#creator. It’s not productive. You’re going to make being a hater of it a part of her identity most of the time. It’s going to be miserable

[cowchickenbeefpork]

you know. The true reason why I should not be in the viziepop critical circles anymore is the fact that my arguments with others in there are never normal. These circles are deeply evil. Gotham is similar in writing quality to helluva boss and yet when you go near people aware the show isn’t written good for helluva boss they are insane depraved individuals. This is the worst community ever. I got tumblr dragged for a day for saying viziepop isn’t a zoophile this is what I mean by you shouldn’t hang out with these viziepop bitches. It’s not a good life out here guys don’t even think about it

[gsl-leyready]

So I did this thing…

I have a passion for music and it’s something that I’ve loved all my life. Over the years this passion developed into me producing music just so I can immerse myself into it as deep as I could and feel a part of it, proud of my creations. Nevertheless I’ve never quite shared my love for production with many people personally as I’ve always had this overriding feeling that my production wasn’t up to scratch and I needed to hone my skills to a higher degree to be industry level like the beats placed on artists albums and mixtapes. Even so, I at least was reaching a point to where I was willing to start an online beat store and if people were willing to buy my beats online it would give me a sense that my production quality and skills were going in the right direction.

One day when I was looking for a tutorial on YouTube regarding Waves Vitamin Sonic Enhancer I came across a video created by a certain someone named Dame Taylor. I thought it was a pretty good video, decided to subscribe to his channel and thought nothing more of it. Subsequent to this, I remember receiving a notification once or twice for one of his YouTube live streams but I had ignored them choosing to divert my attention elsewhere, that is until one pivotal day returning home from shopping when I received a notification I decided to enter his livestream, boy was I in for a surprise. Challenging commenters and subscribers with letters (I one of them) or unidentifiable images in their display pics and a lack of any content on their pages (me also included) as not conveying any human elements to themselves I was instantly enthralled by the message he was pushing - #HumanGang.  I remember him saying “I don’t know what you look like, I don’t know if you’re a guy or a girl...” Finding out that he was an industry producer of some form or fashion one poignant aspect that stuck with me was when he stated that being human and a good person is a key aspect of the music industry, even more so than the beats you make being that this enables the formulation relationships and bonds within the industry. I had not heard no other YouTube creator telling their viewers anything remotely like this and this was a stark contrast to the numerous amounts of videos online portraying that you could make and sell beats online without ever even needing to show who you were.  When I heard all of this I instantly called my brother to pass on the message I had just witnessed and that he must also witness this message first hand himself. So just like that, in the relatively short amount of time I was in Dame’s live stream he had turned my whole mindset in relation to selling beats online on it’s head but yet there was still more to come.

Becoming an ardent supporter of the message Dame was pushing, I canvassed a lot of his videos and made sure to tune into his subsequent livestreams as much as I could - even with the massive 8-hour time difference with him being in California and me in the UK, with his livestreams starting at minutes after 1, 2 or even sometimes 3 in the morning. As entertaining as these subsequent livestreams were with the online shenanigans coming from Dame challenging other YouTube creators and haters going at him, there were many hidden gems to be found in the lives and the videos he posted. In these he would state how beat stores are cap being that they are essentially a rat race and online tutorials not really teaching much with you most likely being just as good or even better than the creator themselves. His advice for improving – PUSH BUTTONS! Although there was no evidence of his beats on his YouTube page his authenticity was palpable so I took the risk of believing in what he was saying, with the trust in my faith confirmed when he had begun to show snippets of his beat making qualities by making some beats in a few of his lives so I definitely knew he wasn’t gassing about his production quality as it blew my mind what I had heard, being the best sounding beats I had heard from a ‘YouTube creator’.

Nevertheless even with this all making sense and being good advice it left me with an interesting dilemma: what was I to do to reach my aspiration of being an industry level producer? Enter M – League: In a few more of his following lives Dame said that he realised that with all the advice he had given about producers not to follow YouTube tutorials he hadn’t provided a solution with commentors and subscribers asking, “So what are we going to do then Dame?” when one day to my surprise he stated that he was going to create an online music community whereby in the end he would definitely have improved one’s production skills. Although initially hesitant I quickly told myself that this was potentially a once in a lifetime opportunity and remembered the maxim, ‘If not now, when?’

So with that said on 21/02/23 I joined M-League! Our first team meeting took place 27/02/23 and ever since then to say that I’ve learned more than most of the years I’ve spent watching YouTube tutorials is an understatement. I’ve been pushed beyond my boundaries instantly and it’s made me look at my production technique in a completely different light. Not only this but Dame has also enquired about every members goals, wanting to get in touch with what really drives and moves us on our journey – totally unexpected.  Being a part of M-League I am extremely proud to represent and share a community with an amazing group of like-minded individuals who are very supportive and motivational in our common pursuit.  Finally and overall M-League has also pushed me out of my comfort zone to realise that I need to be more receptive to sharing myself with the world, such as this here. Next level.

[x--daughters-of-darkness--x]

I TALKED TO AMY LEE OF EVANESCENCE ABOUT INSPIRING THE WORLD’S WORST FANFICTION

The singer of My Immortal (the song) has now read My Immortal (the fanfic)

If you mention the name “My Immortal,” you may mean one of two things. The first is the 2003 hit song from rock band Evanescence. The second is a Harry Potter fanfic so transcendentally, mysteriously bad that it’s transfixed the internet for years.

The fanfic My Immortal is about a time-traveling mall-goth teenage vampire wizard (named “Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way”) who is obsessed with Evanescence and a variety of goth-inflected rock bands. She’s supposed to look like Amy Lee, Evanescence’s lead vocalist, pianist, and songwriter. And to this day, nobody is sure who wrote the story or whether they were serious.

Back in the real world, Lee and the rest of Evanescence have spent months under stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus pandemic. They’ve used that time to film two music videos in collaboration with director P.R. Brown, each shot by band members and their families. The latest is a surreal video for “The Game Is Over,” a song from their upcoming album The Bitter Truth. In Lee’s words, it’s shot as a “psychological thriller,” full of imagery based on a specific fear or inner demon from each member.

These videos — filmed in living rooms, cars, and other personal spaces — give fans a new kind of look into the band members’ lives. But I was curious about a different kind of fan relationship: did the creators of “My Immortal” know about My Immortal? I spoke to Lee, and the answer is yes; in fact, it’s part of a long-running family joke. She’d never actually read it, however, until last week.

You’ve made two videos under quarantine, and they’ve taken very different approaches. What was the process behind each of them?

We really had to just think kind of quickly. We were working on another video treatment that would have been full-production, this whole deal with a big crew and things we could no longer have because of the pandemic — including the fact that we couldn’t even physically get together because we live all over the world.

We recognized that “Wasted on You” had a bunch of lyrical content that felt like all of a sudden where we were. So we went for that. I really wanted it to be real on a level like people hadn’t seen us before: in our own homes, in our real lives, not dressed up, not in makeup, just the real, raw us.

For the second one, it’s like “Okay, how do we take what we’ve learned and amp it up even more to make it look like a real video more than just us being ourselves?” We have all been very serious about the lockdown, so we have been completely alone for the most part during this time — and that is cool in some ways as a creator. But you really have to live with yourself all the time.

A few of us have gone through some difficult things in the past few years. [Bassist Tim McCord] and I both experienced losses in our immediate family. There’s just been a lot of hard. So you know when you’re finally forced to stop being distracted by all the things that keep us happy, there’s silence — and that stuff comes out. So each of us had a private kind of gut-spilling confession with [P.R. Brown] about what we’re struggling with.

We were just sharing deeply in a way that we don’t normally go all the way with when it comes to at least our visuals. When I pour my lyrics into my music, it’s always really raw. But in this, it’s like, we’re not going to hold back on the video side and just make it beautiful — we’re going to go for it and let it be ugly and share the dark parts of ourselves.

I think of a lot of your music as being open and vulnerable, and you interact with fans online. What does filming a video at home like this communicate that your normal social media presence and music don’t?

I hope it just shows more and more of that willingness to be vulnerable because as hard as it is, it always leaves me feeling more satisfied than just putting on a pretty face.

Social media’s such a weird world for me. I love it — I’m grateful for the idea that we can have a direct relationship with our fans. But it’s kind of a double-edged sword. It’s such an open platform for everybody to criticize everything about you. And when you go there, you’re going to see that. I think that’s true for everybody. It doesn’t matter if you’re a celebrity or not. It’s just a place where people don’t have to show their face to say things, and there’s a lot of ugly out there.

What’s your relationship specifically with fanworks? Do people send you things that were inspired by you?

Oh my god, it’s so wonderful. We’ve got so much art. I’ve got this huge collection of stuff that I’ve been hanging on to just from the beginning. There are so many talented people out there that pour their efforts into making a piece of visual art that is either of something in the Evanescence world or just something else that came out of them while they were listening to our music.

Then there are other things that you have to keep because they’re so hilariously funny. People will make a crazy poem that makes totally no sense but I’m a character within it, which is awesome. It’s like, I know this person’s like 12 years old and totally sincere, but this is so funny. I have a little studio, and I dedicated a little bit of time during our unexpected free time to cover it wall-to-wall in the bathroom with all the fan stuff.

Which brings me to my next question: had you ever heard of My Immortal?

I think for quite a while I was just unaware of it. And then my cynical, Reddit-loving younger sister who’s also an English teacher, somewhere during the holiday every year when the family’s all together, it’ll come up for some reason. And she’s like, “Wait — you still haven’t read My Immortal?” And I’m like, “No, what do you mean?” She’s like, “You have to. Okay, hold on. Let me read you an excerpt.” And then she’ll pull up her phone and read some awesome paragraph from the craziest, funniest thing ever that makes no sense.

It’s one of her favorite things that she thinks is the most hilarious thing in the world, and I still just kept not reading it. It’s been kind of this ongoing joke with us. And then I got a call a few days ago that you wanted to talk about it, so I was like, “Oh, crap. I have to read a little bit of it.”

I read I think not quite half of it, but it did have me in tears. I was laughing really, really hard at one point, just because of the nonsense. And then I started asking myself, is this real? I can’t quite tell. I’m totally undecided. Is it sincere? I feel like it started maybe as sincere, but they got in on it and started playing it up for the haters. I can’t tell! What do you think?

It would have to be so elaborate, but there are a bunch of cases that really make it seem like this person knows much, much more than the character they’re putting on.

I noticed a misspelling that was like, instead of triumphantly, it was “triumelephantly.” And I was like, come on, you don’t think “elephant” is inside “triumphant.” There’s no way.

At one point, the main character’s name is spelled two different ways within three words of each other.

I totally saw that, too! I’m torn because I want it to be sincere, kind of... but I don’t know.

There are things about it that aren’t cool to talk about. Like it’s not funny to talk about slitting your wrists. So it takes me a second to get past that joke, which is so recurring.

Yeah, if you go back to old internet culture, a lot of it is really ugly. And it’s weird trying to separate that stuff out.

Is it better now?

I don’t know because now I’m too old to know what’s going on. But kids do seem nicer. They often seem nicer.

I would like to believe we’ve grown up a little bit as a society from that. Maybe everybody having a little bit more of a microphone has taught us some things that we need to be aware of that are outside of our perception and our personal experiences. There are other people that are seeing that in a different way. I think it would be cool if that’s true.

I was a teenager around when My Immortal came out, and it feels like it describes a very recognizable “goths versus preps” rivalry. Did you feel that?

I think this thing is poking fun at that world — I mean it would have to be, come on — and that part of it really resonates with me in a real way. But I didn’t consider myself goth! Part of what’s weird and funny is like okay, this is describing hating the preps, and you’re the cool one, you’re the underground, you understand real life and the gravity of death, and I get it. But if you’re so depressed and everything’s so hard and you’re so real and they’re so fake, why do you put so much effort into your look?

That was what always turned me off about the word “goth” when that started being assigned to me in our early days. If I was 15 years old and you’d asked me what I was, I’m grunge. I buy all my clothes at garage sales, I don’t do crap to my look, I get ready two seconds before school, and all the preps are the ones who put all their focus on their looks and what party they’re going to go to.

But yeah, that part was funny to me. That part existed.

I love the idea of you knowing about this thing for years without having read it.

I kind of want to thank you because I did get a really good laugh out of it last night. It’s not like, when I have free time, I’m motivated to go read some horribly bad thing. But it’s actually pretty interesting.

And you’ve gotta love all the characters breaking into song to sing My Chemical Romance songs. It’s pretty great.

[goatyuzuru]

Thoughts on 2018/2019 Season

Actually, I am supposed to be on a figure skating fast because I want to take a break, take a step back, and remove my feelings from this sport. It’s helped me a lot this week. But I think before I refast, I want to say I’m just so glad this season is finally over. The way the corruption of this sport escalated was beyond what I even expected. I knew about the corruption, the politicking, the amusement of the way judges score skaters, however, I didn’t think it took less than 1 season for it to get to a new level. I see skaters getting low 80s to mid 90s throughout 1 season. I see robbing everywhere. I see selective calls. I know it will not change even after this season ended, but having this off season will allow me to breathe.

Over the past weeks of grieving about World Championships 2019 Men’s event results, I am now in a mix of stages among bargaining/depression/acceptance. I think I ranted too much on twitter and Planet Hanyu last two weeks that I don’t think I need to talk about my denial or anger stages. 

Bargaining

There were many what ifs that went through my mind during these couple of weeks.

“What if Yuzu was never injured? not at cor 2018, not at nhk 2017, or not even his many other injuries that he’s decided to never share with the public? He would probably have been invincible by now.” But that is such an unrealistic and greedy expectation for an elite skater. Also, Yuzu is a human who simply makes the most out of what he has. I don't want to think of him as invincible or superhuman. We are all human who think we are subhuman trying to be superhuman. Yuzu is already inspirational by being his full potential. He allows me to love both the weak Yuzuru and the strong Yuzuru.  

“What if I never discovered Yuzu in 2016? What if I never discovered figure skating in 2010? When I first came to know Yuzu I thought because he won so much, the sport actually rewards talent. After a while I slowly discovered the ugly truth that even when he did win a lot in his life, he’s been robbed and underscored chronically. It was he who earned those titles, snatched those scores off from the judges’ dirty hands, challenged the system, and fought his way to be above the scoring corruption and above the sport. So when I found out the truth about what this sport really is, I really wished I never knew about it.” But then to know Yuzu is also one of the best things that happened to me. He inspired me as a person in so many ways. And to know Yuzu means I have known what true figure skating is. There is real figure skating in Yuzuru Hanyu and the figure skating that ISU is promoting. 

“What if he never won at PyeongChang? That might have been better for me to quit watching figure skating at that time." But that would be super selfish and stupid. The gold medal is one of the best compensations that happened to Yuzu throughout his competitive life as a skater.

“What if he retired after PC? The sport doesn’t deserve him. Everyone benefited from his presence except the man himself.” But I am not Yuzu and I can’t walk his journey. I can’t feel his pain or happiness so how would I know he won’t still enjoy his difficult road ahead. 

