#like. when I first joined the fandom it was important for me to understand how he got through post-rots stuff

[daddyplasmius]

okay, so, I've collected a bunch of DP fandom stuff that I remember off the top of my head, specifically in chronological order & colour coded here in this post (fics/comics, tumblr posts, important imo) for no reason other than I saw a post asking for Phandom history & it triggered my biggest, most long-running hyperfixation & now I'm curious if anyone else remembers stuff.

this link is going to be the permanent version I will be updating, but I'm posting what I currently have (gonna go through my old laptop later for more) just to let people know. you can also find the link on my blog, but only on desktop. It isn't colour coded there, sorry.

please share more if you got anything else cuz I'm 100% sure I'm missing a lot of stuff & am too interested now. the biggest reason a lot of stuff isn't here is that I simply can't find it. second biggest reason is i forgor. things not included here aren't "unimportant," this is just the first stuff that comes to mind.

putting it under a cut 'cause it got kinda long

Mars by JadeRabbyt (2005)

Checkmate by pearl84 (2006)

Conversations of a Ghost Gabber by Cordria (2006)

The Foley Maneuver by bluemoonalto (2007)

One Thousand Years by Nylah (2008)

Lab Rat by AnneriaWings (2009)

Lost by Cordria (2010?) [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Phantom of Truth by Haiju (2011)

Ghost Deaths (2012)

Through Coals and Rain by Kakawot (2012)

Shadow of a Doubt by Haiju (2013)

Pink Pants (2013?)

Wes (2014) [original] [1] [2] [3] [4]

this "I'm Inevitable" gif (2014)

Space AU (2014)

Treading Water by The Full Catastrophe (2014)

Danny, you dead IDIOT!! comic (2014)

wash away the darkest days by anthrop (2014)

Reverse Trio (2014)

Inverse Trio (2014-2016) ALT

Halfas are "feral children" (2015)

Burn the Streets, Burn the Cars by anthrop (2015)

It's Not Gay if He's Dead by phantomrose96 (2015)

You Smell Like Death by starfleetrambo (2015)

Ghost Bird AU by @rest-in-peachs (2016?)

Things I Can(not) Do In Amity Park by RedHeadsRock1010 (2016)

KEtTLE by Cordria (2016)

Deeper, Darker by Silvermoonphantom (2016)

Danny Phantom Punches Butch Hartman In The Face by MistressVintage (2017)

Dannypocalypse (2017)

Ghost Train (2017?)

Ghost Physics by jayrockin (2017)

Ghost Infographics (2018)

The Taxonomy of Ghost Cores: An Observational Study (2018) Communicating with Ghosts Professionally: A Study (2018)

Species in Danny Phantom (2018?)

Diddles Piddles by diddly-darn-ghost (2018)

Broken Ectoplasm by ghostanimal (2019)

Ghost of Heroes by Enigmaris & ScarletNightFury (2019-2020)

do not stand at my grave and cry (i am not there, i did not die) by blueh (2020)

Undercover Phantom by artistfingers (2021)

Corruption is a Two Way Street by datawyrms (2021)

Things That Bleed by artistfingers, kkachis, & Perfectly_Inconspicuous (2022)

10,000 works on AO3 (2022)

Ghost Speak:

Danny's handwriting (2015?)

Cordria (2015)

Fiver-Rivers [1] [2] [3] (2019)

Rubber Chicken Sounds (2019)

[pandora15]

good news!

I am officially doing febuwhump this year :)

I can't say for sure how many prompts I will be doing, but I did finish the first one today and I'll probably have the second one done by the time I go to sleep tonight, so…hopefully it'll end up being more than 2 but we'll see?

but I'm excited! writing has been really difficult lately, as I've said before, and I'm hoping that doing this will break me out of this funk.

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

Fandom can do a little gatekeeping. As a treat.

So I finally decided to archive-lock my fics on AO3 last night. I’ve been considering it since the AI scrape last year, but the tipping point was this whole lore.fm debacle, coupled with some thoughts I’ve been thinking regarding Fandom These Days in general and Fandom As A Community in particular. So I wanna explain why I waited so long, why I locked my stuff up now, and why I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a-okay with making it harder for people to see my stories.

Lurkers really are great, tho

I’m a chronic lurker, and have been since I started hanging out on the internet as a teen in the 00s. These days it’s just cuz I don’t feel a need to socialize very often, but back then it was because I was shy and knew I was socially awkward. Even if I made an account, I’d spend months lurking on message boards or forums or Livejournals, watching other people interact and getting a feel for that particular community’s culture and etiquette before I finally started interacting myself. And y’know, that approach saved me a lot of embarrassment. Over the course of my lurking on any site, there was always some other person who’d clearly joined up five minutes after learning the place existed, barged in without a care for their behavior, and committed so many social faux pas that all the other users were immediately annoyed with them at best. I learned a lot observing those incidents. Lurk More is Rule 33 of the internet for very good reason.

Lurking isn’t bad or weird or creepy. It’s perfectly normal. I love lurking. It’s hard for me to not lurk - socializing takes a lot of energy out of me, even via text. (Heck it took 12 hours for me to write this post, I wish I was kidding--) Occasionally I’ll manage longer bouts of interaction - a few weeks posting here, almost a year chatting in a discord there - but I’m always gonna end up going radio silent for months at some point. I used to feel bad about it, but I’ve long since made peace with the fact that it’s just the way my brain works. I’m a chronic lurker, and in the long term nothing is going to change that.

The thing with being a chronic lurker is that you have to accept that you are not actually seen as part of the community you are lurking in. That’s not to say that lurkers are unimportant - lurkers actually are important, and they make up a large proportion of any online community - but it’s simple cause and effect. You may think of it as “your community”, but if you’ve never said a word, how is the community supposed to know you exist? If I lurked on someone’s LJ, and then that person suddenly friendslocked their blog, I knew that I had two choices: Either accept that I would never be able to read their posts again, or reach out to them and ask if I could be added to their friends list with the full understanding that I was a rando they might not decide to trust. I usually went with the first option, because my invisibility as a lurker was more important to me than talking to strangers on the internet.

Lurking is like sitting on a park bench, quietly people-watching and eavesdropping on the conversations other people are having around you. You’re in the park, but you’re not actively participating in anything happening there. You can see and hear things that you become very interested in! But if you don’t introduce yourself and become part of the conversation, you won’t be able to keep listening to it when those people walk away. When fandom migrated away from Livejournal, people moved to new platforms alongside their friends, but lurkers were often left behind. No one knew they existed, so they weren’t told where everyone else was going. To be seen as part of a fandom community, you need to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known, etc. etc.

There’s nothing wrong with lurking. There can actually be benefits to lurking, both for the lurkers and the communities they lurk in. It’s just another way to be in a fandom. But if that is how you exist in fandom--and remember, I say this as someone who often does exist that way in fandom--you need to remember that you’re on the outside looking in, and the curtains can always close.

I’ve always been super sympathetic to lurkers, because I am one. I know there’s a lot of people like me who just don’t socialize often. I know there’s plenty of reasons why someone might not make an account on the internet - maybe they’re nervous, maybe they’re young and their parents don’t allow them to, maybe they’re in a bad situation where someone is monitoring their activity, maybe they can only access the internet from public computer terminals. Heck, I’ve never even logged into AO3 on my phone--if I’m away from my computer I just read what’s publicly available. 

I know I have people lurking on my fics. I know my fics probably mean a lot to someone I don’t even know exists. I know this because there are plenty of fics I love whose writers don’t know I exist.

I love my commenters personally; I love my lurkers as an abstract concept. I know they’re there and I wish them well, and if they ever de-lurk I love them all the more.

So up until last year I never considered archive-locking my fic, because I get it. The AI scraping was upsetting, but I still hesitated because I was thinking of lurkers and guests and remembering what it felt like to be 15 and wondering if it’d be worth letting a stranger on the internet know I existed and asking to be added to their friends list just so I could reread a funny post they made once.

But the internet has changed a lot since the 00s, and fandom has changed with it. I’ve read some things and been doing some thinking about fandom-as-community over the last few years, and reading through the lore.fm drama made me decide that it’s time for me to set some boundaries.

I still love my lurkers, and I feel bad about leaving any guest commenters behind, especially if they’re in a situation where they can’t make an account for some reason. But from here on out, even my lurkers are going to have to do the bare minimum to read my fics--make an AO3 account.

Should we gatekeep fandom?

I’ve seen a few people ask this question, usually rhetorically, sometimes as a joke, always with a bit of seriousness. And I think…yeah, maybe we should. Except wait, no, not like that--

A decade ago, when people talked about fandom gatekeeping and why it was bad to do, it intersected with a lot of other things, mainly feminism and classism. The prevalent image of fandom gatekeeping was, like, a man learning that a woman likes Star Wars and haughtily demanding, “Oh, yeah? Well if you’re REALLY a fan, name ten EU novels” to belittle and dismiss her, expecting that a “real fan” would have the money and time to be familiar with the EU, and ignoring the fact that male movie-only fans were still considered fans. The thing being gatekept was the very definition of “being a fan” and people’s right to describe themselves as one.

That’s not what I mean when I say maybe fandom should gatekeep more. Anyone can call themselves a fan if they like something, that’s fine. But when it comes to the ability to enjoy the fanworks produced by the fandom community…that might be something worth gatekeeping.

See, back in the 00s, it was perfectly common for people to just…not go on the internet. Surfing the web was a thing, but it was just, like, a fun pastime. Not everyone did it. It wasn’t until the rise of social media that going online became a thing everyone and their grandmother did every day. Back then, going on the internet was just…a hobby.

So one of the first gates online fandom ever had was the simple fact that the entire world wasn’t here yet.

The entire world is here now. That gate has been demolished.

And it’s a lot easier to find us now. Even scattered across platforms, fandom is so centralized these days. It isn’t a network of dedicated webshrines and forums that you can only find via webrings anymore, it’s right there on all the big social media sites. AO3 didn’t set out to be the main fanfic website, but that’s definitely what it’s become. It’s easy for people to find us--and that includes people who don’t care about the community, and just want “content.”

Transformative fandom doesn’t like it when people see our fanworks as “content”. “Content” is a pretty broad term, but when fandom uses it we’re usually referring to creative works that are churned out by content creators to be consumed by an audience as quickly as possible as often as possible so that the content creator can generate revenue. This not-so-new normal has caused a massive shift in how people who are new to fandom view fanworks--instead of seeing fic or art as something a fellow fan made and shared with you, they see fanworks as products to be consumed.

Transformative fandom has, in general, always been a gift economy. We put time and effort into creating fanworks that we share with our fellow fans for free. We do this so we don’t get sued, but fandom as a whole actually gets a lot out of the gift economy. Offer your community a story, and in return you can get comments, build friendships, or inspire other people to write things that you might want to read. Readers are given the gift of free stories to read and enjoy, and while lurking is fine, they have the choice to engage with the writer and other readers by leaving comments or making reclists to help build the community.

And look, don’t get me wrong. People have never engaged with fanfic as much as fan writers wish they would. There has always been “no one comments anymore” wank. There have always been people who only comment to say “MORE!” or otherwise demand or guilt trip writers into posting the next chapter. But fandom has always agreed that those commenters are rude and annoying, and as those commenters navigate fandom they have the chance to learn proper community etiquette.

