#am i still accepted in this fandom...

[pin-poo]

whats the point of being gfs if you guys arent silly together

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Trapped in a vicious cycle of pining? Try gay sex! (More things to learn over at Tiger Tiger!)

[shadelorde]

i don't know how to explain it but the way that some gurathin fans frame him as the only serious or competent human character on the presaux team while everyone else is "naive" is. very grating to me

[laora-ryn]

Hey so like, maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I was looking at the fragments that we get of Gwen's statement in ep 21, and

Gwen's story sounds mundane, even without any skeptic goggles on. A little girl opens the door to a long-abandoned shed, and finds a dead fox covered in maggots. Open and shut, gross, but not supernatural

Except for the fact that it comes out like a statement. That it's being compelled out of her. That it's recorded on a tape recorder

And then I remembered how Sam and Alice found worm tracks on the floor of the Archivist's office, so I went to check the episode 10 transcript, which proved me right. But then I scrolled down further, right to the end of the episode, and:

I didn't think about it at the time. But why does Sam reference a dead fox specifically? That seems... Very odd??

And in light of Gwen's statement, probably deliberate??

[onaperduamedee]

Hey, WoT fandom, it's not bad writing; it's an adaptational choice you don't agree with

[flameo-trashman]

there is nothing funnier to me than to remember every now and then the fact that I created the worst ship in an entire fandom and have left the fandom since, but even after 10 years there are still people actively posting about it and hating on it

[topaziraphale]

"Stop saying Crowley won't help Aziraphale in S3 he'd go back to him in a HEARTBEAT and nothing would stop him" I get it no one likes the idea of Crowley being bitter after what happened for a long period of time but like can we at least acknowledge that he's currently going through probably the most emotional pain in his life since falling? Can we agree that he's opened his heart entirely - something you couldn't pay him to do unless the world is literally ending and he's desperate - to Aziraphale, and got shot down? Can we understand that he did it AGAIN only to lose Aziraphale again? Not that what Aziraphale did isn't without Crowley's own shortcomings (hiding the truth of Heaven's cruelty from him) but like,,,,

The appeal here isn't Scorned Crowley Doesn't Love Aziraphale Anymore, or Never Wants To Help Him Again, the appeal here is Crowley learning enough self respect to not just walk back right to Aziraphale like nothing happened after Aziraphale has had a pattern of consistently refusing him. Going years ping-ponging between "We're not friends I don't even know him" to "That's what friends are for right?" and "We're friends, why would you even say anything?" and "Friends? We're not friends. We are an angel and a demon!"

Like I get it, Crowley is a heartbreakingly forgiving person. Of course he's gonna forgive Aziraphale, I'll be surprised if he didn't forgive him by the time he walked out the bookshop door, but gdi he could at least grant himself the luxury of being at least a little irritated for longer than however long it takes to make a globe and some books float and angrily cry out to God in his flat. But due to the change of pace and dynamic that is establishing part of the conflict for Season 3, I just really like the idea of him for ONCE prioritizing himself and being like "Okay, fine. We'll get back at it when you're ready, then," instead of just taking Aziraphale back like his words and actions meant nothing to him, when clearly they have an effect on him.

What is Aziraphale going to learn if Crowley just accepts what he did so quickly, like he always has the entire time they've been friends? Idk maybe I'm just projecting too much darkness on their dynamic but I mean, if the pattern of Aziraphale pushing Crowley away/disrespecting him one day and then being fine with his friendship the next + Crowley never stopping to be like "Hey, that's not cool, at least give me a little credit" or smth was fine all along and will continue to be fine in the future, then why, after 6,000 years of being friends and loving this demon, can Aziraphale still not accept that Crowley is just fine the way he is, and instead got excited to promote him to an angel in a heartbeat once the opportunity presented itself? You can't blame all of it on Heaven when Aziraphale has demonstrated his free will/defiance to Heaven so many times. Or, I don't know, I guess maybe we can? Maybe I'm just craving too much angst to the point where I'm letting it cloud my analysis of canon. Idk.

[akuma-tenshi]

supremely Eh on demi's new skin but i do think these two could be yurious if we let them

[fitpacs]

,

[eveningrainstorm]

Listen. Swansea is great; he's a well-written character and I like him a lot. But it's weird to me how much fan content I see about him that seems to make him out to be a lot nicer than he's actually shown to be in the game, and nowhere is this more obvious than in how people depict his relationship with Anya.

