#which is a whole other conversation

[whaledocboi]

ai generated images make me increasingly sad and tired the more i see them in more and more casual contexts. i dont know how to explain, but it just fills the world with a bunch of nothing. no matter how visually stunning the pictures might be, there's nothing behind it for me. no dedication, no emotions, no feelings, no hard work or creativity, nothing i can truly think about, admire or enjoy. i dont think thats how art is supposed to be

[miamignonette]

the assumption that bi people are never gnc really shows that a lot of you consider us cishet 2.0

[officialgleamstar]

i do agree, in many ways, that fandom tends to prioritize shipping over like... actually enjoying characters' dynamics and friendships and what makes them unique LMAO but sometimes i see the way people talk about shipping and im like. i feel like you're missing the point here. i don't make and consume mostly romantic (or queerplatonic, but that's a whole other conversation) fanworks because i can't appreciate the characters' friendships. i mostly consume romantic fanworks because the canon already does the characters' friendships so well. if i wanted to see characters be friends, i would go watch the show. they're not kissing each other in the show, and that's why i turn to fanworks for that stuff

now when its media that does not do the friendships well enough, then i am all over the platonic fics, hello kiddads from dungeons and daddies-

[nantokanarusaa]

Ao no Flag (SERIES FINALE SPOILERS!!)

Seriously, don’t read this if you are planning to read Ao no Flag. That being said, go read the manga now!!

Finally finished reading Ao no Flag and I have so many feelings. Non-coherent, rambly, messy feelings. I was looking at reactions online and what mainly boggles me about the reactions to the final 2 chapters is people being “how is Taichi suddenly gay??” My friend living on this big planet he never was (he’s bi). He most likely just realized it later in life. Did the events of his 3rd HS year help him figure it out? Heck yes. Is he suddenly bi? No.

Not all queer people pop out into this world and instantly know they are queer. Heck, it took me 23 years to figure that out. It’s not like Taichi instantly realized he likes Touma and started dating him. He knew Touma mattered to him somehow, but it took him multiple years to realize how, as evident by him maybe starting his relationship with Touma after 5 years when Touma contacted them all. He gained life experience and grew.

People go through a lot of learning, unlearning and growing. Especially if you are outside of societal expectations and norms. Taichi grew up learning to and wanting to blend in with society. “Be normal, don’t stand out too much”. Add to that low self-confidence and you feel stuck. Feel like there is only black and white. only one right answer to life. It can be very difficult to look out of this dark box, trust me, I had a tough time and sometimes still do. But it feels like Taichi thought and thought and pondered even back in high school and came to the decisions that he did.

And isn’t that what the series is about? growing as a person, making mistakes, learning, allowing yourself to be visible and vulnerable, and eventually, making choices, even if they don’t make sense to anyone else, and continuing to do so?

These two pages really hit me hard and I was wondering why. And then it hit me. This is possibly the happiest I’ve seen Taichi be since his childhood. Like genuinely happy. He’s reached max happiness points and is sharing those with Touma. He’s made his choices, and he’s happy. You can and are allowed to choose what or who makes you happy.

That’s all that matters.

[raycatz]

I'm not including a situation where someone might be injured because in that case I'm thinking the bed goes to them by default or they are nominated for it. anyone who wants to be chatty goes to join the living room floor gang.

What are your thoughts and headcanons? Do you have thoughts on how the boys tend to approach assigning beds in inns? Who do the chain choose to sleep near when camping and why? What are their dynamics like when settling down for the night and getting ready for the day?

In "Mirror Vs Open Closet Door: Fight!" by Gintrinsic (here) Four refers to the chain's decision on how to split up between inn rooms as the "Link-per-room ratio" which I find very funny. He, Sky, and Time also talk about their thought process behind why they do or don't want to sleep in a room with some of the others which I find fun and interesting.

