#we all have our biases

[leogichidaa]

Harry thinks Regulus is less attractive than his brother lol

To be fair, Harry thinks everyone is less attractive than Sirius. Sirius has a god like status in the eyes of young Harry and no man (or woman) could hope to compare.

[royalarchivist]

Etoiles: Oh, finally we had a funny moment in Purgatory, let's go. Oh, let's go! One week of wait to have a funny moment.

Roier always knows the best way to diffuse a tense situation.

[spywhitney]

How I sleep knowing I'll never trust anyone that hates Sydney but worships Richie:

[pommunist]

if we can believe quackity when he said he wasn’t aware of all the bad things going on and if we can trust him when he say he’s working towards positive change SURELY we can trust that all the ex admins who shared their stories and continue to do so are doing it in good faith for the good of their colleagues as well as the future of a project they gave their time and energy for months for free RIGHT ?

[phatcatphergus]

I understand why fit viewers are upset that what fit meant as a joke is being taken seriously, but like Tubbo didn’t know that. This is miscommunication the musical!!!! What the hell is Tubbo supposed to think when fit pulls foolish aside and asks if he really wants to work with tubbo? Like that seems really serious and genuine, especially bc he had to evesdrop to hear it! Like it’s really not that deep but to qtubbo it is.

I genuinely don’t think anyone is wanting fit dead or upset with him as a character (aside from not reaching out but that’s on qtubbo too), we just take things how qtubbo takes them and qtubbo overhearing someone asking if they actually want to be his friend while he’s already insecure is hurtful.

Not everything is negative about another character, we can be angsty and say how much we wish fit would reach out and be upset over what he’s saying while still liking him and understanding that the comment was meant to be jokier then how people took it. People view characters how the characters view characters, qtubbo was hurt so we’re hurt. Fit was joking so the huevos don’t see a problem. We all gotta understand that we come from different understandings and that’s okay!!!

[hwanghyunjinenthusiast]

Lee Chan

[pauls1967moustache]

hi, i'm new to the beatles fandom so forgive me my ignorance but in a lot of the fanart i've seen they tend to draw paul mccartney very effeminate and smaller than the others, when isn't he the tallest? from first glance it does kind of seem like a homophobic caricature, though again i might be missing something. is it something to do with the cartoon? which also seems kind of unflattering. sorry, i keep wondering why paul seems to get more distorted than the others by fans, i'm not expecting you to be an expert or anything, but i was hoping you could offer some insight. thanks and have a nice day!

ah, i don't really see that much. not to say there aren't artists who do that, but if there are, i certainly have not been following them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

idk if there's any insight i can offer. it's kind of an age old fandom cliche: artists drawing m/m pairring with one being the "girl" one. same as like, fanartists drawing men in their 40s to look like 20 year old anime twinks, or drawing fat people as curvy with a flat stomach and skinny face, etc. this isn't even exclusive to m/m ships; i once saw egregious fanart for the bear where they drew the main character to be a giant buff dude compared to the main girl even though the actress who plays her is like the same height as him irl. people just do it. you could call it a homophobic caricature, but i don't think it's that nefarious. i think people just internalise the typical heterosexual imagery of every day life in their heads, and paul usually ends up being the "girl" one in that situation. i don't think it's meant to be unflattering. if anything it's being done because those artists probably find that attractive in paul (there's a reason he is the most feminised in fanfiction).

if it bothers you to see that kind of art, my advice would be to simply ignore/block the artists you don't like and follow the ones who don't do that - of which there are plenty, i prommy!

[toytulini]

terfs go climb into a hole and start rotting. animals cannot inherently tell your "biological sex" you are all so fucking stupid. All this post is saying is that animals are not infallible judges of character and some of them make really stupid vibe checks and that people should try not to take it personally. Unless youre a terf in which case they know and they hate you and you should take it personally

re that one post tbh i do want to stress i dont think animals are like magically psychic at knowing your True Gender tbh i think ppl definitely get way too weird about Animal's judgement of ppl.

Sometimes a dog will vibe check a man and the dog will be right and you should listen. but sometimes the dog will vibe check someone for no good reason. sometimes dogs have wack judgement. sometimes dogs have biases influenced by their owners or previous owners. like. there are Racist Dogs. its not the dogs fault, but that doesnt make the bias theyve developed less real, or less potentially hurtful. i dont think we need to like, Cancel Dogs Bc Sometimes Ppl Can Train Them To Be Racist, but we do need to stop perpetuating the idea that a dog's judgement of someone is infallible. theyre not responsible for it and its not their fault its developed, theyre just dogs, they didnt choose it, but that doesnt mean theyre RIGHT lmao. i think its important to stress this for many reasons but in regard to that last post specifically, if youve ever been vibe checked as a gender you arent by a judgy dog its literally not your fault. might not even be the owners fault. not the dogs fault cos like. its a fucking dog. you do kinda have to be the bigger person in that scenario cos the other person is. A Dog.

