#All sorts of fandoms

[finzphoenix]

ALSO: since I want to do everything in my power to finance my mother's hearing aids, I have lowered the prices for commissions! (They're going to be like this for a whole month, probably longer!)

The new price for comics (former $120): $60

The new price for character sheets (former $110): $60

The new price for collages (former $100): $60

[dawnatlas]

neil josten the man that you are

[benevolenterrancy]

I absolutely love just how many time-travel fix-it fics there are in this fandom

[katnissandpeetamellark]

More random Incorrect quotes 🫶

[madamemiz]

sad: falling out of a hyperfixation

tragic: watching your beloved friends and mutuals fall out of the hyperfixation while you're still in it

[lil-lemon-snails]

🌟Welcome to Superstar Daycare! 🌟

I'm back from my hiatus!!! Celebrating my graduation by dusting off this wip I've had sitting and staring at me on my desktop throughout finals :3

Close ups under cut because I worked too dang hard to let tumblr eat my precious precious pixels >.>

also a plain background one just for funsies (i like character art :>)

[biblically-accurate-dca]

encore!

[saltpepperbeard]

y’all. what if

what if we get a dream sequence where ed is longing for what could have happened, what should have happened. like, we see the same few beats of him on the dock, calling out for stede and looking increasingly concerned. but then the brush behind him rustles, and stede actually stumbles out into view.

and ed’s face breaks out into the most relieved, beautiful smile, and there’s this very dreamy sequence of them breathing each other’s names and running to each other. they of course hug each other tightly, maybe even kiss, before ed murmurs something like, “was worried for a second. thought i’d lost you.”

only for stede to go “oh, no. you’ll never ever lose me.”

...and then ed wakes up in the gutted darkness of the captain’s quarters. alone.

[lurkingteapot]

Every now and then I think about how subtitles (or dubs), and thus translation choices, shape our perception of the media we consume. It's so interesting. I'd wager anyone who speaks two (or more) languages knows the feeling of "yeah, that's what it literally translates to, but that's not what it means" or has answered a question like "how do you say _____ in (language)?" with "you don't, it's just … not a thing, we don't say that."

I've had my fair share of "[SHIP] are [married/soulmates/fated/FANCY TERM], it's text!" "[CHARACTER A] calls [CHARACTER B] [ENDEARMENT/NICKNAME], it's text!" and every time. Every time I'm just like. Do they though. Is it though. And a lot of the time, this means seeking out alternative translations, or translation meta from fluent or native speakers, or sometimes from language learners of the language the piece of media is originally in.

Why does it matter? Maybe it doesn't. To lots of people, it doesn't. People have different interests and priorities in fiction and the way they interact with it. It's great. It matters to me because back in the early 2000s, I had dial-up internet. Video or audio media that wasn't available through my local library very much wasn't available, but fanfiction was. So I started to read English language Gundam Wing fanfic before I ever had a chance to watch the show. When I did get around to watching Gundam Wing, it was the original Japanese dub. Some of the characters were almost unrecognisable to me, and first I doubted my Japanese language ability, then, after checking some bits with friends, I wondered why even my favourite writers, writers I knew to be consistent in other things, had made these characters seem so different … until I had the chance to watch the US-English dub a few years later. Going by that adaptation, the characterisation from all those stories suddenly made a lot more sense. And the thing is, that interpretation is also valid! They just took it a direction that was a larger leap for me to make.

Loose adaptations and very free translations have become less frequent since, or maybe my taste just hasn't led me their way, but the issue at the core is still a thing: Supernatural fandom got different nuances of endings for their show depending on the language they watched it in. CQL and MDZS fandom and the never-ending discussions about 知己 vs soulmate vs Other Options. A subset of VLD fans looking at a specific clip in all the different languages to see what was being said/implied in which dub, and how different translators interpreted the same English original line. The list is pretty much endless.

And that's … idk if it's fine, but it's what happens! A lot of the time, concepts -- expressed in language -- don't translate 1:1. The larger the cultural gap, the larger the gaps between the way concepts are expressed or understood also tend to be. Other times, there is a literal translation that works but isn't very idiomatic because there's a register mismatch or worse. And that's even before cultural assumptions come in. It's normal to have those. It's also important to remember that things like "thanks I hate it" as a sentiment of praise/affection, while the words translate literally quite easily, emphatically isn't easy to translate in the sense anglophone internet users the phrase.

Every translation is, at some level, a transformative work. Sometimes expressions or concepts or even single words simply don't have an exact equivalent in the target language and need to be interpreted at the translator's discretion, especially when going from a high-context/listener-responsible source language to a low-context/speaker-responsible target language (where high-context/listener responsible roughly means a large amount of contextual information can be omitted by the speaker because it's the listener's responsibility to infer it and ask for clarification if needed, and low-context/speaker-responsible roughly means a lot of information needs to be codified in speech, i.e. the speaker is responsible for providing sufficiently explicit context and will be blamed if it's lacking).

Is this a mouse or a rat? Guess based on context clues! High-context languages can and frequently do omit entire parts of speech that lower-context/speaker-responsible languages like English regard as essential, such as the grammatical subject of a sentence: the equivalent of "Go?" - "Go." does largely the same amount of heavy lifting as "is he/she/it/are you/they/we going?" - "yes, I am/he/she/it is/we/you/they are" in several listener-responsible languages, but tends to seem clumsy or incomplete in more speaker-responsible ones. This does NOT mean the listener-responsible language is clumsy. It's arguably more efficient! And reversely, saying "Are you going?" - "I am (going)" might seem unnecessarily convoluted and clumsy in a listener-responsible language. All depending on context.

