#AND ITS SO FUCKING PERFECT

[enlighten3d]

(this is literally just an appreciation post for the watcher trope because its one of my favourite things of all time.)

listen ik the whole watcher thing gets quite a bit of hate in this fandom for being so overused, but personally i love it. i love it so much. just because of how versatile it is. i mean, just scroll through the watcher grian tag on ao3, and youll see hundreds of different interpretations of the same beings!

some have wings, some are humanoid, some are decidedly not, some are really fucking evil, some are just misunderstood, some actually do good, some are literal gods, some are just a group of people, some are like a cult, some are just random mysterious fuckers, some are just the explanation for anything weird, some are engaged in gang warfare with the listeners, etc etc etc ETC !!!!! so many different things, so many different narratives, based off one thing!!!

i have like four unfinished watcher!grian fics in my gdocs right now. i will probably not finish all of them. but sometimes i just think about how even between those four fics, the interpretations are so DIFFERENT. so, so, different. but its all from the same thing! the same vague concept from an 6-7 year old smp!! isnt that fucking amazing? what we, the fandom have done with it, and how far weve bent it, and just.

the whole watcher thing is one of my favourite bits of ANY fandom i have ever seen. the sheer creativity of fandom really does surprise me sometimes.

[andi-o-geyser]

a full SAGA of chaos choices at the diner in the centre of your mind

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

some misc Barn & Wally doodles from the past week or so <3 i heart them

[tubbytarchia]

maybe. I hope you guys never stop asking for ranchers

[b4kuch1n]

study of this masterwork

[slymanner]

God dude these two scenes and how roxie moves hurt my heart so so bad 🥹

it's like a mix of anger, feral, emotional breakdown, and complete sadness that just fucks me up soooo fucking bad.

it's like she's a pet who got abandoned by their owner but they see them again after years of sadness and depression of them being gone and leaving them like that and all that anger and sadness just manifest's into one bundle of emotion's towards them they cannot control.

roxie baby ur gonna be okay u deserve better :[

[solarockk]

Sometimes I can't help myself at all

rip doggy allience you will be missed

Kind of a sequel to this

[balleater]

despite being more often than not a "rules as written" fan over "rule of cool", i really do love me a good "rules be damned, i'll give you this awesome moment" call. like matt giving fcg the otohan kill despite what her hp was at or brennan giving cerrit an extra mage slayer reaction attack at the end of calamity. honestly, if anything, i think the fact they mostly play by the book makes these moments even better because it really has that extra weight towards those decisions to put the rules aside.

[meercraft]

Real life is everything to me. Scar, Cleo, Ren and Skizz look like they’re children. No one can run. Combat is horrific. 90% of ppl are on red life within thirty minutes. Grian randomly sometimes shows a facecam for the first time in what feels like years. There’s a sleepover and club you can only enter upon dying. BigB is freakishly tall for no reason. Grian is falling and then ascending like Jesus Christ on easter. All of them are going to puke

[ghostboyhood]

oh my god oh my god

look what fucking got here!! so thrilled the autism hyper fixation is thrivinggg..

thanks so much, to @tinymintywolf (really hope you dont mind being tagged, apologies if you do), go order their stuff!!

[unplanned-parenthood]

everyone and their mother goes thru the monthly occurrence of grabbing pics of young rsl and going 'oh my god new orleans wilson' but like. rsl in Married To It (1991) is literally how i imagine him at that time...the boring suit. the ring. the almost-but-not-quite middle part. the fact that its very much the 90's. if he was a little more dishevelled and fucked up it would be quite literally Him that night

[sicc-nasti]

Poor Engie just wanted to know if they had seen his wrench anywhere

[citrispace]

A GOOD BOY!

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

finally colored that Eddie scribble <3 rough day p.2!

[oatbugs]

last night i got home kind of tipsy and very much in tears and my mother told me the force you exert to keep someone in your life is proportional to the force with which they will leave your life. if you have to fight tooth and claw to keep them, their leaving will be just as hard, just as harsh, and just as definite.

[nekropsii]

Let this be a living example that knowing the beliefs of any individual who wrote any piece of text- be it literature, articles, or posts- can and should drastically alter your perception on what the text is actually communicating, even if that knowledge has, on its face, changed none of the actual printed words. This is how application of real-world context works, and this is how it applies to any recorded medium.

It reminds me heavily of a quote from video essayist Jacob Geller, regarding the 1938 film Olympia- "It's different when Nazis do it". Olympia is a film that, on its face, simply depicts an artistic documentation of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. But within the context of its production taking place during the Nazi regime, with its director being a well known Nazi propagandist... The way the movie fixates on the power and elegance of the human form and Ancient Greek statues quickly shifts from being completely innocuous appreciation to the worship of what is perceived as the ideal forms of the "Aryan race". Suddenly, you understand the movie not to be a pretty inoffensive documentation of a historical event, but a propaganda piece.

Understanding the time period in which something was made, as well as the setting it was produced in/for, and whatever ideologies an artist may hold and experiences they've had is absolutely critical to getting a full understanding of anyone's work. There are some things that are near completely anodyne on their face, but the revelation of what the author thinks and feels about other people and the world around them totally redefines every word on the page.

This image is such a prime example of why context matters. This opinion, laid bare, stripped of context, is both inoffensive and nonsensical. No one's ever thought it to be lame to create your own nickname... But on its own, that's a harmless kind of wrong. ... But with the addition of them being marked as Anti-Trans (red) on Shinigami Eyes, a browser extension dedicated to crowdsourcing keeping track of Trans Friendly and Transphobic creators... Suddenly, "Nicknames" doesn't mean "Nicknames" anymore. Suddenly, you realize that "Nicknames" is code for "Chosen Names of Trans People". Suddenly this isn't about thinking choosing your own nickname is lame, this is about thinking that trans people shouldn't have the right to name themselves. Suddenly it's about invalidating identities, thinking they're worth mocking. Thinking that people who identify as trans are "just trying to be cool", and that they're not actually what they say they are, because you don't get to choose your gender nickname, that's something already decided for you.

Suddenly, you realize, it's not about "being lame".

It's about Transphobic Violence.

This is why you cannot ignore when an artist, author, essayist, developer, musician- so on and so forth- is bigoted. This is why you can't ignore the context behind their upbringing. This is why you can't ignore the context behind their lived experience, their ideals, their goals, their message. Yes, it may appear innocent on its face. Yes, it may look fine stripped from the context of it being written by an inevitably flawed human being. But what's really being said here? What do those words mean... To the one who wrote them?

Context redefines Text.

Even if the words didn't change.