#the more anti bullshit i see the more i will continue to write meta and fic and contribute to fandom

[burst-of-iridescent]

i wish to formally thank all zutara antis for their service to the zk fandom, for nothing makes me want to stan zutara more than being told that i shouldn’t ❤️

[littleweowmeow]

I see you repost a lot of pro zuko post in the last weeks and I wanted to ask, have you notice how much more anti zuko post have been posted in the last months ? I don’t usually mind zuko metas but the last ones I’ve seen are sooooo full of bullshit, they’ll claim things that didn’t happen in the series or misinterpreting things, to make him appear more villainous or more unredeemable ? kind of weird.

i do understand that the sudden rise of zuko’s hate comes from fanon zuko who’s basically a whole ass new character and certainly not canon zuko, but it’s seriously annoying. like I feel that this happens also with Aang. he also gets shit on by soooo many people for the wrong reasons, always citing things that didn’t really happen (or at least not like it’s usually cited) and… is the atla fandom seriously regressing ? how is it possible to misinterpret things like that in a children show. ofc atla is pretty mature for a children show, but it’s also not some Faustian bible with hours long needed interpretation to understand something.

Oh, of course I noticed. Actually, I used to be a fan of reading canon/fanon Zuko comparison posts, but then I realized something. The people writing such posts (mainly Azula Stans) just took advantage of the hype around canon/fanon Zuko, and the one they call the "canon" Zuko is actually not Zuko from the series at all. Seriously, Zuko is much cooler than all this. In fact, this is just a covered-up hatred in order to expose their favorite (Azula) better than she really is, because of incorrect characteristics and other bullshit addressed to Zuko. In general, the tag "anti Zuko" is blocked because I will not tolerate this diarrhea in my feed, but it continues to appear. This is not a criticism or discussion at all, so it's not worth paying attention to.

It seems to me that Atla fandom has sunk to the point that when I see a person saying the right and ironically obvious things, I almost idolize that person because damn it, is there really a person with brains here. What is happening in the fandom is either a special incitement to hatred for God knows what reasons, or people are really degrading at the speed of light. I know that a lot of hatred for Zuko stems from the ship wars (it's just ridiculous), but there is another point. Due to Zuko, it is easier to put your favorite in a more favorable light (it does not matter what specific example we are talking about) For example, this idea that Zuko is a bad firebender is a lie hammered into his head by his abusive father and the show actively refutes this idea. Some people just benefit from picking it up, it's something like "woooo Zuko is a prince and he's had the best teachers all his life and he's still worse than the "character name". Although this is a complete discrediting of the facts and not a desire to take into account the fact that Zuko's mental problems had a strong effect on his bending. And of course this nonsense about him being bad because he's not a child prodigy. There are many such examples, some of them have become considered canon. For example, that he is bad at firebending and stupider than the rest. Now there is really a lot of mischaracterization and humiliation of Zuko, but this is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to make their favorite seem better. It's just not worth a drop of time.

About Aang, I don't often see content with him, but my God, the reason for almost all of Aang hate is the ship wars. I may be wrong, because I have never participated in ship wars, so this is just a look from the outside. I'm sure that Aang hate reasons are almost the same as what I said about Zuko.

[vmures]

Thoughts on Fandom Peer Pressure via Shaming and Bullying

There is a very loud subset of people in fandoms that are incredibly frustrating and hard to deal with--those who seem to think the best way to get what they want out of fandom is to harass, bully, shame, and intimidate others who do not interact with fandom in a way that matches their own. It's hard to know if their goal is to drive all other points of view out of fandom or to shame people into only interacting with fandom in a certain way, whether that's only writing certain pairings or tropes or only agreeing with their meta takes and headcanons.

You may notice that I kept that statement very broad, and I did so intentionally. Many will read this and go "oh great another anti/proshipper discourse take" and honestly, I think the problem is much broader than that because I have seen examples of the above that don't necessarily fit under the typical anti bullshit.

For example, fans of a canon character who dislike other's interpretations of said canon character's actions and bully and harass anyone who dares write their favorite in a way they disagree with. These folks will often co-opt anti tactics because they have seen how effective those tactics can be in driving people out of a fandom. So they'll label those with takes they can't stand as problematic in some form or fashion. Call them racist, ableist, sexist...insert -ist of your choice regardless of whether or not there is anything to support their claims. They'll bend over backwards to create support for their claims and twist the words of those who disagree with them and push back on their bullying.

But there is an outcome they don't consider, which is that they are actively making it harder for many in fandom to like that character because of their actions. There are plenty of studies that show that shaming is an ineffective method for changing behavior. Additionally, we know that shaming and bullying about a topic can lead to complex relationships with that topic. Shaming and bullying someone about their weight frequently leads to disordered eating issues and a rocky relationship with food and body image in general.

Being bullied and harassed over something that brings you joy can lead you to lose all interest in that thing. And if it is tied with a certain aspect of a thing, like a character in a fandom, it can lead you to hate that aspect more than anything and to associate that aspect with the bullies themselves.

When it comes to fandom, this plays out in many ways. Some will leave the fandom entirely, and, eventually, this will cause the fandom to shrink or die out completely. Some will just keep on keeping on and ignore the haters. Some will find themselves hating the character(s) and/or pairings that the bullies love to the point that they can no longer write those characters or pairings in a positive light. And the more they get harassed and bullied, the more they hate the character(s) and/or pairings. And even if they manage to block and mute all the bullies, the negative feelings about the bullies' favorites continue because those favorites are forever chained to the bullying they endured.

Even just seeing others abused and harassed in the name of defending a favorite character can result in people associating that character with bullies and abuse and thus cause them to form a negative opinion of the character. Fandom is a very social culture and the way fans act impacts the way other fans feel about the fandom and various aspects of it. Our fandom creativity is fed off of each other's ideas and takes. So if all we see of fans of a specific character or pairing is utter nastiness, then people will come to dislike it just because they associate it with that ugly behavior.

TLDR - If you bully others over a topic, you'll eventually cause them to associate the take you love with bullying and harassment and probably make more people hate that thing as a result. If you really want to encourage people to interact with fandom in a similar way as you do and to create fandom works that you love, you'll be a lot better off using encouragement and compassion.

[thevioletcaptain]

"The writers wrote this DeanCas scene / this queer Dean moment and then still called us delusional."

No, they didn't. But I'm sure as fuck calling you delusional right now for repeating this completely fabricated bullshit for the past decade without once stopping to wonder "but wait, which writer said that and when?"

Because if any of you had ever bothered to do that you'd realize that not a single one of the 52 credited writers of spn has EVER said anything remotely close to this.

Several writers have, in fact, said the opposite--and feel free to do your own homework on that, because the receipts are out there, and maybe if you dig them up yourselves you might actually pay attention--but people have been projecting and playing fandom telephone for so long that baseless bronly quotes have been falsely attributed to the people who were actively and deliberately writing this stuff into the bones of the show for years, and who eventually made it as canon as they possibly could within the confines of the network's grip on a dinosaur Bush-era TV show.

I swear this take was exhausting to see continually crop up when the show was still airing, and I've gotta say it's even more exhausting now because THE WRITERS UNEQUIVOCALLY WROTE IT INTO THE TEXT OF THE SHOW. AND THEY STILL HAVE NOT ONCE SAID THAT WE WERE DELUSIONAL FOR SEEING WHAT THEY PUT THERE.

For crying out loud the core emotional arc of the final goddamn season was Dean and Castiel's relationship.

Castiel flat out confessed his romantic love for Dean in a scene that was written first thing in the season, that was built toward with deliberate intent for multiple years. Through that confession the show retroactively confirmed that all of the subtext and parallels and on and on that meta writers had been pointing out for years was in fact exactly what we thought it was.

So unless you think that somehow we managed to be spot-on correct about everything on Cas' side but forgot how to interpret layers of text on Dean's side, you should be able to understand that we were given two equations and one answer.

1 + 1 = 2 is what they gave us for Castiel.

1 + 1 = ? is what they gave us for Dean.

If you think they did it by accident you're kidding yourself. If you think they left Dean's answer as a question mark for some malicious reason you're kidding yourself. If you think that "the writers" think we're deluded for reading into all the layers the deliberately included in the story then you're kidding yourself.

Quit uncritically spreading anti trash around like it's truth.

[popculturebuffet]

Uncle Scrooge by Don Rosa:  The Isle at the Edge of Time (Thank You Comission For Rosie Isla)

Hello all you happy people! Today’s review is a bit special as it’s the result of another review. See I had trouble finding a translation of the subject of last weeks’ mother’s day special, Family Ties. 

No not that one. I have Paramount+. I can watch all the Family Ties I want and that’s a fact that i’m pleased as punch about. 

No it was the story 80 is Prachtig, called Family Ties in the copy used, Della’s first major comics appearance and one that explains what happened to her in the classic continuity, one that clearly served as the foundation for her far more fleshed out 2017 versions personality and backstory. It also had Pinocchio in it for some reason, and spent most of it’s large run time on a meta comedy plot that had nothing to do with the reason anyone wanted to read this story in the first place.

But despite being a vitally important story, it never got an english translation, something that baffled me till I read the story and found cameos of the racist indigenous stereotypes from Peter Pan. In 2014. You may commence booing. Even with how weird the story was I simply couldn’t find the story googling it and the Della tag is too vast and deep to go spelunking in.

So what’s all this have to do? Simple I put out a post last month when neither I nor Kev, who wanted to comission it as part of Moons, Millionares and Mothers, my coverage of all three season 2 Ducktales story arcs, could find a copy and offered a review to whoever found it.  Weeks passed I got nothing.. then in the 11th hour I got a break as the lovely @rosieisla​ found a translation that was on this very site, one she seemed to have helped with. As a result I could do the review and as a man of my word, offered it up despite her clearly having not seen that part of the post and simply having done this to be nice. Still she gladly took up the offer and offered me my pick of two stories: The Carl Barks Story Back to Long Ago or this one. 

As for WHY I picked this one Back To Long Ago didn’t seem bad, i’m just not a fan of “The Cast is put in the past as their own ancestors” type deals. Or in some cases put the cast as people from that time period. It’s just not for me and is most often done in TV where it can get really goofy, Beverly Hills 90210 being a prime example of this, though Girl Meets World was no slouch in being embarassing... that being said I really need to finish that show and miss it. 

So yeah when put up against a story with two intresting hooks and FLINTHEART GLOMGOLD, even if i’ts not the version that’s my boy, it was no contest. So what are these hooks you ask? Well join me under the cut and find out. 

We open with a weird stylistic choice: This story has a narrator complete with caption boxes. Now for those of you familiar with comics or pastiches of comics in tv and film, this probably dosen’t seem like a big deal. It was a common thing in comics from their inception to 90′s to have caption boxes, big boxes of text narrating the action to help move things along faster. It did start to fade out by the 80′s and was gone by the end of the 90′s for the most part, replaced instead with first person narration. It’s the kind of thing you’d see most often in the Golden and Silver Ages, with stuff like tihs

It’s not a BAD device, it’s good old cheesy and bombastic fun and some writers did get clever with it.. like that time Chris Claremont used the narration to yell at a greiving cyclops after he lost a teammate early in his long and storied run on the uncanny x-men. 