“What if Yuzu changes the way he skates? What if he tries to go with Nathan’s or Vincent’s strategy? The system doesn’t judge program components correctly or penalize incorrect techniques, so why bother following the rules when you’re not rewarded? Or "what if he changes his nationality to Canada, Japan doesn’t deserve him anyway?” But I realize from Yuzu’s interviews that while he hates losing the most, he would never change himself in order to win. I realize that it is as hard for Yuzu to empty his program for the jumps as Nathan delivering a complete program. Likewise, it is as hard for Yuzu to cheat his techniques as Vincent trying to correct his. And even if Yuzu did all of these things Nathan or Vincent did, he isn’t an American to get this treatment. Yuzu isn’t the one who should change, should lower his standard. It is the ISU, the judges, the tech panelist, the federations. Yuzu does not need a new passport to win. He did it before to be beyond the corruption, he can possibly do it again. 

After bargaining so much, I realized none of the what ifs will do any good for Yuzu, for the other skaters, for the sport, or myself. I was led to a stage of depression.

Depression 

I guess to many spectators, the scoring discourses on social media and among fandoms seem very silly or “not that deep”. But as someone who thoroughly invest my time, energy, and emotion as a fan for it, I find the necessity in having these voices so that even if the scores don’t stand or the system collapses, the true figure skaters can be remembered, the message of unfairness can be reached to new fans. Seeing myself, who is this much invested into the sport just as a fan, I wonder how much more the many figure skaters, who’ve gone through such pressure and discipline, financial hardship and injuries, emotional breakdowns and sacrifices, have been robbed of their potential titles/scores/sponsorships.

The problem I’m seeing is not only the skaters who don’t benefit from the corruption are negatively affected, the skaters who benefit from the corruption also get hate from many people. Look, I don’t hate the American skaters like Nathan/Vincent/Bradie or the Russian skaters from Eteri camp/Samarin...etc. When I don’t like someone’s skating I am usually just indifferent to them, meaning I don’t bother following them. That’s simple; if you don’t like something, you stop watching it. The problem is these skaters are being shoved into my faces and the way they are being overscored robbed me of my enjoyment for the sport because I find it unfair. That’s also very simple. So I hate to see people generalizing all of the rants are coming from a place of biasness or antis. That is not true. Also, as soon as you are a fan of certain skater, in my case a Yuzuru Hanyu’s fan, you are automatically being labeled as a sore loser or hater. The thing is, many fans who truly study figure skating would agree that the scores don’t match with what are being seen. But it happens that they might be a smaller part of a fandom and don’t get too vocal about this. So instead of seeing everyone as an obsessive fanyu, perhaps the reason many of them fight so hard is to see someone like Yuzuru Hanyu, who is the epitome of a figure skater, gets rewarded deservedly. Perhaps it’s because we value great technique and great skating and the skaters who won happen to not have those? I think it is fair to say a lot of people would get hurt because their favorite skaters did not win and the initial reaction could be a bit overwhelming. That’s normal. But if what they are witnessing in the sport that led to their criticism are fair, they should have the right to vocalize their criticism in order for justice to be heard, especially the rulebook to back their criticism. 

Yet over and over, no matter how reasonable many people have been. No matter how much effort in putting up videos to compare skaters’ programs or to explain the discrepancies in the way the tech panel called or didn’t call certain elements, the ISU and general public decide to be ignorant about it. They create their own narratives or put up media play to benefit themselves. They take down videos to remove the evidences. I even think of proposals on how to change the scoring system/format. Maybe the skaters shouldn’t get the scores right after they skate? Maybe we should only have 1 panel of the same judges? Maybe the judges/tech need more time to review the elements and program components? Maybe ice scopes should be inplemented for all jumps and in all countries. Every single element will be put into video cuts for the judges and tech to review and mark the bullets accordingly so the GOEs will autopopulate? The definitions in the rulebooks need to be given more objective, quantative metrics based on collective data or stats? Maybe the scores should be temporarily announced 2 hours after the competition (if the scores get announced later, the competition will be shortened) and the public can vote for what scores need to be reviewed. They can ask the judges to write a review at the end of the day on why they score the elements/PC and if the public do not agree they judges will get a strike. After 3 strikes in their career, the judges will be banned from judging? If any fed decides to bribe the public, at least someone can report it? I thought about all of these possibilities...

And I realize the products are not going to change as long as the creator isn’t willing. There will always be some loopholes.

Acceptance

I am slowly accepting all of this, what I cannot do and what I can do. Accepting neither means that I am agreeing with the results or scores nor normalizing the way the sport plays out. I only know that I cannot change the way ISU/feds politicking or how the general public’s view about certain skaters/achievement stans bandwagon on the glory of its beneficiaries' achievements. But what I know is I will not give them what they want: my attention/money/support. I don’t want to give attention to the undeserving skaters whom I feel like they try to promote. Rather than giving these skaters attention through my ranting, instead, I can just go back to how I should, which is stop watching them. It will be hard since Yuzu will be competing against some of these skaters and that I will follow his career as long as he allows me to, which makes it inevitable that I would see other skaters somehow. But if I would just really ignore, it would allow me to stop feeding on my hatred/bitterness toward other skaters, who aren’t bad people and are pretty talented per se, and just support Yuzu as his fan. I want to spread the love so that even if he perhaps might not always win or get the highest scores on paper, his greatness could still be felt and seen. Because of the love that is spread for Yuzu on twitter, Olympic Channel acknowledges him as the biggest star. Laureus twitter now actively tweets about him. Figure Skating is such a low profile sport but Yuzu is often compared to other greats like Rogers Federer or Tiger Woods (lol) or even Ronaldo by commentators. That shows how he really beyond this sport.

At the end of the day, I console myself that whatever Yuzu has achieved does not even define everything about how great he is as a skater. So I will just try my best to enjoy his career when I can. 

[hannahlovestheatre]

Riverdale + Heathers = how very...(a good rant and review)

Ok so to start off if you're someone who doesn't watch Riverdale and only watched it solely to watch this episode because you thought it would be "trash" or you were politely curious or whateva whateva, here's a small, spoiler free synopsis of what's been going on this season...

This season of Riverdale has had a hard focus on cults and a massive drug possession. The people running this cult are complete wackadoos and Betty Cooper is determined to stop them as they have taken her mom and sister and also they are bringing out the worst in the citizens of Riverdale and ya know KILLING SOME OF THEM. The cult branches out from a creepy board game come to life called Gryphons and Gargoyles but we don't have to touch on that as much. The drug thing is all on Veronica Lodge's father but her mom has been helping on the side and so has Jughead's mom. Everyone in the town is turning against each other and it's been hard to find trust in people that don't see things through the eyes of "The Farm" or are trying to distribute some strong ass drugs.

Tbh that's not even a good description but it gives some good background on the main points of drugs and cults. Now...

Heathers is a world renowned CULT classic movie. The creators clearly used the term to their advantage (literally the only people to applaud at the end of the school's production were the MEMBERS OF THE CULT) and once again connected their characters to the characters of another piece of work and saw this as another opportunity to do a musical episode considering their Carrie one was a success for them even though it wasn't everyone's favorite, but of course I liked it, and Heathers is now a staple to the world of musical theatre.

I think that the Heathers episode was executed a lot better than the Carrie one. I appreciated the Carrie one more because that musical is so slept on and they were able to get the word out about it. But the Carrie episode was more focused on being an episode about the school musical and showed more of the rehearsal process and what the numbers looked like in their production rather than incorporating the songs into real life to make them seem more relatable. The Heathers episode actually incorporated itself into the current storyline of the show and helped tie up some loose ends with the relationships of this season. All the songs they used supported the conflicts and state of mind for each character. They didn't even have the cast sing songs that their Heathers characters sing like for example Betty and Jughead sang Seventeen even though Betty was cast as Duke and Jughead isn't even in the show (we will touch on this later because I think my puddle of tears is still in the living room). They also heard our prayers to have Casey Cott sing more and then threw Cole Sprouse in there to make it even better. (Thanks Riverdale creators!)

Long story short, it seemed more like if Glee were doing a Heathers episode which I stan hard as I am the biggest gleek to ever gleek.

I think they picked all the right songs, Fight For Me was the biggest surprise choice to me but I liked what they did with it again for context sake. If they had found a way to add Freeze Your Brain, The Me Inside of Me, and/or Shine a Light I would have been interested in seeing that. It also would have been cool to see I Say No (Betty would have nailed it as she is saying a big fat no to this cult).

I also wasn't as mad about them using the lyric changes that are in the school edition because it hit me. This is a HIGH SCHOOL putting on a production of HEATHERS THE MUSICAL. Since most schools would either get a big checkmark in the NO box to even put on the show, if a school did get the clear to put on Heathers, they would 100% have to do the school edition. So ya know what haters, they're actually being realistic with the production they actually got the rights to put on. It makes so much sense coming from a hardcore theatre nerd like myself.

Yes I would say some of the cast was autotuned but my mom thought everyone was a great singer and she was very genuine in that comment. Casey Cott, Lilli Reinhart, and Camila Medes are definitely the most polished but Vanessa Morgan, KJ Apa, Madelaine Petsch, Ashleigh Murray, and COLE SPROUSE are also very strong singers. They have more guts to sing this hard score than most people do in community theatre productions of Heathers.

I do think the casting of their musical was mostly spot on only I didn't really see Josie playing Veronica. But going back to my point on the episode not really touching on the actual musical production of Heathers that's happening, it didn't really matter. They pretty much never showed her singing Veronica's stuff so it went right over my head. I think Toni could have been a great Veronica as her Dead Girl Walking had spot on interpretation but actually Betty could have knocked it out of the park as Veronica and Toni could have been Duke to heighten the conflict between her and Cheryl at the time. They didn't HAVE to do it this way because they know the show better than we do but if I were casting Hearthers with Riverdale characters, that's where my head was going.

I know everyone said Betty should be McNamara and Veronica should be Duke but as I watched the episode, I realized everyone based that off looks because McNamara's dad is "LOADED" and the poor girl tries to kill herself because of what goes on outside of the social circle aka literally what Veronica is going through on the show right now. It all clicked. I believed her when she sang Lifeboat. And Betty is a low key savage. She isn't thirsty for Cheryl's power in real life but she does want to make a statement and be heard and to win this battle over the town cult. It made sense once I saw it in front of me.

Cheryl is Heather Chandler. Period.

And again they didn't really focus on their actual production of Heathers and that particular cast but let me say this rn. If Cole Sprouse does not play JD at any point on the future, the world is cancelled. I really didn't think he would ever sing in these kind of episodes or at all, because the show does have the actors perform on occasion. However, when they announced this was happening, I had a glimmer of hope that Jughead would play JD because it makes so much sense...and then he didn't...and then he sang Seventeen anyways and broke my fucking heart. I'm not sure if he really was singing the entire time because the man went up an entire octave between the verse and the chorus but man I was picturing a future production of Heathers starring Cole Sprouse and Lilli Reinhart. It needs to happen. This was literally 2 minutes of the episode and idek if y'all feel the same way but man it wrecked my emotions and my OG Disney Channel stan was losing her mind over Cole Sprouse singing her favorite song from Heathers.

It's 11:47 PM so I need to wrap this up before I fall asleep and forget everything lol.

As a wrap up, I really liked this musical episode and I really liked the other one but it really grinds my effin gears when people jump to conclusions because theatre people aren't doing theatre things. Theatre is inclusive. The arts are inclusive. We can't close our walls to the select few people that "got our criteria to be in the community" (oh wait, isn't that like a cult...? I guess their plan worked).

If you've seen my other posts you know I could rant about this topic for days but long story short, if you aren't willing to not just be a part of the community and welcome everyone in and accept everything as its separate entities but still have your opinions on it without jumping to conclusions...did you eat a brain tumor for breakfast because what's your damage? ❤💛💚💙

[ghostmartyr]

...I have lost my temper, so this is all going under a cut despite the fact that some of it clearly needs to be shouted into people’s ears. This is pure hate for a fandom I am not part of, because I hate it. Reasonableness not found.

It’s about ship hate.

Specifically, shipper hate. And why NO.

Buckle the fuck in.

...So I don’t spend time in the fandom anymore. I hate it.

But I unfortunately have friends. So I hear stuff.

So. Uh.

I despise the Eren and Historia ship with all of my heart.

Meanwhile, the people who also hate it are so fucking loud and obnoxious that I can’t hate it in peace without feeling tainted by their inability to leave people the fuck alone.

(ETA: ...Several hours later, wow. I was not kidding about losing my temper. The below was crossed out originally, and for the sake of continuity I won’t delete it, but good grief, me. Calm down. You’re not helping.)

Stop sending people hate. You take away my ability to peacefully fantasize about my NOTP burning to a fucking crisp, and you make the general perception in the fandom that anyone who cares about queer rep in the fandom is a raving jackass.

Is that remotely true? No. Does fandom perception function on truth? Also no.

Also, when people get hate, spite becomes a motivator.

Thanks guys. You’ve made the fandom even more full of that thing we can’t stand. Wow, gee, why are so many more people in favor of this ship I hate now?

Gee, I fucking wonder.

People do not stop being invested because you send them hate. Or they do, which is actually awful. Fandom’s fun. It is supposed to be fun. Let the people who haven’t completely fallen to the hate in their hearts actually have a good fucking time and leave them the fuck alone.

I hate this ship. So fucking much. But do you know what happens when I try to hate it at the moment? I feel guilty! Because every single person who actually likes it has to put up with this crap! You people being assholes is interfering with my quiet, simmering hate, and it’s annoying.

(I got calmer as things went on, so that’s crossed out in the spirit of giving people the option of ignoring the vitriol. ...There’s. Still a lot of vitriol. But. The above is probably the worst?)

And you know what? If canon were to actually make it a thing, yeah, there would be some very serious reasons to complain. But you know what else? Right now, you’re complaining about something that isn’t canon. Because it is not fucking canon. You aren’t complaining about a worrying trope within a product of mainstream media.

You’re complaining about other fans enjoying themselves in a way you don’t like.

Does it suck that the whole fucking Historia fandom would prefer shipping her with every single male character over her ending up with a girlfriend? Yes.

Does shouting at the people who still know how to have fun change how much that sucks? Not really.

Look. I hate this fandom. With all of my fucking heart. I don’t belong in it. People don’t like me, and none of the things I care about are things that it values. I spend every second I’m forced to think about this fandom consumed with hatred for life in general. Is that healthy? No. Hence the leaving.

Don’t take away people’s joy. Ever. Even if it’s for something you hate. They need it just as badly as you need yours.

Find your joy again instead of trying to tear someone else’s down. If you succeed, you ruin someone’s day/week/life. If you don’t, they’ll probably create more of that thing you hate. Which doesn’t help you in any way, shape, or form.

I would kill to find a reasonable discussion about wanting Historia to be a lesbian and being disappointed that fandom has zero interest in that. I would kill to find a serious discussion on how fucked up it is that the manga appears to have killed her girlfriend off-screen and impregnated her. Regardless of anything else, she is queer. Hell, she could be head over heels in love with NPC Farmer Guy, and she’d still be queer, and the narrative problems with her arc as it appears would still be worthy of critical discussion.

And instead of that content existing, people keep screaming at fans of a non-canon m/f pairing.

Which, even if it were canon, would be a jerk move.

Pairings being canon means that you can shout about them without hating their fanbase. That’s really the only change, but it is a significant one. When a pairing is canon, that means shouting about it is shouting about canon. When pairings aren’t canon, shouting about them means that you are shouting at their fanbase.

