#but I wasn't expecting the amount of outright queerness in the show

[moghedien]

you know before I started Sailor Moon and knew basically nothing about it, I knew about Uranus and Neptune and I knew the cousin jokes and I knew the show was gay because of them and all

what I didn't know is that it was also gay because of the *motions broadly at the rest of the show*

[cookinguptales]

some feelings about wwdits under a cut, for negativity

WWDITS... I don't know. I don't think I've found the writing entirely fulfilling for a while now. s4 had its problems, but s5 was... let's just say not nearly as funny or cohesive as I would've liked, and the characterization has been... wandering, to put it kindly. Seeing it end now feels a little less like losing my favorite show and a little more like stopping it before things really start to spiral.

I remember someone asked me once post-s3 what (if anything) would make me stop watching the show, and I said Guillermo leaving for good or the characters becoming less supernatural. (i.e. Nandor becoming human for good or something.) I really hate shows where the characters become "normal" as a happy ending, so that's really my nightmare scenario. I'm not exaggerating when I say I think I'd literally rather the characters die than lose the spark that makes them interesting.

Honestly, I feel like that's probably a lot of what's made it hard for me to move forward with writing fic for wwdits after the s5 finale. It felt not only OOC for Guillermo but just... such a boring direction to take it. I feel like there were so many ways they could have made non-vampire Guillermo interesting and IC and they just. did not do that. Instead they ignored a lot of previous canon in order to cancel out an entire season while also trying to make us believe that Guillermo choosing humanity is a happy and fulfilling ending for anyone.

And when you look at characters like Laszlo... like they keep giving him plot lines that go absolutely nowhere. The poignancy of his adventures in fatherhood and his depression over losing his child were basically nowhere to be seen in s5. (I kept expecting them to tie it back to his loss over Baby Colin, like he was making Guillermo his new project because he wasn't coping well with losing his son, but they never really went there.) And then they have him doing all of these experiments in s5 that don't really amount to anything other than making it canon that he can't even remember what happened in s1.

(Or... the writers can't, at least...)

I don't know. When none of the plot lines they write are given weight, it's hard for me to give them weight. If none of the characters' choices matter because they'll just be reset anyway, why do I care about their choices? If entire plot lines are just going to go absolutely nowhere (when they're given endings at all) why should I get invested in them?

They set up a lot of interesting themes about found family, the supernatural world as a haven for those who are queer or otherwise socially othered, etc. and then had Guillermo outright choose the human world and his human family over the found family they'd been setting up for five seasons. Having Guillermo be okay with killing vampires but not humans (which... again, makes no sense with his behavior towards humans in the past, but I digress) basically explicitly tells us that he sees vampire life as lesser than human life and like ????? then how are we supposed to interpret the relationships and themes you've spent all this time building???

When you have Guillermo coming out as being gay and also wanting to be a vampire in the same breath and then have him reject that world, when you give these interviews talking about how making Guillermo and Nandor have [gay] sex would lessen their relationship... I don't know! It almost feels like they can't even keep track of their own themes and really do not care if they shit on the audience that's loyally followed them even through some really questionable writing decisions!

I guess at this point, I only worry that they really do see becoming human and leaving the supernatural world as being a happy ending for all these characters. Are they going to make the other vampires human, too? Are they going to have Guillermo leave for good and choose the human world?

Like it's literally my nightmare scenario. lmao.

I guess I just feel like I've been cutting wwdits a lot of slack because I assumed that the writers were going somewhere really interesting with these seemingly incomprehensible choices, but now that I've realized that they're really just... not great writing choices...

It'll be easier to let go, I guess. I don't have nearly the same emotional connection to this show that I did even six months ago, much less a year and a half ago. If you told me even a year ago that my reaction to my favorite show's cancellation would be "...oh..." I wouldn't have believed you. But. I guess here we are.

I keep trying to make myself feel the same love for this show that I did during the first three, three and a half seasons, and I'm just not sure I can do it. I've been going around in circles over this for months now, but I just feel kind of hollow when I reach for the joy that this show used to inspire in me. And now that I know it's ending soon, I guess my mind is just kind of going "well, I guess it'll all be over with soon, one way or another, and I'll finally be able to choose a way to feel about it all."

I think... honestly, I think the only way I can be happy writing fic going forward is if I write fic that actively ignores a lot of the canon developments. It's literally too fucking difficult to eke out coherent characterization from what they've been putting out lately, and maybe it would feel more fun and less like homework if I just stopped trying.

I really, really hope that the last season of this show is beautiful and gorgeous and funny and makes me remember exactly what I love about it just in time to mourn it forever. I hope that I will happily be able to write fics incorporating every ounce of canon and feel fulfilled by that. But... honestly speaking, at this point I'm just hoping that the last season doesn't actively piss me off. lmao

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[devsgames]

What You Should Know Before Promoting Your Game On TikTok

I'll assume you, reader, know about what I did of Tiktok going into it:

- It's a social media website for short form video

- Apparently the algorithm is good for content creators and discoverability, moreso than other platforms

Checking out numerous "how to market your game" talks, articles, social media posts, etc. etc. this was generally the consensus from everyone. If you want people to see your game, Tiktok is the place to start. Now, after adopting it, I've had numerous problems with the platform and how it works which I genuinely wasn't aware of going into it, and which I personally believe people who advocate for using Tiktok didn't properly advertise as part of that.

The Engagement is Good (I don't know why)

I will say that the engagement on Tiktok is good. I've had a couple posts 'blow up' and apart from me trying to structure them as any other Tiktok you'd come across on the platform I couldn't tell you why it happened (as is the nature of social media). I wouldn't continue using Tiktok if it wasn't at least making people *aware* of my game, so that's saying something.