However, now it seems that a lot of the people who are consuming fanworks aren’t actually in the community. 

I won’t say “they aren’t real fans” because that’s silly; there’s lots of ways to be a fan. But there seem to be a lot of fans now who have no interest in fandom as a community, or in adhering to community etiquette, or in respecting the gift economy. They consume our fics, but they don’t appreciate fan labor. They want our “content”, but they don’t respect our control over our creations.

And even worse--they see us as a resource. We share our work for free, as a gift, but all they see is an open-source content farm waiting to be tapped into. We shared it for free, so clearly they can do whatever they want with it. Why should we care if they feed our work into AI training datasets, or copy/paste our unfinished stories into ChatGPT to get an ending, or charge people for an unnecessary third-party AO3 app, or sell fanbindings on etsy for a profit without the author’s permission, or turn our stories into poor imitations of podfics to be posted on other platforms without giving us credit or asking our consent, while also using it to lure in people they can datascrape for their Forbes 30 Under 30 company? 

And sure, people have been doing shady things with other people’s fanworks since forever. Art theft and reposting has always been a big problem. Fanfic is harder to flat-out repost, but I’ve heard of unauthorized fic translations getting posted without crediting the original author. Once in…I think the 2010s? I read a post by a woman who had gone to some sort of local bookselling event, only to find that the man selling “his” novel had actually self-published her fanfic. (Wish I could find that one again, I don’t even remember where I read it.)

But aside from that third example, the thing is…as awful as fanart/writing theft is, back in the day, the main thing a thief would gain from it was clout. Clout that should rightfully go to the creators who gifted their work in the first place, yeah, but still. Just clout. People will do a lot of hurtful things for clout, but fandom clout means nothing outside of fandom. Fandom clout is not enough to incentivize the sort of wide-scale pillaging we’re seeing from community outsiders today.

Money, on the other hand… Well, fandom’s just a giant, untapped content farm, isn’t it? Think of how much revenue all that content could generate.

Lurkers are a normal and even beneficial part of any online community. Maybe one day they’ll de-lurk and easily slide into place beside their fellow fans because they already know the etiquette. Maybe they’re active in another community, and they can spread information from the community they lurk in to the community they’re active in. At the very least, they silently observe, and even if they’re not active community members, they understand the community.

Fans who see fanworks as “content” don’t belong in the same category as lurkers. They’re tourists. 

While reading through the initial Reddit thread on the lore.fm situation, I found this comment:

[ID: Reddit User Cabbitowo says: ... So in anime fandoms we have a word called tourist and essentially it means a fan of a few anime and doesn't care about anime tropes and actively criticizes them. This is kind of how fandoms on tiktok feel. They're touring fanfics and fanart and actively criticizes tropes that have been in the fandom since the 60s. They want to be in a fandom but they don't want to engage in fandom 

OP totallymandy responds: Just entered back into Reddit after a long day to see this most recent reply. And as a fellow anime fan this making me laugh so much since it’s true! But it sorta hurts too when the reality sets in. Modern fandom is so entitled and bratty and you’d think it’s the minors only but that’s not even true, my age-mates and older seem to be like that. They want to eat their cake and complain all whilst bringing nothing to the potluck… :/ END ID]

-

“Tourist” is an apt name for this sort of fan. They don’t want to be part of our community, and they don’t have to be in order to come into our spaces and consume our work. Even if they don’t steal our work themselves, they feel so entitled to it that they’re fine with ignoring our wishes and letting other people take it to make AI “podfics” for them to listen to (there are a lot of comments on lore.fm’s shutdown announcement video from people telling them to just ignore the writers and do it anyway). They’ll use AI to generate an ending to an unfinished fic because they don’t care about seeing “the ending this writer would have given to the story they were telling”, they just want “an ending”. For these tourist fans, the ends justify the means, and their end goal is content for them to consume, with no care for the community that created it for them in the first place.

I don’t think this is confined to a specific age group. This isn’t “13-year-olds on Wattpad” or “Zoomers on TikTok” or whatever pointless generation war we’re in now. This is coming from people who are new to fandom, whose main experience with creative works on the internet is this new content culture and who don’t understand fandom as a community. That description can be true of someone from any age group.

It’s so easy to find fandom these days. It is, in fact, too easy. Newcomers face no hurdles or challenges that would encourage them to lurk and observe a bit before engaging, and it’s easy for people who would otherwise move on and leave us alone to start making trouble. From tourist fans to content entrepreneurs to random people who just want to gawk, it’s so easy for people who don’t care about the fandom community to reap all of its fruits. 

So when I say maybe fandom should start gatekeeping a bit, I’m referring to the fact that we barely even have a gate anymore. Everyone is on the internet now; the entire world can find us, and they don’t need to bother learning community etiquette when they do. Before, we were protected by the fact that fandom was considered weird and most people didn’t look at it twice. Now, fandom is pretty mainstream. People who never would’ve bothered with it before are now comfortable strolling in like they own the place. They have no regard for the fandom community, they don’t understand it, and they don’t want to. They want to treat it just like the rest of the content they consume online.

And then they’re surprised when those of us who understand fandom culture get upset. Fanworks have existed far longer than the algorithmic internet’s content. Fanworks existed long before the internet. We’ve lived like this for ages and we like it.

So if someone can’t be bothered to respect fandom as a community, I don’t see why I should give them easy access to my fics.

Think of it like a garden gate

When I interact with commenters on my fic, I have this sense of hospitality.

The comment section is my front porch. The fic is my garden. I created my garden because I really wanted to, and I’m proud of it, and I’m happy to share it with other people. 

Lots of people enjoy looking at my garden. Many walk through without saying anything. Some stop to leave kudos. Some recommend my garden to their friends. And some people take the time to stop by my front porch and let me know what a beautiful garden it is and how much they’ve enjoyed it. 

Any fic writer can tell you that getting comments is an incredible feeling. I always try to answer all my comments. I don’t always manage it, but my fics’ comment sections are the one place that I manage to consistently socialize in fandom. When I respond to a comment, it feels like I’m pouring out a glass of lemonade to share with this lovely commenter on my front porch, a thank you for their thank you. We take a moment to admire my garden together, and then I see them out. The next time they drop by, I recognize them and am happy to pour another glass of lemonade.

My garden has always been open and easy to access. No fences, no walls. You just have to know where to find it. Fandom in general was once protected by its own obscurity, an out-of-the-way town that showed up on maps but was usually ignored.

But now there’s a highway that makes it easy to get to, and we have all these out-of-towner tourists coming in to gawk and steal our lawn ornaments and wonder if they can use the place to make themselves some money.

I don’t care to have those types trampling over my garden and eating all my vegetables and digging up my flowers to repot and sell, so I’ve put up a wall. It has a gate that visitors can get through if they just take the time to open it.

Admittedly, it’s a small obstacle. But when I share my fics, I share them as a gift with my fellow fans, the ones who understand that fandom is a community, even if they’re lurkers. As for tourist fans and entrepreneurs who see fic as content, who have no qualms ignoring the writer’s wishes, who refuse to respect or understand the fandom community…well, they’re not the people I mean to share my fic with, so I have no issues locking them out. If they want access to my stories, they’ll have to do the bare minimum to become a community member and join the AO3 invite queue.

And y’know, I’ve said a lot about fandom and community here, and I just want to say, I hope it’s not intimidating. When I was younger, talk about The Fandom Community made me feel insecure, and I didn’t think I’d ever manage to be active enough in fandom spaces to be counted as A Member Of The Community. But you don’t have to be a social butterfly to participate in fandom. I’ll always and forever be a chronic lurker, I reblog more than I post, I rarely manage to comment on fic, and I go radio silent for months at a time--but I write and post fanfiction. That’s my contribution.

Do you write, draw, vid, gif, or otherwise create? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you leave comments? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you curate reclists? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you maintain a fandom blog or fuckyeah blog? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you provide a space for other fans to convene in? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you regularly send asks (off anon so people know who you are)? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you have fandom friends who you interact with? Congrats, you're a community member.

There’s lots of ways to be a fan. Just make sure to respect and appreciate your fellow fans and the work they put in for you to enjoy and the gift economy fandom culture that keeps this community going.

[weirdmageddon]

the shift in lore literacy in homestuck’s fandom

i was thinking about how the people who got into homestuck after it ended—whose interactions with the comic are in a static, archived state, not an ongoing thing—missed out on information that was more common knowledge in the fandom at that time. i don’t know if this is true since i’m not on tiktok, but i wouldn’t be surprised if it was. the fandom certainly isn’t the same as it was before.

ive found that many people reading homestuck now simply do not understand things in homestuck that were common knowledge back in the day, with calls for “homestuck literacy classes to become mandatory” in response to baffling takes because so many people just now seem to have glazed over the comic without absorbing important plot points, and i think i know why this may be. i ended up writing a post reflecting on my time with the comic, my perspective and how ive seen this change. i still think and write about homestuck because it still fascinates me. earlier i quote retweeted that call in my thread talking about the temporal relativity of dave and rose’s god tier ascension in the green sun, saying “my homestuck literacy is 100% so guess im doing my part as a teacher by pointing out whatever i think is really cool about it”. this post im writing now started out as a reply to this tweet i got in response.

i joined the fandom in 2013. i was 11. i had been aware of it since at least late 2011, early 2012 when my friend ryan in fifth grade told me to read it but i couldn’t get past the first few pages. i remember writing a journal on deviantart around this time (late 2011-early 2012) that was mocking people who typed like gamzee, which ironically was very karkat of me. and i remember someone on flipnote hatena i was following was making flipnotes with the alpha kids.

i dont know what caused me to flip the switch into reading it but 2013. i got into it somewhere between april (i think closer to april—i remember it being quite a span of time between the last update before HOMOSUCK dropped.) this was the most recent page the comic, meaning there was no > [S] ACT 6 ACT 6 at the bottom.

i got into it during a pause in updates, which looking into it, was the year 4 megapause. i wasn’t sure of the month until seeing the news post detailing the reason for the hiatus and the status report of the comic’s development at that time. pretty cool i could narrow it down by referencing the dates of those updates and the news post to correspond with the pause!

according to readmspa, the year 4 megapause was a 59 day hiatus from Apr 14, 2013 ==> (EOA6A5) running to 12 Jun 2013, [S] ACT 6 ACT 6. then for a few months there were the first updates that i was apart of the fandom for.

and what an exciting time during the story get into the webcomic! when the updates resumed in june, part 4 of homestuck had begun. here was a glimpse of the updates in that span of time before the next hiatus began in october.

that hiatus was none other than the gigapause, the longest hiatus in the comic, which started october 2013 and lasted for a YEAR, and i already posted about what happened on the date of return.

but here were the main events happening in the story at the time i first actually got interested in it. i wasn’t aware of the full context of them then like i am now, but i was looking at the most recent updates anyway with interest:

the alpha kids just emerged as god tiers from their slabs in derse and prospit, blown up by the condesce and caliborn / lil cal-possessed b2 jack noir.

