#(this isn't a bad thing btw it's genius and perfect and works for the story episode 6+7 is telling. just to clarify)

[p2ii]

too bad both Tenma and atlas are too obsessed with they own respective fathers/sons they could've been such a powerful duo tbh

[therealvinelle]

What's your opinion on the fandom's obsession with Smeyers mormonism? I'd just recently discovered your metas(and they're so interesting btw they brilliantly expand upon the almost kinda psychological horror esque feel of the characters and story). But then I go into your replies and tags expecting everyone to marvel at your genius exploration of what's eluded to in the canon text or just the likelihood or natural outcomes of certain scenarios and decisions that have/may have not happened in the context of the overall story. Instead it's most of the time just a bunch of people going, "Aha. Confirmed it! That's so because Meyers a Mormon" or "See, that insert literally anything happened because of the Mormom themes, characterizations and ...idolization??? of insert literally any character/aspect of the lore. "

It would be a lie to say it isn't irritating even speaking as an atheist because it literally stifles any actual exploration of nuance within the books. Any theory, character analysis, or legitimate in/out of universe explanation in regard to canon can be boiled down to such an archaic supposition. And it's not just your blog. I see it everywhere here on tumblr when discussing anything twilight. Even people indifferent to twilight and twilight antis alike are of such strong conviction that they erase any character's belief or motivation or really anything Meyer has said in regards to that matter

Seeing as I'm running a doylism purist blog I obviously agree with you. The author's religious belief are a non-issue to me when I read Meyer's works, or anyone else's for that matter.

I say that, but there are exceptions - there's something strikingly Calvinist permeating the world of Harry Potter in that people are born good or bad and the juxtaposition between Tom Riddle and Harry Potter seems to boil down to Tom being a bad person who will make bad choices while Harry is a good person who will make good choices, and this extends to the rest of the cast and the Hogwarts houses as well. However, these are children's books with Good Guys and Bad Guys and I won't pretend to understand what's happening in JKR's brain, and so you won't see me saying that Harry Potter is Calvinist: merely that there are parallels that can be drawn.

Similarly, taking a step outside the YA genre I find that Victor Hugo's own political and religious personal journeys are reflected in Jean Valjean and Marius Pontmercy, but while it adds to the reading experience it doesn't make me see the characters any differently. They stand on their own.

I bring up these examples for a reason - sometimes, no matter how Doylist you want to be, you read a book and you can tell that, "oh this is an allegory for apartheid", or "I can tell the author is writing about personal experiences with trauma" or the plain old "you know, this feels like the author was projecting a lot" (frequently found on Ao3).

Twilight, for me, is not one such work. My thoughts on Mormonism and Twilight are summed up here, but one point I feel I should make is that although Twilight never read as Mormon to me, I also straight up know very little about Mormonism, so who knows, maybe I would be picking things up if I was more into it. As it is, however, the analyses of Mormonism in Meyer I've seen have been consistently reductive and superficial, where things like "Carlisle is a young blond leader -> Joseph Smith, the Cullens are a perfect family -> they're mormons, nobody in this YA series drinks alcohol -> they're mormons" are presented as compelling evidence, so I've yet to be convinced of it.

To actually answer your question though, I would just block "Mormonism", "LDS", and "Joseph Smith" on tumblr saviour and smile blissfully at my Mormon free dash. In fact I would do that anyway, regardless of what the Twilight fandom is posting.

[kitkatopinions]

I actually saw a comment saying something in the lines of your most recent post about CRWBY having a plan & also ridiculing & mocking everyone that thinks they can do better than MKEK. 🙄

So yeah, first of all, I don't know why it's considered an end-all argument to say that MKEK had a plan from the start. The only ways it impacts the perception of them is in a negative way like I said, and it just isn't believable with the product they churn out. But it's also such a pointless sentiment. If I say "I don't like the way they did James Ironwood's fall to villainy," the argument "well they always wanted him to be bad" doesn't matter at all to the conversation about whether or not it was done well. Most things in RWBY have the problem of execution, the writing is bad, the set up isn't enough, the dialogue is stilted and awkward, things either move at a snails pace or at lightning speed, the writers don't know what to do with their characters, etc. Which, btw, I've heard that there are fans that are complaining that RWDE posters like the concepts of RWBY but not the execution now and that that means we're just angry that the things we wanted didn't happen. Which is hilarious to me, because I thought that the problem was that we were bashing the ideas of RWBY instead of focusing on details like execution and that that was proof of the fact that we were just mad our headcanons didn't happen. So that's just further proof that there's literally nothing critics can do or say to be considered a 'good RWBY critic' and toxic RWBY fans just want to twist everything we say or do into something they can make fun of so they can pretend RWBY is perfect.

But! Back on track, this is gonna be a long post under the keep reading. Lately I can't write anything to be short, sweet, and to the point. XD More RWDE underneath, obviously.

I think first of all that there's this weird thing toxic RWBY fans do, where they take any re-write to be 'a conceited attempt to pretend you're better than the writers,' which often isn't the case. I feel like only fics or stories actually labeled 'fix its' should be even sort of seen under this light. And even then, most people I've seen recognize that they have a lot of time to think things through with no deadlines, have some distance from projects, and are building off of someone else's creation when they make fix-its, and therefore it can't properly be used to compare whether or not someone is a 'better' writer or creator than MKEK.

