#shane discourse

[sdv-confessions]

admin confession: getting a bit real here and i know it wont end the shane discourse but i want to add my 2c. im an alcoholic. i quit drinking for ~2 yrs and now i drink socially and its under control. i quit cold turkey because i was hurting the people around me (not physically, but with my words and actions). while i have a lot of life circumstances and a predisposition to alcoholism that explains why i am this way and why i did the things i did, they were still shitty things, and the people in my life do not owe me forgiveness. it is their right to talk about how i hurt them. so when anons dont like shane because he reminds them of a toxic alcoholic in their life, i understand them 100%. and when anons relate to shane, i understand that too. we're all coming from different life experiences and thats ok! we dont have to argue we can still be friends ❤️

[orangechickenpillow]

Not to be parasocial but I am glad that the watcher boys seem to be handling everything well. Obviously with their response and listening to the fans, but I'm also glad that the severity of the backlash hasn't completely killed their excitement for their projects and the future of watcher.

This whole situation was a lot for everyone, and I know it's left a bad taste in some people's mouths, but I'm happy that Shane, Ryan and Steven have had level-headed responses to it (at least, public responses)

[jesterraconteuse]

Hey if your gut reaction was to blame Steven for the Watcher stuff, eat a tire. The amount of racist shit I've been seeing against Ryan and Steven, but especially Steven is insane. I don't care if you're not including Ryan, just because you choose a favourite Asian boy to stan doesn't making you immune to being a bigot. Get so fr.

They're all big boys with a will and backbone who made a stupid costly decision. The fact that some of you are buying into the evil CEO Steven Lim shit unironically would almost be funny if y'all weren't old enough to think critically.

[riyu-the-visual-kei-junkie]

I'm probably batting at a bee hive for saying this, but I'm pretty sure fans will not get an apology nor will watcher back track.

Personally, I think they already thought about this, anticipated the hate and loss of subs and decided it would be alright.

And lastly, they prob calculated it and concluded that the amount of fans subbing to their streaming tv outweighs the amount they'll lose from YouTube.

Just saying, there is a possibility that they calculated and saw that they could pull this off with paid subscription on their new streaming site. It's a gamble for them, which they took up. So, I'm pretty sure they think that this is worth it.

Besides, we're not hearing much from the people already subbed because there's too much hate atm for them to joyfully announce that they have an account.

[currantlee]

A few comments on a recent post about RWBY I made got me thinking about something. Basically, I think that Rooster Teeth – and possibly by extension its parent companies – have artificially inflated RWBY as a media project and franchise rather than letting it grow organically. Therefore, it became a bubble that was bound to burst at some point. RWBY might never have been a profitable IP, which might be very relevant for its future.

This is not a problem that arose after Monty Oum‘s passing, I feel like this was already coming before that. Shane Newville‘s open letter (which absolutely comes from an emotional, mentally unwell state of mind, but has had many of its contents confirmed over the years, even beyond being one of the first descriptions of the toxic work environment at Rooster Teeth) makes a few points that support this impression. Whether you agree with the letter or not, you cannot deny that the first two volumes of RWBY, while they also had merch accompanying them and stuff, were not produced following industry standards – starting with the 3D software used, Poser Pro (Monty Oum‘s preferred tool for animation). This led to some really creative animation work that, while not always high-quality by industry-standards, was certainly pushing boundaries. It was creative and it worked for what RWBY was: a passion project created by someone who saw animation as his strongest suit – as his preferred medium to tell a story. I‘ve seen a lot of people claim that Monty Oum wasn‘t a writer, and while that‘s true, I feel like the implication of that statement is always that he couldn‘t tell stories on his own. I don‘t think that‘s true. I think Monty Oum was a great storyteller when it came to expressing certain things through animated action scenes. It‘s just that he wanted to tell a story that included more than just that and a few lines of dialogue – which is where Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross come in, two at the time very inexperienced writers (who possibly had a fallout with Monty Oum over creative differences later), as well as some talented folks – people like Shane Newville. They were chosen to work on this because Monty Oum acknowledged their potential and liked to work with them, and I feel like that created an environment where they were really allowed to flourish. Volumes 1 and 2 are certainly not flawless, but I feel like I can tell the people making it had fun.

To Rooster Teeth however? I think RWBY (and by extension, Monty Oum as a creator) might have been little more than assets to them. RWBY was first created around a time when RT first tried to be more like, well, an actual company. At least from 2014 onward, but possibly even earlier than that, this included an effort to conform to industry standards more, mostly in order to be able to hire more people – very visibly so in RWBY in the form of the switch to Maya (my opinion about that is, the way they did it didn’t do RWBY any favors at all). I think they saw RWBY and Monty Oum as an opportunity to appear… More important, bigger, than they ever really were.

