#Engaging Texts

[spooksier]

young artist posting your work online, heed my warning. im holding your face so gently in my hands, you have to stop caring about numbers right now and start caring about making the weirdest and most self-indulgent art you possibly can

[zentranstech]

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[elfdyke]

i dont think fandom people who only think about male characters and only create content for male characters are like horrible misogynists but i do think they often have some shit they need to unpack. like how can you , for example, play life is strange and the only thing you come away with from that is you want nathan and warren to fuck nasty. how can you watch birds of prey, and the only thing you come away with from that is you want roman and victor to fuck nasty......... like idk! idk! i just find it strange especially when people will engage with media Specifically about women and then put no effort in to empathize or care about them, sometimes even going far enough to say they HATE the female characters and that theyre bitches... IDK!!!!

[chamerionwrites]

Honestly this gets at my chiefest complaint/frustration/discomfort with fandom as a whole. Which is: in their rush to defend the artistic merit of fanworks I think a ton of people have really valorized transformation and remixing and reinterpretation in and of themselves, when imo those are all quite neutral actions. When done well, they can expand and build upon and subvert meaning in really powerful and thought-provoking (and fun!) ways. When done poorly, they are just as likely to flatten and oversimplify and decontextualize and completely erase meaning. The simple act of changing something does not imbue the choice to do so with creative validity. It is entirely possible for a cover song to be bad (or just boring!). To exactly the same degree that it is possible to transform a pretty shallow and straightforward work into something deeper and more nuanced and subversive, is possible to transform a work into a vastly shallower and less interesting shadow of itself. As with nearly everything in art, it's all about the execution!

But the second you voice this position (which should honestly be a pretty uncontroversial one imo), you get people shrieking at you about being gatekeep-y and pretentious and betraying the sacred fandom etiquette of Don't-Like-Don't-Read.

And like...listen. I was not raised in a barn. I am 150% capable of quietly back-buttoning out of a fanfic I think is bad or boring - which is exactly what I do when I encounter them - and I am obviously not advocating for stupid ships wars or any kind of harassment or leaving hatemail in people's AO3 inboxes. (Which some people will also accuse you of the second you say anything less than lavishly positive about fandom, in true piss-on-the-poor fashion.) Literally all I am saying is that you can't have your cake and eat it too - that if fandom and fanworks (in the broadest sense) have artistic merit then fandom and fanworks (in the broadest sense) are fair game for artistic critique. Which means, in practice, that I can go on my own blog and make a post exactly like this one - critiquing broad trends, or stating that some interpretations are bad actually, or pointing out that subverting or talking back to or reading against the grain of canon is very different from simply ignoring it, or saying "fandom's culture of collage/remix/fuck-canon-I-do-what-I-want can lend itself to to really creative and interesting art but also to a lot of really bland homogenized cut-n-paste art, not to mention some pretty troubling decontextualization." And that if you feel this rains on your personal parade, you are then free to DLDR by back-buttoning out of my blog and/or blocking me so you never have to see my hot takes again, rather than clamoring in my notes about how I should let people enjoy things.

[vileidol]

actually maybe it is fucked up that astarion’s story is about allowing yourself to be deserving of love even if you are fucked up and traumatised and have a deeply complicated relationship with sex / aversion to sex and some people’s response to that was ‘if u act nice to the hot sassy vampire u will Fix Him & be rewarded with sex uwu’

[ale-arro]

been going a little bit insane about this sentence from Ace by Angela Chen for the past week

[azherwind-art]

"Tell your favorite creators that you like their work, people usually enjoy things silently, but hate tends to be loud"

This is a phrase I just heard from Dnd shorts that captures perfectly why I often try to make the effort of commenting on posts and telling people that I enjoy their work and why Even to small creators, I advice everyone to make the extra effort to tell them, I can guarantee it makes all the difference in the world, it's not cringy or obnoxious, it'll just brighten someone's day

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

i vote that next year instead of reading Dracula we do a Jeeves & Wooster Book Club. those two never got the rabid tumblr shipping fandom they deserved (disqualified for the sheer technicality of being published a century too soon). we must correct this injustice

[idiotsonlyevent]

it is completely understandable to be uncomfortable with the sexual assault in dandadan. it's important to discuss how it's framed, whether it's handled poorly, or if it could be been portrayed better. but the number of people - even fans - stating that it is only fanservice, irrelevant, or could be removed is frankly bizarre to for SO many reasons, starting with the fact that this parallel exists.

the anime made it even more obvious by interpolating cuts from the first scene into the second one.

i thought this scene showed that momo gaining her powers by believing in her relationship with her grandmother gives her the strength to fight back against what is basically a horrific, much more aggressive and abstract (maybe even absurd?) representation of her shitty gross ex - who was demanding she 'put out' and pay for the love hotel in very first scene.

