#i haven't used twitter in...almost a decade now

[egophiliac]

HII i was just wondering if you have twitter because i really like your art but i rarely go to tumblr 😭?? If none then it's fine! Have a good day OP ur arts r so cool

thanks! :') and also sorry! this is the only place I hang out these days. I do have the toggle-thingy enabled that lets my blog be visible without constantly demanding a login, so you should be able to see it without an account! it just needs to be the egophiliac.tumblr.com URL instead of tumblr.com/egophiliac (or at.tumblr.com or whatever it is now).

and if you have an RSS feed extension, you can get RSS updates -- you just add /rss to the end of the URL, like egophiliac.tumblr.com/rss (which also works with specific tags, like egophiliac.tumblr.com/tagged/art/rss). so you can also only see fandoms you want with that! (I am a fan of RSS, don't mind me)

[kaythefloppa]

Wild Kratts - Fish Out of Water Review [Spoilers]

April is finally here, and with it, three new episodes have been released on the PBS Kids Video App ahead of their release. At the time I'm posting this, it is midnight and the one hour special "Our Blue and Green World" is yet to air on televison and streaming, so I will get to that when I get to that. Given that I have already reviewed No Name Dream and Backpack the Camel, I'll give a review to this episode as well. Spoiler warning and opinions ahead under the cut

First New York, then Hawaii, and now a goddamn University on the list of areas I would never expect these guys to film. Bros are everywhere.

As someone who is about to graduate high school, I feel IMMENSELY jealous of the college students who saw the motherfucking Kratt Brothers filming an episode on campus. I can already begin to see the floods of social media posts bragging about this on Tumblr and Twitter threads.

Ok I feel bad for being a bit salty earlier, I actually think it's really sweet how these people outside of the show can share their interests and expertise in biology and physics to help children educate. The entire live-action opening where they study the locomotion of mudskippers is honestly really sweet, and we haven't even gotten to our main animal yet!

God these are such cute animals. But beyond that, the term "fish out of water" could not be a more fitting title. They have joints like we do, can adapt to different environments, and can swim and climb like we can. This is probably my favorite live action segment because of how well structured the clips and movements are and just how fun it is seeing these little blorbs move around the place.

I should talk about how it took us half a decade to see a mudskipper on the show, and 13 years overall to get a focus episode, but so far, up to a great start and definitely worth waiting (for the most part).

Oh so is it like the Hermit Crab episode where in all of the official releases they leave out the determiner but in the actual episode it's there? This has no overall bearing on the episode but I just felt the need to point it out.

I should check off on my S7 bingo card about seeing the old inventions again because holy shit it's been almost a decade since we saw the Butterflier XT

Also can anyone identify those butterflies? I know for a FACT that those motherfuckers aren't monarchs because of their patterns (the only pattern variation in butterflies is sex-linked, and while I'm aware they live in Asia, this again, does not look like a match) but they also aren't viceroys because they lack the line around their wings. I only ask this to bring up my next point.

I thought the Butterfly Disc we saw in Season 1 was specifically programmed based off of Monarch Butterflies. But as established (until proven wrong), these are not monarch butterflies. So unless Aviva retrofitted or reprogrammed the disc to be multi-familial, as in they can touch any butterfly regardless of classification and activate accordingly (like with the Crocodile, Dragonfly, and Gecko Discs), the activation should not work. I only ask this because while it seems miniscule, Chris' decision to bring out the disc is what sets off the plot - It's what causes him to loose the discs in the butterfly swarm, so I feel like, while not a critique, it's a legitimate question as to the direct programming of the discs vs. the animals used to activate.

Man, Zach wasn't even in this episode and somehow they STILL lose their discs? (Actually, I am pleasantly surprised that they didn't take the opportunity to have this be a Zach-related episode).

You think they'd put a tracker on the collection or encode a chip the actual discs so that they wouldn't get lost this easily. This again, sounds like a nitpick, but earlier seasons set up a firewall for the Creature Power Discs and a tracking device/rocket-device on the Creature Power Suits and gloves because of how frequent these types of contingiences are, so there's really no excuse for this.

(Suck my ass PBS Kids Video App, I'm still able to get high quality snips even with your bullshit formatting!!!)

They really went all out with the "other-wordly" vibe that the mudskippers' territory gave off. Once again, we waited two years for this to be put to animation and to see come air.

I've made enough jokes around these situations in the show, so I think we'd all benefit if I just changed the subject: That front-facing mudskipper is fucking hilarious.

*Martin's voice* - Slimy Skin-breathers!

Okay, but I actually did not know that. At all. Even 10 years later, this show is still teaching me new things about animals in the most beautfully unexpected ways. This is one of the many reasons I will never give up on the show.

[Unexpected angst in bagging area - Also, with the inclusion of No Name Dream, which will air two days before this episode, that brings our Krangstt quota to #2]

Okay so I really like the set-up here, and it genuinely was a surprise seeing Jimmy angst in this episode as a subplot in a series that rarely operates on A-plots and B-plots (unless you count the villains' schemes which are usually just A^2 plots) like most shows. And as someone who legitimately was going through rough times (S7 was actually one of my few reasons to keep going), I heavily related to Jimmy. So yeah, a Jimmy angst episode? Can totally buy. What I'm not gonna buy is how they execute it with the ending, because that and the implications.... yikes...

C'mon! "Mudspitter" was right there! Right there!

Ok, here is where my main problem with this episode's subplot is. If I could boil it down to one word, it would be: Incomplete. Jimmy feeling inadequate based on an observation he made is one thing. Him immediately leaving afterwards on a whim moments after said observation is completely another and doesn't align that well.

Like, this would only work if Jimmy had attempted to be a fish "IN" water. If he tried to help Aviva and Koki with the data-research and inventing, but he failed, and they politely turned him down. Or if there was any basis as to why he suddenly disregards his piloting skills or teleporting, whether he doesn't care or doesn't think them to be enough for him to fit in. Like, he wants to be in on the action because some part of him doesn't feel like sitting around by the teleporter is enough. What I'm saying is, there is no pathos. I personally find it to be relatable, but on a narrative level, it doesn't work. I know the "character feeling left out so they leave" thing is cliche'd, but there's a reason it's a cliche, and that's because it follows a lot of writing beats that this particular episode doesn't, so on top of being cliche'd as fuck to begin with, it feels very awkward. And this is going to be apparent both here and in this episode's climax (which I also do not have many kind words for,) so I had to use my allotted time to talk about why this doesn't work.

Could... could they not call him on his Creaturepod? Could the brothers not call him on his Pod? Did he even have his Creaturepod?? Again, there are so many plot-holes in this B-story that could've easily been written around with a change of dialogue or scenery. Have Jimmy's Creaturepod be shown left lying around which makes them realize they have no way of getting him back to the teleporter in time. Jimmy would have no reason to even bring his Creaturepod on his adventure, so that just raises even more questions. Like, this isn't an active diss on the writers, but I think there should've been more proof-reading of the script since this is a massive oversight.

I think now is the time for me to bring up this question I've had for years now; How exactly does the teleporter work? In several episodes, we've seen that there is a coordinate code in the teleporter that allows it to be sent to the target. Koki's "the communication queen" as Aviva puts it, so she'd likely be able to triangulate the brothers' location. So I'm not sure why the show presents this as a struggle for Koki. This isn't the only example, so I won't hold it against the episode, (they have this be the case specifically to emphasize the point that they need Jimmy, which I can forgive) but it's another piece of lore that I should probably theorize about lmao.

Also

YOU HAVE LITERALLY TELPORTED THE CREATURE POWER DISCS FOUR TIMES.

TWO OF THOSE TIMES BEING IN A ROW.

AND ONE OF THEM WAS FOUR EPISODES AGO IN THIS EXACT SAME SEASON.

This whole episode spent the past five minutes making its main characters look incredibly idiotic for the sake of its B plot.

Once again, this episode's spitting facts that I didn't even know.

This is actually a neat seguay, having the brothers figure out the abilities of the mudskippers while exercising their own cool abilities. It feels really natural, and again, is an inventive way to show off the locomotive abilities of the mudskipper.

I feel like this falls very well between "accurate enough to be admirable" and "uncanny." I can (maybe on my deathbed) get used to this suit's design (though I'm partly glad Chris doesn't activate it because spoilers, he doesn't).

I've given this subplot a lot of flack, but credit where it's due, even with its misses, it does hit with the emotional beats.

Very conflicted on this:

On one hand, Jimmy actually taking the initiative to miniaturize is pretty ballsy. The show, despite not being serialized, does develop its characters in a way that you can sense a clear difference of them when you compare the modern seasons to the earlier ones. And this can be seen as a positive development for Jimmy, since it's his "Creature Adventure."

On the other hand.... back to what I was saying about consistency. Why did Jimmy bring the miniaturizer?? What was his prompting?? Was he planning on shrinking himself down the whole time? Like, he left his friends for god knows how much time and is now out of nowhere shrinking himself down to fish size because he feels inadequate? Uhm, Jimmy, ever heard the idea of therapy?