I've seen other people address the whole "If Anya had told Swansea what happened he'd have killed Jimmy" thing (she did. he didn't.) but there's a larger issue where people act like Swansea cared a lot more about Anya and was a lot closer with her than is actually the case in canon. And sure, the game leaves a lot of room for differing interpretations of things and imaginings of what could have happened offscreen, but I've seen so many people act like this idea of Swansea and Anya being close is something actually depicted in canon which. It very much is not.

Like okay. Let's talk about this. What does the game itself actually show us about Anya and Swansea's relationship?

Well, we don't see much of their dynamic before the crash aside from them just being coworkers with some level of familiarity with each other. They do stand together at the birthday party, and Anya playfully tells Curly that “Swansea really likes that cake. Don’t tell anyone,” to which Swansea only "hmph"s in response. From this we can gather that the two of them are friendly enough that Anya feels comfortable teasing him. Even so, she certainly isn't an exception to his characteristic harshness and brutal honesty — take an interaction later in the same scene, where a distressed Anya says she has no savings and asks if Pony Express can really fire them like this and Swansea, not cruelly but certainly bluntly, tells her that Pony Express going under has been a long time coming.

Of more importance, perhaps, is the game's first "2 months after the crash" segment, where we are first introduced to both of them — and where the game makes it quite apparent just how little Swansea respects Anya. The very first scene, in fact, features Swansea interrupting Anya and mocking her when she tries to explain why opening the cargo hold is a good idea. Later, when talking to Jimmy, Swansea calls Anya "our so-called nurse" and says that "it's in one ear and out the other" when talking about how she nearly got injured on the broken vent. And if you get the code scanner before talking to her Swansea will tell you to get her before opening the cargo hold but specifically with the justification that "even she couldn't make the situation worse with her presence." None of this is really uncharacteristic of Swansea, given he talks about Daisuke in much the same way, but it's not something that can just be swept under the rug — and yet, seemingly, everyone does. I hardly ever see anyone even mention Swansea insulting her here.

Of course, none of these scenes are where the idea that Swansea and Anya are particularly close comes from. No, that idea comes from a single scene: "3 months after", when Jimmy finds the two of them talking in the cockpit at night. We only see the end of this conversation, where Anya, apparently crying, is saying “No. I understand completely. If that’s how it has to be—”

The game never reveals exactly what the two of them were talking about; the two main theories I've seen are that Swansea was telling her that he was saving the cryopod for Daisuke or that she had told Swansea that Jimmy assaulted her and Swansea was saying she'd just have to put up with being around him for the time being. Personally, I think the latter is much more likely, but either way, the end result is the same: regardless of how much Swansea cares about Anya, her well-being is not his first priority.

We never see any follow-up on this conversation; if Anya and Swansea meet up behind Jimmy's back at any other point, we don't see it or hear it referenced. "4 months after" offers no interaction between the two of them at all, with Swansea busy dancing drunkenly while Anya, on the other side of the lounge, tells Jimmy about the extra medicine cabinet. "5 months after", Anya commits suicide in Medical while Swansea sits drunk and oblivious in front of Utility. The only reference to Anya and Swansea's conversation — and the closest we get to a confirmation of what it was about — comes after Daisuke's death, when Jimmy uses "telling Anya who knows what" as a sign of shady behavior from Swansea, and Swansea agrees that he did talk to Anya, "but it was her telling me all sorts of things instead, wasn't it?", the implication being that she told Swansea about Jimmy raping her.

This line is interesting. Swansea is referencing what Jimmy did to Anya here, and implicitly condemning him for it, and yet... well, Anya's already dead. Swansea isn't doing anything for her, really; he doesn't seem particularly emotional or angry about it, either. All it really is, when it comes down to it, is a spiteful jab at Jimmy — just Swansea, still angry over Daisuke's death, trying to get under Jimmy's skin.

We never see Swansea react to Anya's death. This isn't surprising; we aren't shown what happened when Daisuke got the door to Medical open, and afterwards Swansea is understandably preoccupied with Daisuke's fatal injuries. The first thing Swansea says about Anya after her death is the line about her telling him things. And, well... here's the problem.

That line? Is also the last thing Swansea says about Anya.

He never mentions her again. That one line, the one that doesn't even mention her death, the one that seems more about getting at Jimmy than mourning her — that's the last we hear of her from Swansea. And maybe he does care, maybe her death is just as much a catalyst for him trying to kill Jimmy as Daisuke's is. But he never says anything about her. He doesn't mention her in his death scene. Sure, that last portion of the game is largely filtered through Jimmy's mind, his disregard for Anya keeping her out of focus, but Swansea's death — a moment of sharp, simple clarity in which Swansea says all the things Jimmy doesn't want to hear — doesn't have that excuse. Swansea doesn't say a thing about her, because in the end, he's not focused on her either.