while the escalation from one scene to the next is surprising, it's not something that comes out of nowhere. this first scene is meant to be a set-up to what will happen later. it sets the tone, though significantly more lighthearted at this point. it tells you that sex, sexuality, etc. is something dandadan will touch on - though you don't know what the scope and depth will be until later in the chapter.

i cannot recommend this video enough, as it discusses some interesting interpretations of what the serpoians and turbo granny represent in their respective assault scenes, as well as how right now the treatment of both scenes is unfortunately uneven.

more notes about plot and thematic relevance below the cut. spoilers for anime-onlies (up to chapter 8, will probably be covered in episodes 4/5).

momo was assaulted, and almost cut up by the serpoians, much like the other victims turbo granny appeared around. this is an intentional parallel. turbo granny goes to momo because that is what she does. again, SUPER unclear how that factors into turbo granny's assault of ken, but if we keep the video's interpretation of cynicism in mind, it could be related to that; maybe turbo granny has a cynicism toward men - similar to momo in chapter/episode 1 - and this is why she chose to attack ken. unfortunately, it's still too early to really understand and explain a lot of her motivations.

again, completely understandable to not like how the sexual assault was handled or portrayed, and it's important to keep discussing it. but this is what dandadan does for many different types of trauma and difficult life experiences. this is a huge part of dandadan's identity. if you don't like it, that is fine, but calling the sexual assault 'just fan service' is blatantly untrue.

[hexedgelphie]

seeing the “sex scenes are unnecessary” type of person attack the woe’s hollow scene as “unnecessary” has got to be one of the more egregious takes I’ve seen because those people beg for sex scenes to “have a point” and are presented with a scene where we learn the most powerful woman in the company has to use deception to find any real connection, in the most vulnerable quietest moment says she’s ashamed of who she is on the outside, has previously said innies aren’t people but we’re watching her stroke this man’s face and ask him if he’s okay with real tenderness- OH- and that man gets a flash of his outies wife in the midst of the action…

I literally cannot think of a sex scene where we learn more about a character and also push the plot forward more than the woe’s hollow sex scene. Its literally what people ask for if there’s going to be a sex scene: informative, pushes the plot forward, creates new dynamics (and also insane amounts of sizzling chemistry)… but if you don’t hold these peoples hands and spell it out they miss the point.

[sirlancenotalot]

[demigods-posts]

headcanon that percy and annabeth get engaged during college by complete accident. annabeth didn't mean to propose, she just wanted to know at what age he was comfortable marrying her (26 yrs old btw). and when he answered, she told him she'd see him at their wedding, and he said okay. anyway, they shopped for rings later that day after laughing their asses off for a good ten minutes.

[rad-roche]

i was happy for dead man talking/dead woman walking to live in a google doc, and for the art to live in a discord server for me and five assorted perverts, and made this account mostly on a whim and as an archive, so i consider people really enjoying it, and gloria, and this whole strange niche oc/canon thing with a companion from a 2016 video game pretty bewildering in a really pleasant way. i'd be content with just me, but thank you, i'm glad i took the time to make a tumblr

[couch-house]

[blueskittlesart]

in the nicest and most non-confrontational way possible. i feel like some of you think that anything that isn't directly openly spelled out for you within a story is "missed potential" or "unexplored." like. sometimes there are implied narratives. sometimes the point is that you as the reader are supposed to think and draw your own conclusions and participate in the story. the writers not directly spelling every little detail out for you doesn't mean that the story is poorly written or missed its own plot details somehow. PLEASE.

[trailerparkvampire]

what the fuck is going on with all those takes how stack cares about money SOOO MUCH more than smoke. stack's the one who defends the plantation worker not being able to pay in full, it's smoke who's ready to throw him out for paying with credits, it's smoke who tallies the till and tells stack they're going under and it's smoke who equates money with power*. i'd argue that the foreshadowing for stack getting turned is actually that he's the one who constantly pushes boundaries of what's allowed - it's strongly implied the juke joint is his idea, smoke says how when they ran away from home he just wanted to go to the next plantation over but stack had other plans. stack is the one that keeps offering to go outside (and it's poverty that's pushing everyone outside)...that's foreshadowing. not some weird greed people seem to be assigning to him now.

i think a lot of people don't seem to understand that as well as a horror this is a tragedy and that these characters can do everything right, can navigate the existing structures the best they can but the rules of the game keep shifting and even before that, they are doomed from the start!

*) now i think there's a whole other conversation about how smoke tries to put REAL ACTUAL money into the hands of his community - the way he's with annie, the way he's with the little girl - because that's a way of empowering your community, he's well aware that keeping people in poverty is a way of upholding status quo etc.