#some of these tropes are so stupid.

[sabh0]

I need to rant with someone about how this fandom thinks Chuuya's stupid, or gullible, and how Dazai uses him all the time without him even realizing, which hurts Chuuya's feelings like...

What the fuck did y'all read, where did that dynamic even comes from?? Why do you want to make Chuuya look pathetic????

They are PARTNERS. If Dazai only considered him a puppet, they would NOT work so well together, nor have the dynamic they do, they balance each other out while understanding each other completely, PLEASE.

Yes, Chuuya follows Dazai's plans most of the time, because they WORK. When Dazai doesn't give him the entire thing, it's because he trusts Chuuya to understand his intentions anyway, because they know each so well, I am going to SCREAM.

SO TRUE!!! EVERY TIME I SEE PPL CALL CHUUYA STUPID OR SMTH I GO BONKERS,, Asagiri himself said that Chuuya is Dazai level genius,,

And the fact he goes along with Dazai's plans is literally the fact he trusts him?? He literally said it out loud a few times. No idea where ppl r getting that whole thing about him being some pathetic little guy who can't think for himself,, if he didn't want to do something then he wouldn't and that's it 😭😭

The same goes for ppl who make Dazai look like he can't handle himself in a fight or smth,, ghey literally push the dynamic of 'brains and brawn' onto skk like aughh!! Obviously Chuuya is a much better fighter, but Dazai is not a twig that won't be able to lift a finger in a fight??? He does perfectly fine against Atsushi's tiger, running and jumping around,,, or in the Dazai's Entrance Exam novel where he was fighting that big buff guy - obviously he's not a martial artist so it would be quite hard to fight someone twice as big as you, but he still managed to hit him a few times with some tricks,,, also he's pretty athletic considering the way he escaped in the Dragon's Head Conflict (uhh sab u just started yapping sbout a completely different topic))

[seekingjamaharon]

I love the trope of Jim deciding to seduce Spock, but I also think a lot about an oblivious Jim who truly doesn't think Spock would ever be interested in him, but who's every action drives Spock closer and closer to an emotional meltdown

Spock suffering over the green shirt, the red tights, the dress uniform

Jim casually geeking out over some theory or scientific principle and Spock smitten over how smart he is

Spock abruptly having reports to analyze after Jim gets caramel sauce on his hands and sucks it off his fingers

Jim just being Jim: compassionate and brave and selfless and determined and kind, and he'll just smile at Spock and Spock knows it's a lost cause

[trekkele]

ok time to be negative again i cannot stand the trope “character x finds out bruce ““let”” his sons murderer live and chews him out then goes to kill joker” because 60% of the time its a character who has an independent no kill rule, and absolutely zero business yelling at Bruce about anything. Fuck ooooooffffff with the guilt tripping about bruce not committing murder!!!!!

[enchantrum]

Dragon Age fandom had its problems but at least almost everyone understood the usage of tags like "character critical" "character hate" etc and didn't just throw big tirades against characters in the public tags where their fans obviously hang out. and when they did do that even people who also hate the character told them to stop

BG3 fandoms treatment of tags is like "fuck around and find out" and then when OP finds out they cry that everyone is so rude and unfair. like bro you did the equivalent of walking into a clubhouse and telling everyone there you hate the thing the club is about????

yeah people are gonna call you dumb and tell you to fuck off

[mengyanchen]

wei daxun as meng yanchen, fireworks of my heart e02

[vegalocity]

The Dndads finale campaign was great and intense and i have ThoughtsTM but i have a personal subjective moral aversion to 'decades later epilogue where everything is great actually we promise' as a narrative device

therefore if i ever write anything post- Willy Death it will purpousefully and spitefully refute at least ONE thing from the epilogue because Anthony Burch will not All Was Well me

[stellerssong]

ok sorry the OTHER thing about lucienne is like. as previously stated she is dream's handpicked emissary from the waking world to the dreaming she's the diplomat in chief she's the translator she's the bridge. because the dreaming is, in a very real way, dream's own psyche, this is tantamount to giving lucienne a tremendous degree of access to his interiority and by transitive property also tantamount to entering into a deeply emotionally intimate relationship with her (unimportant for the purposes of this post whether that relationship is platonic or romantic).