So what did they do? Again, I kind of have the feeling that they “upscaled” RWBY to a size where it appears like this big thing, but it became far too much to handle. Essentially, they created a mock giant, or a metaphorical quasi-star: something that can appear big from afar, but is actually very small / unstable (and if we go with the quasi-star metaphor, disturbs all of its surroundings). This is what I mean when I say that RWBY was a bubble bound to burst, because no star lives forever – and quasi-stars can only exist under very specific, very unstable conditions (I linked a Kurzgesagt-video in case you’re interested what exactly a quasi-star / black hole star is / was, cosmology is so fascinating IMO). Once these conditions exist no longer, they both fall apart and collapse into the black hole that is their core at the same time.

My main argument for this is that RWBY was essentially a huge money sink for RT (Source: Barbara Dunkelman’s unprofessionalism). They pumped so much money into this… Perhaps even more than they ever made from it. While this isn’t 100% confirmed, it is very much possible (and IMO not exactly unlikely) that RWBY was never profitable — which it might have been if RT hadn’t been so hellbent on creating the illusion of a multi-million-dollar franchise.

This is purely speculative, but this might also be why Volume 10 was never greenlit. We know that Volume 9 was to a significant part funded by Crunchyroll and in fact would not have been possible without them (probably because RT was already out of money at this point). They might have bought into this mock giant, then realized they had pretty much been scammed once Volume 9 aired. This might have led to Crunchyroll’s unwillingness to fund another season for something they knew now was effectively a money sink. Since RT at this point lacked the funds to produce Volume 10 alone and therefore was dependent on investors like Crunchyroll and Warner Brothers… Volume 10 was never greenlit, no matter how hard they attempted to get their fans’ hopes up and start a hashtag campaign on social media (as far as I remember, that was started by Rooster Teeth, not the fans. I don’t have my Twitter account anymore though, so I can’t check). Again though, this is speculation.

The worst part? This refusal of RT to just… Downscale RWBY again, this determination that it had to be this huge franchise… Was all put on the backs of the creatives working on it. We know at this point, from multiple sources, that RWBY and other RT productions have had an incredible amount of crunchtime, working overtime, employee abuse, … going on behind the scenes, which seems to only have gotten worse after Monty Oum’s passing. At the end of the day, all RT does and has ever done is blame others for their incompetence. Like, no shit, I’ve seen fans claim that it’s the FNDM’s job to “keep the show alive” (particularly in the light of #GreenlightVolume10), which… No, that’s not the fans’ job. It’s the job of the company who has been entrusted with this beloved IP, and said company has proven to be utterly incompetent on multiple occasions, which is unfortunate, but a sad reality for all those who love RWBY. And while Rooster Teeth has never directly said such a thing, they have certainly implied it and taken advantage of the existing sentiment within their fanbase, as well as their parasocial relationship with it (again, see #GreenlightVolume10 for reference).

To clarify, I’m not saying none of this would have happened if RT didn’t insist on making RWBY this big franchise (and biting off far more than they could chew in the process) – again, RT was far too notoriously incompetent at everything a company should manage – but I do think it might have played a role. It also isn’t an excuse for all the employee abuse. Again, what they should have done is downsizing the project, not inflating it further and further.

If I’m not somehow completely in the wrong (because IMO this just makes way too much sense to not be at least partially true – but let’s face it, a lot of this is just me connecting dots, and there is always a chance I’m connecting them wrong, even though I don‘t think so), then it kinda blows my mind that there are still people who believe in this scam. Though I will say, emotional attachment can do that to anyone. If anything, I’m honestly sorry that those folks lose something that means so much to them, and that false promises were made to them.

At the end of the day, the story of RWBY (the “franchise”) is twofold. It’s a story about an incredibly talented creator who passed away far too early, who was given the incredible opportunity to make his dream come true. It’s a story of people he trusted taking up his torch, and maybe getting lost in the dark along the way. It’s an inspiring story regardless, and I hope to see it continued at a downsized scale so it can grow organically, preferably in the hands of an indie animation studio like Dillon Goo (🤞)

But it is also a cautionary tale to both creatives and companies who employ them, a tale about false promises, abuse of both employees and fans, as well as how to not run a project. Don’t blow your thing out of proportion too early, don’t create a mock giant / metaphorical quasi-star. Let your ideas and projects grow and flourish organically and sincerely.

[mbat]

i think its funny that theres discourse about this already

like we almost all agree that this situation sucks and now a bunch of us are just arguing about the details of why it sucks

never change, tumblr, never change.