the journey to the new session started 24 hours after jack called an early reckoning in descend—for context that was about when dave entered around midnight central time and before jade even entered. it’s pretty easy to forget that side 1 of homestuck basically happens within the span of a single day—and at this point in the story, the 3 year journey (which was also 3 real life years) had just ended. john and jade emerged from the other side of the yellow yard through the fenestrated plane on LOMAX. john’s real body was asleep upon arrival in the new session, while his dreaming projection out in the dream bubbles came across vriska’s ghost ship to learn lord english lore with vriska and aranea, and go on the treasure hunt where they found the ultimate weapon at the X mark out in in the furthest ring. in the dream john stuck his hand in the juju, started warping all over canon which removed his real body from the ship on LOMAX. he zapped around for a while but eventually zapped back to LOMAX, now awake, completely out of the loop of what everyone else is up to, and bored as fuck. what was everyone else getting up to while john was asleep?

jade was now once again within the domain of the green sun. im pretty sure her space god doggy essence comes with the power to sense what was anywhere within the domain of the session since her face looks like she arrived at that spot with intent (and she literally has jack noir’s exact powers from bec’s prototyping. also this panel). she immediately dispatched b2 jack to the edge of the incinisphere, defending the newly god-tiered jane and jake. i think even if they weren’t in any danger, she would have warped to them instantly anyway because she COULD now, and i can imagine she wouldve been sooooo eager to meet everyone. even davesprite comments about her rapid departure.

the pre-scratch refugees arrived during the only time serious shit ever went down in the nobles’ months-long inert void session. the condesce used her freak psychic bronze-cerulean powers to commune with jade’s bestial side and mind controlled her, which is super dangerous as someone with the powers of a first guardian. she then used jade’s powers to corrupt jane with the tiaratop. no funtime meetup allowed!

the trolls’ meteor with rose, dave, and the remaining trolls was pulling up into the new session with no way to slow it down. grimbark jade warped there once it was in the incinisphere and took active control. she warped everyone off the trolls’ meteor and sent them to LOMAX.

as john was losing his mind on LOMAX waiting for everyone, the meteor crew warped in. after 3 years he finally reunited with rose and dave, and at least saw the trolls in person. close curtains, end of A6A5. this was the newest [S] flash page at the time, one of my first impressions of this comic, and still one of my favorite flashes. knowing the context of the flash in the story only enhances the retrospective joy i have at getting into the comic at the time i did because it’s such an anticipated moment in the story for everyone, while for someone with no context of the story it was still enjoyable.

so that’s what was going on plotwise when i joined the fandom.

from this time, through those few months of updates and through the gigapause, i was familarizing myself with the characters in the story and overseeing the state of fanbase, getting myself acquainted with the story and wrapping my head around everything.

at that time i found that a new-ish group called colab HQ who were producing a let’s read homestuck series on youtube. hearing the voices and the pacing of it like that really, really eased me into it (maybe it was my adhd that gave me trouble actually starting it?). i caught up to a certain point using lets read homestuck and from that point was able to continue with the comic on my own, and by the time the gigapause came to a close i was fully caught up. i remember the rebranding of colab hq into voxus about a year and a half after i discovered them.

but.. back to the main point of my post. even these posts from hussie’s tumblr exist in archived states. how many new fans know about hussie’s old tumblr? i don’t know, unless theyre a new fan that must scour the internet for more deep more dives on homestuck and its fandom as a whole. but since hussie deleted his tumblr (it exists archived now on homestuck.net which, alongside from the unofficial homestuck collection, has nearly singlehandedly kept the most important relics of the fandom and lore archived), that page is not an active part of the fandom now, because it’s gone. it’s a pile of bones. it’s not living and breathing. it’s in an archived state. the whole thing is already there. homestuck and its fandom history is something you now binge instead of slowly consume and meld with as it comes out. it’s now this rapid information intake that you might forget about if you read it now instead of engaged alongside it. you’re not surrounded by people actively talking and theorizing about developments anymore. the ability to have those sorts of conversations during the ongoing development of the story reinforced concepts, ideas, and lore over and over as we tried to make sense of it.

being in a fandom when the author is still delivering the story is like nothing else. it allows you grow alongside the characters and engage meaningfully with the media and people in the fandom space around you. it feels like you’re participating IN the media itself, especially if you’re interfacing with the creator. it’s in always having something to theorize or talk about and speculate. and people become very aware of these sorts of forgotten story facts because they were applying the logic of the newest official post from hussie into making their sburb ocs or something and share resources and discussion posts about “what just happened in this update?? recap????” it was this cultural osmosis thing. i think this is why homestuck literacy is now at an all time low, at least from what i can see on twitter.

reading homestuck then vs now is like the difference between serialized shows with spaces between episodes to discuss stuff and time to reflect and learn and become attached to the story, narrative, worldbuilding and its characters, vs the netflix model where it’s all dropped all at once and people forget about it after binging.

at this point in time im getting the sense that “homestuck elders” now are no longer just people who were there since 2009-2010, but now also people who were there while it was still updating, probably stretching into 2014-2015. there are many sources of lore that were common knowledge in the fandom at the time that, since becoming susceptible to the deletion of content and link rot, and with the thanosing of mspaforums, are no longer accessible at the source. and a lot of people moved on after it ended, especially following the epilogues, the kate drama, and the whatpumpkin-sarah z drama, leaving a void of information behind if not for archivists and people such as me who continue to keep old facts relevant in discussions. my friend has called me a fandom scholar before and seeing this post i think i get what they mean.

EDIT: there is a series of video essays ive watched multiple times (because theyre that good) and they are exactly what modern fans need to see more of. they really help contextualize the comic and the themes present in it help you appreciate the basic fabric of homestuck a hell of a lot more. i highly recommend them and encourage any fan of homestuck to watch them, or someone considering getting into homestuck to watch the first one.

i think this is arguably as close to the “mandatory literacy class for homestuck” that person was talking about as you can get, especially the first video.

additionally, there is also the website https://rafe.name/homestuck which is essentially a sparknotes for homestuck and can help you follow developments in the comic itself.

[theotterpenguin]

I really like the nuanced take about Zutara and why it makes some people uncomfortable and I can see both sides of it. I ship Zutara now but at first I didn’t and it made me really uncomfortable but I think it was just because of certain fan content I was coming across. Some people do portray Zutara in an extremely fetishized & creepy Stockholm syndrome way that makes Katara come off like some helpless damsel stereotype. It made me feel really gross thinking about as a young WOC but rewatching the show and seeing the true dynamic of these characters made me fall in love with them again. So I guess my feeling is that in canon i really love the dynamic but I hate the way *certain fans* twist it and refuse to acknowledge the racism & misogyny in what they’re doing

this is a complicated topic with many layers to it but first - i am sorry if you have ever felt unwelcome in the zutara fandom due to experiences with racism/misogyny.

it would be ignorant to claim that the zutara fandom is somehow uniquely unaffected by systemic racism or sexism, but it would also be disingenuous to claim that these issues only exist in certain parts of the atla fandom. racism, sexism, and general bigotry exist in every fandom due to institutionalized inequality in social structures. and to make it clear, i'm not directing this criticism towards you, anon, you are entitled to your own personal experiences, but i have seen a broader trend of people attempting to use fandom racism to moralize their position in ship wars, which is diminishing from the actual problem - the focus should be on acknowledging the existence of fandom racism/sexism, combatting implicit biases, and creating spaces that can uplift marginalized voices, rather than focusing only on optics in an attempt to gain moral high ground in a silly *fictional* ship war.

however, given all this, the reason that i am still in the zutara fandom is because i appreciate how many people in the fandom are dedicated to unpacking issues of racism and sexism and cultural insensitivity in atla's source material, which i personally haven't seen in many other sides of the fandom (that often sanitize what actually happened in the text to avoid acknowledging these issues in their favorite show). of course this is a broad generalization, but that's generally why i stick with the non-canon shipping side of the fandom because fans that are willing to stray away from canon are often less afraid to engage in critical analysis.

i also do think the zutara fandom has come a long way from the early 2000s when the show first aired. for example, when i first joined the fandom i had mixed feelings on fire lady katara, but i have since read some fanfics that have done an excellent job deconstructing some of the problematic ways that this trope could be interpreted and balancing respect for katara's cultural heritage and autonomy with the political and personal difficulties of being involved with an imperialist/colonialist nation. the fire lady katara trope, capture!fic, and other complicated topics/tropes are almost never inherently racist/sexist, but rather, their execution is what matters. and all this is not to say that issues of systemic racism/sexism do not still exist in this fandom, but it personally has not significantly negatively impacted my experience in the zutara fandom due to the wonderful content that so many other fantastic people produce, though everyone's mileage may differ with what they are comfortable with. anon, i hope that you are able to find a place in the zutara fandom for you! but i also know many people that have stepped back from other fandoms due to experiences with racism/misogyny, so i understand that decision as well.

on a final note, i think it's important to acknowledge that fandom doesn't exist in a vacuum and broader issues of racism and sexism are rooted in the media, the entertainment industry, and mainstream societal norms. while i do sometimes focus on fandom dynamics/discourse in my criticisms, i think it is equally as important to acknowledge how issues of prejudice and inequality are perpetuated through larger social structures, which is why it frustrates me when the atla fandom refuses to acknowledge the flaws of the original show, which has far more influence and social power over the general public than discourse over fandom tropes ever will. personally, i don't understand the phenomenon of holding fan-made material to a higher standard than mainstream media.

[the-orion-scribe]

A critique of Northwest Mansion Mystery – how Pacifica nearly upended the show’s narrative

Note: This essay has been in the works some months before the Book of Bill release. But my opinion hasn't changed much, and highlights concerns from other GF fans.

This might be a little controversial. Don’t get me wrong, for first of all, I’m a dipcifica shipper and I like the episode very much. But every time when people ask around in the fandom (particularly on Reddit) what’s the best episode, Northwest Mansion Mystery would certainly be among the top choices. Reasons would, of course, include the darker tone and visuals, the mystery, the backstory, lore and, above all, the hints of a romance that kicked off the fandom’s most popular ship. It certainly scored very well in terms of the mystery and dark elements that are key to its popularity.

NMM certainly also fleshed out Pacifica a lot more, giving depth to what was initially a rather one-dimensional antagonist. In this episode, we are offered a glimpse of her family’s dark history and her struggle against their expectations. All of that humanized Pacifica, turning her from the stereotypical “mean girl” into a more sympathetic figure. This transformation was one of the episode’s strongest points.

But, unfortunately, as a Gravity Falls episode, it isn’t really the greatest. Truthfully I think the episode also had set false expectations of what was to come, and is rather reflective of the pro-dipcifica reddit side of the fandom and what they wanted more of the show, despite it going against some of Hirsch’s expectations and intentions.

Let me explain.

In my opinion, sometimes the fandom tends to forget what is actually core to the show. Yes, the mystery element is certainly one thing. But there’s another which doesn’t get talked about as often – the sibling bond in the show. What’s sorely lacking in this episode, and what many really overlooked, is the lack of any sibling moments between Dipper and Mabel. Ok, we still have the beginning when Mabel nudged and urged Dipper to negotiate with Pacifica three invites for the party, but after that, the twins went their separate ways.