So! If you have thoughts and want to share them! *gestures to the post!*

[marblellous]

girl help i love a minor npc

[regenderate]

people are soooo mad about the new sonic screwdriver not having an element of thirteen's sonic and saying thirteen era is going to be erased or whatever as if thirteen ever mentioned anything that happened in twelve era despite having literally just lost like all her friends...

[raaorqtpbpdy]

Okay I’m thriving on all the Marie/Jordan posting, it is absolutely deserved, they’re amazing together, but I wish there was a little more love for Emma/Sam too because “I don’t remember you, but I do believe you” fucking broke me.

Imagine you’ve spent years questioning reality, surrounded by people who constantly remind you that you can’t believe your own eyes. You finally meet someone outside of that group and you’re convinced she’s a hallucination, except she passes your test, and she’s sweet, and she laughs at your jokes even though you have a really off-beat sense of humor, and she matches it, and you love her like you’ve never loved anyone. And she promises to stay with you after everyone else you’ve ever loved has abandoned you, whether intentionally or not. And then you start to freak out and you know your scaring her, because she’s seen you rip people apart with your bare hands, but she’s not running. She’s not even trying to make you calm down or be rational or stop. Instead she asks “How can I help you?” She wants to help you. And you run. And she saves you. She stops you from doing something you’ll regret. She’s the first one who’s done that without violating your mind.

And then she loses all her memories of you. She looks at you without an ounce of recognition, and you think you’ve lost her, even if you swear to get her her memories back. And you’re alone again, and you’re hallucinating. You’re hallucinating her. You can’t trust reality. You can’t trust yourself. You can’t believe what you see or hear or touch. Then she comes back again, but this time she’s real and you ask if she remembers you and she says no. “I don’t remember you, but I do believe you.”

I can’t even, okay, I’m losing my mind over here.

[squeakadeeks]

moodboard for this past week ❤️

[cleromancy]

god ppl trying to claim jasons "we're the not so different you and i" villain speech to mia WASNT incredibly unsubtle subtext... that they went through the same trauma... like he says theyre alike. she says he knows nothing about her. he lists what he knows. and then he repeats that they're alike.

that's only barely subtext and not text itself, man. trying to argue that isn't the intention that jason was also a csa victim is just willful misreading at that point

[waterberry-strawmelon]

just gonna go ahead and say this in advance—

if Riz does indeed come out in junior year, and he says, “I’m ace” or “I’m asexual” when referring specifically to his lack of romantic attraction, aromantic people are allowed to be upset about it.

[malevolententity]

sometimes i wonder if m a dnd elitist and then i remember no. i actually just enjoy a wide spread of ttrpg systems indie and mainstream. and just get very annoyed that everyone else in the world is seemingly too allergic to shopping around for systems so instead of finding an indie system that does what they want. theyll just break dnd to the point where it doesnt even resemble dnd anymore. like oh? youre playing dnd 5e but youve changed half the stat names and all basic mechanics? and the only dice you roll is d6s?? GO BUY MONSTER OF THE WEEK. THAT IS THE SYSTEM U WANNA PLAY IT ALREADY EXISTS AND IS VERY FUN. YOU CAN PLAY OTHER GAMES ITS OKAY I PROMISE

[lunar-lair]

every time i think of system jason i think about. well first i think about how jason todd is a separate alter but jason todd is also the person because thats the name they own but the main host for like 20 years goes by jason and thats his name and. anyways. next i think about the ways he dissociates. but THEN i think about the littles/teens/even some adults that will only respond to robin or their name, and if they dont have a name, just robin, and maybe jason