One of those is okay. Unless the shouting leads to direct content with the creators. The other is straight up being a dick.

Not everyone who likes m/f is homophobic. Hell, some people just like Eren and Historia together. Is that a fun thought? No. Is Eren the only character Historia has significant canon interaction with? Pretty fucking much. People will ship anything that stands in the same room long enough. It comes down to personal preference.

Most people do not have personal preferences that lead them to f/f. It sucks. Shouting about it is not going to change that. You can talk about why that is, and why misogyny and homophobia combine with discussion of queer female characters and why that doubly sucks.

People will still ship the thing you don’t like.

At best, you might make them feel ashamed about it.

Awesome. More people feeling like they’re not allowed to love the things they love.

Historia Reiss is a queer character. The entire fandom regularly screams about how she never actually had feelings for Ymir. Currently, her arc involves her girlfriend dying off-screen while she herself is coerced into pregnancy.

So, you know. Let’s complain about how people want Eren and Historia to bang. That’s clearly the problem.

Again, I hate the ship! I hate that half its shippers appear to be following me and I have no idea why (....no offense, I’m sure you’re all wonderful people, I just have a lot of hate I’m really sorry thanks for the likes)! I hate that it’s difficult to find fans who want Historia to be gay! I hate that the one person I’ve seen wanting her to be asexual said that Ymir and Historia weren’t canon! I hate that before I left, every single damn fan of Historia who cared about Historia as a person, not an accessory, seemed to be cheering for the possibility of Eren and Historia!

But you know what I hate most?

I can’t find anyone who feels that way who has remembered to treat their fellow fans with respect. The people I know who have my preferences? I know that because they scream and shout at people. They tag their hate, they send anonymous messages, and generally make people feel like garbage for enjoying a thing.

I can’t even want Ymir and Historia to end up together without feeling guilty, because I know if that happens, everyone who happens to like a m/f ship involving Historia is going to get crapped on.

I’ve wanted Historia to be a lesbian since I started this series, and I am now in a place where I feel bad for wanting that, because the people interested in her being other sections of the spectrum get treated so terribly.

The honest truth is that I left the fandom because psychologically, I am a disaster, and everything being shouted back and forth hit too close to home. I can’t handle it. I don’t expect to ever touch it again outside of my bubble, because every brush I’ve had with it since makes me miserable.

What triggered this mess of temper was one of my friends commenting that someone I know got hate for making some kind of graphic. He used hyperbolic language about how “oh so they did this so that means they’re murdering gay people.”

I don’t hold that against him, but the reason it set me off is because the perception is that people upset with Historia being the m/f bicycle of the fandom are whiny brats who deserve to be unhappy and are overreacting to homophobia that doesn’t exist.

And it’s just... anon hate is never okay. It helps nothing, and hurts people. Including the people sending it. Putting that darkness in your soul into action is just going to make it worse.

But part of what that hate has done is... it’s made it so the loudest voices of the people upset over Historia and the problems with her treatment are anonymous haters who make people who like the wrong ship cry.

That. is not a helping thing.

Historia’s portrayal in the manga is a damn concerning thing. The fact that people still argue that she never had feelings for Ymir is a very concerning thing.

The fact that people ship her with Eren might be frustrating, and even hurtful with the reminder that the majority of the fandom definitely does not want Historia to be gay, but it is very much not the thing to be loud and worried over (especially because, again, non-canon, so you’re really just picking on the fanbase itself, which has zero point except for meanness).

Maybe I’m imagining it, since I left. Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about, since my little corner is so distant.

But what it feels like is that people complaining about homophobia has become synonymous with whiny brats with no respect for fandom boundaries. Because the people complaining about homophobia loudest are acting like whiny brats with no respect for fandom boundaries.

And that is a problem.

Homophobia still exists. Lesbophobia still exists. Biphobia still exists. From my limited contact before I left, I know that those last two are at war instead of holding hands, because they’ve fundamentally misunderstood what each side is upset about.

(Side bar I guess: People upset about lesbophobia are upset about lesbians being treated like crap. People upset about biphobia are upset about bisexuals being treated like crap.

Not wanting a queer female character to like men does not equal hating bisexuals. Wanting a queer female character to like men does not equal hating lesbians.

Meanwhile, at this point, if Historia is ever given a canon sexual identity beyond liking Ymir, a lot of people are going to be hurt for personal reasons that have nothing to do with their respect for various sexualities. Having your hopes dashed sucks. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. You should be allowed to feel however you want about fiction in peace.

Which leads us back to me wanting Historia to just fucking die so that no side will ever have the option of harassing another because “ha ha we were right you all suck.”

Just. Just kill the queer. It will be so much less awful that way. Kill her now.

I need this series to end and the tags to accidentally be deleted. Or on purpose, whatever works.)

Going back to... yeah.

As much as we all like to think we’re reasonable people who use our heads, when something does not actively affect you, it is easy to start taking it as seriously as you take that thing’s spokesperson.

So the fact that the apparent spokespeople for lesbophobia in the SnK fandom are a bunch of rabid anons lacking in basic respect?

That... is really sadness-inducing.

You’ve taken an understandable pain and twisted it into a frothing hate that does nothing but hurt people.

Please don’t do that.

Be hurt. Be upset.

But be kind. For the sake of yourselves, and for the sake of the things you’re trying to champion. It’ll go better.

(...And on that note, I’m really sorry for all the yelling. Which probably made a few people who didn’t deserve it feel bad. I am just a very angry person, and. ...When I say I left for a reason, this is that reason. Every behavior I’m critical of is something I have felt a thousand times worse in my heart. I want to be a bad person more than anyone in this damn fandom.

But sorry for the yelling. I know most of you guys have nothing to do with any of this. Hell, I’m not even in the fandom, so who knows if what I’m screaming about is accurate.)

[pacificwanderer]

Given how people reacted to Rey being a nobody, it's no wonder Disney kept her parentage a secret from the audience till the second movie. Imagine if TFA was blatantly presented as an introductory film about a young protagonist who was not a Skywalker and who would take center stage over the OT trio. Most old school fanboys would not have remained interested. Her potentially being Luke or Han’s daughter was mainly what generated so much interest in the sequel trilogy over the last two years.

Hey Nonnie,

Yeah, I see what you’re saying. They kind of bit themselves in the ass a bit considering how emotionally invested certain parts of the fandom were (and then super let down after the fact). I mean, Daisy has been out there preaching that “Rey is enough on her own” and “she doesn’t have to come from some great lineage because she’s an amazing character on her own” etc, but people wanted to cry foul or say that it was just JJ lying, or whatever. So much of that was the fandom working really hard to not see what was in front of them in order to confirm their biases and play along with the story they concocted inside their head.

Though personally, I was emotionally invested because of Reylo HAHA so I don’t know if that was intentional on their part either.

Headcanons are fun, but if they change into something that makes it impossible for you to enjoy the franchise as it actually is, then it might be time to take a step back and reevaluate. Nostalgia is intense so many haters aren’t remembering SW for what it really is (a silly, fun, space soap opera with laser swords, space wizards that’s targeted at kids) and then getting mad at the current product when it doesn’t live up to their childhood feelings.

Also, it’s okay to grow up and realize that you don’t like something anymore. It happens. But lashing out at the creators for not making the vision you had inside of your head is irrational. It’s impossible for them to live up to everyone’s headcanons; hell, even the most “popular” ideas following TFA didn’t line up with each other at all, so they kind of doomed themselves.

I walked out of TFA and felt like I did when I watched the OT for the first time as a kid–better even. I finally got to feel what it has felt like for many of the OT fans (to see themselves represented as the hero on screen or, at least, someone who I would have looked up to as the hero when I was a little girl), and I hope more people are able to experience the same as the series evolves.

I really think they’re going to keep pushing new narratives with SW heading forward, which means breaking out of this defined mold of what a SW movie is “supposed” to feel like, which is great because it means new stories for us and also (hopefully) better representation so that everyone can feel like they’re a part of the GFFA and not just one type of person.

Change is hard, for many reasons, but in order for SW to survive as a franchise (that is, be successful outside of Western countries, where it’s predominantly popular), they need to adapt.

Thanks for the chat, Nonnie!

[redandfranticfeelings]

'tag things making fun of doug' because your personal enjoyment of an abuser's content should supersede the feelings of the people he abused by making them act out rape jokes? the fact that making fun of an abuser upsets you because you like him warrants some serious self-examination on your part. 'you can't make fun of an abuser around me bc i like his content and you can't criticize me bc mental illness' is some wendycorduroy shit. i'm surprised you'd do this given how critical you are of her.

and yes, people are allowed to not like you for still liking the show. ofc people can have problematic interests if they want, but content that has been directly used by its creators to abuse people is a special kind of bad. you’re allowed to like it, but guilt tripping people or implying they’re not allowed to dislike the fact that you still support it is incredibly callous to the people rob, doug, and mike abused. this is not, nor should it be, about your feelings. this is about the victims.             

you know what. upon further consideration, those asks were not kindly phrased. my intention was to emphasize that because the anniversary movies were vessels for abuse (injuries, rape jokes, etc) it was inappropriate to prioritize one’s own feelings over the feelings of the victims or block out criticism, but i phrased them in a way that was not productive and was attacking you. i’m sorry for my wording and for being a dick          

thank you for your follow up apology. i see where youre coming with this but i think there’s a few things that i can point towards me not giving up on the show altogether.

short answer: while i detest the way the company has been run and is executing public relations, and i am uncomfortable watching any video on their channel and have not done such for weeks, and i really want the harmed ex-producers to receive justice, i still believe there is a shred of hope for the show based on what recent producers have said, and that doug can reform himself by owning up to his deliberate ignorance, neglect, and egotism, though he is not the biggest abuser in this situation. i have a lot of emotional history with NC that means i need time before i’m able to drop the show altogether, if i ever can, and i just want to avoid anything that isn’t constructive and just intended to make anybody feel bad for liking the show/movies before this information was widely known.

long answer:

most of the criticism lauded against doug isnt so much being the direct abuser but being complacent and ignorant of people’s health. if i recall correctly, while it was a pretty unnecessary and terrible joke to make in my opinion, he didn’t pick up that the drill scene in TBF made anybody uncomfortable at the time? and in recent years he seems more concerned about what his cast undergoes, and a lot of them have said that he does ask about jokes that might hurt them and make sure they’re comfortable. i believe he apologized for it and acknowledged his naievity in the movie’s commentary but restating that apology would be beneficial now, yeah.

while complacency and ignorance is bad, i think he has been neglectful, not directly abusive. also, idk if you meant this, but your phrasing makes it kinda sound like his projects were intended as a means to abuse people; the abuse happened because of the movies, yeah, but it was because of doug being egotistical and ignorant, not malicious. the content of the movies reflect’s doug’s massive ego but it doesn’t reflect a desire to abuse anybody. if he did the shit that mike michaud or mike ellis did, that would be inexcusable for me and i would have lost hope for him.

if anybody is definitely abusive, it’s the CEO, who i love watching get bashed because he is indeed a sexist verbally abusive asshole who holds the power in the company and is using it for his stupid selfish needs. it’s also been stated that doug is restricted by his contract with the CEO and could just straight up not be able to make videos if he stepped out of turn, so while i wish he would use his walkout power more, he doesn’t have as much power as some people attribute to him. he’s complicit in abuse but i don’t think that’s the same as being abusive? the producers themselves seem to go back and forth about how they feel about him but a recurring theme is that he’s tragically ignorant of abuse, but not on the same level of abusive as michaud, if they call him abusive at all (most just seem to feel betrayed by him).

additionally, almost all creators who have worked with him in the past couple of years, have stated they had generally positive experiences with the network, even the ones who are now leaving. the only thing that seems to remain an issue is the awful, awful PR (that apology sucked, i criticized it myself) and the lack of communication towards anybody not chicago-based. i feel they need to ditch michaud (which probably won’t be easy, since he’s a shady capitalist fuck), formally apologize and maybe provide compensation for past producers who were abused by the higher-ups, and either improve relations or just restrict everything to NC, because at this point that’s the only show that’s going to be left if they don’t get their shit together anyway. but i do think that if they just take the easy solution of apologizing, even though it’s already way too late and they royally fucked themselves over, things can be a little better.

i’m also not against criticizing doug for not speaking out, because the least he could do is apologize at least privately and i’ve even emailed him imploring him to do at least that (i don’t expect a response though lmao). i just get hurt at people attacking the show and movies as being terrible and something no fan should like. a lot of people really attached to the series before this blew up, and for the most part the content of the show doesn’t reflect the behind-the-scenes issues.

i’m spreading relevant information on twitter regarding abuse and producers’ feelings, but so many people (obviously not the producers, but the fans/haters) involved in this are more concerned with just shitting on doug bc they don’t like him and a lot are trying to make him out as worse than he is. i want to spread what the producers say because i trust them, but i’m wary of fans who seem to just be in it for the drama or bc they never liked NC and they wanna spite people who did (yes, those people exist, they mocked me on kiwifarms).

i know this isn’t about me, but i’ve invested a lot of money and time and emotional energy in the show, it’s introduced me to new friends, and it’s been directly and indirectly responsible for some of my highest and lowest points of the past year and a half. my comfort ship has been very helpful in helping my loneliness. it gave me something to look forward to every day. not to pull the autism card, but it’s difficult for me to drop a special interest very easily and i’m jealous of people who can. i need time to grow entirely out of it if i can.

but even still, i haven’t watched a NC episode in weeks, even the new ones, due to my discomfort and shame towards the show and network (only NC thing i watched lately was the hyper q&a, which is on tamara’s channel, and i used it to fall asleep). i unsubscribed, and i really i only care about a few aspects of the show anyway.

if you want to hate me because i can’t immediately remove NC from my heart then fine, but if so, just unfollow me. i don’t want people to not post NC criticism, and i fully endorse spreading relevant information because i care about the victims and i want them to receive justice. i just want hate tagged so i, personally, do not have to be constantly reminded that a show that is/was close to my heart has so many awful things behind it, even if i’m not sure if i still love it anymore. and while i have been a bit guilt-trippy in the past i’ve been confronted on that already and i’m trying not to come across that way, and i’m sorry for having been manipulative at all. i’m paranoid about being abandoned and hated just for having watched this show but unless you’re like, a super close friend of mine, you can unfollow any time you want.

[dailyexo]

[NEWS] 170825 Billboard: “How EXO's 'The War' Came Together: A Song-By-Song Breakdown With the Band, Its Producers & More”

A behind-the-scenes look at what went into making summer's hottest K-pop album.

From the frenetic synths of “Going Crazy” to the dreamlike melodies of “Walk on Memories,” EXO's latest album, The War, held nothing back from fans. Pulling inspiration from funk, reggae, EDM, trap and more, then weaving it all together through top-notch production, it proved a logical progression in their sonic journey and a summer-friendly successor to the group's darker previous album, Ex'Act.

With The War, EXO topped Billboard's World Albums chart for two consecutive weeks and went on to sell over 1 million copies globally, proving that the EXO-L fandom is sticking around for the boy band's evolution.

Learn what went into the hottest K-pop album of the summer from the members themselves and some of the producers behind its hottest tracks.

