#can’t bring myself to delete it b/c it was very popular and some of it is still very funny & on-target

[highladyluck]

It’s so telling that my first WoT fic ever was ‘characters yell at Robert Jordan for what they think he did to ruin their lives, and to pacify them he has to explain how he actually ruined their lives’.

Girl, this could have been an essay!!! Except then we wouldn’t get to watch everyone be hilariously/tragically unselfaware or force RJ to suffer consequences, now would we?

[invelleity]

psst. be honest. all of the questions. go.

i can’t believe jeanette is tryina kill me in public and i’m still love her??? | not accepting anymoooore | @ltbroccoli​

cracks knuckles here we go ( odd numbers 1-9 are here )

2. Are aesthetics important to you? If they are, why?

Not very. It’s fun and cute and all, but I care a whole lot more about “clicking” with people and having fun writing with them.

Exception: If someone’s aesthetic is so overblown that I can’t even find the pages on the blog or read the text, I.....won’t interact with that tbh.

4. How do you explain rp to someone in the real world?

(kicks down my roommate’s door at 10pm) “OK so I’m writing— stop screaming, it’s me,— I’m writing a character in Security and you’re like a double black belt or some shit, can you explain how—”

( My roommates all know it’s a thing I do but I’ve never sent them a link or shown them any of the actual writing. They’ve met a bunch of y’all over like Rabbit streams and @rumdaydreams​ irl though so like.... They Know. )

More under the cut

6. Do you prefer writing male muses or female more? Why?

Ehhh, depends on my mood. I lean towards female muses in general ( definitely got a bigger chunk of ladies on my list, for sure for sure ) but I love my boys.

8. Name any three things about the rpc that bother you.

Uhhhh A) We’re all such dumb socially awkward blobs so it’s often hard to get to know new people.

B) The feel that if you have a good relationship with one person who writes a canon muse, it’s some kind of lowkey betrayal to write with other people who write the same muse??

C) How much I, a certified card-carrying dumbass, stress myself out about posting on a “regular” schedule. Does that count? Like I want the blogs to look “presentable” lmao and me@me Calm The Fuck Down.

10. Have you ever had a bad experience with commissions? As either someone who makes them or as someone who buys them?

N / A

11. What do you know now about rp that you wish you knew when you first started?

Uhhhh, when I first started was long enough ago and the community was so different a lot of those lessons no longer apply. I wish when I finally jumped over to Tumblr I’d realized quicker how the new like....basic ways of meeting people and posting and all worked, which was mostly just a “calm down and go with the flow more, let go of your stupid rigid old habits” lmaooo.

12. Have you been involved in drama? Do you regret it?

yES. Yeah. Hahaha ha h. 

But ummm, not usually. No. Most of my drama has been either A) me posting the very very softest, most diluted version of barely-touching on my politics and my real goddamn life and people being fuckin butthurt as hell about or B) cutting people who were toxic and draining out of my life. So.

13. Have you ever thought about leaving rp? What caused it? What changed your mind?

cw suicidal ideation ment

Yeah. Once I actually did — when I started college I just didn’t have the time, so I peaced from the larger community to just write with close friends for a while. I’ve also considered leaving the T.umblr RPC a few times, but really only because of long bad depressive episodes. Coming back and “not wanting to literally die irl ha Ha” and catching up with my drafts gets me back on track lmao. 

14. Do you think rp has had a positive or negative affect on your life or you as a person?

Positive! Sometimes I worry that I spend too much time wrapped up in fiction and miss my real life, but I’ve learned to keep my time more separate so now it’s just good to have a healthy hobby that makes me happy. Also I’m definitely a much better writer for it, and there a lot of networking skills I think translate to real workplace skills so it’s 👌

15. How has rp changed you personally?

See above, tbh. And it gives me a lot of good outlets for writing ideas that would otherwise stew in my head until I hated myself for never ever writing any lmao. It’s good.