now, in general, looking at the pattern of dream's close emotional relationships—dream doesn't share himself with people as a rule (beyond the access that all things that live have to the dreaming; but i'm talking about his self here, the one he doesn't like to acknowledge he even has), but when he does share with people, it's with people who have some shadow on the soul, so to speak. just looking at attested relationships in show canon, his deepest emotional connection seems to be with death, who embodies the duality of light and dark even better than he does himself. calliope is the muse of epic poetry—heroism and tragedy—and also bears the sort of divine pride that led her to cut dream off for hundreds or thousands of years when he wronged her. the less said about that other guy, the better, but he's no sunshine-rainbows-unicorns type—he's a soldier of fortune, a bandit and a killer, a man who profits from the sale of human life. even best bird matthew, in comix canon, had a sordid past that will maybe be partially retconned for the show but has still been gestured at.

dream likes the complicated ones. he's drawn to them. they speak to something in him that he won't acknowledge in himself (he has to be Whole, fully integrated, without reservation, because he is the king and he is the dreaming and if the dreaming ain't whole then the universe is in trouble—but he feels that ache nonetheless).

all that is to say: when people try to portray lucienne as dream's Designated Well-Adjusted Neurotypical Friend, i begin to harm and maim.

[ladsofsorrow24]

i think some of you are too used to genre conventions, you guys forgot to question the worldbuilding that many authors painstakingly made to question the subject of death and life in a more nuanced manner than just "wow resurrection is so romantic!"

[tanjir0se]

There’s always. A week. There used to be rengiyuu week but I haven’t seen anything about it and all the blogs that posted about it are long deactivated ..

Well I’m still here bitch!!!! When is Rengiyuu Wednesday week and what are y’all bringing to the potluck

[fitpacs]

?

[buildarocketboys]

Truly so uninterested in the opinion of people who don't really read fanfiction on fanfiction. Like, you think a fic with mpreg in it is crazy?? You'd shit yourself if you knew some of the stuff I've read/written/am casually aware of

[lord-squiggletits]

Idk if my previous posts were unclear but I don't remotely hate any Optimus version that isn't IDW or think they suck. Every Optimus is good and there's a fan (or multiple fans!) of every version of OP no matter how obscure or underrated (as well as all the other characters).

What's more questionable (or at least annoying) is when fandom ignores canon character personalities in favor of writing specific archetypes that are either out of character or repetitive/stereotyped to the point of annoyance. As an example of this, it would be a female character being called the Team Mom just because she's a woman existing in a group of (primarily male) characters even if she's not remotely motherly or nurturing. Or, as a more topical example, how often I've seen Transformers ships where even though both characters are canonically masculine (or gender neutral), fanartists love to turn one of the characters small and weak (or even outright feminine) to turn the ship into Strong Dominant Seme and Sweet Cute Uke to fit a specific kink or romantic fantasy, even if it's a disservice/OOC to portray those characters like that.

In other words, a fandom's popularity of certain characters, ships, headcanons, etc is often more informed by tropes and forcing canon to adhere to one's personal tastes, as opposed to approaching canon and trying to understand it on its own terms. I'm not talking about the quality of the source material, but rather the way that the fandom interprets the source materials in ways that don't make any sense, approach it in bad faith, or just generally don't care about canon at all. So I'm not saying one OP is better than another, my problem is when fandom consistently focuses on certain stereotypes or flanderizations of a character, and then any character that doesn't fit the popular (often stereotyped) mold is ignored or virulently rejected. In other words, I think popular fandom often does a DISSERVICE to characters whether they love them or hate them, it just takes different forms.

So, just as an example, I think one fandom caricature of Optimus that I see a lot (and heavily dislike) is making Optimus some sort of shrinking wallflower type who's innocent, sweet, and virginal, in contrast to an opposite caricature of Megatron that's big, strong, dominant, and rugged, and making ship art that forces the characters into some kind of seme/uke or borderline heteronormative romance. Despite the fact that canon Optimus (in, say, TFP for example) is tall, broadly built, deep voiced, dignified, assertive, and strong (physically and morally), completely incorrect interpretations of him as a shy feminized uke type are still pretty common to find. And it makes you ask yourself why it is so many people make MOP ship art of them of The Small One and The Large One or The Small, Cute One and The Big, Violent One when it's completely different from canon. It feels as if such fanart is made by people who just want to see seme/uke style slash ships, and if canon doesn't give them what they want, they'll simply trash it and replace it with their own version, even if it's completely OOC.

So when I said in my other post that people don't like IDW Optimus because he can't be fit into caricatures like happy dad or shy twink, I'm not saying it to say "other OPs who resemble that suck," I'm saying it to express "Fandom tends to simplify characters into easily palatable and comfortable tropes, and when they encounter a character they can't do that with, they respond by ignoring or even hating on that character."