I understand of course that Pacifica specifically requested for Dipper’s help, and Mabel might not be as attuned to the supernatural. But of all possible things the writers could have done with Mabel and co, they sidelined her to another romance subplot. Really? They could have perhaps made better use of her and her friends at the gala (some fans I've spoken to even suggested she could have joined with Wendy to uncover the ghost backstory). I can get the girls wanting to have fun, but I think it's a bit boring to fall back to some crush rivalry subplot. Especially after what happened in Sock Opera and her trying to move on from failed crushes in Society of the Blind Eye.

It’s actually a chronic issue not rather unique to this episode, I would add. In much of the first half of S2, while Dipper takes the lead in solving the mystery of the mysterious Author, Mabel takes more of the backseat and becomes goofier. This is quite a change from S1, when in episodes like Headhunters and Irrational Treasure, both twins worked together as the Mystery Twins and Mabel still considerably contributed in both cases. Into the Bunker is what I identify as the turning point where Mabel’s character and role regressed to being that goofy sister that messes things up (mostly by accident – I must add) instead of being the supplementary role to Dipper’s mystery-hunting. And that quite led to much of the fandom overlooking what actually was core to the entire series, and also fuelling a bit of the Mabel hate in the fandom. By pushing Pacifica into the spotlight and hinting at a potential romance with Dipper, the episode diverted the fandom's attention from this central theme.

The show quite elevated Pacifica’s character and her importance, to the extent that some in the fandom believed she would play more of a part in the show afterwards. This is rather implied from a few moringmark comics showing her moving in with the Pines. Understandably, this builds from the Bill tapestry at the end of that episode. However, she was never planned to be important to begin with, and she ended up playing very little part in the WMG episodes. It was largely only due to her popularity in S1 that she was given a character arc over two additional episodes. As Hirsch has discussed in past commentaries, he never even planned to develop her in the first place, since she was mainly a foil to Mabel, like how Gideon was to Dipper, but did so for the fan service.

Sometimes I feel like he cares about what fandom thinks too much. But as we've seen in other interviews, he thinks of himself as a fellow fan in the service of the fandom and not just the fandom god. Nevertheless, It’s great that Hirsch never detracted away from his vision of the show. After this episode, he returned the narrative to its original focus on the core mystery and the sibling bond between Dipper and Mabel, while drawing some parallels with the Stans twins.

This certainly left some fans feeling disappointed, as the character development and relationships they got invested in were not given the resolution or continuation they had hoped for. In many ways, this episode highlighted a conflict between fan service and narrative integrity. I would agree it’s certainly a missed opportunity to give a bigger part for Pacifica after the episode, but we already had a much shorter runway to Weirdmageddon. The remainder of the show barely juggled featuring Ford more, and so there was already no way to feature more of Pacifica or even build a romance the fandom so desired. The only nod to that tapestry in the show in the end is Preston attempting to make a deal with Bill, which, of course we know how that ended up.

In conclusion, while Northwest Mansion Mystery is undoubtedly a fan-favorite episode, it kind of stuck out as a sore thumb given it nearly disrupted the show’s delicate balance between mystery, sibling bond, and character development. This shift, though temporary, had some impact on the fandom’s expectations and the perceptions of the show’s later episodes. Nevertheless, Hirsch compensated this by featuring Pacifica more in some supplementary material in Lost Legends and as of late, The Book of Bill, to satisfy the fans.

Ultimately, Gravity Falls remained true to its core themes, but Northwest Mansion Mystery stands as a testament to the challenges of maintaining narrative cohesion while exploring new character arcs and storylines.

Check out more of my essays here! Feel free to comment and reblog!

[honeygrahambitch]

Hi, I'm new to the fandom and unsure who to ask my questions. I recently joined Tumblr and came across your posts while browsing the Hannibal meta tag. I have a few questions: What are Hannibal's feelings towards Bedelia and Alana? I remember Mads once said that Hannibal is in love with everyone on the show to some extent, so what exactly does love mean to him? Also, I'm having trouble understanding the line by Will: "You will only do that if I rejected you" (sorry, I paraphrased). I apologize if these are too many questions. Thanks in advance!

Hi anon! I am in a yapping mood so here we go.

1. What are Hannibal's feelings towards Bedelia and Alana?

They are absolutely women that he appreciates and respects to some extent. Hannibal does not engage with people he doesn't respect. Bedelia is his colleague and...friend? Depends who you ask cause Hannibal did say that he considered her his friend. He doesn't love her, but she matches his freak to some extent. She is a beautiful woman and she is intelligent and most importantly, she probably knows him better than anyone (up until the point he meets Will at least).

He was also very genuine towards Alana. He did use her as an alibi but I stand my ground when I say that he offered her to run away genuinely because he cared about her. She is also intelligent and beautiful, what's not to like about her? (i won't start ranting about Alana now, I have many thoughts ahhhhh). Tbh his feelings towards Bedelia are deeper. Alana did not see him for who he was. She didn't know him intimately enough. He has never wanted to eat her. Hannibal wants to eat people if 1) they are rude and 2) they mean the world to him (because how else to express your adoration). Bedelia did end up for dinner in the end. What he had with Alana was not that deep but it was enjoyable for sure. Alana is more submissive than Bedelia.

So I guess to sum up, both Bedelia and Alana were very convenient both as partners and as pawns for the bigger picture. But his feelings toward them are nothing compared to what he feels for Will.

2. What does love mean to Hannibal?

My take on what Mads said is that Hannibal is an individual who is genuinely in love with life. With every aspect. Life gets complicated? That's entertaining to him. Will did something unpredictable? Entertaining too. Rude people or people he loves are having dinner with him? Wonderful. Murder? Mesmerizing. He loves suits, he composes, he draws, he cooks, he is so full of life all the time. He is a little bit in love with everyone because he finds everyone a source of entertainment and that's really important to him.

Will actually making him suffer is however something he did not find so entertaining. Even if he did find some beauty in all that pain, I am sure he wasn't very entertained. It was a rare occasion where he was really in pain. He is not the same as in the first two seasons. He is more reckless, more impulsive. His little happy narrative was shattered because of a situation where he had no control over. Part of his life satisfaction and entertainment are explained by his need to control how all the subplots develop.

3. What did Will mean when he said "you'd only do that if I rejected you"?

Honestly this is one that I struggled with for a long time and I guess you can interpret it in many nuances. It's meant to be interpretable.

You can either see it as a) "I manipulated you to surrender and you fell for it. I knew which buttons to push. You can't handle rejection. You did exactly what I expected you to do" or b) (my favorite) "I had to say all those things because it was the only way to make you surrender. I knew that you wanted me to know where to find you. While what I said back then does not reflect my true feelings, I had to make you surrender."

[threadsoflacee]

Hi, I'm new to the fandom and unsure who to ask my questions. I recently joined Tumblr and came across your posts while browsing the Hannibal meta tag. I have a few questions: What are Hannibal's feelings towards Bedelia and Alana? I remember Mads once said that Hannibal is in love with everyone on the show to some extent, so what exactly does love mean to him? Also, I'm having trouble understanding the line by Will: "You will only do that if I rejected you" (sorry, I paraphrased). I apologize if these are too many questions. Thanks in advance!

Haiiii welcome to the fandom !!! This will be my own perception of things so if I’m wrong in any way it’s on me !!! Ok so. Hannibal has a very hierarchical scale on his friends and lovers. Don’t know if U finished the show but in s3, Hannibal sees Alana in his Memory Palace as having a deserved place in his psychiatric office in Baltimore, which shows that he has respect for her and she’s a big enough part of his life to occupy the more intelligent part of his attention. We can compare that to how he sees Will as having the first place in the chapel in Palermo, the Uffizi gallery, and the front door of his childhood home, that he described as "it’s the door at the center of my mind, and here you are feeling for the latch", and in a deleted dialogue in the script "you stumbled into the hall of my beginnings". Will is the one who has the most importance in his mind ! Alana is below that. So to Hannibal she’s only a past lover, past work colleague, and an asset to get closer to Will (like when he promised her he would save Will). In s2 he had sex with her ONLY for the alibi when he killed Abel Gideon. So he could tell Jack he was up all night sexing it up when he was actually cutting it up in Gideons guts. OK NOW BEDELIA !!!!! He doesn’t gaf abt her. They only got married under false pretenses so Hannibal wouldn’t get caught in Italy after the whole Mizumono thing. He cuts off her leg at the very end of the show (past the credits after the cliff fall). 1 scene that shows how annoyed he actually is with her is when he kills Anthony Dimmond in front of her, Bedelia is obviously in shock, and he raises her voice at her when she doesn’t answer his questions in time. She couldn’t even be a proper asset because of how sensitive she was to murder (as she should !!!!!). So to Hannibal she was only a piece in the puzzle in his grand scheme of Need To Kiss Will.

Ok now for the second question ! Will saying "you turned yourself in so I would always know where you were. you’d only do that if i rejected you" could mean two things. 1. Will knows that Hannibal is in love with him, or at least desperately devoted, and him saying this is like poking at where it hurts saying "you’re so in love with me you’d ruin your entire life if i rejected you" Which in this case ruining his life is Hannibal turning himself in to the police. 2. Will WANTED Hannibal to be put in jail so it could be done once and for all. He told him "I don’t want to know where you are or what you do" which is clearly saying Get the fuck out of my life we are Done breakup style not entirely out of hatred, but also because he KNEW Hannibal would manipulate his words. And since Will knows Hannibal’s mind so well, he knew Hannibal would find a way to turn this sudden dynamic / domination dynamic around and find a way to put Will in the lesser spot ; which is what he accomplished by turning himself in. He even told him "I want you to know exactly where I am and where you can always find me". In this way Will would always think about him and know against his will where he is and what he’s doing since Hannibal is in prison.

To Hannibal Love is violence. Maybe u read my post abt Will’s question "is Hannibal in love with me?" !!! Hannibal’s love is violence in the way that love and ache gets mixed together. It’s distance and intimacy. It’s sharing meals and music together and isolating Will from all of his friends so they can only be together (Hannibal referenced their relationship to Achilles and Patroclus with the phrase "Achilles wished all Greeks would die so he and Patroclus could conquer Troy alone"). It’s the stabbing wound that Will sees in his nightmare bleeding out his stomach into a bite then a kiss !!! The bite shape is symbolism of possessiveness and the kiss is love. He never fell in love with Alana or Bedelia. He appreciated them as friends, people to fill his days with, and assets to manipulate and eventually guide himself into Will’s way by scaring and erasing everyone that would try to stop him. Will is the only one who Hannibal truly loves on all aspects of the spectrum. Emotionally, physically, psychologically, and selflessly.

Ok now im done lol. I hope this helped !!!

[kriosv]

Thoughts on Alien Romulus(my first Alien film)

If You're afraid that the trailers showed too much, 95% of the shots from the trailer were from the first third of the movie.

Practical effects were horrifyingly amazing. Special shoutouts to the chestburster with every layer of bone, muscle, and skin individually showcased. Horrible.

Biggest problem was the editing. Every pratical effect showcase would cut away every half second. Personally, it was so fast it pulled me out of the moments, and it obscured the amazing effects.

