#fascinating in feathers

[historical-hollywood]

Three different colorization options for Mae West and W.C. Fields in My Little Chickadee (1940).

Do you prefer Mae in purple, red, or blue?

[vintagewildlife]

White feather star perched on a cluster of red sea whips By: Douglas Faulkner From: The Fascinating Secrets of Oceans & Islands 1972

[astronomodome]

Tumblr Poll Tournaments & MCYT

So a while ago I made a post expressing my frustration with the way a lot of tumblr poll tournaments seem to exclude mcyt characters- or if they are included, people in the notes are rude about it. The first situation of these- the poll organizer including rules against submitting characters from mcyt- is something I can easily quantify. I've crunched some numbers in order to find out two things:

How common is this phenomenon, really?

Why does this happen in the first place?

A note before I start: I'm not blaming the poll organizers for this, and I don't want anyone to get angry at them for excluding mcyt. At the end of the day, it's up to them to curate what they want their poll to be, and if they don't want to deal with the toxicity that often comes with letting mcyt characters run (or if they just don't like it for whatever reason), that's their decision. Trust me- poll organizers have to put up with a lot of shit already, and I don't want to add to it, regardless of their opinions on mcyt. If any poll organizers recognize their own words in the later part of this overview, they can contact me and I'll remove it. This is also why I have chosen not to identify the blogs from which I took the examples- I mean no harm to any poll organizer. They are a symptom of a much larger problem and they haven't done anything wrong except be a little misinformed at worst.

Excluding mcyt characters from poll tournaments really isn't that big of a deal on its own- though it is frustrating- but it does speak to the larger attitude of the general tumblr population towards mcyt. While not without its flaws, this can be used as a metric to measure the extent of this attitude and maybe get a hint of why it exists.

...Please note, also, that most of these polls date back to around March-June 2023, when poll tournaments were a big thing on Tumblr. Not super outdated, but I still should note that opinions might have changed since then.

Also also, be warned that there are examples below of some organizers being pretty toxic! It's not a whole lot, but if you don't want to expose yourself to that, maybe pass on this post!

With that out of the way, let's get started.

Part One: The Numbers

The first thing I decided to do was figure out a rough percentage of how many poll tournaments have a rule that excludes mcyt characters from being submitted. To get a sample batch of poll blogs, I used one of the blogs that pits the winners of tournaments against each other and checked each blog included in that. This ended up being a more tedious process than I had thought, since there's a lot of variation in the way poll organizers, well, organize. I ended up with 123 blogs sorted into three categories.

The first category included tournaments where a rule for or against mcyt characters wouldn't really make sense, for a variety of reasons. Most commonly, the tournament was between letters of the alphabet or animo acids or government agencies, not fictional characters, so I counted them out. There were also a handful of blogs where the contestants were determined by the organizer, not by nomination at all. Combined, blogs that did not fit my criteria made up 60/123 of my samples.

The second and third categories were the blogs that either had a rule against mcyt characters, or didn't. Most of the blogs I looked through had rules I could find, and some were more thorough about it than others. For my purposes, I counted the blog as a no only if they explicitly had a rule against mcyt characters, or clarified later that they weren't allowed. Most poll blogs didn't mention mcyt at all. (This will become relevant later.)

Of the 63 blogs that fit my criteria, 11 (17.5%) of them had a rule against mcyt characters, while the remaining 52 (82.5%) did not.

To me, this seems like pretty good news! I had honestly expected the percentage of blogs that excluded mcyt to be much higher. This is definitely a good sign! But I wouldn't really jump to assuming that mcyt characters would actually be accepted in all of these blogs. I will explain this in the next part of my research.

Part Two: The Examples

The second thing I wanted to find out with this research was why organizers end up having rules against mcyt in the first place. Is it just the bad reputation the mcyt space has (largely a result of one green man in particular)? Let's look at a few examples of poll rules against mcyt characters. Some of them are from my sample blogs and some of them aren't.

Type 1: Not understanding the difference between real people and characters in mcyt

The majority of the rules against mcyt I saw were of this type, and honestly, it's pretty reasonable. It's a pretty major debate in the mcyt community over whether mcyts' characters are separate enough from their content creators to count as fictional. However, there are a considerable number of mcyt characters who are explicitly stated to be different from their cc in the same way as a character in a movie played by an actor is different from the actor playing them. Excluding all mcyt characters for being 'real people' is just incorrect, though I can kinda understand where the organizers were coming from with this one.

It should also be noted that the vast majority of poll blogs had a rule against submitting real people. There's a possibility that some poll organizers might have lumped mcyt characters as real people even if they didn't specify it explicitly. Therefore, an attempt to actually submit an mcyt character into one of these tournaments might be against the rules based on what the organizer thinks. I have no way to quantify this, which is why I said earlier that the results of my initial test might not be accurate.

