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Like I'm still baffled at Tommy throwing his parent's divorce in the ring... your mom was going through a divorce and to cope? she argued with dream stans on twitter? and that's dream's fault?

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I was reading your post about RPF and was hoping that you could explain to me why so many people like to write it. I would go so far as to say I am repelled by it and don't understand the appeal whatsoever. tbh I don't even like fan fiction for what I think is the same reason: it isn't canon. It seems presumptive of any individual that has nothing to do with a creative project to contribute to it as if it is part of the original. It is even worse if we are talking about something that is irl. Why is it not enough to create a fictional work with all of the same traits that the writer believes the fiction or irl subjects have, and then just change the names? If the content is good enough, it doesn't have to be propped up on irl people in order to get readers.

Oh nelly here we go.

Whenever people ask about RPF fic I’m used to trying to use what footholds they do have in fan culture to direct them to why people write these kinds of taboo extremes, but you seem to be pretty squarely affirmational in a sea of transformational people, so this is going to start right from zero.  

I wouldn’t choose an RPF fandom to be babies first fandom justifying experience because of how deep in the pocket it is compared to some other transformational fandoms, so starting there is hard. If you’ve never had the experience of being exposed to something and wanting more of something, or different from something, or had your imagination wander off with what you’ve just seen, a lot of what transformational fandom does in general will seem baffling, let alone rpf spaces.

Basic Transformational Fandom

Transformational fandoms tend to kick off in media that provides a fun sandbox or (even when it’s good) leaves a little bit more to be desired. From there, the people left wanting start to group up and create markets for the creation of fanwork, and eventually someone puts hand to keyboard to make something. People sometimes think that transformational fandom is recent but the truth is that Fanficiton Fanzines stretch back well beyond the creation of the internet, people have been craving transformational content and art for a long time, and are very stubborn when it comes to finding each other to do it.  

Speaking from personal experience, even though fandoms often reliably form around media, I haven’t participated in the fandom for every piece of media I’ve consumed, so I know what it’s like to be interested and disinterested in the fandoms around what I watch/read/ect. There’s been times where I was very into a fandom in a traditional “I want as much of this as possible and also X and Y to smooch” way, times when I was kind of put off by what a given fandom was doing so I took the pass, and times when I was more interested in what the fandom was putting out than the actual content itself. It can take some shopping around to find a spot where what a market has lines up with what appeals to you.

So there’s… a bit of a leap between the usual premise of transformational fandom and rpf spaces. My understanding of the people who pipeline from regular fiction to RPF is they develop the instincts in one context and then they just retain and use that capacity when they switch to another. That sounds a bit slippery-slope but I mean that they just don’t have to start from scratch if they came through more traditional and less taboo fandoms. People still tend to draw the line because RPF is still mostly taboo (the fact that this fandom has such a large, open presence of it is wild to me, I’m really not used to it but such is the fine line of Minecraft roleplay) but some people find it easier to cross because of their background.

The Fantasy Market

There’s something of a midway between fic and conversation that doesn’t get covered as much even though it feels like the missing link between regular idle fantasising and RPF. People tend to want peer-to-peer contact with other people who share the same interests as them, and exchanging ideas or scenarios surrounding those interests is a go-to for that.

The line between trying to find the truth vs feeling out an appealing scenario brings be back around again to my imago post, so if people wanted to collect their “parasocial relationships are the devil” ticket here’s an easy one. You may have seen these kinds of posts around—“[name] would like a teddy bear. He would pretend he didn’t at first but eventually he would become the type of guy to get all the way out of bed if it fell on the floor in the middle of the night to go get it.” It’s not fic, but it’s a longform hypothetical that someone would post to their peers, maybe to get a full on conversation going about how much milage [name] would get out of a stuffed animal. From there they get to feel closer to their fellow fans, and also feel like they understand a bit more about the person they’re all interested in, since pattern finding is a big part of human cognition in general and it's fun to do it together.

On the hormonal end of the spectrum, thirstposting is a deceptively complicated art, somewhere between personal venting and posting for the people around them to resonate with. I know people mostly like to act like thirst tweets are always embarrassing and unwelcome, but honestly having a brother in arms in Times Of Great Thirst usually bonds a community pretty tightly.  

