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@lillotte17 said: Plz show us an instance of Dorian with The Boi realizing that he is in fact morosexual 😌 like watching him walk straight into a glass door and being “oh no I love him”
Dorian Pavus, scion of House Pavus, educated by the finest instructors in Tevinter and co-developer of time-traveler magic has been with his pick of intelligent and beautiful mages and scholars throughout his homeland. He would dazzle his company with his intellect, wit, charm, and of course his amazing good looks. He in turn reveled in the intelligence of his affairs. The shared passion for the esoteric and arcane.
Inquisitor Varas Lavellan was a good man. A kind man. A diplomatic and charismatic man who was surprisingly good at getting what he wanted by smiling and speaking calmly. He too was devastatingly handsome with long, thick black hair and bright green eyes. His long nose, high cheekbones and square jaw were all complimented by his dark green vallaslin. After Dorian did some research, he’d discovered that Varas’s vallaslin honored Dirthamen specifically, a god of knowledge and secrets. It was fitting. The Inquisitor had so many secrets after all. But knowledge?
As charismatic and kind-hearted the Inquisitor was, however, he couldn’t exactly be accused of being the cleverest sort.
“The daggers, of course, they’re heavier than feathers,” Varas said, utterly convinced. Dorian blinked in surprise.
“Listen - ten pounds of feathers, ten pounds of daggers. They both weigh ten pounds, neither is heavier,” Dorian explained but Varas shook his head.
“Makes no sense. Have you ever held a feather? No way it weighs the same as a dagger.”
“A singular feather, of course not! But both weigh ten pounds, erego, there are a lot more feathers present than daggers.”
“As an expert in daggers...I don’t see it.”
What was there not to get? Varas shook his head and curse him and his beautiful hair! This whole conversation was ridiculous and stupid. Dorian couldn’t even remember how they had gotten here, but they were and it was absurd Varas couldn’t get the logic. What was more absurd was that Dorian wanted to end the stupid argument by kissing the man on his stupid mouth with stupid tongue instead of making some witticism that Varas would invariably not get!
Varas leaned forward and smiled which was of course the worst thing because his smile was incredible. “I know you’re trying to tell me something, so why don’t you just say it? Take out the guesswork.”
“You are infuriating.”
Varas chuckled, “I’m charming.” And for the first time in that entire frustrating conversation...Varas was right. Shit.
(I am currently accepting prompts! Send’em on over!)
#dorian pavus#varas lavellan#pavellan#dragon age#dragon age inquisition#dai#fanfic#scurv writes#remember to reblog writing you liiiiike#feed your content creators. it's good for the fandom environment#varas is a himbo. a sweet confused boy#result of me making his eyes a wee big in the CC and him looking PERPETUALLY confused
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eruuuuu I honestly can’t remember when I started following your blog (somewhere around last year?? ig..?) but out of all corners of gjhm fandom your blog’s gotta be my fav one. not only you feed us with your stunning art pieces, but you also create such good vibes here. everyone is welcome here. everyone can just drop by and share their hcs with you and the rest of us. we can all just come here and yell and thirst and cry over gjhm, jjk or other hot fictional characters. your blog honestly feels like everyone’s fav comfort place in this fandom. no antis, no drama just good vibes and horny… best kind of fandom experience if you ask me
Awww bby 🥺 thank you so much!! this means a lot to me.. you all can chill here on my couch and have a glass of lemonade and unlimited biscuits <3
Fandom doesnt really have to be toxic and the first time I went on twt for the gojohime tag I was just warshocked lol so I went here literally just screaming randomly my love for uta and gojo and now here we are so so happy people came screaming to me back <3 it makes me so happy too that we now have plenty of creator ... literally gjhms are always always with new content (not from gege) but the creators in this just keep churning out contents we get to enjoy!! fics, hcs, art!! everything. <3
I guess surrounding yourself with the right people that would support you no matter your brain is brainrotting on is really important...we go here to be unwind from reality so even tho I get hate messages/comments for what I draw, I just tend to ignore them and just focus on you guys :3 no one needs to see it and those antis cannot get what they went for me lmao. I only have a very short time when I go online so I really dont wanna waste it on bad vibes lol (unless Im bored and wanna play with these little craphead lol /j not /j)
I am really happy that after a year in this art/fan blog i created I am just learning I was somehow able to create that safe environment I was hoping we all have 🥰 to more brainrots and crumbs for us!!
ask game: how I met this bitch
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smptwt as of 04/07/2020
Right. You asked for it, so you shall recieve. Below the cut is probably one of the most thought-out, in-depth, hopefully unbiased (but probably not) and above all helpful accounts of what the fuck is happening in the smplive and lunch club fandoms right now. I will be covering everything I can- but in the case that I’ve forgotten something, please let me know so I can have a crack at making an update.
Before the cut, I’d just like to link my first three posts about this same topic, covering my thoughts and the events of the last couple of months of drama. It feels so strange that I’ve made so many of these, but as long as they help people, I’ll keep making them.
Part 1: https://crunchy-corvid.tumblr.com/post/619547090403622912/the-cscoopsmptwt-drama
Part 2: https://crunchy-corvid.tumblr.com/post/619746266158661633/more-on-smptwt-long-post
Part 3: https://crunchy-corvid.tumblr.com/post/619886809143476225/smptwt-part-3-030620
I’d like to preface this with a huge thank you to everyone who helped me collect and compile information for this post- and those who helped censor twitter handles and edit screenshots. Without you, this post would have never been made.
Thank you to everyone on the Cancelled Heaven discord server: https://discord.gg/emrh2u
Now, onto the thing.
So we’ll start at the beginning with the easiest ‘drama’ (I hate calling it that) to cover. Charlie (slimecicle) tweeted on his second account and it caused a little upset. It’s not much but it feeds into a greater conversation that I think is relevant here:
We’ll start with Charlie’s original point, then move on to the reply. Obviously, this post was poorly timed, because everyone thought it was about the Cooper (cscoop) drama, when in reality it was just a general comment. I saw a lot of replies along the lines of ‘it’s okay you can @ cscoop’ and similar things. If you’ve read my previous posts you’ll know how I feel about the Cooper situation, but regardless, there are a few reasons why this is a Bad Take/poor interpretation of what Charlie said.
Charlie and Cooper are friends. They haven’t fallen out as far as we know. Charlie is left-wing, and definately doesn’t seem like the kind of person to be friends with someone who is racist/transphobic/sexist etc. So why would he be talking about Cooper in this post?
Also, Charlie is clearly talking about people who still say slurs, not people who have said slurs in the past. This is how I read it, a jab at streamers and gamers who use ‘dark humour’ to justifty their actions. A lot of people seemed to relate this to Cooper, despite him never trying to justify his use of slurs. The people who did try to justify his actions this way were fans, not the man himself. So again, this post doesn’t relate to Cooper.
On to the reply, which sparks a different conversation all together. While I see where the commenter is coming from, and agree with them to an extent, Charlie is allowed to have his own opinion on the matter. And he is right. Using insulting language against heterosexual people does create a larger divide and doesn’t get anyone on our ‘side’. It just makes us look immature and causes a lot of straight cis people to assume that we hate them.
On the other hand, I do think that saying things like ‘disgusting hets’ can be a funny joke if you are saying it to your friends who don’t have any issue with it. You probably shouldn’t get into the habit of saying things like that though, just in case you actually hurt someone with your words. Both sides of the argument have pros and cons, so anyone angry at Charlie for his opinion really have no reason to be.
Charlie’s reponse to this comment was reasonable, responsible, and mature, and he is clearly showing that he understands the concerns of his audience. This is all I’ll say about Charlie in this post. Honestly, he’s generally unproblematic and ‘safe’ to keep watching, if you enjoy a very drama-free environment. Have fun!
Now I’ll move on to Ted. He’s made some great points recently about cancel culture which I strongly agree with. Here’s his first tweets:
I don’t have much to add here, this is perfectly valid in my opinion- though I feel like sometimes you can tell a lot about a person by the people they follow. For example, if someone follows Trump, Ben Shapiro, and a bunch of right-wing youtubers, they probably agree with a lot of the things they say. But I think the point Ted is trying to make is that he shouldn’t be harassed about drama his friends fall into. If he isn’t involved, leave him out of it.
Next we’ll take a look at his tweets on stans, probably sparked by the drama with Carson, which I will be talking about later.
Again, I have no issue with what Ted is saying here. His idea is a good one, and a fun way to distinguish casual fans from people who create art, content, and (appropriate) fanfiction for the ‘flandom’!
Basically, how I see it, is that a ‘fan’ is a casual viewer who doesn’t really get involved in the flandom, maybe posting about smplive and/or lunch club occasionally, but not being too involved. A ‘flan’ is someone who interracts a lot, creates art and fiction that respects boundaries, and posts more about the boys than a casual fan does. A ‘stan’ is a stalker-fan, creepy and obsessive, too invested, maybe creates art and fiction that crosses boundaries, and obsessively posts about the boys.
I think this new terminology is really cool and Ted is smart for coming up with it (also, probably hungry when coming up with it too). I think that the term ‘stan’ should be thrown out and used to describe the ‘bad’ side of fandoms. There is a risk that people will hide behind the term ‘flan’ to disguise the fact that they are a stan, but this is still a good step foward.
But you’re not here to listen to me ramble about Ted or Charlie. You’re here for Carson. So let’s get on with it.
Carson made a series of tweets talking about stans, much like Ted did later. He seemed tired of stans harassing him about his friends, a sentiment shared by Ted (who faced very minimal backlash over his tweets). Here’s what he said:
Which is something I fully agree with. For big content creators like Carson and his friends, stan culture is absolutely insane. Recently they’ve been trying to ‘catch out’ many people who are part of smplive and/or lunch club, most obviously with Cooper and Schlatt but I’ve seen the others getting ‘called out’ too. Carson’s anti-stan stance is well-known in the flandom (yes I am using that word get used to it) so these tweets didn’t surprise me.
For some reason stans seem to think that if one creator is okay with their behaviour, every other creator is too. This is not the case. Carson was within his full right to say these things about stans.
Obviously the replies got out of hand. People became horribly angry very quickly, and clearly Carson had already had enough because pretty soon he started blocking stan accounts- which only made them more mad.
Of course, there were supporters and anti-stan comments out there too, such as this fun exchange:
But a whole lot of people got angry. Carson was trending for a while, too, after he started blocking stans. Unfortunately some people did get wrongfully blocked, which sucks, sure, but use of an alt account or logging off of twitter can solve that problem (this can also be said for stan accounts. Carson didn’t stop any of them from viewing his content, just blocked them so that he didn’t have to see their tweets).
Carson did this for his own mental health. After a long conversation with older people who have been in fandoms for decades, I can tell you that being at the top is always hell. New threads created about you every day, friends you can’t trust, and people giving you shit for things other people said. I can’t imagine how someone as popular as Carson has dealt with this for so long.