[captainkirkk]

what's your opinion on rpf? not as a moral question if it's "right" to write about real ppl, but like i'm the only one who just doesn't find its character dynamics and the world interesting enough? i could read e.g. kpop fics if they'd be more about the struggle to succeed in such cut throat industry but i don't have enough emotional attachment to care about these ppl if it's just a college au and nobody is rising the dead or playing exy or hiding lycanthropy

Oh same! I find it hard to get attached to real people in the same way I am with fictional characters. Achievement Hunter is the only RPF fandom I've ever been in, and even then, I preferred to read about the personas/ characters they played in minecraft or GTA because I found their world-building really interesting. It's impossible to really know a real celebrity outside of TV/online personas, and I'm very very aware of that when reading RPF. I'd much rather reading an original work than real strangers

[useless-englandfacts]

henry kissinger, shane macgowan and alistair darling in one day like you couldn’t have picked a more random combo there

[salvatoreren]

you guys im sorry if i have my replies turned off i swear im not a mean nonchalant account im just an anxious teenage girl in the humanities course i swear 😭😭😭 but if you go back to my roots, you can see i was in the aot fandom during its prime but also at its worse in terms of toxicity and i just happened to be pre teen who made great takes and did weekly reviews which weren't really reviews and more of like glazing over the new episodes and some guy in the replies told me to stop simping for liking the new episodes and said that i was blinded by the fandom like girl...

[hexamoron]

hiii I feel like being inflammatory today !!!! if you're a 9 fan do fucking NOT join the lost stitchpunks discord server 🤑

venty post below

the owner of the server, chaoflaka, continues to allow in the server a certain somebody that knowingly exposed my 12-13 year old self and a bunch of other minors to explicit erp and porn , allowed an at-the-time 16 year old to post in their nsfw chats, and allegedly groomed another .

their fallback for not believing me is that it happened outside of TLS and that I was pretty irate and rude when calling these people out, but consider that when it happened, I was a 12 year old put into a moderator position.

the place is full to the brim with enablers, data hoarders, etc. and is not worth anybody's time.

sincerely; fuck you chao, and all of the others who didn't believe me. you were meant to be the bigger person. and I'm being the bigger person by airing this information out now. you are just as responsible for traumatizing me as they are.

[sdv-confessions]

”You wouldn’t want to marry a Shane in real life!”

Well you most likely wouldn’t want to be a farmer in real life either. Real farming is difficult and gross and exhausting and often unprofitable. But this game isn’t about real life, it is about experiencing a fantasy of rural life where everything works out in the end. Fantasies don’t have to be realistic or desirable in real life to be comforting.

Also I did marry a Shane and we’re pretty happy together.

.

[griancraft]

The vitriol people have for Shane from Stardew Valley because he isn’t able to magically fix his addiction for the player if romanced is nuts. Do you really think you get off a substance once and then can stay off it? Is he genuinely not improving or is there just not a lot of post marriage content and you’re on year 62726 of your save file? He’s not “a terrible person” and he’s also not “unfixable,” you just hate addicts.

[jackiejimenezgrossman]

ngl i abandoned this account because i've dipped in and out of the smosh fandom so much. but one thing that always irked me was the conspiracy palette video. because why the fuck are you making a video about an obvious cash grab from two documented racists (or at least two white men that have done racist things)? i never understood that. it always got under my skin because then they made videos parodying what a terrible person shane was even though a lot of the things that were revealed were already common knowledge. i don't understand people who ignore obviously bad things popular people have done for the sake of their own comfort. then when shit really hits the fan you wanna act surprised. like what??? the guy who did black face MULTIPLE TIMES turned out to also be a creepy weirdo who made sexual jokes about minors?? who would have thought this guy was a shitty person through and through.

[brettdoesdiscourse]

You all remember when Shane Dawson made a video where he was a stalker and brutally murdered Taylor Swift (who has a history of violent stalkers.) Then called her an evil bitch, said he would punch her through the head if he could, and asked his fans to harass her to try to get her to let him repost the video? This is the man that calls himself an empath, btw.

[leighistired]

Every time I see top/bottom discourse about any character or pairing, I remember back to the top/bottom Naruto/Sasuke discourse on Gaia Online. Whenever someone brought it up, some dude named Incubus Shane would climb out of the wood work to announce that he would be topping Naruto, actually.

I hope he got to fuck Naruto.

[sycretsside]

I love to support creators who support us— but Watcher has given us a monetary goal post that is continually moving forward from merch to Patreon to tours to subscription based models.

It also troubles me how other prominent YouTubers with similar employees have come out against Watcher, such as Charlie, to argue that this “survivable living is hard” argument is doubtful. I understand that the type of content differs, but it casts a distrusting light on the whole ordeal.

It’s also very ironic to be posting this response on tumblr, a platform packed with folx who support one another’s low income struggles and is composed of queer, disabled, and BIPOC creators seeking their own growth. It’s kind of icky.

We’re Leaving YouTube