The silent opening didnt work with how loud my theatre was. Cant embrace the vast emptyness of space when all you can hear is recliner gears and rustling popcorn

Prometheus was name dropped. I thought that movie was disowned by the fandom.

MORE MOVIES WITH BAD JOKES IN CLIMATIC BATTLES! A grasshopper walks into a bar is now joined by i don't understand cloning!

More spoilery thoughts below

Love the true meaning behind the name Romulus. Early in the movie there is a plaque stating(paraphrasing) "Son of the God of War and a Vestial Virgin, nursed by wolf, and went to create the grestest human empire."

Now "greatest human empire" is definitely an exaggeration, but from the minds of Waylon and Rook it makes since.

So, with Kay taking the place of the Vestial Virgin, she and her baby are "nursed" by the "wolf" aka, the greatest predator of humans currently

HOLY FUCK ROMULUS WAS SCARY! The person Romulus, not the movie. The movie was good but Romulus's design was the standout nightmare fuel.

Loved Andy so much, and his Bitch stutter was great, but kinda ruined the moment. But Rain calling Romulus a Motherfucker made up for it.

Speaking of Andy, Androids have a long history of being standins for nuerodivergency, but Andy shows different quirks than others. Love it.

This movie messes up vaccuum seals so much. Wouldn't complain if it wasn't such an important part in multiple action scenes. Gravity use was great though. Not sure about ring science, tho. That felt off but i don't know enough. Insert always sunny meme here.

Man, fuck Bjorn. Just fuck him. Ah, this is why I don't like slasher movies. Seeing him die didn't make me feel better, though the effects were great.

Someone just told me Ian Holm is dead. He shouldn't have been in the movie. Now, i haven't seen the others, but there are clearly different faces for androids, and this isn't one he portrayed before, so just use a different actor. Sometimes i approve if it's important to the character or story, but it wasn't. Shouldve been a different actor

[composeregg]

wanted to join in on that meta post by saying yeah, even if we view joker’s and akechi’s relationship as special compared to the others, akechi is still written under the constraints of p5, and an antagonist to boot. like. vanilla had his confidant as automatic bc (iirc) they thought they couldn’t fit it in properly! which is crazy, even tho the automatic rank ups have an interesting implication (such as, akechi will always be rank 10 by the end no matter what you do). i understand that ppl probably wanted someone to talk sense into the thieves for their unwittingly callous actions, but not by the guy who decided to go thru with his 11/20 plan lol

(this post)

YEAH like, I love Akechi. I adore him. But I have SO many OPINIONS about this mans. like. I'm not going berate anyone for how they write characters, that's the freedom of fandom, but I am going to stand over here with my opinions and contrary thoughts and chitchat about them in my space

I know that very often it is because people want someone to refute what canon has shown us (because canon's writing disagrees with it's desired goals as mentioned in that post). They want someone to go "Look at Joker, look at what's happened to him, don't you care? How risky this was?"

But okay I'm actually going to back up a bit!

(this got long)

What other choice was there for 11/20?

Because the answer is not "they could have taken Akechi in a fight."

The goals of the interrogation room/metaverse plan:

Escape with Joker alive

Trick Shido and the conspiracy into believing Joker has died

and you know? you know? you cannot do that latter bullet point if you just beat up Akechi

So enlighten me. How, exactly, were the thieves supposed to come up with a different plan in under 20 days? One where Joker would live, where the conspiracy would believe he had died, and importantly, one that at that point in time cannot count on Akechi being a turncoat. They have no reason to trust that he would

"Don't you care about how risky this was? There had to have been other ways."

We don't get Shido's name as Akechi's employer here until after the phonecall reporting the death, I believe. They cannot change Shido's heart in time to avert this because they do not have the information. The interrogation room plan, genuinely, was one of the smartest ideas they had. It accomplished exactly what they needed to. These are teens in a life-or-death situation, who notoriously have MANY trust issues with adults for good reason, especially since society is so corrupt that a hitman can easily walk into a police department and assassinate a high-profile criminal and get away with it with help (remember the guard at the door?) The other options are basically "change your identity and flee the country" or "literally actually die" lets be real here!

SO

Akechi, let's be honest with ourselves here, would primarily be pissed off that the thieves got one over on him! And if he is concerned about the lasting trauma of it all, or how risky the plan was, he is seeing this and approaching it from the angle of knowing it worked.

(Better options for sense-talking: Sojiro! Sojiro is right there! Takemi! Iwai! Kawakami! Yoshida! All important responsible adult figures to Joker and at least some of the thieves.)

In my opinion if Akechi wants to snark at the thieves about the plan in any way regarding how much it fucks up Joker and how it was risky, they are more than allowed to fire back shots at him for making it necessary and shooting Joker in the head in the first place.

I think people often use it as a shorthand, to show that Akechi cares about Joker, but also as a way to emphasize the importance of Akechi to Joker (compared to the rest of the thieves). It's easier to ignore the fact that he killed two of the thieves's parents when it comes to Joker being in a relationship with him, as long as it can be shown that he's the one that really cares. That he wouldn't put Joker through something so fucked up with his care (hilarious, laughable, he shot Joker in the head). It separates "Akechi and Joker" from all the phantom thieves in a way.

(Honestly sometimes it feels like ship bashing/character bashing but for ALL the phantom thieves with how intensely some people write it! beyond even the point of exploring Atlus fucking up characterization to pretend to have a blank slate silent protag)

BUT like I said in the post, it also points out a major flaw with convincing players that the rest of the thieves DO care in the game. Because the thieves are never really given a chance to show that. It's implied, and it's clear the game wants you to believe they care, but we don't get scenes addressing specific stuff like this enough.

Joker is confident, and cocky, we see that with that bastard smile in the interrogation room after getting "shot" in those cutscenes. It is genuinely a plan to be proud of, and it hails back to his original persona being Arsène. Arsène, who escaped from prison simply by disguising himself and pretending he had already escaped and put a body double in his place. Arsène, who pulled off a robbery while in jail. Arrogant and self-assured and cocky, the interrogation room plan is genuinely something the likes that would be worthy of Arsène's name.

He can be proud of the plan, and also traumatized by it. But he actively agreed to this plan, probably helped come up with it (where does everyone get the idea that it was Makoto's plan? genuine question). Joker is not a hapless victim of other's whims, he also had agency. So many of the parallels between Joker and Akechi are how they exercise what agency they have while being stripped of traditional power and victimized by society.

Honestly? Honestly? In my personal opinion, having Akechi berate the thieves for the plan is disrespectful to his rivalry with Joker, along with his own characterization.

He holds Joker as his equal. Equal in agency, in skill. If he looks at Joker and says, "why would you go along with such a foolish plan?" if he looks at the thieves and says "why would you ever put your precious leader through this?" he is taking away Joker's agency and choices. One of Akechi's focal points is agency. If he sees Joker as equal in this, and he denies Joker his agency, he is also taking it away from himself.

Akechi's cocktail of emotions regarding the assassination can manifest in so many different ways, and he can translate that to anger at the thieves rather than himself for putting Joker through that, but that would be his emotions regarding himself being misdirected more than anything.

Akechi has too much respect for Joker to deny Joker his agency in a plan that was good enough to fool him.

Respecting agency and admiring a brilliantly crafted plan also doesn't mean ignoring trauma that ocurred from actions taken under duress.

(At least, it doesn't mean that as long as you're not Atlus)

[choicesficwriterscreations]

February Creator of the Month: Noesapphic

Each month, CFWC highlights one of our talented fanfic writers or artists, and this month’s creator of the month is the lovely @noesapphic!   The writer is selected at random. More info can be found on the navigation page. Past COTM's can be found here.

Quick Links:

Tumblr Blog Masterlist

How do you want to be known on Tumblr? 

Noe is fine, really!

More below...

1- When did you start playing Choices? What was the first book you played? 

I started in 2018. I was bored in a friend's house and fighting good old insomnia when I saw the app and tried it for funsies. The first book was 'High School Story'. 

2- When and why did you join Choices fandom?

I joined around late 2018 early 2019 and I had just left my community in Amino because the admin had gone full puritanical dictator and I was curious about Tumblr.

3- How did you pick your blog name? 

It was simple: my nickname is Noe and I am a sapphic (aka lesbian). It's a no-brainer, really. 

4- Pull up the first post in your archive, and tell us about it!  

It was a reblogged quote. I related to what it said and I reblogged it 

5- Do you write fanfiction, create fan art, or are you one of those really gifted people who do both? 

I write fanfiction. God did not grant me art skills I'm afraid. My fingers are too fat and my pulse is terrible. 

6- How long have you been creating for Choices and for any other fandoms?

I've been creating for fandoms as long as I can remember. I've had a really troubled life, so creating stuff helped me. As for Choices, I've been creating stuff since 2019 

7- What is your favorite Choices book, and what is your favorite Choices book to create for?

Without a doubt, Desire and Decorum. The first book is simply a masterlist and its characters are so well-written, and everything about it just draws me to it. They definitely botched the other books, but it will always be in my heart. I also enjoy creating for other historical books and books that have similar themes 

8- Share your first Choices fanfic or fan art that you posted with us. Do you still like it, or would you change it if you were creating it today?

It was a set of headcanons of Mr. Sinclaire and my MC, Celestine, finding out that they're going to be parents. While my spelling is terrible, I wouldn't change a thing. The engagement I received was such, it drove me to write for more. I haven't stopped creating since. 

9- What your favorite piece of fiction or art that you created? 

It's no secret for anyone who pays attention to my blog: my au, The Cursed Heiress, is probably my best creation. It's complex and a juggernaut of lore and history, and has all I've ever wanted in a fic and book in it. Although a close second is my Tudor AU, For Love and Duty. I simply love the 'arranged marriage' trope 

10- Do you have a fic/art that you didn’t expect to be well received, but it was? What about one you expected to do well but found it could use a little more love?

The second part of a one shot, A True Man, was probably one of the most difficult to write, and with a very traumatising and important theme. I was 100% hoping anon hate telling me to delete it, but found instead that the people ate it up! It has now 30 notes (which is A LOT for a small fandom like the D&D one) and now that I reread it, I'm proud of what I created and the message I wanted to send, which resonates with happenings of my past and experiences. 

11 - If you could write only angst, fluff, or smut for the rest of your writing life, which would it be and why? 

Definitely angst. There's something so cathartic and relieving as letting out those emotions you can't express out loud without being locked up for being unhinged, and it has helped me understand myself many times. Also, smut is def something that I can't physically write 😅 

12 - Do you ever recognize yourself in any of your MCs or in your writing?

There are small parts of me in every MC. A fragment of my past. Something of their lore that I went through. Something I aspire to be. Something I wanted to be once. I like to think that every writer leaves a part of their heart and soul with each character they create. 

13 - What element of writing/art do you struggle with most?

Ooof, where to begin. I think the hardest part is to just write. I can go on for weeks looking at my turned-off laptop and goof off on Tumblr. But when I do write, the 'boring' parts or writing a character that I am not familiar with or that there isn't much info about can be challenging. 

14 - Do you have any neglected work you really want to finish?

