#use that block button PLEASE

[princeloww]

is it pretentious that sometimes i just stare at people on tiktok and think they would benefit so much from experiencing fandom literally anywhere else. people on tiktok take it so seriously relax guys nobody's watching. the teacher isn't behind you

[starshakez]

To my other non-sharing selfshippers

You are valid, your boundaries deserve to be respected, and you are not 'delusional' for not wanting to share. We really need to learn how to use the block button better in this community.

Why can't we just block and move on if we don't agree? No one is forcing you to interact or be mutuals with people you don't want to. It's your blog and we all deserve to have boundaries. This is your online space to do whatever you want with!

Remember that your f/o loves you so much, and they want you to prioritize your own comfort ♡

[bitchface24-7]

I love the dichotomy between Sam and Dean where they see each other in opposite lights. (lowkey a character analysis below)

We’ve seen how Dean views himself. He thinks he’s worthless, weak, stupid, and unloveable. He “hates what he sees in the mirror.”

Sam thinks Dean is amazing. He’s a phenomenal hunter and an even better brother. He stepped up to take care of him when dad fucked off. Dean took care of Sammy in ways most people would never understand. Dean is strong, kind, funny, witty, and undeniably gorgeous. Sam loves Dean with all his heart. No one will ever replace him. No one. Sam cannot live without Dean. If Dean leaves him, he’ll just be surviving.

Sam on the other hand thinks he’s a weirdo, a freak, an abomination. Something to put out of its misery since how could something so disgusting be alive in this world?

Dean thinks Sammy is brilliant. A keen eye and a knack for researching into unknown lore the brothers didn’t even know existed. He’s snarky, snooty, sarcastic, and sweet. Sammy knows the power of both his bitch stare and puppy-dog eyes. Sammy must know he has Dean wrapped around his pinky finger? There isn’t a goddamn thing in this world that tops Sam in Dean’s eyes. Sam is perfect. He’s both beautiful on the inside and out. Sammy is Dean’s priority, his main focus, his baby brother. Eventually it just switches to “mine. mine. mine.” in Deans head. Dean cannot live without Sammy, he’ll k*ll himself before he lives in a world without his baby brother.

Like??? HELLO?!?! I love them so much it isn’t even funny

[neo--queen--serenity]

The Black Butler revival will, of course, in this day and age, be the complete embodiment of pro-ship vs. anti-ship discourse, given the subject matter.

But for those of you who are watching this for the first time in 2024 (which includes myself!), there are certain things about the show you simply must understand, for the sake of media literacy.

The first is that Black Butler is supernatural gothic romanticism at its core. This genre alone should tell you that the relationships integral to the plot will be complex, messy, and toxic, by default. That is not only a huge part of this genre’s appeal, but very much the point of the story.

The themes are dark, the terrible things that happen to the main characters are dark, and therefore the relationships at the forefront (and in the background) will reflect that.

The gothic genre has been alluringly popular for over a century (longer, if you know your history) because audiences are entranced by the macabre, the tainted antiheroes, the monsters who live inside us all. It’s popular for a reason.

That being said, understand that whether you, the viewer, ship Sebastian and Ciel or not is irrelevant. Their bond doesn’t need to be understood as romantic or sexual, but it sure as hell isn’t normal. It isn’t healthy. And the audience knows that. That’s the draw. It’s what makes them compelling to watch.

Ciel and Sebastian’s relationship mirrors many gothic novels, poems, and penny dreadfuls written in the Victorian Era (the very same time period in which Kuroshitsuji takes place). The Victorian folks who read these tales for the first time ate that shit up, because it was tantalizing. It was shocking. It was inappropriate, and monstrous, and violent, and erotic, and went against societal norms. But that was the point.

A huge part of gothic romanticism is the blatant sexualization of the relationship between the “monstrous” characters and their human counterparts in the story. Sex itself doesn’t need to take place for their bond to be sexually charged. The forbidden nature of their relationship—which typically involves layers of social taboos, moral ambiguity, or simple infatuation—is what makes their interactions erotic. Sexual contact rarely ever actually happens in these stories. It’s the taboo nature of their bond that creates the tension.

One of the many reasons audiences love this genre is the constant question of morality in its themes. Who, between them, is the real monster? Could the human character have ever been saved? This genre is often associated with tragedy, because the bond forged between the characters in these stories are destined to end in death and destruction. The reader knows it can’t end any other way. How can it?

But an integral element of these gothic tales is the catharsis that comes with this tragedy. The corrupted human often gets what they want in the end, even if it’s at the cost of their own life. Whether they regret their choice to foster this monstrous relationship varies on the story, but it doesn’t change the trajectory of their descent.