Type 2: 'Problematic fandom' (toxicity warning for some of these)

This type of rule is usually broader than just mcyt, but lumps it in with other fandoms known for being associated with bigotry (often hp, which is... yeah i'm definitely not going to argue in favor of harry potter but yikes. really? we're as bad as terfy potter? really.) At least one of them let dsmp characters in with the exception of dream, which is a lot fairer than... some of the others.

If we want to give the organizers benefit of the doubt here, we can say that these rules are made to keep the poll less toxic than it would be otherwise... but to be perfectly honest, some of these might be more about that phenomenon of purity culture that has had a habit of popping up in fandom spaces since forever. That's a whole other conversation I'm not ready to have now, but it comes as no surprise to me that mcyt has become a little taboo in some places (likely to a large extent because of dream and all the drama he's generated). There's also no telling whether the poll organizers in these cases even know that there are other smps besides dsmp... but that's besides the point, since there are other dsmp characters that aren't associated with dream at all. Excluding them reveals a misconception about the mcyt genre anyway. And of course, I think we can all agree that some of these are just pretty rude.

Which brings us to our conclusion.

I feel like a lot of the toxicity towards mcyt as a genre and mcyt characters boils down to people either not really understanding what mcyt is (i.e. mcyt -> minecraft youtubers -> real people) or hearing stuff about dream and assuming the entire mcyt space is reflective of that. Of course, it's a frustrating issue that some people think this way. I think it's nice to be reminded, though, that this sort of thing isn't very widespread. Alongside the bad examples, I saw a lot of organizers confronting their preconceived notions: one organizer let in an mcyt character after admitting their 'unfamiliarity with the source material', another allowed mcyt characters 'on the condition that you can explain how they are a separate character' and a few others fiercely defended mcyt characters against toxicity in their polls. Every day we grow as a community and we can't let a few people with misguided notions of what we are keep us down. Keep watching, keep creating, and as Zedaph once said, It's okay to be silly!

[transsexualhollyleaf]

love (sarcasm) how this fandom collectively forgets about the whole "maybe don't make the anti-native racism of this series worse by depicting characters with stereotypical feathers behind the ear" issue every two to three weeks so i am once again reminding you all of the feather document https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ll3Gfo7d5kD2GLT1F1t4fUcP9LkLRHWBQ197XffU_Os/edit?usp=sharing

[amarguerite]

Gotta love The Gilded Age for giving its audience exactly what it wants: a two minute hat montage.

[mail-me-a-snail]

writing really takes you places bc i found the website for an al capone themed diner while looking for 30s slang. and they rlly go all out like they encourage you to dress up like mobsters/swing girls and act the part and everything (they even have stand up comedians?)

anyway they have al capones mugshot on a t-shirt and poster in their merch page. and a mug that says al capones mugshot. if u were thinking of getting someone special a tchotchke with al capones face on it, here's the place for it

[the-valiant-valkyrie]

grampa youre two seconds away from getting replaced if you dont get less lame in the next four seconds

[incorrect-league-of-villains]

Sako: Bottoms up!

Hawks: [lifts Dabi above his head]

Dabi: HEY

[birdricks]

late night insane post i rlly think birdrick appeals to me partly bc of the alien nature of their relationship… and specifically in how bp kind of bridges the gap between them but in many other ways theyre completely different

[ne0nbreeze]

You are also interested in weather?? 👀

Yeah! I’m actually studying meteorology in school, although I’m still relatively early on, so I don’t know too much yet.

I learned about sprites specifically though from a youtuber, Pecos Hank, who documents tornadoes and other storms he comes across while storm chasing, and he occasionally catches a few sprites on camera!

[historical-hollywood]

Western showgirl Jacqueline Fontaine strikes a couple of seductive poses in these promotional stills for her film debut in The Daltons' Women (1950)

[camellia-thea]

me: i hate things deep underwater; nightmare scenario also me: hmmm…. iron lung, sunless seas, subnautica,

bitch make up your mind

[screechingsandwichhologram]

the og countryhumans

[sysig]

Colour picking, palette teasing (Patreon)

[wetbloodworm]

berdes berdes berdes

[katiajewelbox]

Wishing everyone a lugubrious World Goth Day 2023! 

Embrace the darker and more mysterious side of life today, and everyday. Today's the time to listen to goth music, dress in your macabre finest attire, read a spooky story, or just contemplate the eerie side of reality. This is one of my Halloween costumes - The Deadly Nightshade Fairy. Like most of my costumes, it isn't a "kit" bought at a costume store and instead a bespoke combination of accessories and real fashion clothing to evoke the identity of a specific character. This Nightshade Fairy is a Victorian era nature spirit with a connection to poisonous plants who might lure you down a dangerous garden path.