Belmont series, and if The Shadow had maintained the kind of continuous publication that Batman and Superman had, I have no doubt whatsoever that nobody would even peg him as a character that belongs to the 30s and the 30s only, even if a lot of important aspects of his character are tied up in 30s America and The Great War and whatnot.

To try and streamline this response into something more general, I’m going to state that, yes, I do think it’s a case by case basis where some characters don’t work as well outside their time periods, and others should have left them ages ago, but in general? I think most of the pulp heroes would stand to benefit much more from being set, not just in modern times, but outside of time. Or at least, outside of a specific time period being something that defines and entraps them. Pretty much none of these characters, outside of historical fantasy examples like Conan or characters whose genres are locked into specific past time periods like cowboys, were intended to be period pieces, and yet that’s what they became, because time has been extremely cruel to the pulp heroes in many ways.

To bring up superheroes briefly, while I maintain that I think the real secret to making pulp heroes work and achieve success again is to distance them from superheroes, or at least the popular blockbuster superheroes, as much as possible, the superheroes have been around running the show for a while now and experimenting a lot as an inescapable facet of pop culture that's worked out monstrously well so far,nso clearly there’s a lot to learn there. The superheroes by and large belong in shared universes held tight by copyright where the weight of accumulating timelines inevitably forces them to either undergo reboots every couple of years, or endure constant quiet retcons snipping away at continuity so the cohesive “Superhero Universes” can function. But there’s no such thing as some big “Pulp Hero Universe” existing anywhere near the same capacity, there’s works gesturing to the idea like the Wold Newton Universe and LOEG and Dynamite’s shared author works largely scrapped together from separate sources all drifting apart, and most of these characters have largely fallen through the cracks of copyright law and into outright non-existence, or are halfway there. Very few modern instances of "cinematic universes" outside of the MCU work, so what we do instead is go the opposite route, closer to DC's "throw anything at the wall to see what sticks" approach.

What I’m getting to is, I could flip through the pages of Jess Nevins’s Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes, pick about 3 or 5 random characters, put them in a story regardless of whatever time period they used to be a part of, and make something out of it, without anyone stopping to question “Hey, hold up, why is Joel Saber not on Victorian England? Why are Uirassu and Tom Shark in a loving relationship when they don’t even belong in the same decade? Why did you turn Allan Crystal into a talking sparrow? You are betraying the source material, these characters don’t work outside of it”. Because nobody has any idea who those guys are, they might as well be just original names I made up (I didn't, btw), and nobody has any reason to care, they will only care if they read good, engaging stories with strong characterizations that give them a reason to be invested. And if achieving that requires ditching adherence to the source material (which doesn’t even exist anymore for at least a third of these characters), I cannot see that as a bad thing.

He's nowhere near the ballpark of pulp heroes but I'm going to bring up King Arthur as an example because he’s been on my mind today.

All of these, and countless others, are King Arthur. I’m no expert in Arthuriana, but from what I’ve gathered, I’d make a pretty good guess that one of the main reasons why King Arthur has been able to endure so strongly, and have so many variations that we have an entire area of study dedicated just to untangling those messes we call Arthuriana, has less to do with his historical or mythological importance (you hardly see that many stories about Cú Chulainn), but because the lore and imagery and events surrounding King Arthur have so utterly transcended the source material that people still dispute what the source material even was, or if he was a real person, or if he was created by the Welsh and stolen by Brits, and etc, and because he's completely free for any writers and artists to mold and use to anything they see fit.

King Arthur is not so much a character as much as he’s a sandbox that literally anyone can play in and reshape as they see fit, with no shortage of existing events and characters and magical items that you can treat as either essential staples, or guidelines and suggestions at best. I have three separate ideas for King Arthur as a big shark man in a greaser outfit who yields an oversized hair comb with fishhooks attached as Excalibur, one where he’s a monstrous dragon who sleeps in the ruin of his former kingdom guarding the only remaining memory of Guinevere left, and one where he’s a disembodied consciousness inside a giant mechanical bear. I could pick any of these and make a story out of them, or insert these into a story, any time I want, and nobody could stop me.

Point is, I think a lot, even most, of the pulp heroes would benefit from having some kind of “no-holds-barred, just do anything you want out of whatever you find interesting about the original” approach, a lot more so than the superheroes already do, because if there’s a single group of characters nowadays that best embodies an “anything goes” approach, a group that is almost entirely in public domain nowadays save for it’s biggest icons and therefore is already available for people to take and spin any way they want, it’s the pulp heroes. These characters have been in stasis for so long, or all but faded into nothingbbut mere footnotes in encyclopedia or records in libraries not even available online, and sometimes not even that. Most of their fanbases have largely died off and they are nowhere near close to gaining new ones, and our changing media tastes call for contrasts as much as it calls for profit. No sensible person would invest in most of these properties as they stand now, which is precisely what ultimately gives them the freedom to be anything at the conceptual stage. The only thing that really, really holds them back is time, which, again, has really not been kind to them. So why adhere to it? Screw time and whatever power it’s long held over these characters, let’s get weird with it.

So if I have to choose between “full setting update, translating the characters to modern day, or the Legacy route”, all three of which are perfectly viable depending on the character, I think the best option, generally speaking, is full setting update, if only because the setting should never be the main priority in the first place. The setting, like everything else, is there to serve the story and the author’s needs and wants, and I’m of the opinion that the setting should always primarily exist in service of the characters, as my writing and my favorite writings are all character centered above all else.

I think putting the pulp heroes in radically different time periods and settings could even yield interesting results. Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal stars a caveman Conan/Tarzan type protagonist interacting with dinosaurs, Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta is a Shadow-esque character set loose in a dystopian future, Grendel is the Fantomas of 1980s New York, and so on. The precedent is there and I think it can be taken much further.

Really I think a lot of the problems and arguments that have arisen over the years in regards to adapting the pulp heroes often result of people overthinking things, lord knows I do enough of that all the time. I really think it’s just something that only seems impossible because it hasn’t really been done yet. Of course, in regards to The Shadow I obviously have a whole different text as to whether I’d want him to be adapted or not, but in general, my ultimate response to what you asked is just do whatever you think is gonna make the story better and the characters more interesting. A.K.A, do whatever you want.

8 notes · View notes

brighthappybird · 4 years

Text

What if the Angels had Pacts pt. 2

So this has been a thought that I’ve been thinking about. What if the Angels of Obey Me had pacts. What would they be like? So I already answered that question right here - What if the Angels had pacts?