Sebastian and Ciel’s relationship is the whole plot of Black Butler. Their closeness bears a grotesque ick factor, but it is deliberate. It is a constant reminder of how unnatrual their bond truly is. Rationalizing or watering down how abnormal they are about each other misses the point entirely. They will never have a normal, healthy relationship, and that’s what moves the plot forward.

That’s why you’re watching it.

[catboyidia]

sylus would frequently send mephisto to keep an eye on zayne at work to make sure zayne wasn’t overworking himself, and he also trained mephisto to be particularly loud and annoying at specific times to force zayne to take breaks

[micah-of-the-psychos]

I'm begging and screaming for the people that say "attachment doesn't mean love" to rewatch the Prequels. You don't even have to rewatch the fucking Clone Wars. It is literally the most obvious thing that attachment, yes, does in fact mean love. No, Anakin saying "Jedi are encouraged to love" in AotC does not prove you right, it's him saying "well technically I'm allowed to love" in a very tongue-in-cheek manner, blatantly implying that he's actually breaking the rules (on another note, some people on here really like flip-flopping on whether or not Anakin is a reliable narrator, and it seems to solely depend upon whether or not they agree with what he's saying). It's about as subtle as a semi truck. Plus, the entire time that he's married to her he has to keep his relationship secret because his relationship is, y'know, forbidden. He has to hide that she is pregnant because his relationship to her is, in fact, forbidden.

Since y'all love bringing up what George Lucas said about what attachment actually means, riddle me this: why would he write an entire forbidden romance subplot contingent on the Jedi forbidding things like romantic relationships if the Jedi didn't, in fact, forbid romantic relationships? There's two options here: either George Lucas is an even worse writer than we thought, or he's doing the interview version of retconning shit on Twitter. Since people ignored JKR even before she became prolific bigot, I think it's safe to assume most people think Word of God means jack shit if they're actively retconning core aspects of their work. So Lucas's word is utterly worthless in this argument regardless of his intentions.

Another blatantly obvious bit of proof that attachment=love is the fact that Jedi can't have relationships with their birth family. Full stop. There is no ambiguity to whether or not this is true, there is no George Lucas interviews for you to hide behind; this is irrevocably canon. And there is quite literally no legitimate excuse for the Jedi to do this. All excuses for this, canonical and fandom, circle directly back to "attachment is forbidden", and it is so painfully funny to watch the few people willing to defend this. Most don't even try though, and just ignore this issue entirely, because it is a glaringly obvious contradiction to their glorified headcanon on attachments that they so desperately want to uphold.

You know, I remember back when people on TikTok were freaking out about people not having media literacy. And I remember thinking during that entire time "You guys thought people ever had media literacy?" This portion of the Star Wars fandom in particular is walking proof that media literacy never died, it was already dead the second humanity invented storytelling.

Some disclaimers because some people in this fandom are particularly fond of using straw men and ad hominem, as well as just trolling:

-I don't think the Sith are good guys. You should watch me play KOTOR 1 and count the amount of times I call the Sith assholes, dumbasses, or scum. I very much hate them.

-I don't think that Order 66 was justified. This really shouldn't have to be said, but some people on this platform have rendered this necessary.

-People can headcanon that attachment and love are different things. My problem is when people start treating it as canon and try to force other people too as well.

-Criticizing the Jedi does not mean I am criticizing Buddhism. Even if it did, I will criticize any religion I damn well please because the "It's My Religion" card immediately loses validity the second you physically or psychologically harm other people, especially children. However, the Jedi philosophy on attachment and the Buddhist philosophy on attachment are different, so this argument doesn't hold any water to begin with.

-You are free to like the Jedi. I encourage you to do so. I am not, and never will tell you that you can't.

-I really shouldn't have to make these disclaimers to begin with, but since this is the internet and people don't read the words on the page anymore, I unfortunately have to spell shit out with crayon.

Also, I can and will use the block button. If you engage in bullying or harassment, engage in bad faith arguments, or otherwise say fundamentally false or incredibly stupid shit, I will block you. If you can't handle that, then don't engage with this post. I am not making this post in hopes that you will actually listen to me, because the people that this is directed at don't listen, and don't want to. If you truly disagree with what I've said in this post on such a fundamental level that you need to make a long-winded reply about how everything I've ever said is wrong, please just scroll — dealing with that shit is actually exhausting.

[cuephrase]

have you even fucking read tim’s comics or are y’all just bitching about the cliffsnotes version of him you’ve osmosed through reductive posts, out of context panels, and/or ooc fic. the reading comprehension skills cannot be this bad.

and before you get pissy- no, you don’t have to like tim. hate him all you want. but could you at least hate tim drake and not this strawman caricature y’all have slapped his name on? or at least have the decency not to act like you’re giving out the Real True Facts about who he is, the things the rest of us have our heads too far up his ass to see clearly, unlike your free-thinking selves?

anyways, so sorry that bruce and dick and cass and steph love his annoying little ass. and that he and damian have been getting along. and that jason’s not trying to kill him anymore. i’d be pressed too if i had to deal with the fact that my blorbo doesn’t also hate that obnoxious loser tim drake who’s living rent free in my head because i’ve got such a hate boner for him <3

(and also, fwiw, you don’t have to read tim’s comics either. just maybe idk keep your mouth shut if you don’t know what you’re talking about. isn’t that what you hate about non-comics reading fans anyways?)

