#and tags viciously implying i was the worst person

[not-poignant]

I was watching RotG and suddenly I could only see the meme with the increasingly large dominos. With the small domino being 'Pia watching RotG' and the big domino being 'Efnisien, Gary, Anton, Temsen, Gwyn and Augus all starring in the same a/b/o fic'. Does RotG hold a special place for you, thinking of all the stories you've written since?

Hmm,

Yes and no? There's an even smaller domino you're not seeing which is that I had written original characters and stories before this, and Augus in particular was based off an original character I'd written before (and not published) so like, Rise of the Guardians didn't *invent* him, I did, years before I ever watched the movie. But there's also dominoes that drove me out of the fandom, and it was my bitterness re: the fandom that prompted the writing of original fic in the first place.

So let me tell you a story, anon. If you don't want to know how toxic the RotG fandom could be, I recommend you just walk away now and know that no, actually, RotG doesn't have a special place in my heart, knowing I wrote original fic to initially escape the way some small pockets of that fandom treated me. Otherwise I would have written RotG fiction for far far longer, because as the old-timers will remember, I actually had a couple of longfic ideas lined up to go immediately after SAL that I abandoned because of well...everything.

I actually spent a while after finishing SAL kind of hating Rise of the Guardians because of some nasty drama and meanness/spite towards me, particularly in the last few chapters, and it took about 2-3 years before I could even consider watching the movie again or write for the fandom again. And then by the time I'd come back, all of my original stuff was established, and I felt a lot more comfortable, and a lot more 'fuck the haters' with some of the stuff I had previously had to deal with.

(Fandom wank beneath the cut, lol)

For example (self-harm and suicide mention) one person would specifically post graphic horrible self-harm photos complete with blood tagged into the RotG and blackice tag/s specifically to coincide with my chapter releases towards the end of SAL - and she was a BNF in the fandom in her own way, so *everyone* kind of knew who she was and what she was doing - and she blamed me and my story for the self-harm, and so I had people coming to me going 'do you realise what this story is doing to this person, don't you even care.' And of course I felt horribly guilty and distressed, but I was also at this point around 7/8 chapters from finishing the story, wanting to give everyone a happy ending, and after posting the last chapter I broke down and cried because I was just so relieved that I didn't have to be tormented by this specific person anymore or see these images as a survivor of suicide attempts and self-harm myself.

But also just crying out of sheer distress because of how horrible those last few weeks were, because like, if it wasn't for the readers I would have walked away due to the pressure and bullying and coercion to get out of the fandom just because I had a story that some folks enjoyed reading. That was a level of targeted hate I'd never encountered before, and have never encountered since.

Around that time a couple of small hate groups started up about me, and I would get messages like 'you realise there are hate groups about you, right?' and I'd be like 'please don't tell me about this, people can hate me, leave them alone.' Then there was the time I just got - over around 10 days - about 100+ messages telling me to kill myself because of SAL and how 'horrible' it was re: it's 'really dark themes' which I find hilarious now, but back then, was actually really stressful when it coincided with someone literally *harming themselves* or posting old self-harm photos on days I posted a chapter, talking about how the reason she was doing it was because she hated that my story was so popular when it didn't deserve to be.

Like, no, I did not have a special relationship with Rise of the Guardians by then, or the fandom. I hated it. It's why I stopped writing for it when previously I literally had so many ideas I wanted to write for Jack/Pitch. For years after that. I would remember the good memories I'd made with SAL, but a lot of readers followed me into original works. And otherwise, all I remembered was being forced to see those photos and this person's tags if I went into the tags to look for fanart to share and promote. I'd made some very good friends (some very best friends, actually), and some of us got the hell out of that fandom as fast as we possibly could to escape these people.

So like, I would love to say that like, I feel nothing but fond memories thinking of the influence Rise of the Guardians has had on me, but no fandom that I've ever been in has ever had this kind of level of underground viciousness that developed as the story gained momentum.

When I wrote The Golden Age that Never Was I was truly detached from the fandom and the movie. I was writing based on my memories and feelings of the characters. I didn't look in the tags like I used to, and instead looked for when I was mentioned directly. I had a spike of anxiety every time I got an anon message while writing it, and I had to like...avoid fics and a bunch of other stuff to get through it.

I have watched Rise of the Guardians since and I do really enjoy it, but...I don't see the dominoes the same way you do anon, probably because of the way it all happened in my head, though I do think putting original writing on AO3 happened partly because I was in a hurry to get out of the RotG fandom. So in a way RotG is connected to that, but like, only because I was fleeing and abandoning all of my Pitch/Jack ideas as I went (to the point where people remembered them and still asked me about them years later and I was like 'haha oh no sorry I'm not writing those oh well maybe one day!')

Chances are high I actually wouldn't have written original fiction if my love for Rise of the Guardians had still stayed strong. I was ready to write two very specific longfics, and had done worldbuilding for both, and was talking openly about them, but towards the end of SAL I bolted from the fandom as fast as I could. The hate I got from specific corners of the RotG fandom is one of the reasons I started writing Game Theory before SAL was even finished - to cope with how I felt about the end of SAL and the hatred I was getting there. When some of those folks said 'omg I'll never read a story about Augus' I was literally like 'oh thank fuck, I'm going to be left alone now.'