16. If you could change one thing about rp on tumblr, what would it be? Why?

Oh, I dunno. I wish I could post replies from mobile more easily, god. That’d keep me a lot more on top of my drafts lmao.

17. Have you ever sent a message to yourself on anon? Why?

Not on any of the rp blogs. ;^)

18. Have you ever sent hate to yourself on anon? Why? 

No, wtf

19. Do you delete anon hate or post and address it? Why?

Depends on the hate — things I feel need to be addressed or I want to be clear about not tolerating I’ll post. Personal hate and mean shit I delete.

Or if it’s stupid and makes me laugh I will definitely post that shit.

20. Have you ever felt pressured to write something you weren’t comfortable with?

Sometimes. If a partner is actually pressuring me I’m real good at saying uhhh hey, fuck off about that? but sometimes partners will perfectly-innocently be enthusiastic about things I’m not super comfortable with and that’s harder to bring up. So it’s..... more like I pressure myself, whoops.

21. Have you ever followed someone because you felt like you had to, not because you wanted to?

Ehh. Not really. Sometimes I’ll follow a friend of a friend despite lack of interest just because, like.... My friends are smart and good, maybe I’m just not getting the right “vibe” from their blog as who really they are. Sometimes that just means we never click and I unfollow them later. Or sometimes @rumdaydreams​ drags me straight to mutual hell and we write 20,000 unfinished bullshit and meet irl and she actually talks me into wholeass new blogs and muses. So, you know. Mix bag.

22. What would make you block someone?

Red flags for manipulation and lowgrade emotional a.buse, especially ones I viscerally feel in my stomach from previous experiences. Obvious r.ight-leaning politics ( Weirdly, I’m not particularly comfortable around people who don’t think I or my friends deserve to be treated like human beings! A character quirk, haha! )

Also ngl sometimes I block people just to remind myself I’ve followed them before and I don’t wanna re-follow them six times and look like I’m trying to intentionally harass them. My memory is bad but the block button always knows, lmao. 😅

23. Have you ever stolen something from someone else?

Not intentionally — I try very hard not to steal hc from duplicates or take plots without asking. But, y’know, sometimes an idea sticks in your head and you eventually just forget where it originally came from.

24. Have you ever had something stolen from you? If so, how did you handle it?

Not that I’m aware of.

25. Are you open to duplicates? Why / why not?

Absolutely, for the most part! I like seeing other perspectives, and especially since @thewrongsorts​ is such a bigass multi it lowkey just makes my life easier.

There are a few exceptions — less because they’re duplicates and more because there are hc/fanon I just......dislike enough I don’t wanna write with them. Not a feeling that’s limited to duplicates tbh.

26. How do you feel about vague posting? 

Ehhh. It’s like not a great thing, but I get the appeal. I tend to unfollow if someone posts a lot of it because then they’re just passive-aggressive as a person, but the occasional vagueblog I don’t mind. Sometimes you gotta get shit off your chest but you don’t wanna make it a wholeass call-out, I get it.

27. Do you follow people even if they don’t follow you back?

Generally I unfollow. I’m here to write, if we’re not interacting it’s clogging my dash. ( Honestly I unfollow mutuals eventually if we never write.... ) But very occasionally someone’s got such good #takes and hc that I stick around just bc I stan.

28. Do you read people’s rules before following or interacting?

A l w a y s.

29. What is your opinion on “reblog karma” and do you practice it?

It’s nice! Like.... I wouldn’t require anyone to do it, but it makes people feel better about their blogs, it’s polite. I know I’m happier getting memes as well as passing them along. You know, be social. Connect with people. I always try to practice it, yeah.

30. How have you responded to popular slang used on tumblr? Do you use it in every day life? Do you use it at all?

Uhhh, yeah. My irl social circles are a lot of dumb gay millennials, we use a lot of dumb internet slang.

31. Is there something you don’t know the meaning of but you haven’t asked anyone because you think it’s supposed to be general knowledge?

