olive-branch-witch - Tumblr blog

[olive-branch-witch]

i wanna show off my progens!

Then

Now

Mature label is for my blog as a whole!

[olive-branch-witch]

A lot of the censorship on FR is to the detriment of diversity and creativity and I think staff should take another look at what 13-and-up actually entails.

I don't think most players are actually annoyed about permabab zombie skins. I don't care about those either way. But I think it's a community breaking point for the deeply flawed content rules FR struggles to consistently uphold. The way FR handles this kind of thing is half the reason I don't actively play anymore, because my art or lore could possibly be flagged as inappropriate due to what? some fantasy violence and scars? which are all very common in 13+ media??

The game should always be a safe space but this is all getting a bit ridiculous. Some of these rules protect nobody and harm the community.

Note: edited for clarity, this was a spitball post and i didn't make the point very clear oops. Issue is less with moderation (although I have my critiques of that too) but with the inconsistencies and excessive tightening of player-made content rules in some places but not in others, which could lead to users making mistakes. It also just makes the game less varied and inclusive.

[olive-branch-witch]

FR staff wants to keep making money above all else, and their decisions are in line with erring on the safe side of an internet that is rapidly turning conservative. That's the long and short of all their content moderation decisions. You will never get anything but the most moderate, safe, restrictive decisions out of FR content again.

I just don't see what future the site has for the player base. If you already like the status quo--great, you will get more of the same until the site shuts down. If you already don't like where things are going--things are not going to change. It's really as simple as that. If aligning with conservative decisions to protect brand viability is totally alright with you as a user, then keep buying gems.

[olive-branch-witch]

and also, moving the scars thing from "no scars at all" to "Scars will be heavily scrutinized" is just taking it from "all scars are inherently nsfw and too obscene to be seen other people" to "scars from especially traumatic events are inherently nsfw and too obscene to be seen by other people", which really isn't that much better! all we've done is very slightly shrink the definition of the boundaries of the category of The Unmentionables, we still haven't stopped having an Unmentionable Ugly Freaks Who Shouldn't Be Seen Because They're Too Damaged category! it was bad enough when it felt like even the most basic scarless missing limb skins for adult dragons were on thin ice with them (and even then only out of fear of backlash for banning them outright), but this is just a straw meets camel situation.

"protect the children" rules about never depicting any kind of healed injuries or deformities or """"body horror"""" are fucking awful, no matter what, no matter where they are, and continuing to uphold that hays-code-ass standard for everything in media that some people are simply too grotesque to be seen by others is BARELY a step above and stems directly from the exact same mindset that leads to straight up ugliness laws (a real thing, look it up. the only way we're ever going to get rid of laws like this permanently is to root out every trace of the underlying mindset that it's even possible for someone to be enough of a walking cognitohazard that it's reasonable on any level for "normal" people to be "protected" from having to see them, entirely). people need to get used to the fact that people they find ugly and even disturbing exist and shouldn't have to hide themselves from the public for their comfort. you know what really protects the children? not being told they're too hideous and disturbing to Normal People to fucking exist, over something they have no control over and obtained through being traumatized as often as it's obtained from scraping a knee on the pavement while riding a bike, and growing up in a world where they're acclimated to the existence of Uglytm and Scarytm people from a young age so they don't have a knee-jerk horror response to just fucking seeing them. would help a damn lot with bullying i'd imagine too. this isn't about protecting kids, it's never about protecting kids, it's about comforting adults that think kids are pure porcelain dolls of purity (and keeping them from having to look at those who have Failed At Being A Child Aka Filling The Role Of A Perfect Pure Untarnished Doll Properly) for them to own and control as they please, and it's about preserving good normal undamaged people's subconscious false sense of security that they're somehow better than the damaged and deformed because they've so far been lucky enough to not be noticeably Altered, so that they don't have to think about the fact that it's even a real nontheoretical possibility in the actual physical world that they inhabit that they could potentially be rendered like that too.