Oof, where to begin, lol. My modern AUs, The Viscountess and Plan B. There's also Your Most Ardent Admirer and For Love and Duty. There's the fix-it fic series of the Blades LIs. Profiles of my MCs from several series. And also fic ideas that I want to create, but don't know where or how to start it. Woe is me indeed 😭 

15 - If someone you know in real life (who isn’t involved in fandoms) asked to see your work, would you let them? If yes, what would you show them first? 

Depends on the person. I would be very, very picky. I did show some parts of The Cursed Heiress to two trusted friends. But I wouldn't be against showing my mom a few chapters of The Viscountess… Unfortunately, she does not speak a word of English and I am terrible at translations, so it's wishful thinking, lol. 

16 - Are there any writers (published authors and/or fanfic writers) who influenced your writing or art? Are there any artists that influence you?

For the published ones, Holly Black and Cassandra Clare have probably been my biggest help. Leigh Bardugo is also a newer inspo, and Spanish author Laura Gallego got me into fantasy, and anonymous author Bebi Fernández's raw and brutal prose have helped me find my voice. I have now bought George R.R Martin's Game of Thrones, looking for new sources to grasp. 

As for fandom-wise, the very first writer to inspire me unfortunately hasn't been active since the pandemic, and despite our differences, @hellospunkiebrewster 's writing and essays got me into Regency and its history. My thriving years were by her side, and I'm grateful of having had a great fandom friend and hyper. The most recent ones are @missameliep my amazing fandom mom (te quiero mami 🥰) and some pieces by @princess-geek 's writing have inspired me to expand my horizon. 

17- Which one of your stories would you most like to see as a movie/series? 

The Cursed Heiress, definitely. I think that my messages would resonate with many people. There's also The Viscountess: many people should see the messages Nicole, Anne and others have, and for what I have planned (and have been stalling out of laziness 🫣) would put things into perspective for many minorities and certain groups that are neglected by society and governments alike.  19- Do you write original fiction or create non-fandom art? 

I am now at the outlining stages of making The Cursed Heiress an original novel. I tried many times to make my own novel, but always dropped it. But now that I've been for years with it, I feel like this might be the one project I dreamed of publishing one day. It's tough and scary, but I'm loving the ride so far. 

Also, I have tried my hand with poetry, but it didn't have engagement and felt like talking to a wall, so I now feel discouraged. But if someone out there is interested, lmk 👀 

20-  What other hobbies do you have?

Apart from literature, I love make-up, skincare, cooking and making gifs and videoedits. I also love travelling and discovering new adventures and learning as many languages as I am capable. I also love listening to music. Basically anything that has to do with the humanities and art, I'll take it. Also, I am very invested in modern royal gossip. I know, not very republican of me… 🫣😅 

21 - What’s your favorite emoji? 

Apparently, the one I use the most is 🫡🫶🏻👀. Heh, sounds like me, lol 

22: BONUS - tell us anything you’d like (if you want to).

____

Two reminders to both creators and onlookers alike: 

Creators: making content is NOT a race or a chore. It's something you make just because, and share it with the world. If you don't enjoy it, it's not worth the effort. 

Onlookers: I know how much you may love X thing, but remember that behind that art, fic, etc, there's a person with real feelings, real life and that is taking off free time to make something. Enjoy it, reblog it (please, reblog the stuff you love) and if you don't like it, filter the tag, block and move on. It's really that simple. 

Also, happy Valentine's Day AND Black History Month to the black creators of Choices! You're awesome and we love you ❤ sending you love 🥰 

[valworth]

I do think that Wrightworth's popularity makes the AA fandom slightly uninhabitable. I'm by no means the first person to say this, but it sure is on my mind. This isn't to say I don't understand the appeal. I do. They have some incredibly strong moments and are an interesting, compelling couple. They are also both massive bitches, which is tremendously fun. My issue lies more so in how inescapable it is.

I think both Phoenix and Edgeworth deserve the grace to be interpreted apart from each other. They are individuals, with massive lives outside of the other. I think it's really insulting when some can't bear to think of the two apart, god forbid in other relationships, for more than five seconds before they have to make a joke about how they're the most important couple. We get it. Can people talk about something else, though?

Not only that, but I yearn for more varied and nuanced depictions of their relationship, if we're using them at all. My request will always be to make it fail. They're so compelling as a failed couple. I mean, god. You, on an obsessive whim, shape your life around chasing this guy. This guy you knew for a year in elementary school. You have other reasons, but always in your mind, there he is. This thing that's just out of reach, a goal to pursue. Then it happens. You get him, and you win, and it's everything you dreamed. And then it isn't. It just doesn't work. Plain and simple, cruel and real. You're not a good couple, and it crumbles, and every time you see him from that point forward, you have this pang of anger. This feeling of betrayal. You were not what I wanted you to be.

Then there's the inverse of that. The feelings that come from being a trophy, a conquest, an item. They both lack the emotional intelligence to talk about and navigate their own feelings, with Phoenix running head-on into everything with reckless abandon, refusing to question his own motives, and Miles having a tendency to detach himself from his issues as hard as he possibly can. It's such an interesting, flawed basis for a relationship. That's just my take, though. It's how I like them, and no one else will ever be beholden to my interpretations!

I get AA is escapism for a lot of people, and if that's how it works for you, total respect. But I crave variety, god I do. It's not about being right, it's not about being wrong, I just think there are so many ways to play with these characters and the fandom is stuck in a rut of samey-same content, both happy and sad. I'm not here to shame you for liking what you like, either. I'm pretty esoteric. I mean, Jesus. There's nothing less welcome in the AA fandom than a self shipper getting between Wrightworth. I don't mind doing my own thing, and I'm happier with fewer eyes on me anyway. If my stuff upsets you, that's okay.

That being said, I think I'd have a much easier time being around the fandom if people treated it less like there was a way to interpret the games correctly. The general fandom consensus is suffocating at times. Escapism can be dangerous if you don't know how to handle threats to your perception of a made-up world. I don't mean that to be condescending, I've just been there.

It was a breath of fresh air to leave the AA fandom for a while and focus on something built upon 18 years of fan-interpretations, with no right answers. Where every artist's version of them feels drastically different. It made me realize how silly this all is. It also made me remember how sad it was that when I joined the fandom and started trying to share my opinions on certain Phoen-ish ships, a popular AA blogger publicly ridiculed me and let their followers harass me. I just don't understand why the AA fandom compels people to feel like they have to be correct about everything. I've had to be very careful not to let feelings like that sour the whole franchise for me.

I myself have veered into that territory, and it's why I don't like writing this post. I don't want to be that person. I think everyone should be able to give each other space to do what makes them happy. If common fandom interpretations are what you like, then go with those. If you're like me, though, and you've ever been nervous to share headcanons and analyses that are unpopular, this is me telling you I think you're great. Say what you want, make what you want. It doesn't have to make sense. It doesn't have to be right. People might be mean about it, but you still deserve the right to self-actualization, even if no one else likes the things you do.

It's more important for you to post what you want than for others not to see it. If you're not hurting anyone, you can always rest assured that you've no reason to entertain their ire. From the bottom of my heart, just get silly with it.

[sweetlittletangerine]

Why Queenie Exists or something

Hey there! So I don’t really know how to put together this theory in a cohesive way and I made this for fun, so keep that in mind if I jump around a bit.

But I’ve had this theory for a long time now, and the fact Kinger is one of the two characters getting major focus in the next ep has just hyped me up even more. (Guess who my favorite is you’ll never guess it.)

So… as a not-so-normal Kinger fan, there’s a certain someone else who’s been rattling around in my brain for a while too.

Yes. She.

My theory is about why she even exists in the first place from a narrative standpoint. I have many other theories but this one feels like one of my most concrete ones (imo ofc), So I thought I’d share it before ep 3 comes out, even if it won’t come out for a while. I mean, it’s very possible this is the ep we learn about her since I don’t think she’s gonna be very relevant for any other character’s stories outside of Kinger.

ANYWHO time to get to the theory itself.

So let’s start off with one question. (Well it’s two, but same deal.) Why does Kinger get a look-a-like? Why not the others? Hell, Gangle exists and she has the whole ‘comedy tragedy mask’ thing going on.

Well it’s simple, he’s been there the longest. I personally don’t believe he’s the first player to join the game, but he’s been there the longest out of our main cast (Of humans). So naturally, that brings up another question… how did he last so long?

This is where Queenie comes into play. She’s important in understanding why Kinger hasn’t abstracted yet, which would tell us, the viewers, how a person can prolong their abstraction.

So for starters, I 100% believe without a doubt the reason these two look so similar is because they entered the circus at the same time. This means they started off with the same level of “girl where tf am I” When they arrived.

Second, when you compare and contrast their appearances, you realize that their differences… don’t actually affect how their bodies function. (Assuming the bottom half of Queenie is like Kinger.) So, they also came into the game with the same body when it comes to how they work. They had to adjust to the same new features in the same environment.

So when you combine these two factors, they were basically given the same tools to work with to survive (for as long as they can).

But the most important part of this… is their personalities. I love the theory that the chess pieces they became are tied to their personalities, with people connecting how Kinger’s personality relates to the role of the king in chess. (For those that don’t know, the king is the weakest piece and the queen is the strongest.) People have used this as a base to figure out who Queenie could’ve been. But if this is true then that wouldn’t be all. When you think about the role and power of each piece, you realize they’re opposites. So the bottom line here is that they’re very different people.

This impacts how they process and adapt to their new environment. And this is why Queenie abstracted and Kinger hasn’t. Some people truly are more adaptable than others in the circus. Queenie couldn’t handle the place as well as Kinger, making her lose her mind and abstract first.

Hell, we can already see something about Kinger’s personality that could’ve helped him out. I think the fandom (including myself) overestimated how much of a scaredy cat he is. The more I think about it, the more I realize that he’s not afraid of the adventures. He’s afraid of the circus itself, which is probably tied to his trauma.

(I’m aware it’s only been two episodes, but the only time we’ve seen him panic during an adventure is when an abstracted Kaufmo entered the Gloink Queen’s nest, suddenly making the adventure way more dangerous.)

You could argue he’s so chill on them because of experience, learning that at the end of the day if someone gets hurt or lost, Caine can snap his fingers and bring them back to normal. There’s pain, but no serious harm.

However, maybe he learned this a lot sooner than we think, back when he was adapting to his digital life. He internalized the fact that he’s not going anywhere sooner/better than Queenie, and was able to ‘go with the flow’ better than her. Who knows, maybe Queenie avoided going on adventures, (wink wink nudge nudge to a character Kinger is oddly fond of in the group), which gave her more time to think about her situation and mental state. The adventures are a surprisingly effective distraction from all of that.

If the story itself is supposed to focus on why the characters are the way they are, then it’s going to focus on the characters as individuals. And considering the fact Kinger and Zooble’s characters are heavily tied to their identities, that’s probably going to be one of the main themes of ep 3. So it makes sense that the reason Kinger lasted longer is tied to who he is and how he copes with the world around him (both now and back then.) This would, by extension, explore the fact that Queenie was her own person too, and now that that person is gone. The abstracted characters were all people, people who lost themselves as they went mad, leading to their inevitable abstractions.

So uh, I guess that’s all for now. Posting things online scares me so idk if I’ll post more things like this, but I might. If you read through this whole thing, then thanks!

