#tw discourse mention

[5-7-9]

And to point out the actual Batman creator’s intentions on this discourse. No, he did not queercode Bru#ick as a relationship. Insultingly enough, Bill Finger actually did have connections to the queer community.

If he was going to write any of them gay, we would have done so, but he explicitly stated he didn’t.

Although i will give people credit- this was lost information that was only found recently only 13 years ago from at the time I’m posting this post in 2024. Still, it’s concerning how despite this info finally being out, we still use outdated information. What a sad world we live in.

[bucciarati-answers]

(( if anyone wants to spam the inbox with asks, as silly as they might sound, please do!

mod is trying to take his head out of discourse (mainly jjba ships/shipcourse) at least for the day. but my brain just can't seem to leave me alone about it once i'm home. and apparently all of them are from part 5 😭 i don't know why it makes me so anxious everytime. Many people told me it's because of the OCD, and I actually really think it might be. Nothing will happen to me if I don't have all of them blocked, but I don't actually feel relieved until I do. No matter how old the posts are. And, seriously? It happened so many times about different things that it's not making me feel depressed anymore, it's making me feel annoyed!

Spam as much as you'd like ! i really don't mind it! We love you all. ))

[h4zardousch3micals]

Somewhat spiteful statistics

Aka, I'm bored and needed something to do

There has been some debate recently over various slugcat's popularity within the fandom - particularly over the popularity of the Artificer and the Gourmand specifically - so I decided to briefly investigate which claims were valid.

Keep in mind that I'm not suggesting that any side is "correct" in their opinion about said character - though I do have my own opinions - this post is only intended to look at the raw numbers.

Here is my method:

- Posts were counted between 00:00 and 23:59 UTC on 26th April 2024

- All posts between the established times which were tagged "rw [character]" and had that slugcat as a primary subject were counted.

- Posts that featured all (or most) of the slugcats were not counted for any slugcat. Posts with several, but not all, slugcats were counted for each slugcat featured.

- For characters with multiple names, I only counted from one tag (these were "rw inv" and "rw watcher")

The final results are:

Survivor - 5

Monk - 9

Hunter - 11

Spearmaster - 10

Artificer - 15

Gourmand - 8

Rivulet - 15

Saint - 8

???/Inv/Enot - 3

Nightcat/Watcher - 2

Organised by popularity:

1st - Artificer and Rivulet (15)

2nd - Hunter (11)

3rd - Spearmaster (10)

4th - Monk (9)

5th - Gourmand and Saint (8)

6th - Survivor (5)

7th - ???/Inv/Enot (3)

8th - Nightcat/Watcher (2)

As we can see, the most popular slugcats during this timeframe were Artificer and Rivulet, with the least popular being Watcher.

The other main subject of my analysis - Gourmand - was only the 5th of the 10 measured (tied with Saint), making them far from the most liked.

Do keep in mind that my method was not reliable. The information collected was an incredibly small sample time which only utilised one tag on one website, and therefore may not reflect the wider fandom opinion. However, I still believe my results are something to think about.

Thank you for reading ^^

[thegardengrows-infrozenrain]

bitches be like "i'm a fan of [band] but anything besides their first 2/3 albums is just pop trash and really forgettable and i hate every song on the first few albums besides [tiny list] and honestly they've overstayed their welcome as artists and need to stop producing and if you like their first few albums/[specific album that is popular/unpopular] you're a tiktok fake fan who's only posing and pretending to like them"

like honey you're not a fan you're a toxic piece of shit

like yeah don't consume anything entirely uncritically but at the same time don't become an asshole who does nothing but criticize yknow

[tnfrb-official]

(little update, after learning some absolutely fucking WILD drama about the original author of TnF/TFH/TDH/TEH/WP, i've decided not to link their toyhou.se page anymore in the blog bio.)

(i'll still leave a variant of their username as credit, the way i do for trashpandaballs and the typo!au stuff, but... y'know- no links.)