[olive-branch-witch]

flight rising mods attempting to explain their fuck ass rules for hatchling skins: yea so we wanna keep the hatchlings safe since a lot of things can sexualize them ! so we decided to ban frilly dresses (kids clothing is OBVIOUSLY just sexualized adult kink gear), scarring (because yknow scars are definitely not kid friendly and must be censored) and zombification (because even implying that the hatchling got hurt is really really bad. dont look at the fact that we have canon zombies/zombie-esque creatures). and if you have any questions we will shut you up. thanks

[olive-branch-witch]

writing this b4 i sleep so this is gna b very disconnected and might be worded weird, sorry . but its all just so ??????? fucking confusing to me how staff keeps (indirectly or otherwise) saying/promoting really racist or ableist shit and expect people to just keep treating it as an accident like idk. you said it yourself! this is a kids site. therefore kids with scars/deformities are going to see the tos about banning baby dragons from having characteristics similar to their own because it's "too grotesque" being lumped in w literal zombification, and they're going to extrapolate things about themselves because of that! as if the offline world isn't mean enough. but it's about protecting kids though, we swear. staff legit needs to do some introspection and really comb through what they think abt marginalized people and come to the realization they have some Really Fucked Up Opinions, Actually! that they just never choose to actually address and just say they'll be hiring a sensitivity reader or two to do it for them in the future. i've not been here all that long but seeing and hearing about their current/past conduct really fucking bugs me and i think people are too lax about it sometimes.

[olive-branch-witch]

Hey, if you’re sending in a “contact us” ticket about the ableism in disallowing the depiction of scars on hatchlings, consider using/turning on an adblock for the site if you haven’t already, and mention that in the ticket. Same for if you’d been planning on buying gems or have bought gems in the past. If people’s displeasure with this costs them money they’re more likely to take it seriously.

[olive-branch-witch]

The 'hatchling skins can't have scars or be zombies >:(' feels really dumb mainly because like...staff have let much more fucked up implications fly for years!

For example, Bai, owned by Limanya, is a baby Emperor in their lore. Bai has 1k likes and for good reason! The story is well written and the concept is interesting. Go read it if you haven't!

But it has the incredibly fucked up implications of three baby imperials dying, having their corpses buried together, and then fusing together into the same type of monster as Luminax.

And Bai also has a lot of likes. Certainly not the most likes ever, but enough that, if their lore was an issue, staff would've already nuked it...but they haven't.

Is staff suddenly going to start cracking down on darker stories for permababies or are they gonna sit there and be like "No zombie/scar skins because of implications >:(...but we're fine with implications if you write them in your lore :)"

[olive-branch-witch]

Instead of banning injuries and Lolita clothing skins for hatchlings, they should make the rules on them stricter

No black eyes or bleeding noses, keep the dress OVER or BELOW the knees, keep the hatchling's body fully covered with the exception of the tail, head, wings, and feet being uncovered, do not draw the hatchling in a cast, no oozing or heavily bleeding injuries, keep the band-aids colorful and lighthearted with little to no signs of blood, etc.. Lift the ban on scars, too, because scars exist on infants and children who have been in accidents or surgeries

[olive-branch-witch]

just read the new hatchling skin rules and am having Some Type Of Initial Emotional Reaction and am now writing down said Initial Emotional Reaction uncensored as i currently Strongly Feel A Type Of Way and Require Venting. i cannot word this more politely. i do not have the capability to render this rage into polite borderline corporate-speak for the sake of the damn rules that act like anything short of apologizing for being alive to make up for having even the most constructive understanding friendly criticism or even personal mild non-critical dislike of something like a color or a breed is tantamount to personal targeted hatemail. i cannot wait until i cool into calm bitterness later because if i think about this enough to write about it again i will just go right back to being furious and the fact that everyone ielse who's complaining is focusing entirely on the lolita fashion thing and not on in my opinion the far more significant and offensive part is pissing me off even more. extremely angry unedited ranting ahead

fr having it's own "female presenting nipples" moment right now, not that i'm particularly surprised, they've been a prime example of "conservative protestantism in a lefty-language veneer" for a long while now.