Now let’s look at what if the brothers, as angels, had pacts and what the MCs may have gotten from that. And just for the fun of it, I’m throwing Satan in here.

Like always, if you want your MC, Demon or Angel to be thrown into the mix, don’t be afraid to like throw them my way. I’ll gently catch them and write for their pact, if you wanted!

Let’s start off with what we know what the pacts do. There might be more information that might come out later, but for now, we know that the pacts help the MC control the demon brothers, by either controlling them or by having some form of bond to them. That’s about as much as we know, if anyone else knows more, feel free to add on!

With the brothers, it is a little tricky since you would need to look at what their sins would be the opposite in the Celestial Realm. Additionally, when I talk about their symbolic animals, I’m analyzing them from a totem standpoint since that gave me the most information when analyzing them.

Lucifer, Avatar/Prince/Sin of Pride --> Virtue of Humility

Mammon, Avatar/Prince/Sin of Greed --> Virtue of Generosity

Leviathan, Avatar/Prince/Sin of Envy --> Virtue of Admiration

Satan, Avatar/Prince/Sin of Wrath --> Virtue of Forgiveness

Asmodeus, Avatar/Prince/Sin of Lust --> Virtue of Chasity Love

Beelzebub, Avatar/Prince/Sin of Gluttony --> Virtue of Discipline

Belphegor, Avatar/Prince/Sin of Sloth --> Virtue of Zeal

I hope everyone likes this! I will be posting a Diavolo bonus to this, but I’ll be taking a quick break from this. Also, please send me your MCs/OCs for Obey Me! I would absolutely love to write something like this for them!

Now that we have each of their virtues listed out, we [as the players] know that each of them have shown some form of their former virtues (before they fell) when interacting them. Granted, it is a little warped, but it is still there. The issue is most of their personalities that we know now, are their current demon forms. We don’t know much about how they acted as angels. Though who is to say that isn’t going to be changed in the future!

Lucifer, Virtue of Humility - He was once known as the Morning Star. There are times in the story where multiple characters will say he was the gem of the entire Celestial Realm. The pride and joy of the Celestial Realm. There are instances in the game where Luke has said that he admired Lucifer more than Michael before he fell, which means, he was one that probably had the biggest influence amongst the other angels, even compared to Simeon (from the last post).

Since he is the virtue of humility, we can assume that he was not as prideful as he is now. There was a sense of give and take, where instead of having the burden of the entire world on his shoulders like now, as an angel (even if he had his own fanbase), he would share the burden of what he was thinking. All in all, he was humble or rather, had a much lower view of his own importance.

Lets go a little deeper into this by analyzing his symbolic animal as well. His symbolic animal is a peacock, which we know symbolizes pride, beauty and confidence. Something that he no doubt, he has had follow him through his time of being an angel then his descent in being a demon. The other things that a peacock symbolizes are balance, awareness, leadership and ressurection. In a way, we could say that his rebirth as a demon was foretold in the cards, but let’s skip that. Balance, Awareness and Leadership, what was Lucifer known for in the Celestial Realm? He was someone that the angels would rally around and see him as this great leader. The Morning Star.

If the MC were to make a pact with Lucifer, when he was an angel, one could assume he would be guardian angel++ like Simeon. Though instead of taking more of a passive guardian role, he would take more of a assertive role should the pact holder be in danger. Though getting a pact with him would be much more difficult compared to the other brothers and this is because of how low he views his importance and how his importance is only tied to his title of The Morning Star. So have fun MCs!

Mammon, Virtue of Generosity - Though not much is spoken about Mammon and the others during their time as an angel. All we know is that Mammon was Lucifer’s favorite. That’s about it. Honestly, a part of me likes to think that Demon Mammon and Angel Mammon would have the same issue of being poor. Angel Mammon just giving away every single cent that he has in order to help someone else. Instead of looking for an opportunity to make money, he looks for an opportunity to try and help. Remember that impulsivity that Lucifer has tried to curb with many rules? Well, different realm, same Mammon, just a different reason why he’s out of money.

Since he is the virtue of Generosity, we can assume that he is still actively seeking money, but also seeking opportunities to help others. There is a sense of “give” “give” “give” and it is almost uncontrollable. He is just as soft in his angelic form as he is in his demon form, but he does not actively hide it. If anything, it is one of the reasons why humans and other angels find him more approachable.

Let’s also talk about his symbolic animal. I know, I’m like dissecting each of the attributes that each of the brothers have, but it is just so interesting. So for Mammon, his symbolic animal is a crow which is known for being a bringer of prophecy and good luck. Other attributes denoted to the crow is intelligence, adaptability, insight, and being fearless. Now, Mammon is not that fearless, but he does have his moments where he will disregard Lucifer’s warning and do what he wants, despite the consequences. Though there is something deeper, Mammon shows much more emotional intelligence compared to most of his brothers, he is able to tell how the MC is feeling (despite disregarding it a little) and there are times where he shows high levels of intelligence when it is something he cares about.

If the MC were to make a pact with Mammon, when he was an angel, one could assume that he would be a guardian angel. Not a guardian angel++ like Lucifer or Simeon, but he is the guardian angel that would have quite a few pacts. Instead of being indebted to witches, he would be constantly fretting over the state of his human. With the pact, Mammon would know the state of his human and how they are doing financially or emotionally. He would be the angel to search the ends of the earth to find exactly what they need to make them happy and feel secure. Even if it means, spending some time with him.

Leviathan, Virtue of Admiration - Going to be a little honest, Levi was a little hard thinking of. Since his Envy and his admiration are rather similar. Though the one thing that does change is that he respects himself a little more. He appreciates his own interests instead of putting himself down. He still enjoys consuming media, video games and using netspeak as he usually does. He is still interested in anime/manga/books, but he is a lot more social able.

As the virtue of admiration, he admires other individuals collections and instead of comparing himself to them and putting himself down, he takes an interest in their interests and actively asks them questions. If anything, he feels embarrassed and shuts down when he feels like he has crossed a boundary or forgot the MC’s interests.

As interesting as it is, Leviathan’s symbolic animal is the serpent, which symbolizes fertility, life and healing. They are also the symbols of rebirth, transformation and immortality. There are various aspects of this that almost seem like it opposes Levi as a character as a whole, but he does go through his own form of rebirth. Instead of being a recluse in the game, he ends up opening up more and talking to his brothers as well as the MC more. The healing aspect would be something that he does as well as has his charges do, if he were to have multiple pacts at once. Helping them heal from their social awkwardness, at least bring them to a bearable amount, where they could make friends/allies.