People who were blocked started to claim that they were having panic attacks, that they hyperfixate so they can’t help being obsessive, and that Carson doesn’t care about mental health for these reasons. They said some pretty toxic and manipulative things and a lot of people clearly didn’t know what they were talking about:
First of all, these comments on the Katerino and Fitz situation are honestly disgusting. These people are only proving Carson’s point that stans will be super supportive one second and turn around to hate you the next. To bring up something like this, something completely unrelated and highly personal- knowing Carson will see- is disgraceful. To speculate about a relationship that Carson has explicitly stated he doesn’t want people to speculate about just to try and make a point? Horrible.
A lot of stans seem to have this ‘we made you famous so we dictate how you feel’ mentality, which I hate. Exactly as the reply says, they sound like toxic parents with these words. To think you deserve ‘respect’ from someone after accusing their friends of horrible things and harassing them to the point that they block you is so manipulative and quite frankly cruel.
Again, Carson has the right to block anyone he wants. Creators are not your friends, they are entertainment. If you are making them upset and harassing them, you shouldn’t get mad when they block you.
Listen. It can be tough, finding out that someone you look up to has blocked you. Yes, I’m sure people had a not-so-nice time with their mental health when it happened to them. But in most cases, they were blocked for a reason. Some people were even literally asking to get blocked and then got mad when they did. But again, no one has been barred from viewing Carson’s content. He simply blocked people who he didn’t want to see in his comments section.
You have freedom of speech, but you don’t have freedom from consequence. If you say something that hurts someone else, you’re not always going to be free from their judgement.
Carson has been very open about his own struggles with depression and imposter syndrome recently, and people are viewing his actions as... hypocritical? This is flawed logic. Carson blocked stans because they were bad for his mental health, the fact that some claim to have had ‘panic attacks’ as a result is not on him. He has the autonomy to block who he wants to block.
Wilbur Soot made some comments about the situation, which can be found in this video from 7 minutes 30 seconds in, and goes until 10 minutes and 11 seconds in:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/667971714
What Wilbur says here is completely understandable. He doesn’t have a problem with stans, but doesn’t speak for anyone but himself. Just because one person is okay with something doesn’t mean someone else is, too.
Also, a lot of people think that it’s okay to hate on someone like Carson or Schlatt, then turn around and stan Wilbur, which is kind of fucked up, because they’re friends in real life. How would you feel if someone was super nice to you, then turned around and harassed your friends?
A lot of people claimed to have ‘hyperfixations’ on Carson or lunch club, which they used as an excuse to be obsessive and creepy. This is bullshit, but someone else explained it a lot better than I could:
And I absolutely agree with this. You cannot use neurodivergence to explain away your creepiness. That’s just offensive to people who do hyperfixate, and leads to even more problems and misunderstandings.
Carson did a stream much later where he talked about all of these things, and boy did that go well (not). Here is a clip of him talking about hyperfixations:
https://m.twitch.tv/clip/SuaveBlushingDotterelBCWarrior
Now, here’s where my support for Carson falters. He should have done more research on what hyperfixations really are before he said things about them. He hurt some people with what he said, and just saying he’s uneducated on the topic isn’t really an excuse.
HOWEVER. Carson was given very little time to research (about 24 hours between his original tweets and his stream) and, more importantly, it is very obvious that the use of the term ‘hyperfixation’ has been warped and manipulated by stans who are misusing the term to excuse their behaviour. Carson probably saw stans using it and assumed it was something synonomous with ‘obsessions’.
What he said was poorly worded, but the point he was making is the same as the (much more researched and informative) tweet above. Anyone getting mad that he is somehow ‘invalidating mental health or autism’ with his comments clearly don’t understand the point he was trying to make in the first place.
And here’s a clip of Connor talking about it, too, as well as defending Carson’s right to block people as he wishes:
https://www.twitch.tv/connoreatspants/clip/YummySlickPlumageSpicyBoy
https://www.twitch.tv/connoreatspants/clip/JazzySpotlessMelonMoreCowbell
What he said here is completely valid, a little poorly worded in the same way as Carson’s statement, but overall something I stand behind.
Some people are claiming that Carson is being manipulative or ‘gaslighting’ fans and stans:
Carson is not against fans who create cool stuff for him and his friends. He is against the people who harass him, accuse his friends of horrible things, and try to look for every little thing they’ve said and done wrong. This is what he said, and people got mad at him for it, and so he blocked them. That is it. There is no gaslighting. There is no manipulation. I’ve seen much more manipulative things coming from the stans’ side of things.
Now we move on to Noah’s reply to Carson’s tweet. Which, yes, caused a whole new can of worms to be opened.
Now, for those like me who have trouble figuring out Noah’s way of speaking, let me translate: ‘stans are insecure people who start to feel entitled because they’ve started to view a streamer they like as a friend/someone who shares their pain.’
For those of you who don’t know, this is what ‘don’t negotiate with terrorists’ means:
However, almost predictably, stans saw the word ‘terrorist’ and lost their goddamn minds. That, coupled with the complicated phrasing of Noah’s words, caused a lot of stans to freak out.
This conversation is full of Bad Takes, but my main issue is that they are trying to diagnose Noah with an actual mental illness. That is not only offensive to people who have that illness (especially calling him ‘insane’ in the same sentence, as well as implying that having said illness makes you a bad person) but is also highly hypocritical since so many stans claimed to all be neurodivergent themselves.
Also, 90% of his fans aren’t stans. They’re mostly fans or flans. You are a loud minority. You aren’t as powerful as you think you are. Noah even started to retweet hate comments, that’s how few shits he gave. He also shows that he is concerned about people making things up about him, which is understandable.
Plus he outright said that stans are not fans of him, which in most cases, they’re not. Noah’s content isn’t as widely watched as some of his friends’ stuff, and a lot of stans don’t watch his streams.
But anyway, here’s one good take I saw floating around:
After this, before his stream, Carson deleted his original tweets and spent some time with his family, which was a sensible and mature thing to do at this point.
During Carson’s stream, someone notified him that his ‘fans’ had started to doxx stans. Here is his reaction:
https://m.twitch.tv/callmecarsonlive/clip/SpicySassyGerbilArgieB8
A lot of people got mad that he didn’t do more to stop the doxxings, but I want to raise the question: what was he supposed to do? He can’t control his ‘fans’ (another breed of stans who don’t call themselves stans were doing the doxxings, to be honest) and he said not to do it. He was streaming, he didn’t know how serious it was or even if it was true, at that moment, what was he supposed to do?
It did get serious. People I know were doxxed. Anyone posting anything (positive or negative) about lunch club, smplive, and Carson were in danger. It was not fake like some people claimed. The twt handles in this post are blurred out because of the doxxing threats. I am making this post at my own risk, but I do feel that tumblr is safer than twitter at the moment.
This being said, it is in no way Carson’s fault how out of hand this has become. He has been against doxxing in the past and his sentiments haven’t changed. He has said more about the doxxings in replies to tweets such as this one:
Also, here’s what the mods on Carson’s discord server had to say about the situation. They’ve clearly talked about this with Carson, and are strongly against anyone who is doxxing these people (especially since a lot of the people being doxxed are minors).
A similar sentiment was shared on Ted’s discord server:
Here is what ItsAsaii had to say:
So that’s basically where everything stands right now. If you want an even fuller update on everything, check out Carson’s stream ‘afternoon fellas and fellettes’ where he talks about everything.
Here’s the last tweets I have from Carson regarding the whole situation:
And I agree fully with what he has said. And again, Carson doesn’t owe stans anything. Just like what was said here, he had subs and fans before he had stans, they did not ‘make’ him, and they cannot control him.
This is all I have to say, for now. If I have missed anything or you’d like me to cover anything else, please let me know. If I have hugely missed the mark and said something super wrong/offensive, let me know. If you’d like me to talk about a streamer or youtuber not related to lunch club, throw me a DM or an ask and I’ll try to compile some things, even if I don’t watch their content or know who they are.
If you’d like up-to-date information about drama in smptwt, streamers, and youtubers, join the Cancelled Heaven discord server- which I linked at the start of the post.
I thank you all for reading, and suggest that you reblog this so that as many people as possible can see it. If you want to risk it, go ahead and link this post in a tweet or something, but please do be careful.
For some ‘extra reading’ (watching) I highly recommend Contrapoints’ video on cancel culture: https://youtu.be/OjMPJVmXxV8
And Philosophy Tube’s video on artists and fandoms, there’s some really insightful things about parasocial relationships: https://youtu.be/3IG0Y63LkDM
Lots of love, and have a great day <3
#smptwt#smplive#lunch club#callmecarson#ted nivison#slimecicle#cscoop#twitter#twitter drama#twt#lctwt#stan culture#cancel culture#long post
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Hi! I just started reading your fan-fiction, "Adrenaline Rush" and I have to say it is VERY good. I have a question if you don't mind answering it. I am writing fan-fiction of my own and I have been pushing it off for months because I don't know where to start. For this, what was your writing process? Example: Did you write your plot first or did you write as you went to each chapter?
Hi, anon! Thanks for your very kind note and interest in Adrenaline Rush! The story has its issues/tangles, but it’s definitely been a fun and personally meaningful project for me to try writing. It means a lot to hear that you’re enjoying it! And that’s very exciting that you want to start writing as well. :)
Each writer will be different in terms of their creative process, so a part of your question involves learning more about yourself as a creator too! It’s good to know how your brain likes to work and what environment helps it hum along, which may or may not align with what works for me.
Honestly, AR’s design and development has been haphazard. For me, AR all started because I was unable to attend a nearby drag racing competition in 2018, and those races had been a pretty big staple in my life. At the same time, my head was full of Voltron shenanigans because I’d just recently joined the fandom. I was walking the family puppy when it hit me that Blue Lion, Red Lion, etc. would be good names for Top Fuel machines. I was so excited at the concept of exploring drag racing in a fic. It gave me a “race” to look forward to, along with all the drama and adrenaline that came with it. In that moment, I had enough excitement in my brain to convert the Potential Energy of my idea into the real Kinetic Energy of writing/typing.
If you have the energy but are not sure how to “start” your story, then you might consider what it means to set aside the opening or even the assumed first chapter for now. What scene/image/dialogue in your head do you really want to write right now? What happens if you just…start there, and then work backwards or forwards? Sometimes you have to get a feel for the medium you’re working with before you can really start molding the scenes and imagery into something fully formed. My first “scene” I wrote for AR was definitely not the opening one. The first story lines I wrote involved Lotor smoking a cigarette on a pro stock motorcycle, lol. I built around that image, as well as the image of a determined Allura sitting in Blue Lion, preparing to race. The desire to bring these characters and their racing machines to life really helped me hammer out that first chapter in a blur of a few days, where I puzzle-pieced scenes together.
Other activities that can help you start a story is to look at how other authors start their stories. For example, do they start with a question, or a conversation, or a description of scenery? Do they start at the very beginning of a plot, or in the middle of action and catch you up on the details later? What kind of opening in other people’s stories most engages you? What happens to your story if you start with one element over another? What kinds of plots and story structures make you feel most engaged when you read them? What happens when you try to emulate those things? (Just questions to munch on here.)