"don't adultify" is such a fucking vague and easily selectively interpreted rule, not to mention insulting for a number of reasons,

but putting that part aside the whole idea of "nothing that suggests that the dragon is an adult in a young body" is. look, i'm not exactly fond of the "adult who looks like an anime schoolgirl" trope myself, but i fail to see how in the absolute FUCK having it be canon in-universe that it is both possible and legal for someone to be forced to stay as a child permanently, is somehow LESS creepy than just saying eternal youth dragons have dwarfism. also, fuck you to anyone with dwarfism apparently i guess?

and "no zombie baby dragons" is just stupid. even fucking minecraft has baby zombies, and microsoft has steadily butchered that game into one of the most t for toddler babymode things on earth this side of cocomelon.

and "no scars on hatchlings" so fuck you to any kids with scars too apparently, even though that's way more common than anyone seems to realize. you hear that, kids? if you're under 18 and have scars your very existence is too obscene for public view. 13+ year olds will be irreparably traumatized if they have to know you exist at all! fuck you disabled kids and fuck you amputee kids and fuck you any kids that have suffered anything ever at all for not appearing as a perfect unspoiled image of conservative christian child-doll innocent purity. flight rising staff says your body and existence is inherently too nsfw to even be acknowledged as existing much less visually seen. everyone knows REAL children don't get damaged at all, and if they do then they're too horrifying and defective at their job of Being A Child Properly to exist in public spaces! how dare ugly things that might make us uncomfortable with their existence by contradicting out ideals about aesthetic moral purity be allowed where good respectable normal people can see them!

i don't say any of these words lightly, and i'm very much not the type to go around calling people whatever-ists and in fact find that kind of thing extremely annoying, useless, reductive, and more or less only ever see it used as a blunt cudgel to shame people into line so they don't question you, and have historically found it especially annoying when people pull out the accusations-of-ism card on fr staff over things that are far more likely just completely understandable (if dubiously competent) issues of certain things simply not occurring to someone on code and design level due to lack of sufficient exposure to the idea, and have always been of the belief of giving them the benefit of doubt (even if often that just means i think they either most likely made an understandable mistake that i would likely also make, or, when i'm feeling less kind, that they're simply not particularly competent rather than actively hostile) so understand how much it means coming from me when i say- flight rising staff, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, fuck you, you ableist batch of pricks, so far up your own asses with your performative veneer of vaguely lefty-flavored language that you don't realize how fundamentally extremely conservative all of your actual beliefs underlying them are. for every update you make that i approve of there's another that does twice as much damage as the good update fixed (and i'm starting to wonder if you maybe know what you're doing with that too-always batching the fucked up shit on the tail end of some big thing you know people will be excited about, always hiding these controversial moderation changes under something shiny and new, to the point that now i dread any new good update that genuinely seems a step in the right direction and/or is something we've been wanting for awhile because i'm just constantly expecting the knife hidden behind the footnotes afterwards, the fucking "ban tiktok/gay marriage/strip rights from this population/end net neutrality/whatever/ect" clause stapled onto the end of a bill about something entirely unrelated functionally holding a change people want hostage until they allow the fucked up part through. i've been here most of the site's 10+ years and i've seen this sort of thing happen far, far too often.) and every year the shit that gets pulled on the management and moderation end of things makes me more and more almost glad i've never had an income to spend on this, and the fact that apparently the moderation behind every single other petsite in existence is somehow significantly worse fucking astounds me. the only reason i stay around here is because It's Free Dragon Pictures, because it's literally the only actually good petsite game i've ever played and not gotten sick of within a week or so (and really the only good low-energy game i've ever played in general, which i'm increasingly convinced is in spite of it's management), and because somehow, despite all of this shit, i still genuinely love the game itself, because unfortunately by some accident of creation it seems they apparently stumbled purely by coincidence into making an actually good game idea no one else quite has. and after all the fuckery that gets constantly pulled, i refuse to believe the game being good is anything other than, much like many of the of the incidents i think they're unfairly accused of malice and -ism over, an accident.

Disabled children too obscene to fucking exist. fuck you. good to know half the child population's existence requires a trigger warning to even be allowed to be acknowledged as existing to you. good to know if the heart surgery i had when i was 11 had left any visible external scars i would be considered inherently too obscene to exist to you. good to know if the overhealed and benignly potentially cancerous scar on my back from whatever actually happened when i was a toddler (i don't trust either of my parents to ever be accurate about something like that) was in a more visible spot you would demand i have a trigger warning to post selfies online. good to know if any of the shit that's broken me emotionally left visible physical marks you would think it was good and right for me to be forcibly hidden from good normal people's view and considered too taboo for even the slightest discussion without hiding it with makeup and lies, just so i don't make good, lucky, undamaged, normal people uncomfortable, god fucking forbid. should we hide the gays too, since they also make so many people uncomfy? i imagine it won't be long before disabled adults are too obscene for your polite societytm sensibilities too. i've had the feeling for a long time that amputee and disabled skins were living on borrowed time with your rules, kept technically not explicitly dissalowed where all other forms of injury and ""body horror"" are banned simply out of fear of the backlash it would cause to include them, and well. the doomsday clock on that one just got a little bit closer to midnight, huh?