If the MC is able to get a pact with him, they should feed into his admiration aspect. Since keeping him hooked on their interests and keeping him interested. Which is a downfall for him, but I digress. Though he falls into the same category as Mammon, he is a guardian angel. He is able to sense when his human is excited or if someone hurt their feelings regarding their interests or just hurting their feelings in general. That is enough to bring him to their side and comfort them. Just reminding them why they liked what they like. Though if he needs to, like in the game, he is not afraid to snap at those making his human feel bad.

Satan, Virtue of Forgiveness - Now humor me for a little bit, we know it is canon that he was not originally an angel. Just humor me. Though not much of his personality changes. He is still the sensible, quick witted and the voice of reason. Though instead of his voice just being reserved for his brothers, he is used to settle arguments between all angels that may have a spat.

Satan was still born from Lucifer, but instead of blaming Lucifer, as much as it annoys him, he ends up forgiving Lucifer a little more. With how well read he is, he understands that there are certain causes that he can argue for since he would know why the individual acted the way they did. Though unfortunately, this would cause some tension, since even as an angel, there might be some ridged that may come from him going from what the book said or going with a solution he had ended up seeing that worked. The MC would need to actually show him not all problems are cut and dry, but also there are other paths to forgiveness and that sometimes, individuals cannot forgive if someone truly wronged them.

Lets quickly look at his symbolic animal. In the Devildom, his animal is the unicorn. This mythical animal is generally tied to both strength and fierceness. Though delving deeper the unicorn also represents a wisdom that is far beyond their years, reason, innocence. Which is true in a way, there were times in the game where despite having all this knowledge at his fingertips, Satan was caught offguard by something simple and it embarrasses him, but despite that he probably has more information in his brain compared to your average demon. This does not change as an angel, if anything, he is able to use the information that he has stored in his brain to help him better understand problems and work through it.

Since he is a newer angel, it takes a bit of time for him to fully grasp everything. Though that does not mean that he is not a strong angel to have a pact with. Like Lucifer, he needs to be convinced since his entire value is based around whether or not he is well read but also his worry that he is not worth much because of his connection to Lucifer and only being compared to the Morning Star himself. The MC would need to pull him out of his shell a little bit. Though getting a pact with him would be like an guardian angel, not on the same level as some of his other brothers, but he would be the inner voice of the MC. Though there are times where he has talked MC down from doing something rash, or talked through the pros and cons of their actions, but ultimately leaves them to pick what they do.

Asmodeus, Virtue of Chastity Love - You know, this one is a bit tricky considering what the word Chastity means. So I’ll be going with a more broader definition. So, let’s change it to Love. Virtue of Love. Since in the game, I feel like Asmo’s role in the Celestial Realm was not representing Chastity. That is just my opinion. Once known as the Jewel of the Heavens, there is a time where Simeon tells the MC that despite falling, he still views Asmodeus as the beautiful angel that he once was. Since there was one line that always stuck with me, despite being a demon for a millennia (or longer), he still tries to be the angel that he once was. Someone who was loved and adored, which means, he knows the feeling of love and the feeling it gives when one is in love.

As an angel, he would have been an expert when it came to feelings like love, ecstasy, compassion, and sometimes even the more negative emotions like anxiety, anger and jealousy. All of it driving from a single point - passion. Unlike the other brothers, I want to focus on his symbolic animal, which is a scorpion. As stated it symbolizes both passion and dominance, which we see quite a bit, but what if it had a deeper meaning when he was an angel. With a little bit of research, you can find that scorpions also represent transformation, rebirth, defense and a sense of devotion. Which are aspects that one could find in love as well. Where love can bloom as friendship, where it slowly kindles and grows into a strong flame for one another. A requited love.Then if you look at the rebirth aspect, you can think of it as someone going through a broken heart, finding a sense of love and belonging in another, when their time comes, and so on so forth, but there is always a level of devotion between all of those.

Asmodeus as a demon is quite passionate, in our case - as an angel, he was passionate about humans and finding their love or helping them work through their love if they were scorned. If an MC were to enter a pact with him, one could expect him to be a guardian angel++ and some form of a cupid. He is the one that would be there to lend his ear to his human, help them heal through a broken heart, but if the other person in the relationship/friendship truly wronged his human, like Lucifer, there is a chance he might take on a more assertive role versus a more passive role when dealing with it.

Beelzebub, Virtue of Discipline - there are aspects of Beel’s virtue or his former angelic status in him, the more you play through the game. There are often times where he shows restraint (despite the inner battle he keeps fighting) when looking at delicious food or looking at something he wants. He shows quite a bit of discipline compared to his Sin of Gluttony. His discipline shows when he focuses on the sports he plays, his work out routine, but also

Alright, now this is a little bit of a tricky one considering his symbolic animal is a fly. Since it is generally symbolic of illness, disease and war, but what if as an angel, he had a different symbolic animal? Something similar to a fly, but when he fell, it ended up becoming a fly. How about a dragonfly? Since if you look at the symbolism of a dragonfly, it is almost the opposite of what the fly represents. A dragonfly represents joy, adaptability, understanding and self realization. Now, the reason why I’m focusing on these four traits is because these are traits that we have seen Beel exhibiting in the game. There are numerous Devilgram cards that talk about how Beel has a deeper understanding of his and his brothers emotional states and how he holds family above food. Which, for someone who is always assumed that he holds food above everything, having a meal or something, this is a big turn of events. He seems to be the one who tries to adapt compared to the rest of his brothers, tries to understand, and generally, he realizes what he needs before most of his brothers realize what he needs.

The type of angel is wrapped up in how he is even as a demon. I feel like, compared to the other brothers, he hasn’t lost most of his angelic charms compared to them. It hasn’t been warped as much. Though all in all, as an angel and with his pact, you’re going to find yourself well loved. He’s more like a companion angel, ones that you may see walking beside humans in human form or protecting their charge without a second thought. This goes back to his level of love and respect for his family, and while having a pact with him, you’re like family.

Belphegor, Virtue of Zeal - A part of me thinks that zeal really does not match Belphie if you ask me. This is one of the virtues that make me go “hmm...maybe not,” but you know, we’re going to work with it. As a demon, he is a trickster and usually goes after his own goals, no matter the repercussions. This is seen when the MC is interacting with him in the first season. Don’t worry, not doing to spoil anything. Though he does show some form of mellowness and some level of playfulness that is harmless mischief.

Belphie has the cow representing them. These animals generally symbolizes positivity, and fertility. We are ignoring fertility for this, it does not exist. Other aspects that the cow represents are selflessness, generosity, calming, grounding and new beginnings. There are a bunch of things that demon Belphie has here that works for his demon counterpart as the angel counterpart.