Also, again, very weird presentation of the episode. They don't at all put any attention to Jimmy's coms and whether or not he has them, (which would easily solve a bigger issue of why he's not contacted), yet they have him carry the Miniaturizer with him. Now, the latter is plot-relevant, but so could've been something about the Creaturepod.

This [from what I interpret] gets Jimmy out of his slump, making his "scientific discovery." Not realizing that his job of piloting and teleporting are equally important. Again, this is structured poorly. I like what they were going for, but it shouldn't have been the only thing that altered the trajectory of this subplot. Again, he can teleport discs to the brothers and pilot and while those are mentioned later on, it's not something he comes to himself in an "oh shit" moment. So this just feels unearned and weird. I really hate how harsh I am, since it's a Jimmy centric episode and it was the #1 requested thing on all the chat-boards during the hiatus, but this is one of those things where it has to be done right if at all. This isn't done right, and the fact that it takes up 50% of the episode just... ugh.

You can't tell it through screenshots but with the way Aviva says it and the scene cutting to her and Koki laughing at it, I'm 98% inclined that this was a specific innuendo, and ngl, I kinda laughed too.

Oh look, it's Kenge's cousin! [For you Lion Guard fans that also recognize Wild Kratts] - [I was inclined to make a reference to Jessie, but that felt in bad taste considering y'know]

Ok, but that has to be an Asian water monitor. Correct me if I'm wrong. What I'm definitely not wrong about is that their bites contain venom; To a human it's not lethal, however to small prey, including mudskippers, or anything around that size, it's lights out. So yeah, Chris and Martin are fucked.

Ok this line is absolutely badass.

Also, grey?? Grey?? I thought Jimmy's signature color was orange/yellow? Or red with the implication of the tail episode? Great, now there's another color that'll be in the debates for his future Creature Power Suit.

Once again, this arc feels weirdly put together. This notion comes up specifically at the climax when it should come up beforehand as Jimmy realizes his worth. Because otherwise, it gives the implication that he knew this all along and yet still felt like a fish out of water, which doesn't mesh together properly (it could, if the episode actually tried to do so which it didn't).

The episode, Sea Otter Swim, does this plot so much better. We see Jimmy's doubts, and we see how he overcomes said doubts in a way that is presented clear to the audience, and the climax where he actually realizes what he's capable of feels earned. This is not earned. So even though I am rooting for him to win, this whole thing just feels messy.

So is nobody gonna ask why Jimmy left his post? Is Jimmy not gonna tell everyone why he left, or at the very least ask why nobody bothered to call for him? Is nobody going to at least let Jimmy know that he can't just... abandon his post without warning because of the fact that they need him? Is Jimmy not going to come to that conclusion himself? Is anything in this episode gonna be earned??

This entire ending feels like an ass-pull: First off, Jimmy and the brothers had enough time to head back to the miniaturizer and then the Tortuga, and in none of that time, did Jimmy ever give them the Power Discs? Why? Yes, it was for the sake of the fake-out defeat/joke, but was there any reason why Jimmy just kept the thing hidden waiting to give it to the brothers?

The entire emotional climax to this episode is basically everyone putting Jimmy on a pedestal. It's unsatisfying because there wasn't any acknowledgement or follow up to Jimmy's conflict at the beginning, nor is the lesson learned in the right way, and the conclusion just overreacts by hyping up Jimmy instead of just having a reasonable "We're a team!" thing, or through any self-actualization of his good qualities that Koki pointed out. None of it, friggin' none of this is earned! Now it comes across as Jimmy being uncharacterstically boastful and cocky and the others just kissing his arse. That's probably not the intent but it was the result.

That is actually like, so fucking cool. I have massive respect for all of these people, like legitimately (also, considerning that's the exact opposite of what Zach does on an ethics scale, I find that really interesting). But beyond that, I think this episode has the best live action segments ever, they are so ingenuitive. I could easily see someone at my high school showing a clip of this episode in robotics' or biology class.

CONCLUSION:

PROS:

The live action segments.

The info dumps about the mudskippers.

The Kratt Brother's adventure with the mudskippers.

The animation

The background music (a lot of which is recycled from earlier seasons)

CONS:

Everything else (specifically the B plot). I feel like the writers wanted to give Jimmy his own storyline, either out of interest or seeing how popular the character was in chat-boards, but they didn't know how to do it so they just went through the motions without really connecting anything at all, so it's a lot harder relating to the exact conflicts in some cases, and you feel disatisfied by the cimax. It reminds me of what they did with Vitani in the Lion Guard finale, a case of giving this one character the spotlight, but hitting all of the wrong marks that does the character and the audience a disservice and leaves a bitter taste in the viewer's mouth by the end credits.

This is the first episode this season that has made me cringe, primarily off of its premise, not just a particular scene, a dated pop culture reference, or a weird-looking Power Suit. It is the first to make me cringe because of its story, which again, the B-plot takes up 50% of the episode, so it's constantly in your face. It's definitely not bad, not hateable bad, and it's far too early in the season to call it the worst, and there are definitely worse episodes out there, ones that have aired and ones that probably will inevitably air, but I can safely say, thus far, it's the one Wild Kratts episode that I enjoy, but only to an extent. The live action segments were by far the only thing that I got extremely engaged in, but other than that, and the other pros, it's not that good.

Final Ranking: 6/10: Above Average, but Needed Improvement.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

What's your opinion on parasocial relationships

From: "I don't think we should be able to see fictional characters have sex because they haven't consented"

To: "Blatantly and overtly objectifies -insert celebrity here-"

There seems to be wild swinging from one end to the other 🤔🤔🤔

okay so this is uuuh a Large question and I need to start by saying flat out that "parasocial relationship" is a pretty value neutral term that's only very recently taken on a distinctly negative connotation. the term was invented in the 1950s in response to increasing television viewership in America, to describe the one-sided attachments that viewers formed with fictional characters and media personalities. while Horton and Wolh, who coined the term, did express concerns that some people might be prone to substituting parasocial relationships for real, reciprocal human connections, it wasn't intended to be a condemnation of the practice. parasociality in small amounts is essentially necessary to have any sort of stake in fictional characters or celebrities who can't love us back, and its worth noting that parasocial relationships significantly predate the terminology - humans have felt strongly about rulers who don't know them and characters from myths and stories for centuries. this sort of connection-making is fueled by the same extremely social nature that let us bond with dogs and other domesticated animals.

so the tl;dr there is that my feeling on parasocial relationships is that it largely depends on whether we're talking about, like, people having harmless crushes on attractive and charismatic actors or, like, twitter stans sending each other death threats over musicians who don't know they exist. like most things, it's harmless in moderations and is mostly down to individuals to use their grown-up brains to not make it weird and harmful.

now, onto the example you gave of people objecting to depictions of fictional characters having sex because they can't consent. I don't know that parasociality is the main issue at play here, although as we've noted a degree of it is certainly necessary to care that much about a fictional character in the first place. that particular ideological clusterfuck is a result of several things colliding, I think namely:

a.) an increasingly prevalent and normalized streak of extreme sexual conservatism amongst people who broadly consider themselves progressive. if you've spent much of the last decade online and especially in fandom spaces, you've probably seen this mindset becoming more and more pronounced via a bunch of horse-assed debates about the morality of depicting #problematic things in fiction and fanworks. sincere arguments that sex scenes are bad because made up people who don't exist can't consent to being featured in them is pretty much always where that particular line of thinking was heading.

b.) an absolutely tragic conflation of media consumption with activism and political beliefs. this overlaps heavily with point a (with a lot of assumption that if you're a Good person you must take great pains not only to not consume Bad fiction but also to call it out at every opportunity for being Bad, lest you be accused of having Wrong opinions) and also generates a lot of very stupid takes like treating Captain Marvel as a #girlboss #feminism movie despite being sponsored by the US Air Force and holding creators from historically oppressed identities to impossibly high standards of Good Representation, a thing that doesn't exist and no one agrees on. (read Elaine Castillo's excellent essay collection How to Read Now for way more eloquent thoughts on that.) the point being that people's so-called hot takes about popular media are almost conflated with their politics, whichever way they may lean. this also related to point c, which is"

c.) the internet and its many insufferable algorithms encourage outrage and conflict at every opportunity, so nobody can just say some normal shit like "I don't like seeing sex scenes on tv, it feels uncomfortable :/," because people will start crawling down their throat screaming about how it's actually very sex negative and queerphobic and problematic to dislike watching sex scenes and that the person who posted that is somehow personally oppressing people with sexual trauma who are reclaiming their relationship with their sexuality and were greatly helped by [insert sex scene here]. so you have to pre-empt those replies by acting like you're teeing up a fucking tedtalk and also are ready to throw down in defense of your lukewarm opinion, and that's a lot easier to do if you've figured out how to use language affiliated with social justice to bolster your point.

anyway. that's my opinion on that.