There's zero depth

Since it's, well, short-form video, don't expect to be able to adequately answer anything

The Userbase is very lazy

Tiktok is a platform that thrives on minimum effort for a user. You open the app and there's already a video in front of you, and you are expected to just start scrolling and consume as many of these videos as possible. This is a problem for content creators in that you as a creator are expected to pick up the slack.

For example, I made a Tiktok showing off some of the painting in Bombing!! 2: A Graffiti Paradise and posted the game name in my profile, expecting people to - like I tend to do on any social media thing I see that looks cool - click a profile and seek out more info if they want to know more.

Instead I got a LOT of comments from people saying "What's the game name?" or "When's it coming out?". Despite the fact it was information that was a Google search away, it wasn't easy enough because the UX doesn't expect you as a user to actually do the work to find information like that out yourself, and the chance of someone looking at your other videos to see if you've already given a similar answer is slim to none.

Expect to spend a fair amount of time replying to very simple questions that viewers could easily discover by Googling (or be like me and give up outright).

In-Profile Links are locked until 1000 followers

Anyone will tell you that when marketing on social media the key to getting people to take action on your game is to give them a path of least resistance - make it foolproof and stupid easy for them to take action and they'll be more likely to do it. 

With my game, my goal is to get as many people to add it to their Wishlist on Steam. However trying to promote a game and not being able to simply provide a link to your store page feels detrimental in this respect as people are now expected to search for the game online and add it to their Wishlist thereafter (and remember how I said lots of people won't even put in effort to check your profile to find out what your game is called..).

If you're just starting out on the platform then you'll have to spend quite a bit of time building up content and a following to unlock access to the feature, and potentially miss out on opportunity to have people take action on your game in the interim.

The Userbase is activelytoxic

This is my #1 complaint about Tiktok. Among everyone who says 'use Tiktok to promote your game', none of them mentioned how much work is involved in comment moderation or trying to ensure that people generally aren't just bashing you and your work in the comments.

While content about your game might be getting engagement, a lot of that engagement will be people trolling or being rude. Like, I'm a queer creator posting queer content online. I have a baseline expectation to get hate for my work, and I'm not new to social media on the whole so this really isn't my first rodeo, but the amount and speed of the hate has certainly been surprising and overwhelming to even myself.

To take an example, I had a Tiktok where I painted on a wall with a spray can in Bombing!! 2 that took off a while ago. Probably half the comments on that video have been fine, innocuous people asking questions about the game and engaging earnestly, while the other half was filled with people saying "looks like shit" and variations of "piss".

I think this speaks to how the userbase of Tiktok is probably riddled with fourteen year olds who haven't developed the whole "don't be mean for no reason" part of their brains yet, but it's still a lot to deal with.

So from there you have some options:

1) Prevent all comments on your videos (not great for a platform that probably prioritizes discoverability based on engagement)

2) Moderate all comments coming in through the Comment Filter feature ([Privacy -> Comments -> Filter Comments] on the site)

3) Read every comment yourself and delete all the nasty ones (uhhhh no thanks?)

4) Give up

Obviously, none of these options are very good.

I'm currently attempting to moderate all comments via #2, but even then I'm not convinced it's necessarily going to stop comments from getting on my nerves. I imagine I'll eventually just resort to #1 or to giving up entirely as in #4. We'll have to see.

The point here is that the Tiktok community is astoundingly hostile towards creators and I'm genuinely shocked no one has ever mentioned this as part of the whole "you should use Tiktok to promote your game" spiel. If you're planning on using Tiktok be prepared mentally and emotionally for the fanbase to be toxic as hell, as it's certainly an inevitability.

I've not seen great responses from Support

I value a platform a lot based on how reliable it seems to follow up on reports about hate comments, and so far my experience on this front from Tiktok is so weak.

On one of my videos I received a comment saying "I'm going to paint so many swastikas [in your game]". I reported it as a hate comment (because uhhh it is) only for support to reply that it didn't violate community guidelines. Naturally, this doesn't convince me that the Tiktok support team would step in if something even more severe were to be sent my way, which has me on my guard.

It's incredibly time consuming without a dedicated marketing person

My final complaint is that all this work has you performing the role of a comment moderator and content creator, all on a social media platform in a format that can't easily be cross-posted to other platforms like say, an image or text could be. A screenshot takes maybe fifteen minutes to capture and post on Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram respectively.

A Tiktok however, requires recording a video in a specific vertical resolution (or editing it to be that way), sending it to your phone, editing it using Tiktok's proprietary editor for Text-To-Speech or caption capabitility. In my experience depending on the Tiktok this usually takes about an hour for one video. On top of this, I'm not posting Tiktoks to Tumblr or Twitter or even Instagram because the platform and what users want from it is so intensely specific to its case that it doesn't feel like something that's super applicable elsewhere.

I'm not a marketing person (or maybe I'm just stupid and old now), but at the end of the day all this is a lot of work to expect a developer to do alongside building a damn video game.

I like Tumblr or Twitter because you don't often have to do crazy elaborate amounts of work to find return, you just need to be consistent. I can maybe see the argument if you have someone on your team who just manages and promotes on Tiktok all day, but for someone like me asking me to spend an hour a day making one video for one website is...quite frankly absurd. I suspect this is another case of people aiming their game dev advice of "well-rounded and fleshed out teams of people with time money and resources" and not "one or two people already stretched thin on everything".

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Anyway yeah, this is all stuff I wish I knew before I picked up Tiktok expecting a very different experience, and I'd advise anyone considering adopting the platform to promote their work to be aware of this before doing so.