What people can compare to MKEK in terms of writing/creating are their own works, their own created projects. Whether that's published, professional works, or original stories published on AO3 or FictionPress. But the bar for being 'better than MKEK' in that regard is very low. I myself have never managed to make anything of my own enough to even publish it on AO3, despite my wide variety of concepts and characters that I love. I'm not very good at writing on my own (I mostly write fan fictions with my sisters,) and I've rarely completed a fan fiction, and even then, I get insecure about publishing my work even on AO3. So while I consider myself pretty good at understanding characters and very good at concept creation, I can't know if I would make a better product than MKEK if I had the money, resources, and time right now to make something of my concepts. But that doesn't make me unequipped to spot some ways that MKEK has faltered and gone wrong. To suggest that people who have never *made an animated seires* are unequipped to criticize or point out flaws in one is basically like watching someone eat a hard and moldy cake and then yelling at them when they complain because they're not a trained chef and they've never owned a bakery. It doesn't take a genius to realize that RWBY's writing is flawed and the writers don't know what they're doing. Then when the unsatisfied customer says they're just gonna make the same kind of cake only without the mold and make it soft, it's "oh so now you think you're a better baker, huh? You can't make their cake any better, how dare you remove that mold!" And then if the baker makes a mistake, the person yelling at them promptly ignores that the original cake can be used as a stepstool due to how hard it is and that it's practically green with mold , and laugh about how the unexperienced baker undercooked their cake so now it's too soft in the middle. And once again, this allegory...

Point being 1. Very few people are actually this conceited image of someone pretending to be God's gift to writers because they're making a RWBY re-write. 2. You kind of can't judge whether or not you're actually better than MKEK in writing by comparing a re-write or fix-it to the OG product, holding up your own original works is better. 3. You don't have to be a writer to know that MKEK's writing is bad and does suck, and therefore the bar for 'what's better than MKEK' is very low. Disney Channel's Lemonade Mouth is better writing than MKEK. Sonic Adventure Director's Cut is better writing than MKEK. Wreck It Ralph 2: Ralph Breaks the Internet... Might actually be worse.

However, you can easily know whether or not you're better than MKEK in terms of *not being offensive and writing in an inclusive way.* Which is really not hard to do. "I'm actually going to include confirmed gay characters in the main cast of my story." Congrats, you're better at rep than MKEK is. "I'm going to make sure that my LGBTQ+ inclusion isn't wholly centered around queer women, I'm going to have queer women, queer men, and non-binary rep." Congrats, you're better at rep than MKEK is. "I'm going to not brutalize one of the only two people of color in the main cast, and I'm going to make sure that I don't portray the other as being bad for thinking things that his white friends don't, and needing to change." Congrats, you're better at rep than MKEK is. "I'm going to have a main character become disabled and actually put work into writing her recovery and not have her dismiss her prosthetic as 'just extra' and not a part of her. And I'm not going to depict disabilities in other people as monstrous signs of a loss of humanity that signals their downfall into cruelty." Congrats, you're better at rep than MKEK. Etc. Etc. It really isn't hard at all to beat out MKEK in terms of rep, considering they're behind the curve.

Funnily enough, when I was around eighteen-to-twenty two, I had a concept of a post-apocalyptic anime style cartoon centering a Very Special girl who joins the army/police equivalent program in the world and has adventures with her group of friends including a somewhat-Spirit-Albarn based mentor character and a fantasy-equivalent fake racism plot. This was before I had ever done more than watched and disliked the first two episodes of RWBY, having turned it off because it read like a low-budget attempt at a Disney channel storyline based show. And I was stupid and indoctrinated at the time and I'm so glad that I never did do anything with it, because I would've churned out a horrible and much more offensive than I realized product. But! Do you know what my fake-racism plot plan included? The oppressed people fighting the government for their rights, and the heroes fighting alongside them instead of fighting against them, and taking down the corrupt government officials who resisted that. Even my terrible past ideas that I'm embarrassed of now that I definitely wouldn't do now aren't as bad or as offensive as the product MKEK gave us. So I think it's ridiculous when people say things like 'you guys are making fix-its and re-writes? So you think you're better than MKEK?' In terms of writing, maybe not, but at the same time

But! On that note, I do want to caution people with intent to write re-writes... I wouldn't call them 'fix-its' if you're gonna go too off script with what you do. Admittedly, it's hard to write a RWBY fix-it without going off script specifically when it comes to the Faunus/White Fang stuff, and Adam specifically, because all of that was one big mess. But generally speaking, if you go off script in terms of ships, basic plot points, excluding characters or keeping them around when they weren't in the OG, changing too much in terms of how the world works or how the dynamics are supposed to work, you get into 'this is what I wish happened' territory. That's not a fix it, that's an AU, a re-write, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But for instance, say someone is writing a RWBY fix-it and they decide that instead of fixing Bumbleby as a relationship, establishing it earlier on to let the burn simmer, making them healthier or having them work through some of the unhealthy aspects of their relationship... They just scrap it completely and go with BlackSun and Freezerburn. That's not a real fix-it, that does feel like someone who is writing a version of RWBY that suits them better. If it doesn't need to be changed in order to be a good concept, then changing it is a wish fulfillment, not a 'fix.' Things like established ships, character deaths, the characters leaving Beacon, and even Ironwood turning evil are all not bad ideas, they're just very badly done.