[cosmossystem]

System Ask Game 🤎 I wanna know how wide opinion variations are in your system if y'all don't mind answering

ask game

thanks for the ask <3

🤎 Do system members typically agree on things or is there a broad range of opinions?

hmm it depends! So we have the same experiences with things outside of the body like tastes and bad sensory things (none of us will wear velvet because we all dislike the feel, for example.) but our stances and what we each individually enjoy are kind of varied.

for instance, we all enjoy the same general 2000s pop music or more emo stuff. those are safe bets. but some of us like those less than other forms of music. Red likes edm and scene music, meanwhile our new guy Mike likes more classic rock. they both listen to rock and edm, but both prefer one to the other-- if you give either of them the aux cord, they'll each go for a different song, etc.

and when it comes to major stuff like politics, we always agree but our exact stances may vary. Like, none of us are far-right or anything. We've never really been split on stuff like discourse because we experience the same stuff and have the same general thought process.

but our collective opinions have changed in the past. For example in that regard: we used to be pretty puritanical/anti-ship and really mean about it. but then Red did a lot of healing, and was the first to start changing everyone's minds. it was a slow change but we made it work. some of us didn't fully agree until months later, and were sort of just on the fence about it, but that's how it goes-- whereas any one of us might change their mind immediately, the general consensus usually takes a while to switch, and that applies for everything as well (even the not-so-serious stuff.) even then, we usually end up in the gray area.

- caspar

[demonic-shadowlucifer]

why do you call shipping discourse "syscourse"? i thought syscourse was short for "system discourse".

Elaborate for me please? /genuine question I don't remember using 'syscourse' as short for shipcourse. unless I made a mistake on a post (if so please tell me which post).

[crimson-rain-smoked-flower]

I’m not trying to attack you, but do you know that proshipper means someone who supports and romanticizes pedophilia, incest, and abuse? Your reblog on that post seems to read that you think antis just hate on people for having ships they don’t like. But it’s completely different than that. Just looking on the proshipper side of Tumblr and the internet and you can see people happily shipping children and adults and making nsfw content of such things.

i appreciate that you're not being outright hostile, but i have to say, that on its own put you above basically every anti i've interacted with.

i understand where antis are coming from, i really do. there are a lot of things on the internet that make me deeply uncomfortable, including the minor/adult ships that you mention. i don't want to anything to do with those kinds of ships and i would be happiest if i never saw them again. which is why i'm proship.

nine times out of ten, if i see that kind of ship brought up on my dash, it's because i was following an anti without realizing it, and they brought it up unprompted and untagged, to talk about how bad it is that they exist. they are the ones putting that kind of content in front of my face and making it harder to avoid.

the thing about people who ship those ships is that they're generally very aware that not everyone wants to see that kind of content, and so they tag it. they make sideblogs to talk about it. they don't go out of their way to shove it in people's faces. that means i, and everyone else who doesn't like it, can avoid it.

what antis want is for it to not exist at all. they want the tags to be purged and blocked, and for anyone who uses those tags to have their accounts deleted. and sure, that might get rid of some of it, but do you know what would happen to the rest? it would stop being tagged. people who don't want to see it wouldn't have the tools to avoid it. this isn't just a hypothetical, that's what's happened any time a fan space has tried to do that.

that's not even getting into the rabbit hole of what should be banned and what shouldn't. obviously any content that depicts real children or real life abuse shouldn't exist and shouldn't be allowed to be posted, but basically any platform that people use already enforces those policies, and there's not much of a slippery slope to go down there. if it involves real living breathing people being abused, it's bad. end of discussion.

but the same can't be said for fiction. ask ten antis for a specific list of all the content that should be banned, and you'll get ten different answers. what about kink? what about roleplay? what about horror and murder and anything that involves fictional characters being graphically tortured? what about people using art to process terrible things that have happened to them? what about art that uses dark themes as a horror element? if you just want to ban anything questionable to anyone, that's the line of thinking that gets any mention of lgbt existence banned. and again, this isn't just a hypothetical, this has happened before, and that's generally where it leads.

i know, from personal experience, that antis do, in fact, send harassment to people just for shipping things they don't like. i've gotten accused of absolutely vile shit for shipping two fictional characters who were both consenting adults. i've seen ship wars turn into moral battlegrounds, over ships that an average person wouldn't bat an eye at.