“The Eve”

Mike Woods: I was one of the producers on “The Eve” which was originally titled “Black Dress.” I wrote it alongside Kevin White, Andrew Bazzi and Henry Lau. Originally the song was for Henry Lau's project, but we all felt that it going to EXO would be best for everyone as it was a perfect record for them. The sound came about from us wanting something sexy and melodic, but also performance driven. We wanted to paint a dark and mysterious vibe, hence the title “Black Dress.” We wrote the song during a writing camp for SM [Entertainment] -- we basically write one to two songs a day for about 10 days and see what we come up with. “The Eve” came about on the fourth day of the camp and only took us one day to complete, from conception of music and lyrics to the final composition. We recorded the demo for the song the same day of conception.

“Ko Ko Bop”

Styalz Fuego: I went out to Seoul early November last year. It was maybe 10 of us ... and basically we were all put in the the SM studios for a couple of weeks. It was my first time out there. [You're] basically hearing a quick [overview] of the whole scene and everything that's going on in K-pop and then you're put in the rooms every day to just write songs. “Ko Ko Bop” was maybe the fourth of fifth day in. The first couple of days I was trying to get a hang of [it.] I listened to a lot of K-pop, but still, it's a different scene to write a song [for] because it's so much more complex. [K-pop songs] have so many more moving components to them, than say, if you're out in L.A. writing, trying to make things very simple and trying to get to the core of the lyric and have the beat as simple as possible.

I kinda knew as soon as we'd done the song and we played it back for everyone, just from the response we got to the song it was gonna be something, but I had no idea it'd be [EXO's]. Going into writing that song, it was basically to do something with the reggae feel, that was the main thing we were aiming for. It took a whole different direction with the crazy drop section after the chorus. We went into this doing a reggae-pop song and it transformed into what it is.

I don't think it was ever for EXO -- I think it was more for a female group. Shaylen [Carroll, co-producer] did the demo. When they did the playback for everyone at SM, [we thought] they would essentially understand this is for one of the girl groups. A girl is singing it and it's in the range of what the girls can sing. The song was actually in a higher key -- I think three semitones higher -- so it was more fitted for a female [group] originally.

But I guess it worked out well because we had a few of our voices in the song spread out, so I guess when they started picking where the song could go, it made sense for EXO because there are so many different sections vocally.

Shaylen Carroll: I wrote the lyrics and melodies with Tay Jasper, then I sang the demo. It's a “feel good” type of track, so the melodies came easily. Styalz's stuff is easy to write to. When I was recording some melody ideas I kept on singing nonsense phrases and one was “Shimmy shimmy Ko Ko Bop,” which we all thought was super quirky and catchy. So we built off that and turned it into something real. The song is about not worrying about things... Sometimes you just gotta go with the flow! Don't worry about the haters.

Jared Cotter, Shaylen's manager: [SM Entertainment] let us know it was being considered for a girl group.

Carroll: [I] definitely never thought it would get flipped to EXO, but obviously we are thrilled it did. We [knew] it was special when we finished it. I am really glad it found the home that it did.

Chen: [The members and I] wrote the lyrics separately and worked on putting the lyrics together for the song afterwards. We worked on the song using a special method, where we gathered all three of our lyrics for the song and selected which lyrics would suit the song the best. I don't think I have any regrets or wish that it could have better since it's the best result produced through all the effort that our members and other various writers have put into the process. Through the lyrics, I wanted “Ko Ko Bop” to have people shake off all their stress and enjoy themselves just as who they are.

Baekhyun: I felt that a lot of our fans were unable to fully enjoy our concerts or performances because they're conscious of what others would think. Since “Ko Ko Bop” is a reggae and EDM genre and it's easy to groove to, I wanted my lyrics to have people to become more carefree, release their stress and dance away with the music.

“What U Do?”

Ronny Svendsen: The song was written in Seoul last December. We went over to Korea to do a camp for SM with our, at the time, new publishing company called Ekko Music Rights. We tried to create a song that would be danceable and organic sounding with emphasis on real instruments -- bass, guitar, piano. The song was really based around the guitars and a simple chord progression. Sound-wise we had a reference from another boy band of SM Entertainment's called NCT, which we originally aimed for: danceable, but not “synthy.”

“Forever”

Greg Bonnick of LDN NOISE: This was written in Seoul with Kenzie and Adrian McKinnon. We knew the vibe was perfect for EXO so we worked on it for about a week on and off to get it right, trying different chords and toplines. The intro part was initially the chorus. We thought, “Great, we nailed it,” but once we listened back, it needed to go up another gear. We then added the extra section, which is now the chorus, and it came to life and made it so much bigger.

To be honest, we wanted to make a “Monster” 2.0 but still be different and bigger, you know? We always have fun when we can mix hard hip-hop verses with a bright chorus, and for a group like EXO, it gives it the perfect balance.

We wanted to make a statement: this song, this album, it's EXO forever. We feel really connected to this group and the fans so it's important we got it right, and the feedback has been amazing, so we are very happy.

“Touch It”

Denzil Remedios: From what I recall, “Touch It” came to Ryan [Jhun]'s hands first. He got the song originally from the Jackie Boyz [Carlos and Steven Battey] and the Fliptonez. I think they sent it to him while we were still in Korea and this was actually more than a year ago now, maybe close to almost two years ago when they sent that record, and it just kinda connected right away. We heard what it could be -- it already sounded like the guts of a smash was there, at least something we could put into a big group's hands. From there, Ryan and I did what we normally do, which is pick it apart and say, “Hey, what parts could get stronger? What could we do extra with the production to pump it a little bit more?” That's how we got the record, and then we just worked on all those elements over probably months back and forth.

“Touch It,” when we first heard it, already had such a non-today-ish vibe -- a classic vibe. It's not like the everyday pop EDM electronic-y sound that everyone's doing, which was refreshing when we first heard it. We were like, “Yo, this sounds like an old Justin Timberlake, almost Michael Jackson type of thing.” That old school vibe. We didn't wanna change the production or toplining to the point where it didn't sound like that anymore. When we were hearing it, sonically we were like, “Cool, this can be something that a group like EXO can take and use for the album and it doesn't sound like everything else they would normally be putting out.”

We were thinking stage performance at the time too. It's just a really fun track that doesn't have to be too serious -- you don't have to have crazy choreography where they drop from the top of the stadium.

Chen: My imagination provides the most inspiration for the lyrics. For “Touch It,” I played out the lyrics in my mind as if it is like a scene from a movie when writing it. After completing the draft, I worked on it by fixing awkward pronunciations by singing along the lyrics with the music. This helped me figure out more suitable and comfortable words that would enhance the groove when listening to the song.

“Chill”

Otha “Vakseen” Davis: We went to a song camp last year -- I wanna say it was November -- and it was probably the third camp my team has been on. Anytime we go to song camps at SM, they usually have a focus for us as far as what to work on and I know we worked on some things for EXO. For any creator, you always wanna try to make an EXO project. We fell in love with the vibe and the energy[of “Chill”] in the studio and SM's team felt the same way about the record. That happened to be one that everybody loved -- the guys loved it ultimately when they heard it.

There were certain elements like the breakdown in “Chill” that was added at the camp, but we came with the ideas already fleshed out. Ultimately, [the breakdown] was to serve as a dance breakdown. K-pop acts, especially EXO, are very performance-oriented, so you wanna have sections to show out. You wanna make something that feels good but still can allow them to move.

Chanyeol: Usually it's common to work on the lyrics based on a demo guide, but for the song “Chill” I worked on the lyrics with an empty track without demo lyrics. I think that’s part of the reason why the lyrics were able to come out pretty naturally.

“Walk on Memories”

Albi Albertsson: In late 2015, Wassily Gradovsky, who was actually interning for me as a producer at that time, brought an instrumental to me, which was later to become the instrumental for “Walk on Memories.” He had recorded a loop on the upright piano I have in my living room and incorporated it into this smooth R&B style beat.

I immediately liked the chord progression and the vibe of the track, so I sent it to Justin Reinstein, a writer from New York who we had just started working with at that time. He had a very smooth topline and vocal style that I thought would be perfect for this track, so he worked on the instrumental to craft the melodies.

From then on it was only finalizing the song: I added stacks of vocal harmonies and other details to make it work better for a group performance and make it more “K-pop,” added some vocal adlibs and then finalized the production by adding more instruments and finalizing the mix.

When I sent it to EXO's A&R, he immediately loved it but wanted a more distinct intro that reflected the fantasy theme he had in mind for the new album. So instead of the very basic intro the track originally had, I came up with a new, more mysterious and vibey intro, which is the intro you can hear in the final version of the song.

Wassily Gradovsky: The track was influenced by the genres of '90s R&B and jazz, reimagined with contemporary sounds. The arrangement of the piano chords -- being arpeggiated from bottom to the top -- was inspired by Justin Timberlake's “Cry Me A River,” but with a lighter and more positive tone. The slightly melancholic bridge, which is modulating into the final uplifting chorus, represents an uplifting, “happy ending” twist to the story.

“Going Crazy”

Otha “Vakseen” Davis: It was something that we did maybe around February of 2016. They loved it and for some reason could not find the right topline for it -- I think they had one originally and it didn't work at the end of the day. So they had this track, it was already placed on EXO and my team was presented with the opportunity to write to it. So I had one of my writers go in and do what he does. Funny enough, it was supposed to go on the Ex'Act album. It was something that they loved, but it didn't make sense then. We were persistent. Between myself and my business partner, we [would say], “Hey, what about this one? Don't forget this record!” Fast forward to now, the new album was coming out, [and] we were finally able to get them to connect. I think we had to make a couple of edits on it between that year or so passing just to make sure it was as fresh as possible.

The track's over a year old -- there's something so special about it because you drop it now, 2017, and it's still hot, still relevant. And that's the goal: create timeless music that can be good any time.

Credit: Billboard.

[knightofbalance-13]

Horseshoe Theory of Fandom Appreciation

http://dudeblade.tumblr.com/post/159601708316/blind-fanboyism-and-the-dangers-of-it

I could go on a rant about how dudeblade doesn’t get the message and how he’s a hypocrite but I want to do something productive with this. This a point in fandoms people seem to miss a lot: If you’re a blind ANHING, be it shipper, fan or hater, you ARE damaging the show. You are NO better than the other and as much as you deny it, you are JUST as bad as the other.

This is called the Horseshoe Theory Of Fandom Appreciation

Before we begin, I to explain WHAT the original Horseshoe Theory is. Essentially, the Horseshoe Theory is the belief that the Extremists of the far left and the far right have more in common than their center of the road counterparts. Such as the belief that sex should be demonized, whether because it’s immoral for the far right or because it’s sexist for the far left.

My theory is that those who are blinded by devoution (AKA fanboys) and those who at blinded by hatred (AKA haters) have more in common and do equal amounts of damage as each other. Throughout this post I will using this theory in practice against Dudeblade’s arguments, showing how blind hatred is just as bad as blind devoution. As well as disprove any misconceptions about myself in the post.

Here’s one reason: You stunt the growth of the show. By constantly praising it, and never giving suggestions on how it can improve, you cause the show to get stuck in a rut. It will never grow.

While at first this seems impossible to compare to blind hatred as it seems impossible for harsh criticism to be destructive,, the problem here lies in the fact that if you constantly bash on a show, constantly insult the people behind the show and never show them what they are doing right, they’ll either make desperate changes to the show to appease fans, think they an do nothing right and give up all together or hate their fans and make the show spit in their faces. The last is especially true as this HAS happened before with Neon Genesis Evangelion as the so-called fans of the show sent death threats to Hideaki Anno and he responded with End Of Evangelion, basically a giant middle finger to everyone and drastically lowering the quality of the show.

See what happens? Blind devoution and Blind hatred make the exact same outcome using the exact same tactics through different means. So Both are equally wrong. As for myself, I have criticized RWBY before and do have problems with the show. But likewise, I have problems with how criticism is given which will be discussed later.

Here’s another reason: You make the creators of the show unable or unused to taking criticism. The world isn’t sunshine and rainbows. So sorry that you can’t handle the fact that your work has flaws. Get. Over. It. If you can’t accept criticism, then maybe you shouldn’t be a content creator.

That also happens with blind hatred. By never letting the creators know what they are doing right or if every criticism has the intent of harming them (We’ll talk about intent latter) they'll never accept criticism because that’s all they get and to preserve their mental state, they will ignore everything but the positive which they ae so starved for that they accept it at first glance, whetehr constructive or not. Same goes for the bad. Once again, same result and same tactics through different means.

I’d also like to point out that both sides usually contain hypocrites of the highest caliber who refuse to see anyone in the wrong except who they personally believe, For fans, they can’t see that their slight dislike of this one character from a different media is the same as this other character someone else dislikes that they attacked them over. Or in Dudeblade’s case: Saying that you shouldn’t be a content creator if you can’t take criticism then deletes criticism directed at him.

Here comes a man named Semmelweis. He was one of the first who pioneered the idea of sanitation in a workplace like a hospital. He was also, a huge asshole. People didn’t listen to him because he came off harsh. But his ideas were still right. Criticism is criticism. Doesn’t matter if it’s put ‘nicely’ or not.

Here is the question of intent and what separates a critic from a blind hater. Did Semmelweis say that we should be sanitary because it was the right thing to do? or did he say it because he did it and he wanted everyone else to act the way he did?

Intent dictates what is criticism and what isn’t. If your intent behind your words is that you want the show to get better or you don’t want it’s mistakes repeated, you are a critic. If your intent is to bash a character, bash a writer or make people do what you want selfishly then you are a hater. The same goes for the difference between a real fan and a fanboy:Ifyour intent behind denying criticism is that you do not see what the criticism is even after giving it a shot, you are a normal fan. If you deny any and all criticism without thinking about it because of personal feelings: You are a fanboy.

Blind hater: Rawgh! I hate all the characters! They should die! The show is stupid! The creators should go kill themselves! Neutral fan: Can you explain why, or are you just going to rage on? Blind hater: … Neutral fan: Huh. He left. — Blind devotion: OMG The show is perfect!!! I hope that it gets nominated for something! Neutral fan: But what about3this scene, where some questionable shit happens, and there’s a glaring plothole after it- Blind devotion: OMG! I can’t believe you hate the show! If you don’t like it, then don’t watch it! *Scoff!* — See? It’s not easy handling the blind fanboy. At least you can shut up the blind hater, or wait until they find something else to hate/fanboy over.

Let me modify this with my experiences from fighting blind haters even outside of RWDE:

Blind Hater: Ugh I hate everything aboyt this show! It’s complete and total shit! Neutral fan: Why is that? Blind Hater: because it is! Neutral fan: Okay but...why though? Blind Hater: Because you idiot! Neutal Fan: But..Don’t you have a reason? Blind Hater: Because I say so! Neutral fan: But... tha’s not a critical reason. And even the reasons you provide are clearly contradicted by what’s shown in the sho- Blind Hater: FANBOY!

Blind Fan: I love this show! It’s perfect! Neutral Fan: Why is that? Blind Fan: Because it is! Neutral Fan: ... Why though? Blind Fan: Because you idiot! Neutral Fan: ... Oh dear god, it’s happening again-Do you have a reason? Blind Fan: because I say- Neutra Fan: You say so, yeah I’ve ehard it all before. Let’s just skip to the part where you call me a hater because I point out you’re being blind? Blind Fan: HATER! Neutral fan: Called it.