[stackslip]

no reblogs on purpose

haven't been to shul in a while, in large part due to how normalized racism and zionist justifications of palestinian oppression were there. talking about palestinians like they were vermin and encouraging the settlements. it came to a breaking point and i haven't been back since. since there aren't any other non-orthodox synagogues around here, i haven't been to synagogue at all for a few months now. been struggling to practice or do much on my own. but i'm still subscribed to my old shul's newsletter and oh boy! am i glad to have left! the language used towards palestinians is flat out genocidal and dehumanizing. suddenly all the rivalries and conflicts with the local orthodox synagogues have been dissolved as "we stand as jews together against this wave of savagery".

seeing all the posts from people who had literally nothing to say on palestinian oppression except now, when it's to be "yeah it's bad BUT israel isn't the same as jews and zionism isn't inherently evil and really the people suffering most here are us" makes me feel so deeply cynical. ok. are you saying anything against anti-palestinian racism in your shul and jewish spaces at all, as vocally as you are about *any* pushback on zionism online?? do you think bds is inherently evil and antisemitic while saying jack shit when your local leader talks about palestinians as being vermin and inherent dangers to jews. do you push back against the idea that any antisemitism among palestinian supporters is proof that all western governments should ban palestinian flags and criminalize very identity. no you don't. you fucking don't. maybe you are in one of the very very few anti-zionist synagogues or jewish spaces. but the reality of the matter is, zionism and the belief that palestinians are parasites, dangers, annoyances, threats--are endemic to jewish spaces in the west. there has been very little vocal pushback against any of it, no matter how much you cry on tumblr or twitter. look at how major jewish orgs are responding right now. how many are demanding deescalation or even calling for israel to not fucking cut water and electricity to gaza? a basic plead for humanity? very fucking few. as long as you are blind to this reality, shit ain't gonna be fixed.

it fucking hurts, man. it hurts me more than words can say. it fucking tears at my soul, seeing so few jews stand up for justice when it's one of the reasons i sought conversion in the first place. justice you shall pursue. it hurts, seeing both the violence and the complete refusal to even acknowledge the violence's existence except to say "but hamas attacked first". in the next few months and years things are going to get so much worse for palestinians, in the name of jews and judaism, and how many are going to do shit? how many of the people who posted tepid posts about how it's antisemitic to condemn the idf and how Both Sides Are At Fault are gonna say shit when israel murders a thousand times more? if and when palestinians resist more, how many will justify the horrors of zionism?? i couldn't go to shul on yom kippur. i'm glad i didn't. i think of standing next to these people at shul i cared about and bearing my soul as we share collective repentance, and how merely two weeks later they are calling for genocide. it makes me sick to my soul. i'm glad i left shul. i want to participate in jewish life again, someday. i don't think i will be able to for a while. not as long as i enter a synagogue and find donation boxes for settlements in the west bank and for an army that has been holding two million people hostage for almost two decades.

[elbiotipo]

A Polish game company just released a game about Aztecs killing Castilian conquistadores... Curious about what the reviews say, I've seen some stuff on twitter about the cities not being too accurate

I've taken a quick look at it. Gotta keep in mind this is still in development, so things can change...

Very unpolished (pun unintented) gameplay. It's fine if it's a small indie team, but I always find the clash between the ultra-realistic Unity graphics and the weird gameplay jarring

While I haven't played it, there's a plot, apparently, where your warrior can decide to choose to support "the strangers who want to free us from the priests that kill our brothers and sons"... it's... ehh.

...Let's not whitewash it, human sacrifice was awful, and lots of Aztec-conquered peoples allied with the Spanish against the Aztecs (though a debate on how much was it political expedience and how much was disgust with human sacrifice, which seemed to be widespreadly accepted in Mesoamerican culture, could take us for whole pages). But the way the whole thing is worded tells me that they aren't gonna approach this with too much nuance.

Especially now that you can choose to be a conquistador and kill natives. Yeah.

Yes, the cities look like ruins. It seems that they have based their setting in current ruins (in fact, from a brief look, they seem more Mayan than anything) than actual Tenochtitlán when it was at its peak. The whole "Native Americans lived in rainforests with some temples sticking out" is a trope that repeats itself again and again. These were urban cultures, those cities should be full of stuff, art... I can forgive the excuse that it's after the fire of Tenochtitlán, but it still feels like they wanted you to play in the ruins of a civilization, not the civilization itself.

Overall, it seems that the devs got a concept, it was very poorly thought out, and just went with it. If you're making a "natives vs. colonizers" videogame, you should double down in your research and presentation, this is a very delicate topic you're presenting. It just reeks of a half-baked game with some very, very eurocentrist popular history thinking behind of it, intentional or not.

I'm reminded of the Age of Empires II Aztec campaign, where you could also play as the Aztecs and drive out the Spanish. Based, yes, sure, but the units were the same as any other, with metal-plated armor Aztec soldiers and catapults against the Spanish (to be fair, the devs did give American units some flavor to distinguish them from the Old World, and because of limitations, pretty much everybody had to share the same sprites). But still, it is an interesting piece of history you could show, but you can't be this sloppy about it.

By the way, the Incas resisted the Spanish conquest for decades after the fall of Atahualpa, and they even laid siege to Cuzco using European equipment and were close to retaking it, the last Inca state (Vilcabamaba) was only conquered in 1572, almost thirty years after the death of Atahualpa. Now THAT'S an interesting campaign for a strategy game. There could have been many points (even leaving aside the Tupác Amaru rebellion) where the Incas could have expelled the Spanish or regained independence.

[blindrapture]

Hey... Hello there, Jordan! You might not remember me, but I'm AC11 from waaaay back at the Fear Mythos? I was doing some cleaning on my 'puter and I found my way back to the OG JCINK forum and man... It was a trip down memory lane.

Don't know if you keep in touch with the other members like Alliterator, LizardBite, Red, Cute, etc and I know it's been almost a decade... But idk, I just got real nostalgic and I wanna say Thank You to y'all. Right now I'm in a good place writing-wise, I got an amazing opportunity and I owe it to the community since it was the first serious writing community I ever joined. So yeah... just wanted to say thank you for everything <3 <3 <3

Of course I remember you, AC. You wrote Memories, Chronicles, Tales. And you analyzed Jordan Eats Normally Now and called it a masterpiece. :)

There is a lot of nostalgia in the Fear Mythos. Hundreds of stories, lots of discussion and mutual enthusiasm for writing. We were a community of writers! I went through a period of nostalgia for it when I was making Viceking's Graab, as I wanted to consider our history in full, so I had to go through the forums, the wiki, the original TVTropes thread and archive every story anyone had ever written for it. The mythos still has memories for me.

I don't really keep in contact with the others. I've heard from alliterator a few times, mainly I end up relaying messages to him from Fear people asking questions. cute and I are mutuals on twitter. LizardBite is writing books! I'm friends, or, mutuals with Red on facebook, he seems happy and also still writes. TheSomnambulist is still someone I consider a friend. I don't know if you were around when Dr0Shadow and Hexillith joined the mythos, but they're very much still in contact with me. I recommend asking around for the Fear Mythos discord server, if you haven't already; plenty more people are active there, it's a chill little hangout spot, and you're sure to find some old faces.

I'm really proud of you for what you're doing. Make the most of your good place, do it for us. :)

[vergess]

Copying this to my main for the sake of my organization.

TLDR: some self-aggrandizing asshole decided to vomit some egregious levels of ignorance while pretending to be an authority on the sociology of fandom.

Anyway, to save us all some trouble, the point by point is going under a cut.

Not only because of pervasive issues of (especially anti-Black) racism, misogyny, transphobia/homophobia, and the like, but the particular way those things take shape within fandom.

There is no "particular way" racism "takes shape" in fandom. You're thinking of GENERAL SOCIETY, the supergroup that includes fandom.

Your ignorance of fandom specific and society-wide sociological information is already a screeching red flag, btw. This is why so many "intellectually incurious" people stopped listening at word one. People have been saying that the vulgar masses need to have our culture and art shaped by academic, political, or religious "trained thinkers" since the dawn of civilization. You're literally bringing up an argument OLDER THAN LITERATURE ITSELF and pretending that you have new insights. No wonder people fucking ollied out.

What I mean is that people almost invariably approach fandom at the level of character, often at the level of ship - your primary way of viewing a text is filtered through favourite characters and favourite relationships, as opposed to, say, favourite scenes, favourite themes, favourite conflicts.

Yes. You're literally providing a textbook definition of transformative fandom here. But you're presenting it disingenuously as fuck, by acting like that's the ONLY type of fandom that exists. Again, your ignorance is on display, and it's going to get bigger quick!

Because in the very next pgaragraph we find:

This is reinforced through the architecture of dominant platforms that host fan content, particularly AO3

And here we go. Because if you thnk AO3 is the major platform for fandom, you're WILLFULLY IGNORANT.

Youtube is the major platform for fandom. Next up is tiktok. After that comes other socials, like Reddit, FB, twitter and tumblr.

AO3 is AFTER all of that. It's a small, indie platform. Even in the scope of fanfic, FFN and Wattpad both are larger.