This is a objectively weird scene that’s still somehow effective by the by. On the one hand it does come off as Chris Claremont essentally bullying Cyclops who already feels guilty for a death that was not in fact his fault as Thunderbird was told the plane he was attacking with fleeing villian Count Nefaria was about to explode and refused to listen.. and that they needed to get rid of either him or Wolverine as both served the same purpose and chose the non-white guy. 

On the other htough it comes off just as much as Scott beating himself up in his grief and anger over the event and his perceived failings as a leader. It’s good stuff and shows why this run caught on as this was only three issues in. Also the rest of the issue features the X-Men fighting a giant cyclopian demon that Cyclops accidently freed in his rage by destroying the stone thing keeping him imprisoned. No really here’s the cover

Huh so tha’ts what Nifty’s dad looks like. Neat. Also I REALLY hope we get the X-Men fighting aliens or demons in the MCU. Unlike the XCU the MCU isn’t alergic to getting batshit.. and for the record Deadpool and New Mutants are the exception, not the rule.

My point that I swear I do have is that this was common practice for most comics.. but never really for Disney Duck comics. It popped up ocasionally, like with Scrooge’s introduction, but Barks and those after him never really used them that much. Sure they’d have caption boxes for flasbacks and what not but Barks and Co geninely only used this sort of thing to set up a story. The most i’ve seen it in a duck comic is life and times and even then i’ts usually only used for gags or to set up the passage of time, as the story IS covering decades and thus often needed to have montages to show time passing, and in the case of chapter 11, had to cover decades in the span of a single chapter, so it’s not like they had many other options. So even Rosa as a personal quirk didn’t really use these often. 

Rosa used this specifically because he felt the plot was complicated by the use of the international date line. As for what it is, it’s essentially a line marking calender dates from one side of the hemisphere to the others. To use the offical defentition from the National Ocean Service I found via a quick google:

“The International Date Line, established in 1884, passes through the mid-Pacific Ocean and roughly follows a 180 degrees longitude north-south line on the Earth. It is located halfway round the world from the prime meridian—the zero degrees longitude established in Greenwich, England, in 1852.

The International Date Line functions as a “line of demarcation” separating two consecutive calendar dates. When you cross the date line, you become a time traveler of sorts! Cross to the west and it’s one day later; cross back and you’ve “gone back in time."

Despite its name, the International Date Line has no legal international status and countries are free to choose the dates that they observe. While the date line generally runs north to south from pole to pole, it zigzags around political borders such as eastern Russia and Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.”

Rosa felt this made the story complicated.... and that... really isn’t remotely true. The narration is mostly used for gagas and really dosen’t clarify anything. it’s mostly used well in the opening.. but the actual explinations for the date line are clear enough in the story that even if I hadn’t looked the thing up, I still would’ve got it and i’m sure a kid would’ve too. It just feels like a weird thing to ruminate on, especially because he’s got actual things to make up for: while to his credit the native american characters he cribbed from carl barks are sympathetic, their culture respected and treated decently and used for a green aseop, their dialouge is stitled and sterotypical something he dosen’t even comment on (And these trades ewren’t THAT long ago) 

And of course it dosen’t help that he dosen’t even comment on using a common device in american superhero boooks.. in the same volume where he ONCE again makes an unwanted and outdated diatribe about superhero comics. I’ll probably cover the Super Snooper Strikes again so I can throughly tear this apart but higlights include: Calling superhero comics “Unwanted” just because he dosen’t like them personally, when people like me would disagree and they’ve lasted through a LOT of highs and lows, outdately saying they took over the American market as the only suitable comics which while true for a TIME,but by 2015 when this book was printed is laughably out of date, as non superhero works like The Walking Dead, Saga, and Scott Pilgrim were massively popular, one of my faviorite comics that is entirely slice of life and would go on to bea huge hit, Giant Days, re-debuted that very year. He also has the fucking gal to insult The Uncanny X-Men by name and I swear to god I did not know this when I made those references earlier, but as you probably guessed REALLY god me livid. 

And this is just on his COMMENTS on the story I can’t imagine just how bad the content itself is and having read the first few pages which come off as Rosa using Donald to essentially do an “old man yells at cloud rant” about superhero comics, I really don’t want to. Might make htis a patreon exclusive or again would do it on comissoin. You all make the call.... the point is I don’t likes his elitist bullshit about superhero comics, and this is clearly something that gets my hackles up as I just spent a good two paragraphs of an entirely unrealted review yelling at the guy for it. I don’t like when he does this and this authors notes entirley felt like an excuse. I GET the dark age of comics were bad, they REALLY were that bad, but I will NEVER accept painting an enitre genre as bad just because one work in it is bad. And I wont accept it from someone who himself writes about an often throughly unlikeable anti-hero for a living.  Scrooge may not have a gun on his gun on his gun or get to stabbing or have pouches, but he DOES finacially abuse his nephew, scoff at people’s personal troubles, and often refuse to use his wealth to help others in general. So yeah in conclusion Rosa really needs to say less about this subject. 

Okay so where were we.. right the story hadn’t even started yet. Jesus. 

Okay so our story begins with the narrator. Whose going on about time and what not. The main point of this speech about time is that it’s night in Duckburg and Scrooge is going to bed as, even being the workhorse that he is, he can’t keep going 24 hours. While he’s snoozing though something major happens and it’s the hook that made me pick this story along with the international dateline one.. an island rises thanks to volcanic erruption.. and the lava is GOLD. That’s just pure unabashed classic Duck Stuff: a mysterious treasure or phenominon of gold bound to bring scrooge in. 

But Scrooge isn’t stupid: the sun comes up and the world still spins while he sleeps, so he set up a satalite to monitor for this sort of thing. The thing naturally goes nuts.. and even more naturally breaks down becasue Scrooge bought cheap parts. A nice gag and a fully in character way to bring our antagonist into the picture, as the Satellite of Loaded falls in the middle of South Africa... right on the property of my boy Flintheart Glomgold. 

This is something Rosa brought up in his commentary for the story i’d never thought about. It turns out Glomgold being a citzen of Duckburg WASN’T an invention of the original Ducktales but the comics: some overseas had understandably moved him from his home country of South Africa. Him bieing in the same town as Scrooge instead of half a world away allows for easier setups and more intresting ones.

Rosa however being obdient to Barks Version of things, ketp Glomgold in South Africa like barks did, which was an .. ifffy decision given Apartheid had JUST ended at the time of this story. Not so much in the reboot as not only had apartheid been long gone by the time of the reboot, but that’s more fair. Still we do get some gorgeous vistas as a result as Glomgold’s minon goes to look at it and finds it’s from McDuck Mining company... Glomgold’s reaction is obvious. 

So on that note we cut to Scrooge rushing to Donalds house and forcing him awake and not telling him anything at first. Look his Ducktales Counterpart straight up kidnapped his donald in my last review, I’d call this a win. He also tries to dress Donald while explaning both his panic to find the crashed satlitle and what it found: the golden island. The end result of him dressing donald is worth a chuckle

So after Donald puts his shirt and little hat on our heroes get rollin rollin rollin what keep rollin rollin rollin who to Manilla. On the plane we get the scene I mentioned: The boys make a quip about Scrooge having lost a day and the group go over the international date line. It’s a fun little scene especially Donald trying to get paid early at the end. Classic scrooge and donald stuff without the abusive undertones some of their classic stuff has. 

Meanwhile Glomgold works out the data and finds out about the gold island, and his excitement accidently wakes a giraffe outside.. welll it was nice knowing him, Giraffes are the deadliest species known to man.. here’s an educational video t back that up....

So at Manilla Airport, Scrooge finds out abotu the south african crash, figuring he’ll get a laugh out of glomgold being there ... only for Donald to spot the Jet. Scrooge figures this can’t be anything good... now come on man maybe he’s just promoting his energy drink. 

As super sayin god super sayian as my witness, I will never get tired of Ultra Instinct Glomgold here. 

Scrooge isn’t so nice about that though and figures he better find out if Glomgold knows about the island and bribes one of the fueling crew for his uniform. He sucesssfully eavesdrops on Glomgold talking to his pilot, finding out from him exactly WHERE the island is. He ends up hilariously botching the mission though: when getting ready to leave Glomgold complains abotu the price of gas and that naturally causes Scrooge, just as cheap, to join in... and Glomgold to find out it’s Scrooge. The two wrestle outside the plane but before this can progress to a game of Naked Robber an airport security guy comes up and Scrooge cleverly claims that Glomgold’s plane has an infestiation, requring it to be quanrantined and allowing Scrooge to jet on.. thoguh not with an actual jet. With Glomgold seemingly dispatched, he can afford to save some money and take his time with a seaplane and I know just the man for the job. 

Oh nope looks like he’s busy. So one time related rambles later we meet Keoki, their asian pilot from the tiny island of Wookawooka.. and no that’s not a real place i checked... and no Fozzy dosen’t own it his check bounced. That being said it is a very well done represntation of someone from a smaller country: he’s doing this job to try and bring money back home, but being a seaplane captain just isn’t enough and his island is dying. Scrooge naturally is about as sympathetic as you’d expect, having apparently never even heard of the idea of a bonus when Huey, Dewey or Louie suggests it. 

Even less suprising is that Glomgold streaks by in his Jet:turns out Manilla was already overun with the bugs Scrooge claimed and Donald rubs it in that had Scrooge got a JET this wouldn’t of been an issue. 

So Glomgold easily beats them there, and to add insult and actualy injury to a cash based one, our heroes get blasted by golden lava on the way in and crash. Should’ve gotten launchpad... got the crashing professional. Keoki is dispondent as this means his people are doomed. He also dosen’t know waht staking a claim is when Scrooge mentions it and the boys bring him up to speed with the poor guy saying he wish he could for WookaWooka. Donald also makes a valid point about how greedy and heartlress scrooge can be.. and really billiionares in general.

No no YOUR the Grouch who refuses to have one drop of emapthy. Donald’s just pissed at your general selfish and terrible behavior. 

Glomgold glomgloats and has seemingly won... but naturally that rant that seemed extranious at the time about the date line comes into play: turns out the Island is on it, and since glomgold put his marker int he west, Scrooge simply puts his in the east which is a whole day before. Now GRANTED there’s nor eal legal prescendice for the intetaoinal date line itself , as noted above... but there’s enough witnesses in Scrooge’s favor that it simply does not matter anyway. Scrooge SEEMINGLY wins.

But Huey, Dewey Or Louie instead backs another claim: Keoki’s from earlier. While it was made in gest, he and the others along with Donald back it as witnsses instad. WookaWooka is saved and SCrogoe ends the story yelling at the narrator.

Final Thoughts: Don Rosa.. did not like this story, feeling it wasn’t one of his best and apologizing for it. I however.. really loved it. It’s not PERFECT: the narration feels not entirely necessary and the gag isn’t as funny as he thinks, though the payoff of scrooge saying “it’s time for this story to end” is fucking hilarous. I also feel it’s a bit too compressed: the story is only 16 pages and was only THAT long because Rosa added a few for exposition, a worthy addition. This feels like one of his 30 page adventure stories but slightly crammed into half the length. I also feel the golden island bit was BADLY underused as it’s such a cool setting but barely shows up in the story. 