Oh yeah! Joined Tumblr rpc ten years late with Starbucks! But also like.... I’m a web developer. 90% of my irl workskills are being good at Googlin’ shit. So I’ve pretty much always found the answer on my own, at least. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

32. Was there ever something you had to ask someone to explain? 

( See above. )

33. Have you ever experienced discrimination? 

Here or irl or....? I mean yes in any case, but much less often in the rpc specifically. This blog is a lot less outspoken ( both about politics or about who I....am....generally ) than most of my others or me irl.

Shoutout to that time I complained one (1) time about how copacetic the H.arry P.otter rpc is and an actual irl n.eon.azi jumped in my inbox lmaooooooo.

34. How do you feel about personal blogs following your rp blog?

Uhhh, I don’t love it? But if they mostly chill and don’t fuck with my actual threads I usually ignore them. ¯\_( ‘ ‘ )_/¯

35. Have you ever cried while writing a reply?

No. I’m not like......good at crying. 😐

36. Do you read other people’s threads or do you only read your own?

Depends on the blog. Some multis I follow are in fandoms I just like don’t even understand, so I don’t read those. Sometimes I just don’t got the energy. But I read a lot of my friends’ other threads or threads on blogs I stan.

Good writing is good shit and I’m.....a big 👀 bitch. Tbh.

37. What’s one thing that other people seem to hate that doesn’t bother you?

Call-out posts, bringing real life politics into rp, generally acknowledging that we have lives outside of the fictional world that affect how we read and interact with fiction.

( 👏 The O.rder 👏👏 of the 👏 P.hoenix 👏👏 is A.ntif.a 👏👏👏 )

I don’t want to ever push that onto other people though, definitely. (Especially people affected by terrifying irl politics and coming here for escapism. )

38. How do you feel about tagging triggers? Do you tag them? How do you determine what is triggering content and what isn’t?

Always 👏👏 tag 👏👏 fucking 👏 triggers 👏👏👏

I tag things that are common or obviously upsetting, and if someone asks I add whatever tags they need to my list — the “list” is mostly a mental tally so I occasionally fuck up, but god I feel strongly about triggers.

Let 👏 people 👏 who are hurting 👏👏 live. 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

39. What advice would you give to someone new to rp?

Poking around to see how other people seem to “operate” and scrolling through posts about how to get started is so so so fucking helpful! Don’t be afraid to do it!

Also reach out to people as much as you can work up the spoons to. If they’re rude back to you, like..... They were never worth your time anyhow. You dodged a bullet.

( Value yourself 2k19 )

[queerofcups]

why do u think tumblr is trash for fandom? not that i disagree lol, i've just never noticed u talking about it and would be interested in hearing your thoughts

 terrible for fanfic writers - i’m biased obviously but tumblr is a really terrible format for any kind of text based art. 

formatting - theme fonts are really variable and i’ve seen countless writers blogs (usually younger/newer writers who need the attention) with fics that I won’t read because I *can’t* read them. 

getting people to read your fic - Also, if you’re posting to tumblr only and not to the Ao3 (which I totally understand especially for drabbles) there’s a strong chance only your followers will see those as opposed to posting in a community where, if its a central fandom comm you’ll probably get decent traffic from folks who’ve never heard of you. and if you want more people to see something you have to keep reblogging it because it gets pushed down by your other blogging because you can’t have pinned posts (which is way easier than creating a separate masterlist page). also tags work like 60% of the time

feedback - if you get feedback on fic on tumblr its either a. a reply that you may or may not be able to reply to easily depending on if tumblr/xkit is freaking out or b. in a reblog that you then have to reblog to reply to cluttering your/your followers dash further

 terrible for building community

If I go to someone’s tumblr and they don’t have an intricate tagging system, chances are pretty good I don’t know shit about them other than their name/age/maybe pronouns. Y’all don’t know shit about me as an actual person unless you happen to catch the one post or hell, the one tag where I talk about being from the American southeast or the weirdness of planning a wedding while feminist, or how I’m working up to weightlifting. Meanwhile, I have a friend that I friended in 2007/8 when I was in bandom who just graduated with her PhD! She was just starting her program when we met. She also just proposed to her boyfriend whom she’d just met when I started following her. I know her, as a person, not just a fic producing machine.