[3416]

ppl genuinely mad theyre breaking up 88 and 34 are so funny as if every game i don't have to hear "another missed pass" fkljdslf or as if auston isn't self-fueled rn. like. 599188 was better than 233488 has been in this stretch of the last whole month they've got and if you don't want the second line to get eaten alive, you gotta change something man. first line's not even been that good either on the whole, it just looks insane w auston willing the whole team back into games. willy's point yesterday and a couple over this ten game stretch haven't even had much to do with his own line like lmfao.

ppl only support the whole "we have two talented right wingers so switching them when things go stale is reasonable" when its auston and mitch being split up and that's it. like it's a fairly low stakes move when everyone's played together now, so it's insane i have to read takes about mitch marner and his ~family~ pulling strings in the leafs org like that's a reasonable thing to think or that people constantly complain abt this not making ~logical~ sense when it does ? and they never complain when it's the other way... we just lost 9-3,, like that's not an accident and the leafs are rightly not happy about that. the leafs think auston can drive his own line and if you all really thought willy could, you'd be wanting that second lining firing again bc then that's TWO usable lines and not just one like we had with the lines yesterday.

[clhampir]

one of my least favorite themes about the internet lately is non-american people complaining that americans are talking about american-centric issues on the internet and being like "nOt EvErYtHiNg ReVoLvEs ArOuNd YoU iDiOtS" and it's like. yeah buddy. that's why we didn't apply it to anywhere else in the world. we're talking about the specific issues we are facing as americans living in the states. the reading comprehension is atrocious

[mantisgodiveblog]

Good to hear that you are okay! I was wondering it you were doing better, and it’s good to see hear that you are at least somewhat! Take your time to recover- being sick sucks!!! (((I debated whether or not I should speak on Mira- didn’t want confirm or deny but decided to: Honestly, just seeing rep is so rare. And from my small vantage point of being the the vanilla flavor of aroace (I tried to word that in a different way, failed, and landed on a joke lol), I think she’s a pretty good one.)))

Currently, mostly Doing Tired. Fairly standard state of being for us, admittedly. We will persist regardless. Unclear on what you mean by "vanilla flavor of aroace", here - perhaps a sign of the fact that an incredibly disproportionate percentage of our friend circle is on the spectrum, but we cannot for the life of us figure out what would be treated as "default" here. In our books, any representation is good - what someone might like varies enough by person that it's a bit hard to gauge "good" versus "bad" compared to just... what appeals more or less to any given person.

Our personal preferences when it comes to most media, for example, are in an area where something like 90% of what we really want to see is stuff where we have to "make our own food", so to speak - though, admittedly, the way that our own personal preference tends to complicate things a bit. Our love for picking things apart is a double-edged sword, in that being capable of picking apart things to the extent that we do often offers them far more opportunity to wear thin.

We are very capable of identifying trends, both in stories and people, and this has been both a great source of fun and a great source of frustration, because at the point we're at, we're often very well capable of picking apart underlying patterns of behavior to a degree that we're not necessarily "supposed" to. Because we are who we are, this means that a lot of stories can draw... dull, after we've seen enough of it. Because we know the motions, and we've most likely analyzed the underlying structures to death and back, if the story itself falters or does not succeed at offering enough new to interest us, we tend to have our interest rapidly drop off.

The degree of this, of course, varies. Body horror, transformation, gore, and a great deal of similar topics are very unlikely to wear thin for us. Good character studies tend to be the sort of thing where we can reread the same words over and over again without it getting dull. On the opposite side of the spectrum, pure fluff is the sort of thing that we struggle to get through more than maybe once every few months, and we're of the personal opinion that fandom as a whole has worn the idea of "found family" thin enough that you could stick its cloth in front of your face without noticing any difference in visibility.

This is, of course, thoroughly in the realm of "tangent" by now. A trope, like any other narrative tool, is a building block - how well it works out will depend almost entirely on execution, and if executed well, pretty much any building block can be used to spin a damn good story.

We are, however, ourself, and knowing ourself, we're going to have to start taking breaks just to make sure that the game remains enjoyable if we stray too. We're banking on things getting worse, we're banking on the warnings on the site paying off, we're hoping that the narrative we're walking into won't dull its teeth, and we're... admittedly, mostly hoping that whatever they do with Mirabelle is interesting, because we generally prefer "interesting" to "something that would be considered good representation", and we've spent enough time being aro by now that explaining things to us will feel thoroughly... plastic.