I think it also helps to ask yourself why you want to write this story. Do you just want to explore an aesthetic that makes you feel good? Do you have a deep need to explore a certain kind of character or world? Are you hoping to get a catharsis of some kind? Is it a couple of things at once? Are you wanting to write a massive epic or just a short drabble to convey a moment in time? If you know “why” you are doing something, that can help you to know what kind of scenes to write—and what the story’s goal or vibe should be. Silly plot holes and clunky dialogue and some OOCness can be forgiven, especially in fanfic, which is a labor of love anyway—but if your story radically changes its tune or plot and no longer addresses the “why” that made you so excited in the first place, then that can alienate even you from it. Once you know what you want out of your story, then you can start plotting out all the different ways you could potentially achieve that goal. This feeds directly into the types of scenes that appear in a first chapter.
Before I started writing any actual scenes for AR, I did try to feel out more of the story by writing a promotional blurb. Like, if this were a book jacket or a Goodreads summary, what would that enticing blurb potentially look like? What was this story going to be about, aside from Lotor and Allura being pretty while they race machines, lol? I had some people in a discord who were kind enough to let me “pitch” a blurb at them to see if it would be of interest. This was my original pitch, which isn’t terribly different from the story summary as it appears on AO3 today:
The discord members were very encouraging, and so that gave me the push I needed to start writing story content, beginning with the images of Lotor smoking on his bike and Allura preparing to qualify. This tactic might not be for everyone just starting out, but writing a short promotional blurb/story summary can help you identify some initial parameters in terms of characters/conflict/setting. Having those basic parameters can then further target the types of images, dialogue, and scenes that make logical sense for introducing your story.
If you need more structure than just free-form writing or building off an image in your head, you can definitely use an outline to help you identify scenes or images that you’d like to try working on. While AR did not start off with an outline, it does have a plot outline now to help ensure I don’t drop something important. So I started bulleting ideas, trying to stretch out the story summary to its natural/logical end point.
An outline can help you write linearly if clear, concrete structure resonates with your brain. It can give you an opportunity to “preview” how a chapter opening can affect future events before you even write them, if you’re worried about where free-form-writing can take you. If you want to use an outline, it doesn’t even have to be all that elaborate. It can just be bullet points or explanatory sentences, or pieces of dialogue. It can be notes on a poster arranged in a spider web design. It can be a collection of gifs on your computer that signify the emotions you want to simulate in the story—it can be literally anything, and it can evolve too.
Paradoxically, writing an outline has also helped me move away from having to write individual chapters in a linear fashion, which is sometimes hard for me to do over a long course of time. So readers on AO3 might experience AR as a linear story, but I have dozens of pages of future scenes or bits of dialogue that I felt inspired to write over the last few years. Like, one major scene appearing in the most recent chapter 9, which published here in January 2021—it’s been written since July of 2019, lol. Using an outline to tackle a story can empower you to follow your bliss in a nonlinear fashion. For example, sometimes I’m more in a mood to write racing, and other times, I’m more emotionally invested in writing AR’s background drama or romance. If I halfway know where I’m going based on my outline, I can switch gears to write what I immediately want to write, and then I can later sew scenes and dialogue together later in a fairly smooth fashion.The concept of writing a chapter straight from start to finish just doesn’t have to constrain me with this method, and that’s critical for me. I understand having to trudge through writer’s block for a particular scene, but I like to minimize that pain as much as possible. And sometimes moving beyond that point can remove the writer’s block entirely.
Admittedly, the original outline I wrote for AR doesn’t match 1:1 to what’s currently written. As I started actually writing out scenes correlating to those bullet points on my outline, things changed. The space between bullet point 1 and bullet point 2 expanded with additional scenes, and those additions changed the details in the original bullet point 2. So my outline has gone through several tweaks as well.
This is the “organic” slop that can occur between your true written product and your initial assumptions for where the story should go. There are going to be plot milestones that you likely have to hit in order to achieve your end-goal/correct vibe with the story, but it’s totally okay to let your characters have a voice in how they get there. You might start an outline or a story assuming Road Trip A through the city is the best way to get to the end or achieve a certain vibe, but as your characters grow in your head, they might decide for themselves that Road Trip B through the mountains is the best way to the end. Once you set a story in motion, it’s no longer just you driving it. Your characters should drive the story too. Allowing them to do that will keep you emotionally invested and interested in the story. Sometimes, your characters will even write for you if you don’t know what to write. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure I’m in control of AR—I suppose I’m the navigator with a map sitting in the passenger seat, but I know I’m not the one holding the wheel, LOL.
And while we all do hope to create something quality that we’re immensely proud of, I do think it’s important to keep G.K. Chesterton’s thought in mind: “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” In other words, the desire to create something immediately perfect with minimal effort can keep you from doing anything at all. It’s better to accept a messy first draft and to know you may have to revise later, than to sit in fear and end up writing nothing. And sometimes, your brain needs physical content to react to before you feel you’ve found the best option. Like, just getting content down to start with can change your whole perspective. You can revise and mold things as you get a better feel for what you want to convey. There’s always draft 2 for structural changes. Or draft 3 or 4 for polishing and getting a satisfying first sentence down. There’s no pressure to crank out a Pulitzer Prize Winner on a first draft or even after you publish something to a fanfic archive. This is fanfic. It’s supposed to be fun, at the end of the day. Let yourself enjoy the process of messy creation. Let your characters help you out. Don’t be afraid to revise or try out a few different things get to the vibe/end you really want. To do is to know.
If you’re still not confident in yourself or your abilities to make a critical design decision, you can always engage a beta reader or have someone listen to your ideas. Talking things out loud or reading your work out loud to yourself can help you process creative decisions in a new way! There’s also a significant difference between typing on a computer or writing things down on paper. Typing on a computer can take away the fear of permanence, while writing things down on paper can slow you down and make you experience each word more fully.
So I guess to wrap all of this up: I have a pretty fluid process, and I’m more worried about not creating at all than I am about screwing it up. Even a screwed-up work can teach you something and help you get somewhere better next time. And if you had fun making it, then maybe it wasn’t a screw-up at all! I really encourage you to soul-search on what gives you joy or excitement regarding this fic idea you have, and to hold on tight to that joy as you begin translating images in your head or outlining plot points, or something in between.
I hope something from this response helps you! <3
#Voltron#VLD#Adrenaline Rush#Fanfiction#Fanfiction writing#writing#writers of tumblr#writeblr#lightning rambles#it's hard to know how to start something#but it can be rewarding to jump into the challenge#I believe you can do it!#Best of luck on your first steps with writing fic!
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What We Lost: Returning to Tumblr in 2020
On December 17th, 2018, Tumblr banned 'adult content' across the site, marking the end of an era. The ban was the result of a cavalcade of issues which reportedly made maintaining NSFW content unfeasible for Tumblr. Now, it's 2020. I'm back on Tumblr, and I can't help but meditate on what we've lost both on Tumblr, and across the globe in 2020.
Part One: Tumblr and Adult Content
*Things we lost to the flame Things we'll never see again All that we've amassed Sits before us, shattered into ash
— Bastille, "Things We Lost In The Fire"*
A bit of personal history: Tumblr was the primary community I used in various forms from 2012 onwards, associating with various fandoms, doing what I could to design interesting things. The various communities I was involved in intersected with social justice communities, and eventually I dug into those further and tried to learn to better myself in the process, starting along the path to becoming the person I did.
Part of that process was also learning to love my own body, a thing I was not particularly good at and still struggle a bit with nowadays. One of the ways I did this was by making 'adult content', or more plainly, pornography. It was a unique opportunity to experiment with femininity and sexuality - something I'd been very closed off from as part of my upbringing - in a supportive, fun environment. Experimenting with my self image first in this way, in semi-private, led to me experimenting more publicly and eventually embracing aspects of that as part of my day to day life. That's right: making pornography was part of what led me down the path to figuring out I was trans and embracing that part of me.
Making porn on Tumblr was a great time; the adult content creators and consumers community on the site was largely supportive of queer people and sexuality, different body types, all manner of things. It was - in my experience - a healthy and fun place to be, and certainly one of the better places you could be on the internet for a visual medium like pornography. Tumblr's format made it easy to share both adult content you made yourself, and stuff you were curating. Vex Ashley wrote that "this sharing was so desperately vital for women and other marginalised people whose sexualities are often overlooked or infantilised in media about sex in preference for the tastes of the traditional porn consumer – the straight white guy" in a eulogy and love letter to Tumblr's adult content communities.
Tumblr's format remains novel to my knowledge as well: the notion of having a large image-focused feed which also allows for easy sharing and curation, gorgeous, high resolution pieces and photos to be uploaded with relatively little compression, custom arrangements of photosets, and personalized theming of your blog. There was, and remains, lots of potential for expression on Tumblr., and its focus remains unique. Twitter and Mastodon's focus is on what's written, Wordpress doesn't have the sort of interlinking of blogs that Tumblr does, and Facebook is... Facebook (read: evil).
I think the novelty of that format is what made the announcement of the ban on 'adult content' so impactful. Even looking back at the framing of it is gross: the post posits that 'adult content' is something which is negative, and says that removing it is working towards a 'more positive' Tumblr. There appears to be an attempt to try and strike a balance in allowing conversation about sexuality and such, but this is the killing blow. A huge portion of the community, including countless queer and furry artists, needed to find a new home online.
3 months after the ban had hit, traffic had reportedly dropped off 20%. Recent data from SimilarWeb, the outfit which published that initial data, shows that visits to the site have dropped off a little bit more, but have stayed otherwise pretty consistent. August 2020's data shows about 317 million visits. [1] In other words: any hope that this move would allow Tumblr was dashed. A massive portion of the userbase deleted their accounts after archiving them; Tumblr and the internet at large had lost a massive, vibrant chunk of community, and it was completely in vain.
I lost contact with a bunch of those folks I was following on Tumblr for years. The mass exodus left both people who wanted to find and share artwork and adult content and the people who made it completely adrift. Years later, some artists are still picking up the pieces. Archaic policy like SESTA/FOSTA being brought into the picture has left very few standing when it comes to adult content, Twitter included. Who knows how long that will last? If something happens to change the way that Twitter handles adult content, for example, what options do casual creators like myself have?
Fortunately, platforms like OnlyFans exist. But even those are at potential risk from legislation like the EARN IT Act, not to mention the danger this poses to Twitter and to the internet at large. OnlyFans and its ilk, as they exist right now, are fantastic for sex workers because they offer pay-gating and a variety of features to make sure sex workers get paid. But they leave those of us who want to be able to curate the content they enjoy or casually create their own content freely without real options, and without real community.
We stand to lose a lot, and as always people in the margins will be the ones most impacted: the queer, the people of color, the disabled; all will suffer greatly if adult content is found without a home. Media dealing with queer themes is enough to be considered "adult content" by some and it's not hard to imagine what we could be staring down the barrel of here.
What have we lost in eliminating platforms like this?
Part Two: 2020 and the World
*These are the things The things we lost The things we lost in the fire, fire, fire.
— Bastille, "Things We Lost In The Fire"*
Meditating on what we have lost seems to be a running theme for the year 2020.