the thing about "romanticization" is a whole other can of worms. the anti logic goes like this: if someone sees something (even if it's very obviously fictional) in a positive light enough times, they will start thinking it's okay in real life, and go on to hurt real people. the problem with that is that it's just. blatantly untrue.

if it were true every horror movie fan would be a serial killer, every person that studies dark media would be an unhinged psychopath, and everyone who is into ddlg would be a pedophile. but they're not. they just aren't. people have directed movies just as fucked up as the darkest shit on ao3, and are still capable of being normal human beings who know right from wrong in real life.

even if someone is that impressionable, scrubbing away the existence of every piece of questionable content isn't going to solve their problem, because they're still going to be vulnerable to con men, scams, and cultists. the only thing that would actually materially help someone like that is developing their own morals and critical thinking.

children are also more impressionable, and there's a lot of content that's not suitable for them, but that doesn't mean that content shouldn't exist. it just means that they should stick to spaces designed for them (which most social media sites, tumblr included, are not) or, if they're old enough to be responsible for their experience online, they, or a trusted adult in their lives, should block and filter out things that they aren't comfortable with.

which is what everyone on the internet should be doing. it's what i do, and it's made the internet a much more pleasant place to be. and it's why i sometimes worry for antis mental health, especially teenagers, because they're being told it's right and moral to seek out content that makes them uncomfortable and to engage with the people making it. and that's just. really bad. it's not good for the creators that they're harassing obviously, but it's also really bad for them! it's not healthy to seek out things that make you feel bad, and it's a terrible internet safety lesson to teach minors that it's okay for them to seek out and engage with people making adult content.

individual harassment and crusading is never going to succeed at removing dark content from the internet. it just isn't. at best you might get a small percentage of people who create that content to stop sharing it, at worst you're just going to make people stop tagging it, and either way, you're exposing yourself to things that make you feel bad, when you don't have to.

if you want to materially change the type of content you see, you can. the block button is your friend, use it liberally. same with content filtering and tag blocking.

[sparkling-pink-lemonade]

Saw a post of an anti saying that they are leaving AO3, as they are too uncomfortable to post their fics there now. The reason? They found out one of their long time readers was a proshipper, despite their fics having proship dni. And how "that includes silent readers too, I don't want you all looking at my content."

My brother in christ, you are posting on the fiction freedom site. The proshipping site. Dnis aren't god damn restraining orders. They are one tool in helping you display your boundaries. It's still on you to enforce your boundaries. You post something publicly, you forfeit your ability to regulate who can view your work. If you're obsessive enough, you can regulate who actually interacts with your work by stalking each person in the kudos list, comments, or bookmarks and then blocking snyone you don't like, but you do not get a say on who may silently read your posts. Not unless you private your work and only show it to specific people.

And if you don’t want proshippers to interact, get off the profic site.

[adollchild]

What do you think of dxlb.?

I would rather not be involved in this kind of discourse. Thank you for respecting my boundaries. Have a lovely day/night ^-^

[serpenlupus]

About Wyll and his horns (and what they mean)

Let's say I was writing a part of my Tav's story with Wyll directly connected to the dialogue he has during the tiefling party, and while struggling with this bit, I've realized there's quite a few misconceptions floating around. I felt compelled to add information to the table that might clear them, so here we go.

First, what exactly happens to Wyll when he disobeys Mizora in act one? Well, he doesn't get turned into a devil, he certainly doesn't get turned into a tiefling, he's not a half fiend, not a demon, none of that. Wyll stays human, but he has horns and red eyes (and other features we can't see on his model as of now).

(Everyone has their race listed, Wyll's remains "Human")

This is because when a warlock fails to uphold some part of their contract they can suffer a certain number of consequences, Wylls is “The character grows horns, a tail, or some other devilish features that can't be removed by any means short of divine intervention. As long as these marks persist the character detects as a fiend when subjected to Detect Evil and Good spells or similar magic.” ( from Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, page 214)

And I’ve come across some people that think it wasn’t so bad of a punishment, that he was being racist towards the tieflings, or just not being justified in being upset after having his body forcibly changed against his will. I think they are missunderstanding just how insidious Mizora’s actions were, and here I just want to give some context to maybe bring a better understanding to the situation. Your conclusions are up to you.