You picked a small site MADE SPECIFICALLY FOR HOSTING QUEER SHIPS FOUND UNACCEPTABLE TO HOMOPHOBES, and then looked around asking yourself, "wow, why are the people on the gay sex website so obsessed with gay sex."

I would like to believe you are simply ignorant, and inadvertantly malicious. But I do not think that is the case, as I will detail later.

Dead Dove: Do Not Eat,” which doesn’t indicate perspective or theme but rather that there is, broadly, some kind of “problematic content” contained therein - often of a sexual nature, frequently as a warning about “bad” ships.

You literally just made this up based on rumours you heard from antishippers. This has ZERO relation to reality.

Dead Dove contains everything from graphic violence to body horror to rape to surrealist meditations on the way the human mind cannot cope with the scale of the universe.

But you wouldn't know, because you're cheerfully ensconcing yourself in an enclave of people telling you what you want to hear, and pretending that's "decades of study and experience." You haven't been 'engaging for decades' you've been swimming in a tiny corner of a tiny pond and claiming the ocean doesn't exist.

Now this is not an inherent problem, as in, it is not inherently incorrect to approach a text and primarily derive pleasure from it by focusing on a given character or relationship,

The sheer HYPOCRISY on display. "Oh it's fine to do this, but don't do it on the websites you MADE SPECIFICALLY FOR DOING THIS ON, because I personally would like to see you do other things. What? Those things are available on dozens of much larger and more active platforms? No, no, I want to see YOU obey MY demands specifically."

It's "not incorrect" to do, it's just that the people doing it are incorrect, for magical mystery reasons that you'll never actually specify, because you can't. You cannot actually give a reason why any of the things you dislike are bad because they aren't. There is no harm being done. Your disliking something does not mean is is harmful to you.

If someone were FORCING you to engage with this disliked stuff, sure, thats actually horrific! Fucking beat the shit out of them!!

But as far as "I opened this fic and I didn't like it" goes, that's not harm, that's someone making a thing you didn't like. Just close the goddamned tab.

And I think a lot of mainstream media encourages (even requires) audiences to engage with their stories at these character- and ship-levels. […;] If you do not care about the familial drama […] because you think the institution of monogamous marriage and the nuclear family is stupid and violent and heternormative, then you will have a difficult time engaging with the show in general.

Okay, I'm going to give you the benefit of my doubt here. Either this is you saying fandom self selects for people who enjoy garbage, a shocking condescending and fundamentally untrue but at least plausible statement.

Or you're saying fandom is responsible for the actions of major media producers, violating basic concepts like linear time. Which would be absurd, but not wildly out of keeping with the rest of this essay.

Let's assume the former.

That's not just a thing we've studied to death and found to be untrue after decades of sociological research.

It's also just demonstrably, on the face of it, nonsensical.

Transformative fandom appeals to people who wanted MORE from a piece of media, not people who hated it enough to walk away. It's specifically about making an experience greater than it was when you first encountered it, by engaging with it communally. By ripping at the facade heteronormative white supremacy creates in art, and forcing diversity, sexuality, and liveliness into an otherwise sterile space.

Which you would know if you had engaged with or studied transformative fandom in any meaningful capacity whatsoever.

A standout example I recently encountered was browsing the fandom tags on tumblr for the movie Prey. […] It is a movie that makes the argument that, despite this alien monster running around killing people, the villains of the franchise are these occupying soldiers and settlers, an alien force who themselves have just as little regard for (indigenous) human life. And when browsing the tags on tumblr, what I found was dozens upon dozens of horny posts about how hot the predator monster was

And here's the crux of the issue revealed. You want other fans to enjoy art in a way YOU approve of specifically. Not any actual concern with addressing systemic issues of racial, sexual, etc violence. Just a desire for more of the fan content YOU like, and less of the hornyposting you dislike.

But you went on tumblr, the famously sexual mosterfucker website, and were confused to find a bunch of people want to fuck the monster!

Meanwhile, on youtube, the LARGEST FANDOM PLATFORM IN THE WORLD, searching "prey 2022 racism meta" provides dozens of hours of essays on that very subject.

And if this is your takeaway from an extremely straightforward film with a very clear message, this is not merely a failure to comprehend the content of a text, this is something beyond it

Oh the sheer vanity on display. The assumption that people cannot be hornyposting AND still have complex feelings about a racism narrative?

Man, the book about holocaust survivors who fantasize about fucking nazis is almost a century old. You're operating under DECADES AND DECADES of misinformation, and you're wallowing in it so gleefully. To the point that you act like anyone trying to provide you with even a single piece of legitimate information are worthy of mockery and derision for not Speaking High Academia Goodly Enough All The Time Forever.

I don't know how to explain this to you, but someone can find the monster sexually appealing in spite of, and indeed even because of, the colonial implications of its narrative. AND people can still be critical of colonial racism while being horny for a FICTIONAL MONSTER THAT I NEED TO EMPHASIZE IS NOT REAL AND IS NOT ACTUALLY KILLING OR COLONIZING ANYONE BECAUSE IT DOES NOT EXIST.

People can enjoy fiction without that meaning they want to fuck racists IRL. I'm sorry that you somehow believed that sexual interest in a fictional character makes you TOO STUPID TO EXIST, but fortunately, you're wrong.

a phenomenon wherein fans will move from one fandom to the next in search of two (usually white, usually skinny) guys to draw and write porn of, uncaring of any of the surrounding context of the stories they are embedded in, and consequently dominating a large sector of fandom discussion.

Again, the gays are not "dominating" fandom. The gays are dominating fandom websites made or popularized for being accessible and welcoming to gay sexuality.

Do you also go into the sexual studies aisle at the library to complain that THOSE are too sexually focused, while ignoring the whole rest of the library, too?

The actual dominant voices in fandom are Straight White Men Ages 18-40. Do you really think Star Wars was made with a bunch of teen and middle aged trans people in mind? Do you REALLY?

Because you keep SAYING that the dominant force in fandom is presumed young, presumed white, presumed female, presumed straight fans. But it isn't. It never has been.

Only in the rare enclaves of transformative fandom spaces made by and for people marginalized for their sex or gender is this "obsession" with sex and gender apparent.

Because we MADE SPACES for those subjects to be engaged with.

And now you march into these spaces, made for engaging with these subjects, and demand that instead we do things your way.

You are so ignorant you've looped back around to accusing transformative fandom of being a nasty gay hypersex conspiracy, literally no different from the latest Fox News "special guest scientist" who uses academic language incorrectly to create an illusion of authority, such that hopefully the audience will obey.

Your stance on engagement with fandom itself historically was (and still is) always first filtered through one of these two labels

YOU JUST! MADE THAT UP!!! AND PRETENDED LIKE NO ONE ELSE WOULD KNOW???? Do you think everyone else on this website was born after 2014, the year antishipping started?

Antishipping, proshipping, and even shipping itself have NEVER been the primary, central function EVEN of TRANSFORMATIVE fandom.

Let alone the archival and analytical fandoms you're looking for while claiming they TOTALLY don't exist.

But at least now we can say with authority that you're being a misinformational twat on purpose!! Because you want to REDUCE fandom to something you perceive as "drama" so you can shit on it and demand that it obey your whims and desires.

Meanwhile, just for the sake of pointing it out AGAIN: antishippers have literally killed people. Literally, no metaphor, people have been KILLED by antishippers. Dead.

Lives ended.

That's not touching on the constant spread of videos/photos showing real, actual child sexual abuse. Nor the dozens of admitted cases of raping shippers to punish them. Now the hundreds of adittmed carses of adults using the label "antiship" as a way to prey on and sexually abuse children.

No, setting all of that aside, because apparently you're the kind of Both Sides cunt that want to put random authors on the same level as CHILD RAPISTS?

THAT. ENTIRE.PHENMONON. ISN'T EVEN 10 YEARS OLD.

2014 was NOT EVEN A DECADE AGO. "Historically," my ass. NOTHING you just said there is true. Do you really think you can get away with lying that brazenly if you use the formal tone?

Because you cannot. Well informed, well educated fans who LIVED THROUGH AND STUDIED the events you're describing exist, and will continue existing. Or did you forget that many of us are "real" academics too? That this is our HOBBY where we engage with our INTEREST INFORMALLY.

Your claim that anyone who is involved in fandom is too fucking stupid to be ABLE to engage with a text in the way you want is based, wholecloth, on the assumption that there is a hard line between literary academia and fandom. Meanwhile, A LOT OF THE INFLUENTIAL FANS ARE ACADEMICS, AUTHORS, AND SOCIAL SCIENTISTS.

But, with classic vanity, you assume that anyone who disagrees is too stupid to listen to, and dig deeper into your cavern of joyous ignorance where something that started 9 years ago and that most people wouldn't even recognize the terminology of has always been a "defining" factor?

No.

That is a lie. Full fucking stop. You are a liar.