January: New Year's Day. In Aotearoa New Zealand, smoke covers the skies from a fire a literal ocean away. The Australian bush has been on fire, part of one of the most and it has turned the skies of a nation not it's own orange at midday, across thousands of kilometers. What did we lose in those fires? What stories and history? What wildlife, what species? What will remain afterwards? What will grow anew?
April: Aotearoa New Zealand hits the peak of COVID-19 related lockdown with the entire nation moved to Level 4, meaning that nothing except truly essential services, such as roadworks, pharmacies, and supermarkets were open. During that time, I thought a lot about how some of my favorite small shops were doing; the bakery with astonishingly good pies, the charming dollar store which always has a few things that catch my eye, the coffee cart near one of the local parks every morning. As a nation, Aotearoa acted early to deal with COVID-19 with a strong hand, and it was risky for all of those small shops across the country. What would we come out the other side of the lockdowns having lost, both in terms of human cost and cost to the places around us?
May: Following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin, massive protests against police brutality, racism, and white supremacy break out across the United States of America. Daily protests have continued to the time of writing in some cities. George Floyd is one of 781 people killed by police in 2020 at the time of writing in the United States alone [2]. 1099 people were killed by police in 2019 [3]. What incredible lives and stories have been lost in the process? Are those stories being told now? How do we prevent this from happening again? (Hint: defunding the police will be a start, and supporting the cause now is a good choice too.)
It is now September: The incompetence of the US Government has allowed COVID-19 to spread beyond control, leaving tens of thousands of deaths in its wake; lives and stories which must be remembered and their stories carried on by others. The western coast of the United States is on fire, blanketed in smoke and ashes. Massive west coast cities like San Francisco gain an apocalyptic feeling as the skies turn orange, like they did for me in January. Friends of friends lose everything in small Oregon towns. The costs of the prolonged fires will be paid by people all up the coast; it's their health outcomes which will suffer. What will we lose as a result of this in the future? What can we do to make things better?
I want to be clear: this is not a comprehensive list, and is centered around the things that me and my social circles have been aware of and talked about. Even with that consideration, we have to reckon with massive, ongoing, and far reaching concerns. The loss felt as a result of all of the above issues is staggering, and far reaching, and we must fight to ensure that loss is not in vain. Voting alone is not going to solve these concerns, and there's more to concern yourself with than any one person should have to cope with. There's not a magic bullet to solve all this stuff though.
Rather than pretend that I have one, I want to propose a couple things to close this out: one bit of advice, and one plea for yourself and others.
The advice: pick your battles carefully. Pick issues you want to focus in on, and fight for those things to make things better where you live, and in your social circles. Choose things to care deeply about first. Keep caring about them.
The plea: think carefully about the questions I've asked throughout this piece, and think about the things in your life and communities that you have lost. Think about how to make sure those losses are taken with you and learned from; to take lessons learned and better yourself and the people around you. Think about the things you don't want to lose, and how to fight like hell for them.
Move forwards to something, and some place better than where we are now. Stand united with the people around you, and press on.
*Do you understand that we will never be the same again? The future's in our hands and we will never be the same again.
— Bastille, "Things We Lost In The Fire"*
If you enjoyed this piece and want to support my work, please contribute to my Ko-fi. If you are interested in re-publishing this piece on another site, please contact me either here or via my business email.
References
[1] Data provided by SimilarWeb; accessed on 15/09/2019 at 5:30am. (https://www.similarweb.com/website/tumblr.com/)
[2] Data provided by Mapping Police Violence (https://mappingpoliceviolence.com); accessed on 15/09/2020 at 4:08am NZT
[3] Data provided by Mapping Police Violence's (https://mappingpoliceviolence.com) database, downloaded on 15/09/2020 at 4:08am NZT. Count obtained using the following formula:
=COUNTIFS($'2013-2020 Police Killings'.F:F,">=1/1/2019",$'2013-2020 Police Killings'.F:F,"<1/1/2020")
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I'm feeling frustrated that so many fandoms are all now on twitter and yet 9/10 they're dumbasses and assholes that just complain all the time. I'm wondering if I should just bite the bullet and go to other sites meanwhile *shrug*
If you mean you’re already on Twitter and are wondering if you should just leave? That’s up to you. Personally I’d say yes. The current environment is one where you either have to prioritize high engagement (seeing lots of people, seeing lots of content, having a very active feed for any given fandom) or prioritize having a good experience by carefully curating which other fans/content creators you follow and engage with.
I personally choose having a good experience by curating and not following people simply because we’re in the same fandom/enjoy the same sort of stuff. It’s not a good way to build lasting connections (even if those connections are just as superficial as liking each others posts online) and quickly wears you out because you begin to do performative things in order to continue being palatable to the types who would attack you otherwise. (Don’t get me wrong, I still see plenty of drama going on...but the point is that me and whoever I’m friends with are usually not directly involved and therefore not stressed out by it).
The best way to do fandom is with a small handful of people who you can actually tolerate. That doesn’t mean you have to cut yourself off from content. Read fanfic on Ao3, look at fanart, read meta. But when it comes to actually being friends and discussing and gushing--that should, in my opinion, always be limited to a select few you can get along with in general. In that sense it doesn’t really matter where most of the fans are. Just where the fans who you can tolerate are.
I also prioritize being on a platform I like. So what if a large number of the fans do their fannish stuff on Twitter? I hate Twitter. I’ll just stay here thanks. (Granted, I have a Twitter...but I don’t use it at all). Twitter is a terrible way to do fandom IMO but I think that’s not related to this ask.
At the end of the day do what you want and don’t let other fans ruin you enjoying Your Thing because they wanna be piss babies.
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I don’t think all the anon hate started after bottom Craig week was announced. I think it started after shutupmimsy wrote a post saying how Tweek is infantilized or wimpified. Then it sparks this debate about wether Tweek wearing a dress/being soft reflects the points above, hc vs canon and somehow escalated to bottom Tweek and how it supports his role as the girl. This fandom is shrinking cuz of this have you noticed? Sorry idk what your main blog is to ask how you feel about this
Sorry I guess it was worded weirdly. I just meant a lot of the anon hate and backlash that specifically Bottom Craig Week received could have been solved if Turd Sandwiches didn't jump to conclusions and instead asked a few questions about the week to clarify it was in fact a Not SFW week.
As for hate being sent over how charaters are betrayed, unfortunately it's been going on long before Creek was even canon. It's been an age old argument that crosses generations and fandoms.
The only thing that has really changed is the amount of hatred and venom people spew while hiding behind a pare of shades and a screen. The less accountabil-a-buddies people have, the more likely they are to be meanier than your average shades. Turd Sandwiches and Douche Bags a like are driving people away. They foster an environment that favors very few creators and attack people who don't fall within a narrow window where they overlap. Some even rejoice when they have chased off a creater, they are proud when someone just leaves the fandom because they don't want to deal with how they are treated. And we all can agree, not cool.
We've seen how this kind of behavior can just decimate the enjoyability of a fandom. Just look at the Voltron fandom. We don't want to be like them. We are better than that. We are better than the hate that is spewed. This is an adult show made by adults for adults and anyone who honestly enjoys the show should have the Tegridy to not send anonymous hate messages with "Kill yourself" and to obey the one law that rules the fan content world, Don't Like Don't Read. (or consume) Just move along. I'm not saying don't critique or give the person feed back. But if your only feed back is "Craig would never leave Tweek for Stan" then you keep your opinion to yourself, stop reading, and move along.
But that's not the only reason the fandom is shrinking. Another part of the problem is the Tumblr ban. We all know some good people got swept up in it and have since gone to Pillowfort or Twitter or another platform. It makes the fandom seem a lot smaller than it is when your favorite artists are on another platform.
So what I'm saying is, Douche Bags and Turd Sandwiches are a huge driving force behind why the fandom is shrinking. If you someone you know and love is one of these, call them out. Confront them about their behavior. And if they think it's okay to be mad at someone over bad animation and fart jokes, then cut ties with them. It sucks, yeah, but there are better people in the fandom. You can dislike artist and authors and particular content. But the moment you send a message that is unnecessarily mean, you become the problem. If you discuss trying to doxx a person in private conversation, you've become the problem.
Sorry. I have a soap box, and I will rant from it. And this isn't the blog to be doing it from. Honestly, I feel like if check out the notes on my Fandom Week Post, you can easily figure out who I am. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Keep yer Tegridy, folks.
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as someone who's only been watching this sh-t show from a distance (and don't actively follow the twitter/social media besides what I see cross-posted here, so who knows maybe they actually /did/ already) can I say how at this point it's completely plausible to me for a fan to say how harmful it is to constantly yell how you hate and want to (and HAVE) kill the single canonically queer character in the entire canon, and have the lovely duo of VLD snap back (1/2)
how not only are they exempt from the Bury Your Gays trope and completely immune to any effects or consequences of it, but that “we’re actually TOTALLY EVEN MORE SUPER PROGRESSIVE becuz gay kuron being totally 120% evil shows that gays can be villains too uwu u just dont understand it duh get on our level sweetie!” (2/2)
I had the privilege to attend the “The Future is LGBTQ” panel at NYCC.* Marguerite Bennett, a queer comic book writer, spoke about issues she had when writing DC Bombshells. She was accused of having written harmful queer tropes by a few fans, to which she replied, “The majority of the cast was queer. Angst is going to happen to queer characters with a queer cast.” (I’m paraphrasing.)
Contrarily, the majority of Voltron: Legendary Defender’s characters is not queer. And many of the terrible events in the script were reserved for the queer characters.
Below the cut, an exploration into the BYG trope and how Kuron being evil feeds into it.
Canonically - there are four queer characters. Shiro is the only main cast queer character, but Zethrid, Ezor, and Adam are also queer. If you listen to the EP interviews, then you also know Blatyz is queer.
Every canonical queer character has been killed.
Out of all the deaths in VLD, Adam’s was truly horrific. He screamed out in pain as he was killed, compared to Thace, who closed his eyes and surrendered to the blast; compared to Antok who accepted a blast, groaned, and fell to the side; compared to the Druid, who received a sword in the chest, muttered, and disappeared; compared to Zarkon, the Evil Emperor of the Universe, whose labored breathing ended and his bayard stopped glowing; compared to Trugg and Ladnok, whom we actually didn’t see die; compared to Keith’s dad, whose tombstone symbolized his death.
Adam’s death deserved a trigger warning. While I do not agree with Hypable’s most recent season review, I am grateful to Donya for spoiling his death. On August 10th, I was anxious about Adam’s impeding demise, but even knowing - I was horrified when it came.
The EPs are not exempt from the BYG trope or the consequences of its use.
The issue with VLD is its treatment of its gay characters. All Lotor’s disabled and queer generals were killed. The only general to survive and turn “good”? The straight, non-disabled one. The only paladin to return home to absolutely no family? The queer paladin. Keith found his family in space. Hunk, Lance and Pidge had family. Even Allura is shown with Romelle and Coran.
Shiro? Absolutely no family.