[dullahandyke]

Thinking abt metis cykes again. I love her so so dearly shes just like me. I am deeply disinterested in any au where she does not die and I think her image should have been used to torment her loved ones more than it was. I dont think she should have a face

[nepobabyjimkirk]

It’s easy to say that fandom as a whole’s obsession with white men is because most of the well written characters in popular media are white men, that it’s entirely a problem with writers and producers and not on fandom at all, until you’re in a fandom for a show with a whole host of well written women and POC characters and the fandom as a whole is still continuously sleeping on them in favor of the white men. Like absolutely media needs to do better but @ my fellow white fans, we do too and we all need to examine our own internalized misogyny regardless of our gender

[rawliverandgoronspice]

ganondorf in descant: okay sure I snapped at fate a few times but I am also very understandable + tragic so can you really blame me

gerudos in the background: *on the verge of tears, stress-drinking and trying to prevent him from getting murdered every 5 seconds while avoiding literal extinction themselves* sure my king whatever you say

[mantisgodsdomain]

Okay we're done getting really mad about bug game worldbuilding. If you are interested in seeing us get extremely mad about Bug Fables' consistently shoddy worldbuilding, then it is below the cut. We'll tag this properly in like a week so it doesn't haunt the main tag for everyone who might not want to read 1.8k words of a random author getting really fucking mad about shoddy worldbuilding.

We've done a lot of stuff with worldbuilding for Bug Fables. Our handling of Bugaria itself is, we will admit, not quite canon-typical. There's a lot going on, and not all is easy to work with. We know from the game itself that Bugaria is surrounded by hostile deadlands, making outside trade difficult and often-lethal - we also know, from being able to observe the in-game map as a human with outside perspective, that Bugaria is contained within a single backyard.

For the game proper, this is fine. It lends itself well to the "borrower" type aesthetic that the devs appear to prefer, limits the scope of the in-game map, and allows for them to do significantly less legwork trying to figure out how to design things. We, however, are a man obsessed with semantics, and we know too much about the amount of food and territory generally required for one hive of wasps or bees to buy into one suburban backyard that's... what, 60 square meters of backyard?

IRL honeybees alone will forage up to, on average, 1-6 km away from their hives, potentially going up to 13 km, and though there's been less research done into the habits of other colony bugs, it's fairly safe to assume they'd need similar range - more likely greater range, actually, as any form of what we humans call "higher intelligence" is incredibly demanding, resource-wise. Bugaria has four different kingdoms of social bugs, many of which would have overlapping needs for resources, combined with a whole load of other miscellanous solitary bugs. loaded into the space of a single backyard that likely wouldn't account for the range of a single hive of honeybees, let alone four hives of miscellaneous bugs and venus-knows-how-many solitaries.

In order to survive in any place, you need to fulfil the requirements of life. Food, water, and shelter are basic needs for a reason, and without access to all three, settlements are likely to quickly peter out. In order for The Hive to process nectar into honey, they first need nectar, which would have to come from flowers, which would be the exact same food source that wasps, butterflies, and moths would need, which clearly aren't growing in the needed

Put quite simply, it would be really fucking difficult for a space of this size to support the presented numbers of bugs. Plants are not an infinite resource, and even assuming that there's a density of flowers far beyond what's shown in-game, there's still predatory bugs to consider. Wasps and ants need protein to feed their grubs, dragonflies and damselflies need protein to feed themselves, mantises and mantidflies are obligate carnivores that cannot survive without a steady supply of prey- you can't survive if you never eat, and Bug Fables is incredibly low on lesser bugs that could potentially serve as food for the more predatory bugs.

Canon offers only aphids and cochineals as cattle, and those still wouldn't really serve to feed larger predatory bugs - and that's even without noting the ecological desert that results from only ever having a handful of enemies. We know that there are limits to what you can do in a game, but the second you want to expand on life beyond what's shown, you run straight into the lack of known prey and wildlife like smacking right into a brick wall. Roaches raise scorpions in a wasteland that seems to have only Mystery Berries for food unless they're trying to hunt Deadlanders, which we doubt are particularly edible. The Royal Blade of the Ant kingdom is an obligate carnivore, and there's nowhere he can go if he wants to buy lunch.

Realistically, we know that the answer is "the devs didn't really think about it". This game is built on the work of devs who persistently place "because it looks cool" over doing any of the worldbuilding work to integrate their existing story elements into the world. You only have to look to Yin to see just how many parts of the game are riddled with things added purely because Someone Thought It Might Be Cool, and no one did any further legwork to make it WORK. The Termacade is a living monument to the philosophy, being added A WEEK before release without anyone so much as communicating it was going to happen before it was in active development. 