Like...I got diagnosed with Fibromyalgia like 6 months after that, I cracked teeth because of how stressed I was, and I still have crowns in my mouth and teeth removed because of that whole period. I was sleeping an average of 3 hours a night.

...I feel a very special fondness for the people who supported me at the time, especially my good friend Silvia, who is still my beta and friend today. She is responsible for far more of the dominoes that have led to this moment than Rise of the Guardians could ever directly be. And I am extraordinarily grateful for the readers who have found my stuff since. Now the majority of readers of my original stuff have never actually seen Rise of the Guardians or read my RotG fics, and like, actually sometimes that's really nice, if a bit weird.

I have never, in my life, encountered a fandom that could get as toxic as pockets of Rise of the Guardians got, and I'm including Dragon Age: Inquisition in that, which had literal blocklists of asexual people, so you know I mean business! But as a final point, I do want to say the majority of people there were amazing, absolutely amazing, this is truly a case of a few bad apples spoiling the whole experience, and I'm still to this day gutted it happened like that, and have zero surprise a lot of people left the fandom all at once, at the same time, because of it.

[lifblogs]

Title: Just For a Moment

Summary: Anne struggles to get through the day; with her eating disorders, her depression, her post-traumatic stress, and her personality disorder trying to hold her down.

Word Count: 1870

A/N: I would love, love, love to put a keep reading, but my laptop is a useless creation of science, so that won’t be possible. Just going to tag it as #long post.

WARNINGS: eating disorder mentions, self-harm mentions, minor self-harm, suicidal thoughts, violent thoughts, violent urges, implied miscarriage, unhealthy behavior

oOoOo

Anne has the urge to swear when she hears her alarm go off, but she’s too tired for her lips to move. She rolls over, the warmth and fur of her cat resting against her head. He grunts in protest and whacks her with his tail. Reaching around, Anne finally finds her phone, and taps mindlessly at the screen till the alarm stops.

She drops the phone on the floor.

Finally.

Now her cat is up. His name is Loki, but she’s taken to calling him Little Prince — it’s what he responds to at dinner time. Little Prince is pacing in circles about the pillow he’s claimed, legs and feet carelessly bumping into Anne’s head. He meows, voice a yell.

“Hi, Little Prince,” Anne mutters, though she doesn’t want to take the energy to get up.

Little Prince settles down, meowing, and cooing, and purring, and he gives Anne kisses that leave her cheeks wet.

She still considers drifting off to sleep.

But she has classes today: physics, calculus, Chinese, a bit of English, and then there’s work. Ugh. Recently she got swindled by her newest client, but she’ll still get over a hundred bucks out of them, so she’ll finish the job and fucking move on.

Thinking about it makes her want to stay in bed. There’s a heavy, dark feeling in her chest.

She thinks about physics. She’s no good at it.

Calculus? Too hard.

Chinese. Her family tells her to drop it and that the world won’t give a shit.

English. She took it because it was easy.

It would be easier to stay in bed all day. Much easier. Anne could just lie there, and sleep, or read, maybe play some games on her phone. She can just stay there with Little Prince all day.

The more she thinks about it, and the more hurt by the world she feels, this idea really begins to sink in. She wouldn’t have to stop her crying about derivatives and intervals, and she wouldn’t have to sit there with the same damn thermodynamics problem about ice, and she wouldn’t have to stop getting confused by the differences of mā, má, mǎ, and mà. And she wouldn’t have to read that stupid article about publishing sectors.

Anne could close her door. Ignore her family. Her head tells her to break all ties with them, to yell that she hates them.

Does she?

Her head says yes, yes, yes.

But it just hurts and feels so wrong.

At least in bed she wouldn’t go to her brother and say something stupid. At least in bed she wouldn’t be doing any serious harm to herself, right?

She wouldn’t be cutting, she wouldn’t be thinking of running away, she wouldn’t punch a wall (probably), she wouldn’t try to sell nudes, wouldn’t find a stupid, trashy guy to hook up with.

So it was better.

Right?

Anne knew her brother would yell at her about food.

But who gave a shit?

Staying in bed all day meant she got to stay out of the kitchen. Even now, thinking about a potential breakfast sends her stomach into heated knots of anxiety, and her shoulders and neck tense.

God, what would she even have for breakfast? She didn’t fucking want anything. She wasn’t hungry. The food wasn’t good. No food was good. If someone could go up to her right now and convince her that one dish was good, she’d marry them on the spot. But that won’t happen, and all food is basically garbage. It’s a waste. Her time could be spent doing something else. Every day it was eat, sleep, eat, sleep, eat, sleep. And only the sleep part sounded kind of nice (when she wasn’t having nightmares).

Eating. That was a living nightmare.

Her family called her picky. They didn’t even try to get food that she sometimes liked. And they wouldn’t let her eat her own portions.

Hmm…

Maybe if she locked herself in her room with her cat she wouldn’t have to eat all day. Not at all. Besides, she could feel the fat clinging to her body like extra packaging. She felt like a kid crammed into too many winter coats at once. Oh, to shed them off. To just be! That would be spectacular.