If one were to get into a pact with the angel Belphegor, there is a level of harmless mischief that still tags along with him. Though he is a guardian angel in training. Being the youngest when it comes to power, there is sense of playful rebellion, always trying to find a way to have Lucifer to break character. Honestly, not much changes? Though compared to his brothers, he finds this strong sense of need to protect his human that’s holding a pact with him. Though if something deeply troubling happens to his human, he’s there as a comfort. He is there to comfort them and make sure they’re alright, generally taking on a more mellow tone and being the voice of reason - much like Satan.

Like I said, Zeal does not fit Belphie all that much, but trust me - when I say MC will be protected with him.

#obey me #obey-me!#obey me lucifer #obey me mammon #obey me leviathan #obey me levi #obey me angels #obey me satan #obey me asmodeus #obey me asmo #obey me beelzebub #obey me beel #obey me belphegor #obey me belphie #someone should stop my brain #daddydemus help me chro too powerful #the one thing Obey Me taught me was how to spell Beel's name properly #Obey Me also taught me how to spell Belphie's name properly too #Obey Me could be an educational game for names

47 notes · View notes

snom0001inu · 3 years

Note

I remember hearing that Alastor became a cannibal when he go to hell. Do you think that would make a difference in terms of those negative stereotypes? Like him being a cannibal only because he eats other demons? I'm not too sure. 😅

This is something I’ve pondered about myself because I haven’t seen any official material explicitly refer to him as a cannibal in Hazbin Hotel. Even in the comic, it’s kind of grey? Let’s backtrack a bit. Since this is covering a sensitive topic, it will be a deep dive and under a readmore!

Keep in mind, I am not a Black or Creole person or someone of direct African/Black/Creole descent so I cannot speak for the community, but only reiterate what was said by people of this community.

Alastor was originally written to appear in Zoophobia and was a deer demon stated to eat other deer, here is the original reference sheet.

Almost all of the above is outdated information since Alastor was re-written to fit into an entirely different series, but the fact that he continues to eat venison remained as part of his debut on Vivziepop’s channel in a speedpaint where he is depicted as eating a raw deer in a swamp despite being a deer demon himself (linked below)

youtube

However, what really upset people was his connection to vodun (as shown in the trailer/ “Let’s Misbehave” snippet) and being confirmed of Creole descent (through Vivziepop’s live streams) AND Vivziepop saying that she was inspired by a W*nd*g* (an Algonquin entity) when it came to his design and backstory.

In my opinion, I don't think Alastor still eating venison in his "Hell" form confirms any cannibalism because I doubt it's actual deer meat AND Alastor himself isn't a deer or human anymore, he's a deer demon. Him eating the butcher seemed like an intentional move on his part to be ironic or cruel because nowhere in the pilot does it show him eating others during his takeover. The butcher tried to hack Alastor before being threatened so I truly do think Alastor just wanted to hurt his pride to make a point. He didn't eat Sir Pentious, or threaten Vaggie with his appetite, and the pilot ends with him offering to make jambalaya for everyone but doesn't use anyone's flesh to do so. I don't think this cannibal shtick is as canon as the fanbase tries to make it.

If you're unfamiliar with the negative connotations of Vodun and cannibalism, here's the story as to why it was a racist attempt to colonize and force assimilation onto the African/Haiti victims of diaspora and Creole people have Indigenous heritage as well so here's some history of cannibalism in Indigenous spaces and why it's became a negative stereotype for colonizers to utilize against them as a society.

SOOOOOO

With all that in mind, for Alastor to be implied to have eaten humans in his life has some extremely unfortunate implications when one considers his heritage and how much other media plays into those stereotypes making life harder for actual people and cultures.

Do I think him being "cannibalistic" post-mortem would be less offensive? It depends on how it's played into the story because if it's too similar to the W*nd*g* story presented by Until Dawn or other non-Indigenous media, it's still offensive as it is inaccurate and inconsiderate to lump/mistake tribal entities like that. What the Cherokee tribe believes is not the same as the Choctaw or Algonquin or the Cree or the Navajo and so forth.

I do think it is possible to work the "cannibal in life" angle based off of the racism he more than likely experienced in his life as he's from the 1900's and a minority, but from what Spindlehorse has given the fanbase so far.......they're not exactly there yet.

TL;DR:

Alastor's race and heritage makes any sort of cannibalism a lethal oversight on Spindlehorse's part, but since nothing is truly set in stone yet (rather just overanalyzed by fans), they can still work with other parts of his character to keep that aspect so long as it's not rooted in those ethnic stereotypes . But they really gotta work and shut down fans pushing otherwise.

#ask and you shall receive #anon reply #alastor #hazbin hotel #long post #zoophobia #racism #stereotypes #thank you anon!

11 notes · View notes

dandivinity · 4 years

Text

Madokannon: Religious Symbolism in Madoka Magica

If there’s one word I’d use to describe the show, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica, it would be deceptive. If you’re wondering how a cute Sailor Moon rip-off with even brighter colors and a moe art-style is deceptive, congrats, you fell for the deception. As the series continues, it becomes clear that the show is not a cut-and-dry monster of the week where good always triumphs. Rather it is a pastel-colored Faustian bargain where even the best intentions can lead to dire consequences. In the end it is only through the titular characters unshakeable hope and faith and no small amount of divine intervention that the series reaches it’s bitter sweet conclusion. This is obvious upon a first viewing. What is less obvious is the nature that this divine intervention takes. While the show occasionally makes direct connections to Christianity, It seems to me that the theology implemented is Buddhist through and through complete with Four noble truths, samsara, vile rebirth, and an allegory of the bodhisattva Kannon.

Let’s start with the basis of the show, the wishes. This is one of Madoka’s most prominent aspects and the largest concern from the beginning of the series before the villain’s true underpinnings are revealed. For those of you not familiar, 1). Why are you reading this? And 2). The set-up of the Madoka, like most magical girl anime, involves a cute animal mascot offering the girls magical powers in order to fight monsters. What makes this set up unique however is that the oh so cute cat-bunny-thing known as Kyubey also offers the girls one wish as an incentive so that they would accept it’s “contract”. Now the use of the word “contract” is an obvious red flag meant to alert us to the Faustian nature of the deal. And yes, the agreement comes with several hidden clauses that Kyubey conveniently leaves out such as the fact that becoming a magical girl involves having your soul removed from your body and placed into a gem because it’s “easier to protect”. But Kyubey’s not exactly stealing it like a Christian devil would. More importantly than the hidden clauses though, is the wishes themselves.

