u ever see a mildly iffy post and look at the comments and just think “wow, everyone here is so fucking unpleasant in their own special way”

i havent been in front of my computer much this past month so i mostly just have a lot of pictures of my sketchbook

it's pretty implied that ellie never came out to joel in the proper sense. she lets him assume that she's into men, gives him the false satisfaction of "seeing" her "crush" on jesse, does not correct him. she's fairly confident in being gay in public for others to see and having others close to her know; so why not correct him? why dodge the topic?

was it out of fear? could it be that she never broached the topic despite being close to him in the early years because of the possibility of his reaction being negative? that she was afraid that out of all things that could force them apart (further apart after they split), him reacting badly to her being gay would be the worst?

what about at the dance? would she have been as wound up as she was if the moment hadn't been an encounter with a vicious homophobe? maybe she would've still snapped without this context, but why is she immediately on the defensive against joel after he sticks up for her?

what about the porch scene? why did she refute his question of dina being her girlfriend so insecurely, looking away, nervously and quietly stumbling over words? why isn't she mean about it? why doesn't she get defensive at the question? why did she lash out again when he expressed acceptance?

i think these scenes revolving around her queerness indicate it as such; that ellie never told joel for fear of a response, that she lets him think what he wants because that's the easiest way for it to be. then, when she's ready to face off against a homophobe, because that's the way things are, that's what she can expect, and joel defends her, she lashes out.

it's such a clear juxtaposition of support and hatred between joel and seth, and being faced with joel's acceptance is too much, makes her turn to the anger she'd been holding onto and reinforce what she thinks is true -- that she doesn't need him. and in the fallout, as her regret dawns on her, so too does the realization; he was protecting her, like always, without hesitation, over this thing she was always afraid he wouldn't accept her for.

in the porch scene, joel chooses his words wisely, and asks if dina is her girlfriend -- not "so you're gay?" or "why did you never tell me?" or "how long has this been a thing?" -- with such a casuality that it seems to throw her off. it's like ellie can hardly get the words out. she refutes the idea, fumbles for each following part of her response, is tense. she wasn't prepared for the question.

and when he finally asserts his support for her, in as explicit terms as he can, you can see ellie become emotional, touched for a moment but overcome, before she launches into the defensive again, exactly like at the dance scene -- meeting his kindness with hostility as a way to cope with her emotions.

and then, in response to her basically saying her life doesn't matter, he affirms that it does.

so he's now affirmed two things that ellie has doubted: that he accepts her being a lesbian, and that her life matters. a conflation of the two, in ellie's mind, may have come after; and after that, her olive branch.

and yeah, him affirming these things for her is fully in the context of his overwhelming parental love for her and her complex feelings about being the cure, but within a queer subtext, it means more. it's such a familiar thing to slink around loved ones and hide being gay/queer for fear of any type of response, and lying by omission in conversation just to keep that state of peace, of normalcy. ellie, with all her brutishness and bravery, falls into it like anyone else, because even while mad at him, she valued that response from him.

a lot of people seem to think that the approach to ellie's queerness is nonchalant, that it's just some unrelated thing about her, but i think that it holds more weight in the narrative that what is explicitly spelled out. it's subtle but it was a deliberate choice to place her queerness at the center of the confrontation. i think that's why ellie's relationship with dina took center stage in the story, and why so much time is devoted to just them -- because her being queer matters to her character, but in a way that perhaps only a queer person can see, analyze, and appreciate (without being blatant enough to anger certain other fans).

Happy Birthday to Ferdinand von Aegir!

I actually made 33 emotes, affectionately known as Aegirglyphics to some, for my own personal use on discord. However, I figure why not share some of them! They're free to use for discord servers/icons/pfps or whatever. However, my only request is Do NOT use them as subscriber emotes on Twitch. You can make them free follower emotes but you are not to make them locked behind a paywall.

they're calling 7 year old maprojects classic....................... ( slowly withering into dust) (/LH)

QUACKITY TALLER THAN INCEL.

I JUST FOUND OUT ABOUT THIS.

I had a stunning revelation today that I can't believe I didn't piece together sooner.

The best things really do come in 3's.

Ignore if you don’t want to read about me being stupid once again

shoutout to the experience of watching the new hbomberguy video, a bit like being at a party and having fun until about exactly halfway through when someone shoots you in the stomach

Does it make you sad when you follow an artist and they delete their blogs and just vanish? Bc that happened to me. I loved 10PieceChickenNugget's art, and now they're gone

I have good news for you anon! They just changed their URL for pride month and they're still around

Out of curiosity, when did the, 'fanfic doesn't need to adhere to canon, everything is valid and good, don't give concrit unless specifically asked for' attitude become the norm? Genuine question.