But despite that.. it’s still a fun story: as is standard for Rosa the art is gorgeous and the humor is great. And unlike some stories where Rosa casually ignores how terrible scrooge is, here it’s his own greed and hubris that do him in: had he actually agreed to help Keoki, the boys likey would’ve let him keep the island but his own cold refusual to be a human being does him in, just as his cheapness nearly did. Flintheart is also decent here.. not the deepest foe but frankly most classical duck antagonists really aren’t all that fleshed out, and we still get some good bits with him. The dateline bit, while telegraphing that it will be important, as I said REALLY isn’t that hard to understand. All in all while i’ll agree with Rosa this isn’t his BEST, it’s still a really damn good story and one he shoudln’t be ashamed of. 

Tommorow: Green Eggs and ham is back for some train shenanigans! Kay. 

Saturday: The Tom Retrospective returns for it’s last detour! Eclipsa and Moon team up to stop meteora but grapple with diffrent wants: One to save her daughter.. the other to stop waht she clearly sees as an out of control monster. The result.. will only lead to tragedy and a hell of a two parter. 

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But if you go up to 5 you get a guaranteed review of whatever you want every month, and will get me to my next milestone, which will give everyone including yourself a monthly public darkwing duck review, reviews of the two Ducktales minis’ I haven’t covered (Time is Money and SuperDuckTales) and a reivew of the Danny Phantom film the Ultimate Enemy. So please join today and if you cannot, like this review, subscribe and give me your opinions on it bellow. Or even if you can feedback is always appricated and I will see you at the next rainbow. 

[weirwoodking]

hi i was wondering if you would be interested in making a meta on the differences between show!sansa and book!sansa bc i know they changed a lot of her storyline but i don't understand why everyone hates on sophie turner? it can be short or inexistent meta if you're not up to it but i would be very interested to know what you have to say

I mean, the differences between the two are pretty simple. After season 4, D&D decided to cut Sansa’s book storyline, and replaced it with their own rewrite. This affected the plots of multiple characters, particularly Show!Theon’s and Show!Jon’s, but most of all, Show!Sansa’s, obviously. George himself has spoken on how much he hated what the show did with Sansa. He said in 2014 that he had “no idea what they were doing with Sansa or where they’re taking her storyline.”

I could go episode by episode and point out everything that’s wrong or is out of character, but it’s kind of useless. The show did not adapt books 4 & 5, it’s as simple as that, everything is different and feels like it’s out of character. For the first 4 seasons, I thought that Sansa’s story was handled fine (I haven’t watched GOT seasons 1-4 in over 4 years, so my memory is a bit foggy on the specifics tho). Sophie Turner isn’t exactly how I picture Sansa to look, but her acting was fantastic, especially for someone so young and for her first television role.

I personally haven’t seen people “hating on Sophie Turner”, but I’m not involved in the GOT side of tumblr, only the ASOIAF side, so I don’t see people talk about the actors that much. I do know that there are people in fandom (not just in the GOT fandom but in fandom in general) who will conflate actors with their characters. I have seen some toxic Show!Sansa stans do this with Show!Dany and Emilia Clarke (mostly last year). It seems to be more of a problem with female characters and actresses (‘cause sexism), and I think it’s really creepy and disturbing. Sophie Turner is not Sansa, so if anyone is “hating on her” because they didn’t like how the show changed Sansa’s story, that’s really fucked up. I don’t know much about the GOT cast, actually, I rarely watched interviews or behind-the-scenes videos. I don’t know if Sophie Turner has said that she likes the show’s ending or something like that, so if that was the case I could see people being critical of her opinion. But even if she did like the ending of the show and the way the writers changed her character after season 4, I still don’t think you should hate on an actor for that. Because the actors didn’t make the show, the showrunners did. It’s not on the actors to get everything right about their characters, it’s on the writers and directors to tell them the story and guide them through their acting. I don’t blame the actors for anything about GOT (no one should), I blame the writers.

What I find is the biggest problem about post-season 4 Sansa is how little regard they had for her character, while simultaneously claiming she was their favorite. I believe their exact quote was “Sansa was the character we cared about more than anyone”. Okay… then why did you cut her storyline? I feel like their whole “she’s our favorite character” act was more to try to defend against the criticism of the cutting of her storyline. What bothers me most is how they just casually threw her into the Ramsay plotline without thinking at all about what that meant. If you’re going to have one of the main characters of the show get serially raped, you need to think about what you’re doing and how to handle that horrific situation. In the books, the Jeyne Poole storyline is handled very carefully. The acts committed by Ramsay against Jeyne and Theon are never really shown, only implied, alluded to, or very briefly described. The show, on the other hand, explicitly showed Theon’s torture scenes, and made Ramsay a much bigger character in seasons 5 & 6 than he is in the books. I feel like they just used him for shock value, because so much of Game of Thrones revolved around shock value and in-the-moment reactions. I think they just saw Ramsay as a character they could turn into Joffrey 2.0, which is why they put Sansa with him. They didn’t care to follow Sansa’s book arc, they just wanted to continue the whole “caged-bird” thing with her, for shock value.

And to deflect against criticism, that’s why they made her so smart and powerful in the final few seasons. There’s next-to-no build up, no character development, no focus on her growth, the show just tells us that Sansa is the smartest character, and the audience is expected to agree. Because D&D did not care about showing her development. There’s a line in season 7, when Sansa and Arya kill Littlefinger, where Sansa says “thank you for all of your lessons, Lord Baelish.” And that immediately stuck out to me, because that sounds like something Book!Sansa would say. The show cut out Sansa’s Vale storyline, where she spends much more time with Littlefinger, and so… what “lessons” is Show!Sansa referring to here? They didn’t spend a lot of time together in the show. I do think that Sansa will defeat Littlefinger in the books, so that line makes sense for Book!Sansa.

What they did was cut Sansa’s storyline, throw her into a horrific situation that they used for shock value, and then expected to be praised when they made her a “girlboss” later on. They basically said “hey, we know we essentially erased this character’s arc and development, but at least we did a feminism, right?” And that’s what really pisses me off. The blatant disregard for female characters, then saying “no, we do care about them! Believe us!”

Lindsay Ellis has a really good video called “Woke Disney” that touches on this. Basically, she talks about how Disney’s recent live action remakes tend to make each of the princesses a “#girlboss” in a very corporate, fake-feminist manner that is very easy to see right through. (I recommend just watching the video, she goes more in-depth into the subject.)

A similar thing occurred with GOT (the show only had one female writer after season 4, by the way, who was a staff writer for season 8. And before that, only 4 episodes were written by a woman). D&D wrote a lot of problematic, misogynistic, homophobic, and racist things. Then they tried to cover that up with (to use a line from Ms. Ellis) a coat of #girlboss paint. For example, I remember after s8e3 (when Arya killed the Night King) came out, that was when the big criticism for season 8 really started. People saw how bad the writing of that episode was, and how ridiculous and anti-climactic it all felt. However, when people criticized the manner in which the Night King was killed (i.e. saying that it would have made more narrative sense for Jon to do it instead of Arya), there was another group of people who called that criticism sexist. “That’s sexist! You’re just upset that a girl did it instead of a guy!” Which… ugh... do I need to explain how idiotic that line of reasoning is?

And that’s kind of how the HBO show tried to get away with its misogyny, not just the misogyny of Dany’s ending, but of the whole show in general. “Look, we can’t be misogynistic, we had Arya kill the Night King! Look, we can’t be misogynistic, we had Sansa become a #girlboss!” Bullshit, you’re just trying to hide your sexism and bad writing behind a facade of fake feminism.

… *sigh* ...

Anyway, nothing but love for Book!Sansa, and nothing but hate for the writers of Game of Thrones. I hate how the show turned Sansa into a very polarizing character, when she shouldn’t be. None of the child characters of ASOIAF should be polarizing, they’re children for fucks sake.

I’m very excited to see where GRRM takes Sansa’s character in TWOW, I feel like she’s got an awesome journey coming up (hopefully involving her discovering her skinchanging powers, taking down Littlefinger, and heading north for home). 

Uh, wow, this got really long… and I’m exhausted after thinking about the sh*w that much. Here, as a treat for reading all the way down to the bottom, have a Sansa WIP drawing that I haven’t finished yet:

[cornfedcryptid]

This will quite literally be the only post I make in terms of the current fandom drama in DA, that only came to be after seeing this post @kunstpause posted as well as what @wardenari tagged me in and the mass of new followers I have gained from it. I only know bits and pieces of what's going on, only by those I know who are directly effected by it...so what I'm about to say may be the wrong thing to say or fall short of my intended plan.

I'm conflicted as to whether or not I should put all of this under a 'Read More' or not...or even if I should post this...or even if I should add my voice to the sea of voices, inevitably shining the light on me as well. Ah well.

Regardless what I'm about to say may be triggering to some people as it involves suicidal thoughts.

Dragon Age was first introduced to me by my 'ex' a number of years ago. During this time I was at the lowest point of my life, off and on anti depressants and ADHD meds left at right, in the vain hope that my 'ex' and I would become more than what we were. Those that are on the types of medications that alter the state of your mind know that shit ain't something you go off and on of at whatever whim strikes your fancy. To this day I can't remember 99% of what happened between when I was 24-28ish. But I digress.

At that time, I had no access to internet and only had the DA games on PS3. In them I was able to escape from the nagging voice in my head that told me everything would be so much easier if I killed myself. It's been a voice that's been following me around for over 15 years. But when I played Dragon Age it was quiet. I was able to pretend I was someone I wasn't. Happy. Whole. Not a waste of space. Loved unconditionally. It was a stark contrast to the life and relationships around me.

Once I had some semblance of internet access, I had come back to tumblr after being away a few years and fell into the fandom. It was my first ever experience in a fandom, and I had so much fun hanging out in the fringes reading what people wrote, seeing what they drew, the meta posts...all of it. It was as if I had found a safe haven from the bullshit of my life. Even met some amazing people whom I still cherish to this day, regardless of whether not if I still talk them.

Dragon Age became my oasis in the shitstorm of mental health that is the fall/winter months for me. It's become an oasis for many people, young and old. Telling someone what they can and can't do in terms of self-care is no different than any person who's offered unsolicited advice on how to deal with your mental health. It's lowkey downright insulting.

The whole reason why I'm making this post is because I am a 30 year old woman who has ADHD, and upon seeing the post while I was initially angry at the utter shittiness of the asks and disregard towards those of us with ADHD, Aspergers, and those of us that are older, I am more disappointed and sad for the person who felt the need to send them...and every other person involved in spreading the hate. I'm saddened because life, the world, those who raised them, etc. have been so unkind as to teach them that this is okay to do for whatever reason and/or the only response to something they don't agree with. The world's already a fucked up place. The pandemic only compounding it...and I understand the need to direct that feeling of hopelessness, stress, etc. upon something. But not like this. This is just hateful, toxic, and solves nothing. I understand it is easier to go this route...to direct the negative shit in/around you at someone else. It can feel cathartic. But all this does it help keep the ball of negative emotions, thoughts, whatever you want to call it within you where it grows like a cancer.