This is how it always goes: Both sides demand that they are right because they think so, ven if the show and criticial analysis denies either one of them. It always happens like this.

My problem isn’t that I am a blind fan: RWBY has problems. Undeniable problems. Too many clichés, shaky pacing, development to the wrong people at times, not enough development for others, not enough time for what they are trying ect. RWBY has problems. My problem is that you are clearly blind haters as shown by my application of the horseshoe theory, that you are blind to your faults and blind to your damage. I just want critics to be critics, not haters.

And I hope  have conclusively proven that no matter what they say: Blind hate and blind devoution are essentially the same and do the same damage. And I hope you learn not to be like the others.

Good day.

[theconservativebrief]

Racist tweets. Messy divorces. Sketchy social media advertising practices. Accusations of hacking. No, I’m not talking about the current players in American politics. I’m talking about beauty YouTubers.

It all starts with influencers. While it might be hard to believe if you’re over 25, YouTube and Instagram now produce legitimate celebrities, the kind that can draw a crowd of thousands and shut down meet-and-greets.

Influencers with large followings on social media have become an important force in the beauty economy, and companies have shifted their marketing resources to focus more on social media and less on traditional advertising like TV and magazines. Now, influencers land the kind of lucrative cosmetics collaborations that were once saved for traditional celebs. And where the money and power goes, so does the scrutiny.

For major beauty influencers — like Jackie Aina (2.7 million subscribers) and Jaclyn Hill (5.4 million subscribers) — some of that scrutiny comes in the form of drama channels on their own home turf: YouTube. There is a robust group of self-appointed watchdog/gossip channels that chronicle, expose, and analyze all manner of bad behavior perpetrated by so-called beauty gurus.

Channels like TeaSpill, Sanders Kennedy, and Petty Paige explain the gossip and stoke the flames, including digging into the current scandal in which popular members of the YouTube beauty community were accused of racism and of failing to disclose paid posts, among other claims.

These claims — known as the “Dramageddon” — have rocked the community and even culminated in some influencers losing hundreds of thousands of followers, the YouTube ad money those followers bring in, and the trust of the people who made them successful in the first place. The drama channels — and their fans — have been right there, chronicling every last step.

In fact, drama videos are so popular now that the drama channel creators themselves are getting fame, notoriety, drama, and money of their own, leading to one giant beauty drama ouroboros. It’s yet another data point in the continuing narrative about how the powerful ecosystem of YouTube creators is fundamentally changing how people are communicating and consuming information online, and taking a global industry with it.

Beauty influencers aren’t like traditional celebrities; untouchable in their gated Beverly Hills mansions. These young women and men happily flip on their ring lights and show you their houses, boyfriends, cars, and designer bags along with their favorite eyeliner techniques. They speak directly to fans via social media and on YouTube. They frequently show millions of viewers their faces without a speck of makeup on, a particularly vulnerable act that makes them seem even more approachable.

“When fans see a person online frequently, they develop a parasocial relationship — the one-sided sense of knowing”

“When fans see a person online frequently, they develop a parasocial relationship — the one-sided sense of knowing, which feels like a real relationship,” explains Pamela Rutledge, a media psychologist. “When people are given intimate details, it’s as if they are being rewarded for being a close friend.”

Because of this intense interest in influencers and their own oversharing tendencies, there has always been gossip about them. For years, anonymous fans and haters alike have snarked on forums like Guru Gossip, the users of which can be shockingly cruel to their subjects, and Reddit’s r/BeautyGuruChatter, a generally more civilized arena for discussion.

One r/BeautyGuruChatter moderator said in an email to Vox that she considers YouTube to be “the new magazine,” with all the aspiration the old glossies offered. Then she added: “That said, you know people love to watch these people fall from their pedestals, too.” Drama channels document this fall.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly who the first beauty drama channel was, but it’s generally acknowledged that Sanders Kennedy (215,000 subscribers) was one of the earliest ones. Other popular early adopters of the genre include Peter Monn (169,000 subscribers), Karina Kaboom (108,000 subscribers), and Rich Lux (204,000).

The popular ones now are the controversial John Kuckian (382,000 — more on him shortly), Here For The Tea (393,000), Teaspill (403,000), Beauty Truth Sleuth (20,300), and Petty Paige (116,000). A lot of the original drama channels started out dabbling in makeup reviews and tutorials themselves and pivoted to drama when they saw increasing view counts after posting that kind of content.

That is certainly Kennedy’s story. He dropped out of college, briefly worked at Home Goods, and went on to write for the pop culture website Dos Lives, which has been defunct since 2014. Around the same time, he started posting makeup reviews on his personal YouTube. One of the first drama posts he ever did in 2015, about a disappointing encounter with guru Nicole Guerriero, is still his most viral video at 1.8 million views and counting. Kennedy says he is inspired by Wendy Williams, Perez Hilton, and Andy Cohen.

Sanders Kennedy has a reaction to a Jaclyn Hill video. YouTube/Sanders Kennedy

“When it took off and I was just like, ‘Okay, let’s just be real about things that I do not find great in the YouTube world.’ The beauty industry is already a shady business, and I think that if people are going to pay money for these products and work so hard and not pay their rent because they want an eyeshadow, they should know what’s behind the story,” Kennedy says. He eventually wants to expand his coverage of pop culture on his channel.

Paige Christie, a.k.a. Petty Paige, is an ambulance dispatcher by day in the UK and part of a second wave of drama channels. She started hers in early 2017 for the same reason that many beauty influencers start posting — as a black woman, she couldn’t find someone who looked like her in that area to relate to.

“I thought to myself, ‘You’ve got gay male voices, you’ve got Caucasian female voices, but there’s not really a voice that represents me and where I come from,’” Paige says, describing the landscape of the drama community. “That was kind of my motivation to start making videos. Because there was no voice that represents my demographic.”

Drama channels, most notably the notorious Keemstar, have popped up in many YouTube communities over the last few years. Vegan channels have had their fair share of incidents as has the gaming community. Shane Dawson, who does documentary-style long videos on subjects that cooperate with him, focuses on general interest vloggers like Jake Paul, and has even done one on frequent beauty drama target Jeffree Star.

But beauty seems to have spawned more gossip videos per capita than other interest areas have. Now, at least a dozen so-called drama channels are documenting these gurus and their behavior on YouTube — spilling the tea, as they say, on the same platform where the gurus pour it.

“Tea” is another term for gossip, and it originated in black drag culture. It was referred to as T for “truth,” but it eventually evolved into “tea.” The term has thrived in this community and several drama channels name themselves a variation of it — HereForTheTea, TeaSpill, Mango Tea. In a particularly entertaining Twitter thread, Sam, the woman who runs HereForTheTea, asked for potential new names for her channel and her followers suggested things like TeaMZ, BeauTea News, and Teatorials.

And “TeaMZ” is an apt comparison. Graphics and teasers on drama videos take a cue from the fonts and visual hyperbole that traditional tabloids use. You’ll see lots of red, lots of exclamation points, and screengrabs of the video subjects with unflattering facial expressions.

The channels cover everything from influencers “cheating” fans out of giveaways to influencers fighting amongst themselves. Jeffree Star’s many beefs with others in the industry have become its own genre. Jaclyn Hill’s split from her husband Jon was predicted, analyzed, and picked apart with the zeal of the paparazzi stalking the Brad Pitt/Jennifer Aniston/Angelina Jolie triangle in 2004.

Like InTouch or Life & Style magazines, the channels are sometimes accused of using clickbait thumbnails that don’t deliver quite the piping hot tea that was advertised.

Drama channels collect information that’s already out there — often posted by influencers themselves, on Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram — then organize these “receipts,” and give some context along with text, voice over, dramatic music, sound effects, and occasionally really funny comedic delivery. Some take a newsreader tone in their videos, and some deliver with full-on dish and snark. Some never show their faces, while some have become as recognized as the YouTubers they cover.

[embedded content]

A handful of the drama channels see themselves as investigative reporters, and their mission as journalistic, but they often have a subjective slant. The videos run the gamut from providing actual evidence of a transgression to a channel creator analyzing and opining in the style of a cable pundit.

Gathering receipts is a top priority. Some of the drama channel personalities who spoke to Vox say they get tips from viewers, and occasionally even get dirt from influencers about other influencers. They get sent PDFs, screenshots of conversations, and Google Drives. One has paid to access legal documents. Some reach out to the parties involved for comment; others don’t. “Beauty gurus do not typically reply to me. They either ignore me or block me,” says Alicyn, proprietor of the Beauty Truth Sleuth channel.

Sometimes they make judgment calls about what’s appropriate to post. Christie, of Petty Paige fame, says, “Sometimes you get some sensitive information and you think to yourself, ‘Holy crap. There is no way I should know this.’ But it’s a part of the game.”

The game has entered the big leagues over the last few months. Three separate storylines played out all within a few months of each other.

The recent Laura Lee racist tweet scandal, documented by Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos in painstaking detail here, involved enough high profile influencers to keep the drama channels busy for weeks. Among other things, Lee — who has collaborated with several mainstream beauty brands and also launched her own makeup line — was accused of tweeting at black people to “pull ur pants up” to make it easier to “run from the police.”

A short time after that came to a head, influencer and Makeup Geek beauty brand founder Marlena Stell called out influencers for their reported high pay rates and not disclosing when they get paid by brands. Finally, Jaclyn Hill (5.5 million subscribers), a popular vlogger who gained mainstream fame after doing a highlighter collaboration with makeup company Becca that went viral, has been in the drama channels’ crosshairs.

She went through a well-chronicled messy divorce and is now enduring scrutiny for a big collaboration with indie brand Morphe that has been controversial since it launched. Collectively dubbed the “dramageddon,” the confluence of scandals has been an existential crisis for the beauty world, but a boon to drama channels, which gleefully covered it all:

“The beauty community is in shambles!” “Where is Laura Lee? Fans scared for her safety!” “Jaclyn Hill lied about the vault!?”

Unsurprisingly, influencers don’t love the drama channels. Recently, Hill posted a long video about everything happening in the beauty community generally and about the unflattering portrayals of her own business practices specifically. She tossed in a rant about drama channels toward the end.

“It’s like a game of telephone,” she says. “It’s been filtered through this strainer of bullshit and by the time it gets to them, there’s 5 percent accuracy in it. I take their videos with a grain of salt and you guys should too. I do not hate drama channels. It’s not something that I would personally ever do with my career, but I do not hate them.”

“I take their videos with a grain of salt and you guys should too”

Christie says some influencers, like Kathleen Lights, have utilized the drama channels savvily. In September 2017, she was recorded on Snapchat by Jaclyn Hill saying the n-word. “She went out of her way to contact every single drama channel, including myself, and basically said, ‘Hey, just to let you know, this is not the situation.’ She used us effectively and essentially she silenced the entire community by telling us her side of the story,” Christie says.

Tati Westbrook, of GlamLifeGuru (4.9 million subscribers), is a beauty guru veteran and a godmother of sorts to younger influencers in the beauty community. In a recent video with influencer Thomas Halbert, she says, “You’re going to have great channels that actually do research and report fact and then you have some that completely manipulate and run things in a really bad way.” Halbert claims that a drama channel “extorted” him out of $6,000 in exchange for taking down a “slanderous” video. He implied that he paid it.

“I know drama channels haven’t always had the best reputation in the community. There are a lot of great drama channels that just give you all the facts and let you form your own opinion and most of us even have boundaries on things we’ll cover on our channel, like breakups and relationships for example,” writes TeaSpill, who does not share her name and does not speak in her videos, in an email to Vox.

In a rare drama channel alliance, HereForTheTea and TeaSpill teamed up for a huge Jaclyn Hill project that was supposed to comprise three videos. Part 1 has more than 1 million views, but the pair decided to abandon the project after TeaSpill supposedly (according to HereForTheTea) received a private message from Jeffree Star, which they said “honestly left us with no choice but to cancel the series.”

They continued: “Although our intent was to share the truth, we cannot possibly move forward given that someone’s life is potentially at risk.” It’s not clear what this was a reference to. (Hill did not respond to a request for comment.)

My channel is lighthearted and no video or series is worth risking someone’s mental health. That being said the series will no longer be going forward.

— Tea Spill (@TeaSpillYT) September 25, 2018

Several prominent influencers on Instagram spoke to Vox anonymously about the drama channels. Two of them noted that they respect HereForTheTea and watch her channel specifically, but a few had concerns that the channels in general promote bullying.

“I feel like there are channels who do their job well and then there are other channels that stretch the truth and reach for drama just to post new content, which can lead to false news, rumors, and hurtful words against influencers. Some can even verge on bullying. The moment a drama channel starts making derogatory comments about a person is when I turn their video off because I don’t find satisfaction in putting others down,” says one.

“My biggest issue with drama channels is the impact they have on people online, on the subscribers. In my opinion, the language used in those videos can truly be associated with bullying. And certain drama channels tend to abuse that type of language, a behavior that their subscribers repeat afterwards,” says another.

Some drama channels pay lip service to this, like Rich Lux writing in his video’s notes, “Please don’t go out of your way to ‘witchhunt’ anyone that I have talked about in these videos. This channel’s purpose is to entertain people and not to spread hate to anyone else’s channels.” And Karina Kaboom starts her videos off stating that her videos are “opinion videos these are not facts” and “please don’t send any brands or people I mention any mean-spirited comments.”

Some drama dishers do seem conflicted about how they present information. “I was 100 percent a character. Then when I got the attention, I was asking myself, ‘Okay, what am I going to do with this? This is a chance for me to be professional. Am I going to be a clown?’” Kennedy says. “I got a lot of criticism over some stuff. I listened and I was like, ‘You know what, that is mean and that is bullying,’ and that’s how I learned.”

You can’t talk about beauty drama channels without mentioning John Kuckian, the notorious persona non grata of beauty drama YouTube, with followers he calls his “tittyfam.” While he has one of the largest followings of them all at over 380,000, he is also the most despised, at least by his peers. (HereForTheTea’s Sam originally declined to be interviewed for this story because Kuckian was going to be mentioned.)

He has had a beef with pretty much every single other drama channel out there and is generally characterized as one of the more mean-spirited drama channels. He once reportedly made and sold ringtones of one prominent influencer having a sobbing meltdown.

“He’s pretty much been declared an outcast by the entire beauty drama community. Nobody takes his opinion seriously,” says Christie, who actually started her channel by specializing in videos about Kuckian. “When people make a John Kuckian [drama] video, they don’t necessarily receive any backlash at all because I think everybody is kind of synchronized in saying, ‘Yeah, he’s a piece of shit.’” (Kuckian did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

It was probably inevitable that these drama channels would become the subjects of gossip in their own right. In some cases, they’re doing the same thing as beauty influencers — showing their personalities and personal experiences on YouTube, like Christie sharing her weight loss surgery and her wedding on her channels.

They become the subjects of drama too. Imagine TMZ publishing something juicy about Perez Hilton and you get the idea of what that looks like. Beauty Truth Sleuth says she was “doxxed” by another drama channel, which got ahold of an old mugshot of hers. That prompted her to post a video “exposing” her face and talking about her history with addiction. She was arrested after allegedly trying to steal from her parents, and spent several months in prison.