(also also, if you don’t read comics at all, this is not about you, regardless of whether or not you hate tim. cool? cool.)

[bougiebutchbitch]

gonna become The Enemy (an aggressive and vitriolic anti) but ONLY for the characters played by spn actors on The Boys. out of spite

[pyrosomatic-metamorphosis]

OH. okay so normally i dont touch discourse with a 20 ft pole, but this has been niggling at my brain tonight and i finally realized why

the people who are mad at qbbh for the memory loss and “dodging consequences” dont understand that he doesnt want to dodge consequences. Like they cant know that, they werent focused on him when he was literally feeding himself to the soul vultures and planning his eventual imprisonment and also. The Many Many Many hints he made towards suicide/sacrifice/Just Fucking Dying.

ccbbh is a subtle roleplayer, he’s been building this shit up for two whole months- it was day FIVE of the eggs going missing that he resolved to do whatever it took (hurting his friends) to get the eggs back. It was day three that he followed in dapper’s footsteps and started feeding himself to the soul vultures (and gaining a Massive headwound beneath his hood in the process- you can only see it if you go on namemc and remove the layers). He’s got impaired judgement. Even the memory issues arent a new thing- i cant remember exactly when they started, but one of the first big moments i remmeber was september 30th where he spent an hour falling into a delusional frenzy searching his base for cameras that he forgot he asked aypierre to plant.

The super murder of purgatory and the memory loss afterwards probably all feels very sudden for people who havent been following his story, but as someone who has been- all of this has been true to character. The only cheap swings he’s made have been combat-based in purgatory, and even the motive for those was built up in rp.

People are calling for consequences, but he has alrwady been experiencing self-inflicted consequences for months. The blue on his usual outfit is blood. This recent memory loss isnt a restart to get away with the atrocities - it is yet another consequence of his egg-protecting complexes and the ways he punishes himself for failing them.

he is NOT a moral character. he’s a demon hiding in plain site. he has eaten people. he has killed people. he understands the cruelty of his actions, and the consequences of them for the loved ones of his victims. but it matters when that harm is being done to his loved ones. he’ll still do it, because he will do anything for the eggs, but it matters, and that means that he has already started the process of self-inflicting those much-demanded consequences

[justaproshipwatermelonnerd]

Love how I used to defend my liking of characters in like 400 paragraphs just so the antis could get it and leave me alone, this is probably how my writing got to where it is today lol

[dallasmajarra]

genuinely shocked on how this fandom is this god damn small and yet we still have pointless drama I stumble on once in a blue moon.

[catboyidia]

zayne would use his evol to make really stupid looking crows for sylus, in which sylus would show them to mephisto and tell mephisto that they were supposed to be him just to get under the poor mechanical birds feathers

[tmnt-ocxcanon-comp]

There are rules in this comp against disrespectful, homophobic, sexist, and racist behavior. I will not be responding to every instance of someone breaking those rules. These kinds of people are delighted to be platformed. I shall simply block them and move on. They are not welcome here, and I will not think of them longer then the time it takes to block them, like swatting a particularly slow fly.

[kyliafanfiction]

I sometimes feel like characters who do truly monstrous things while also having been victims of some pretty insane shit themselves are sort of an exercise in empathy. Or at least, should be seen as such.

Like, in real life, if a person who has been horribly broken by their experiences and failed by society than proceeds to rape someone - it's hard to feel the justifiable sympathy/empathy for that person (without excusing their rape, never do that) because well, you can look at this actual human person they hurt, or worse, and it feels gross and disrespectful to the rape victim.

And this is understandable. (And applies to more than just rapists/rape victims of course, that's just the most visceral one and thus picked for that reason)

But a fictional rape victim is... fictional. You can't 'disrespect' their trauma, and while obviously rape/whatever else is real, and people may related to the rape victim and thus see your comments about the rapist also being a victim as somehow being about their experience...

Well, it's not.

Because the rapist here, didn't actually hurt a real person. Fictional characters are objects. They're objects that often grab us by the throat and refuse to leave our fucking heads, yes, but they're objects. They are tools used by writers to tell a story, and readers to tell a story.

And one of the things fictional characters are good for is allowing us to consider experiences we never had, and imagine ourselves in other circumstances and lives. (Also just fun and fascinating and interesting to watch their stories).