I should know...I did it in the past. I had left the fandom for the most part a couple years ago, and when I came back I saw the person who was a source of my anxiety, reason for leaving out of fear, self-doubt, and things I do not wish to divulge was still around and a prominent face. I was angry that this person got to continue doing what they were doing while I and others dealt with the effects of their insecurities. And I was scared because I feared them sending a witch hunt after me because they didn't want to see me in their space. I helped feed into the idea of calling this person out and exposing them for what they were because they had their claws in someone else. To this day it is still something I deeply regret. Not only for the stress it caused on those associated with that person, but because it marked the beginning of the end of a friendship with a person I dearly love. Because by feeding into it we let the tumor that was our anger and insecurities grow to the point it consumed us.

We were fortunate this never gained any real traction and therefore we didn't suffer any outward consequences of it. But just because it didn't go anywhere/had no real effect, doesn't mean there weren't prices that were paid.

But let me also be very clear this does not mean I do not think any of the people spreading the hate and anything else in The Mess(in all its variations) shouldn't be held accountable. We are all responsible for our actions and must hold accountability for ourselves. We must also each be aware that just because something someone has made or thinks doesn't agree with our beliefs, religion, etc. does not mean they are inherently wrong(with a few exceptions. But that is besides the point)...as well as if something goes against any of the stated above and is therefore something we can't or won't interact with doesn't mean that is universal. That type of thought is no different than...well, the Trump supporters a majority of tumblr makes fun of.

And I know taking accountability is hard. No one wants to admit they're at fault, and that it's easier to come up with a continuous list of reasons why we're right and they're wrong, even if they're ludicrous. We have been taught that in doing that it is no different than signing your own death warrant, that there is no chance at redemption. It took me a long time to realize that I played a part in the cancer that infected my friend and I. Even typing this out I feel at unease writing this on the off chance they see this and have all of that shit brought back to the forefront.

But from the sea of voices that are speaking, I do not think there is one that is speaking to you that was in a similar situation. That knows how hard it can be to just be 'Yup, I fucked up. I see that now and I'm sorry. I will try harder in the future. Please bear with me because this isn't easy for me.'

But it's okay to admit when you're at fault, because you'd be surprised at the number of people that are forgiving and understanding once you do. It's okay to let go of the negativity and anger. Don't use it as a shield, you'll only burn yourself in the long run. Don't let your ego control you. It'll only be your downfall.

And to the person I have mentioned in the paragraphs above: If you see this, I am sorry. I see now that I let my anger and fear feed into the cancer that fucked us both, and helped ruin our friendship.

[incarnateirony]

You didn't ship Destiel until S13!? That really took me by surprise! In that case, thank you for defending the ship even if you didn't ship it, that's really nice and your meta made it easier to deal with the antis. And welcome to the Destiel side of the force! :)

Yeah, several people -- @dotthings off the top of my head, I really don’t remember who else -- literally witnessed the screaming fall into the dumpster.

Again, I really don’t know if I still consider what I do ~shipping.~ I have no specific demands for how their relationship continues from here, I just acknowledge it within the work. The difference that hit in S13 was welcoming that content instead of guarding myself against it because we got slammed with several consecutive bookends that completed an entire romantic arc and punctuated it with a far more impacting mirror of an endgame that didn’t even have said romantic arc to begin with, in Swan Song, so like??? what am I supposed to do? Just ignore it? Act like I can’t understand what just happened in front of me?

To put some perspective, I’ve been running SPN games for... a while. My most recent one was on a discord server that’s niche, but my prior one was on a giant multifandom server. I covered for Cas to keep his power levels in check to the story balance without like, making the humans irrelevant. My Dean at the time was hardcore shipping trash. His name was Chris, he was a bisexual dude in Chile, psychologist, good dude. But like??? it deadass annoyed me? How up Cas’ ass his writing was? The shippers that came in actually kinda annoyed me with trying to matchmaker them in game??? Like. I saw it, but I guess it’s the old “That’s not what the show is about” (which unlike how fandom whips it around, doesn’t mean it can’t exist at all, it’s the obsessive tunnel visioned focus that pissed me off because it kept railroading scenes)

But despite that, during and before it, I was yeah, defending it. Just because I wasn’t an active ~shipper~ didn’t mean I was cool with people stomping on people for very reasonably seeing the stuff my last post mentioned. I just kinda kept myself from investing because I know this old media song and dance too well and didn’t expect it to break, say, S10 levels. And then 11 happened. And then 12. And then--

Because no matter what this fandom says, Castiel’s alien mystified staring at Dean, while great chemistry in old seasons, does not actually compare to things like frequent lunch dates, need and love yous, mixtapes, Eileen being Sam’s Cas in 15.09 and so on. In the actual, not-head-up-ass-about-old-rewritten-content-meta’ed-15-times-over often fused to really bad hot takes on what people call queer coding. But I could respect that, say, the ramifications of swapping Cas and Anna roles to keep Misha around while Julie was bouncing out and getting uncomfortable naturally landed Cas in the hero’s journey goddess role, ala princess Leia if you will, the distressing warrior nondamsel rebelling against the empire and whatnot. But that doesn’t start or end at star wars, that’s thousands of years of human writing.

So while yes, the show heavily stripped the actual content that would have traditionally structured it romantic, people like seeing that x their chemistry early on-- not crazy.

And I defended it for years /to my wife/ despite my server vexations. On this giant dozens-of-thousands-of-users multifandom server not connected to any core fandom spaces and hosting innumerable fandoms and walks of life, I was the oddball out -- me. As a nonshipper annoyed by the crowd, often having 20-30 people logged into my channel at a time playing everything from early Cain to Benny to TFW to Wayward to *throws dart at board* whatever, of the hundreds of names that drifted through the game in sum (including player rotations, OCs and audience that just came to watch/read like a fic), you know how many antis we had?

Three.

One was my wife. so removing her, two.

Do you know how many shippers there were? 

Yeah neither do I, just, “pretty much all of them.” a few hung in “see it, don’t care, moderately annoyed” like I did. But this idea that the GA is a bunch of het-guzzling bozos that can’t do the same basic math all of you fucking did before you got here, just because some other dead-ass irrelevant ship composed entirely on leftfield interpretations to validate niche fandom ships -- that shit’s so far fucking divorced from goddamn reality.

As for my wife, yes. She was an anti. In fact long before I wandered into fandom social media (I think I actually jumped in around S12 bc I saw Dabb taking over and Bobo getting promoted and was interested in Yockey-- Yockey was the first person I tweeted at), I was on these servers, running these games, having these ARGUMENTS with my wife to be quite honest, because like, look, I get it, Destiel fandom can be weird and needy and over the top but they’re not crazy for what they see out of it. By Carver era it was classic subtext.

But she had followed Winbros for years not realizing it’s literally run by the real world becky and her BFFs that have tasteful POVs like “Misha Collins is cancer” “Dabb is a disease” and whatever else on their personals that proxy through their posts and motivations. She attended it on Facebook, which is THE goddamn conservative magafarm asshole platform and yeah, read a lot of shitty arguments. Yes, she picked up sayings like “it ruins the show”. Yes, she hated it. No, that didn’t mean I felt anyone deserved more than mild frustration for their behaviors at the time just because they were stuck in fanfic-shipping-fiction-over-romanticised-land and not canon-divergent-show-genre-complex-interpersonal-relationships fiction. 

She, too, cracked about the same time I did. I was more receptive sure, I saw it more sure, but after a mix of addressing some personal problems, making an OC that completely changed how her perception filtered Dean and Castiel working together, whatever-- and yes, 12.19->13.5. The night of 13.5, the final shot, as the screen went dark, she stared over her phone and, with tonal distaste, said “Oh. So they’re going there.”

Yes, it’s that fucking obvious. No, she didn’t admit that’s what did her in. Not until the end of the season, when she admitted she had been bullshitting arguments since early season 13 because, literally, and I quote, “otherwise Min wins.” -- which, if that comes by way of my own wife, I can only stare into the fandom camera at other people that have turned this show into a decade long money sink and have been divorced from the actual canon path for like minimum 3 years, maybe 6, yelling about it being wrong all the time, etc. Because on the internet, people convince themselves they have ownership and power, that their opinion of what the piece should be overrides even the creators, et cetera. Yeah. There’s a lot of disingenuous horse shit.

TLDR my wife fell into the dumpster and, as the flag of the end of our weird spats, and a birthday present, I made her this, since she IDs as Dean (OLD vid, has hiccup issues newer ones don’t)

So, yup, dat me.

To this day I still don’t read fanfics or browse fanart or any of that. I’ve never cared about that face of the fandom. I’ve never cared about making up rando ships, I’ve never cared about exactly how any given relationship plays itself out, I just enjoy the ride and address it as it does indeed play out. Most shipping culture still pisses me the fuck off with its dialogue, as I’ve made very clear. But because I’m acknowledging the text instead of denying what keeps happening more centrally and critically every year on screen, I’d be called a shipper. Because I’m tired of watching people spew logic even most children could pick apart in an endless roundabout of negativity, because I have no tolerance for absolute horse shit and fandom whining so I just lay out counters to bad talking points, I’d be called a shipper.

But 13.5ish is when I finally let myself start emotionally receiving the content rather than barring it off in a distant wall of exhausted old gay that knows their media too well. Why? Because it already completed and went above and beyond every element of the original way they painted the original goddamn endgame and I guess because I won’t set unfair bars against queer relationships and set them at Extra Hard Difficulty, I’m a shipper. IDK. This fandom fucking exhausts me. Fandom culture in general exhausts me.

[racefortheironthrone]

Have you seen Captain Marvel? Thoughts?

thoughts on captain marvel?

Have you seen Captain Marvel?

Have you seen Captain Marvel yet?

Given all your great People’s History of Marvel stuff lately, I assume you’ve been asked already, but any Captain Marvel thoughts you can share?What did you think of Captain Marvel?

Ok, ok already, I’ll write the post!

Full Spoilers Below

I really liked it! As solo origin movies go, it was definitely one of the better ones; personally I’d put it up there with Doctor Strange in how it deals with bringing some big new ideas into the MCU, while having way higher expectations than that film ever did. (Also, I want to plug my colleague @elanabrooklyn‘s podcast episode about the film, which you should listen to while reading this.)

Things I Liked:

I thought the amnesia/false memories plot was a great way to wrong-foot the audience who’re used to superhero origin stories (the good guys are the bad guys, the bad guys are the good guys, Vers is Carol) which worked hand-in-glove with the film’s broader thesis about gender: that male dominated institutions are not just going to try to exclude or diminish you, but also gaslight you about who you are, what strength looks like, etc. to get you to comply. “What was given can be taken away”/”““Don’t let your emotions override your judgments.” are the key throughlines here, a great example of how the writers are taking worn-out Hero’s Journey tropes and flipping them on their head. 

I really liked the twist on Mar-Vell. It makes the origin story less of an accident and more of a choice, and I’m always in favor of more active protagonists; there’s really no reason why the Space Alien Defector from Decadence couldn’t be a female scientist instead of a male warrior; and it both honors the original (that no one really cared about, tbh) and surprises the hardestcore of fans. Also having the light speed engine be the Tesseract is a good way to incorporate Captain Marvel into the broader MCU without needing to explain a brand-new source of wibbley-wobbly. 