Which brings me to my next point. Tumblr’s great for being a lil bitch without accountability. Don’t get me wrong. Wank is as old as fandom. Where there is fandom there will be wank, bet on that. And its not like the journal-based websites and forums didn’t often have an anonymous function. But anon hate on tumblr is so normalized and so easy-- you don’t even have to log out to ask a question on anonymous on my blog! And even if you aren’t leaving hate. I talk to 2.5 people regularly via tumblr chat regularly. I think of them as my friends. I know their names. They know mine. They call me by my name. You could be the same anon that’s asked me an anon question since I started this blog. We could be well on our way to fandom besties and I would have no idea. To be a lurker on tumblr is to be anonymous, whereas to be a lurker on your livejournals and dreamwidths still came with some name recognition. 

Also tumblr is great for BNFs. Which like. Whatever, I don’t think there’s any one unifying quality I can place on everyone who’s The Most Popular in a fandom (...and I’m not sharing my phandom bnf opinions with an anon) but I do think that tumblr makes it feel like you either have many thousand followers and a constant stream of anons or you’re Nothing and that’s some ol’ bullshit. 

Livejournal and Dreamwidth (the ones I’m most familiar with) had community functions where one person created a blog to which lots of people could submit fanworks. The bandom one I was most familiar with was called bandslashmania (go check it out!), there was minimal modding and it was on you to post your fic, post it with the correct formatting, tag it so people could find it later, etc. And it was a hub that everyone could go to. It could be your daily stop, congrats now you have a selection of the fic that got posted that day. And if you miss a day, or you read a fic and want to go back to it weeks (or even years) later, you can just go to the tag. I’m having very strong feelings about how much fic we’re going to lose because of fucking tumblr (seriously. post your shit to Ao3. Also if you have a favorite fic? C/p that shit and save it to your computer. That’s the only way to (sort of) guarentee you’ll always have it) and the fact that you can accidentally delete your blog.

You ever made friends in the replies or reblogs of a tumblr post? If you did you’re a rarity. That shit happened every day in forum/journal based 

And I love IDB, I think its a really cool space to have more extended conversations, but I still don’t think its a great place to get to know people unless you have time to be really active on there and pay a lot of attention to peoples usernames, lol.

This is. A delicate one. I’m not going to shit on the tumblr’s contributions to people’s growth in awareness of social justice and the experiences of marginalized folks. Its been a really integral piece to amplifying the voices and communities of people who, previously, would have been shut down and made to talk about their issues only on their blog. That’s a statement. And I think tumblr likes to get on a high horse. There’s some shit fandom does that I have real problems with (the fact that I have to block extreme underage on Ao3 is A Problem for me. The blatant racism of who fandom chooses to write about over and over again is A Problem for me. I could go on). But I do think that there’s a subset of fandom that’s like oh, I don’t like this thing, lets use social justice language to talk about why its Bad and Morally Wrong, rather than just not reading it. And that gets extra annoying because they then sound like people who are trying to point out some real ass problems and so people lump these groups together and I have to ask myself before I follow someone if they’re disagreeing with the idea that fandom’s collective love affair with whitecock is problematic, or if they just want to write their fucking otayuri fic.

This is probably way more than you were expecting! I don’t hate tumblr (...mostly). I just find it really frustrating that we’ve decided that this (and a little bit twitter and a little bit instagram which i’m just flummoxed by) is our fannish home when its actually The Worst for a hobby of which one of the main tenants is community building. Like we’ve glued and stapled shit together, we’ve adapted like fandom always does but like Dreamwidth is right there. We could have it all, we just don’t take it. 