sometimes its just a game of firing off names. some of them only respond to red hood, some of them respond to jason todd in full specifically, some of them respond to peter. theyre bad at names and in the early days its hard to figure out whos who (both in the system and out), too, so sometimes theyll just stare at whoevers talking to them with squinted eyes until they say a name they recognize as their own. some of them only respond to Specific Nicknames, some of them love people besides dick and bruce and alfred (and sometimes damian and tim and steph, but not duke, or...you get the picture) because they all love their family, even if they dont know them, but they dont Know Them. and some of them only respond to jaylad or jaybird or little bird, some of the older ones only respond to damian. its definitely a trial and error kind of thing. usually they can interact with everyone just fine, but some days they find jason in the kitchen and when tim tries to talk to him he looks away and creeps into a corner of the kitchen and they have to find dick and then bruce (bad choice) and then damian. its the trauma conversation but its also the memory conversation and the 'who are you to yourself and who do people know you as' conversation. i have a lot of thoughts abt jason w osdd/did (preferably did that sounds more like him) it does things to my brain. this post was supposed to be abt alters that respond to robin and then i just. kept talking. oops

oh my god the thought i just had. some of the littles dont know any of them and just hole themselves away in the library and everyones like 'ok has anyone seen jason he skittered off earlier and he looked fucking Scared we are Worried' but they learned early on that looking for him is a Bad Idea because hell get scared. so they just have to wait until jason texts one of them or smth like 'bad news weve got a new kid and they dont know any of you. good news we know what they respond to. bad news its a nickname from our mom most of us cant bear to hear. good news were getting them a name. bad news we cant leave the library yet. were alive though' and thats all they have to go off until he trudges out of the library three hours later asking what the hell happened because the little and a protector had a whole Convo then threw jason back in front to fend for himself

ok thats it this time i think. for real this time. anyways i have thoughts abt system jason if you have any queries please ask them i would love to talk abt him

[bisexualamy]

I see people talk about fanfiction and novels being different mediums a lot, and while I don’t necessarily disagree, I don’t feel like I understand either. In your opinion, what makes them different mediums from each other? What decides that two things are separate mediums like in general? It’s totally cool if you don’t wanna answer this btw, I know it’s kind of a lot

No worries I think that's an interesting question! With any categories, the boundaries on this are going to be fuzzy, but the reason I believe they're different mediums is that fundamentally, on a metatextual level, the languages are different. What do I mean by this? Let's use film as an example, a medium that I'd argue is very obviously a different medium than novels, even if we may not be able to articulate all the reasons why.

What are some attributes of film that differentiate it from novels (another storytelling medium) or paintings (another visual medium)? Films and novels are both storytelling mediums, but films have visual and auditory components. They also mainly consist of storytelling through visual cues and dialogue. Exposition is given visually or in media res by characters speaking. In a novel, your omniscient narrator giving you a few paragraphs of background on your main characters is common, and so expected it probably flies over the reader's head. In a film, a narrator doing the exact same thing for all the main characters often comes off clumsy. It takes you out of the story in a film, where it doesn't in a novel.

Film is also a time-based medium. A film unfolds over time, and you cannot experience the entire film in one moment or glance. That's not true of a painting (at least traditionally). With a painting, you can view the whole painting in one look. Now, you can sit with a painting, pick out details, analyze the craft or ponder it for a long time and watch as new aspects jump out at you. Fundamentally, however, if you wanted to view a whole painting in one look, you can, and it would still make sense. You cannot do that with a film. On the other hand, a painting is typically not an auditory experience. To do so would be an experimental use of the form. In modern film-making, the exact opposite is true. Music, dialogue, and environmental sound, all of these things are essential to how a film tells a story. To not use them would be considered experimental or odd.

These are three different mediums with three different "languages" in how they interact with their audience. They may share parts of their languages, like I said above, but they don't speak the same language. What works well for one medium can come off clumsy or strange in another.

I believe fanfic and novels have sufficiently different languages that they should be considered different mediums. Both of them are short or long form written mediums telling some sort of story. But fanfic's relationship to its source material is such an inherent trait that novels do not have. The relationship doesn't have to be positive (it's often, in fact, argumentative or strained or dismissive), but the relationship exists. Even in AU fanfiction. Even in fics full of OCs.