The war metaphor. There was a lot of handwringing before the film about Captain Marvel being pro-military propaganda, because of the Air Force deal that had been worked out. As I suspected going in, the film is a very sneaky subversion of that, with the Kree Starforce being a very clear stand-in for the U.S. Military. The surface level analogy is that the Kree Starforce is a male-dominated institution that tries to gaslight and prevent Carol from reaching her true potential just like the Air Force tried to do, but it goes deeper than that. The whole first act of the film sets up the Starforce as Seal Team Six equivalents - a highly-trained special forces group, fighting an enemy explicitly described as terrorists, but trying to do it in an efficient/precise way that makes them the good guys as opposed to Ronan’s carpet-bombing Accusers - which is a narrative we’ve been conditioned to accept since 9/11 through films like the Hurt Locker/Green Zone/Zero Dark Thirty/etc. However, the second and third acts reveal that’s total bullshit. The Starforce try to kill civilians, do kill their own people to get their hands on military intelligence, and are perfectly happy to carry out the Supreme Intelligence’s imperialist total war, and their supposed commitment to precision and avoiding collateral damage goes out the window the moment it’s the least bit inconvenient. 

Seeing Carol Danvers in the Jamie McKelvie suit - fauxhawk and all - blow through an alien warfleet whooping with joy made me ferklempt a little. I think that moment will only grow with time as something on par with the first time that Iron Man does the superhero landing or “I’m always angry” as genuinely worthy of the term iconic. 

EDIT: Forgot about Goose. Cute, funny, and instantly wins over the cat-lovers in the audience. I imagine the dog-lovers out there will want a much bigger role for Cosmo in Guardians 3...

Things That Surprised Me

I was genuinely surprised at how good the de-aging CGI has gotten. Coulson looked slightly waxy, but there was a real performance in Samuel L. Jackson playing not just a younger Nick Fury but a younger Nick Fury who is very specifically Samuel L. Jackson in the Long Kiss Goodnight. I have no idea what this means for the future; are we going to see the original Avengers forever, just with more and more de-aging GCI slapped on them? If only for salary and contract reasons, I doubt it’ll go beyond the realm of cameos and secondary performances, but it’s a nice way to try to maintain continuity as the MCU ages into its second decade.

The Skrulls. I had thought that the anti-war message was going to be more of a Kree-Skrull War plague-on-both-your-houses thing, but turning the Skrulls into the equivalent of Syrian refugees totally blindsided me. It’s an incredibly gutsy move, and I’ll echo what @giveamadeuschohisownmovie said about the brilliant bit of culture-jamming that is casting it-bad-guy Ben Mendelsohn as “the lead villain” and Jude Law as “the wise mentor,” judo-flipping audiences with our own expectations about recent films, the hero’s journey, and how we should feel about aliens who look like the Skrulls and aliens who look like us. That being said, part of the reason why it’s a gutsy move is that it precludes a lot of possible stories: I don’t think you could do a Kree-Skrull war, or a Secret Invasion movie, or a Super-Skrull movie after this, given the way that the film deconstructed the entire notion of Skrulls-as-heel-species. 

Things I Could Have Used Even More Of:

While I totally understand the pacing reasons why they didn’t do this, I kind of wish there had been more time to do some road-trip banter between Nick Fury and Carol; give Nick a chance to introduce the alien to 90s music and fast food, crack some meta jokes about Pulp Fiction, etc.

I also could have used some more banter with the rest of the Kree team. I think some stuff got cut here, because there’s definitely some shots from trailers of the team walking down a hallway and staring down Ronan coming the other way that didn’t make it into the film. As a result, Carol’s team turning on her and her fighting back doesn’t have as much emotional weight.

Finally, and this is a really small nit-pick, but a bit more budget spent on the CGI during the Supreme Intelligence scenes would have gone a long way. Annette Benning’s dual performance was so good that the slightly dodgy mirror tendril stuff stood out in a negative way. Or just don’t do the mirror tendril stuff and double-down on the memory-warping or dueling beams stuff, which worked much better. 

[dillydedalus]

what i read in march

several antigones & some other stuff

call me zebra, azareen van der vliet oloomi

oh boy. i really wanted to like this one, but uh. nah. so this book is about zebra, a young iranian-american from a lineage of ‘autodidacts, anarchists and atheists’, still traumatised by her childhood experience as a refugee (incl. her mother’s death on route). when her father dies years later, zebra decides to retrace the route of her exile thru barcelona, turkey, and back to iran. this sounds great! the beginning is good! but zebra is a quixotic figure (don quixote is unsubtly flagged as THE intertext several times), delusional about her own importance, obsessed with some kind of great literary mission and obnoxious & condescending & egotistic as all fuck (she looks down on students but treats her realisation that like, intertextuality is a thing, as this grand revelation when like..... we been knew since Lit. Theory 101) - and this is intentional & part of the quixotic thing & in general i approve of abrasive & bristly & difficult female characters BUT i expected there to be a gradual process of realisation where she sees that a) maybe her entirely male lineage of geniuses ain’t all that, c) her mission is uh.... incomprehensible. instead, once she reaches spain, she gets bogged down in endless pretentious bullshit and a #toxic relationship that takes up way too much space. knowing that all of that is likely intentional doesn’t.... make it good. also the writing is pretty overwrought for the most part & not even your narrator’s voice being Like That excuses plain bad writing, like the  absurd overuse of ‘intone’ and ‘pose’ as dialogue tags. i see the potential and i see the point & i liked some of it but uh. not good. 2/5, regretfully, generously

in the distance, hernan diaz

i don’t really go for westerns or man vs wilderness stories but damn i’m impressed. despite the violence & deprivation and sheer amount of gross shit, this story of a swedish immigrant getting lost in the american west for decades remains at its core so human, so tender, so sad (honestly this book is SO SAD, yet sometimes oddly hopeful), so evocative of isolation, loneliness, and the desire for human connection. 4/5

notes on a thesis, tiphaine rivière (tr. from french)

god, if i ever considered doing a phd i sure don’t anymore. this is a short graphic novel about a young woman’s descent into academic hell while writing her dissertation about labyrinths in kafka. it’s funny, the art is expressive and fanciful, and it is incredibly relateable if you’ve ever tried to actually write your brilliant, glorious, intricately constructed argument down, battled uni administration or had a panic attack over how to phrase a harmless email to a prof. Academia: Not Even Once. 3.5/5

red mars, kim stanley robinson

this is a very long hard sci-fi novel about mars colonisation & terraforming, discussing the ethics of terraforming, the potentials of a truly ‘martian’ culture, and how capitalism will inevitably fuck everything up, including outer space. all of this is up my alley and i did really like the first half (early colonisation efforts), but the 2nd half (beginning of terraforming, lots of politicking) was a slog - i liked reading about how terraforming was going, but the rest was just bloated, scattered and confusing. also there’s a tedious love triangle the whole time. 2/5

dragon keeper (rain wild chronicles #1), robin hobb

i love robin hobb she really can write a whole 500+ page book of set-up, characterisation and politicking and make it WORK. anyway, this has disabled dragons, a quest for mystical city, lots of rain wilds weirdness, a dragon scholar in an unhappy marriage, liveships, a sweet dummy romance, and uh... a lil penpalship between two messenger bird keepers? not much happens but it’s so NICE & so much is going to happen. also althea & brashen & malta turned up & i screamed. 3.5/5

season of migration to the north, tayeb salih (tr. from arabic)

this is a seminal work of post-colonial arabic literature, a haunting tale of the impact of colonialisation, especially of cultural hegemony in the education system, the disturbing dynamics of orientalism and sex, and village life in a modernising post-colonial sudan. it’s important, it’s well-written, it’ll make you think, but fair warning, there is a lot of violence against women - it has a point but still uh... wow. 3.5/5

dune, frank herbert

SOMETIMES.... BOOKS THAT ARE CONSIDERED MASTERWORKS OF THEIR GENRE.... ARE WORSE. so much worse. the writing in this is atrocious (”his voice was charged with unspeakable adjectives”), herbert somehow manages to make court intrigue and plotting UNBELIEVABLY DULL and sure, it was the 60s, but i’m p sure people knew imperialism was bad in the 60s! the main character, the eugenically-engineered chosen one or whatever, literally spends years among the oppressed & resisting natives of a planet ruled by a space!empire and at the end he’s like ‘i own this planet bc imperialism is Good Actually’. emotionally neglecting/abusing your wife, who you (!!!) decided (!!!) to marry for political reasons bc you’d rather marry your gf is also Good Actually (cosigned by the protag’s mother....) the worldbuilding is influential for the genre, sure w/e, but mainly notable for there just.... being a lot of it, the whole mythology-science makes No Goddamn Sense, all around this is just Bad. Bad. 0.5/5 i hope the Really Big Worms eat everyone 

dragon haven (rain wild chronicles #2), robin hobb

this healed my soul after toxic exposure to dune. anyway w/o spoilers: everyone is very much In Their Feelings (including me) and there’s a lot of Romance and Internal Conflict and Feelings Drama and Complicated Relationships and Group Dynamics and also dragons, which are really like very big, very haughty cats who can speak, and a flood and a living river barge with a mind of his own (love u tarman!). it’s still slow and languid but so so good. also: several people in this have to be told that People Are Gay, Steven, including Sedric, who is himself Gay People. 4/5

an unkindness of ghosts, solomon rivers

super interesting scifi story set on a generation ship with a radically stratified society in which the predominantly black lowerdeckers are oppressed and exploited by the predominantly white upperdeckers, mixed in with a lot of Gender Stuff (the lowerdeckers seem to have a much less stable and binary gender system than the upperdeckers) and neuroatypicality. it’s conceptually rich and full of potential, but just doesn’t quite stick the landing when it comes to the plot. 3/5

sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass, bruno schulz (tr. from polish)

more dreamy surreal short stories (ish?). i didn’t like this collection quite as much as the amazing street of crocodiles, but they are still really good, even tho you never quite know what is going on. featuring flights of birds, people turning into insects, thoughts about seasons and time, fireman pupae stuck in the chimney, and the continuing weird fixation on adela the maid. 3.5/5

angela merkel ist hitlers tocher, christian alt & christian schiffer

a fun & accessible guide to conspiracy theories, focusing on the current situation in germany and the current boom in conspiracy theories, but also including some historical notes. i wish it had been a bit less fun & flippant and more in-depth and detailed bc it really is quite shallow at points, but oh well. also yes the title does indeed translate to ‘angela merkel is hitler’s daughter’ so. yes. 2.5/5

the midwich cuckoos, john wyndham

fun lil scifi story in which almost all women in sleepy village midwich are suddenly pregnant, all at the same time. the resulting children, predictably, are strange, creepy, and possibly a threat to humanity. i get that it was written in the 50s but it is strange to read a book where almost all women, and only women, are affected by A Thing, but all the main characters are men & no one tells the women ‘hey we think it’s xenogenesis’ -  like realistically 80% of women affected went to the Neighbourhood Lady Who Takes Care of These Things like ‘hello, one (1) abortion please’ and the plot just ended there. i still liked it tho! 3/5

antigone project

antigone, the original bitch, by sophocles (tr. by fagles)

god antigone really is That Bitch. that’s all i have to say. 4.5/5

antigone, That Bitch but in french, jean anouilh

the Nazi-occupied france antigone. loved the meta commentary on what tragedy is and how antigone has to step into the Role of Antigone, which will kill her “but there’s nothing she can do. her name is antigone and she will have to play her part through to the end”. i didn’t really like (esp. given the ~historical context) the choice to make creon much more sympathetic, trying to save antigone’s life from the beginning. hmm. 3.5/5

antigonick, anne carson

look, antigone really is That Bitch and you know what? so is anne carson. best thing i’ve read so far this year, don’t ask me about it or i’ll yell the task of the translator of antigone at you. 5/5

home fire, kamila shamsie

honestly i really wanted to like this bc politically it’s on point and an anti-islamophobia antigone sounds amazing, but it just doesn’t succeed as a book/adaption. it spends way too much time in build-up/backstory (the play’s plot only starts in the second half of the book!), waaayyy to much time on the weirdly fetishistic antigone/haimon romance, and even the most interesting characters (ismene & creon) don’t fully work out. sad. 2/5

currently reading: the magic mountain by thomas mann, but i should be done in a week or so! also: the paper menagerie by ken liu, a collection of sff short stories

[corseque]

I wanted to publish/answer the asks I got because of the bullying thing because they made me emotional and I’m really grateful to you guys. like, genuinely, I was overwhelmed by the support that day, and I’m feeling 100x better about the whole thing now.