Self-inserts and X readers have never been my thing, but they’re an important link in the evolutionary chain of how we get from one person daydreaming to a whole community of readers and writers. There’s a market for good ideas about a certain person or situation even if they aren’t fleshed out, but a few steps in you start looking at content that looks more like fiction. A good offshoot of this step that people don’t often talk about or understand in these terms were the original POV tiktoks and concept/Imagine blogs. The people love a good scenario, and environments where some of the best imaginations are grinding out content to fuel your daydream can be great for that.  

I think that the people who didn’t enter through ‘regular’ transformational fandom probably found their way through this door instead. Fantasy tweet becomes thirst tweet becomes thread fic becomes wattpad, graduates to ao3 maybe, whoops we’re reading novels now.

The Reader / Writer Market

I use the word ‘market’ a little differently than some others might when talking about this stuff. A while ago I started poking around Economic Anthropology in a very amateurish way, because that was the first place I came across an idea that managed to line up with the majority of my fandom experience, the idea that ‘economics’ are the dynamics of human exchange based on wants and needs, not just the study of money and assets. Money only covers a fraction of the number of exchanges that happen in life, non-monetary economy is what I find really interesting, and what I relate to parts of fandom as. Think of the strangely elaborate systems that seem to reliably pop up when people want something, I have seen amazingly complex fandom coordination from young teenagers as long as the desire and the drives were there. Economics gets a lot more saucy once you start to relate to it as a study of human desire and how those desires get met.

The people want what the people want, and in fandom they often want more of the thing they’ve invested in. It’s often not enough, or even very appealing at all, to write something “original” or removed from the scene when the party is in the scene itself. Some people probably give it a go, but truth be told they often don’t get seen as often as work with the built-in audience that a fandom has/is. The goal probably isn’t even to be seen by a lot of people, but to show stuff to the people who would be most interested in that stuff, even if there’s only five people who are invested. People get content, author gets validation and engagement, it’s a little loop that’s a lot harder to get to in the cold world of original publishing. Most people don’t really want to become career writers anyway, they want to see their favorite boys smooch in the form of the kind of stories they read, which are likely already fic.

Footnote about old lit on transformational vs affirmative: A lot of the old conversation is gendered in ways that I understand, because they absolutely mattered / do matter, but modern fandoms like the MLP fandom are shaking up that binary. Men do take part in transformational fandom, just not as often as women on the whole.

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2023 WORST MCYT DUO NAMES COMPETITION

Welcome to the bracket competition for the worst duo names in the MCYT community!

For those of you who know, there are a lot of Minecraft YouTuber duo names. Some of them are good and iconic, like Crimeboys, Rivals duo, and Clingy duo. But some... some are not good. Today, we are gathered here to find the worst duo name, through the power of Tumblr polls!

Each poll will last 24 hours. I will be making this a masterpost for the first round of polls--once the polls are posted I will link them here and you can access all of them easily from there so that you don't have to reblog every single poll to participate. Once the first round is done, I will make a new post (and include similar disclaimers) and link to the new polls and so on and so forth. I will also be tagging all polls as #duo name brackets 2023 on my blog.

Reminder, you aren't voting for the option you like more, you're voting for the option you personally consider the worst. Happy voting!

Shoutout to @searching-for-a-home for providing me with the poll submissions to make this possible!

Taller Duo vs Stoner Duo

Socket Duo vs Crew Boys

Peer Pressure Duo vs Comfy Duo

Bee Duo vs Angel Duo

Loud Duo vs TNT Duo

Among Us Porn Duo vs Short Duo

Revengers vs Giggle Duo

Tampon Duo vs Pronouns Duo

Sex Havers vs Piss Duo

Gay Trio vs Pickle Duo

Golden Duo/Golden Boys vs Meow Duo

Selfie Duo vs Therapy Duo

Earth Duo vs Tower Duo

Spit Duo vs Chipmunk Duo

Treasure Duo vs Quirky Duo

Homie Duo vs Manipulated Minors

Questions/Clarifications under the readmore

What is a duo/group name? - A "duo name" is a name commonly used as shorthand to refer to two (or more) people, typically used in a platonic context, as an alternative to the more ship-inspired mashing together of names. They're generally called duo names because most of them are for a duo, and each one often has a name such as [word] duo. Generally though, similar names like trio or group names fall under the umbrella as well.

