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[maebug1990]

Peppino and The Noise's reaction to Sally Cruikshank's characters from the Seseme Street animated segments invading their arena, and the Squirrel won't give a fucking crap to them. "Asshole" indeed!

[minwonaucollections]

[50]

Parts: 3

🔗 Link

[beaulesbian]

~ But what if they still hate me? ~ No one hates a hero of the realm.

[wynterstrawberry]

(Almost) breakfast in bed

Seth woke up somewhat jet lagged and still having to remind himself he didn’t have anywhere he had to be currently. The clock flashing 6:55 am seemed to be taunting him. Since he couldn’t fall back asleep he begrudgingly got out of bed and decided to make breakfast for the two of you.

Normally his breakfast would consist of a breakfast bar or maybe cereal. But today he was going to go fancy and all out while attempting to make your favorite breakfast.

Seth was pretty proud of how the breakfast had turned out so far. His own multitasking skills impressing himself. But he got over confident and both plates slipped out of his hand. The sound of glass shattering woke you up.

You hurried in and saw Seth attempting to clean up while blood dripped into the mess.

“You do know you’re bleeding right?” You asked as you gently guided his hand to the sink to clean it. Seth stood there shocked wondering how he was oblivious to the cut on himself.

As the water made contact with his hand he couldn’t help but flinch. You cleaned up his hand and applied neosporin before putting a bandaid on it.

Seth held his bandaged finger up to you expectantly. “Kiss it.” You laughed at his childlike antics and lightly planted a kiss to his finger.

“If you wanted me to kiss you there were other less painful ways to get that you know?”

“Eh I wanted to spice things up this time anyway.” Seth bantered back. With his hand bandaged you cleaned up the mess and realized unfortunately nothing could be salvaged.

Seth looked at the ruined breakfast “oh no we have to go to our favorite restaurant now. How tragic.”

[aroaceleovaldez]

What is the PR disaster in question that made Rick announce TSATS? I wasn’t active in the online fandom at that point

Of course! This was awhile ago so it figures people don't remember it/aren't familiar:

Basically a couple years back (2020) the fandom had some posts circulate discussing the ways different characters in the Riordanverse were written poorly or offensively. There was a masterpost that went around tumblr but the two major points people were particularly focusing on were Piper and Samirah (particularly because Piper had featured prominently again in Trials of Apollo recently and the third MCGA book had further emphasized and discussed Samirah being Muslim, since it was supposed to take place during Ramadan). Basically each had multiple posts breaking down the ways they were depicted incorrectly or offensively. The entire fandom for a little bit was VERY intensely discussing this (and it's around this time the "RR crit" tag got very popularized on tumblr - it did exist before, but suddenly was being used VERY frequently - cause it was that wide-spread - though the discussion took over basically every side of Riordaverse social media on different platforms). People really wanted Rick to respond to these criticisms, so he did!

He made two blog posts, one about Piper and one about Samirah. He has since deleted both so the links are to archived versions. The short version: he essentially tried to justify his poor research and double-down that he hadn't written them offensively, actually, people were just being mean to him. The fandom, of course, reacted poorly to this.

[Further elaborated events under the cut since this got a bit lengthy]

(Fun fact, this all happened within a month or so of the time i posted an open letter on aphobic tropes in the Riordanverse that Rick replied to, and then he immediately followed with announcing that Reyna was intended to be ace-coded [which cause a LOT of fandom debate] before Rick dipped for a couple of weeks, and then came back to post the blog posts in response to Piper and Sam stuff. So I like to jokingly refer to this as "The time I imploded the fandom/drove Rick off of twitter." Twas I that set the house ablaze.)

Rick fully left social media after this and the LT Musical social media manager became Rick's social media manager for the time being.

So this all happened June/July of 2020. Tower of Nero would end up being published in October of 2020 and a few months after that Rick would state that he was done with the series and wouldn't be writing any more series installments involving Percy, and also that he wouldn't be writing a Nico quest following Tower of Nero as it "wasn't his place to" and encouraged the community to write their own versions of Nico's story.