Lol, other Fandom Olds that follow me, feel free to hop on this post, I’m sure you have other shit about fandom on tumblr that you hate.

[fuukonomiko]

Mini-rant about Toxicity in Fandoms

This is just a mini-rant. Feel free to skip. Read at your own risk.

I’ve been in fandoms long enough to see great things happen, and the worst crap go down. I’ve been in fandoms longer than some people here have ever existed. I’ve seen fandom good and fandom evil before even some of you folks here have been potty-trained or said your first word.

But anyway....

To those folks who do nothing but SHIT on other people’s happiness just because you don’t agree with them, KNOCK IT OFF. SERIOUSLY, KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF. IT’S NOT CUTE. IT’S NOT FUNNY. IT’S NOT HARMLESS FUN. STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT.

Opinions are allowed. Of course they are. It’s a free world. Go ahead. Ship who you like with whoever you like. Go furry. Go paint your Orcs pink. Go ship FemShep with every Turian, Asari or Geth you please. Go write your fanfic or draw your fanart about Lucy Heartfilia x Laxus. No one is stopping you.

At the same time time, people who have differing opinions, who ship different, who paint their Black Templars white or their White Scars black, who think it would be awesome to have representation...we exist. And just because you don’t like what you like, just because we like stuff that isn’t 100% “canon”, just because we like a different spice in our salsa, DOES NOT ENTITLE YOU TO SHIT ON US WHEN WE ARE HAVING FUN WITH WHAT WE LIKE.

Did the global warming just get worse because we ship A x B versus A x C?

Did tigers get extinct because we put female heads on our models?

Did your car crash and kill twelve pedestrians because Gruvia/NaLu became canon instead of GrayLu and NatLI? 

Did a volcano erupt and bury an island in the Pacific killing all its inhabitants with its lava because Guilliman came out instead of the Primarch you want?

NO? NO? NO? NO?

Then quit it. Seriously. Quit it. Do you know how harmful it is to bully people who like different? It’s freaking awful.

I was in the Thundercats fandom back in 2011. I shipped TyChee (Tygra-Cheetara). The popular ship was LiChee. Tychee became canon---granted it wasn’t in the best way possible--I swear some of these writers could use a little lesson in romance writing. The LiChee fans were rabid. Not all of them of course. But some of them were very loud. They called us names, they harassed us, they trolled us in the forums, they insulted us as human beings. IT.WAS,TOXIC.

Granted, none of us found if fruitful to engage in such behavior so for the most part we just ignored it. Until the fandom dies and moves on to other stuff. But it was without consequence.

In the midst of this war I was writing my fics. And mind you they were good fics. Good fics about MY ship. I was doing some of my best writing in a decade when I suffered from writer’s block. I even drew fanart. I wasn’t great, but I was happy. I was happy during the darkest period of my personal life. Because my fandom made me happy. It was a temporary escape.

But the toxicity got to me. It really, really got to me. It got to me so bad I ended up deleting every piece of art I collected from DA. I deleted my fanart. I deleted my published fics. I had one fanfic, the last one I wrote for the fandom...one of the best stories I think I have ever created...there was one chapter left to finish. And you know what? I abandoned it. I can’t get myself to even look at it because it made me feel bad. Just as the toxicity that surrounded it made me feel like shit. And dammit that was one damn good story if I do say so myself.

Now that I look at it, five years later, I still can’t. I cant. It brings back bad memories. It’s like goddamn fucking PTSD.

So before you take a massive dump on someone who thinks different from you, who wants to ship different, who would like something a little different than you do...think...how is this person’s differing opinion affect MY likes? Is it justifiable for me to harass them because of it? Am I giving someone crap for something that isn’t even fucking REAL?

Are you?

A friend of mine said it best. “It doesn’t make sense. Its like hating someone because they like red, and you like blue.”

Live and let live. Seriously.

Rant over.