Nowhere in this binary is space to describe any other perspective you might take

You're just repeating yourself over and over. "Oh, why do the people on the gay sex website obsess over gay sex." "Oh, why do the people whose hobby is indie romance lit keep talking about indie romance lit on this, the indie romance lit website."

JUST! GO! TO! ANY! OTHER! FANDOM! THEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!! STOP DEMANDING THE PEOPLE WHO MADE THE GAY FUCKING WEBSITE REPURPOSE IT TO YOUR WHIMS YOU WEIRD PRESUMPTUOUS CUNT!!!!!

It’s not just that the pro/anti divide is juvenile and overly-simplistic

Bold words from the asshole still equating the child-raping death cult to people who read/write for fun, but I mean… we've established that this is a purposefully misleading shitstorm already so.

it is a declaration that all fan conflict must be read through the lens of shipping and shipping only

Do you think that the fandom meltdowns about the removal of Biologically Evil Races from D&D was about shipping????

Do you think that the backlash against the Black storm trooper in star wars was about SHIPPING?

You just throw out anything outside your blinders, huh. You just ignore EVERYTHING ELSE that ever happens, so you can claim it's 'all' about shipping.

My friend, fandom isn't obsessed with shipping, YOU are.

Which, again, I think is a fundamental error of methodology.

Okay, you keep saying "methodology" in a way that makes me think you don't actually know what it means. It's not a special magic term for "critical lens that will make you agree with me."

There isn't even "a" fandom methodology to speak of. Now, at the more precise level of AO3-centered, transformative, romance based fandom SPECIFICALLY, there are some methodoloGIES (PLURAL) that occur fairly frequently. And THOSE are, I assume, the things you have an issue with. But since you continue not to define what methodologies you disapprove of, it's meaningless filler word to make yourself sound smart.

And don't point to your paragraph about capitalism heteronormativity; that's not a fandom methodology and it's not even discussing a method at all, just contextualizing how a method might arise without actually specifying what the method is.

Don't point to your paragraph about Prey, either. You still didn't actually specify any methods, let alone full methodologies. You simply said, repeatedly, that you personally feel like people were missing the point. Nothing about how many times they read the original text; nothing about note taking; nothing about citation; nothing about research; nothing, nothing, notheng methodological whatsoever. Just your personal disgust that people might be horny in a way you think is "too white."

the thorny issues of representation not just as expressed through individual characters but entire worlds, narratives, settings, and themes

So you've just not been tracking the meltdown of the Harry Potter fandom over the last 5 years, either, yeah?

Because these days, that fandom is LOADED with people explaining in exquisite detail all the ways the world building is, itself, deeply racially, sexually flawed.

Or is that too cringe for you to talk about?

Because the Lord of The Rings fandom is also known for this trend. Star Wars too.

There's shitloads of this stuff out there, you simply refuse to leave the Gay Sex For Monster Fuckers website to find it. Instead, you lounge around here complaining about how the monsters are too fuckable and the gays too sexual.

You keep harping on about how this is a western individualism problem, but you're literally just refusing to acknowledge that other things exist. Do you think there are no shippers in Vietnam? Because buddy, there for sure are. I'm friends with some.

And this issue is best perhaps epitomised by reader insert fanfiction, circumventing any need for you to project onto a character by literally inserting yourself into fiction, primarily in order to write/read about a character you want to fuck

Ah, you see? You think the gay sex website has too much gay sex on it.

This then intersects in particularly disgusting ways with real world politics, such as reader insert fics about Pedro Pascal going with you to BLM protests.

Wow, you just really uniquely hate shippers, huh. You really went all in on the "people writing fanfiction are sex criminals" thing instead of "people forcing Mr Pascal to read porn on camera are sex criminals."

Do you also think that the guy who made the camera my rapist filmed me with as a child is the real sex criminal, not the rapist holding said camera?

Even if this is (incredibly over-generously) interpreted as a very poor attempt at being “progressive,” it still demonstrates that many (white) fans are often incapable of thinking about anything outside of a character-centric perspective, quite literally centring themselves in the process, and consequently they think it’s totally appropriate to do things like that

Again the assumption that any fan you dislike is white. No wonder you've convinced yourself no other POC are left to speak up: you call us white when we disagree.

The fact that this is also frequently a racist lens is not coincidental, because again, a chronic focus on (fictional) individuality prohibits any structural perspective from entering the discussion

"Why doesn't this character piece focus on systemic issues more!!!!!"

Mate, just go back to reading "real" literature until you've pulled your head out of your ass enough to answer that question.

To say nothing of the bold audacity displayed in the assumption that a character study cannot comment on social issues, because…. because what? Because it's written by a hobbyist? Because it's not in an 150 year old anthology?

Do you also think poetry is incapable of analyzing systemic issues because it has a narrow focus, too?

Your ego, ignorance, and anger have combined to render you absolutely abominable, yet you wonder why people aren't falling over themselves to fulfill your every wish??

Oh it must be because your sycophants are being excluded, not because you've gone off half-cocked and wholly ignorant, making the same stupid, unfounded arguments based on your own assumptions about other people's beliefs, values and actions.

where people come to the conclusion that the topic of police brutality is little more than a fun stage to enact whatever romantic shenanigans you want to get up to with a hot guy.

No, mate, YOU came to that conclusion. That's not "fandom" that's you. You did that. The writer's reasons for producing that fic are unknown to you. You decided all on your own that it was written by a white person for fun, and not by a person of colour who wanted to imagine that someone they idolize would hold similar moral values to them.

You didn't need any straight white fangirls to do it for you. YOU reduced it to sex all on your own.

But I think that this being the dominant mode of engagement

STILL not the dominant mode of fandom. No matter how many times you say that, it's still not true. It remains false and, at this point I feel confident in saying it is a willful lie.

inherently excludes and marginalises all other approaches, and creates a fandom space where the most valuable way to talk about media is to discuss which two characters you most enjoy imagining fucking each other

Finally, and in conclusion, your experiences are not universal. You surrounded yourself with people insisting that This Is The Only Thing Fandom Is, and then you ignore and deride anyone pointing out that you're wrong.

I can, right now, go on my dashboard and ask people to drop me their favourite meta and haedcanons and get dozens or hundreds of replies from people with the most beautifully complex, nuanced grasp of character, setting, causality, and more and be blown away by the connections they make to real world issues.

You, however, it seems can just go on your dashboard and be flooded with things you hate.

But here's the thing: YOU decide who you follow on here. YOU decide which fandom platforms you frequent. YOU, in this one TINY arena, get to have the actual final say.

Use. That. Power. Revel in it. God knows that as QTIPOC we're not given that kind of authority ANYWHERE ELSE in life.

Use it.

Make your fandom space look the way you want it to, instead of making up a bunch of gibberish.

PS: Some (just a small sample) fandoms active on tumblr you definitely forgot when you were pretending you have authoritative knowledge about how all fandom is about The kind Of Sex You Hate and not about engaging with art wholly and joyfully.

Shakespeare.

Dante.

Other renaissance lit, especially italiana.

Queen (band).

Dracula and assorted Victoriana.

Classical Chinese literature.

Classical Greek and Latin literature.

Poetry (western)

Poetry and calligraphy (eastern, incl middle eastern)

Botany (the science) (VERY popular on here)

[wayward-jack]

I'm on Sun/Moon fantasy au brain rot help. I already started rambling to Twitter so throwing it here cause its slowly becoming a lot.

Enchanted puppets made to entertain y/n prince(ss) that double as assassins of a witch that wants to end the bloodline. Paranoid king and his staff keeps getting in the way of the murdering so they start getting attached.

Can't decide if they're single or two puppets.

Maybe two and Eclipse is like a fusion of the two designed to slot together into a more murdery murder puppet. Parts easily exchangeable between them if anything breaks on one. More hidden compartments than a 1800's nobles desk for both weapons and party tricks.

Sun caves in first and wants to stay with y/n as royal jester till the end of time. Extremely over protective and never leaves Moon alone with them cause Moon still wants to do his job as the witch intended.

They fight like kids with each other, weak lil slaps, until its something more serious and suddenly theres blades involved.

Moon is worried about being dismantled/tortured by the witch if they don't do their jobs. He can't see her being merciful & disenchanting them for failing.

Y/n hates being a prince(ss) and spent their life harassing castle staff to teach them things. From baking to archery, y/n is a chaotic gremlin of many surprises throwing off the lads all the time. Y/n loves to sneak out and join in festivals often disguised as a performer.

Lads know a bit of magic they picked up from the witch and use it to entertain y/n who's seen all the normal tricks in the book. Moon being an actual dream diver/eater, with enchanting songs too. Sun being great at illusions, he loves making light shows, & excellent at conjuring.

Vanessa is the witch, old man Afton her master that took her in/taught her magic to harvest souls to keep him alive. Royal throne originally his? Dethroned/outcast and dying in some forsaken lands? =^=??? Still thinking on that one, I mostly have celestial puppet brain rot right now tbh.

IM GOING TO BED, MIGHT RAMBLE MORE TOMORROW I DUNNO. I haven't thought of making a fic or anything in like a decade.