How can a duo name be bad? - There is a severe oversaturation of duo names that are either for two creators who hardly interact, or they're too vague to know who it's referring to, or the name refers to an instance or interaction that's so obscure most people don't know it, or sometimes they're just... downright bad. Some are apparent why they're bad.

Me posting and hosting these polls does not mean I hate any of the groups described, and I don't hate all duo names here, and not all of them will be equally bad - Most of these were submitted by other people with their reasoning as to why they're bad names. Some will obviously be worse than others, and I am not trying to equate how bad all of these are. I mean, some of these will be clearly worse. But I had to fill out a bracket of 32, people. Also, me including a name for a duo doesn't mean anything against the people in said duo. Many of these names are for dynamics I personally enjoy!

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two years after the concept was first introduced and three months after official merch was designed, ranboo finally knows what generation loss will be about

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i feel like we always talk about the am i in love with my bestfriend quiz but there is so much more insane shit that happened in the same drodcast

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there’s a really fucking gross pattern of mcytblr using techno’s Sacred Memory in their agenda against dream and completely disrespecting him/his family in the process. like getting mad at the remembering techno stream (even though techno’s dad wanted to do it because he invited dream into their home to meet his family) and getting mad at dream putting the crown on his skin (even though that’s a completely normal tribute to a close personal friend) and now getting mad at the amnesia ending because it fOrCEs eVeRyoNe To FOrGet HiM (even though dream had a one-on-one call with everyone months ago to confirm the ending and, again, was a close personal friend)

it’s sick to weaponize phil and niki’s grief for your parasocial hatred for some guy, it’s sick to look at two people (dream and tommy) who are also grieving and say “you must have forced this on people, it must be to sweep under the rug all the bad things c!/cc!dream did.” no matter what you think of dream and his actions it’s sick how determined mcytblr is to find bad intentions from someone who was trusted to share the news of techno’s passing, who’s done nothing but honor him since. and of course everyone is so completely lacking in self awareness about it, because Dream Bad so anything we say against him is morally and logically correct, even if it disrespects the wishes of the family and friends of the person we’re leaping in front of imaginary bullets to protect. dream can do anything he wants regarding techno as far as i’m concerned. he knew and loved him more than you or i ever could

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not wanting technos memory to be erased is one thing and at that 100% valid (me too, i miss him), but if that little pea brain of that person thinks that Techno was what he did on the DSMP and nothing else, then they should go outside and never interact with anything Techno related ever.

He was awarded an award for his courage in raising money for the Sarcoma Foundation.

He was an incredible Minecraft player. That man could game.

Hell he invested month into a potato war.

He was funny and interlectual and so so kind.

He was a nerd and loved greek mythology and lied about his name and tried to include as many people as he could.

He wanted everyone to be seen and the queer community seemingly for a while turning on him (at least from what he saw on Twitter) made him sad. He wanted to be a safe place.

He was a sell out and a little capitalist pig who was making all that money to have a fund for his siblings to go to college.

So fuck anyone who is trying to pretend like something as miniscule as a few Minecraft buildings would make anyone forget or hell, dishonor Technos memory.

Technos loved ones, his viewers and anyone who was ever graced with having heard of him, will remember him and honor him in the way they seem fit and in times of grief, those grieving deserve patience and kindness.

(sorry, sending good vibes)

💞

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gnfloid my absolute beloved

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Wine Stream Soon!!!! 🎉✨✨

Keep reading

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he's turning into monsieur bacteria before our very eyes

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Introducing my mcc team idea

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this is a very worrying tweet coming from him 

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dream the dads need you !!!

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i can't believe we waited for so long for anything, for any content at all. and we get THIS..???

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sorry

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i love you

so love me back