Back into the pit I go

[spock-smokes-weed]

I wanna talk about about the big issue that's going on in the dan and phil fandom rn because I've been sitting on my thoughts for a few days, and because I think it's important for us as a community to keep talking about it.

Dan and Phil mean a lot to me, they've been a real bright spot for me in a very dark time in my life, so it did give me a major spike of anxiety when I started seeing discussions of racist behavior coming from Dan and the Phandom. My first instinct was to just brush it off because what people were upset about didn't seem that "serious", and it's a bad habit of my mine to try to bury things that give me anxiety. But like a pulsing sore, my mind couldn't let me ignore it and I kept going back into the tags to read what people were saying. And I realized I was doing the exact thing that a lot of POC and Latin American fans were criticizing.

I'm not POC or Latin American, and comments like the ones Dan made (idk if there are anymore but to my understanding he called mexico and brazil third world countries in WAD, and titled a really old video "I'm Mexican Now" back when he used to tan himself) don't hit a sore spot for me like it would other people. It's a lot easier for me to say "oh that's tasteless" and let it roll off my back. But this is personal for a lot of other fans, and I never want to be that kind of person that goes "well it didn't hurt ME, why can't YOU let it go." no matter how much I like Dan and Phil.

And I think that's gets a the core for what a lot of fans are upset over (at least from what I've observed, feel free to tell me if I'm off the mark.) Dan's comments made them feel like a person they really admired doesn't hold the same kind of respect for them. It made me really sad reading about how isolated POC feel in fandom because when microaggressions come up, they're expected to suck it up. And that's so unbelievably shitty that we are making fellow fans feel this way. I've seen time and again POC people have to leave fandoms, or never join them to begin with, because the environment is so hostile towards them. And that's really a shame, because fandom has been such a positive aspect of my life, and it want it to be that way for everyone.

And what Dan did is just one part of it, the other part is us, the phandom. People who speak up about this, or the fact that DnP's tour has zero shows in Latin America, Asia, or Africa ("world tour" lmao) have been getting racist harassment from other fans. They're framed as "trying to cancel" DnP, or "making a fuss over nothing". That is completely unacceptable, and if we really want to be this positive community, we have to push back on this behavior when we see it. That includes when it's coming from Dan and Phil.

I honestly don't think Dan was being malicious in what he said, nor do I think DnP were intending to exclude people by not taking the tour to the global south, but that it's really not the point. It's about the fans that feel excluded and hurt. Dan and Phil are both human beings, they are not "unproblematic kings", and they will always fail to meet your standards when you paint them that way. It's causing real people harm when you deny that they can do no wrong. Dan and Phil are very meaningful to me as artists, and I know it can feel personal when you find out someone you admire did something wrong, but sometimes you have to step back and remember that this isn't about you. And it's not a healthy approach to take any criticism of something you like as a personal attack.

Contrapoints once said something that really stuck with me, and it's how I'd like to be living my life, which is that often, admitting when you were wrong can seen as a weakness, when in reality it's an incredible strength. I was wrong with my initial gut reaction over this, and Dan was wrong for what he said, and I think all people want is to hear him say that.

I felt a little nervous writing this post because I don't want to be speaking over anyone, or speaking for anyone, (and if you're a POC and want to elaborate please go ahead), but it felt wrong not saying anything because of how much Dan and Phil mean to me. I don't exactly see myself a part of the "phandom", and I only post about them when they upload, but they are very meaningful artists to me. I want other people to keep discovering Dan and Phil and enjoying their art, but for that to happen we need to be candid about where they've fallen short.

[onesunofagun]

The implications on Ganondorf and his background in TotK suggest some very interesting things to me.

First of all, like. I love him. He specifically did not disappoint me. His JP audio fucks so hard. I love his design. He's glorious.

And Hyrule as an imperialistic divine hegemony is not a new concept in the slightest, obviously, the Ganondorf corner of the fandom have known and discoursed about the potential story ramifications of those themes since OoT, but Fujibayashi really went ham on it in his run. (And look. Zelda is made in Japan. Framing a divine imperial authority as a good thing narratively is pretty par for the course JP nationalism, to be really blunt. It is what it is. Grain of salt.)

But I do appreciate that it revisited some OoT plot beats even if it... really drove that point home again in retrospect

I guess new fans are in for a treat unpacking that;;;

Anyway in the BG of that, I'm interested in the particular minutia of what was happening with this Ganondorf specifically to flavour his particular brand of 'fuck you'

And a few important points that give broader context to things are these and I'll put under a cut bc spoilers obviously--

Rauru's repeated 'invitations' to join Hyrule and benefit from their protection (presumably some advanced technological access or strong magical allies as part of that promise, which I believe is probably anti-monster focused within world context) which Ganondorf as a King has very much ignored (and good for him tbh).

Clearly, he has an interest in keeping Gerudo independent.

Ganondorf is acknowledged as a Hero to his people. Not only does this heavily resonate with the very particular themes of his actual character design and both its Buddhist reference and Samurai trope homages, but like-- we're actively shown an explanation for WHY he may be considered such.

Being who he is, he's already magically inclined with a kinship to monsters. We are unapologetically shown him in command of a Molduga Army. Trained Moldugas, under his command-- and not under specifically his mystical command, either, but musically conditioned. Trained to follow sound based command cues, which makes plentiful sense given Moldugas are sound sensitive and Ganondorf usually has musical inclinations. Plus it's Zelda franchise, magic command music is also very much a thing but--

Moldugas are, at least medicinally, very important resources. On a larger scale, they're also a very present threat to desert dwellers and travellers, and from the looks of it in much larger numbers, back then.

Given the context of everything, Ganondorf was a badass even before 'he took a magic relic and fucked up the Hyrulean Royal Family' as he tends to do. Sporting as ever, he fights Link one on one as just a Gerudo, also showing once again that he does in fact have some personal code of honour when it comes to fighting worthy opponents. But it gives us a yardstick of how capable he probably was even before he nabbed the tear.

Capable enough of tangling with most big uglies in the desert, such as Moldugas, which he has at least trained and at most maybe even raised.

Exemplified Power as he ever is, I'd like to point out that in this case, he's demonstrating a flipside of what Power looks like-- benevolence, protection, guardianship. Once again, we have the pieces that indeed he is capable of that and showing that to his own people. He also flexes the Molduga Army as a show of Gerudo and its own power.

To anyone other than Rauru, who is an incredibly powerful Sage already, a Molduga Army would have absolutely won the day, I think. The reaction of the other Gerudo is pretty telling.

Ganondorf's faction were deeply shaken by the display of Rauru's power. And as a guy that's been knocking on your King's door and saying 'you should come and bend knee to me' when Gan already has the worst problem in the sands sorted out?

Very understandable.

From their perspective -- what do they need protection from, exactly, if not Hyrule itself? Their monster problem is a non-issue. From the viewpoint of Gerudo loyal to Ganondorf, everything about this looks like a pressured threat.

Which comes back around, of course, to what Ganondorf plainly lays out to Rauru when he gains the tear-- this is because Rauru tried to control him. And yes, that's Ganondorf and his pride and his nature in full tilt too. He will not be pulled beneath anyone or anything.

But that's the point about that hubris on Rauru's part, he felt superior and he underestimated both Gerudo and Ganondorf-- as a warrior and a leader, and as somebody who was likely managing things very well on his own.

But I mentioned factions. This is something that should be made clear.

Pointed ears are, canonically, associated with faithfulness to Hylia and/or the worship of Hyrulean spirits. This gets debated all the time, but that's the fact of it. We have been shown again and again that humans from outside of Hyrule have round ears (as long ears are associated with hearing the voices of the gods; ie being open to them). Exposure to Hyrulean aligned divine elements can lend pointedness to previously totally round ears. We see this happen.

It has been doubled down upon that the ancient Gerudo (such as in oot and FSA, with FSA having the introduction of the floral association in Gerudo design and OoT heavily centering mirrors in their spiritual practices) worship different deities, whether derivatives of Din or Hylia or completely different myth. The Goddess of the Sands has been confirmed as a deity that Hyrule itself views as evil and false.

I generally interpret this to mean that part of the reason boils down to this-- Hyrule's main concern is that pointed ears are living lives closer to the gods, and therefore more insulated against corruption and demonic influences. Rather fittingly, their patron's foremost spiritual antagonist tends to find his reincarnation in unprotected, non-Hyrulean tribes who are 'open' to demons.

Now that may be another layer to what Rauru means when he says protection, also. Worshipping the 'right gods' affords certain protections (and certainly supports the security of Hyrule itself).

In SkSW, by the way, there's a really cool point of questioning early human society too-- the fire temple depicts demons and monsters and snakes quite a bit, and these were built in a time when I suspect the humans were mostly a large proto-people.

Sidenote: I think Hylia's faithful went to Skyloft and generally shook out to be the Hylians we know later, where some stayed on Earth to serve Hylia's plan and became Sheikah, many more people were transformed into demons in a reverse-Batreaux situation, and some humans just scattered far and wide to avoid conflict.

Anyway that temple depicts Bokoblins making hand signs and long story short, the overall motif and meaning of that temple shows demons offering to teach things, approaching humans with a different kind of enlightenment. Whoever built that temple was very much in a state of open spiritual and mystical curiosity.

Now the takeaway there is, ultimately, the ancient Gerudo very much seem to be descended from such a sect of people. They have their own gods, and they're not part of Hyrule proper, and they have round ears because of it.

Botw departed from that very clearly, but in doing so, also erased and replaced almost all traces of the ancient Gerudo deities with new Hylian analogues.

The Seven/Eight Heroines count as Hylianised deities, and I believe the reason for this-- first suspected in botw but I feel it's weightier after totk-- is that they represent tear holders / Hylia aligned Sages in the seven group (edit: and apparently a Hero in the Eighth) such as those in the decline timeline. They are functionally the reason that the Gerudo of modern day possess long ears-- even where they are selective in what they worship, they are still worshipping Hylia aligned aspects of Divine Hyrule.

And in case this wasn't absolutely irrefutable to me beforehand, the ancient Gerudo Sage from Rauru's time is both loyal to him, and possesses pointed ears under her camel mask.

I would also point out the Hylians of Rauru's time seem to have longer ears in general, probably owing to having a Zonai King, ostensibly a Hylia aligned Deity himself.

Ganondorf's ears are rounded, of course. He clearly doesn't believe in Hyrulean worship even in lip service, and it's little wonder why.

But following another beat of OoT, that ancient sage is a very obvious Nabooru type character. And, in much the same way, that suggests that even when Ganondorf was King of the Gerudo only, there may have already been factions splitting up amongst their people based on spiritual practices.

I don't think it's beyond the pale to speculate there may have been a mixture of Gerudo at the time who had both pointed ears and round, signalling the confusion from and conflict between their spiritual leaders.

It seems likely that a schism probably existed, regardless of ears, but that schism-- and the sage who may well have been leading it-- may have been caused by people who decided respond to those calls from Rauru and join Hyrule without their King.

Which gives a lot more context to why Ganondorf would be in the mood to send a giant Molduga shaped "back off" Rauru's way, also.