And to shed that she has to stay in bed all day, and continue hating food. Easy enough. Preparing food is stupid. The process of eating food is exhausting. And then the hate and guilt afterwards isn’t worth it. And it’s not worth the extra attention it draws to her body. She’s sure everyone can see it. How can they not? Her thighs are too jiggly; her calves are soft, ugly lumps that could do with some thinning; her biceps are puffs of fat; her hips carry weight like a fucking fannypack; and her stomach is too round, jutting out from whatever she wears.

Basically… her body’s a mess.

And that’s not the only mess of it. She should get up, take her medicine.

But punching a wall, tearing apart her headphones, and breaking up with her boyfriend is starting to sound like an increasingly good idea.

God, her boyfriend. She has to actually fucking talk to him, connect with him, put time into something temporary, something part of her would be more than happy to run away from.

She loves him.

She hates him.

Telling him he’s the worst thing to ever happen to her would do it, right? She’d never have to talk to him again? Never have to hold on to a connection that would break away and die either way?

Anne resists the urge to grab her phone.

She eventually does, and she just stares at the homescreen.

One-hundred-thirty-seven notifications from social media. Friends, fandom… She doesn’t want to respond, doesn’t want to talk to them. And she hasn’t for days. It’s just easier not to. She at least opens up the apps and clears the notifications. This way Anne can pretend that those people aren’t there, that they don’t exist.

But then, she smacks her thigh with her phone, feeling the keen sting. She does it again and again, until Little Prince urgently wraps himself about her, weirdly-strong tail around her neck. He’s purring. He’s kissing her.

Anne holds him close.

“Hey, dude, you getting up?”

Her brother.

Fuck.

Anne just grunts, hoping that’ll get him to leave her alone.

She loves her brother. He’s her best friend. But right now, when he comes to stand in Anne’s bedroom doorway all parent-like, she wants to scream and throw her phone at him. She’s tense from resisting.

A conversation Anne barely pays attention to ensues, and she drags herself out of bed. The temporary vision loss that follows is nothing new. Neither is the light-headedness, nor the headache, or the weak feeling in her legs, or the ache across her shoulders, the wheeze in her lungs.

Just another day in the life of Anne.

Fuck.

She goes through her morning routine, hating every second of it. She broke a few pills instead of getting herself to take them. But who cares, right? She’s not even on the right medicine to make her feel like a real person.

Anne finally looks in her drawers, and in her closet. Standing there, before all her clothes, she feels so vulnerable. With each article of clothing her eyes land on she assesses what bad quality it would cover up, and which it might make obvious. Sometimes the perfect outfit doesn’t exist, and sacrifices have to be made. But not today. Today she just stares and stares and feels completely empty, while her mind wanders to a celebrity’s wife that she’s a fan of.

God, she’s not just into the wife, but she likes her as a person, admires her. The night before she’d gone through her Instagram, and fan accounts for an hour.

Anne feels like her.

She picks out an outfit she thinks the wife might wear. She cries at the state of her body, which is being efficiently ruined with her recent reproductive health issue. She holds her lower abdomen and cries at the emptiness.

Wash your face, she tells herself. Get the fuck over it. You’re pathetic, and weak. No wonder your family hates you.

She tenses, curled in on herself, breath held as she thinks of her extended family. It’s as if somebody has suddenly punched her in the chest with brass knuckles.

Anne burns inside. In her head, she’s killing them. She’s brutalizing them, tearing them apart, screaming at them because they were evil bitches and they didn’t deserve to live.

Little Prince rolls over, demanding tummy kisses, and it passes.

After viciously brushing her hair, Anne lies back down with Little Prince, and smothers him in kisses. He needs her. She needs him.

Anne cries her last tears into his white, kitten-soft fur, and they hold each other until she’s ready to start the day, until her little boy knows she’s alright.

Time for breakfast.

She hates all the food they have. So Anne just sits down at the table and stares at her placemat till her brother finally decides to make pancakes.

Anne stops herself from throwing her plate at the wall. Little Prince brushes against her legs. Pancakes will do.

Beside her, her phone dings, dings, DINGS with notifications that will not be read.

The world would be better without all those people talking to her. But getting rid of them would be too much work. So, as she smells the pancakes start to cook on the pan, her stomach turning from the thought of having anything in her mouth, she thinks it’d just be easier to get rid of herself.

For now, all she can do is not eat. That would lessen herself, her physical presence, take all the weight off.

But then why does she still want to smash the hot pan into a cabinet? Why does she want to snap her laptop in half? Why does she sit there and start hitting herself with her phone, making it look like innocent tapping?

Why…?

Anne doesn’t know.

Her brother calls her name.

But it’s not her name. Not really. Anne isn’t her. Not inside. Inside, she’s nothing.

The pancakes sizzle, her phone dings, Little Prince yells, and she just sits there and sits there, holding it all in.

She makes it through one second, and then the next, all in her head thinking what that celebrity’s wife would do. That’s the right way to be, clearly… that other person. Who else would she try to emulate? Sure, it changed day by day, but today, she is hurting as she thinks of that woman and tries to be herself.

Ha! Be herself. What a joke. And not even one with a good punchline.

Anne’s brother asks her to set the table, and somehow, she gets up. She feels the soft dress against her skin; the nice, cool marble floor beneath her bare feet. The pancakes are nearly ready, and they actually smell good. Her brother smiles at her.