Gonna start by using a not exact analogy, but I think it’s going to make the explanation easier. Stick with me for a minute.

Remember Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean? He had a branded “P” on his arm that marked him as a pirate. A murderer, robber, criminal, etc. in the eyes of the society he was a part of. What did Jack do to earn the branding? (if you don’t know this I suggest you look up the “people aren’t cargo mate” scene) He refused to transport slaves and later freed them, and Beckett had him marked as punishment.

Then, in the first movie, he saves Elizabeth, a woman he didn’t know, from drowning. Right after however, when Norrington sees he has a branded “P”, he’s like “alright, off to jail with you, and then hanging”, no other option crosses his mind. Again, Jack doesn’t know Elizabeth, isn’t indicated to think he is going to be rewarded for helping her, he just sees a drowning person, sees that no one else is going to help, and chooses to save them. That is a pretty selfless/good aligned thing to do, for no other reason that he was the one able to do it, yet the branding in his arm overrides any good action he could ever do, marking him as a criminal for execution and no further thought.

In a way, that’s what Mizora did to Wyll; she forever visibly branded him as someone that has made deals with devils, and that in the world of DnD is a VERY BAD THING. Personally I really like the mod that gives him more devilish features, but at the same time I think there was something clever about choosing to leave him looking more human. He can’t be confused with a tiefling, he doesn’t have the ears, the claws, the tail, all those features that characterize them. He looks kind of uncanny, and that would be like a red flag for anyone in that world. (Beyond the already existing hate for tieflings that I’m not gonna tackle on here because it’s a complicated thing that deserves its own post). And Wyll wants to do good, he wants to help people, to be a positive force in the world so, so badly. This dude got abducted by a nautiloid, got tadpole’d, and the first thing he did right after that was come across the Tiefling refugees and be like “Oh you need help? No worries let me teach you self defense. Oh you being attacked by goblins? Let me blast them real quick”. His way of saying fuck you to all the awful things that have happened to him is being aggressively good and kind. Mizora knows this very well, wants to see him suffer for her amusement, wants to remind him he can't escape her claws, so her choice of punishment was to forever taint his future interactions with mistrust and suspicion. Some people can go real fast from “oh thank God they saved me” to “oh no, are they gonna rob me, are they trying to trick me, are they in cahoots with the ones that attacked me first?” just because of outward appearances. Especially in DnD world. And that deserves its own conversation, but we're focusing on Wyll here.

(Mizora, when I catch you Mizora)

“Well, maybe he shouldn’t have made a deal in the first plac- - “ He was seventeen, alone, preyed upon by Mizora and put in an impossible situation. Please PAY ATTENTION to the story you’re witnesing.

Anyway.

About the tieflings. I know it’s easy to think his words can be derisive towards them, but it’s less about the horns and more about his body being changed against his will. Imagine instead that he got half his face burned, or something that disfigured him. I think his feelings at the moment were closer to that, and yeah they are pretty insensitive words to say to someone with a similar condition (horns or disfiguration), but when feelings are fresh and raw like that it’s easy to say insensitive things. Not saying it was ok for him to say them, but there was no malice in his words. I’ve also seen some people share that they think Mizora wanted to change him more to make him unrecognizable to his original self, the Wyll Ravenguard kid, and I think there is some truth to that too. She wants to make sure that Wyll remembers that he belongs to her, there's no question to that.

(MIZORA, WHEN I CATCH YOU MIZORA)

Whether the Tieflings refugees would feel unsettled by Wyll or not? Yes. In a way, they would. From reasons aside from the ones I explained above, remember that these specific tieflings come from Elturel. If you didn’t pass the History check or don’t remember, Elturel is a city that was literally ripped from the land and dragged to Avernus, First layer of hell (it left a hole on the ground and everything) because their mayor made a deal with the Archdevil Zariel some decades back in the timeline. He sold the souls of all its citizens and the city itself.