Unfortunately, we are permanently obsessed with semantics, we can't stand "because magic" as an answer to important worldbuilding questions, and every time we have to do all the legwork to fill massive holes in the setting where no one ever thought that the answers to questions like "how the fuck do these people feed themselves" is relevant, we will be sadly prone to falling into madness.

There is no canon answer to how these bugs feed themselves. There is no indication as to how things that should be basic parts of the setting WORK. The bugs, in the first place, are written persistently as more People With Hats than actual BUGS - there are nods made to biology, sure, but the difference between a wasp and a bee is little more than a set of aesthetics and a silly hat. There are enough elements in the game that are simply thrown in without care of how they interlock that it sometimes becomes genuinely maddening.

Some people, sure, are satisfied with this - there is a madness that we have that we lack, a need for SUBSTANCE that is prone to driving us to inadvisable lengths hunting for a hint - any hint - that there was care put into this detail, rather than a single flippant comment. We have no complaint with things left vague, but we VERY MUCH have a problem when the setting is consigned to being little more than a backdrop decorated with random glittery ideas to act out anime tropes on, rather than something that should be paid attention to all its own.

We've said this before, and we'll say it many times again, but worldbuilding is important for a REASON. Your setting will affect your characters just as strongly as it will affect your story - your plot, your setting, and your characters are fundamentally inertwined, and to affect ANY part of the story will have rippling impacts on the rest of it. Your characters are not created in a void! Whatever structures created one person MUST still be present to shape others! You cannot throw shiny ideas on a canvas slapdash and expect it to turn out well! It's a miracle that the character writing in this game turned out as well as it did, considering that massive swathes of the setting are loosely assembled from anime without even taking the time to learn how certain aspects WORK in their home media!

We enjoy writing. We enjoy crafting plots, doing worldbuilding, tinkering with the little pieces of setting that we feel might create something interesting. We wouldn't be writing at all if we didn't enjoy it on some level, though we sometimes wonder if it's more masochism than care for some aspects. This is the trade that we have chosen to work towards working. Perhaps it is this that makes it so violently infuriating when we run into people who don't seem to care for that which we pay attention to.

There are a handful of aspects in this game that are well done. There are far more aspects in this game that are half-baked at best and actively difficult to work into the rest of the world at worst. There is a particular handful of aspects that are so poorly done that they could pass as active malice, towards one group or another. Unfortunately, as with many things, to assume ill will often overlooks the far more pervasive, far more common culprit of simple negligence.

Bug Fables, at its core, is a game made by devs with chronic shiny-object syndrome. There is little care spared to its worldbuilding, to the implications of its setting, to the implications of character actions, because the devs have never cared to think on it. It takes tropes from a hundred and one different animes without caring to learn what makes them work in their home context - just that they're cool, and that the authors want them in their own work.

It's something that we've been guilty of ourself, in previous works, but that only makes it easier for us to spot it here. There is an mirror of mistakes we have made ourself written on the walls, and it echoes with every step. We are the sort of author who learned to build worlds by stealing shards from different worlds and patching them into a new quilt. This is a work that takes does much the same, taking pieces from other works to make a new whole, but it makes the mistake of not spending the time to make sure those pieces FIT.

The mosaic on the floor is made of broken, disparate parts that are only partially fit together. The world falls apart more and more the closer you look at its shards. There are pieces of harm in this painting, pictures of pain, things put together and only barely examined. There is prejudice that could pass for malice woven into the threads of even the more comedic writing, an undercurrent commonly present in society and rarely examined. They've made an entire species of bugs into an incomprehensibly racist trope. Perhaps it's foolish of us to spend so much time and energy on a world that does not love us back, but we care for this setting, and we care for the potential of what it could have been.

The prejudice and shoddiness and pieces of poorly-thought-out and tropey writing in this work are not an act of malice. They are an act of ignorance, left over from a development team that wanted to add the latest shiny thing without stopping to think that their favorite anime tropes might have roots in something rotten.

Anyways, the reason that we wind up putting so many fucking footnotes on our fics is that every time we have to answer basic questions like "how does the wasp kingdom fucking feed itself" we have to rewrite, like, half a dozen tropes ripped off from shitty isekai anime, come up with an entire power structure and system of government that could potentially exist in this universe, write 2000 words of geopolitical bullshit minimum, reinvent animal agriculture, create at least one brand new species of bug, and then battle our conviction to avoid cushioning or avoiding the implied Fucked Up Elements that are Very Much Present In The Base Work if chronically ill-addressed vs the question of if we Want to include this particular brand of Fucked Up Bullshit or if we'd actually rather avoid having to reckon with the aftermath of yet another poorly-thought-out trope ripped from Trapped In Another World With My Smartphone.