Anne smiles back, and somehow, despite it all, she feels it. Just for a moment, there’s peace.

[rivetgoth]

OC #1 - Hollywood California

Pinterest board ✨ Tag on OC blog

I wanted to start with Hollywood California because she’s one of my oldest OCs, although she’s obviously been through a lot of iterations. Really really loyal followers may remember her from the very first work I ever used her for back in 2016, a novel I did for Camp NaNoWriMo called Balthazar and California, although she’s been around since before that (Balthazar didn’t really survive nearly as long, though, but a lot of his early developmental concepts actually went into a different character of mine, Giovanni, who we’ll get to later on). Nowadays she resides in my main alternate reality futureverse which is the 2080s (instead of the 1980s, get it?), in the Fresno, California megalopolis, where she was born.

California is a trans woman. She’s in her early-mid twenties and heterosexual. She was originally from the poor outer ring of the city. She grew up the only child of a single mother and struggled throughout school, where she was a constant target of harassment. Her mother, while not necessarily meaning to be cruel, had no real way to support her or understand her and her overprotection drove her to lean more towards “just try to be more normal” rather than accept her and help her express herself. California’s frustration with being stifled in every aspect of life kept building until she was sixteen, when she ran away from home with no word to her mother. After becoming a talented shoplifter and thief she began amassing a collection of clothing she had never had access to in the past, and through nightclubs and bars she found a place where she could dress as she dreamed with less judgment, falling in love with the city’s underbelly nightlife. At the clubs she frequented she enjoyed making herself the star of the show, glamorous and glitzy. It was then that she picked up her name, choosing Hollywood California because “that’s where the movie stars used to live.” To keep up her glamorous lifestyle she would soon become involved in sex work, which for better or worse was quickly a profitable venture. As her income grew and her looks became more stunning, she caught the attention of Pandora, a wealthy drug dealer in the area. Pandora offered California a place to stay for as long as she wanted with heat, electricity, and air conditioning, so long as she paid rent, which she happily accepted. She moved in with Pandora as well as Pandora’s boyfriend Johnny, a shy boy with the face of a cherub and slicked back hair, always recognizable in his leather jackets. For a time being the three of them seemed like an inseparable trio, attending clubs every night, California and Pandora both doing their own work and raking in cash.

However, things took a turn for the worst when Johnny grabbed California in the middle of a club one night, dragged her out back, and drunkenly confessed his love for her, as well as the fact that Pandora had been viciously beating him for some time now. He revealed scars hidden with makeup, and begged California to help him. California, only seventeen at this point in contrast to Johnny’s twenty-two, knew that she was in over her head, but made a clumsy and hurried attempt to help Johnny by staging a plan to run away with him. It was soon revealed that this entire ordeal was overheard by Pandora, and in a fit of rage he murdered Johnny and framed California. California had no defense, and Pandora’s careful staging of evidence and tearful claims to the Street Patrol that a crazed transvestite junkie had murdered his lover was a case that she could not refute. It soon became clear that it would take a miracle to keep her from a lifetime in prison, if not much worse.

That “miracle” came in the form of Himmel Medicine (they’ll come up throughout my OC descriptions, trust me), which had just bought out the prison system in order to “partner” with the prisoners, giving reduced sentences in exchange for cooperating with them on experimentations for cutting edge surgeries. Presently, they were conducting a study on the brains of criminals, specifically those who had done something extreme such as murder, rape, etc. California was offered a simple choice, which was to agree to be apart of Himmel’s new study, or face capital punishment.

The thesis of the study was the suggestion that those who break laws simply struggle with internal wiring that gives them the ability to understand the importance of laws, and that simply rewiring one’s brain to make them more willing to conform to preexisting expectation will remove the desire to break rules. In short, suppressing free will in order to suppress resistance to law in order to suppress crime. For obvious reasons, Himmel’s interest in such research extended far beyond criminal activity, but it was a significantly more acceptable angle to announce the project with. Thus, California became an early test subject on the surgical restricting of free will, trying to medically alter her desire to commit a crime she had never committed in the first place. She spent years under Himmel’s control, and in the meantime, she was kept in a dormitory-type location along with others from similar medical and surgical experiments. It was there that, after a few years alone, she was assigned Angel Steel as her roommate - Angel is another OC of mine who many of you are probably familiar with, and he was now under Himmel’s “supervision” for reasons similar to her own, although he was being used for a different series of experiments. Between tests and operations, California was expected to be something of a high class prostitute for Himmel’s wealthiest donors and supporters, alongside Angel, so the two of them bonded over that, as well as the fact that both were transgender and around the same age, and California attached to Angel quickly as a sort of survival instinct, even going as far as to believe she had fallen in love with him, although how much of that was built out of coping with the trauma of it all is debatable.