This was probably one of the worst times of their lives. Some even got captured and forced to participate in the blood War, like Dammon as a mechanic. And after Elturel got returned to the surface, the tieflings lost their homes because they reminded the other citizens of the literal Hell they’d just gone through, and they kicked them out. And remember, they met and saw Wyll as a human, and then saw him with horns. It’s not unreasonable to think that by looking at him they would be reminded of all the events that led them to the awful situation they’re in. Because of someone that was making deals with devils, just like Wyll. Even if his situation is completely different. And Wyll knows that, that’s why he tells you the tieflings are unsettled by him and chooses to stay away during the party.

It was never just about the horns.

And I know Wyll calls himself a devil but I think it’s because it’s the closest thing he looks as; devils are a whole different race with their own intricacies, although humans can be turned into devils ONCE their souls go to Avernus and they start climbing the power hierarchy there (Mizora and Raphael are cambions/ half-devils btw, which is a different thing,  there are plenty of videos exploring those details more in depth).

Do I think Larian should have made some of this information clearer/easier to access? Maybe? but to be fair, it's a game focused and dedicated to a crowd that was already somewhat familiar with the source material, that blew up waay out of what they originally expected to reach. Hopefully they’ll add some clarifications like they did to other quests. 

Anyway these are my two cents to the conversation, have a nice day, and don't hesitate to add your two cents if you feel like it!

[5-7-9]

Youtube and Tumblr are on different planes

[5typesoftrash]

if you are pro-censorship, you are not my ally. Not in feminism, not in queerness, not in anti-racism. Bad actors aren't going to just censor the things you don't like; they won't stop. Sure, they'll sweep over the explicit incest and pedophilia, but then, just like the fancop teenagers have, they will start stretching those definitions to include everything that they dislike. Calling queer people pedophiles is a textbook example of queer oppression; you don't think conservatives are gonna use that as an excuse to burn books about trans joy and wlw/mlm experiences? Because they will.

If you are pro-censorship, you are not my ally.

[memryse]

if mcyt isn’t fiction then

people who create dnd characters that are similar to them in personality are just playing themselves and should not be treated as having made a character

people who make any other dnd character should also be treated as just playing themselves since people refuse to even consider roleplay smps as fiction

any ocs someone puts a bit of themselves into? nope not fiction!

actors who play a character with the same first name as them aren’t really acting

and so on

maybe YOU can’t separate characters and real people and think that everything you see from a youtuber even when they’re explicitly acting is how they are in real life but we as a fandom just don’t have that issue lol. we’ve had disclaimers and indicators for when we’re talking about characters and not content creators for years because a certain smp contained a character having suicidal thoughts as a result of abuse at the hands of another character and we needed to make it absolutely crystal clear that we were referring to a fictional storyline and not real guy #1 being an abuser and real guy #2 being suicidal. these customs have either extended into other corners of mcyt fandom, or some developed their own independently like hispanic mcyt fans have used the word cubito to distinguish mc guy from real life guy from years, a term that other language speakers liked so much we’ve also started picking it up lol

we know exactly what we’re doing. i get that the line maybe does seem more blurred to an outsider looking in (i wouldn’t know given that both my first fandom at age 12 and current fandom at age 20 were mcrp lol) but it’s universally understood amongst us. i don’t have a problem separating hermitcraft!gem and empires s1!gem the wizard with a twin brother and empires s2!gem the princess and cc!gem the real life canadian woman.

idk it rubs me the wrong way that after years of trying to explain this we’re either met with people calling us racists because of three guys that the rest of us (all of us, really, because dream team fans do not claim to be minecraft fans. those are the type to actually write rpf and ship the real life racist guys) hate probably a lot more than any of you do, or they watch a few minutes of a less roleplay-heavy series/part and decide that the entire medium is invalid as a form of storytelling

it’s so annoying. i don’t think we need to be understood to have validity as a fandom we’ve been doing this for years already without that but it is so infuriating and sad how whenever there’s some kind of fandom poll thing one of three things happens