The community continued to circulate the tumblr posts and discuss the topics of Rick's offensive character depictions, and this is also where we see the dramatic shift in how the fandom depicts Piper in fanwork (though in most cases it is admittedly not an improvement 😬) because of all this discussion. This is also around the time when the fandom brought Viria under scrutiny claiming that she was whitewashing Piper as part of the same discussions, through the justification that she was drawing Annabeth as having tan skin (which she does canonically), and if Annabeth has tanner skin then Piper then that's whitewashing Piper? Except they were using completely separate images of not fully rendered Piper art versus Annabeth in dramatic lighting, so it's all very awkward and poor logic, and did actually get kind of racist. A lot of people were calling it "Tannabeth Blackchase" (yeah, i know) or similar and a common sentiment you'd see repeated is "Don't draw Annabeth as having darker skin than Piper, because that's offensive/racist/whitewashing." (Note: it was not phrased "don't draw Piper as having lighter skin than Annabeth" - we also won't get into certain offensive depictions of Native Americans, but I digress). But yeah, the Annabeth stuff in all that did not age well at all.

Anyways, in October of 2021 however Rick would announce that he was co-writing The Sun And The Star - with a lot of heavy emphasis on how Mark Oshiro works as a sensitivity reader, and some false advertising from the official social media that Mark Oshiro was the first time a non-Riordan author would be collaborating on the series (disregarding the ghostwriters completely). One of the big criticisms in the breaking down of issues in Rick's writing was his lack of ever seeking a sensitivity reader, and fans claiming that a sensitivity reader could solve a lot of the problems. This was basically Rick's "look! I totally listened!!!!" (though it did little to actually improve things, based on the book) and in TSATS as well Piper gets a large cameo at the end where the text very directly addresses a lot of points made in criticism of Rick's writing of her.

We also then of course got the CoTG trilogy later, explicitly stated to be for advertising purposes for the show.

So basically, short version: Rick came under scrutiny for a lot of offensive writing within the span of two months, made some bad blog posts doubling down about it, left social media. TOA ends. Rick says he wasn't going to continue the series/write what would become TSATS. Community celebrates the end of of the franchise but also continues to discuss Rick's poor writing and the blog posts at length. Rick suddenly announces TSATS and Mark Oshiro's involvement. Everybody gets distracted from being mad. Show announcement stuff also happens and the discussions peter out.

[ineed-to-sleep]

And what if I said I scrapped like half of this comic, rewrote it and started redrawing it 👉🏻👈🏻 :3

[birb-tangleblog]

I know we all hate Chris, but where does the idea that he wrote Varian out of season 2 as a reaction to his popularity in the fandom come from?? I've been here for a long time and it seems like I'm only recently hearing ideas like this get circulated and repeated more frequently. It feels like since the show ended the fandom has turned into a rumor mill/game of telephone.

When you purport the idea that Cass replaced Varian due to creator bias, it implicitly places blame for Varian's lack of inclusion on Cassandra as a character. It unnecessarily pits the two characters against each other when this is already kind of an obnoxious issue in the fandom.

Varian also isn't the only victim of bad or messy writing in the show and I find it hard to say he was specifically targeted/excluded when there were tons of other character inconsistencies, loose ends, or concepts that were introduced and then dropped. (As an aside, when you look at the lead time on production for animated shows, the timeline just seems unrealistic/unlikely to me.)

I don't want to preclude the idea that Varian really was deliberately written out of S2 - of course I could be incorrect, but in that case, it's an example of why citing sources when making claims is important and responsible.

[colorful-horses]

For Florid: what aspect of your artworks, or which sculpture itself, do you feel best represents your spirit?

[knockknockitsnickels]

Not sure if anyone's pointed this out before, but I think across the endings where you free the princess in the three new routes (princess and dragon -> cage -> happily ever after) you can see a bit of an arc for the narrator.

In PATD he is Mad as hell and tells you he hopes your happiness is ruined even as he fades away, in Cage he's more resigned (he doesn't like it but he'll still give you a good ending) and in HEA he outright admits he was wrong and wishes you well.

I don't have a good conclusion lol. Good for him.

[grossdyke]

we as a society really need to get into the torrid awful years long harry/hermione affair that started with them stumbling into bed together during the horcrux hunt when ron left. btw

[armatages]

hello current little guy obsessions i have assigned you jon archivist and martin blackwood because you didn't have enough problems already

it is funny to me that this is my first time drawing jayce

[rad-roche]

feels nice to draw gloria's lumpectomy scar in the pinups n such. it's not the focus of her character, but it's a big part of her character. but she's got other stuff going on. she's smart, funny, has a bunch of hobbies. no matter how things shake out, you'll always, always have other stuff going on

[lauraisakilljoy]

I love how they explained the D&P lore for the parents and straight boyfriends that were dragged along to the show and those people probably still had no idea what the fuck was going on 90% of the time

[r26yz]

Top 3 reasons to not open a multidimensional time rift: number one will surprise you

[ao3screenshotss]