Now stories of the devil tempting people with promises of wealth or power are quite common in Western literature, as are tales of djinn or monkey paws providing wishes that always go wrong in Near Eastern lit. But what’s extraordinary about Madoka is that for the most part the wishes the girls grant are simple in nature and rather generous. Our main focus point, and the only wish we see pursued from beginning to end in chronological order is that of Sayaka Miki. Sayaka is established to be crushing on a boy who was a former violin prodigy before a car accident left him paralyzed with no hope of playing ever again. Sayaka wishes for him to be healed, and just like that, it’s done.

The boy does not relapse, nor does he lead into another accident. He simply starts a miraculous yet slow path to recovery, until the series finale where he is shown without crutches and playing beautifully for a wide audience. The problem? Well as pointed out before Sayaka even makes the wish, she’s wasn’t actually doing it for him: she was on an unconscious level hoping that he’d be forever grateful to her. Does she hold this over him? No. Does he reject her? No. She simply doesn’t ask. Sayaka is too busy with her new responsibilities and ashamed of what she has become to ask.

And frankly the importance of Kyosuke in Sayaka’s fall is largely overstated by the fanbase. Yes, he’s a large factor but even more so than wanting to heal him or his gratitude, Sayaka wants to be a hero. This is heightened when their magical mentor dies within the first three episodes. Sayaka now feels like it’s her responsibility to protect her city as no one else will. Unfortunately, she��s simply not as strong as her former mentor or the new morally unsound magical girls that seeks to dispose of her (both Kyoko and Homura). This is really what leads to Sayaka’s downward spiral as she comments, “The world doesn’t need a magical girl who can’t even kill a witch”. Sayaka wants to be a hero, and she wants to get the guy and she gets neither. Her desires, both fulfilled and unfulfilled, all lead to her suffering. This is the First Noble Truth of Buddhism.

I realize this isn’t the most convincing argument on its own but let’s zoom out a bit here. What is desire if not earthly attachments? Attachment and inability to let go of attachment is a concept found in nearly all the wishes in the show. It doesn’t matter if it’s Sayaka’s wishing for her friend’s health, Mami literally trying to cling to life, or Kyoko (in the most directly religious moment in the show) wishing that people would come to her father’s sermons so that her family could have enough to eat. All of these desires are moral in some way and yet they are still desires. More importantly, they all involve a longing for what once was, and are attempts to return things to how they were rather than moving on. This inability to let go is characterized not just in the wishes but in the reason they’re implemented in the first place.

When Kyubey finally explains why they knowingly cause suffering to countless adolescent girls throughout time, they explain it’s to harvest enough renewable energy from the emotions of magical girls to stave off the entropy of the universe. The whole process is rather convoluted and -let’s face it- an excuse to deconstruct magical girl tropes, but that doesn’t change the fact that preventing the heat death of the universe is still Kyubey’s number one goal. That combined with their inability to truly understand the suffering they’re causing has caused some of the community to question their villain status or at least say they’re a villain with a just cause. And while postponing the heat death of the universe may be noble in the long run, it is a literal fight against the impermanence of the universe. A fight that we know from Buddhism is doomed to only lead to personal trauma in the face of inevitability of a changing world. But it is this fight against impermanence that kyubey embodies so well, and one that is baked into the wish-based magical girl system they run.

Ok, enough beating around the bush. It’s time to talk about Homura. After spending most of the show as a mysterious red-herring villain that knows far too much, Homura finally gets an episode dedicated to her near the end of the show where it’s revealed she’s a time traveller who restarted the timeline over and over again in order to make her wish come true; to be able to save Madoka. Specifically Homura has to replay the same month over and over again until she can succeed in saving Madoka’s life and cannot escape until this goal is reached. This obsession leads to a very literal samsara, by repeating the timeline again and again Homura is actively choosing to trap herself in endless cycles of suffering, death, and rebirth all because of her attachment to the mortal world. Through this process we can see Homura fall apart becoming more and more monstrous in her single-minded focus to save Madoka at the expense of everything else. By the time she arrives at our main timeline that the rest of the show takes place in, Homura is comparable to a hungry ghost. She’s directly accused of walking through the world as if dead, unable to feel anything except for the desire that damned her in the first place, her obsession with Madoka. When even this too seems lost, she nearly becomes a witch.

In Mahayana Buddhism, rebirth on earth is not the worst thing that can happen after one’s death. If one leads a sufficiently desperate life they can be reborn as an animal, hungry ghost, or in hell. This is where Madoka’s witches come from. Perhaps the most tragic twist in Madoka Magica is that if a magical girl falls into despair (usually due to her wish’s inability to make her happy), her soul gem will transform into a grief seed which then becomes one of the monsters they fight. These nightmare collage monsters have new names separate from their old identities and live in pocket dimensions where they lure people in. These pocket dimensions often in someway manifests the desires of their old lives being filled with sweets, TVs, or (in Sayaka’s case) violinists. Interestingly, when Sayaka first dies and is reborn as the witch Octavia in a train station, her labyrinth is also full of railroad tracks. She relocates to a concert hall and the labyrinth follows suit, but train wheels remain despite having no apparent bearing on her previous life. This could be a reference to Buddhist beliefs about your final thoughts and which direction you look when you die having bearing on which realm you’ll be reborn into.

Homura’s obsession in contrasted by Madoka’s ability to let go. Madoka’s final wish and subsequent ascension has often been compared to Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross, and rightfully so. Madoka’s wish to become a cosmic force that can take on all the despair of magical girls before they become witches at the cost of her own mortal life has many strong parallels to Jesus suffering on the cross to redeem humanity. However that idea only works if Jesus is suffering. Madoka is stated to be taking the grief of every magical girl who ever became a witch onto herself and we even see a far future version of her becoming a witch large enough to destroy the world. But before it does it is shot down by another version of a truly ascended Madoka in a white dress. This version states paradoxically that since her wish applies to all magical girls that would become witches, that includes herself. The fluidity of time and direct denial of the necessity of suffering or sacrifice are at odds with Orthodox Chriastianity, or at least its perception of Jesus. Rather I argue that the way Madoka saves all the magical girls, her subsequent erasure from existence, and even such mundane symbols such as the white dress all link her closer to the Bodhisattva, Kannon.