I take particular note that Ganondorf's destruction intentions are faced towards Hyrule and her allies, and specifically those who oppose him in that goal. And while I concur that his whole Red Inheritance party ran hard and may well have had a decent hand in frightening the bejeezus out of the Gerudo who were previously faithful to him-- maybe even inadvertently sent some running for camp Hyrule-- it seems he considers modern day Gerudo, fully converted to pro-Hyrulean status, to be traitors.

We have no idea what happened to the Gerudo who followed him, so that's really up in the air as to how messy that may have gotten.

Even the woman who plays to summon the Molduga has pointed ears though, so I tend to lean that his camp got converted to Heroine worship (or at least those with pointed ears mostly did if the mixed ear situation was happening).

But heck, it would not be the first time some Gerudo got ran outta dodge after a King went belly up.

Food for thought.

[saintsenara]

I really like Snape as a character. I made the mistake of mentioning that online. Someone asked me how I like a character is inexcusably mean to children when he is a position of authority around them and how he is petty, can be cruel and harsh teacher and his lack of patience towards Nerville and basically a list of all the mean/horrible stuff that he has said/done. What do you say when people ask you how you can reconcile liking such a character given all of cruel and hurtful things that he has said and done both towards his students and joined willingly a known blood supremacist terrorist group and said known slur towards his friend that is a member of a minority group? I find Snape to be a deeply compelling and flawed and complex character- that's why I enjoy seeking out Snape centric fics.

thank you very much for the ask, anon, and i'm sorry that people have popped off about you liking snape. it's an extremely tedious way for them to behave, since these people are fictional.

i must be honest, i don't really get asked to justify my fondness for the baddies - partially because i curate my fandom space in order to avoid it and partially because i must give the impression of not caring - but i've never found it particularly difficult to reconcile the fact that all my favourite characters are mass-murderers with the fact that i myself am not one...

the first - and frankly the most important - way that i do this is because i understand what genre conventions are.

it seems to me that this is the thing that really is the most lacking in the discourse surrounding the 'bad' characters in the harry potter series, with snape chief among them, but it’s absolutely crucial to understand:

snape is a mean teacher because harry potter is for children, and children do not want to read about sweet or competent adults.

[this is also the reason why the dursleys are horrible, or why hogwarts is such a dangerous and poorly-run school. if the series contained the line, a troll did not get into the dungeon and so harry did his homework, then any child worth their salt would be hurling the book into a fire.]

it must be remembered that child readers - for whom the text is primarily intended - will have a different response to the tropes and themes of the series than adults returning to it with their own experiences, and that adults' responses to the books are not responses that the books were written to provoke. this doesn't mean that adults' reactions are unreasonable - nor does it mean that adults shouldn't engage with harry potter, as my 300k words on ao3 attests - it simply means that it is not a flaw of the series that snape's behaviour is not addressed in the way that adults would like it to be. it's just genre.

because children tend to see the things in the series which horrify us as adults as considerably less frightening or problematic than we do ourselves. indeed, they often see interactions which we read as abusive, or as evidence of systematic cruelty, as simply unfair, and they are looking for retribution not in terms of legal punishment or wide-ranging institutional change, but in the character who is behaving unfairly getting their comeuppance, often in a comic way.

this is because fairness-unfairness is one of the primary ways in which children understand justice. as adults, we think with more nuance - but that doesn’t mean that our response to the text is better. in fact, we have a responsibility to understand the series’ genre conventions when we approach characters in our own writing - if you want to make snape a violent abuser, you actually need to understand all the ways in which the series shows him not to be those things.

snape’s relationship with his classes is written in a way which provokes the response in children that he is unfair, but not one which provokes the response that he is frightening - indeed, the story generally treats his "cruelty" as comic, at least until half-blood prince, and he often gets an embarrassing comeuppance when he tries to be sincerely malicious. [i.e. literally everything which happens to him in prisoner of azkaban.]

he is unfair, because he doesn’t tell malfoy off for misbehaving. he is unfair, because he doesn’t give hermione a chance to answer questions. he is unfair, because he is rude to harry [who, like any good child hero worth his salt, has no respect for snape and isn’t intimidated by him]. he is unfair, because he gives horrible detentions.

but no child character in the story ever seriously believes his behaviour to go beyond this - including neville.

neville’s fear of snape is caused by snape being unfair towards him - and, since neville is a character the text likes, snape therefore frequently gets his comeuppance for this unfairness. the incident where he threatens to poison trevor is horrible to read as an adult, but as a child the outcome - snape is foiled in his plan because of neville and hermione - is understood as triumphant. snape - an adult - is constantly outfoxed by his pupils - who are not adults - and children love to see that.

[similarly, it really should be emphasised that the text treats neville’s fear of snape as ridiculous. lupin laughs in his face about it in prisoner of azkaban, and neville himself admits that it’s silly and irrational. it cannot be seriously suggested - although i've seen plenty of people try - that snape is his boggart instead of bellatrix because snape sincerely frightens him more. he fears snape more than bellatrix because his narrative purpose in the first four books is to be comic relief - he’s a bit cowardly and a bit useless, and he provides a character for the child reader to feel braver and cleverer than.]

obviously, these incidents read very differently to adults - especially if you are an adult who has, knows, or works with small children. but if somebody complains to you about your favourite characters because they're upset by children’s literature without thinking about how it’s intended to be read by its primary audience... that’s not your problem.

but even beyond genre, i feel comfortable liking "bad" characters because i understand human complexity.

online, it is increasingly becoming a dogma that our attitudes are fixed and unchangeable. i feel incredibly sorry for young people nowadays, who often have to live in a state of hypervigilance in order to make sure that they never do or say anything cruel or ignorant. this must be miserable, because flawlessness is unattainable - not only for real people but for fictional ones as well.

the fannish desire to write someone like snape off as bad and unchangeable - alongside the accompanying tendency to minimise the human flaws of characters such as james and sirius - comes from the fact that snape, like many antagonists, holds up a mirror to us as the reader. and we may not like what we see.

snape’s life demonstrates that it’s very easy to be radicalised into joining a terror group - particularly for people who have experienced things like poverty, being othered, or being bullied. it forces us to recognise that people who end up involved in evil did not come into it fully formed - they started somewhere, and they often ended up where they did because of failures in societies and their institutions which we ignore because they benefit us. after all, hogwarts does nothing to prevent voldemort recruiting death eaters among its pupils, hogwarts does nothing to dismantle the oppressive class system on which the wizarding world runs - the school is the archetypal ivory tower, and the ministry is no better.

snape’s life demonstrates that it's very easy for people who are victims in some areas of their lives to be perpetrators in others. trauma is often not sympathetic and perfect victimhood does not exist. having experienced trauma means you have experienced trauma - it can still make you act like a cunt.

and snape’s life also demonstrates that it’s very easy to - without entirely intending to - do something absolutely terrible, and this is something which we should always be compassionate towards. because it’s going to happen to all of us - and, actually, our terrible deed could easily be something as significant as snape’s report of the prophecy. if you drive, for example, it takes one momentary distraction for you to kill someone. what are you going to do if the person you kill is your childhood best friend, whom you love?

well… you’re going to try to redeem yourself. and, like snape, you will learn that redemption is messy and often strange, and that people can show growth in some areas and lack it in others.

and the redemption point is important - the idea that snape is redeemed by the end of the canon text is something which lots of fans push back against. but it’s crucial to note two things:

the first is that one’s own capacity for forgiveness and the potential of forgiveness as a concept are not the same thing. you might never have been able to forgive snape if you were lily or harry or dumbledore, but that says nothing about whether anyone else can or should. the second is that forgiveness and redemption are not inextricably linked. one can redeem oneself without being forgiven.

my view is that approaching bad characters with nuance is actively beneficial for us, and that having a "problematic fave" is a good thing when it comes to our self-growth in the real world. if we believe ourselves to be immune to the sort of radicalising forces which would lead a person to other their best friend to the extent that they call her a slur, we will be easy to radicalise. if we believe ourselves to be incapable of making a dangerous mistake, we will be more likely to miss the clues that we’re about to. if we do not believe in the possibility of redemption for all, then we are going to have a very hard time when we do something bad, since we therefore have to believe in redemption for none.

thinking critically about oneself - both in relation to the media one enjoys and in general - is a protective act. learning to identify commonalities with bad people protects you. learning to recognise that you’re not always going to be good or right protects you. learning to accept that you’ll fuck up protects you. learning to be remorseful protects you. learning to forgive protects you. learning that the limits of your personal capacity to forgive is not the same as the potential of forgiveness protects you.

unsympathetic literary characters show us how to approach unsympathetic people in real life. snape is a brilliant example of what can be caused by failing to see the whole person - voldemort is evidently the only person who offers him a life-line, where dumbledore and the "good guys" in wizarding society do not. this is a lesson to us all - if we flatten people into good-and-therefore-worthy-of-help and bad-and-therefore-not, it’s a recipe for disaster...

but this is all very pretentious and philosophical. the main reason why i have no qualms about enjoying "bad" characters is because i’m not a cop.

the summary of the last point is - basically - that readers need to learn how to sit with discomfort in media, because discomfort within a fictional context is completely safe, and therefore it provides an outlet for people to think about themes or characters which are darker in a way which cannot cause actual harm.

fiction is not real life and fictional characters cannot harm you - and this is the case even if the fiction is about something which would or did materially harm you if it happened in real life. [this is doubly the case in harry potter because the harms upon which the series focuses are themselves fictional - the series’ blood-supremacy obviously reflects real-world examples of discrimination, but it is not something which any real person has actually experienced.]

this means that a reader’s reaction to something in fiction is always on them. authors have no responsibility to anticipate every single reader’s response to their writing - encountering something that upsets you in a fictional setting is your responsibility to deal with. [even if the author’s not tagged properly.]

snape may upset a reader for various reasons, some of which may be related to experiences of real world discrimination, but his existence cannot cause actual harm to any living person, because he and the society in which he lives are not real.

fictional crimes are not real crimes, and so, if someone tries to say that you shouldn’t enjoy reading about him because they don’t like it… they are a cop and you should have no respect for them. acab applies to the thought police too.

and knowing this gives us a powerful tool… i have no qualms about being criticised for liking bad characters because i just say acab and go on with my day.

just as you can’t cause anyone else material harm in your consumption of fiction, nor can anyone else cause you material harm just by criticising your choices - obviously, if they’re attempting to doxx you, or to cause any real-world repercussions because of your fanfiction tastes, that’s another matter - which means that you have the power to choose to be unbothered by unjustified criticism. it’s not even that hard! simply refuse to be upset!

curate your fandom experience without shame. post what you like. block and move on. filter assiduously. scroll past without engaging. don’t waste your time getting into fights. don’t answer comments which are rude. don’t feed trolls. delete messages. this is just harry potter!

and also be compassionate towards the fact that people don’t express themselves perfectly. if you are primed not to immediately get upset or consider yourself to be under attack, you will be able to read comments with more clarity, to look and see if you can find commonalities, and to answer them in a way which doesn’t escalate the situation.

[and always remember that a lot of the angriest and most righteous comments come from teenagers, and being a teenager is hell. be compassionate, as your fandom elders had compassion for you.]