California grew increasingly afraid of what the experiments were doing to her. Because the operations were all still experimental, they had not managed to suppress her free will yet, but with direct modification happening to her brain she could hardly even tell what was changing, and she feared that she was losing control of herself and what she knew to be true. She knew she would need to escape. When she discovered Angel was making his own plans to run away she ended up blackmailing him in order to force him to let her accompany him, telling him that she would report him to Himmel’s authorities if he refused. Angel bitterly allowed her to come, and the two made their escape together, leaving Fresno entirely and taking up residence in the Outskirts, the furthest the buses will travel outside of the city before turning back around. This is where we find her (and Angel) at the beginning of my novel, so I don’t wanna say much more about that storyline for the time being, since a lot will be revealed then :)

As a result of the various and intensive brain surgeries California went through she was left as more or less the equivalent of what’s going on with Ella Enchanted, although not quite as extreme. She struggles to not follow orders set for her, although she is self aware and can fight against it, it just takes a lot of mental effort. On a physical level she’s left with a metal plate on the side of her head, think Chop Top from Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, although she covers it with wigs. She kind of has this endless battle with her own autonomy and sense of self and has to fight to keep a grip on who she is and what she believes in, although it’s something that, over the course of her narrative, she improves on.

California is fascinated by old fashioned glamour, as her name implies she’s extremely interested in golden age cinema, as well as the New Romantics of the late 70s-early 80s. She considers herself a new age New Romantic. She speaks in a Cockney accent and she can be very loud and excitable to the point that people read her as obnoxious sometimes. Her brash nature comes in part from her attempt at fighting back against what she knows has happened to her, wanting to be loud and filterless and uncontained to prove that she’s still her own person. She always loved making a scene and capturing people’s imaginations, but now it’s as much survival instinct as it is enjoyment. She still carries a lot of the weight of trauma with her, blaming herself for Johnny’s death and having to work through the lingering effect of the years stuck at Himmel (both the obvious surgical impact as well as the trauma of the whole ordeal). She’ll openly speak her mind or be heavily sarcastic to the point that it can hurt others, although she’s a genuinely well-intentioned person with no actual desire to hurt anyone, she just over compensates by speaking unfiltered a lot of the time. She’s one of my few OCs who I would say is genuinely a good person, or at least genuinely wants to be, and will put aside her own safety to help others in need. She saves Giovanni’s life at one point despite hardly knowing him and having no reason whatsoever to trust him.

She loves the color teal, and she loves glitter and pearls. She drinks too much but she avoids hard drugs most of the time at this point. She gets frequent migraines. She loves new wave pop music and dancing. She believes in magic but she hasn’t quite figured out what to do about that. She wears an empty heart locket around her neck that Johnny gave her long before the events that transpired the night that he was killed. She goes by “Cal” for short (no one calls her Hollywood).

California is a special OC to me. Her hardships mirror some personal stuff in my life and she’s been through a ton of change and development. I’m proud of how far she’s come. Her backstory is rough but with an outcome that makes me really happy.

[ganymedesclock]

ALL RIGHTY, onto them TFA people. since these take a lot more out of me than I was expecting, I’m gonna close this particular meme for now and not take any more asks.

Bear in mind these reads are only as far as SUV: Society of Ultimate Villainy and I would really prefer to avoid any spoilers! I’ve already seen some and it’s not fun. And yes, I do read the tags/replies on this post so watch y’alls spoilery mouths, people.

@numinousbones said:prowl and shiro for the ask meme!

Shiro was last masterpost, so, Prowl!

general opinion: fall in a hole and die | don’t like them | eh | they’re fine I guess | like them! | love them | actual love of my life

Prowl is my absolute favorite out of the main crew so far and that’s pretty darn hot competition since most of the TFA main cast won me over fast and hard. I mostly love how deeply expressive he is with his noticeably flat affect and how this isn’t met with a “ha ha but what is Prowl feeling or thinking??? he’s such an impossibly unreadable enigma.” Prowl does have his enigmatic qualities but they are not tied to his autistic traits.

Also when he grinned really big in Megatron Rising Part 2 that absolutely melted my heart. Prowl, you are like almost definitely a child soldier career assassin with deep personal issues where do you get off being that cute.

hotness level: get away from me | meh | neutral | theoretically hot but not my type | pretty hot | gorgeous! | 10/10 would bang

Evaluating the attractiveness of robots is. weird. I like Prowl’s color scheme and also him being a delicate-built lanky motorcycle man.

hogwarts house: gryffindor | slytherin | ravenclaw | hufflepuff

This was a tough one. I almost went with Ravenclaw or Slytherin, and excluded the former because while Prowl is smart and observant, he doesn’t particularly value knowledge for its own sake- his curiosity and fascination is saved for specific things that capture his interest. 

And Slytherin is right out- Prowl might be ambitious, but the other side of Slytherin is interpersonal loyalty, maintenance of a trusted circle, and while Prowl heavily benefits from that, he relies on others to build it for him, and often doesn’t really think to reach out to it.