Let’s take a closer look at the scene where we see Madoka actually ascends and manifests to relieve the potential witches of their grief. We see Madoka split herself into thousands shafts of light, all of which appear above different suffering magical girls in different places and time periods. And above all of them Madoka appears, she touches their corrupted soul gems which are then purified before shattering, allowing the magical girls to die in peace. A rather sad ending, but one that’s better than rebirth as a witch, which we already identified as equivalent to the hell realm. So while it is unclear where the magical girls are going to go after they die (or even if they go anywhere at all as we just saw the gems holding their souls shatter, possibly destroying them), we can know that Madoka is saving them from a worse rebirth. This directly parallels miracle tales that surround the Bodhisattva Kannon, especially in her Chinese incarnation as the white-robed Guanyin.

Kannon is the primary example of Bodhisattva or one who has put off Budhahood to aid those still on earth. Kannon in particular swears to never ascend until all living things have been freed of samsara. She’s often depicted as having 11 heads and a thousand arms to better reach all those suffering in the world at once, like how Madoka splits herself into a myriad of forms. Many of these tales have devotees of Guanyin spared from tragic fates such as beheadings or shipwrecks. However a few, adapt these stories to instead refer to a more metaphorical salvation, especially in the pure land tradition popular in Japan which then says that anyone who calls out to Kannon on the verge of their death will be still die and be reborn to the pure land rather than wherever else they were supposed to reincarnate. Madoka’s god form even highly resembles the Chinese incarnation, Guanyin. Wikipedia states, “Guanyin is generally portrayed as a young woman wearing a flowing white robe, and usually also necklaces symbolic of Indian or Chinese royalty. In her left hand is a jar containing pure water, and the right holds a willow branch.” While we never see Madoka with any water; the flowing white dress, red gems along her collar bone, and branch-like bow (though on that seems to be more of a sakura branch) all bring to mind Guanyin.

Finally Madoka’s ascension ends with her body dissolving into glimmers of light as she explains how no one will remember her, but she’ll still be there. This dissolution of the her spiritual body is a visual symbol of ego-death. Madoka recreates a word where she does not exist, and had never existed, yet still manifests as a concept and virtuous force that leads others to salvation rather than as a sentient entity. This is the Nirvana. Madoka hadn’t just ascended to godhood, she had surpassed it and achieved nothingness, as her buddha nature radiates throughout the world, ultimately changing it into something better. This is the paradox of Buddhism and the goal of any buddhist practitioner, to achieve an inner peace so strong you become a part of the universe like madoka had. And the new world she created was better for it.

That is at least until the show decided to make a movie sequel and trick madoka into descending. At that point she stops acting as a Buddha and instead as Pistis Sophia in line with the obscure belief system of 2nd century Gnostics. But that will be a conversation for another time.

#madoka magica #buddhism #madoka kamane #kaname madoka #kannon #guanyin #kuan-yin #samsara #homura akemi #pmmm sayaka #pmmm #Essay #Religion #Religious studies #I should've submitted this two months ago when it was still relevant.#oh well

78 notes · View notes

call-me-rucy · 4 years

Note

Hey, how does the Layton anime fares in the Japanese fandom?

Hi! Thanks for asking!

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m in position to answer this. Mainly because of two reasons:

The First: It’s been over a year since the anime finished. No one talks about it constantly anymore, same as English speaking fandom. Everyone’s back to whatever characters/ships they talked about before with the addition of occasional use of older Luke’s design and Marina.

The Second: I don’t think it would be fair to generalize. I’m aware a few people who liked it, but that doesn’t mean everyone liked it. So I cannot say how it did in general.

I’m sorry about this. One think I can say, while it wasn’t an extremely popular anime (I never saw it being trending topic), it had a constant and dedicated fanbase, having around 1500 likes in the tweets both the first visuals ever and the anouncement of the last episode. I hope this helps to your question somehow!

#lmda #professor layton #katrielle layton #layton anime #layton #asks #thanks for asking #its been a while since I got questions #first one in months and this is my answer ^^"

6 notes · View notes

thedoctordanko · 4 years

Text

I’ve been struggling a bit with - stuff.

I say, “Stuff” because I don’t know what to call it.

I have 3 friends I talk to regularly. Not counting my SO. Though she is my partner and my favorite person and I adore talking to her every single day. We live together. And she knows that I love her.

Of those 3 friends however, there’s really only one I feel I could genuinely open up to about my life. We share the same interests and a lot of the same world views. We’ve been friends since high school but we’ve only recently started talking again.

Aside from that I just feel more or less empty inside when I login to social media.

I know social media isn’t necessarily great for mental health but it’s also a way to stay in touch with the world and that’s what I’ve always done.

Recently I decided to drop Facebook. Too many faces from high school judging me through tempored glass. Watching if I succeed or fail in any of life’s endevors.

Is this actually what they do? Probably not. But it’s that pressure you put on yourself after high school. The kind that makes you want to prove your doing better than everyone else or that you lived up to their expectations.

Then I dropped Twitter. I followed less people from high school and moreso people I went to college with. The friendships I never fully invested in because I felt like I wasn’t good enough to be there. Add that to the increasingly maddening current affairs and baby, you’ve got a stew going!

So my SO suggested I dive into Tumblr. With it’s randomness and uncaring nature of letting you be who you want to be, it sounds like a good choice. That, and I can curate my experience to reflect my interests better.

I love movies. Like love-love movies. Part of my current depression stems from not being able to go to see new releases with my Disturbia Combo Pack (A Large Popcorn and a Large Cherry Coke). But if some fuckers just wore masks and didn’t think it was some crazy conspiracy or infringing on your human rights - which it’s neither - then maybe I could go see Bill and Ted 3 in a week when it comes out and enjoy a flight of fancy that makes my heart happy.

But alas, people are selfish and I cannot.

I also love Batman and Kevin Smith and comic books and toys, dang do I love toys, and music on certain occasions, and the sound of Jim Dale’s voice, and Vanilla Ice Cream, and a nice big Kerplunk (which is what I call any body of water since it’s the sweet sound of me inevitably tossing a pebble into it).

But with a lot of these interests comes two things. A toxic straight white male dominated fanbase that consists of them yelling at the top of their lungs that they enjoy these things making it harder to hear/find other people’s opinions, thoughts, and enjoyment of it. Or a toxic straight white male dominated fanbase that gatekeeps or is overtly negative and condescending of how anyone could possibly find enjoyment in something like this.

It’s truly disheartening. And I too am a straight white man so I know it’s a bit hypocritical. But at the same time like, I already know what we think about that thing, I want to know what others think!!

Unfortunately, I’ve found very few friends in real life that I can talk to about this. And not just talk about this problem but talk about my interests specifically and that have the same level of enjoyment of those interests.