This gets tricky both when the ambiguity of the missing subject of the sentence is clearly important (is speaker A asking "are you going" or "is she going"? wait until next chapter and find out!) AND when it's important that the translator assign an explicit subject in order for the sentence to make sense in the target language. For our example, depending on context, something like "are we all going?" - "yes" or "they going, too?" might work. Context!

As a consequence of this, sometimes, translation adds things – we gain things in translation, so to speak. Sometimes, it's because the target language needs the extra information (like the subject in the examples above), sometimes it's because the target language actually differentiates between mouse and rat even though the source language doesn't. However, because in most cases translators don't have access to the original authors, or even the original authors' agencies to ask for clarification (and in most cases wouldn't get paid for the time to put in this extra work even if they did), this kind of addition is almost always an interpretation. Sometimes made with a lot of certainty, sometimes it's more of a "fuck it, I've got to put something and hope it doesn't get proven wrong next episode/chapter/ten seasons down" (especially fun when you're working on a series that's in progress).

For the vast majority of cases, several translations are valid. Some may be more far-fetched than others, and there'll always be subjectivity to whether something was translated effectively, what "effectively" even means …

ANYWAY. I think my point is … how interesting, how cool is it that engaging with media in multiple languages will always yield multiple, often equally valid but just sliiiiightly different versions of that piece of media? And that I'd love more conversations about how, the second we (as folks who don't speak the material's original language) start picking the subtitle or dub wording apart for meta, we're basically working from a secondary source, and if we're doing due diligence, to which extent do we need to check there's nothing substantial being (literally) lost -- or added! -- in translation?

[danmeichael]

it's really cute when a character is completely obsessively devoted to someone they are entirely aware is toxic. submissive not because they're naive but because they are completely content with being taken advantage of.

[seagull-scribbles]

But tonight, I’ll need you to stay

[mello-when-hi]

So I’ve seen people lamenting the lack of new fics, how there’s nothing New to read and that they’re waiting out the days until writers resume posting. When the fics start trickling out again, show them some love! Leave the kudos, write that comment! You have no idea how much the support of the readers means to a writer, so make sure to let authors know how much you appreciate their work!!!

[fuumiku]

A shadow of myself, just who am I?

… I committed to the bit

Alright everyone do we want to listen to the Shadow identity crisis song the Shadow ptsd attack song or the Shadow existential angst song. Alexa play I Am All of Me. Alexa play Rhythm and Balance. Alexa play The Chosen One.

Appealing to the tiny overlap between Dungeon Meshi and Sonic fandoms. Mithrun is also like Omega in many ways (stoic but enthusiastic about maiming). Hm sometimes team Dark just be Mithrun, Cithis and Lycion... I need Mithrun to get a voice like Shadow’s in the anime soo bad please, raspy and deep... Parched throat with 0 intent or motivation to intonate aka low and pretty flat

Okok let’s gooo assigning characters chars, Fleki Sticks, Izutsumi Sonic because she craves freedom, Kabru Knuckles because he’s all about duty and isolates himself… Laios & Falin, Surge & Kit because it'd be funky and their parents want them to be people they aren’t :) Everyone having matching Sonic phone straps would be so cute. The context in that comic was that both groups passed each other by at the grocery store and Mithrun's big flashy merch sure is big and flashy (which happens to be quite bothersome for him) Laios is a Metal fan. Reasons: 1) he’s cool and murderous and there is a causal link there. 2) He transforms into a dragon once and it’s both empowering and angsty. 3) "No one SEES who he IS!!" says Laios and I as we burst into tears. Also Fleki is a big Team Chaotix fan I know it in my heart

You know it’d be fun drawing what Shadow’s dungeon would be like if he was dungeon lord. I’d imagine something like Mithrun’s. The ARK, but with flowers growing everywhere for her, his dead sister alive and well besides him as they live isolated from the rest of the world. It’s all fake, but Shadow’s heart feels at peace for the first time in so long, he is at home. See, they’re similar

Merry Christmas! I hope Mithrun gets a Shadow plushie

[natjennie]

i think mostly we as a culture need to stop pretending media is for us and instead recognize that it's for the people making it. "the show didn't do the thing I wanted it to" is so not the point. did it do what the people making it wanted it to do? did it tell the story they were trying to tell? than it was successful. if that doesn't align with what you wanted to happen, don't get up in arms about it. don't badmouth the creators and throw a tantrum. that's what fan works are for. the text is the text, and it told the story it was telling. you wouldn't be like "ugh shakespeare is insane for act v btw like there was no reason for juliet to kill herself she should've just waited and then her and romeo could have been together wtf this ruined the whole play" like no!!! the themes were there the set-up was there the foreshadowing was there shakespeare did what he intended to. just because it wasn't a happy ending and just because you thought it should've went differently doesn't mean it was bad. read a fic where juliet lives and move on.

[crystaltoa]

Thought experiment: In an alternate universe where Bionicle recently got a wildly popular reboot and now has a MASSIVE following on Tumblr...

...What's the most annoying thing that the fans are doing?

[poirott]

Poirot Barbie

There's some French gent at the door. No, no, no, I am not some "French gent", I am some Belgian gent.

AGATHA CHRISTIE'S POIROT (1989 - 2013)