Thus, Gryffindor remains- because if there’s one thing to be said about Prowl, he’s very headstrong- about what he believes in, about what he thinks needs to be done. He pushes tenacity further and further to the point that in Fistful of Energon in particular, “whatever it takes” is practically his mantra.

best quality:

His empathetic side is pretty prominent, especially when that’s the thing that reigns him in during Fistful of Energon. Where his mind can justify almost anything with the urgent, hand-to-mouth way he seems used to operating, he sets his compass to his heart to figure out if he’s going too far. Also, he loves cats, and that’s adorable.

worst quality:

Prowl. Prowl for the love of fuck I don’t know what your backstory is yet but these implications are incredibly viciously unhappy please just. pursue journaling. Get a cat. Talking to your teammates might be too uncomfortable and you’re afraid of the only friends you’ve had in a while judging you and that’s understandable but please talk to someone, and, of course, you won’t, not until this becomes an informative but upsetting episode plot. :/

ship them with:

I have no Prowl ships at present. Mostly I’m trying to figure out what exactly his approximate age ‘in human years’ is. 

brotp them with:

Honestly Ratchet loaning him the EMP generator in Fistful of Energon was a pretty deep statement of trust, which makes me really want to see the two of them interacting more in positive situations. As far as relationships we’ve actually seen, I really like his interactions with Bulkhead and Optimus.

needs to stay away from:

I Still Don’t Know Prowl’s Backstory disclaimer but nobody gets like that without someone else setting things up and I have three guesses who and all of them start with “fucking” and end with “Megatron.”

misc. thoughts:

I have a Prowl backstory theory and it’s one part the entire way he relates to Grimlock and one part “so anybody, at any point, gonna call Prowl on his ability to fly and noticeably dark, murky color scheme compared to literally every other autobot we have clapped eyeballs on”

@theicombaticon​ said:  Hi! Since you're doing the character asks and I haven't seen you say as much about her.....what are your thoughts on Sari?

general opinion: fall in a hole and die | don’t like them | eh | they’re fine I guess | like them! | love them | actual love of my life 

So Sari is one of the few details I knew about Transformers Animated before watching it (specifically her having some sort of relationship with Cybertron/ not being all human) but I didn’t have that many assumptions about her character, but whoa nelly does she deliver.

I would seriously point to Sari as a case study in how to attach a Kid Sidekick to any kind of long-running franchise. Because she’s narratively, perfect- has a well-defined niche, conflicts and problems, unique and reasonable relationships with multiple characters, she’s cute, endearing, has character flaws and conflicts, has nicely diversified interests and is proactive in a way that’s both realistic and effective. 

hotness level: get away from me | meh | neutral | theoretically hot but not my type | pretty hot | gorgeous! | 10/10 would bang

She Is An Eight Year Old.

hogwarts house: gryffindor | slytherin | ravenclaw | hufflepuff

In like... the third damn episode Sari basically told the gods to fuck off and brought Optimus back from the dead because what’s the point of gaming the system if you can’t punch the world hard enough to make it cough your friend back up and that is like the most Slytherin possible exercise in heroism I have ever seen, ever.

best quality:

Honestly I love this scheming eight-year-old. I love her heroics and equally obvious inclination to break the rules because. what are you gonna do??? stop her?

worst quality: 

I mean she has character flaws but a lot of them are related to her debilitating loneliness and the growing horrified realization that a lot of her life was living in a kind of narrow protected bubble that her father made for her because the possibility for magic destiny aside, the Allspark itself pretty clearly implied that her story isn’t one that she particularly is gonna enjoy hearing.

And that just feels... mean to criticize. She’s eight. She’s doing the best she can. That’s only so much. 

ship them with: 

This Is An Entire Child.

brotp them with: 

Her sibling relationship with Bee and Bulkhead is adorable, and I would LOVE to see more out of her interactions with Ratchet but this is because I want to see Ratchet interact more with everyone because I love Ambulance Dad from the bottom of my heart.

But y’know what I really, really want? I honestly want Arachnia and Sari to take their grudging mutual same-hat to the next level. I want Arachnia to become Sari’s terrible decisions big sister. By their powers combined they would be literally unstoppable. Optimus gets to find out second hand what sort of shit his sorta surrogate niece and his Significant It’s Complicated have been up to when Arachnia rolls up an hour past midnight like “guess who’s officially a wanted criminal in Botswana?” 

There is at least one (1) heist in which Arachnia gets Sari to climb in the vents to infiltrate a place, which she complains about the entire time but is mollified when someone corners her and tauntingly asks what a Little Girl can possibly threaten him with and then Sari’s just like “oh, y’know” and a giant spider crashes through the wall.

needs to stay away from:

Fuck you, Powell.

misc. thoughts:

Literally my only qualm with Sari is why the hell doesn’t she take her pigtails and hairclips off to sleep. What’s up with that Sari. I know you’re some manner of bizarre cyborg child but what.

Anonymous said: TFA Optimus Prime

general opinion: fall in a hole and die | don’t like them | eh | they’re fine I guess | like them! | love them | actual love of my life 

So I’ve been very aware of Transformers for a long time because it’s pretty impossible not to be, but I’ve also been obstinately indifferent to it for a long time. Watched the first episode of Prime ages ago, really didn’t get into it, haven’t really felt compelled to look further until friends of mine whose cartoon tastes I trust talked me into TFA.