It's very easy to feel for the rape victim in fiction, and rightly so. That's Level 1 Empathy there. Granted, some people IRL fail that, but that's not really what we're talking about here.

Advanced Empathy, hard Empathy is feeling for the rapist. Not for the rape, of course, even if they feel guilt about it, but if someone really was failed on multiple levels and was broken and damaged and went through the sort of psychological wringer that would leave most of us here on tumblr catatonic - they do deserve the same Empathy any human (any person) who went through all that.

Even after they also do the bad thing, critically they still deserve Empathy. And that is fucking hard. I very often have a hard time feeling bad for truly awful people who also deserve empathy and sympathy, real and even fictional (despite all this, yeah, I'm not perfect on this) for what they (separately) went through.

It also becomes even harder when what they went through is utterly bound up with what they did. How what they went through and experiences is in part responsible for what they did - because they still made a choice. The circumstances may have left them not in their right mind, may have left them feeling without choice, may have driven them to things they normally might not think of or do, but they still chose to do that bad thing. And that's not okay. They still hurt someone.

And yet - one cannot remove the action from the circumstances. So you can still feel empathy, and elucidate all the factors and circumstances as to what led up to their choices and why, and it doesn't change that they did the horrible thing. The rape, or the murders, or whatever.

But circling back - with a fictional character... they didn't hurt a real person. There's no one who is real that suffered. The things the character did IRL are bad because they hurt real people.

So you're not being disrespectful to the victim by feeling that empathy, or sympathy. By exploring the things that they were a victim for. Even by wanting to focus on those things - fictional characters should be compelling in all their aspects, if they're written well.

And yet, of course, if you do that empathy and do talk about what the bad person went through and all that context, people come at you. They call you evil, just as bad as the (again, fictional) character, or they say that you're treading dangerously close to the arguments people use to defend the real people who do these things in real life. Or you're disrespecting all the victims of these crimes IRL. Especially of course, if the person coming at you has a reason this comes close to home.

But again - fictional.

In an ideal world, we'd all feel sympathy and empathy when it's called for, regardless of what the person did. Even the worst most monstrous people deserve human treatment in prison. And if you don't have empathy, that's hard. Even if you do have empathy, that's hard.

So if you look at a fictional character (who doesn't hurt a real person by virtue of being fictional) that does horrible, vile things, but went through so much, and you still can't empathize or sympathize with them... I mean, it doesn't make you a bad person, not even close, this is still fiction, and there's people I should empathize with in fiction that I don't, but...

It's still a failure of your ability to be empathetic. And we're all humans. We're all failing at that, among other things, all the time. But... it's good to be aware of that. at least?

At the very least, bear that in mind when other people are talking about that context, and that victimization. And please, for the love of god, don't fucking pretend that the victimization didn't happen, that this person who did do terrible things (in fiction) suddenly didn't also (in fiction) experience awful shit, as if doing a bad thing erases all the bad things done to you.

Again - it doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, but like... the horrible state of prisons in our society is a real, actual problem. The way we as a society dehumanize people who do bad things is a real actual problem for a lot of reasons (not least because it creates an incentive for authority that wants to dehumanize a person or a group to expand the definition of 'did bad things' to make their dehumanization now acceptable, among other things).

So yeah. Fictional character who suffers but than also makes others suffer - that's a useful exercise in Empathy. And doing that doesn't make you or anyone else a bad person, or actually defending the sorts of crimes, IRL or Fictional, that this character did. Contextualizing is not whitewashing, empathy is not erasing, and humanizing is not disrespecting the victim(s).

So yeah, they fictional character did bad things. But there's more to them than that. And you can say but and talk about what comes after but without disrespecting the fictional victim. Because the fictional victim... is just as fictional. Just as not real.

Is it possible for this to end up being taken too far? Yes. But that's a reason to be mindful of yourself when it comes to real people, not to never do it. And when it comes to fictional people - again, fictional. Nobody was actually, really hurt.

(I really do want to make clear, before people read the tags, that this applies to all crimes these sorts of characters do, rape was just picked as the one to use as the example.)

[truthsinwhispers]

You guys are report brigading?

[doesdarlingexe]

get out of the main selfship tag you pred

ctrl v much

anyway posting this in main tags again, but anon, you can always just use the safeshipping tags if you don't want to see proshippers. we aren't invading your space, it's a communal space with subgroups. that can apply to any fandom or any community, there will always be subgroups you don't like, but fortunately there's usually more specific tags that cater to you! there's also the block button if my content makes you uncomfortable in any way, and I highly suggest you use it if that is the case (though, something is telling me you didn't look at a single post i made).

Have a great day anon! /gen

And to everyone in the main tags, anti or proship, I hope you have a good day and remember: your f/os love you!