Paige Christie in a video discussing a hacking accusation. YouTube/Petty Paige

Then in June, influencer Jackie Aina (2.7 million subscribers) appeared to accuse Christie of hacking her and stealing $1,500. Aina eventually deleted the video and apologized on Twitter.

“When the whole situation happened I was super duper worried and scared. I was getting a lot of hate across all social media platforms. People just like straight up emailing me to tell me to go kill myself,” Christie says.

There are times when there is a lot of infighting among the drama channels. Someone stole someone else’s receipts. Someone is getting a bit too cozy with influencers. Someone gets things wrong in their videos. But both Alicyn from Beauty Truth Sleuth and TeaSpill say that there is less drama among the drama channels since the Dramageddon.

“I think every community on YouTube is bound to have some drama when you’re all out here doing the same thing,” writes TeaSpill. “It’s just like going into an office every single day. You’re not going to get along with every person you work with. I think all that matters is how it’s dealt with.”

It could also help their business by promoting a sense of tribe. “Drama with other channels is an easy way to enlarge the audience and extend the narrative,” says Rutledge, the media psychologist. She compares them to cliques. “It benefits both parties and replicates social behaviors. It triggers feelings of loyalty and affiliation that enhance the connection by creating a social identity.”

Kennedy has had spates with other channels in the past. “I don’t want to be the news,” he says. “I want to be the person who talks about the news. I pulled back a lot and I feel like if I didn’t pull back, maybe I would be at a million subscribers right now and I would be on these vacations and around the world like these beauty gurus go.”

“That’s their thing, honestly that’s their business. They sit around talking about us. That’s how they get a paycheck,” opined Jaclyn Hill in her video rant about the industry. She’s right, kind of.

Some drama channels say they only make a few hundred dollars a month. Kennedy says he makes “definitely enough to have an accountant.” In addition to his YouTube ad income, he, like many of the other channels, sells merchandise such as T-shirts with his catchphrases (“Allegedly”) printed on them.

TeaSpill, who was a 21-year-old college student with a part-time job in a veterinary clinic with 43,000 subscribers in the spring, now has 407,000 followers and has made it her full-time job. Her days look a lot like that of any YouTube creator.

“When you work with social media, it’s easy to constantly be on your phone but it’s important to step back and find a healthy balance,” she says. “When I’m working on a video, if it’s over ten minutes long it takes me about 10 hours to research, put everything together, and then edit. Longer projects can take anywhere from a couple of days to a week to complete.”

While this can all seem petty and niche, beauty influencers are a significant part of the beauty industry economy now. Brands spend millions on influencer advertising and multiple millions of people follow them and buy things they recommend. The fact that some scrappy channels have been able to draw attention to potentially sketchy practices and call influencers and brands to account is remarkable.

But there’s definitely a dark side. The idea of “tea” as entertainment is one as old as the gossip that surrounds more traditional celebrities. Princess Diana’s death following a paparazzi chase is the worst example of what can happen. And detailing people’s personal relationships very rarely has no endpoint except pure voyeurism. Gossip magazines — and drama channels — ostensibly seek to demand accountability from the powerful, but often it’s really about schadenfreude and entertainment at someone else’s expense.

But what’s clear is that as long as beauty influencers remain so, well, influential, gossip will follow them. “Every single person is into gossip. You don’t think you’re into gossip. You don’t think that gossip is a part of your life, but it is. And it will always, always be there,” says Christie. “If I can take people’s mind away from the bullshit of life for 30 minutes in a video, then I’ve done my job.”

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Original Source -> Meet the TMZs of beauty YouTube

via The Conservative Brief

[iwilldare]

Writing it Down

My fingers have not itched with such a strong desire in a long time.. Lying in bed tonight, I got that feeling, and the longer I lay there, the harder it got to ignore it. I’ve not been here in a while, sans the normal junk that people post to their blogs as a sort of a keepsake, but my how I’ve missed you. Every time I sit and stare at the blank page, or blank screen I wonder how am I ever going to fill such space. This is how it’s always been for me, the meaning is crystal clear, but the words are illusive. Then the inner voice, the one I keep hidden away, takes over, and with its misguided and misspelled words the blankness begins to disappear. Like puzzle pieces scattered across the floor, it slowly comes together on these pages, both seen by everyone and hidden away, and I accomplish something I can never seem to do inside my head.

As a general rule, I try to not look back.. The past is the past, and for the most part it’s best that way. Things happen, good and bad. People happen, good and bad, and the world keeps right on turning. Then, out of nowhere, a small, seemingly inconsequential event happens and I find myself doing just that…
Someone asked me the other day what kind of person I am. Am I giver, or a taker, a liar, or a faker, a lover, or a hater, and a list of other comparisons to choose from, categories of black and white that no real person could ever fit in, and it got me thinking. What kind of person am I? What is it that I have to give to you? Simple. A piece of me.

I’ve skirted around the idea that I started as a whole person, and that along the way I’ve lost pieces of myself in this journey we call life. I’ve talked about it to death in previous blogs but yet I never really gave it any depth. I’ve never really laid it out like I intend to now. Before I get too far into this, I have a small disclaimer. I am not intending this to imply that my value is anymore than anyone else. Or that these rambling, mostly useless words are to prove to you that I am superior. This is just my realization and it’s brought me to a place of finality somehow. It’s brought to a place where I can be me, I can be comfortable, and I can feel as though in the long road, I do mean something. So here is my randomness for you to skim through with (dis)interest.

I’m one of those people that has always felt that there is something missing from my life. I walk around trying to find that final piece day after day, and I will find things that feel right, and I will hold on to them, and yet still that empty place remains. I used to blame it on everything that has happened with my father. Like I could never fill that hole he’s left me with. I’ve realized that’s not the case. Am I angry? Yep. Am I bitter? Absolutely. Do I still hate the world sometimes? You got it. Do I feel empty because of everything? No. I feel a lot of things about him, but emptiness isn’t one of them. So why do I feel so empty? The answer lies within the kind of person I have found myself to be. 
I can be selfless to a degree that I’m not sure I can explain in words. I am the friend that will never give up on you. I am the person that will give up anything to make you feel better, often in detriment to my own well being. I am the one that will give my life for yours, and think about all of these things a little too late and a little too little. This sounds weird even as I type it out about myself, because at the same time, I can be selfish. I can be a dick. I can tell it how it is. I call you on your bullshit. I get heated and upset a lot. My tolerance is high, but when I explode, I have an awful habit of decimating whatever lies within reach. I’m real. So maybe this is the price you pay for the goods you receive from me. I give up a part of my soul to everyone I touch… A part of my heart. 
I will always be empty to some degree, because the pieces of myself that I long for lie within the people of my past. I gave a part of myself to each person, a different part, a necessary part that makes their life a little easier to deal with. Maybe this is why I find it so hard to let people in my life go because in essence I feel like I am giving up on me. I am giving up on the parts of me that I felt I could do without. I love so deeply and so passionately that I do not see giving these pieces of myself away as anything great. I see it as necessary. A need. I love doing it.

Everyone that I love holds a piece of me that I can never get back. And I realized today that maybe they are better for it. They have never, nor will they ever again, have a person like me in their life. My pieces lie like breadcrumbs in the hearts of those that I have touched, and even if I wanted to find all those pieces, I could never have the heart to take them back. At some point they needed those pieces more then I did, and more than I will ever need them again. All those pieces of me, those little versions of myself, they still exist out there in some small way. I like to think of it like that. Like there are a thousand little versions of me out there conquering the world, because each person with a piece of me, no doubt passes that part of me along to those they come into contact with in their own lives. It sounds crazy, and maybe a little existential, but perhaps I’m not so far off..

Maybe emptiness doesn’t have to be this bad thing. Maybe it’s just a slight reminder that in some small way, I’m changing the world. Maybe my pieces help make other people feel whole and my emptiness is a reminder of that. It’s my incentive to keep living the way I do. To love without limits. I’m a dick, but you love me, and you’re probably better for it. 
So, if I were to have to define myself, I would say that I’m a completer. I meet people, I pick them up, dust them off, and in some small way I help fill a tiny hole that allows them to continue on by themselves. I’m not a creator, I’m a helping hand. And I love doing it. It’s my nature. I love finding something broken and helping to fix it. Maybe someday I will encounter another person just like me and I’ll finally become my own finished product.

I almost hope that never happens….

[blueunicornapp-blog]

Celebrities: A Guide to Social Media

Cutting to the chase:

This is a manifesto about the ways celebrities use and leverage social media, how their activity is valued by fans and corporate partners (studios, networks, publishers, etc.) and how they can derive even more value from their efforts by evolving the classic agent, manager, publicist ecosystem.

I all-too-often see them getting taken advantage of by partners focused on a specific, short-term goal (promote the next movie, the upcoming show, etc.) at the expense of a quality social media strategy set up for long-term success (and profit).

And beyond those types of relationships, there is a whole undiscovered country online for most talent – one that offers the ability to create their own content, explore their own passions, drive attention to their causes, and enjoy a level of creative control and intellectual property ownership that they likely haven’t experienced previously.

Taken to the rare extreme, we see savvy celebrities create entire digital businesses. Short of that, there are specific, powerful ways that a smart digital strategy can benefit a talent with even the most traditional career ambitions (bigger roles, better parts, larger venues, conventional spokesperson deals, etc.)

Ultimately, I believe each celebrity who understands (or is curious to understand) the value of their digital presence will grow to have a “head of digital,” who works alongside the other members of their ecosystem, to help them navigate ever-changing trends, vet opportunities and maximise the impact (and income) from everything they do on everything they want to do.

Celebs getting social:

By the way, I’m using the words “celebrities, talent, creators, influencers” interchangeably and focusing almost exclusively on “traditional” talent, as opposed to digital-native stars. Some celebrities are adamant about staying offline, some dip their toes in the water hesitantly, some consider social media for purely promotional purposes, and others embrace the medium as I do, as a fascinating and impactful storytelling platform, offering endless possibilities for sincere engagement, authentic creation and serious business.

For those that do make the leap, there’s a whole spectrum of how they do so, from tackling social media personally, to outsourcing to ghost writers, assistants, publicists and high school friends.

The corporate comparison:

Regardless of whether or not the talent is active themselves, celebrity social media is executed very differently from corporate social media.

Companies usually employ “social media managers,” as well as analysts, designers and editors, to carefully craft and implement strategies that learn from case studies, exemplify every-changing best practices and experiment. Companies have budgets for staff, as well as for vendors and tools to help track, analyze and publish.

A celebrity, as an individual, typically doesn’t have any of those resources. That’s where we get either the celebrity handling things themselves (and figuring stuff out as they go along, sometimes with help from reps at the various networks) or relying on assistants and maybe someone junior from the agent, manager, or publicist.

Unfortunately, in almost all these cases, there is little to no actual social media expertise in the mix. And even if there is a little experience there, it can’t compare to well-staffed, well-funded, well-trained and well-connected corporate teams.

That’s not meant as a value judgment. Even when they lack a professional level of savviness and resources, talent that love it can still excel at creating personal and energetic social media presences … while those that don’t love it, and perhaps rely on outsourcing, are left with a mostly generic, uninteresting social media presence.

And even then, those that don’t love it, and maybe don’t even care about it, might nevertheless have huge digital followings, which come from the sheer force of their celebrity. Unfortunately, when you dig below the surface of those staggering numbers you’ll usually find accounts that can’t deliver the quality reach, engagement or click-throughs of much smaller-but-better accounts. And by “better,” I mean “more authentic.”

Not shitting on agents/managers/publicists:

In general, I’m avoiding the claim made by some agents/managers/publicists about their teams’ social media expertise and resources as I draw a clear distinction between their expertise and the expertise needed to really capitalize on the potential of the digital revolution on behalf of their clients. It’s simply a different job.

Very few invest in creating the sort of full-blown digital practice you’d need to really compete. Instead, if they do try to pitch this type of service to clients, they more often than not hire a few junior social managers and call it a day. This approach falls short for various reasons:

The resulting content will never be as authentic and impactful as that coming from the talent themselves – especially when considering interactions like replying to fans, live-tweeting and Q&As.

There are more and more outlets that require personal, real-time content creation that can’t be faked, ghost-written or produced ahead of time – like live-streaming and Snapchat. Just in the last few days we’ve seen news that growth on Facebook will soon be very difficult without live-streaming video (or spending lots of money).

There’s a vast difference between young, social-savvy social media managers and overall, high-level digital strategy that only comes from seasoned, senior executives, who have deep relationships with investors, the social platforms themselves, vendors, startups and apps, as well as experience with insight analysis, trend-spotting and overall business strategy.

Having said all that, it’s not impossible to conceive of agents/managers/publicists who can pull this off to the high standard I’m setting. It takes money, commitment and planning because it isn’t easy, can’t be done in a day or with a few junior folks.

Talking ROI:

If you’re a celebrity who’s chosen to embrace social media, hopefully you’re not overwhelmed or intimidated while growing a quality fan base, enjoying unfiltered feedback and interaction, ignoring the haters and welcoming it all as a fun part of your overall career.

From the perspective of “return on investment,” you likely feel the potential for your social media activity to benefit specific projects, like getting the word out about new shows, movies, albums, books. You probably also tried leveraging your following to benefit the social causes and non-profit orgs closest to your heart. Maybe you’ve even made some money from companies who were willing to pay for specific promotion.

When not done in the right way, these attempts at ROI can really harm your reputation. Its easy to “sell out,” seem overly self-promotional or come across as just boring/generic. You or your friends might have even questioned whether it’s worth the effort, wondering, “what are my millions of followers good for?!”

That’s because being “worth the effort” depends on who you ask – it definitely benefits your corporate partners (film studios, production companies, retailers, etc.) But their interests are usually short-lived, focused on the project at hand (let’s say a new movie’s release) instead of the long-term quality of your digital reputation.

Similar to how relying on external resources might not lead to the best digital strategy, likewise only valuing your efforts through external lenses (like promotional partners) misses the point.

Recognizing your intrinsic social value:  Hopefully you’re not falling into some of the traps I described because, even when not tackled with high professionalism and resources, your celebrity social media can still bring massive, tangible impact.

That’s because, as a general rule, anything you do with your digital presence will overshadow anything corporate partners do with theirs. Of course there are exceptions but, again, generally, audiences are much more apt to act based on the post of a celebrity, someone they theoretically love, than the post of an official show account, which everyone knows is corporate-run.

In short, companies might theoretically have the savviness and resources but celebrities have the audience trust and attention. Of course you want to make money and promote your projects but only you have your long-term reputation with the audience in mind.

Recent research from the film world:

Twitter teamed with analytics firm Crimson Hexagon to analyze tweets for 33 movies released in 2015, spanning each film’s lifecycle from trailer release to post-premiere. The films included 15 “over-performers,” which had an average box-office-to-budget ratio of 2.5, and 18 “under-performers,” with a B.O./budget ratio of 0.5.

The key findings: Over-performing movies had 150% more posts on Twitter than the pics that bombed, among the films analyzed. Overall, movies that had talent who were active on Twitter saw a 326% boost in average daily volume of conversation on the service, compared with those whose actors or directors did not have Twitter accounts.

“It’s a powerful story to tell: Having your cast on Twitter does boost the overall conversation about your movie,” said Rachel Dodes, head of film partnerships for Twitter.