I don’t even believe Adam and Shiro should be together -
(Tangent - as a former caretaker of someone with degenerative disease, I can tell you that most people who say they will stick around to the end, don’t, and if Adam wasn’t willing to wait for Shiro to return, then he wouldn’t have stuck around to take care of Shiro. Furthermore, Adam and Shiro made the decisions that was best for them, which is mature and thoughtful. Even if we disagree with Adam, he broke up with Shiro, and Shiro, by choosing to go to Kerberos, broke up with Adam. But that doesn’t mean Adam deserved to die.)
- but I’m not going to argue whether Shiro and Adam fulfilled the BYG trope. Each person can decide for himself/herself how they feel about Adam’s demise - but Zethrid and Ezor are unequivocally the BYG trope. A touching moment, a promise for them to be together, and then they die.
There’s no way for the EPs to escape that, technicality or not. (Another point - I don’t care for technicalities. The spirit of Adam and Shiro’s relationship wasn’t written in good faith, especially since the EPs wanted to kill Shiro - so they don’t win any points here.)
Now, I will give the EPs credit that Kuron is not your traditional “queer-coded” villain, but Kuron being evil doesn’t make them or the story progressive. In fact, it makes them either woefully ignorant or actively offensive.
In “The Strange, Difficult History of Queer-Coding,” Tricia Ennis writes how during the 1950s and ‘60s, conservative groups in America discouraged queer characters in films. These characters were still written but in subtext, and actors were told to play these characters as gay.
Even dangerous LGBTQ tropes rose out of this time period as the depictions of pulp noir femme fatales and other deadly women rose in popularity. These women were usually written as promiscuous and sexually devious, both with men and sometimes with women. They were also evil and usually met their end as a result of their sins. While depictions of LGBTQ characters were frowned upon, depictions of them in this specifically negative light were not. You were not endorsing an “alternative lifestyle” if your gay characters always met an untimely demise. Instead, they were merely paying for their poor choices. This trope would eventually give way to what we now refer to as “Bury Your Gays.”
Thus, Shiro/Kuron being the only queer paladin, the only paladin to have his bond with his lion broken, the only paladin to turn “evil” and to be killed twice - Shiro’s body and Kuron’s soul - the EPs are not progressive. In fact, they fed the trope they so adamantly denied using.
Coupled with Shiro being announced as no longer being a paladin in the same season that he was revealed to be queer, in the same season it’s revealed he has/had a degenerative disease, in the same season his one-time partner was killed - one can even make the assumption all this happened to Shiro because the EPs and DreamWorks do not support LGBTQIA+ rights.
Rounding back - the EPs aren’t exempt from repercussions.
Joaquim Dos Santos and Lauren Montgomery came from DC Comics as directors, became showrunners at DreamWorks, and went onto Marvel, back to the director chair. That is a demotion. DreamWorks cleaned house - even before Season 8 premiered - and though I think the messages were offensively underwhelming, JDS apologized on Twitter the Monday after Season 7 was released, and LM expanded upon that apology at NYCC.
The damage is done, though, as many people found Season 7 so harmful that they will not watch more DreamWorks’ show and definitely not projects with JDS and LM. The best thing DreamWorks can do is to apologize (an exec this time), admit there were issues with Season 7 - including the BYG trope, plus the racist, sexist, and ableist themes, as well - and promise to do better in a Voltron sequel and in all their shows by creating diverse teams and an inclusive environment in which to create inclusive shows.
DreamWorks hasn’t completed that final step yet, but the fact that the EPs are no longer a part of DreamWorks and are not working on a VLD sequel, despite the show being “popular” and what I would say, an overall “success,” says DreamWorks did take notice. Now it’s up to us, as fans, to continue the conversation and not to stop discussing. We need to keep telling DreamWorks and others content creators to create inclusive stories until we get shows with true and empowering representation.
* I highly recommend any fan of any fandom to attend a few educational panels at each con. They’re included in the price, and they are welcoming and informative for writing true representation in your stories.
#voltron#voltron critical#represenation#tropes#answered#answrs#shiro#queer characters#operation kuron
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on public block lists, personality cults, and not perpetuating fandom hate
on a side note, I feel it’s important to say this:
the now-deleted post that was created by a popular pro-shipper in the VLD fandom which named out some antis/former antis is a good example of why I do not support making public block lists or 99.8% of callout posts, especially on sites like tumblr where that post is forever the second somebody reblogs it. People can change, URLs get abandoned and picked up by somebody new, etc etc, and unfortunately, when you can’t control distribution of a post you can’t control people who use that post to harass and attack the subjects of it (and there are plenty of people out there eager to do so).
Similarly, I think it was entirely too generalizing of the post to simply blanket-state that all blogs with kl urls or referencing being lesbian are likely to be antis. though the majority of anti-shippers in vld fandom are kl shippers, that does not mean all kl shippers are antis. and while I see what it was trying (and failing) to correlate*, it’s both false and harmful to imply or state that all blogs with sapphic/lesbian url references are anti-shipper blogs supporting harassment.
that said: I’ve seen a number of anti-shippers holding up names on that list as innocent because the blogger is a minor and/or there’s no direct examples of harassment or threatening people, and I need to point out that being a minor and/or never harassing or bullying people yourself or under your own blog name is far from proof that a person is not contributing to or even a principle instigator of harassment and bullying.
first of all: minors are absolutely capable of abusing and bullying one another and bullying/abusing adults, especially on a site like tumblr where our social power is roughly evened out by the site structure. that doesn’t mean I think minors deserve to be immortalized on public block lists - I don’t think anybody deserves that - but being a minor is a mitigating factor, not an excuse.
second: it’s extremely important to recognize that communities with cultlike structures such as anti-shipping circles frequently have popular ringleaders who provoke, encourage, and praise their followers for acts of harassment and bullying, but never participate in it directly themselves. This makes it difficult to point out how they perpetuate a toxic environment because there’s little or no direct proof of their actions. These people form cults of personality and frequently take an active part in cultivating their following, and if they are not always actual predators, they are certainly toxic bloggers that can be difficult to escape from after being drawn into their influence.
(this is not to say that anyone on that post fits this category. there are people both on and off their list who I have seen be toxic in the past, but that does not mean they are acting that way now. I discourage anyone from judging people on behavior from years past, and I highly, highly discourage anyone using a public block list completely blind. the deleted post and the backlash just reminded me to point this out.)
my suggestions to protect yourself from buying into or perpetuating hate in fandom would be:
avoid generalizations: especially about marginalized groups, but also for non-marginalized groups. no category of people are a monolith.
be very wary of anybody who tells you what to think and/or tries to trick you into thinking the way they want you to, shipper or anti-shipper.
recognize that while anti-shipping communities tend to foster fear and toxicity, this does not mean that pro-shipper groups, anti-anti groups, or any other group is automatically free of abusers and hate.
learn the warning signs for toxic people and the warning signs of toxic groups and judge your fave bloggers and fandom circle based on how they behave and treat people now/going forward.
limit voices of fandom hate and/or salt in your life. salt begets more salt. hate is like a fire: anything that doesn’t douse it can only feed it.
never forget to celebrate what you love.
(timestamp: first posted on March 14th, 2018.)
(EDIT: March 16th, 2018: my wording put too much emphasis on the creator of the (deleted!!) post. I’ve edited it to better reflect that my issue is with the contents of the post itself, which - as OP deleted it - does not seem to reflect their views properly either.
also the backlash against the OP has been WILDLY out of proportion to the offense in an absolutely classic example of how abusers in the anti-shipper ranks feel no compunction or offense over keeping public shipper block lists (that are still up, by the way!**) but draw big red circles around the slightest slip-up of people they hate. because hey - the rules don’t apply to them. only to YOU.
edit repeated under the cut to ensure it’s seen.)
(EDIT: March 16th, 2018: my wording put too much emphasis on the creator of the (deleted!!) post. I’ve edited it to better reflect that my issue is with the contents of the post itself, which - as OP deleted it - does not seem to reflect their views properly either.
also the backlash against the OP has been WILDLY out of proportion to the offense in an absolutely classic example of how abusers in the anti-shipper ranks feel no compunction or offense over keeping public shipper block lists (that are still up, by the way!**) but draw big red circles around the slightest slip-up of people they hate. because hey - the rules don’t apply to them. only to YOU.)
As in: doxxing and threatening family members levels. (Another reason I regret making this particular post.)
*I think the poster was trying to draw a line of association that may exist to some degree, but they did it in a way that’s hurtful to lesbians. that line is:
anti culture adopts/modifies a lot of radfem - particularly swerf - ideology (porn and kink are always bad/harmful to perceived women, perceived women are harming themselves and one another if they like/participate in it). many blogs that support radfem/terf/swerf ideology - sometimes on purpose, sometimes just by absorbing the rhetoric from tumblr - have urls referencing being sapphic or lesbian. therefore, they suggest that lesbian url = anti-shipper, which is simply too broad a claim to even draw a meaningful correlation.
the truth is:
radfems/terfs/swerfs as an organization are generally only interested in anti-shipping/fandom in general inasmuch as they can use it to recruit new members. (there are radfems/terfs/swerfs in fandom because they love fandom.)
many people with sapphic/lesbian references in their URL are not radfems or any subgroup of radfem, nor do they support radfem ideology either on purpose or by passive acceptance of radfem lite(tm) posts on tumblr. similarly, many people with sapphic/lesbian references in their URL are not antis.
not all antis are radfem/terf/swerf. In fact, most antis probably believe they are opposed to radfems/terfs/swerfs without realizing that they utilize some of their rhetoric in fandom policing.
it’s understandable that a correlation would be drawn by people on tumblr between lesbian/sapphic urls and radfems/anti-porn blogs, but it just can’t be generalized like that b/c it hurts those with lesbian/sapphic urls that aren’t of that crowd.
**the list itself is private, but because the mods answer questions publicly anyone who was requested to be added by a third party on anon is still publicly listed! HILARIOUS.
PS: i’m leaving this post up because anyone who clicks the readmore will be able to see my edits and I think that’s going to be more helpful than deleting it entirely in the long run. but otherwise I would delete it entirely because this post was brought to the attention of the OP of the deleted post in a way that wounded them, and i am deeply sorry for that. :(
#fandom toxicity#public block lists#anti culture is abusive#vldiscourse#homophobia tw#anti shipping is about control#anti culture#anti shipping#unasked for advice#anti culture is about control#anti shipping is a form of control#anti shipping is abusive#equal opportunity content callouts#radfems again
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Lift Up
The Iron Bull x F!Trevelyan (Mage)
Rating: T, language and suggestive content
Bull helps with Esme’s fear of heights. Fluffy. Not edited because I’m tired.
And it’s on AO3 :) same name, under scurvaliciousbay
_
Bull first noticed the issue the first couple of times he was in the Inquisitor’s quarters. The first clue were the large dark blue curtains she had apparently insisted were installed over the tall windows overlooking the mountains. The next clue was her avid avoidance of the windows whenever the curtains were open. She shied away from ledges, was never first to go up a ladder, and never volunteered to go up...anywhere. When he started consistently spending the night with her, he noticed a trend where at least once a week, her body would thrash in the bed briefly, her arms and legs splaying out as if to catch herself while falling. During one particular nightmare, the Mark flared, her magic lashed out and thrust them and the bed downward - breaking the bed. They needed a bigger bed anyways, but the writing was on the wall.