Optimus... won me over a lot. It’s really nice to see energy and color breathed into a character who’s such an archetypal cornerstone hero- he feels fleshed out and this allows me to actually connect with him as a character.

hotness level: get away from me | meh | neutral | theoretically hot but not my type | pretty hot | gorgeous! | 10/10 would bang

I know all the autobots have pretty baby blues but like... Optimus in particular. They are nice. I also like the curvature of his mouth because especially in his more snide expressions (e.g. The Headmaster Returns) it means that Optimus Prime, Headliner Hero of the Transformers Franchise, goes >:3 sometimes. Also when he’s sorta miffed about something, it makes him look like he’s pouting.

hogwarts house: gryffindor | slytherin | ravenclaw | hufflepuff

See the interesting thing here is Optimus is exactly the kind of person who’d get incredibly snippy at the Hufflepuff House reputation, but, what mostly sticks with me is that fitting with his fireman’s motif, Optimus’s primary weapon in this setting is a fire axe- which is not a weapon meant for fighting. It’s a tool- meant for clearing obstructions in the way of rescuing people. 

This is both a rather powerful statement of confidence- it implies that the enemies he faces down are obstacles, rather than rivals, reflecting both his formidable skill as a combatant and the certain degree of unforgiving pressure he brings to bear on people he sees as obstructing what needs to be done- and it heavily suggests that to Optimus, combat is a labor of necessity, not something particularly glorious or to be reveled in.

Optimus is a hard worker. His morals are stated repeatedly in someone willing to put his nose to the grind and who would rather be doing meaningful work with people he finds honorable than reveling in glory. In a meta sense in Garbage In, Garbage Out, an episode partially about being a hero and what that makes, the first thing we see Optimus doing is personally hauling waste because it’s a job that needs to be done- and it’s Prowl that comments on the indignity of it all, not Optimus who was actively covered in other people’s trash.

best quality:

Optimus has an impressive tenacity of personal character. He’s, I think, one of the big archetypal Lawful Good characters out there, and his willingness to do things like take Sentinel out in Mission Accomplished is contrasted by his willingness to calmly walk right up to Ultra Magnus and state that he accomplished his objective- if Optimus appears to rebel from the system, it’s because, in his eyes, he’s not the one turning away from the ideal of what should be- it’s Sentinel, it’s Magnus, it’s Cybertron that turns away and leaves him to chase what he’s sure is the right course of action, and, as a Lawful Good, he is also willing to quietly turn himself in and face the consequences of his actions as long as he feels his point has been made.

worst quality: 

He feels pretty overly responsible for other people. This can lead him to sink deep into personal grief (see Along Came A Spider and the way he parsed Elita’s fate before reuniting with Arachnia), it can make him a little pushy and intrusive (see the way he needles Ratchet about opening up to him about his history in Transform And Roll Out part 1 and again in Thrill Of The Hunt, the latter only acknowledging there’s a reason Ratchet might not want to discuss it after something similar happened to him) and, at his absolute worst, it can make him incredibly snappy and controlling when he feels like every minor thing counts (several occasions, but Megatron Rising part 1 is the cleanest example)

ship them with: 

Arachnia. It’s pretty clear they both miss each other terribly, though, they’ve still got a lot of work to do.

brotp them with: 

BRIDGE CREW! BRIDGE CREW! I particularly like his interactions with Ratchet (surprise there, huh) and Prowl.

I’d like to invite Sentinel to this party but Sentinel has a lot of emotional shit he needs to sort out first, because, while Sentinel is clearly at least awkwardly trying to patch their friendship, he’s still not... listening to Optimus about what’s important to him.

needs to stay away from:

Nobody in particular that’s not a general hazard to all autobots.

misc. thoughts:

For the longest time I thought Optimus was the equivalent of a twentysomething but now I am genuinely wondering if he’s actually like. basically eighteen. The bridge crew is just Ratchet shepherding a bunch of teenagers around.

@sepublic asked: General opinion on Lugnut?

general opinion: fall in a hole and die | don’t like them | eh | they’re fine I guess | like them! | love them | actual love of my life 

Lugnut’s honestly got me really intrigued. From his appearance to the sheer raw firepower he’s capable of to the way he is absolutely, to the bottom of his soul terrified of Megatron and at the same time snarls at the idea of anyone so much as suggesting Megatron is less than a grand and benevolent god resplendent on the planet raises some deeply upsetting questions. There’s clearly something to him we haven’t heard, yet.

hotness level: get away from me | meh | neutral | theoretically hot but not my type | pretty hot | gorgeous! | 10/10 would bang

Not necessarily in the conventional sense but he’s got a really appealing monsterish design that makes him stand out a lot visually.

hogwarts house: gryffindor | slytherin | ravenclaw | hufflepuff

Fervent, unyielding loyalty, personal ferocity in the face of battle. Lugnut never abdicates unless it’s in the face of Megatron- if anything, we’ve never seen him afraid of anything except his beloved lord.

best quality:

Loyalty and tenacity, definitely. 

worst quality: 

Like Sari, it feels a little mean to criticize Lugnut because I think it’s pretty obvious a lot of his flaws aren’t really of his own crafting outside of stubbornness. He’s pretty obviously profoundly indoctrinated, and the purr to Megatron’s voice in Lost And Found when he calls Lugnut “truly loyal” is deeply disquieting when we know thanks to Soundwave and Grimlock both that Megatron is quite fond of child soldiers... and Lugnut looks almost nothing like a conventional cybertronian.

ship them with: 

I’m not convinced he’s not a child given cybertronians basically pupate directly to their adult size and then stay there so I consider him off the shipping table.’

brotp them with: 

None of his current canon connections seem super appealing to me. I mean, in an AUish sense I really like the idea of after Megatron’s defeated or driven off Earth, Isaac Sumdac taking in Lugnut and helping rehabilitate him. The guy just... really deserves better than to fling himself reverently at the feet of an abusive person who actively finds his worship either obligatory or annoying.

needs to stay away from:

Megatron, child protection services has a sniper on the roof.

misc. thoughts:

Lugnut’s really not a guy I expected to care about this much, which is kinda the story of TFA. If I didn’t go in expecting to love the character, I was proven wrong.