Other versions of Optimus have the problem where fandom turns them into a stereotype instead of the actual character they are, e.g. portraying TFA OP as some poor abused damsel with no self confidence and crippling anxiety being abused by his superiors, and then they talk more about this fake uwu smoll bean cinnamon roll version of TFA OP than they do about actual canon TFA OP. And honestly I can't think of any prominent content/meta about G1 OP that isn't just "he plays basketball and does funny one liners and is Team Dad/Grandpa." (Hell, you even get that with non-Optimus characters that get simplified to just sexy twink, old grandpa, comedy relief, evil ex, Diversity Win-- She's A Lesbian, third wheel to the favored ship, etc even though there's way more depth to them than just their surface level stereotype.)

IDW OP's problem is that he can't be stereotyped like that so instead the fandom ignores him. He's not small, so they can't stereotype him as a skinny twink getting topped by a burly uke. He's not jovial or happy go lucky or extroverted, so they can't stereotype him as Team Dad or Comedy Relief. He's assertive, blunt, and has a temper, so they can't stereotype him as a shy wallflower in need of protecting. He makes catastrophic mistakes and is responsible for bad things happening, so they can't stereotype him into a sweet cinnamon roll who has never done anything wrong in his whole life or The Infinitely Wise and Kind Paragon. There's no Big Bad Authority Figure who was mean to IDW OP and traumatized him, so they can't excuse the bad things he did as "he's traumatized so he couldn't help it" and wave away his flaws as "it's his abuser's fault, they made him this way." IDW OP has the kind of depression where he's grumpy, shut off, and angry-- as opposed to the shy, sad kind of depression that just stares forlornly out of the window in a beautifully tragic way-- so they can't make him into a sad woobie kicked around unfairly by life.

Or I guess they just stereotype IDW OP as "evil bastard with no redeeming qualities that's mean to everyone for no reason, plus the writers forced everyone to like him just because he's Optimus Prime" even though that isn't accurate either.

Put bluntly, IDW OP forces fandom to contend with the idea that someone can be a good person with good intentions but still fuck up on a massive scale and maybe end up hurting more than they helped. IDW OP is messy, ugly, flawed, mean, stoic, closed off. When IDW OP has mental breakdowns or has his feelings hurt, he's loud and angry and harsh, and the consequences of what he did while he was unwell continue to haunt him long after. In other words, he actually experiences negative emotions the way a real person would, and sometimes when he's under the influence of negative emotions, he lashes out or does stupid things (like a real person might) instead of inoffensively crying in a corner somewhere. He isn't sanitized enough for a fandom that only wants Perfect Pure Good Optimus Who Never Hurts Anyone Even By Accident, so instead of IDW OP's mistakes and dark moments being treated as the logical end point of a person put in constant no-win situations until he breaks, he gets treated as if his mistakes and flaws make him an irredeemable bastard with no good qualities who should've fucked up less often to make fans actually like him.

And this is all in a fandom where 90% of the characters are war criminals and a good half of them have massacred organic planets. But god forbid IDW Optimus ever make a bad decision in a stressful situation. Or be mean to someone. Or have a character arc about how blindly idolizing people as paragons ends badly for everyone involved because no one can be that perfect. He is simply The Worst Optimus Ever and there's absolutely nothing about him worth discussing.

And just to be clear, the problem isn't the fact that some people don't like IDW OP, or he's just not their thing and they don't care.

The problem is the fact that he's consistently and actively hated by the fanbase who makes a concentrated effort to say he sucks and make sure none of their fan works ever include him. It's literally at a level where I stopped looking in the Optimus tag on this website because I was tired of people randomly going "and btw IDW OP sucks and I want to drown him in a ditch" in posts that weren't even about IDW, and I stopped looking for MegOP fic on AO3 because most of it is IDW Megatron/clearly TFP or G1 inspired continuity soup Optimus. Places that are Optimus friendly for Optimus fans, where I could reasonably expect to find positive conversations, but instead get sucker punched by hate about the character The Space Is About. And I can't even have conversations asking about why they do, bc the way 90% of them talk, I can tell they literally just didn't read the comics or deliberately misinterpreted the story.

I find it bizarre and frankly, tragic, that the hate train for IDW OP is so pervasive that people actively erase and replace him from fan works IN THE IDW UNIVERSE in a way that no other character is targeted in. I have tried so hard to understand why IDW OP gets this sort of hate and erasure when other characters who were as bad or worse than him have perfectly normal takes about them that go "yeah he kinda sucks but he's cool and I like him" or "who cares if he's problematic IRL, it's a story." The only conclusion I can come to is that because Optimus Prime (TM) has a specific brand image and is locked into being a cultural icon, he's held to a standard of The Ideal Perfect Hero instead of the way better standard of "Is he an interesting, well written character?"