In canon compliant and even canon divergent fics, this relationship is more obvious. These fics are both conversations with the source material as much as they are stories. They're playing in the author's sandbox, or they're wrecking their sandcastle and building something else. They're saying "I like/dislike what you did with this specific story, and I'm going to show you that by rewriting or expanding it." They take large aspects of the author's story whole cloth: the characters, the setting, the magic system, the tech, etc.

These fanfics often have little exposition at the top because they presume a familiarity with the characters, the world, or both. This alone makes them really different from novels. Creatively and seamlessly integrating exposition, immersing your audience in a new world and convincing them to stay, is a really important aspect of a novel that these fics don't have to contend with. This alone fundamentally changes how you'd structure a story.

For AU fics, both fics in AU settings and AU fics full of OCs, the above still applies. These fics are still a conversation with the source material. Something about the source material compelled an author to flip it and remix it and change it around. That conversation might be "in the source material, these characters suffered, and I don't want them to suffer any longer" or it could be "I felt the story had a vacancy that this OC fills" or it could be "if these characters had the time/awareness/ability to grow closer, they would've fallen in love." These are all direct commentaries on the original work.

An exercise that I believe illustrates this point the best is to try and adapt an AU fanfic to an original work. Try to file the serial numbers off. I've done this with some of my fic, and it just doesn't work. You don't realize how much you presume the audience knows until you have to cater to an audience who knows nothing of the source material. That hilarious joke you wrote? Turns out it's only funny because it's a nod to this character's original characterization. This awesome climatic plot point that ties the whole story together? Turns out in relies on a specific bit of lore, a quirk of the magic system, or an aspect of the character's past history or personality. Now that this is a novel, you have to back-fill all of that exposition. And you can try to do that, but watch how your story gets clunky and bloated. You will have to start viciously killing your darlings, as you realize that your favorite scene is beautiful in a fic, but sounds awkward and out of place in a novel. Soon, you're basically just rewriting the whole thing to fit a different medium.

Many fanfic writers are extremely talented. And much of that talent, that wit, that perfect line that you can't get out of your head, is integrally informed by your knowledge of the source material. The irony falls flat without having read the source books. The relationships suddenly feel shallow when you don't have seasons of backstory to deepen them. You do not realize how much of fanfic writing consists of this back and forth until you go looking for it.

And here's the thing: if your fanfic has a totally AU setting and it consists of completely original characters, I'd argue that's just a novel posted to AO3. If all you need to do is change the names to make it work, that's a novel. This is why Clueless is inspired by Jane Austen's Emma and not an AU fanfic of it. If you've never read Emma, if you went into Clueless not knowing that Emma was the inspiration for it, you'd perfectly understand the movie.

In fanfic, the source material is always present. It can be obviously present with canon compliant fic. It can be antagonistically present with canon divergent or AU fic. And it is still present, floating in the background, with totally AU fic. Ultimately, the changes a fanfic author makes to the source material are, themselves, as integral to the fanfic as the words on the page. It is a dialogue with the source material: what it did well, what it could've done better, what this author believes is the essence of the story, or the world pushed to its limit, that even though we're in space or in a coffee shop or 1920s New York, we're still, on some level talking about the source material.

This is an aspect of fanfic I love that novels do not have. Novels have a lot of other great stuff! I love novels! But while novels are often engaged in a dialogue with their present society or their predecessors in a genre, that conversation is much more nebulous than it is with fanfic. You can read Slaughterhouse-Five or Gravity's Rainbow, and while knowing their contexts helps you understand them on a deeper level, that is unnecessary to their enjoyment. They are fundamentally more standalone works than fanfic will ever be.

This is ultimately why I think comparing fanfic and novels is comparing apples to oranges. They're different mediums. They use different languages. They require different skills and they fill different artistic niches. You might as well be comparing a film to a painting just because they're both visual art.

[corfisers]

i really need to finish this one day

[magentagalaxies]

went on a trans seinfeld tangent in class today and none of the cis people thought it was interesting >:(