Anonymous said:

I’m so sorry you went through that! I haven’t had a tumblr in literal years but after TLJ came out I somehow found your blog through Pinterest and wound up creating a new one because I admired you so much and wanted to follow you lol. Keep doing what you’re doing, and thank you for being so cool and like a beacon of positivity

holy shit, this is such a nice message. ;_; I’m so happy you like my blog, and I hope you have fun. I actively work and concentrate on being positive when sometimes I might not want to be, and I’m not perfect, so I’m glad that it at least comes through in a noticeable way.

morphinepudding said:

Confession: you're the only blog on this hellsite I've been following for years, since it seems we both love scar-faced, emotional, broken men with ominous masks and a soft spot for (not so) vulnerable little birds. I am a silent lurker outside of my art posting but know how much I appreciate your insight, your humor and your tags, and how I audibly squealed when you reblogged my latest piece since your posts were such an inspiration for it. Never let them bring you down.

this message made me burst into tears at my grandma’s house when I got it in my inbox. I adore your art so much, whenever I go to your page I have to like clutch at my heart with the emotions they give me. When I saw your latest piece, I was overwhelmed with like ‘oh my gosh, this is so relevant to my interests, how did they know???’ I genuinely felt like my heart was being read. My posts were an inspiration for it??? oh my god, I thought it was just because of Wayward Jedi’s videos or something and we were mutual fans of the theory ;______________; 

hahah, I’m tearing up again.. good to meet you after so many years

Anonymous said:

As someone whose not a reylo shipper I’ve always loved seeing your analyses of the scenes and what it means for the ship because it makes me happy to see you happy; to see thousand upon thousands of other fans happy. I like to do the same exact thing for my ships (like I’m a fan of finnrey) I can not stand those anti posts about reylo. Literally why on earth am I going to hate something that brings someone else joy and is not causing harm to anyone. I hope you continue loving what you love ♥️

This ask gives me so much hope. This is like, my goal, to just effing talk about stuff that makes me happy and draw people to me who like to talk about the things that make them happy. I actually love following blogs of people just talking about their interests, even if I know nothing about them. I’m glad my posts are a positive and not annoying to you, because I genuinely adore Finnrey. I think it’s literally only that I’m so married to certain extremely specific tropes that made me ship reylo more. And I’m just utterly annoyingly myopic about stuff until I feel like I’ve ‘figured it out.’

Anonymous said:

I love your Reylo metas!! It's a real shame that some in the tumblr Star Wars community are so closed minded and think it's cool to bash and make fun of viewpoints and interpretations that are different than theirs. Your posts are so well thought out and articulate. I am glad you are not deterred by the haters, and wish you well.

Thank you!! It was so fuckin bizarre to me because I don’t even mind being disagreed with. for a minute, I was almost like ‘why didn’t anyone I know tell me politely that I was writing foolishness?’ but then I realized it was all just middle schooler bullshit and bad takes. Thanks so much...

Anonymous said:

This is a fan who loves your blog and meta and interests!!! I’m sorry you have to deal with antis but I think you’ve really touched on something that I relate to in terms of the male characters I’m interested in as a heterosexual in theory but rarely in practice female. We are both interested in raw, emotional, flawed male characters and I think that’s just fine. Screw everyone else and do you! You’re fantastic. Sorry, this is a tired rambling late night ask haha

God, thank you. Like, this whole blog is me trying to figure out why I’m interested in these emotional male characters, especially in terms of my sexuality and gender, and I’m glad the wild stabs in the dark resonated with someone else in any way. “we are both interested in raw, emotional, flawed male characters and I think that’s just fine” BEAUTIFUL, I want ‘’and I think that’s just fine’’ tattooed on me. I feel like I’m constantly thinking ‘it’s not fine’ because this site’s culture gets to me sometimes, and having to shake myself out of it. This site is hell on earth.

Anonymous said:

I saw that stalking post & the bullying post. Someone I used to chat w/ (I left the Solas fandom & Tumblr about 2 years ago) was completely delighted by it & participated.For what it's worth,she is an incredibly miserable person who hates herself, her body, her family, her boyfriend.Everything/everyone. It's nothing about you, it's these sad people who would rather tear others down because it's easier than building themselves into better people who make genuine & sincere connections w/ others.

It makes me uncomfortable to think that someone who knew me from Dragon Age was enjoying this, cause like... man. That’s worse. I thought I had a relatively good reputation, so that’s kind of sad to me. I guess I’m falling for the fallacy of thinking ‘if I behave well enough x won’t happen to me.’ I don’t understand the draw of being so negative, but I hope someday they can self-reflect and figure stuff out.

Anonymous said:

what i don't understand about a lot of antis on this site is why they have to be so mean. look, i have characters i dislike and ships i dislike and if someone asks me about why i dislike them i'll tell them but otherwise why would i actively seek out things i don't like? i stay away. instead people have to mock and act like child bullies. we are just trying to enjoy, they are the miserable ones. don't need to publish this but just want you to know there are people that appreciate you.

Thanks, I have no idea either. I think getting worried and interfering about what other women are doing or interested in sexually is a thing people start doing when they feel powerless in other parts of their lives. The whole thing is pretty transparent because you just don’t see this kind of patronizing moral policing on websites populated by mostly men. Anyway, it always feels nice to have a Holy Crusade to believe in, and feel like you’re protecting children and doing good. Even if you’re not doing anything productive, it still feels great and the rush of moral superiority is addictive.

Anonymous said:

i like the assertions from people that folks use too much freudian stuff in talking about analysis in film and talk about how it's discredited and, ok sure but if people took a few film theory classes they'd find themselves running into freudian theory an awful lot in the context of, well, most films and especially hollywood films. (this is about tlj specifically though)

Yeah, like, it’s deliberately used in symbolism in movies. Full stop. Nothing more to discuss.

reinaben said:

Hey, corseque, you rock and you were right! I'm so happy today I'm bouncing like Adam on that gif. I remember reading some of your posts tagged #shitty wizards after TFA and wondering maybe she likes Kylo Ren? because he is like the shittiest wizard ever. I was so happy when you started posting meta about Star Wars, I still am. Anyway, I'm sorry to bother you and I'm sorry that the antis were assholes. Have a nice day!

Kylo Ren is such a #shitty wizard and I have loved him from day one. It’s just that this website is such a bad one that I was convinced not to post about the boi. Part of the reason why I’ve been posting So Much in like a flood is like... I was censoring myself for 2 years, so there’s a lot to catch up on. Glad you enjoyed my transition to Star Wars <3

[toukaisbetterthanyou]

Woah!!!

This is nuts, I feel like we just made a thank you note for our 1,200+ followers goal mark!

Thank you all so much for your continued support! This blog all started from the need to defend Touka’s character after all of the increasingly hostile backlash after chapter 125. Tumblr became a harsh space for Touka and Touken stans alike, and we wanted to call out some of the hypocrisy, double standards, and misogyny that we saw. You could say that this blog was a direct response to anti--to//uken’s original blog, as well as many others. We didn’t intend this blog to blow up the way that it has! It’s nice seeing so much more fanwork in the Touken and Touka tags, rather than salt.

Mod A and I also want to thank you for your support on our fanfiction -- the response has been so heart warming as well as unreal. It’s been so much fun to come home from work and chill on this blog in my free time when I’m not with friends or family. You guys have made fandom fun for us again. I had just about thrown in the towel before making this blog.

So -- now that my thank yous are out of the way, let’s do some house keeping, shall we?

This is a Touka defense blog. This means that we are not “drama-free.” While we no longer engage directly with antis or other nasty shippers, we don’t stand for rampant fandom misogyny and double standards and we will critique it when we see it. While we respect those on tumblr who want to keep negativity off of their blogs, we feel like it is important to directly call out bullshit when we see it. So -- we will discuss those kinds of things. Feel free to vent your frustrations at us!

We also like smut, if that wasn’t obvious, so this blog is also pretty NSFW at time. Mod A, Mod S, and I all write fanfic and contribute to the fandom in that way.

The mods of this blog mostly ship touken, but it’s fine if you don’t. We will discuss touken here. A lot. But, we try to tag it when we can.

We also dabble in meta from time to time that is Touka centric.

We hope that you all enjoy the blog! Also, you can miss us with the homophobia. While we are indifferent towards HK and H/ide it doesn’t mean that we hate it, nor do we hate H/ide. We are just critical of slash shippers that like H/ide for the same reasons that they hate Touka. That’s not all slash shippers – and we’re all queer women, so don’t generalize us as slash ship haters.

Welcome to the blog!

Fic Masterlist

Meta

[betareaderwanted]

Markiplier, JackSepticEye and Cryaotic meets SCP beta wanted!

Your penname: Ink_of_my_Veins  

A way for your possible beta to get in contact with you: http://inkofmyveins.tumblr.com/ is my personal tumblr. You can also find me on Facebook as Cassius Hellstrom or by email if you prefer. Just let me know that want to talk about beta reading and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!

Fandom of your story: Ok! First thing that I would like to state is that this is not a shipping fic so with that in mind I had a stupid idea that turned into so much more. If you’re a Markiplier and/or Jacksepticeye fan then you may know of their alter egos, mainly Antispeticeye, Darkiplier, and Wilford Warfstache. Please bear with me on this, because I had the idea of what if these guys were SCPs? Oh, also I’m bringing in Cryaotic as an SCP assigned to MTF Omega 7.

Still with me? Awesome! I have plenty more information, a little bit of which I’ll add in Other Info.

Rating of your story: Until determined otherwise I’m sticking with a Mature rating for language and descriptions of gore, violence, and dark themes.

Type of your story: General I suppose though it probably leans more towards horror.