Inquisitor Esme Trevelyan, his Kadan, was terrified of heights.
Living under the Qun meant prioritizing the Qun over personal fears. He may fear the madness of battle, but he never shied from it because it was his duty. It didn’t hold him back, he did not allow it. It was a conscious decision that he maintained even after leaving the Qun.
Esme didn’t have the Qun, which all things considered, was for the best. Her magic and the way she felt most comfortable utilizing it would have been...incongruent with the Qun. But Esme’s fears of heights were never challenged. She allowed them to be an influential part of her life, going so far as to actively avoid heights. Falling into the rift at Adamant and then the final battle with Corypheus had only heightened her response.
Now, in the Frostback Basin she stood at the base of a staircase to one of the treehouse camps. Her eyes were closed with that little wrinkle between her eyebrows, lips tilted down in a scowl.
“Kadan?” The Iron Bull leaned down so that his lips were close to her ear, keeping his voice low so only she would hear him. His hand rested on the small of her back
“I killed Corypheus. I walked the Fade. I fight and kill demons daily.”
“You do. You are the bravest person I know.”
“But a damn treehouse is what makes my heart feel like it’s going to beat its way out of my chest.” She leaned slightly against him and he moved his hand from her back to hip. Even after all the time they had spent together - in battle, in bed, side-by-side - he still reveled in how well they fit together.
“Hmm.”
“Before you suggest it, I do not want to beat with a stick.”
He chuckled, “No, Kadan, that isn’t your style. What I was going to say is that you must be tired from all the hiking through this difficult terrain.”
“...Yes...”
“And I haven’t held you all day.”
“You’re not suggesting-
“Kadan, let me carry you up. We can take the lift, it’ll be romantic.” He squeezed her hip and he was rewarded with a small smile.
“My pride wants to say no, but...yes.” She turned into his embrace more and opened her hazel eyes, “carry me up to our tent, Kadan.”
Bull pressed a smiling kiss to her temple before shifting down to sweep her up into his arms in one smooth motion. She was tall for a human woman, but still small by qunari standards. Esme let go of her staff as she was swung into his arms and she made a gesture so that the thing floated and followed them as Bull walked to the lift. She pulled herself closer to him as he stepped onto the platform and he could feel the slight tremble in her body. He tightened his hold, angling her so that she could only comfortably look up at him.
He widened his stance and tried to take all the wobbliness out of the lift as it started to crank, slowly lifting them into the trees. Esme tensed and closed her eyes once more. She tucked her face in closer to his arm, uncharacteristically displaying how frightened she was. The great Inquisitor, she who defeated Corypheus, walked through the Fade, took on the entirety of the Orlesian government at a deadly masquerade ball...and here she was in Bull’s arms, tense and scared of heights.
Damn, he loved her.
He began talking about some stupid assignment he’d been on with the Chargers way back. He rambled on about how they had to track what they were told was some terrible monster, but turned out to be some weird noble who was kidnapping and drugging people to listen to his weird drugged up speeches about magic crap. It was ridiculous and he embellished, but she smiled into his shoulder. And when she shook, he knew it was from laughter rather than the nerves from height. By the time they reached the top of the treehouse camp, she felt more like herself in his arms. She held onto him, sure, but she also was grazing her lips and teeth up the side of neck.
Well, if that was how she wanted to be distracted, who was he to deny her? Bull shifted his grip so that he could give her rump a good squeeze. He was rewarded with a gasp and a little shock of her magic that sent a thrill through him. What once would have set his teeth and nerves on edge now aroused him. How times changed. How he’d changed.
The lift lurched to a stop and he quickly disembarked, making his way to the large tent he knew belonged to them. After deciding their affair was a commitment, Esme had decisively ordered a tent large enough to fit both of them. It stood out, which was both a blessing and a curse. Right now, it was a blessing as it allowed him to immediately locate the tent and direct his path to it.
Esme sucked Bull’s earlobe into her mouth and he stifled a groan. Neither of them were exhibitionists, per se, but more...indifferent about public displays of affection and being watched. It wasn’t an uncommon sight for the Inquisitor to walk into Herald’s Rest and land directly in Bull’s lap, her mouth against his and his arms around her. Josephine had talked to them about “public decency” but it...didn’t take as well as the diplomat had hoped.
But there were only soldiers and their companions now, and they all knew to steer clear of the two at this time.
Finally, Bull reached the tent. He ducked inside and deposited a smirking Esme onto the bedroll.
“Now, where were we?” He said before descending upon her and distracting her completely from the fact they were high up in the trees.
#the iron bull#f!trevelyan#the iron bull x trevelyan#trevelyan x the iron bull#dragon age#dragon age inquisition#dai#fanfic#esme trevelyan#mage!trevelyan#scurv writes#fluff#remember to feed your content creators with reblogs!#it's good for the fandom environment
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There’s no cursing in The Good Place... (spoilers for season 1)
This post may contain graphic and sexual language. Most of my blog does. Sorry this is way too fucking long.
I had a thought a few weeks ago about how the “no cursing” rule is used on The Good Place, and how a benign act of “appropriateness” is actually an early sign that the characters are living in a dystopian scenario. And how--bear with me here--this reads to me as a clear analogy for dramatic flailing of fandom groups this last two years. Now, I may not make this point in the most thorough or elegant way possible, as I feel vaguely intimidated talking about a show that has such thoughtful philosophical consideration behind it, but I’m going to give it a shot. If I flub, blame the messenger not the essence of the idea.
In season 1, Eleanor and the audience are presented with a world that is supposed heaven, specifically a “neighborhood” of the good place that is specifically curated to fit its residences (in this case, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jianyu, and others). Of course, we learn right away that Eleanor believes she’s there by mistake, and one of the first rules that demonstrates her “wrongness” is that she wants to curse, and can’t.
Eleanor: “Why can't I say ‘fork’?” Chidi: “If you're trying to curse, you can't here. I guess a lot of people in this neighborhood don't like it, so it's prohibited.” Eleanor: “That's bullshirt.”
The show glosses over this pretty quickly, and it’s played for laughs for the rest of the season. It very cleverly supports the show’s season 1 misdirect: any awkward or unsettling aspect of The Good Place is excused away by the audience (and by the characters) as simply being a side-effect of Eleanor’s misplacement. Of course you can’t swear in heaven! Swearing is for bad people, and good people wouldn’t even want to hear it. So, therefore, it doesn’t exist here.
And yet, this is not just a subtle form of personal torture for Eleanor (as she is, of course, really in The Bad Place), it’s actually a pretty grotesque form of censorship on all of the characters. Notice that Chidi doesn’t say he is particularly averse to swearing. He says “I guess a lot of people in this neighborhood don’t like it.” Although not nearly as much as others, Chidi does curse a couple times in the show, himself. So, clearly, it’s not a thing he feels particular discomfort about---so why is it censored when they’re alone? If this were truly a heavenly place customized for each soul, then Eleanor would be able to express herself and Chidi would be able to hear it, but other people who didn’t want to hear it would simply not be subjected to the cursing.
Instead, the neighborhood completely outlaws cursing anywhere, at any time. In the s1 premise, it’s not enough for the other citizens simply to not hear the swearing, it matters if it’s even happening anywhere in their environment, whether they themselves are witness or not. So why am I focusing on that idea, when we know the whole thing is manufactured, and the people who made up this rule did so as a lie, just to be cruel?
Because that line of thinking is so endemic to certain parts of fandom right now. Whether it’s making a story or fanart that contains content someone morally disapproves of, or whether it’s only a simple text post or meme going around, there’s thing now where people feel like content boundaries and warnings aren’t enough. It’s not enough to acknowledge that public platforms like Tumblr are unmoderated and that venturing forth to search or browse is accepting a certain amount of risk that one might run into something that makes one uncomfortable.
[read more below the cut]
When people are campaigning that content they disapprove of--sexually, romantically, politically, morally, paternalistically--shouldn’t exist, they’re doing what the demons of The Bad Place have done to Eleanor and Chidi. They’re saying “This offends me, so it should not exist anywhere that I can know about or ever possibly visit.” Yes, that’s fic about characters who are underage having sex. Yes, that’s fic about characters having sex in a way that doesn’t fit their canon sexuality. Yes, that’s fic about violence and torture being done to characters for brutal and bigoted reasons. Yes, that’s fic about rape, assault, and abuse. Yes, that’s fic about uncomfortable, even disgusting things. Yes, it’s fic about noncon, dubcon, bad bdsm, ABO, slavery, fetishism, power differences, incest, and unrealistic depictions of drugs or sex. It’s fanart and headcanons about those things too.
These ideas, posts, fanworks, and concepts are part of fiction and literature. They’re part of fandom too, and are in fact one of the ways that fandom has pushed the edge of creative development for decades. As they said in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, “We do the weird stuff.” Now most people in fandom don’t want to be a dick and just shove things in the face of someone who isn’t interested in consuming it--the artists and writers usually want their work to be found by people who want to consume it. So various media platforms have tools or informal conventions for negotiating shared spaces: tags and ratings on AO3, for example, serve a primary service of sorting the archive and secondary service of warning people of undesired content. On tumblr, it’s most an honor thing where people typically don’t follow blogs that post stuff they know they don’t like, and if someone is going to post something controversial they usually throw up an “FYI” at the top, or put it behind a read-more tag. Those decisions are voluntary, however, and everyone who uses a site like Tumblr is doing so with the express acknowledgement that they cannot control what others post, and may in fact browse a post with content they don’t like. For emotional, personal, or political reasons. ((Note: I’m not referring to personal targeted bullying and harassment, which may violate the TOS of particular social media sites, and is off-topic for this discussion.))
What happens when you see that post that offends you? Well, you have three primary choices. You can engage with the OP, you can ignore it, or you can hit the “block user” or “report” options. At any given time, those various options may be what you decide to do, and that’s fine. That is, pretty much, the system working. It’s not a perfect system for sure, but it’s a reasonably functioning one on sites like Tumblr that try to accommodate the needs of millions of users. (don’t worry, fandom wont stay on tumblr and twitter forever.) AO3 has similar protections in place, with the difference being that AO3 is a far more opt-in user process: there is no personal “dashboard” or “my feed” on AO3. A person has to seek out content and utilize filters, and doing that only gets the user to the basics like title, summary, and tags. To actually SEE content, the user has to willfully click into the story.
I’m describing these processes (which most of you reading this will already know) because it’s important to keep in mind scope when we’re talking about content exposure and potential resulting damage. When you use these sites (and for the most part, the whole internet), the onus is on the user to curate their experience. On Tumblr that means blocking or blacklisting what you see, and on AO3 that means not clicking the link to a story unless you’ve read and accepted the warnings and description. On Google, it means don’t search “HS History teacher Dean takes teen Castiel in the locker room” if you don’t want to read something fitting that description. Yeah, it may offend you that it exists, but that doesn’t mean that you have to engage with it to prove that it’s harmful to you.