The number of times I have almost typed muppet instead of puppet. That'd be a whole other energy that has me cracking up just thinking about it.

[qqueenofhades]

Do you think the helpful Europeans on tumblr and twitter who keep advising Americans in red states to move to blue states realize that that distance between Dallas, TX and Chicago, IL is about the same as between Paris, France and Warsaw, Poland ?

I'm going to say probably not, no. Also, "just move!!!" is about as helpful as "start a revolution!!" in terms of a workable solution, which is... not at all. I have had to move a lot (a LOT) in my life, and it totally absolutely sucks even when it's somewhere you WANT to go/do! When you don't and you're being forced by external circumstances, it sucks even worse. It is expensive, exhausting, time-consuming, stressful, and generally a pain in the ass, and when you get to where you're going, you've got to transfer your voter registration, your driver's license, your utility bills, your health insurance, navigate a new administration system, find a job, resettle your life, make new friends, etc etc. It is a total absolute fucking HASSLE, and not to mention, most people who won't be able to afford so much as traveling out of state for an abortion will absolutely not be able to afford moving!

Like, I am lucky enough to be a lesbian living in a blue state (albeit a very red part of said state), so this is very unlikely to apply to me personally. But if, God forbid, a situation arose where I needed to get up and leave immediately, I would almost surely not be able to do that. I haven't been able to do it in the last three years despite vigorous trying, and the only reason that I might be able to do it now is because a) my grandmother recently died and my mom inherited some money from her estate, and b) she also has a job now when she hadn't for a while. So in my personal circumstances, if it was extremely necessary, my parents could help me get out. But that is a sheer fluke and dependent only on our own situation and, given how poor all of us have been for many years, would absolutely not have been an option before.

Besides, "just uproot your whole life because fascists run your home state!" is astoundingly tone-deaf. Due to gerrymandering and other Republican dirty tricks, a state counts as "red" if only 50.1% of the population votes for the Republican candidate; that still leaves the 49.9% who didn't and yet are subject to GOP nonsense anyway. It's like when liberals write off the entire South or see them as "deserving" it, when, like... you know how the South has been structured, built, and sustained on minority-white-conservative rule since the beginning, right? The many good people who are NOT racist Christofascist KKKlowns have been fighting for DECADES to undo some of those structural barriers and systemic injustices, and some of the keyboard warriors need to do as much work as even one day in the life of a southern community organiser or local Democrat before they shoot their mouths off about The Establishment.

Anyway, I suspect that telling someone from Poland (where abortion is likewise tightly restricted/outlawed) to "just move to France" as a solution wouldn't be particularly well-received. Plus, Europeans, or indeed any non-Americans at all, who feel like chiming in right now should restrict their commentary to "I'm sorry the Supreme Court did this" and "let me know if I can help." That goes double for all the non-American leftists who get cred points on Socialist Twitter by bashing the Democrats endlessly, and never have to live in American society, participate in it, vote in it, live with the consequences of their words, or anything else at all. The end.

[criscura]

Yeah I dont see how the manga is ending soon when there is still more webcomic after garous arc and the webcomic isn't finished? Maybe they're hinting Murata will be taking a hiatus cause after garou because there's not much webcomic material left to work on until ONE get more webcomic out or maybe they think this arc will be somewhere neat to tie off the manga idk lol

I'm actually gonna post something I just wrote on Reddit (with minor edits):

There are really, REALLY good chances that the whole "HE MEANS THE END OF THE SERIES" is being taken way out of context. In the thread this tweet came from, Murata was answering another artist who said they were checking out OPM for the first time. They were impressed with the fight between Saitama and Garou, and Murata answered with that tweet. It's more likely than not he meant that this series of fights is almost over--not the whole-ass manga--because it doesn't make sense for the story at all, the rumor is coming from an extremely unreliable source, and it's been disproved.

Explanation under the cut:

Story-wise, why on earth would they end it here? After introducing so many new, unanswered plot threads (some of them within the last few pages!); spending a year redrawing fights so that they worked with wherever the story was going, which would then be ending immediately after all those redraws before you could understand why they were done; hinting hardcore at MANY different mysteries that we haven't touched; and not that I think ONE or Murata care particularly hard about profit first, but having the series rocket up the charts over the past few months?? To the point where it's been trending on twitter multiple times now? And when ending it here would contradict almost every single element of the story, on every single level, effectively destroying it, after busting their asses over it for the past ten years? And they decide to say it's done with a fucking off-handed comment in a reply tweet to another artist?

No. It makes way more sense that Murata just meant, "Oh man, I'm so happy you like this fight, but I'm sorry because it's coming to a close. Me and ONE-sensei will try to make sure it's a satisfying finish though!"

Also this rumor was started by an extremely toxic "fan" who, for the past several years, has done nothing but start fandom-wide drama. So far as I can tell his only motivation is that he thinks the webcomic is better than the manga (and seems to have a personal grudge against Murata, who he's constantly insulting and making fun of). It's to the point where he gets pissy and petty if anyone says they enjoy the manga, and will go out of his way to make people miserable for disagreeing with him--or just for making content he doesn't like. So like....yeah. Yeaaaahhh, I'm taking anything and everything he says about this with the tiniest grain of salt. It doesn't help that the people I'm seeing push hard for the rumor being true are all people who will agree with anything he says and/or can't stand the manga and want to see it over. They don't want it to exist for whatever reason, so they're gonna read this tweet in the worst possible light--even if it doesn't actually make sense.

On top of all that, a Japanese reader on Reddit said that in their decades of reading manga, they've never seen シリーズ used to mean a series or manga, but moreso an arc. Here's a link to the comment. That matches what I've seen from the Japanese accounts I follow on Twitter--Japanese fans aren't freaking out the same way non-Japanese fans are. They have Twitter same as we do, and if they're reading the same tweets and getting a different meaning, I'm going to trust them. (And that's not to mention that the translations the linked as "proof" of the rumor that the is series ending seem pretty half-hearted and lead-on to me.)

TL, DR: This was a rumor started by an unbelievably toxic fan who hates the manga and wants to see it end, which has been disproved or completely unacknowledged by native Japanese speakers, and makes no sense in any context of the series at all.

[destinyc1020]

that was the most interesting part of the article how there wasnt anyone really under 40 to take the mantle of the previous generation and there isnt alot of actors under 40 that would make you go to the movies.

I think a part of that has to be how the media landscape and our access to celebrities have changed. The previous generation if you wanted to see your favourite actor you had to go to the theatres to see them. Now with social media, celebs are available through instagram, twitter, tik tok and your constantly bombarded by celeb updates, there opinions, video interviews which has led to an influx of people with parasocial relationships with celebs. The younger generation of actors have utilized these for their brands but at the cost that air of mystery that clear separtion between celeb and fan is gone. Fans can easily access to there favs on social media without ever having to spend the money to watch them in theatres.

That didnt really happen in the past like the previous gen of stars had an air of mystery to them you only had access to them through magazine interviews , red carpets, gossip but thats pretty much it.

Also vod and streaming has allowed people to wait and the cost of movie tickets are expensive. Studios looking for projects tht can make the most money rather make original and taking more risks etc.

I totally agree with all of this. 👍🏾💯

I think it's more so due to how the "celebrity world" has changed greatly due to social media. Then, there's also streaming.

Lots of factors to consider.

I also feel like studios are less likely these days to take risks or make films that may or may NOT become box office hits. 🤔 When you're only wanting to make films that are "sure things", you don't allow for RISKS, growth, or creativity in the film-making industry. 🥴

I need our generation of actors to step it up out here lol 😆 🙃 😂.... But I ALSO need Hollywood to take more chances on us. 😔

I personally think we have some really good solid, promising actors in the industry under 40 who have the potential for longevity and putting butts in seats....

Tom, Zendaya, Timothée, Florence, Anya, Austin, Paul, Michael B, Jennifer Lawrence, Barry, Chris Hemsworth, Halle Bailey, Callum, Mike Faist, Josh O'Connor, Jharell Jerome, Janelle Monae, Letitia, Nick Robinson, Taylor Russell, Jenna Ortega, etc.

The list goes on and on....

But Hollywood just has to take a chance on us as the younger generation, and allow us to build our own legacy. 🤷🏾‍♀️

Some haven't even had much time to really prove themselves. 🙃

I think another thing that's hindering the success and advancement is the fandom wars too.... 👀 Maybe I'm completely wrong, but I don't think fandom wars existed like this decades ago when the OG celebrities are younger and popular. I think back then ppl just embraced them ALL!

Ppl loved Julia Roberts AND Halle Berry AND Sandra Bullock.

People loved Denzel AND Tom Cruise.

People loved Ryan Philippe AND Paul Walker.

People loved Whitney AND Mariah.

People loved Ben Affleck AND Matt Damon.