Recent reporting from the branded marketing world:

It turns out that consumers have little interest in the content that brands churn out. Very few people want it in their feed. Most view it as clutter—as brand spam. When Facebook realized this, it began charging companies to get “sponsored” content into the feeds of people who were supposed to be their fans.

On social media, what works for Shakira backfires for Crest and Clorox.

The problem companies face is structural, not creative. Big companies organize their marketing efforts as the antithesis of art worlds, in what I have termed brand bureaucracies. They excel at coordinating and executing complex marketing programs across multiple markets around the world. But this organizational model leads to mediocrity when it comes to cultural innovation.

Cashing in on your value:

Your activity online as a celebrity, with an active, long-term and hopefully authentic, vibrant, smart social media presence, is WORTH REAL MONEY and, therefore, should be treated with the sensitivity, forethought and business savviness as any new venture, promotional appearance, endorsement and the like.

I said I wasn’t shitting on your agent/manager/publicist and here’s exactly where they play a key role – fighting for what you deserve, based on the real impact you can have digitally. And they can do this for you when properly empowered by insights and hard numbers from your digital strategy. Imagine them preparing pitches (for your traditional work) that include things like average engagement rate of your posts, breakdowns on genders, ages and locations of your digital audience, and on and on. Real stuff!

Don’t get taken advantage of by partners who only care about their one project with you. Don’t assume you need to live-tweet your show as a *favor* to the company or that it “comes with the territory these days.” Don’t swap out your header banners with something gaudy and over-promotional just because the VP of Marketing asked nicely or offered to do it for you. Don’t give out your passwords, admin access and advertising rights (the permission of a company to put money behind “boosting” your posts) because an intern of the VP said it’d save you time. Don’t participate in some sort of spin-off web series or other digital campaign as a freebie/bonus even though it’ll “just take a few minutes during down-time on set.”

Yes, this means you:

My thesis applies not just to the biggest stars but to every working talent who’s committed to their own digital presence and the role it can play in their career and business.

Of course, there are some stand-out examples of celebrities that have seriously capitalized on their digital activity, which can be used as points of reference and inspiration for us all.

Celebrities like George Takei have become full-blown masters of content curation. Celebrities like Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Buscemi and Nicole Richie have enjoyed great success with web series (where they can enjoy more creative control than traditional media). Celebrities like Lauren Conrad, Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon have launched their own entire digital publications and full-blown lifestyle offerings. Celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Justin Timberlake have created, invested in and nurtured multiple digital businesses. Others, like Louis C.K., have experimented with leveraging digital strategy to radically disrupt the standard operating procedures of their fields. And don’t get me started on the digital mastery of the Kardashians.

Even if you’re not going to launch a digital business, there is still a wide middle-ground between just doing what your corporate partners want and exploring the potential for you to leverage your efforts to earn extra money, bring attention to the for-profit and non-profit causes you care about, and use your digital activity to achieve real goals in your traditional career.

Where do we go from here:

It might be a little extreme to say, and we’ll likely see various hybrid models emerge, but the bold pronouncement I’d like to make is, welcome to the birth of the Personal Chief Digital Officer!

As a celebrity, you probably have or had some combination of agent, manager, or publicist. I believe you’ll soon also have a “head of digital” on your team that is probably independent of the other three. This person will be much more than a social media manager. In fact, you might still have a social media manager and they may actually work for one of those other three.

Your own personal ‘head of digital:’

This will be the person bringing a digital perspective to everything you do. Sometimes they’ll equip your agent with analytics regarding the online demographics you resonate most with to help with pitches. Sometimes they’ll brainstorm with your manager what new content to create that’ll help attract your desired audience or show off your specific “range” that you might think isn’t currently obvious in the industry. Sometimes they’ll work with your publicist to make sure all the right media outlets – traditional and digital – are targeted with the right stories that exemplify what you’re doing and how it’s special.

From day to day the job will change. There’ll be a mix of making sure you’re always up to date with new features of existing networks, which new networks to experiment with, which old networks to drop – as you always want to be on top of the right trends and growing at a respectable pace.

Then there’ll be specific initiatives that capitalize on your traditional projects, partnerships, causes and general interests. Maybe it’ll be a cool way of working with an interesting startup or a savvy way of connecting between your passions and what’s trending on any given day. There’ll certainly be a lot of dialog and coordination with all your corporate partners to insure that your digital footprint is properly valued and suitably leveraged, with your own long-term interests in mind. So when you promote those partners, are they promoting you too, and are they providing you with the most effective content to use, customized to your audience, not just the same generic materials your costars are promoting?

The idea is simply to take the resources, capabilities and intelligence of what a company has and bring it to the realm of what you, as a celebrity, should have for yourself… because you deserve it, because your digital presence can be even more powerful and make even more of an impact that those corporate accounts. It’s time for you to have someone on your side that you can trust who is savvy to these issues, someone who lives and breathes every breaking trend, startup, vendor, case study and best practice.

Takeaways:

Many studios, networks and agencies like to claim they are “talent first.” In this day and age, given the state of the Internet and its impact on popular culture, I don’t think claims of being “talent centric” can be sincere without serious investment in the sorts of strategies and resources I described. It is possible, and I’m not throwing anyone under the bus.

Hopefully I’ve helped you, as a talent, see this topic in new light. Hopefully I’ve equipped you with new ways to evaluate who you chose to work with and the claims they make.

And if you’re curious to talk more about these issues, just say hi!

Celebrities: A Guide to Social Media was originally published on Blue Unicorn

[knightofbalance-13]

Boss Battle: VS. Dudeblade

http://dudeblade.tumblr.com/post/160307778687/in-response-to-everything-you-said-here-i-decided

Okay Dudeblade, you want a battle? I’ll give you a battle.

A Boss Battle of sorts.

In response to everything you said here, I decided to take a page out of your book, and deconstruct everything that you wrote. Because, you know, it’s not like you did the same to me on multiple occasions.

So you’ve learned how to debate: Glad it took you several months to do so. Now you’re facing a veteran debater with a shit ton more experience at this than you do. Come back in about ten years.

Oh, and just so that you know that I’m calling you out personally, I’m using your full username. Knight-of-Balance-13.

This is dudeblade, from the rwde tag. And I, I am just a man, trying to enjoy the show that we all love

Then why have you not posted a single good thing about the show in over a year and even then you have gone back on some of your stances about teh show since then and haven’t gone back on any of your negative posts. And you have attacked the writers and numerous characters on the show multiple times. Your actions speak louder than words.

Now isn’t this just a lovely piece of work? It looks like that there was a whole lot of thought put into this one. I wonder what would happen, if I were to look at every single detail, and deconstruct it. To just, distort it and force my opinions here. Like how you do with most of mine.

And right away we have a problem: the way he structures his critique. He puts up a slab of text on screen and puts up a slab below it, a mistake I made for so long. You can go sentence by sentence and dismantle it that way, thus giving you more breathing room and a quicker pace to it.

On to the content itself, I haven’t outright shown malice towards a post and when I do I usually label it as a “potshot”. as I have done so before in the past. While it is true that I have been hostile towards posts, it has never gotten to the point of sadism as you are implying with both your tone and language. SO right off the bat you are presenting yourself as more hostile than I am 90% of the time and this is on the very first post of your very first rebuttal. Not a good sign.

Also: You say deconstruction which implies a professional tone (which is what I usually do) but then you’re lanuage shows you are going to be anything but. Seriously man, if you are trying to attack me, be outright with it. It just makes you look more honest in the end.

For starters, you also can’t be objective if you love the show as well. It’s a two-way street. This is something that is called a catch-22, a situation where there is no reasonable solution to the problem at hand, or where the primary solution, also contradicts the parameters. You want to know why people are so harsh? - It’s because the writers have no intent on listening. How would you feel if every time you tried to offer advice, it was ignored, and the person(s) you were giving it to kept making the same mistakes over and over again? - I’m pretty sure you’d be upset.

However in one of your posts and in numerous reblogs you have stated that just because you are critical of RWBY doesn’t mean you can’t be critical of it so your own words contradict what you say here for no other apparent reason that that argument now applies to me then.

And I have said in the past that you can be critical of something and still like it, it’s your INTENT that judges what is criticism. If your intent is to harm the creators then that isn’t criticism, it’s just hate. As I said in the quote you posted. Your tone and wording have shown that they are closer to hate than criticism (some going as fair to label themselves as hate) and thus what criticism you might have had fails on death ears because you are using the tone, wording and intent of a hater.

Not to mention the fact that you are the one who put the parameters there in the first place: the only evidence people have of Miles rejecting criticism is a meme from Rooster’s Twitter so it can’t be confirmed that was Miles and a link to a guy trying to shut up criticism and Miles calling him out so that’s actually a contradiction. You believe this is grounds for personal attacks despite the fact that the grounds for harsh criticism alone isn’t even met here. This shows you just want to hate.

How about this: Instead of going after the symptoms, you go after the cause. Reducing a fever isn’t going to magically cure the flu. But getting medicine will help cure the flu. I use this analogy, because it’s the best one that there is. But if you want to talk about blowing up information, you should take a look in the mirror. Because you seem to blow up every time someone wants Yang to express what happened.

... Those two definitions of blowing up don’t collorlate. One implies exaggeration but the other implies excessive amount of emotion. While one does cause the other, you didn’t link them. Might want to edit that.

And the only thing of proof you have to prove that is a piece of sarcasm and if that’s being treated as proof then I can point out that you told the writer’s that they were fired from breathing and thus telling them they should die. No matter what way you go with this Dudeblade, you lose.

And in a way, I am trying to cure the cause: the cause being that people are trying to pass off hate as criticism and I am here to criticize and have the actually criticize or shut up and let other people do it. So I still fit your bill.

You always claim that Yang expressing herself undermines the trauma Tai went through. When exactly did Tai get his arm cut off in a terrorist attack when he tried to save his partner? When was Tai’s goals of becoming a huntsman demolished because a terrorist group attacked the school? When did Tai lose his mother at a young age? - The answer is “Nobody knows.” (At least for that last one. The other two have the straightforward answer of “never.”) So far, I have only seen you undermine what Yang has gone through to make Tai’s life look worse in comparison. - Hypocrite, much?

So we’re doing this huh? Okay then: When did Yang ever lose a lover? When did Yang ever lose nearly lose a child? When did her child jump off into the great unknown with only a note? When did Yang have to protect Taiyang from Grimm while she’s depressed? When did Yang ever reach out to Taiyang but he pushed her away? That’s 5 questions that answer never to your two and each one can be answer as “Twice” at the very leats so that actually 10 -2. And that’s not even going into how Taiyang basically has a worse version of the other traumatic events and we don’t even know his backstory. So how about you sit doiwn and take a note from teh White Trailer, something I have been trying to get across showing how ridiculous it is to deem a person’s sorrow by using another (Everyone is entitled to their own sorrow.)

Also, note how he calls Adam a terrorist. This is going to boomerang on him later.

This is possibly the only part where I can at least, partially agree with you. There is a degree of arrogance from both sides. While it’s spread out in the rwde category; the anti-rwde, has it much bigger, but in fewer people. Both sides are to blame for this, and it’s not fair of you to put the blame solely on the rwde tag.

considering the fact that we haven’t suicide baited people, told people to go die, called people pedophiles, called people abusers, slander people, warp facts, sexism, racism and so much more, if we seem arrogant to you that’s probably an intense disdain for RWDE.

Also,”Abject failure”? That guy, (rerwby) is doing their best to fix some plot holes that were left from the writers neglecting to think ahead. Like how when (in canon) Jaune claimed to be from a family of hunters, it made very little sense that he hadn’t unlocked his aura. But in the re-write, he says that “those huntsman genes must have skipped me.” - Something that makes infinitely more sense from a story-telling perspective. Not to mention that I don’t think that word means what you think it means. I read it to day, and found it enjoyable. I’ve read worse stories, and the Re:RWBY story is not the absolute worst story ever. It’s doing its best to address plot holes, and made references to LGBT+ Representation in under three chapters, when the actual show hasn’t made a reference in over FOUR VOLUMES. Though, I’m willing to bet that you think he shoehorned that it for “moar views.” No, B1umenkranz actually made a positive reference to the LGBT+ community. Contrast actual canon, which has promised representation over and over again, but has yet to reveal who is part of the community at best, and is completely baiting at worst.

Yes because that kind of product’s first and fore most priority is that they need to be entertaining. And between the numerous failed attempts at visual humor, interjected dialouge, switched around lines and lack of description, it is a chore to sit through a single reading of Re:RWBY whereas I would gladly sit through Volume 1 of RWBY again.

Also, a lot of what you say here doesn’t work. The huntsman genes don’t work because genetics wasn’t Jaune’s problem, it was training. It created a plot hole as to why Weiss would think a nest is a temple, why Jaune tried getting into Beacon if something he could not control ect. And just because you have LGBT in it doesn’t eman it’s good: Mod Regalia a bisexual talked about this before (https://team-crtq.tumblr.com/post/160160464449/rwby-and-ships) and these exact problems show up: Yang and Blake have tacked on Chemistry when they have a netural at best relationship and Ruby’s sexual observation of Blake makes no sense considering she is stated to be uninterested at sex right now. Combine this with awkward dialogue, OOC moments out of the ass, unnecessary dialouge changes that ruin the jokes, a lack of detail, more plotholes, tacked on LGBT mentions and inconsistent narrative style and you have an inferior product.

Please refer to these three posts on why people are upset about the lack of LGBT+ representation. Now get off your high-horse. Damn, and here I thought that someone in the crtq tag would call you out on that one.

I match and raise your tag with several LGBT members who are just as sick of this as I am: @phoenix-theurge @tumblezwei @ula-star @mageknight14 @rainbowloliofjustice @takashi0. You, as a straight person, cannot claim to speak for these people who are closer to the subject and disagree with you.

Both sides are using Monty’s name in vain. Not just rwde. You have people who are claiming that “The writers are shitting on Monty’s dream” and then you have guys who basically say “You are hating on Monty’s legacy.” - Both are petty, and even I have a major beef with it. But don’t act as if Monty’s death makes his show safe from criticism. If that were true, then people would go apeshit whenever someone criticized a Disney movie. - Point is, is that both sides are guilty of doing this, and considering you got mad and upset that someone made a rwde meme post on the anniversary of Monty’s death, you aren’t free from blame on this part either.

In the main RWBY tag where every RWBY fan can see it, which is what I did. You also only have one example for me and two examples against you: It seems more like I’m an isolated incident than anything so that point does not stand.

Re:RWBY is structured like a book. They aren’t structuring it like a show. Books are different than shows, movies, games, etc. Do you really think that the Harry Potter films follow the books to the exact letter? - I don’t think so. So, maybe you should stop bitching, and start looking onto details. re:Rwby made their points clear, and you claim that they’re arrogant? - They only said that he thought his ideas were better. Gee, for a person who claims that the rwde tag takes things out of context, you sure seem to do that a lot. Plus, if you read his tags, you’ll see that he was very polite compared to your “Everything is wrong, and you should feel bad for writing this wrong” attitude that you seemed to project through your comment.