I’ve seen a lot of discussion this last 18 months about what people “can” or “cannot” write, draw, post, or squee about. I’ve seen it in The 100 fandom, I’ve seen it in Teen Wolf fandom, I’ve seen it in Star Wars fandom, I’ve heard about it in anime/cartoon fandom, and I’ve even seen it crop up in, OF ALL THINGS, Game of Thrones fandom. (side note: if you complain about sexual content in fic while also posting gifs of GoT or Sense8 then I personally would like to throw a pie in your stupid face.) For some people, the answer to “I don’t like that this thing exists” seems to be to aggressively rail against it, to the point of targeting the creator, harassing them, or campaigning for websites or forums to change their rules so that XYZ offensive content does not exist. They say “I don’t care if you write it, just don’t post it where I might find it.” The idea here is that the world around us is better without XYZ being part of our creative works or discussions, and that shunning that content and those creators makes the world (the internet) a kinder, softer, more welcoming place.
A good place.
A place where only good things can be. Where no one is made sad, and nothing that happens here can bring discomfort to anyone. And if you want something that’s not allowed in the good place, the righteous place, then it’s you who doesn’t belong.
To circle back, the show The Good Place has gotten more popular this season, and I couldn’t be happier. I think it’s a fascinating examination of the ambiguity of people, as well as how mental stress can be used to torture. It’s a funny show with a lot of heart, but it’s a dark show too. And one of the darkest, subtlest things the show has ever done was reach into Eleanor’s mouth and change the words she is speaking. Not to prevent actual harm, but to make sure that other people could live in a world where things they abstractly disapproved of didn’t exist at all. For that, Eleanor was denied her basic concept of self and expression. The elimination of communication like that is such a profound violation of individuality and self that it’s almost incomprehensible that any world in which that happens could be ever perceived as a “good” place. That’s not a nice neighborhood where everyone gets along and is sheltered. That’s mind control. That’s gaslighting. That’s Hell.
There are a lot of ways to handle the struggle of content filtering, and hopefully we’ll figure out new and better ways in the future to balance the needs of artists with the needs of consumers, but one way that doesn’t work is censorship. AO3 isn’t going to change its rules to prevent content you don’t like. They know where that road ends. Tumblr might someday, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it. And if they do, this whole network of fan culture will migrate to another site without those constraints. It’s already happened twice since I’ve been around. Purity wank is an old problem for fandom, but it used to be an attack from the outside. Now it’s coming from the inside too, probably because the community is so much bigger. So it’s time to really examine the discussions we hear, and sort out if silencing each other is really going to fix anything.
#fandom#fandom politics#purity wank#fandom police#the good place#the 100#Supernatural#Teen Wolf#Voltron#game of thrones#mcu#star wars fandom#yaoi#yuri#some of the stuff I talk about here has been said by others before#things I've reblogged in the past year#I probaby should make a list of the great posts on this topic but then i'd probably just get depressed#but anyway#thanks to the others who've said it shorter and better#i get mad at my phone for autocorrecting my messages. i can't imagine how upset id be if the universe did that to my VOICE#because what even is reality then? I think therefore I am
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Audience Studies (3P18) Blog Post #3
Hello my lovely readers and welcome back to another COMM3P18 blog! It is with great sadness that I inform all of you that this will be my last time writing to you as this semester has come to an end. This means that media audiences has also come to end…BUT…someone once told me that every ‘blog’ has an end, but in life every ending is a new beginning. With that being said I have the privilege of taking COMM3P17 instructed by the famous Jennifer Good herself and I am thrilled to find out what that class will bring me…maybe more BLOGS!!:)Diving right in to these past three weeks I learned a lot about Reception & Contexts, Media Fandom & Audience Subcultures and Online, Interactive Audiences in a Digital Media World. That doesn’t sound entertaining does it, I know most of you are probably thinking about how Christmas is 28 days away, and the new iPhoneXS Max just recently released… perfect for you to indulge in more media. My phone is my alarm clock, so from the last thing in my hand at night and the first thing in my hand in the morning is my phone. I always start and end my day along with all the spare time I have in between that, surfing my Instagram, Facebook, Snap Chat or texting my friends and family. These are all the platforms that came to my head as of this moment but I don’t even want to think about the amount of things I google, GPS, YouTube or watch on Netflix. Just today alone I spent a total of 48 minutes being a part of an audience on Instagram. Thank you to Instagram for providing me with this information, unfortunately Facebook, Snapchat, Netflix, YouTube, Google Chrome texting/iMessage, WhatsApp, Outlook and all the other wonderful apps I have such as banking and photography, do not provide me with my daily consumption, but God only knows and its probably best it stays that way. As you can tell I am closely integrated with technology and I generally access these technologies alone but when I am with a friend or family member and see a funny video or post on one of my platforms I will share it with them as well. Now I know when you’re in the movie theater you’re not supposed to be a “Tommy Texter” but I do admit to pulling out my phone or at least quickly glancing at the screen if I hear a buzz go off. I also multitask and watch videos or movies at home while scrolling through my Instagram feed. I’m also guilty of going to the back room at work and sending a quick text to my friend. Furthermore, my best friend could be telling me about her worst or best day ever and I might sneak a peak at my phone depending on how boring or entertaining his/her story is. Now that I’ve confessed all my sins lets dig a little deeper into each of the three chapters mentioned above.
Reception Contexts and Media Rituals
In this day and age, we live in a world where media is at our fingertips more than it has been in any other time in our history (Sullivan, 2013, Pg.163). According to Sullivan “our media experiences occur during specific times and in particular physical spaces, and these contexts can play a powerful role in shaping our understanding of media content” (Sullivan, 2013, Pg.162). Thankfully I do not live in the era where I had to adapt to a specific schedule in order to watch a TV show that was broadcasted at a specific time. I have the freedom to time-shift my media exposure to the time I want, wherever I want and on which ever device I chose. For example, I have been fascinated and extremely addicted to the show “This is us”, but it only plays on Tuesday nights on CTV. I am a student and do not live at home, therefore I do not pay for cable TV. Not to worry because I have access to the magical web which puts me into contact with websites such as Putlocker that stream this show for me %100 free but also illegal, so that people like me are able to watch their favourite shows whenever they want and on whichever device is most convenient for them instead of sitting infront of the TV at 8pm. With reference to the article I read in relation to this chapter, it talked mainly about how experiences of viewing sports content in a movie theater differ from typical television viewing conditions at home (Kim,K.,Cheong,Y.,&Kim,H.(2016). Personally, I do not keep up with sports but I do enjoy watching the world cup for soccer every four years that it is on, and cheering on my country. There are times where the games are playing and I am unable to watch them due to other circumstances and I have the option of watching the recaps or reading apps such as sports net to keep me in the loop. When I do have a chance to watch a game and all my friends and family are cheering for the same team it would be a better audience experience to go out to an environment such as a pub or somewhere where there is a larger group of people who are all there for the same reason. It makes my audience experience more enjoyable and one to remember. The cheering atmosphere, being able to dress up in my country’s attire, watching the game on a bigger screen and in higher quality, as well as being able to stay as long or as little as I want at a pub and not worry about having to entertain guest are all factors as to why viewing sports content in a different space rather then at home would be more ideal for me. Taking it back to earlier when I mentioned my favourite show “This is us,” I would prefer to be in the comfort of my own home, in my bed and watching it on my phone or laptop. According to Livingstone this is known as “bedroom culture”. Watching television for me is not really a social experience. That being said Sullivan states “television viewing has become (a) more ubiquitous given the proliferation of small-screen TV viewing via mobile phones, computers, and MP4 players, and (b) more individualized. Robinson and Martin (2009, p.83) argue that since “more sets in the home became available and more people live alone, more viewing is done alone- producing a more individualized experience””( Sullivan, 2013,Pg.172). When I watch “This is us” it is definitely an individualized experience for me and something I do alone, on my own time and at my own leisure. I can pause and resume the show at my own freedom without having anyone else complain about me doing so and have the flexibility to go on my phone without distracting anyone else watching the show with me. I do however discuss what happened in the show amongst my friends who also keep up with this show on their own time. This can be seen as conversion because although I am watching the show alone and in my own home, I am able to communicate via text or in person outside of my home what happened in the episode I watched and what I liked or disliked about it.
Media Fandom and Audience Subcultures
First thing I entered into google was “what are different types of fans”? Results were “there are three basic types of fans” propeller, tubeaxial, and vaneaxial” (CanadianCentreforOccupationalHealth&Saftey,1997-2018). This was deffinetly not the answer I was looking for, so instead of searching google I searched my handy textbook. What is a fan Sullivan? Well according to Sullivan, “… fan audiences are deeply engaged in their favourite media texts. Fans often reinterpret media context and create their own culture productions in response” (Sullivan, 2013, Pg.193). Hold on, it gets a little more complicated. Just when you thought being a fan of yourself was that simple Sullivan has something else to throw at you, better known as a “super fan”. What is that you may ask? Sullivan uses a term called “fandom” which is “associated with the culture tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class and race” (Sullivan, 2013, Pg.193). “This is us” first aired on television September 20th, 2016. No I do not watch it ritually, infront of the TV every Tuesday night because I never heard about the show until recently, but I do binge watch it ritually, because I am a fan of the show and chose to invest my time and energy into consuming this show. I have an attraction to the show, in the sense that I show my support and fandom though following the actors such as Milo Ventimiglia and Mandy Moore on Instagram as well as following the shows “thisisusbc” very own Instagram page that gives me behind the scenes footage, highlights, updates, bloopers, and even spoilers. These actions can also be seen as patronage, which is “the support of a fan audience (which) boosts the artistic and authorial credibility of a creator” (Navar-Grill, 2018, Pg.222).