Now days....??? 🥴 Now days, being a fan is almost like practically being in a darn near CULT lol 😆 😅

If you're a fan of X actor, then you mustn't be a fan of Y actor!! And don't you dare watch his films either because that would be a traitor-like offense! 🥴

See, when fans operate like THIS, it also stifles the growth and success of our generation's actors. 😔 Instead of making things a competition all the time, to me it's better to just support them all. 🤷🏾‍♀️

Anyway, those are just my thoughts.... Feel free to agree our disagree....

[eisforeidolon]

I really really wish I could see prequelgate as not a big deal,but just today Jared said it almost broke their friendship forever,he moved on bc he loves Jensen but he was obviously hurt.I also love Jensen,it hurt me to see him doing all of this and treating Sam as less than an after thought,I really wish I could move on,but I thought he loved SPN,Idk as I said is sad and it didn’t help Jensen fans treat us as if we are crazy for being shocked Jensen did that,everybody was shocked,nobody expected he would exclude Jared like that.It’s also funny now AAs and hellers are saints that just mind their business and don’t attack Jared for breathing,please.

I have no idea where you're getting the idea anyone is calling hellers/AA saints, so I'm not touching that. As to what Jared said today, are you talking about the Inside of You Interview, or something else? Because I don't see any other new Jared news today and we did not get the same general feeling out of what Jared said about prequelgate [X] (transcript with some ums/likes omitted included below the cut). Which is just the specific part about the prequel and not even including the two other parts of the interview where he gushed about Jensen's work ethic and was so proud of the chairback pranks he got to pull on him on Walker.

I'm not telling you that you can't feel the way you feel. However, speaking as someone who has had their own adult friendships spanning decades with their own rocky moments? It's their relationship and if they're over it, I'm over it. I kind of get the impression a lot of fans are very upset to realize a couple of random actors aren't perfect people with a completely perfect friendship, as if such a thing even exists.

MR: Did you and Jensen settle, did the dust settle with the whole thing when he announced that the Supernatural prequel and then you tweeted and all that stuff? Did you guys have a talk and have a laugh about it?

Jared: We had, we had a laugh and a cry, man. Yeah, we - I mean, you know, we're two grown ass men with spouses and kids and mortgages and car payments and this and that. And so we did link up, or sync up or whatever, and talk on the phone and I've seen him many times since. He just directed, we were just in some city together ... Denver? Las Vegas, Denver, Dallas - I've seen him many times. We were together in Austin three or four days ago. I love the guy, man. Like, and he loves me back, I have no doubt. And I think he and I would both would rather things had gone down a different way. They didn't, but it's not productive to say, like, who is to blame or what happened. It's productive to go, like - I mean, I feel part of me feels like, you know if you are in a relationship with somebody? Friend, family, or whatever? And you haven't gone through hardship? Then you don't really know - it's once you go through a hardship of some sort and then your instinct goes to like, 'I want to make this right or I want to say goodbye to this.' And he and I both figured the former, like, 'Hey I want to make this right.' This is gonna sound like, 'Hey everybody out there, go get in a fight with people you love!' And that's not what I'm saying.

MR: But too strong of a friendship to let something like this kinda get ya?

Jared: Sure, yeah yeah yeah, things - I mean, goddamn. Can you name anybody you love and have spent this much time with as an adult, as a sovereign adult human being, that you haven't kind of been like, 'Dude, like, I wish this was different, and they like I wish that was different.'

MR: Yeah, I've said the wrong things, I've acted the wrong way, this is this thing called life. Again, it comes back to not being hard on yourself, you know what I mean? Or, or the people you love most.

Jared: Yeah, yeah. We're straight, man, I mean I want to be really clear because I know ... You know, you always see, like, twitter trolls and stuff, and all that. So I want to be abundantly clear, man, nobody believes in Jensen more than I do. I look at him -

MR: You said that, baby, you said that and I, it's touching, that's touching. I think him hearing that - he knows how you feel about him.

Jared: He knows. He knows, yeah.

[riseofthecommonwoodpile]

ok this is straight up just a personal post but it's too long for my private twitter so i'm putting it here. somewhat tmi i guess and it's about some pretty hardcore / lifestyle kink stuff, so. read at your own risk

ANYWAYS. last week i started texting with this guy near me who had very similar kink interests and stuff, and to make a very very long story short, it turns out he has two other subs and is now looking for a 24/7 D/s thing with a service sub / slave who likes domestic work. basically just like a maid he can put into bondage and fuck, which just so happens to be precisely the kind of service i really enjoy but haven't had an outlet for in a long time (especially enforced domestic work), essentially since i stopped living with my previous owner (who is my best friend still who i love so, so dearly, that is not a sad story)

obviously if that were to happen, it would only be after we got to know each other extremely well and knew we clicked enough to sustain that kind of relationship, but idk, he seems genuinely super cool? unlike most cis guys LARPing that kind of relationship, he hasn't been all "if you're my submissive you must do what i say and be devoted to me and only me always", he communicates like someone who's actually done this before and knows that one-note, no flexibility dynamics like that really don't work except for a tiny, tiny number of people. he seems very understanding that i have other people and things in my life that i care about, and any move into something higher protocol would involve looking at what is a reasonable amount of time i can give him in person each week while still being able to maintain those things i care about in the rest of my life, and what expectations would look like when i wasn't there in person, check-ins, responsibilities, etc. which seems incredibly minor but is very much not among cis guys looking for 24/7 D/s dynamics lmao

and, like. a confusing part of my relationship with kink is that while i have 0 romantic interest in men, i can very much find them attractive and enjoy playing with them, and it seems like neither of us are looking for a romantic aspect to this even if it were to go full on high protocol shit, which is just such a relief, it feels like a lot less pressure that way. i've been into kink for over a decade as my almost exclusive form of sexual relationship (and most of my romantic ones), so i know what i want and what i need, and he at least talks like he does too, in a way that feels genuine and not like someone bullshitting. and also he used to foster kittens and has 4 cats and a dog!! this is somewhat unrelated to the previous information but it was a big green flag for me so i'm putting it here.

we have our first meeting on Wednesday and i am very excited for it, plan is coffee and talking and if we are both feeling a good vibe then to his place to do a bit of domestic work, a bit of bondage, and possibly more, to get a taste of what he'd be looking for and whether it's for me. it's weird! but good? maybe. i'm trying not to get my hopes up because a.) maybe IRL he just sucks and can only talk a good game or b.) maybe we just have 0 chemistry in person, who knows. but i'm hoping it goes well.

[snippetsearch]

The ghost in the corner of the screen

I've been doing my best to avoid thinking about a certain person in any way for months, but I was reminded of him today in a way I hadn't accounted for at all.

Months ago, I'd blocked him on twitter, deleted his work from my computer, and all the rest in an effort to move on from the time in our lives that we were friends. It had been successful, we're now at almost a year without any contact. Today, I booted up Soulseek (A peer-to-peer file sharing client with a focus on music) to download several albums by musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, who had passed away recently. But as I went about searching through the list of available files, I was presented with a little notification in the corner of my screen, telling me that he had logged in – this gave me pause: What the hell was I supposed to do with this information? I had set up the reminder years ago so that I'd be able to download tracks from him when he was online, but now it had become a weirdly detached, accidentally voyeuristic moment where I had gleamed the tiniest of tiniest pieces of intimate information on current activity.

The nature of this notification is set up is inherently one-way: totally un-reciprocal, extremely basic. The other user has no clue that you've created the alert – Soulseek doesn't even have a "friends" system, just an index of users. This is an aspect that I enjoy about Soulseek. In its quasi-illegal status as a file-sharing client used by thousands of users to share music, its design and features haven't been updated in a major way for almost a decade, resisting the web's slow tide of social network feature creep.

For a brief, brief moment, I had become an unwilling spy into the intimate world of a person I had done my best to scrub from my life. Reflexively, my brain conjured a picture of him on his MacBook, file-sharing client open, perched on the edge of his bed in his room with the curtains closed maybe, or sat at his desk by a window overlooking the street beneath his building. What was the weather even like in Chicago right now? For some reason, I decided it ought to be rainy. I was reminded of how many memories of him live on in my brain, images fixed in time from when we were friends. I was an invisible onlooker in a place I'd never been, staring through a hole opened by an accidental connection between our two computers.

The timing of the notification was totally typical for him – Oversleeping deep into the day, then logging into soulseek first thing out of bed. You could set a watch by it. When we had known each-other, I'd leave soulseek open so that, separated by a transatlantic timezone gap, I'd receive a little unwitting indicator of when he had woken up. I was aware that if he knew, he'd have found it a little obsessive, but since it was a one-way setup, he had no way to know.

My brain flashed different, conflicting impulses in the moments after the notification appeared. Maybe I could open his user directory and take a look through his shared files. What was he listening to nowadays? He used to send me music excitedly, imploring me to share my thoughts on each track he sent every day. Now, I was faced with an opportunity to recreating that connection, one of my favourite parts of our friendship, in a form that required no knowledge or consent on his part. If I did that, I felt like I would be interfacing with a strange kind of unconscious version of him, playing out a little puppet-string version of our everyday friendship where my co-conspirator was a list of files on his hard drive. But doing so would have felt like some kind of twisted violation, like forming a hollow replica of him with which to act out my imaginary version of friendship without his knowledge.