Pairing of your story: None, sorry guys

Length of your story: Definitely looking to make it long. I have several different ideas for how the story can go and plan for character development, plot building, and world building.

What kind of beta-reading are you looking for?: Oof, this is the fun bit, isn’t it? I’m pretty decent at characterization and plot building, but I find that some of my best plot and character ideas develop when I have someone to discuss my ideas with. When it comes to the story itself I want to know if the dialogue sounds real or if I’ve added too much exposition. How is my pacing and development? I’m not too worried about grammar, but I’m pretty sure my grammar sucks so I definitely don’t mind if you want to grammar check me!

Other info: Just a few things before I give a little excerpt from what I have written. I work second shift at a factory 8 hours one week and 10 hours the next because of mandatory bullshit and yes, I tend to swear a lot though I can try to tone it down if it bothers you. If you’re helping me with early drafts then I may send you incomplete chapters or bits of a chapter I’m currently working on to see something is or isn’t working. When the inspiration is flowing I find it kinda hard to simply stop at a certain spot continue at a different spot.

Now, for the story itself. Mark talked about Dark during a livestream and mentioned that he sees his alter ego as someone who is manipulative and uses others for his own personal gain. Basically a sociopath. I don’t know if Jack has talked about Anti, but after watching his Halloween special he strikes me as a psychopath. I’ve also read some meta on tumblr and it seems that others agree so that is how I plan to write them. Wilford is definitely a narcissist and like the other two that is how I plan to write them. I will not romanticize them or their disorders and as a fair warning the story will be dark (no pun intended).

Alright, time for an excerpt!

Item: SCP-4403-1 Object Class: Euclid

Description: SCP-4000 is a heavy ring made of pure polished silver approximately 2.5 cm in length and 1.3 cm in width, but possesses a fluctuating mass. The object is carved into the shape of an open mouthed skull with more intricate carvings of unknown origin along the forehead. Two snakes intertwining in and around the skull both appear to be smiling as they emerge from an eye socket and open mouth.

Sources that lead to the discovery of SCP-4403-1 suggest that the object has existed prior to 5000 BCE. These same sources provide varying accounts of SCP-4403-1’s activation and in many cases these accounts conflict with each other. As a result any and all sources regarding SCP-4403-1 must be submitted by to two or more level 3 research staff members for further research. Failure to do so will result in the source being confiscated and the personnel withholding the material to be reassigned from the project.

SCP-4403-1 was first located in an unidentified temple built into an isolated cave system in [Redacted] (Hoia-Baciu, Romania). Local superstition surrounding the area around the cave system has served to discourage exploration. Unfortunately these superstitions seemed to encourage locals in several surrounding towns and villages to respond aggressively to the presence of retrieval teams. To avoid unnecessary casualties mobile task force [Redacted] (MTF-Omega-8 “Pandora’s Box”) was deployed eight kilometers away from the forest surrounding the cave systems.

While MTF-[Redacted] was successful in retrieving the object, the team suffered severe psychological trauma while two of the six members suffered severe physical trauma and are now deceased.

Based on previous accounts of SCP-4403-1 it is theorized that the ring, upon physical contact, alters the subject’s perception of reality. In many accounts subjects have described contact with SCP-4403-1 as “euphoric” and claim to feel as though they were “gods”.

[tessatechaitea]

Detective Comics #957

Let's all read a bad comic! Let's all read a bad comic! Let's all read a bad comic! And curse James Tynion V!

This right here is at the heart of what's wrong with the modern age of comic books. Superheroes are supposed to be inspiring! They're supposed to save people. Fuck this cynical bullshit where dozens of people die while the hero saves the day after which their relatives become super villains and blame the heroes. Then they attack the heroes and keep the cycle going because writers are lazy and/or think they're being clever by questioning things like "What if Superman had to fight in the real world instead of a stupid made-up world where he saves the day and makes people happy and causes readers to feel better about their lives and the world around them through the hope and inspiration of their actions?"

If I hadn't read so many James Tynion IV stories in which Batman was portrayed as being wrong while his youthful sidekicks all knew what was right and how to do things better, I might just think, "Spoiler will surely learn a lesson here! At the end, she'll be thinking Batman is the bee's knees!" But I'm fairly certain this will end with Spoiler proving something to Batman while Batman eats crow and admits he could probably be a better person. Because that's what the Patriarchy should be doing, right?! Shutting up and listening! Although I don't know how they can shut up and just listen if the shit they have to listen to is akin to the shit coming out of Spoiler's mouth in this comic book. By declaring she's no longer a superhero, Spoiler decides that her way is better and it'll allow her to save people from becoming innocent victims of Batman's war on crime. After Spoiler Narration Boxes her speech to whomever the fuck she's speaking, it's time for Wrath to do the same thing! He's also going to explain how Gotham City works and he's going to agree a bit with Spoiler. He agrees that the first thing you have to do as a super villain is to defeat Batman. You can come up with a criminal plan after that! Wrath is the anti-Batman. He's usually used in Batman comic books to show what Batman could have become if he allowed himself to use the tragedy in his life as an excuse. I bet this time he'll be used to show that there isn't really any difference between Wrath and Batman at all! Even as I was typing that, I was thinking, "Don't type that! That's such a stupid conclusion to make! There's not way even James Tynion IV would write that story!"

You mean you attempt to solve the hardest problem first and then you spend the next few years in Arkham Asylum wondering why you just didn't rob a bank on Staten Island.

At the beginning of the Wrath scene, he kills one of his own men. Later, he threatens to kill one at random for every minute they go over a deadline he gives them. Who would work for this asshole? The pay and benefits must be unfathomably generous!

So you constantly lose? Because there's no way you got through the level of Arkham Asylum that I grew bored with and quit because you have to be stealthy or you start over! And I'm fairly certain some levels of Thief, even when playing on the "Oops! I've been noticed and have to now murder an entire castle full of guards!" difficulty still forces you to be stealthy on some levels.

That previous caption was where I exceeded my "This comic isn't too bad!" threshold and decided I needed to vent. Spoiler continues to mention how so many innocents got hurt due to Batman and his Bat-Family stopping crime. She thinks (or Narration Boxes, actually), "Who's there to stop my friends when they go too far?" Um, you could be, you coward. She continues, "To say how many losses are acceptable?" Have you met Batman? Zero losses are acceptable! I mean, you know, in Bat-Theory! If anybody dies, it's not because Batman did something that caused their death. It's because somebody else did something that caused their death and Batman wasn't able to save them. I suppose in the world I described earlier where lazy writers only ever have villains attack Batman directly, you can, if you want to be a dick about it, put the blame on Batman. But once more: that's not Batman's fault! It's the fault of shitty writers! Spoiler's conclusion is that super heroes brought about super problems. Fuck you, you idiot. This is the worst hot take in comic books and it has continued to hang around for decades. Writers who continue to use this trope should be shunned from the comic book community. Spoiler is all, "I'm going to use my super training to prove that Gotham doesn't need superheroes!" And Batman will, hopefully, be all, "Fuck you, dummy!" The last story arc was to show that Cassandra was better than Batman. This one is to show that Spoiler is better than Batman. How is she better? I'm not exactly sure since she takes out Wrath pretty much exactly how Batman would have taken him out. I mean, if Batman were being written by somebody who didn't have a grudge against the Patriarchy. I mean Batman! I suppose Tynion's Batman would have exploded all of the walls and toppled the building with his raging hard-on to battle Wrath and all of the hostages would have died. Afterward, Batman would have been all, "It's a shame that Wrath killed so many and it wasn't my fault at all! I had to stop him by any means necessary!" Which totally isn't a Batman thing to do so I don't actually know how Spoiler thinks her version of stopping Wrath was better than the way Batman, being written honestly, would have done it. Spoiler's entirely plan is to save the day and let the police take the credit. So she's trusting that the police will be dishonest bastards who lie about their jobs? That's a great message! Anyway, she somehow thinks that if super villains think the cops are stopping all the crime, they won't want to do crime anymore! Especially since — thanks, again, to the lazy writers — all they actually want to do is beat up super heroes. She'll see how stupid her plan is when super villains continue to do whatever they want (even more so!) when they think all the heroes have left Gotham. Anarchy shows up at the end to be all, "That was great! What a great idea! This story wasn't stupid at all! Spoiler isn't a terrible character with stupid thoughts after all!" That's when I throw up. The end!

[nyxelestia]

Serious question - do you actually ship Sterek? Because I've seen you say you do ship Stiles and Derek romantically, and also know that you've written Sterek fic, but going through your blog I literally never see any positive Sterek content. I mean, it's totally OK to dislike a ship, but it seems counterintuitive to simultaneously claim to ship it... Also, if your answer is you dislike the fandom, why don't you interact more with the "less toxic" Sterek fans?

Well first off, I have a sterek tag, and there is plenty of positive content in there, mixed in with meta - as there is for most of my ships, and my Teen Wolf tag in general.

Second, you have to define how you mean 'shipping' before I can give you a simple "yes/no" answer. tl;dr version: "yes, but not the way most people do".

Some people use shipping to mean soulmates and romance and true love and OTPs - and I don't do that with any pairing, including Sterek. A lot of romance tropes - especially the types specific to fandom culture and monoshipping - are just normalized emotional abuse. I don't understand why people find it romantic for a character to abandon all their friends and family for an S.O. I don't understand why only your S.O. "understanding you" is supposed to be romantic. I don't understand why an S.O. being able to solve all your problems for you is supposed to be cute or loving. More specifically to Teen Wolf, I don't understand why so many Sterek fics are dependent on Stiles having problems with Scott and his father, or why so many fics feel the need to undermine or erase Stiles' attraction towards Lydia or the ship-teasing with Erica in order to support Sterek. I don't get why anyone thinks any of this shit is romantic, or the appeal of romance in general.

So in that sense, I ship nothing.

There is another way to use shipping, though, which is to simply enjoy the relationship between two characters, or think that two characters have compatible personalities and would be good friends or good intimate partners.

(Please note: if they can't be good friends, then they can't be intimate partners. If you can't love your friend, or if you can't be friends with the love of your life, that's not love.)

Now, this means that the way I use 'shipping' and 'otp' is how most people describe or use 'brotp' (and what other people just describe generally as shipping, I refer to somewhat specifically as monoshipping). Certainly, there's a lot of "brotp" content in my ship tags, and I use a tag derived from shipping culture to describe a sibling, non-ship relationship between three characters who I'm writing a fanfic about (Stiles, Allison, and Liam as siblings). If I didn't use "family feels" tags already, I'd probably use shipping nomenclature to tag my content about family relationships, too, even though I don't intend/enjoy them incestually.

In that sense, I ship everything.

My problems with Sterek, as a fandom, aren't really about the ship itself. It's about the character erasure, character bashing, and the warping of canon without acknowledging it. Headcanons are one thing - thinking your headcanons are canon and then getting mad when reality doesn't match up is another.

I identify a LOT with the Stiles of the TV show, which is why I get so disheartened to rarely ever see him in Sterek fanfic - instead, I find a Manic Buzzcut Dream Boy that is basically a demented conglomeration of Scott and Stiles' best traits and with all of Stiles' flaws or worst traits erased out, and with many other characters sidelined, flattened, or erased entirely. Throw on all those "romantic" tropes (many of which are really normalizations of emotional abuse tactics disguised as ~True Love~), and it's like my favorite characters are gone, and no one's noticed because something 'better' took their places.