And RWBy itself is structured as a book and that is why I judge it so: It’s lack of detail and terrible story structure makes it a chore to sit through because the gags in RWBY use both visual and vocal aspects and both are botched by the writer who claims to be a better writer than Miles. He outright said that he could do a better job than Miles and failed to do so and so by your standards of attacking Miles over Soul Eater and LOK, I am still right. In fact, considering Miles never said he was better and Re;RWBY did, I would be more right by your standards than you all are. And then he blocked me and continues to mock me, so what?

Again, refer to the posts that I linked to earlier about baiting. I’m not going through the effort of re-linking them again. But I have a new one right here.

Said by a guy who has a noted hatred of Miles. By your own logic, all that does is discredit you.

Just because Yang was in a rut, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t ablest. Tai made it clear that Yang wasn’t worth his time unless she had two arms, and that is pretty much ablest. Also, if what you said was true about lines and screentime, then that meant that Penny was there for Ruby’s development. Pyrrha was there for Jaune, and Adam was there just to make Blake the definitive “good guy.“ Another reason why people are critical of Jaune is because he was the first character to get a two-parter arc to himself. It wasn’t Ruby and Weiss (who had their problems resolved by the end of the episode) it was Jaune. And considering that no other character that one of the writers voice has gotten the same treatment, it leads to the conspiracy theories that Miles gives more development to Jaune because of his ego. Also, to quote Mr. Enter, “Just because you bring one character down, doesn’t mean the other character is brought back up.” It doesn’t work like that. Making Jaune look weak in comparison to Ruby doesn’t automatically make Ruby a better character, it just makes Jaune look weak.

- In fact, Ruby’s character remains static. But here’s another thing: If Jaune really is there to make Ruby look good, then why is he the strategist? - If this were the case, as you so claim, then Jaune’s strategies would have been thrown out for Ruby’s much better worded, and thought-out tactics. In addition, he’s the ONLY one mourning Pyrrha. Pyrrha is apparently non-existent for the other characters. Pyrrha was put in a Schrodinger’s Cat situation when it came to the reason for her abrupt death. She was either killed to further everyone’s character, or she was killed to further Jaune’s character and his alone. Since no character brings her up aside from Jaune (and Qrow that one time), it comes off as if Pyrrha was killed solely for Jaune

The rut thing was about depression, not the disabled thing. Right off the bat, you’re moving the goalposts. And even so, I have shown that disabled people DO think it was a good portrayal as seen in the Meta folder on the awesome tag of RWBY’s Tv Tropes page. And even then, you have shown an intense and irrational hatred for Taiyang so you’re not allowed to talk. Just as well, you aren’t allowed to talk about Jaune because you have shown personal bias against him so that doesn’t work either. In fact, you’re biased against most male characters as you have admitted before so in reality, most of this is pointless.

And yeah, some characters are like that. Adam isn’t because he’s more used to show what happens when you fight an opponent long enough: you start acting like them. But Penny and Pyrrha? Yeah, that’s true. That’s also not a bad thing: Most mentor characters are this way and Pyrrha actually got an arc outside of Jaune. Hell, the most well known character from Gurren Lagann is Kamina, a mentor character with no purpose or menaingful character traits that aren’t “Make Simon Better.” And Gurren Lagann is one of the highest regarded anime of all time as well as a stated influence on RWBY so my comparison has some weight.

And that only works if Ruby herself is weak, she’s not. Ruy has very strong characterization in that she is an innocent, naive but determined and altrustic girl with a love of weapons and zero social skllls. And contrary to what you say, her character has developed. She has gone from denying that bad things happen in the world to accepting that they happen but still struggling to amke things better because its the bright thing to do. And this coincides with Jaune’s character as a foil to Ruby: he’s the tactician to her stradgest, she inspires people through actions while he does so through words,  she’s talent but naive whereas Jaune doesn’t have talent but is aware, Jaune gets more cynical while Ruby becomes more optimistic.

PS: I guess actions don’t speak at all huh? Ruby being sad at the mention of Pyrrha holds no weight to you huh? Good to know you have such a narrow view of things. No, you just put things in a damned if they do, damned if they don’t situation.

The only time I have ever heard of the opposite of Queerbaiting (Which Blizzard Entertainment invented, and was called Straightbaiting), was Tracer from Overwatch. Proof: https://ravenclaw-rebel3390.tumblr.com/post/155915548399/i-guess-overwatch-invented-straight-baiting

Okay and i be you rolled your ewyes at that. Now imagine how the five people I mentioned feel.

RWBY was marketed as a show about strong female protagonists. People didn’t sign on to watch Jaune (and only Jaune) cry about Pyrrha. I, myself am a fan of Ren. Jaune has had many lines over the course of the series, whereas characters like Ren, Sun, and Neptune have had very little. Also, Penny hardly had any screentime, and she was supposed to be one of Ruby’s close friends.

Once again, glad to know you have such a narrow view of things that Ruby being emotionally sad doesn’t work unless she says it.

And Jaune is the Deturagonist, so what? that’s like complaining that Gohan got too many lines in Dragon Ball Z.

Also: man Pain AKA a man can’t feel emotion over a woman. Nice to see such hypocrisy.

Right. Pyrrha totally deserves that label. After all, it’s not like she asked Jaune out multiple times, regularly ignored is rejections, and only backed off when she found out that he liked someone else and that affection was reciprocated… Oh wait, that happened… But it was Jaune doing it. Also, you were the one who undermined Yang’s trauma by claiming that she doesn’t know what it feels like to have people close to you abandon/die on her, when that’s been most of her life. Tai had absolutely ZERO joking tone when he said his insensitive comment, and you never seem to bring up the fact that Port and Oobleck were shocked by his comment. Why would they be shocked if this is supposed to be normal? It doesn’t seem logical to me.

Because you have a bias against male characters, we’ve been over this. You have outright stated it before and shown it numerous times. BGuit I’ll humor you:

Pyrrha also made advances at Jaune, just not directly. Nurmous Times as well. She ignored his attention to Weiss or ignored his lack of attention and only abcked off when Jaune was stated to like Weiss outright. So yeah, she does get that label if Jaune does. It’s called equality, something you seem foreign to.

Zero joking tone huh? Then I guess Church never joked once in the entirety of Red Vs. Blue because the tones were EXACTKY the same. Glad to see you’re blinder to sarcasm than an aspie.

And I guess if someone were to see the Reds And Blue or Rooster Teeth themselves,m they despise each other right? Or oif yous aw @ula-star‘s family you’d say that they are abusive too huih? Glad to see the world only works one way. (sarcasm)

Adam is an asshole. But Y’know what? - Weiss was the one who called “Controversial Faunus Labor” a “morally grey area.” Also, Adam is a minority, broken by the discrimination that he has faced. I don’t approve of his actions, not by a long shot. But the White Fang seem to be emulating the rwde tag (or maybe vice-versa), in which that side was sick and tired of being ignored when they were being peaceful, so they resort to brutal tactics. Weiss is also a racist heiress who somehow got over her racism overnight. From a storytelling standpoint, Adam deserves more sympathy than Cinder at this point. Unless both of them get an expanded backstory, they have both done some pretty terrible things, but Adam was forced to work for Cinder because she had power, and he didn’t. People tend to root for the underdog, especially if that underdog has been discriminated against. Adam’s story is more relatable to people because he’s a person who was sick and tired of peaceful protest being ineffective.

Let’s go through this, shall we?

1. Adam is also racist and to a degree that overshadows Weiss and Cardin (Name one time they6 demanded genocide. I can with Adam.)

2. Mind linking to that?

3. You comparing the rwde tag to the White Fang and called their leader a terorist shows that you pretty much know you’re trying to use fear to control people and thus cannot be listen to. Thanks for the confirmation.

4. And that’;s why Weiss was still weary around Sun because she wasn’t being racist to him. Also, she got over her racism, Adam hasn’t.

5. And no one forced Adam to try and blow up the train in the Black Trailer, abuse Blake, chop Yang’s arm off or call for genoicde either. Man, this is like a textbook example of Draco In Leather Pants. And weiss’ is a form of Ron The Death Eater as well: Big surprise.

Jaune has taken the protagonist role. He’s the only one mourning Pyrrha, and as that line chart stated, had Ruby not had that speech at the end, she would have had less lines than Jaune. Not to mention that we (the audience) already knew why Ruby was doing this. By having her do that speech, she’s simply stating the obvious. No audience member asked “Why is Ruby doing this?” - Because we already know. Ruby hardly did anything. It was primarily Jaune.

If Jaune is the protagonist, why did he immediately default to giving up his angst and sorrow to Ruby the minute she shows sorrow? Why would the entire Volume be using him to prop Ruby up? Why would the emotional scenes with him either use Ruby as the start and finish?

And the part about the lines thing doesn’t work because, again, 75% of Jaune’s lines go to Ruby because they were used to develop here.

And if she is staing the obvious there then you missed the obvious point about her development, the theme of the Volume and the emotional wrap up,.Also shows that no matter what, Ruby will always be secondary in your eyes to Jaune even when she isn’t/. Nice to see you again Sexism.

- Jaune gets hit. Jaune gets an upgrade. Jaune is telling the team what to do. Jaune is sick of losing people (which would have carried more weight if Ren were the one to have said it). Jaune is sad that Pyrrha died (Again, he’s the only one to be actively mourning her). Jaune catches Tyrian’s eye. Jaune calls out Qrow. Jaune saves Qrow. Jaune shows off his weapon’s new mode.

So is Ruby, so is Ruby and Jaune’s upgrade only made him get bitchslapped. Jaune can’t do anything else. Audienbce surrogate. Ruby is also saidf and he immediately stops being sad about Pyrrha to allow her to be. Tyrian immediately dismisses that and focuses on Ruby. In character for him, out of character for Ruby. So did Ruby.

And Ruby also had the focus of Salem and Cinder, 75% of Jaune’s lines where made to build her up, She is the fcous of the plotline and not Jaune, 2 out of the three scenes Jaune is notable in is centered around Runby, Ruby gets the final words, Rubty is the fcous of Yang’s plotline as well, Ruby does far better in combat that Jaune, Ruby is the reason WHY Qrow is there, Ruby is the reason WHY Qrow gets injured, Qrow is Ruby’s uncle and Jaune has no family in the story, Ruby is the butt of one joke whereas Jaune is the butt of three in the first episode alone. Yeah, doesn’t work/

Ruby showed off a neat aspect of her semblance in the first episode of the volume, and then it was never seen again. Ren comes across his ruined village, and we get only one flashback to it. Nora hardly does anything other than provide some relief, and acts as a means to keep Ren calm, and Qrow only gives us exposition. Then there’s the fact that Ruby only used her semblance in the finale fight a total of one time, whereas if that Grimm was as threatening as it was hyped up to be, then she should have been using it to tie the thing’s arms around a tree or something. - But nope, gotta have that ancient Grimm get killed by four newbies when other, more experienced fighters all fell to it. This just makes any hunter that’s not part of the main cast look pathetic in comparison.

Except for the numerous times she files into the air.

Ren and Nora got foreshadowing in Episode 2, 5, 6, and 9.

And semblances use up Aura therefore if she did one hit would break her aura as it did with Ren, The Nucklevee has more control over the arms than Ruby and all Jaune’s weapon did was get him bitchslapped.

Also: Name one Hunstamn in Ren’s village or any that fought the Nucklevee before the heroes. ot Ren’s dad, weapon isn’t correct. Not Xion, The bandoits took care of them and other Grimm weakened them down/ No? Can’t? Then I guess you have no argumnet.

Misuse in animation is a sin of itself. It’s a sad day when Monty (God rest his soul) forgets that Rapiers aren’t used in that fashion. It’s a poor decision that needs to end, and if RW/BY can’t be the trend setter and be the first time it gets used correctly, then why should it be exempt? - The lead animator was someone who studied fencing, this shouldn’t have been a thing in the first place. RWB/Y shouldn’t be a trend follower, it should be a trend setter.

Most of the Raiper usage cited in RWBy was from The White Trailer, Volume 1 and Volume 2. AKA when Monty was the animator. And even then, many trend setters WERE trend followers, they just diverged. NGE was a normal Mecha show for 16 episodes and yet it set the ENTIRETY of the deconstructions in anime after 1995. You fail using yet ANOTHER inspiration to RWBY.

The mention of trains is only mentioned in the exposition-filled bore-fest that is World of Remanent. If people need exposition about that from a filler spot that disrupts the action and flow of the show, then why shouldn’t they repeat what happened? - After all, they did it with the Schnee Heir twist. They revealed that Jacques wasn’t a real Schnee in the WoR, and then, in the following episode, they repeat it. Despite the fact that the twist was ruined by the WoR, they still thought it to be a good enough of a twist to repeat in the story proper. If they can do that, why can’t they repeat the train thing?

“Borefest”

“Likes on WOR are the sma eif jnot higher than normal RWBY”

Yeah, those don’t work.

Because it’s a part of the show? Okay then, whenever exposition happens in a show, you MUST skip over it because all it is is an inclusive version of WOR. What’s that? You won’t? Then no bitching about WOR.

- Also, Yang got used to the prosthetic in only a few weeks. Even FMA makes it a point to mention that their character getting used to their prosthetic in under a year is unusual. And if you mean to tell me that Remanent has the technology to make a prosthetic that can be gotten used to in under a few weeks, then why are they so stupid to make it so that you need four active towers to allow for cross-continental communication? - It simply doesn’t make sense. - Also, most PTSD victims take YEARS to recover (if they do at all). Yang getting better overnight (Putting on the prosthetic, and being able to use it like it was her original arm overnight) is insensitive to actual PTSD victims who lost a limb in a war, terrorist attack, or a freak accident.

And she had six months beforehand. That also means you wnat Yang to be out of the show for a year: Good to know.

Okay then: Do you want me o watch Legend of Korra and go through ever single plot hole in that show? Because considering last Airbender had quite a few, I’m sure I’ll be able to match you blow for blow. If not Korra then..basically any show ever? Or will you keep your standards.the same watching RWBY as you do everyone else and Not be a nitpicky asshole?

I believe that this is what you would call “a critique.” After all, I provided solid evidence as to why your reasoning is flawed, much like how you constantly did to me. And if this upsets you, then perhaps you could do us all a favor and keep it to yourself. And how about you don’t go whining to the rest of crtq that someone was being mean to you?

No, because you shown numerous times t5hroughout this study taht you have quite a few biases that you refuse to put aside as well as t5he fact that you amde it clear that you were attacking me rather critique, summerized by how you expect me to hold up to a standard that you yourself have rejected numerous times and didn’t follow once in this section. Meanwhile, I have.

And I wouldn’t do that to the crtq tag, I have higher standards than that. Nope, i’ll just my comrades talk you down while as Mod Quartz I will say nothing, thus giving you no ammo against me as a critic there.

I’d sure as hell appreciate it.

I’ll even be nice and not post this under the usual anti-knight tags (Though if someone else reblogs this, and adds those tags, I refuse to take responsibility for the actions of another).

Then why is Rwde a tag then? That is an anti-knight tag since so many people in the rwde tag dislike me, you7 are still singling me out for ridicule. And no, rwde doesn’t apply here as you are, in your won words, criticizing me. Meaning no RWBY and thus no rwde. Too bad about that huh?

And since you held me responsible for MSD even  after we said we didn’t approve of him: Nope.

Now how about you quit with the weak punches and actually do some damage.

Or

Is that all you got?