#YOU'RE the problem

[iamawhiteoleander]

i just stare at people open mouthed cuz wtf am i supposed to say

[asynca]

lol the irony in a Zionist calling someone ELSE a Nazi while they dehumanize and support/enact the genocide and ethnic cleansing of a whole people

[mytardisisparked]

People who send other people anon hate about fictional characters should be laughed and pointed at. You dummy, you blurred the line between fantasy and reality again, didn't you? You forgot who was a real person and who was a fictional character again, didn't you?

[pincb0nes]

serial experiments lain (1998)

[beetlebrownleaf]

the user: omg why is ffxiv fandom so toxic, why is there always discourse, why can't we talk about things we like and not what we hate

the same user, three posts down: anyways here's a callout post for someone who thinks it's okay to ship Lalafell with non-Lalafell which is an evil nasty thought crime and you should die if you think like this

[jordanstclair]

did you hear my covert narcissism i disguise as altruism?

like some kind of congressman?

[kenapiece-main]

Can you believe I'm having to make this meme even after successfully finishing up taxes and applying to job

[christadeguchi]

(✿◕‿◕) die (ꈍ ꒳ ꈍ✿)

[shigure]

this post was about transmisogynist hate mobs online. you are all so fucking stupid i'm sorry. i don't even have anything else to say honestly just play proverbs of hell

[moddymoon]

I just wanna know if you’re racist or not, but looking at your blog you just seem like a little freak and that’s ok lol. Wym by you’re a bigot though 🤔

Well, if you just want to know if someone is racist or not, you probably don't really understand racism. If you don't really understand that the only way that a person is not racist, is to cease to exist... Then you are racist, and you are the problem.

Yes, I'm racist. I try not to be. I try as best I can to be anti-racist. If you think that that's not good enough for you. You can probably go find a way to go harass other people.

It's clear that you are very much racist, and a very terrible person. And I'm glad that you're so open and honest that you send open...

oh oops... You want to hide your bigotry behind an annonymous ask. That's pretty telling.

[queensnickerdoodleofcookieland]

Everyone has issues, but if you're comparing people's issues, you're always in the wrong.

If we're talking about women's issues, and you bring up men's issues. Shut up.

If we're talking about men's issues, and you bring up women's issues. Shut up.

If we're talking about LGBTQIA+ issues and you bring up cis/straight issues, shut up.

If we're talking about the issues black people face, and you bring up issues white people face, shut up.

If you're in a conversation about issues of one group of people, and you bring up the issues of a different group as some sort of "Gotcha!", shut the actual fuck up.

Unless you're talking about it in a respectful manner or something like that, shut up.

[count-demonlord-of-decadence]

When are y'all gonna figure out that rich women of color are the exact same problem that rich white men are?

[problemnyatic]

"I think this Category of human being is disposable" okay that not only sucks and is fascist but also makes getting you to deem someone to be disposable a simple matter of convincing you they're in The Category regardless of the truth. Also The Category is often misapplied to a vulnerable minority because it makes people like you agree they're disposable.

"Anyone who disagrees with me about The Category of people being disposable is a Category apologist or probably also in The Category themselves" Oh so you're just totally unconcerned with truth or justice or ethics or human rights and just are feeding your bloodlust for the sake of revenge fantasies. got it 👍

[miniaturecatmentality]

I don't have the boop update yet :((((( somebody euthanize me

[egophiliac]

queen of diamonds, upright + reversed 💎

I've redone this like eighty times, I have to just be done with it now and stop staring at all my mistakes oh no 🫠

[aethersea]

another thing fantasy writers should keep track of is how much of their worldbuilding is aesthetic-based. it's not unlike the sci-fi hardness scale, which measures how closely a story holds to known, real principles of science. The Martian is extremely hard sci-fi, with nearly every detail being grounded in realistic fact as we know it; Star Trek is extremely soft sci-fi, with a vaguely plausible "space travel and no resource scarcity" premise used as a foundation for the wildest ideas the writers' room could come up with. and much as Star Trek fuckin rules, there's nothing wrong with aesthetic-based fantasy worldbuilding!