So that's what we have. They don't seem to be that close, before or after the crash, though they theoretically could be. Anya telling him specifically about what Jimmy did could be considered a notable show of trust, but then again she could have just wanted to tell someone and considered him her best option, and in any case if she was hoping for him to do anything about it, he didn't. And despite a large portion of the fandom believing it to be the case, there isn't actually anything indicating that he told Anya about the cryo pod — if anything, his assertion that it was Anya who told him things rather than the other way around is evidence against it. Technically, anything's possible — Swansea could have comforted Anya when she told him about Jimmy, he could have offered her the cryo pod, he could have grieved her just as much as Daisuke — but looking at what the game itself presents, the picture it paints is far different from the one typically seen in the fandom.

We don't know what's going on in Swansea's head. We don't know what happens in the time between the moments the game shows us. But what the game does show us is this: Swansea repeatedly is disrespectful and rude to or about Anya; Swansea doesn't do anything after she tells him what Jimmy did to her; Swansea doesn't have any real reaction to Anya's death. Does he care about her? Probably. I'd like to believe so. But she's not the one he decides to kill Jimmy over, she's not the one he has regrets for in his dying moments, she's not the one he's saving the cryo pod for.

Maybe Swansea cares about Anya, but she's not his first priority. And isn't that sort of the point? This is what the game has been showing us the whole time: Anya is no one's first priority, except her own.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Happy Valentine's Day! (and this blog's first post anniversary!)

[eloquentsisyphianturmoil]

Dear silm fandom, concerning Fandom meta. Might be provocative for some.

‘The silm fandom is misogynistic’ ‘Feanorian fans are misunderstanding the characters’ ‘Silm fans hate Elwing’ And so on.

Can we stop? Your opinions are not better if you like feanorians. Your opinions are not better if you like peredhil. This is not black and white. I won’t argue ‘not all silm fans’, because I recognise that we have problems. But condescension will not fix them. Thank you.

[jiangwanyinscatmom]

With the encouragement of @admirableadmiranda I had some thoughts regarding fandom and it's expectations that they want, and not necessarily the message coming from the text we read and are supposed to digest. As well as how it places these strict boundaries of not being able to make these characters nuanced as they are constantly called. I feel like what fandom wants a lot of the time is this self fulfilling need in themselves or want served some sort of comeuppance despite that's a call of further unnecessary cruelty and if that's what you choose you aren't any different from the in world condemnation and finding that scapegoat.

If you choose to see a sort of betterment for a character to please yourself it is to deny the heart and harm they canonically caused and underplay their existing personality to play to the wants you have. If you choose to hate them as well it is to the condemnation that they aren't capable of betterment upon the character's core nature that is nothing like our own.

In this sense I am specifically noting the way fandom deals with Jiang Cheng. They do not let him have his own sense of "redemption" or choose to see it as dissatisfying based on their own yearning and self experience. Yet it's not about "us". Self peace of one is not, and should not be, what I need for my own self. For Jiang Cheng his own peace is realizing that sacrifice and the catharsis of that acceptance is being able to accept yourself.

Jiang Cheng decides to be as he is without condemning Wei Wuxian finally for what he is or what he became as an adult. His core nature is still unlikeable, chooses force to keep anyone from arguing and is arrogant. But he uses that to protect Jin Ling, despite how much fandom may dislike this fact, he does love and who loves him in turn. He uses his nature now to protect someone he was not willing to do that for previously. He is not kinder or softer in nature and never will be, but he is standing by someone he truly does want to prosper without the expectation of gain for himself.

He stops forcing his own way onto Jin Ling as we are shown Jin Ling openly continuing his own hunts with the Lans as well as Wei Wuxian without Jiang Cheng interfering or inserting that Jin Ling is wrong for his associations he has chosen. As much as he hated Wei Wuxian, he also hated himself and by the end is able to accept his own bitter core without dying in hate as his mother had done. He is able to escape the shadow of being his mother in full, on HIS terms and no one else's. The point is not what is a dissatisfaction for the audience but what is a peace of self for the character.

What am I to decry a person's peace finally in their existence that does not resemble mine or what I want? That is the arrogance of the self that I refuse to partake of and find even more cruel to force on another and tell them "You are wrong for finding your own sense of self and peace because that's what I think".

[shanastoryteller]

Hey Shana! Would you ever consider doing commissions for charity?

sure, i've done it before, as long as the money goes straight to the charity and i'm not paid in any way

[rubbership]

i would be much less lonely and so would a lot of other people if i could handle 1 on 1 conversations like a normal person

[carry-the-sky]

.