I identify with Stiles the most. When people change him so dramatically in fanfic and fanworks, it's disheartening. In implying that Stiles has no value as who he is (and will only have value once he is drastically changed), it feels like they are saying the same thing about me.

On top of that, I can't really get into romantic melodrama, which is why even though I generally like Stydia, I actually despised it in Season 6A. Their friendship, their actual relationship, was sidelined or erased entirely, and replaced with bullshit shipteasing and overwrought melodrama that had previously been exceptions for their relationship, not the norm. I "shipped" Stiles and Lydia as genius badass geniuses who worked together to solve problems and take care of their friends, I "shipped" them as the two pack detectives (or as the two ravens to Scott's allegorical Odin), and I "shipped" them when their relationship was built on a foundation of support, of growth, and respect. When 6A tried to erase that growth (i.e. claiming the 3A kiss changed everything, even though it actually hand't), when they overplayed Soulful Gazes (TM) instead of showing all the awesome scenes of them working together or protecting each other, and when the remembering episode/montage involved Malia and Scott having to talk up their ship (as if the ship couldn't stand up on its own???), that's when I started to hate it. If the show hadn't tried so hard to prop up Stydia, it would've stood just fine on its own. Instead, they overplayed it, hollowing it out in the process and robbing Stiles and Lydia of real growth and what could've been a fantastic relationship.

So do I ship Stydia? Do I not ship Stydia? I still say I do, but I know a lot of people who say I don't. I've gotten anonymous asks in my Inbox accusing me of being anti-Stydia after making pro-Stydia posts.

That applies to Sterek, as well.

There is very little Sterek in the first two seasons. Most of their scenes together are extremely hostile, and if we count "all scenes with hostility" as belligerent sexual tension and "scenes which they both happen to be in" as shipping, then most other ships have far more canonical support than Stiles and Derek. Scott has way more "shipping" scenes with both of them in that regard, if we're going to look at it that way.

But, I think that if we set aside the nasty history, Stiles and Derek have very compatible personalities that go well together, and I can see why people shipped it even without canon.

And then I got to Season 3A, which actually does have a lot of Sterek in it - people just didn't notice because the show still teased multiple ships (as it's kinda supposed to do), and because the show continued to be about packs and be about Scott, instead of turning itself inside out to be about Stiles and Derek. I absolutely adored the growth in relationship, and Stiles and Derek's relationship growth in Seasons 3A, 3B, and 4.

However, I like it because of friendship, as I like all ships because of their foundation in friendship and love - and not in romantic tropes or sexual tension. I loved Stiles and Derek's friendship in the show, which is why I ship them - but if you based shipping solely on romance, then no, I don't ship them,  and I don't ship anyone else, either.

So do I ship Sterek? I'll let you decide that, because it depends entirely on how you define “shipping”. :)

[cwdcshows]

The Flash - S6 E10 - Marathon

Man, the recap for this episode is all of the reasons they should have started the seasons on each of the shows with Crisis; it feels like forever since any of this other shit happened and I barely remember or care about any of it. So wait, Jitters is celebrating the crisis being over - but how?  No one remembers Crisis except those at the dawn of time or their memories being restored by J'Onn. I mean, there'd probably be at least $100 in the til at the start of the day, right?  Not much, but how much cash does this tiny coffee shop do in one day otherwise?  It's not like anyone robbing it would be walking off with tens of thousand of dollars or anything; they could maybe make off with a grand tops.  Plus, they say they've "just opened," but clearly some people have ordered and presumably paid, unless the employee is handing out freebies to the first dozen customers.

Yeah, dipshit, you're robbing a coffee shop in the town where the Flash lives and works, what the hell did you think was going to happen? Ah, yes, Iris' new oh so important news article.  Where to start?  A) Flash didn't disappear during crisis, at least as far as anyone else was aware.  Sure he ended up at Vanishing Point for a while, but that was after Earth 1 was gone; and at no other point was there really any noticeable absence of the Flash to go with the original concept that he vanished during Crisis or need to specify his return, since he didn't really go anywhere.  B) Once again, no one is supposed to remember that Crisis happened, unless they're now referring to the moment the Anti-monitor attacked for all of two minutes and got taken down by some handguns and a shrink bomb.  And C) Flash saves the day?  Flash.  Well, I guess fuck you, Oliver.... Diggle!  ....Eh.... Sorry man, I know Oliver would be all smiles about seeing you, but it feels a little soon after you series ended for you to pop up in a show a week later.   And is it right after the finale episode or sometime during that transitional period?  Because he's talking about still packing boxes and getting ready to move and I was under the impression that he had finished with that by the end of the episode, but maybe not.  More importantly, is this before or after his encounter with an ominous green glowing object that may or may not have been a power ring? This is the second mention of Diggle moving to Metropolis, is this supposed to be setting up John being part of the new Superman series? Augh, and here we go with Barry tilting at windmills, because there's genuinely nothing better to do...   Seeing as how they reminded us of the other two employees at Iris' paper working together, obviously this episode is going to focus more on them than Barry. Wait, if a prototype and an employee go missing at the same time and someone says the missing employee's background looks fishy, why the fuck wouldn't you believe him?  Just the fact that they both went missing at the same time is suspicious; and if there's any proof to further warrant that suspicion, why wouldn't you at least entertain the notion? What?  How is this fucking "reporter territory?" and is there nothing in between Joe sitting around with his thumb up his ass and launching a fucking Rico investigation?  There are legitimate crimes being committed that they could be investigating in their own right; and if in the course of that investigation they find enough proof of conspiracy, you apply the necessary resources. To Cecile's point, if they don't have enough evidence for the police to move forward with, it seems kind of irresponsible for a newspaper to start printing something that is at least partly speculation.  I mean, they'll more than likely turn out completely right about every assumption they've made, based on the least amount of evidence, but that's more due to lazy writing for the series.  In any other circumstance there's every possibility that they might get at least some details wrong.   How is this magic gun shooting through the outside of the office without first damaging the exterior wall of the office....? Is Cisco still Vibe?  They made a big deal about the Monitor making Cisco Vibe again during Crisis, but they they didn't even seem to need his powers during Crisis, or barely used them if they did; and since he wasn't at the dawn of time either and is therefore a version of Cisco who never physically lived through Crisis, he shouldn't have his powers.... God, Crisis is the cluster fuck that keeps on giving.  It's become the herpes of crossovers. Why is Nash?  I know that's not really much of a sentence, let alone a questions; and yet it pretty much sums up everything that crosses my mind when he's on the screen.  Why is this the version of Wells they're going with now?  Why is he going to be permanent Wells they go with, en lieu of a multiverse from which to plumb the infinite depths of others Wells?  Why couldn't it have been Harry?  A version of Wells already established, that the audience likes and has a rapport with the other characters that can be friendly, but still abrasive?  What is the point of any of this?  He wasn't even at the Dawn of time and shouldn't exist post-reboot. Why is Nash? How exactly did Nash becoming Pariah accomplish anything for his atonement?  They did even less with that than Cisco becoming Vibe again. But for that matter, does Nash really deserve the level of blame he's gotten?  He was doing what Oliver was basically trying to do; and to some degree the Flash too.  Oliver was at a point where he was determined to undermined the Monitor and find a way to stop him to prevent Crisis; and while Barry wasn't quite as active about it, he wasn't exactly against the idea - none of them were.  And the fact that most of the characters knew that Crisis was happening before  it was supposedly triggered by Nash opening the vault or whatever it was, kind of makes it a paradox that might have been unavoidable. This again is where it would have made more sense for Harry to be responsible for awakening the Anti-Monitor through some experimental work he was doing; and then trying to find a way to rectify his mistake, but all this bullshit putting the blame on Nash - who only really has memories of doing these things, since he technically didn't physically experience them, since Crisis never happened.  Which there again, "Nash" Wells shouldn't exist on this Earth, because in a timeline where there is no multiverse and Crisis never actually happened, there'd be no Nash Wells.  If anything Nash should have died during Crisis and have the discover that in this reset reality the real Harrison Wells is alive and wells. Or Harry. So Harry and Jesse are effectively dead and apart from Cisco casually throwing that out there, it doesn't seem like anyone on the show actually cares. How does a hologram from a version of Harrison Wells who in this new timeline never existed....exist....? Seriously, how long after the attack did it finally occur to Iris that the attack happened shortly after she confronted that CEO? "I never miss twice." I mean, except you did.... You missed Iris in her office and again later in the parking garage..... So they're going to wrap up this elaborate conspiracy theory and meta-cabal or whatever after an episode an a half, split up between a bunch of other bullshit and like 3 or 4 months of a gap since the last time this was brought up?  They're not going to do anything else with? *sigh* So is Frost basically immortal or damn near close to it? Oh for fuck sake, make up your mind.  When Cisco and Caitlin talked about how Cisco had been given his powers back again, I took that to mean he did still in fact have his powers; and that he was having difficulty working out whether to get rid of them again or keep them.  Now he's saying he doesn't have his powers, so when did he lose them or?  Or did the reboot of the universe mean he never got them back and he just remembers getting them back? I called Cisco leaving, but the way they're doing it is kind of open ended and ambiguous as to whether he's actually going to be gone gone or if he's just sort of less involved and we occasionally see him for an update on his research or something, like how he spent time away last season to work on the meta-human cure.  Given the preview for this episode shown the previous week, I had the impression that one of the characters had been erased from history and that it would turn out to be Cisco and they'd explore what that might mean for him, but that's clearly not the case here with Cisco.  And I'm starting to think it's going to turn out Ralph was erased from history, seeing as we haven't seen him or anyone mention him; so I'm expecting him to pop-up at the end of the episode and everyone be like, "Oh, yeah.....we forgot you exist...." Why would anyone go to the trouble naming a door the mirror inverse of their wife's name?  I mean, I suppose it helps reversed it looks like a room number, but it's kind of like making your password "password" when it comes to subtlety when hiding shady shit; plus they continued the convention by numbering the other doors using the same convention.  So what, the big bad CEO said, "I'm going to hide something in this random room in the middle of the hallway that has something to do with my wife.  And because it has to do with my wife, I'm going label it using her name, but reversed; because her name in a mirror is AV3.  So name the doors before it AV2 and 1 and doors after it AV4 and so on." "Uh sir, what if that room hadn't been the 3rd door?" "Fuck you, that's what." And don't you just love how for no fucking reason Iris took notice of this other door that as far as she or anyone else could tell, was just another door along that hallway?  And she ties it all together with the random last breath comment by her informant about "mirror" which of course is going to turn out to be completely unrelated to the door number. It could have been the fucking broom closet for all she knew, but no, she has a reporter sense or some bullshit, so not only she immediately right about the elaborate conspiracy she's uncovered on the first guess with the least amount of evidence, she's God damn prescient. Wait, she just happened to have that little dodad she found on the dead guy months ago on her?  That thing looked like a fancy button off a coat or something, what would give her the idea that she could use it as some sort of magic key?