the only reason i wasn't a (physically, visibly, externally) scarred kid was pure sheer fucking luck. the only reason you weren't a physically scarred kid too is pure sheer fucking luck. the only reason you're not some type of disfigured or ugly or amputated or visibly injured or whatnot is pure sheer fucking luck. you're lucky. nothing more. if having to contend with that fact-the fact of how easily it could have gone a different way and there is nothing they would be able to do about it- makes good normal tm people uncomfortable, then well, get the fuck used to it, other people children very much fucking included don't exist to cater to the aesthetic sensibilities of a lucky perfect few. the only thing that separates you from the damaged ones you find too obscene is a bad day and an unlucky hand. and one day, even if you were lucky enough to escape being damaged when you were young, you and i will both be just like them too.

more festival skin winners slots is good. elemental swords sound fun.

[olive-branch-witch]

Geeze those new skin rules are wild....

No lolita inspired apparel?

Sure okay thats fine

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No scars?

Yeah okay sure I get it

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No zombies either?

Geeze if you say so

[olive-branch-witch]

Confirmed staff is deleting posts of people upset/questioning their decisions. I really thought that with the updated uma system I would be fully returning to fr but if this is how they're treating the community then... Fuck. I don't know.

I've got so many gems in the vault and I want to just give it all away and never come back.

[olive-branch-witch]

Flight Rising staff suddenly dropping a new skin rule update out of nowhere with no prior community input and then locking any thread that even discusses it at all is certainly a choice.

Also no scars or zombie hatchlings allowed? Really??? I'm sorry, but how did we get to the point where Neopets has more lax rules on body horror and gore than the website that Plague Flight exists on?

At this point I'm just convinced that Plague Flight just mutated into existance in the code and the staff just rolled with it. How else can you explain creating a landscape of rotting flesh and pustules, but being to afraid to allow any sort of user created content that uses the aestetic?

[olive-branch-witch]

Just read the most recent update - the one on Eternal Youth skins/accents - and hm. Staff certainly has made some choices. Not very good ones, though.

All I'm saying is, the first scar I ever got was when I was 3 years old. Kids get hurt sometimes, man.

[olive-branch-witch]

Sorry I keep thinking about this but it would genuinely be stupid if they are talking about the fashion subculture. Breaking down the phrase "Lolita-inspired" in my brain it literally cannot and should not be anywhere near the fashion.

Capital L Lolita - likely referring to the 1955 novel, because it is The First Instance of the term Lolita

Inspired - inspired directly by the novel and direct adaptations into other mediums

Fashion subculture Lolita - (sourcing from wikipedia sorry if I'm wrong) started around 1970s-80s, highly influenced by Victorian clothing and styles from the Rococo period. Predated by Otome-kei, which is just a feminine style of fashion I think?

The only connection the fashion and the novel have is the name being derived from the novel, which according to that bit on Wikipedia, was introduced to Japan with the novel and the word sort of just acquired its own separate meaning within the culture and has become removed from the novel to the point where a lot of people seem to genuinely not know about the origin of the word at this point.

Literally only related to the novel by name. But a couple of decades after it evolved it's own meaning.

[olive-branch-witch]

just said this in a tag but gonna make a post about it too.

if you want a change with staff's rules against scars on hatchling skins, i really do recommend sending a ticket. get everybody you know to send in tickets too, and keeping reblogging poses from people talking about it (we know staff uses tumblr after all!). be loud, essentially, and dont stop talking about this. it worked with the auraboas and even some smaller things like the gene split in marketplace. we can get change to happen, we just gotta be persistent about it.

(and i do have to remind people to at least be polite when sending in tickets. im upset about this blatent ableism too but unfortunately we're gonna have to be adult about our response if we want staff to listen(