I’m not super special or anything and, it’s not like I strictly enjoy 80’s British Sci-fi, although I do *cough* Red Dwarf *cough* but I like so many things and I like them so intensely sometimes that I just can’t bring myself to listen to people bitch about all of it.

Don’t get me wrong. There is always room for criticism and critique. I like genuinely everything, unapologetically. So after the initial viewing has washed over me and I think about it more I might have something negative to say. I just generally don’t like to harp on the negative. There’s so much shiftiness in the world. LET PEOPLE LIKE THINGS!

And you might think that’s dumb. That people can have opinions about whatever and it doesn’t effect me. Which is is true. They can totally do that. They just don’t need to shove it down anyone’s throat though.

Oh? You don’t like Robert Pattinson as Batman, based on a photo of his suit, a trailer getting people excited for the movie that will come out (maybe next year) and that set of Teenage Vampire movies that he stared in but you didn’t see because you just decided to hate on it since it was the cool thing to do in 2009?

Like, mother fucker there are 7 mainstream Batmen that exist in live action. 3 of which will be happening simultaneously. If you are speculating how much Battinson is going to suck without any actual evidence then like literally pick ANY OTHER BATMAN or just be patient and wait a couple more years for them to pump out another trilogy based on the exact same take on the character.

Which I know kinda sounds like I’m complaining but really, I love Batman so much, and I’m glad we are getting more of him. I just can’t deny that the DCCW has made me fall in love with a deeper cannon of characters that the big screen movies will never come close to.

With that being said. I’ve just been really sad about a lot of dumb little things lately and I hope that Tumblr’s big goofy arms will embrace me in such a way that I will feel a part of the conversation without having to be at the center of it.

#friends #community #belonging #movies #I dont know how hashtags work #im doing the best i can #batman #reddwarf #toys #toycommunity

3 notes · View notes

migleefulmoments · 5 years

Note

lmao Abby is losing her shit because Darren is gonna be singing White Christmas with Lea on her new Christmas album. Apparently that song is "sacred" and can only be sang by Darren and Chris. She seriously needs to get a grip.

Anonymous said: "I can be upset, I think it is a complete slap in the face. there are like 3000 christmas songs, there are THREE that are sacred. And yes, D should have sad no." Oh look Abby doesn't approve of something Darren is doing AGAIN. Seriously she claims to be his biggest fan but yet complains about everything he does.

Man, I didn’t see this coming. I’m amazed at how deeply emotional they are about a scripted, tv-show couple and a really old song! I might understand if Abby was a lesbian teenager and this was 2011. It was empowering for gay, lesbian and bisexual kids and young adults to turn on network tv and see people that looked liked them. But times they have a changed. Klaine and Brittana pushed boundaries, but in 2019 there are LGBTQ characters on many shows, Netflix has LGBTQ programing and Ryan Murphy continues to create shows that specifically tell LGBTQ stories-ie Pose and he has created LGBTQ characters for all of his shows because that’s life. He’s continues to normalize LGBTQ characters on his shows: 911 has a main character who is a married lesbian, The Politician has gay characters and its been reported that Rock Hudson will be a character in Hollywood.

So here we are in 2019 and Abby is devastated that the sacred White Christmas will be covered by Darren and Lea on her new Christmas album. First off, why is the song sacred? Abby mentioned the “Bryant Park riot”-a riot we know never happened. The people “holding the fandom together” were not in the cc fandom when Chris and Darren filmed in Bryant Park. Their “memories” of that day have all been created by watching a few moments of the 11-hour day. I’ve come to realize that the cc theory is built on slowed-down gifs and screenshots. Reality looks nothing like cc so they manipulate the facts to fit their needs. It’s a powerful method because it is so easy to con people into believing inane facts. I am sure that Abby and Flowers and Cassie and Leka fully believe everything they hold near and dear about CrissColfer. It’s all a lie but they fully believe they are throwing out tried-and-true proven facts. Abby in particular is really baffled why we can’t see what she see. The difference between them and us is that we don’t listen with our eyes. We don’t get information about Darren and Mia by piecing together gifs. That’s it-gifs and screenshots from videos! Can you imagine if a lawyer a police officer used a gif as evidence?

Nobody set out to con the tinhatters into believing a fantasy that doesn’t exits-in fact, nobody is conning the fandom-they are conning themselves. They don’t look at the evidence and form an opinion- they literally create the evidence. Zoom in a photo until you can crop out what you need or clip 1-2 seconds from a longer video, slow it down, add some text and suddenly *BAM* you have proof! Proof with all the drama and emotion to make it feel so much more important than it was.

How the shit hit the fan:

Leka:

jaci3

I will definitely be purchasing this album! So much talent! Cynthia!! Darren!! Jonathan and Lea!!

notes-from-nowhere

I’m going to take this as a good news👍🏻

ajw720

But no, no, no no. Do not get me wrong, I am thrilled D is on the album, but no, no, no, not a K/laine song. Why? There are so many Christmas songs out in the world and they chose a K/laine song?

I have no interest, it can never live up.

I hate 2019.

DRAMA MUCH?

Thanks, but it’s a hard pass for me.

ajw720

I actually have tears in my eyes. This feels like a complete slap in the face. Sorry, but it is and it should not have been this song and I don’t care what you believe, Those songs are sacred to the K/laine fandom whether you think he is married to her or with C or something completely different.

How many Christmas songs are there to choose from? If she wanted WC, she could have sang it with someone else.

With you @cassie1022 hard pass. It may seem silly to be this upset about something, but this actually makes me angry. I feel like K/laine fans are being discarded. That is his LEGACY, something he should be proud of, through that character and that pairing, he and C made a difference, and I do not understand why it needs to constantly be chipped away.

I have to say the thing that strikes me the most is how obtuse she is about what Glee was the end. It was a mess. I loved Glee but most of the fun by the end was the amazing fanfiction, Fanon Klaine and fandom itself. It was fun to get the song sneak peeks and BTS photos and videos. It was amazing to be a part of a fandom of people who loved what I did. It is amazing to be part of the Chris and Darren stanclub. But Glee...it was a disaster. .

Leka proves some context for “White Christmas is Sacred” and notice how how many are gifs:

leka-1998

Excuse you.

WC is so much more than just a song.

undefined

youtube

(She does know this is a scripted moment right? Darren didn’t actually travel to NYC from Lima with Chris’s dad and someone told him when to skate, what to say, what to sing.).