Online, interactive Audiences in a Digital Media World
Depending on how high speed your internet or data is, we can see or find anything we want to know in the matter of seconds. According to Sullivan “media audiences today have come expect the ability to provide instant feedback to media producers and to other audiences” (Sullivan, 2013,Pg.215). Every media outlet/platform has a different way of displaying or interpreting media and thus depending on what media pages we follow we will also interpret that media differently then someone else. As stated in the textbook, “…looking toward the future of media audiences by considering some of the newest forms of online, interactive media and how they complicate our understanding of media audience” (Sullivan,2013, Pg.216). Moving into digitalization, fragmentation, and the rise of audience autonomy, a term known as “convergence “allow me to display my favourite show “This is us” on any device I chose. According to Sullivan “simple reproduction of these media into computer file formats that can be easily distributed via the internet, leading to widespread privacy of copyright material” (Sullivan,2013,Pg.217). As previously stated, I do not watch “This is us” via cable TV, or in other words the legal way, which only leaves me with one other way to watch this show, and it is by streaming it online. People have the power and accessibility to go to the movie theater and video tape the whole entire movie and post it online for others to see without having to pay the money to do so. Some websites are a little tricky to find an actual good quality movie, for various reason, one being that the movie is still in theaters and has not yet been released on DVD. With this being said, a little bit of hunting and browsing through several streaming websites is needed in order to find the substantial quality of video you are looking for. O’Reilly states that there are two important parts of the internet. The first aspect is “technological, because the internet exists as a series of interconnected servers that are continually exchange data. Secondly, the internet is social because the technology allows for easy information exchange, users will begin to leverage the technology to interact with one another in ways that mimic traditional forma of conversation and cooperation found in the “offline” world” (Sullivan, 2013,Pg.219). If you stop for a minute and just think about how much information you phone or computer takes from you, it will blow your mind. You wonder why people cover the cameras on there laptops, because it is already bad enough how indivduals are basically being spied on every letter they type and every click they make. Do you ever wonder why something you just googled will suddenly pop up on the side of every other website you look at? Or when you go to open your Instagram/Facebook app it just so happens that there is an advertisement for that exact pair of jeans you were searching for online? It’s not a coincidence that you keep seeing advertisement for things you were just talking about or googling about. Media has expanded immensely as well as the digital age to the point where us human beings cannot keep up with it. With reference to an article I read “How Social Media Editors Frame the News and Interact with Audiences via Twitter” Wasike designed a study to examine how social media editors use their Twitter accounts to interact with audiences and how they shape and frame the news via the articles they link to their tweets, and whether these trans vary depending on the media format” (Wasike,B.(2013). SME’s can be both beneficial and not, depending on how you interpret it. News recourses now a day will post fake news or their own version of news just so they can have their information out there first. With this being according to Wasike (2013), you must be aware of SMES’s this way you be fully knowledgeable on how they interact with an audience and what there framing patterns on based on the things they post on there media platforms.
Conclusion
NOW THAT YOU HAVE READ ALL THIS … it is time for me to say my goodbyes. It was a pleasure writing to you all about my audience experience in COMM3P18, and I hope you all enjoyed reading my blogs just as much as I enjoyed writing them.
References
Sullivan, J. (2013). Media Audiences: Effects, users, institutions and power. Sage Publications Inc., New York, NY.
Kim, K., Cheong, Y., & Kim, H. (2016). The influences of sports viewing conditions on enjoyment from watching televised sports: An analysis of the FIFA World Cup audiences in theater vs. home. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 60(3), 389–409.
Navar-Gill, A. (2018). Fandom as symbolic patronage: Expanding understanding of fan relationships with industry through the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign. Popular Communication, 16(3), 211-224.
Wasike, B. (2013). Framing news in 140 Characters: How social media editors frame the news and interact with audiences via Twitter. Global Media Journal - Canadian Edition, 6(1), 5-23.
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I have been reading and reblogging some of your posts and wanted to thank you for that detailed account. I have been out of fandom for a while, and antis really baffled me at first. But now I have a question: Could you talk some more about how current antis relate back to the LJ social justice scene and when the morph from debating fanworks to dissing people happened? Thank you!
I’m glad you’ve been enjoying this blog!
I think this reddit post does a nice job of summarizing the history of fandom and how it’s led to our current point. But I’m going to go more into how tumblr’s very structure led to a ‘race to the bottom’ sort of enacting of punishment via social justice.
Almost all of this is from personal observation, having been here since late 2010.
To get more into the actual history of it: Racefail ‘09 is the name given to the big, public 2009 debates about racism in genre fiction (published fantasy and sci-fi), which happened primarily on livejournal and private websites. (Racefail was itself the result of the rising awareness of social justice in the real world thanks to the democratization of information via the internet.) Racefail raised a couple of big questions: were non-white (and non-straight/non-cis/non-male) creators being silenced and erased in published genre fiction? And were the stories being told primarily racist/sexist/homophobic and lacking in representation for non-white/Western cultures (and LGBT+/queer/female stories)?
From everything I’ve read I feel like a lot of good came out of these talks; in particular, it greatly raised the awareness of social justice in genre fiction and fandom spaces - which had been there before, but not quite so prominent. But one major bad came out of it: it revealed, via the shitty behavior of one member of the genre fiction community, how social justice could easily be used as a silencing tactic by applying arguments meant to dismantle power structures to individuals who may (or may not!) benefit from those power structures.
Fast-forward to 2010-2012 tumblr. LJ has undergone multiple journal purges and partial restorations, been bought out by a Russian company, and - final straw - changed the way anonymous threaded posts were handled, ending its value as a space for anon memes like kinkmemes. Fandom dispersed. A not-insignificant number of us eventually end up on tumblr, and those of us coming from LJ have brought with us a greater awareness of social justice, particularly lgbt/queer culture and feminism.
At the same time, Facebook has opened its doors to everyone instead of only allowing college students to use it. Facebook has almost single-handedly popularized the notion of making your offline life publicly available online. Gone are the days of keeping your age, real name, and offline identity hidden; we share everything except maybe last names and exact locations.
Tumblr democratizes the fandom experience like never before. Livejournal and forums had moderators; tumblr has none. Communities are gone - instead we have tags where people gather to talk about shared interests. People who previously felt shut out, forced to be ‘lurkers’ because they had nothing to say, could now have a blog and share the work of others via reblogging. The main way to gain social capital is by having the most followers and therefore the most widespread content.
But tumblr is a weird experience compared to other blogging sites because at the time it was the only one with a ‘reblog’ function. any one post can go absolutely viral and the people who see it beyond your immediate circle will lack the context of the rest of your blog. This means that either every single post needs to be entirely self-contained … or get wildly misunderstood. (Guess which one happens.) It also means that that the posts that spread the fastest and furthest are the short, witty ones or - you guessed it - the controversial ones. Finally, people tend to not fact-check - if something is interesting and seems believable, people reblog it uncritically. Tumblr’s dashboard structure actively encourages people to not leave their dash to look at provided external links - you’ll lose your ‘place’ on your endless-scrolling dash, and the little ‘home’ button in the corner is reminding you how many new posts have been created since you last refreshed. You don’t have time to fact-check.
Controversy without context is polarizing - without the original context, people provide their own context and agree or disagree based on a bunch of assumptions. Tumblr is a breeding ground for this. Opinions don’t get more nuanced - they get more vitriolic, more sharp and quick-witted. And with people not bothering to fact-check or click linked information, misinformation spreads like wildfire.
The early experience of fandom on tumblr is one of widespread acceptance. Possibly because FB does this, people feel safe to share their age, sexuality, and gender on their tumblr profiles - and those identities get more and more specific as people learn more about gender identities and sexual orientations that are off the gender binary. People spread educational posts about queer/LGBT+ culture, feminist theory, and racism alongside fandom posts. The importance of minority representation in the media is a hot topic and posts that criticize media for their lack of (or bad) representation get thousands of notes. Social justice theory - fighting the appropriation of colonized cultures by imperialists, promoting the voices of the oppressed over those of the privileged, the right to be angry because of the oppression and trauma you’ve experienced, not tone-policing people who have been hurt, and not erasing the experiences of others - are widely discussed.
A lot of good came out of this, too, but I believe a natural backlash resulted. Earnestly working to promote the voices of the least privileged and trying to avoid silencing or erasure, what started as an effort to even out the social strata gradually became a kind of reversed social strata. People who were oppressed on any axis could not be corrected by anybody of lesser oppression - it was considered to be silencing. People could not say their feelings had been hurt by a marginalized person’s word choice - that was tone policing.
And this led to a secondary, and probably lesser conclusion: people who identified as ‘privileged’ - that is, white, cis, straight, mentally well, able-bodied, (and male) - felt guilty for all the privilege they had. and the promotion of marginalized voices over their own - the tendency to tell people, regardless of the validity of their points, that if they were privileged their voice did not matter - to escape their privilege, at least on tumblr.
I think we hit Peak Tumblr in 2012-2013-ish. Non-human and nonbinary identities proliferated. Asexuality awareness exploded, as did other lesser-known sexualities and paraphilias. People wondered what it meant to be trans in a world with no gender binary. People self-diagnosed severe mental illnesses. And this unto itself wasn’t a bad thing! Probably many people learned a lot about themselves from the openness and acceptance.
However: there’s no way to know how much of this was from people self-discovering and how much was from people who realized that unless they had some axis of oppression they could point to they could be silenced. And people were extremely open about these identities as well: despite all of the talk about social awareness, interactions on tumblr suggested that most people still assumed that everyone else was white, cis, straight, able-bodied and mentally well (and therefore completely unaware of social issues and in need of education). And due to how tumblr’s reblogging system could separate posts entirely from the context of the original poster’s blog and personal details, this assumption happened a lot!
Whatever the actual numbers of people who were self-discovering versus self-deluding, this extreme acceptance got its own natural backlash. It wasn’t possible for everyone on tumblr to be oppressed, but everyone on tumblr seemed to be finding some way to be marginalized - they weren’t cis, they were ‘a demigirl’. They weren’t straight, they were ‘gray asexual’. There had to be some way to distinguish the real marginalized people from the fakers.*
Enter gatekeeping - which seems reasonable enough at first, given the sheer number of people who are claiming to be part of the marginalized club. People start making fun of ‘transtrenders’ and ‘starselves’ and say ‘heteroromantic demisexuals’ are ‘just normal’. People call one another ‘cishet’ specifically to erase their gender identity/sexual orientation.
This environment makes tumblr ripe for radfems, who greatly benefit from people putting limits on what identities other people can have. And radfems feed the gatekeeping mentality, leading to more and more policing of one another on tumblr instead of acceptance. Instead of trusting others to be honest about their gender identity, sexual orientation, race or mental health, people increasingly decide the identity and experiences of others based on whether or not they say and do the right things. Conversely, if you say or do the wrong things you are ostracized and your identity is erased using the reverse social strata of tumblr: ’cishet’ becomes shorthand for ‘ignorant asshole’ - and ignorant assholes are not to be listened to.
One no longer has to identify wrongly to have the wrong identity to be worth listening to. One only has to do the wrong thing.
So how does this tie back to debating fanworks vs dissing people? Well: tumblr isn’t just the home of social justice. It’s also the home of fandom, and these two spaces heavily overlap.
Like our genre fiction friend that I mentioned back at the beginning of this long-ass post, tumblr had already begun - with the best of intentions - to silence people for having the wrong level of marginalization. And when radfems and gatekeepers entered the scene, one’s level of marginalization became a function of how you behaved. Now you had to behave right to have the right to be listened to - and fanworks, far from being the exception, are the rule for determining if people behave ‘right’ in fandom spaces.
In other words: debating fanworks/fan opinions and dissing people have become the same thing. If a fanwork is for the wrong pairing, that makes a person a bad person. And bad people are only able to create bad fanworks.
This attitude is how you get things like ‘if you ship [x] you’re straight’ and ‘oh, you ship [x], your opinion on this unrelated social justice issue is invalid’ or ‘i’m not surprised to find that this person is [x]-phobic, they created problematic fanworks.’
And that’s where we’re at today.
Man this is much. I’m sorry for your eyes.
*And in case it isn’t obvious, I think policing sexual orientations and gender identities is nonsense - demigirls and gray-ace people count as much as everyone else.
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