mcyt fans are banned outright and placed on the same level as something like hp

an mcyt fan runs their own and gets harassed for it

a non-mcyt fan allows us in until they get harassed so badly by whatever fandoms we go up against that they end up deleting our bracket

in what world is that normal behaviour. and that harassment always involves calling them all racist cishet white men such as misgendering both eret (real life bisexual genderqueer person) and their character (also queer), attempting to harass jimmy solidarity fans because jimmy makes mc videos so he must be a dream associate (the only time they interacted was in a tournament during which dream and georgenotfound shittalked jimmy’s best friends to his face), all the shit quackity has gotten for being a former friend of the dream team as if he wasn’t the #1 victim of their racism and xenophobia, the fact that any time c!technoblade is involved in a poll we have to beg other fandoms not to talk shit about him because the real life man died of cancer before dream’s grooming allegations came out, similarly when tfc was in one. and so on and so forth. all because people can’t separate roleplay and real life and think that the entire minecraft sphere revolves around dream just because their idea of mcyt does (not even his own smp named after him did that).

[thegardengrows-infrozenrain]

yknow for all the talk Hargreaves does about how they're never using C!Tord again and how much he shits on Legacy for the disrespect towards me with regards to bringing C!Tord back i find it immensely funny that they keep running limited merch events with his stupid fucking face.

from Red Oct to YouTooz, when will it end?

and of course the fans will justify it at every opportunity... but Legacy was a different story and therefore somehow worse... [sigh].

[frownyalfred]

Can I get clarification on your pro shipping post? The example you gave was a 20 year old with a 40 year old, and that's "problematic" (not really), but not really what I think of when I hear "pro shipping". Usually it's the shipping of minor/adult or incestuous relationships that I see getting defended. Does being against fictional works/ships that depict pedophilic or incestuous relationships as normal/romantic count as puritanism to you? Do you see the ship of Bruce Wayne/Damian Wayne as a personal preference with no moral implications?

I think there's a huge difference between being personally against something, and wanting to shame others or ban others from reading or writing something. The Puritanism comes from wanting to limit and ostracize others who don't share your beliefs. It comes from believing that your perspective is the only morally right one.

I think there will always be people who want to write or read about ships like that, yeah -- incest, pseudo-incest, everything in between. By moral implications, do you mean for the person interested in the ship? Or do you mean for others? Because I see that concern a lot on here -- this idea that somehow, by wanting to read/write about something, people are either 1) harming others by spreading this morally wrong ship or 2) harming themselves by normalizing the ship, and therefore making it more likely that they'll pursue similar relationships in their real lives.

We don't have much evidence for either of those claims. People have been clutching their pearls and wringing their hands over "morally wrong" books for ages -- and yet, Game of Thrones is still available in every bookstore. Am I a bad or woefully misguided person for having read Lolita in high school? Is a 16 year old reading a Bruce/Damian fic likely to turn around, shrug, and say "guess fucking my Dad is okay now"? Did an entire generation of fans shipping Wincest somehow have lasting, moral effects? I really don't think so. Not at the scale anti-shippers online seem to think, at least.

I think we need to separate how we moralize people from the content that they consume. And acknowledge that shaming and excluding people for wanting to read something doesn't exactly do much to prevent "moral implications." There's also a huge difference between reading a book, and endorsing the ideas/events inside of it. Same things with fics.

Anti-shipping is very appealing to people because it purports to protect people from harm. Until you look a little closer, and you realize that that protection comes at the expense of free expression, creative license, and agency to choose what we personally do and do not consume. And that that protection isn't really airtight out of your anti-shipping discord or tumblr community.

I think the best we can do is let people write and read what they want -- whatever they want, with limited warnings/etc like ao3 employs -- and ensure that those pieces of content are tagged, warned, and displayed accurately. We need to understand that the only control we have is over ourselves, and what we choose personally to consume or not consume.

I don't generally read those fics you mentioned, but I'm not saying they should be banned from ao3. Just because I might possibly think they're wrong or gross doesn't mean I think the person who wrote them is wrong or gross, either. The more we go down that moral slip and slide, like I said in my previous post, the worse off we will all become.