(sidenote we're not calling this 'soft fantasy' bc there's already a hard/soft divide in fantasy: hard magic follows consistent rules, like "earthbenders can always and only bend earth", and soft magic follows vague rules that often just ~feel right~, like the Force. this frankly kinda maps, but I'm not talking about just the magic, I'm talking about the worldbuilding as a whole.

actually for the purposes of this post we're calling it grounded vs airy fantasy, bc that's succinct and sounds cool.)

a great example of grounded fantasy is Dungeon Meshi: the dungeon ecosystem is meticulously thought out, the plot is driven by the very realistic need to eat well while adventuring, the story touches on both social and psychological effects of the whole 'no one dies forever down here' situation, the list goes on. the worldbuilding wants to be engaged with on a mechanical level and it rewards that engagement.

deliberately airy fantasy is less common, because in a funny way it's much harder to do. people tend to like explanations. it takes skill to pull off "the world is this way because I said so." Narnia manages: these kids fall into a magic world through the back of a wardrobe, befriend talking beavers who drink tea, get weapons from Santa Claus, dance with Bacchus and his maenads, and sail to the edge of the world, without ever breaking suspension of disbelief. it works because every new thing that happens fits the vibes. it's all just vibes! engaging with the worldbuilding on a mechanical level wouldn't just be futile, it'd be missing the point entirely.

the reason I started off calling this aesthetic-based is that an airy story will usually lean hard on an existing aesthetic, ideally one that's widely known by the target audience. Lewis was drawing on fables, fairy tales, myths, children's stories, and the vague idea of ~medieval europe~ that is to this day our most generic fantasy setting. when a prince falls in love with a fallen star, when there are giants who welcome lost children warmly and fatten them up for the feast, it all fits because these are things we'd expect to find in this story. none of this jars against what we've already seen.

and the point of it is to be wondrous and whimsical, to set the tone for the story Lewis wants to tell. and it does a great job! the airy worldbuilding serves the purposes of the story, and it's no less elegant than Ryōko Kui's elaborately grounded dungeon. neither kind of worldbuilding is better than the other.

however.

you do have to know which one you're doing.

the whole reason I'm writing this is that I saw yet another long, entertaining post dragging GRRM for absolute filth. asoiaf is a fun one because on some axes it's pretty grounded (political fuck-around-and-find-out, rumors spread farther than fact, fastest way to lose a war is to let your people starve, etc), but on others it's entirely airy (some people have magic Just Cause, the various peoples are each based on an aesthetic/stereotype/cliché with no real thought to how they influence each other as neighbors, the super-long seasons have no effect on ecology, etc).

and again! none of this is actually bad! (well ok some of those stereotypes are quite bigoted. but other than that this isn't bad.) there's nothing wrong with the season thing being there to highlight how the nobles are focused on short-sighted wars for power instead of storing up resources for the extremely dangerous and inevitable winter, that's a nice allegory, and the looming threat of many harsh years set the narrative tone. and you can always mix and match airy and grounded worldbuilding – everyone does it, frankly it's a necessity, because sooner or later the answer to every worldbuilding question is "because the author wanted it to be that way." the only completely grounded writing is nonfiction.

the problem is when you pretend that your entirely airy worldbuilding is actually super duper grounded. like, for instance, claiming that your vibes-based depiction of Medieval Europe (Gritty Edition) is completely historical, and then never even showing anyone spinning. or sniffing dismissively at Tolkien for not detailing Aragorn's tax policy, and then never addressing how a pre-industrial grain-based agricultural society is going years without harvesting any crops. (stored grain goes bad! you can't even mouse-proof your silos, how are you going to deal with mold?) and the list goes on.

the man went up on national television and invited us to engage with his worldbuilding mechanically, and then if you actually do that, it shatters like spun sugar under the pressure. doesn't he realize that's not the part of the story that's load-bearing! he should've directed our focus to the political machinations and extensive trope deconstruction, not the handwavey bit.

point is, as a fantasy writer there will always be some amount of your worldbuilding that boils down to 'because I said so,' and there's nothing wrong with that. nor is there anything wrong with making that your whole thing – airy worldbuilding can be beautiful and inspiring. but you have to be aware of what you're doing, because if you ask your readers to engage with the worldbuilding in gritty mechanical detail, you had better have some actual mechanics to show them.