[thelambthatkilledthewolf]

Sometimes being autistic makes being in fandom so annoying because I cannot stand people who don't interact with content the same way I do

Like yes, I do believe that everything is open to interpretation. I do believe that everyone should be allowed to ship whatever they want, because it's all made up and you should do what makes you happy

However

My interpretation is correct. My ships are correct. All other ships are disgusting. My headcanons are correct and if you don't agree with them or you have a headcanon that clashes with mine, I wish bug infestations in your house

I know these thoughts are wrong, and I'm being stupid. I know everyone is correct because there is no incorrect answer. But stupid autism dictates that it's MY hyperfixation, so I am automatically correct about it and everyone has to agree with me

I do not like the ship JonElias. I find it very icky. I think that people should be allowed to ship that, if that's what they're into. If I see it or hear about it though, I have to take several minutes away from the Internet and maybe scream a little because it makes me feel so icky. If you ship JonElias, it doesn't matter if you're a cool person or not, it doesn't matter if I have the tag blocked so I don't see it anyways, I literally cannot like you. It's so stupid. I could block a really really cool person just for liking a ship that I don't. It's ridiculous

I'm just. So damn annoyed. I feel bad for the mean thoughts I get about people who have different opinions than me, but I literally can't stop them. It's so frustrating

[lala-blahblah]

HMM uglies movie thoughts again. I like Laverne cox and I think she slayed as Doctor Cable, and I don't want to say this was a bad casting decision. But I will say that being familiar with her as a person , knowing she is a trans woman, and seeing her playing a character whose storyline is trying to force kids to get a surgery feels like it plays into right wing trans fearmongering in a kind of icky way? And I don't think this was intentional at all! I don't know if I'd even go so far as to say that this was a bad casting choice because in some ways it's empowering to see a trans women held up as an ideal beauty standard. But it's something I ended up thinking about the whole movie and I feel like it undermined the narrative it was trying to share.

On a more positive note, the uglies universe is a really interesting one to look at when it comes to trans folks though because they for sure would be allowed and accepted, and I don't think anybody would think twice about it. Its a future where everyone is expected to go through a major surgery anyway, like the pretty committee wouldn't care if you wanted more feminine features or masculine features or whatever, as long as you let them mess with your brain and turn you obedient they're happy! Which is kind of ideal for trans folks (minus brain washing of coursee). And the surgery isn't even fully a bad thing in the series. The Uglies universe is interesting because at first it really emphasizes how messed up beauty standards are and has commentary on intense plastic surgery just to like yourself. But (spoilers!) Tally never undoes the surgery afterwards. Like it happened but the focus is regaining her mind and her clarity, she never returns to her old face (and in a way she can't go back because she's changed too much on the inside anyway). So it's not like "in order to be your true self you must remain looking like you were" it's like "your true self is your thoughts and your appearance shouldn't define you" which to me still allows for room for that trans interpretation

Even after they "win" and stop the forced surgeries, in the following "extras" book that's set around a different character, people continue to get surgeries all the time, it's just more customizable and up to them. So body modifications are very normalized. I think there's nuance to it of course and there is still that underlying body horror element of all these crazy surgeries, but I do think it's neat to see a dystopian future that doesn't exclude queer expression. I think it would be interesting to follow a trans character in this universe... maybe not written by scott westerfeld but like, if a trans person has their oc and wants to write a little fanfic. I would read it.

[sorenlionheart]

i am dangerously close to making my own interpretation of superman

[zapsoda]

i like this video i love good faith criticism. i have a very different perspective on the show from this guy though because i dont remember shit about season 2, i remember a lot about season 3 because i binged it all at once and drew a bunch of fanart of the russian guy because i liked him a lot, and i didnt like season 4 that much.

atp the show has lost like 90% of what originally appealed to me and the rapidly expanding scale of the threat only furthers my disinterest. you already know that the finale has gotta trump all the others in every way it has to be bigger louder and gayer or whatever and i just dont really care.

i find incomprehensible cosmic threats far less interesting than the story of like. a mom and her sons friends and the freaky shit going on with them. yknow. still gotta watch the finale though what do you take me for. someone who only watches things that are good or interesting. what if a 20 year old Will idk how to spell his last name kisses a dude i gotta be there for that.