[koriginaladdict]

How now that I had a good preview of TW fandom i confirm what i already said, too many “cas fans” completely failed their “fave” for a ship

I’ve been in spn fandom, and now i went back to teen wolf

I’m a castiel and derek hale fan, and while i looked for fics about them i noticed a glaring difference between how the fans support them

most cas fics are dest/el, but you could find like 5% other than that if you dig enough

almost 99% of derek fics are sterek

BUT

most cas fics written by dest/el shippers (most not all) tear down the angels, write them as uncaring, horrible to cas while in canon most were shown to care deeply for cas and want what’s best for him, and defended him against how badly the winchesters treat him all to show how “the brothers are HIS REAL family”

most derek fics written by stereks actually explore his backstories more than the show ever cared to do, his family was fleshed out, given flashbacks, laura hale is pretty recurring in those fics, also a lot give his pack (erica, boyd, isaac) a 2nd chance, explore an actual pack dynamic (instead of acting like derek is the worst thing ever when he never had a chance to make it up) they create such amazing stories even a non shipper like me, find myself completely hooked in most of the fics, the relationship is there,but no one is ever brought down to prop it up

what i love most about derek stans is that, they viciously defend him no matter what, scott blatantly said that “maybe his whole family did something to deserve burning alive” something like that and no one acts like scott loves derek or scott is a better friend to derek than anyone else, scott uses derek’s body to give gerard the bite, tricking him into thinking he has accepted being part of his pack and then gloated in his face, the fandom doesn’t act like every one else treats derek horribly and scott is the only one worthy of being with him

well over the dest/el fandom the standards are so fucking low it’s pathetic, while i mentioned two big examples paralleling them with scott/derek  well, let’s just say what dean put cas through would take me hours to list just check cas deserves better tag, and yet people (again not all, but too many) act like dean loves cas and his verbal abuse is a sign that it’s a “cute married couple” and is secretly in love

ok someone might say “you’re biased, derek was pretty agressive back on s1 and you don’t defend stiles”

again i’m not a shipper, but it doesn’t matter unlike dean, derek is always held accountable for anything he does or blamed for things he didn’t, but here’s the thing HE EVOLVED!! he got better, he didn’t spend 6 seasons mistreating anyone (he was mostly the receiving end) there was development and i can accept that, cause no one is perfect

(and stfu about “but john” bitch derek is the living breathing example of how having a shitty life isn’t an excuse to be a shitty person to others no need to make excuses blaming anyone but your fave, he needs to get over himself and be better)

dean rarely changes, while there’s slightly less horrible abuse by s10 but that’s mainly because cas isn’t around as much as he used to, the track record is horrifying, 8 years of endangering cas, rarely saving him, can you believe after all the sacrifices cas made and all the suffering he went through it took the winchesters 8 whole seasons before doing anything that could be considered remotely decent by not leaving him to die in 12x12, while yeah it’s good it shows how horrible the situation was

and the shippers, when dean does something horrible like ? bully a mentally ill cas and yell “nobody cares that you’re broken” or kick him out to starve and freeze while he was human. what would the fans do ? yeah they’ll jump to defend dean against any valid criticism using the old “it’s john’s fault” “he didn’t tell him bedtime stories and trained him to surive being hunted by demons so everything he’ll do as an adult is his fault” “dean probably heard john say that to him”

ok but how about sam, they had the same father? while yes it was dean who suffered most of it i admit but still, sam never ever treated cas the way dean does (with 2 exceptions and one of them was souless) so are you implying that dean is so weak he has no ability to be better?

I almost forgot to mention, while the abuse is always overlooked at best, glorified at worst, there’s another aspect i don’t like : “REDUCING EVERY SINGLE HEROIC THING CASTIEL DOES ABOUT DEAN” cas wants to save sam? it’s not because he’s that good or because sam is his friend, it’s for dean, cas saves the world? it’s all thanks to dean who taught him, cas rebels, nah it’s not about the world ending it’s all for dean

also, i wrote a rant about how the showrunners disrespect the actor playing castiel misha collins, what was some of the shippers’ reaction? to completely dismiss it, saying the show’s mantra that they’re family and love each other and it was his idea when there’s no proof of that, they’d rather defend anyone but the person they act like supporting, we even lost like 15 followers because of it, if i reblog some posts defending castiel losing some followers is guaranteed and it’s just, idk cas deserves better than his “fans” completely ignoring his pain cause acknowledging it would severly harm their ship

my point is, when i joined yet another fandom it’s more and more obvious how spn fandom is pretty messed up, and failed their so called fave just for a ship, a toxic ship that is a huge reason why he’s left with so many mental issues, why with the constant abuse and bringing down he completely stopped believing in himself (also the writers sabotaging him plays a role but nvm)