“It’s been a whirlwind, but amazing. We got to film at the ice skating rink in Bryant Park, which was just incredible. It was one of the best filming experiences I’ve ever had.”

- Ch/ris Col/fer

(Yes, Darren laid down on the carpet and took a picture of Chris which was about the most cc thing that happened in 11 hours)

(I have no doubt that these three gifs were created from 1 or 2 seconds of real-time video. These images created the false impression that they spent the day together, gleefully skating and being intimate. Not too long ago, I read a cc post that claimed “Darren spent the day taking care of Chris”. No, not true- see the videos below for a more realistic representation of the day). )

#truly this really upsets me

(I guess she is reminding us of how much they mean to the world- eye roll.)

I tried finding a long video on YouTube-ideally much of the day or even just big chucks of the day but *surprise* nobody bothered to upload that snooze fest. If the day was actually the cc riot the posse believes it was, there would be an 11-hour complication video.

I did find some video that accurately represents what I remember. Basically just imagine 11 hours of the following:

undefined

youtube

Chris was pretty shaky when they started skating but by the time they filmed, he was much better. I cannot imagine being on skates for 11- shaky- hours.

undefined

youtube

undefined

youtube

Chris skating alone, trying to get more comfortable with skating before filming.

That’s it! That s the totality of what is posted on YouTube from the “Riot”.

The conversation continues;

Anonymous asked:

White Christmas is literally one of the most cliché christmas songs. The album is just Lea's favorites. Darren has sung White Christmas before and he sounded amazing so it's only natural she would invite him to sing it with her. I get the a lot of things can be frustrating, but good god you all being THIS upset about it is the reason why everyone mock our fandom. It's not even baby it's could outside. At least we know for sure chris is going to be mentioned at some point during the promo.

ajw720 answered: (in victim mode)

Why do you care if I am this upset? Seriously, let them mock me, they have blogs dedicated to hating me and posts multiple times a day. I am over it, they are the ones with the sad lives who actually give me power.

(Nope, not dedicated to “hating you”, I simply debunk your “facts” and “proof” beaus they are not evidence of CrissColfer; Yes, this is unfortunately a negative side effect to disproving your lies- you don’t care if the attention is negative or positive- you just like the attention. But pointing out the lies and misinformation is more important to me )

I can be upset, I think it is a complete slap in the face. there are like 3000 christmas songs, there are THREE that are sacred. And yes, D should have sad no. We sit here and swallow everything, including having “D” himself mock and yell at our fandom on SM. And I virtually defend everything he does, probably to a fault, including holding out that person as his wife. This was easily avoidable.

(well at least you acknowledge that Darren calls out your fandom for their bad behavior on social media. Now would be a good time to really analyze why you think that is. Really sit down and think about why Darren would mock your fandom without a gif or a screenshot to zoom in on. What would drive him to be angry at a ccer?) .

Sorry, not sorry, don’t like, post on your own blog and stop reading mine if you don’t like the way i represent. Happy to pace the torch.

(Wow she is happy to pass the torch? Right. )

notes-from-nowhere

(Notes comes in and tries to soothe Abby’s fragile nerves).

So, I feel the need to say something. I’m not that much upset for the song mostly because I think it may be the song D picked out if those presented to him so I don’t fully like the idea but it could have been worse. At least all of the involved knows the meaning of the song.

What bothers me though is this kind of attitude, anon. This urgency to come here and to tell to another person what/how/when she should feel about something. Trying to put a weight on it or to dismissed the rightfulness of her feelings.

If this is how she (and everyone else) feels about this, she has the right and the freedom to say it out loud without having to face someone else’s judgement because maybe she has another opinion.

(and the anon has the right to say what she feels-see how that works?)

There are different ways to approach a person to communicate so please next time, think better.

ajw720

Thank you @notes-from-nowhere, hard to believe, the above was at least more respectful than this anon:

This is why I left the fucking fanbase. I still very much agree with the same views and ideas that all of you have, but jesus christ, it’s a SONG. Calm down. I’m just happy whenever D does something that doesn’t envolve PBB. Getting so upset because D is singing a song that he sang with C. Maybe he’s doing it because it reminds him of the Bryant Park shoot? Maybe? Good god, everything is the apocalypse to you guys. Leaving was the best thing I’ve ever done.

I want to remind everyone, I am the one, with a handful of people, keeping this fandom alive and supporting D&C daily,. And just like i can praise them, i can tell them when they hurt me. This hurt. Maybe I am being overly dramatic and if this was isolated, i would say yes. This is not isolated, it is a continued effort to erase K/laine and CC. As has been pointed out, not only did they offend K/laine fans in general, it is a knock at our fandom who still to this day celebrate the skating riot.

(Oh lord, she reminds us she is the HBIC, sacrificing everything to keep the fandom together. I love that she believes this is “supporting D&C daily”. Nobody needs to be told the suck everyday. She support them and so she can criticize them but nonnie cannot criticize her. That makes perfect sense)

Again literally THOUSANDS of songs to choose from. Not even sure why L would EVER want to compete with C, but in this case, the fault doesn’t lie with her. D should have said no.

(I don’t think Lea is too worried about putting up her vocal chops against Chris’. The both have great voices)

I am not going to say anything else and just accept that yet another of D’s 2019 projects is something i won’t ever see or hear.

(once again it’s all about her and her hurt feelings. But this response is at least rationale-if you don’t like the project- skip it. It isn’t Darren’s responsibly to provide 100% Abby approved content)

I really hope things are going to change, I really, really do.

(But they aren’t..they really aren’t. This is Darren’s life and I know it’s super stressful because you are trying to hard to make his life work with yours and it just won't You both have very conflicting and opposing goals for Darren’s life. Here’s a protip: Go on a gif-free and zoomed-photo-free diet for a few months. Analyze the information at face value. Learn what PR really means and see how things look.If for no other reason than your own sanity. Stop trying to shove the square peg in the round hole

#please do not send any more asks on this topic

#i am very upset

ajw720

My feelings aside, WHY in the world would LM EVER want to compete with this? Sorry, but it won’t be half as good. Stupid move and that is trying to remove my bias.

(Her thought processes never ceases to amaze me. Abby and Trump- they start criticizing and they just can’t stop. Lea gets to make her own decisions about what songs she sings, who she’s competitive with, whether she wants to take a chance and put herself out there or not. It just isn’t anyone else’s business. Chris has a beautiful voice but Lea has a stunning voice-she isn’t worried. This is right up there with her criticisms of TSG’s air conditioning, drink names, theme nights and every comment she’s made about a bar she will never go to.

9 notes · View notes