Instead, I moved quickly to remove the traces of him from my client. I clicked through each menu as fast as I could, so that I wouldn't hesitate and consider the temptation to lurk on his profile. Almost faster than I could think, I had clicked on his username, opened a drop-down menu, and selected the option to remove him from my list of bookmarked users. The traces of his ghost on my screen had been deleted as easily as deleting any other thing. There was only a blank space where his username had briefly been displayed.

I took a moment to think about how strange it was, what an odd reminder of a person I'd been trying to forget. It seems like when you try to push someone out of your life, these fingerprints of the space they used to fill leave themselves smudged across your screen, and no matter how much you try to wall them off, their presence seeps through in un-anticipatable ways, and you're forced momentarily to imagine them with the same shade of care with which you viewed them as a friend. Maybe he too had been presented with some moment in which he had to reckon with artefacts of our split. Where should he put the book I sent him among the others on his shelf? Did he still hold on to all of the drawings of mine that he had saved to his computer? Or did he have to go through carefully and pick my traces from his life one-by-one, just as I had erased his? Did he find himself accidentally imagining me, creating his own version of where I was now, cued by some minuscule leftover from our past?

It doesn't matter. Spending more time inventing useless questions is just a use of time that moves you nowhere. I downloaded Sakamoto's album 'Cendre' from 2007, which he created in collaboration with german musician Christian Fennesz. It was their second release as a pair, the two of them subsequently trading remixes and collaborating for years and years after. It's a slow, hauntingly beatiful album that pairs Fennesz's distorted pads with Sakamoto's impressionistic piano improvisation. When Sakamoto passed away, Fennesz posted this short message to his website:

RIP Ryuichi Sakamoto. One of the greatest ever. I am grateful for the friendship and the music we made.

The cover of the album is a grainy photo of empty bedroom. The photographer must have been sat at a weird angle within the room, crouched behind the bed. On the left, a mirror tilts down, pointing towards the floor at the foot of the bed, as if avoiding eye-contact. On the right of the image, an open door leads to an empty bathroom, where another mirror is hung on the wall in the back. Through that mirror is the reflection of the room behind the photographer, and at the very back is a tiny sliver of a window looking out on a rainy blue-hour sky.

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | Shut In (Caruso, 2022)

The most notable thing about this movie and the reason I sought it out was the involvement of Vincent Gallo, who came out of retirement for almost a decade to appear in this movie. His participation can likely be explained by the fact that Gallo is an outspoken conservative and that this movie was produced by the Daily Wire, a conservative media company owned by a deeply unpleasant man who shall not be named and who is something of an intellectual hero to the right on the basis of many arguments where he DESTROYS the dumbest people on the left by talking too fast for them to keep up. Who could this person be? We will never know. But Gallo's involvement gets a lot harder to explain when you realize he has like ten, maybe fifteen minutes of screentime, or at least scenes where he's given some dialogue. Maybe he didn't read the script beforehand, but what I can say in favour of the movie is that his presence hangs over the rest of the movie. His portrayal of a pedophilic meth addict is so sleazy and so forcefully performed that he makes the movie around him feel a touch extra noxious. To the extent that Shut In works as a thriller, a good amount of credit goes to him.

Now, I have not seen the Daily Wire's other productions (I'm not particularly keen to support their work directly, and that school shooting movie sounds a little too vile even for me), but I understand that as far as explicitly conservative movies go, they're supposed to be closer to real movies than all those movies where Kevin Sorbo rails against atheists, abortions, antifa and probably Anthony Fauci. (I haven't actually seen those movies, I'm going by secondhand reports.) Given Dallas Sonnier's involvement as a producer, I can make a comparison to two Cinestate productions, Dragged Across Concrete and The Standoff at Sparrow Creek. Both of those are similarly grimy thrillers and can be read as right wing (although I think there's some ambiguity with the latter), but despite their politics, I think those movies know how to work as examples in their genre and are willing to muddy the moral waters of their protagonists. The heroine here is defined as a recovered drug addict who loves Jesus, and the movie has no idea how to make this dramatically compelling. We get long scenes of her looking longingly at the cross nailed on her wall, and one very long scene of her reading the bible. In the middle of a home invasion. Exciting stuff.

And her recovery from addiction is nominal, because the movie never depicts her as being even remotely tempted by drugs during the runtime. Some of this is the movie's gross views on addiction at play, as the drug addicts in the movie are almost comically evil and crippled by their addictions, and the movie makes the not terribly subtle metaphor of throwing out bad apples or cutting out the rotten bits (and does so repeatedly, meaning we get lots and lots of shots of apples). The movie posits that drugs are something only bad people and good people can never succumb to them because they're good people. Which, despite never having been near hard drugs in my life, reads as entirely dishonest to me. I recently watched The Boost, (starring James Woods, who shockingly enough hasn't shown up in one of these movies despite the views he's voiced through his deranged Twitter account), and 8 Million Ways to Die, and what those movies get (despite the former plunging into a worst case scenario style depiction), is the idea of constant temptation and threat of relapse. This one features the heroine being handed some supposedly high grade meth and batting nary an eyelash, instead scheming how she can use it against her assailants.

Aside from that, much of the movie has the heroine locked repeatedly in a pantry while her dumbass kid proves useless in helping her get out. Which means that it's pretty low wattage as far as home invasion thrillers go, although D.J. Caruso does provide some sturdy visual direction. That being said, the fact that the heroine's comically run down house looks like something out of a Conjuring sequel and is shot in fecal tones to boot means that it never registers as a real, lived-in space, which greatly undermines the immediacy of the premise. So no, I do not recommend seeing this movie, although Gallo's performance is pretty engaging and the few minutes of conscious screentime he has could be edited into a pretty tense short film.

[melodraca]

your oc tag intrigues me

can I have some fun facts about kade I see that name a lot and kade seems great

sorry am awkward

Don't worry, you don't seem awkward at all! ^_^ But oh my gosh, I'm going to apologize in advance, because seeing an ask about any of my ocs makes me really happy and I may or may not start rambling a bit. Bear with me here...

Fun facts about Kade:

He's a character from a roleplay between me and my friend

We actually both agreed that he's our favorite character

He's bi

Kade started out in 2015 as a slightly humorous antagonist who was supposed to show up for one plot arc and then disappear forever

We liked him too much, so we brought him back as a side character with a redemption arc

We then liked him SO much that he became a main character

(He was a diamond amongst the trash of our terrible old writing)

He was kinda toxic, kinda manipulative, but also so cringe and sexy, he captivated us

He's like 6'5"+. A beanpole

He's one of our most intelligent characters

I wouldn't say he's got low wisdom necessarily, but his sense of humor is really dumb

He laughs at his own jokes

The first thing he did after being introduced was unsuccessfully attempt to make the lives of everyone around him worse (he didn't have a clear motivation for this)

He loves his cool, scary wife so so much

He started out as a part of a gang, which was initially supposed to add to his ~villainous intimidation factor~ but he was so universally disliked by this gang that it was just kind of sad

He attempted to leave and somehow ended up in an infinitely worse situation (mafia-esque crime organization)

The first thing he did in this organization was form a codepedant relationship with the boss's equally touch-starved and closeted son (Nic)

Their relationship is healthier now, but for a while they both sucked so much. They enabled each others issues, and Kade loved to make Nic mad on purpose

He's polyam, and he's been collecting partners like pokemon cards

His partners have a groupchat that they didn't let him join

He was crushing on his cool, scary wife (Mian) for almost a decade, but she was his bestie and he didn't want to ruin that in case she didn't feel the same way (she did, but the whole time she thought that she just REALLY liked him as a friend)

Still unironically says "epic" (me too)

He had so many vices and issues <3 he still has so many issues

I'm pretty sure he questioned his gender at one point, and he came to the conclusion that he was still cis, but in an Ascended kind of way

He's in his 40s by this point

He has kids, he's genuinely really sweet with them (also collects them like pokemon cards; most of them are adopted. He's not the step dad, he's the dad that stepped up)

Deals with gut-wrenching trauma :(

He almost caused a divorce because a bromance with one of his best friends (Tsubasa) got a little bit too gay

"He has a very punchable face," - a comment I once got on a drawing of him vaping

He has his stupid spiked collar insured

Ate a cigarette more than once

I think we canonized him being autistic shortly after I realized I was autistic, because too many things made a LOT of sense retrospectively

During his wedding vows, he asked the audience to give him a "hell yeah."

I imagine that he smells very subtly like weed and drugstore cologne

He went through a lot of personal growth. Had some issues with toxic masculinity, now he respects women soooo much

He has a special interest in horror films/shows/books/etc. He also just likes film in general

His other thing is math, and all of his partners hate it

I just think he's really neat :)

That's all I can think of off the top of my head rn 💀 but thank you again so much for asking!

Art by swagamicchi on twitter, me (old art, but I haven't drawn a lot recently. rip.), and frozenspoots on twitter