I was active in fandom back in the LJ days, when sporkings and comms viciously mocking Mary Sues were the norm, but then I sort fell out of fandom spaces for the past (checks notes) fifteen years holy shit. The current attitude seems diametrically opposed to what I remember fandom being like (kinda shitty, it was 'cool' to be an asshole back then), and I'm just curious as to when and how the shift happened. I mean, I assume it was a gradual thing, but is there anything in particular that stick out to you?

(Also, because tone doesn't convey very well through ask, and I don't want to leave you with a poor impression-- this is by no means a defence of the 2000s attitudes, nor an aspersion on the current ones. I'm genuinely only curious about the evolution from one to the other; I hope that comes across.)

Hi anon!

TL;DR because my response got LONG -> Anon this existed before Livejournal as an attitude, in fact modern fandom was literally born out of being not canon compliant (*waves aggressively to Spirk shippers*) and this existed on Livejorunal too and there have always been big pockets of fandom that really frowned on sporking even there, like that was not cool when I was on LJ, unless you were a certain age, or in certain spaces in fandom.

But also AO3 was its kind of final death knell re: making it cool to bully 13-16 yo writers (who were largely the victims of sporking) and killing dreams, which was born out of meta happening on LJ and in other places about like... not trying to make people miserable for writing a free fic out of the love in their heart that someone else didn't like or think was good enough.

Anyway, the longer version of this under the read more!

(For everyone else, welcome to some of the uglier aspects of 00s fandom!)

So there was actually criticism around all the stuff you mention 15-20 years ago as well. I was also on Livejournal during that time and there was a pretty big proportion of people in certain fandoms who recognised even then that like... setting up communities to mock say, Mary Sue writers, was actually a pretty weirdly cruel thing to do to people who were providing free labour and the literal only 'payment' they could get in a kind of energy exchange was people just not being complete dickheads to them.

So things were already changing, especially in many LJ communities and awards communities. There were a lot of big debates over whether concrit should be asked for, and a growing movement of authors who said they welcomed constructive criticism for example, instead of assuming it should automatically apply. There was also a lot of meta around the function of fanfiction and whether it should even be 'good' by published standards if the author was just doing it for themselves, and for fun (esp if they were just going to get punished for it by folks who were elitist, judgemental, grammar purists etc.)

Things really changed around the time of AO3 (2009-2010 - literally around 14~ years ago, you may have just missed the big change anon!), Strikethrough and the Dreamwidth exodus. There was a massive swing away from leaving concrit unless the author specifically asked for it, and fandom became a lot more generally able to recognise that a lot of labour goes into fanart and fanfiction and that paying with public criticism is shitty actually. Also people were just more able to recognise that like most fanfiction writers aren't trying to become professional writers and many don't want to be.

(I would actually say things changed around the time of fanfiction.net too - rude comments there were definitely noticed and could create some pretty forward 'hey why are you doing this on something you literally don't have to read' responses from fellow readers - idk what fic sites you were on. The small indie fic sites where you could often only comment via email for example, definitely drew a lot more critical attention than sites that tended to have public comments).

The 'fanfic doesn't need to adhere to canon' literally exists since the very first Spirk slash fic in modern fanfiction in the last few decades. Literally, as soon as you write Kirk/Spock, you're not adhering to canon. Our fanfiction 'ancestors' literally paved the way for a legacy which is about not adhering to canon in order to see the world/s and thing/s you want to see, be entertained by, by turned on by, or enjoy, from the very beginning. You may not have been in slash circles anon, but the foundation of queer same sex fanfic is in many ways the foundation of fandom. But yeah, this is literally where fanfiction started! As soon as you're shipping characters that aren't canon for fun (or for whatever reason), you're making it pretty clear that you want stories different to canon, and you have to change things to often keep those characters in-character.

So yeah! That's been there for decades. Idk what circles you were in on that front! While it was fairly common for a while to criticise characters for being OOC (Out of Character), imho, a lot of folks started to recognise that they literally weren't paying for what they were criticising, and they could just walk away and potentially not like...blast the fanfic. Some folks started to recognise more that people were writing with ESL, or were teenagers (some 40 yos in fandom realised they were mocking literal 15 year olds in their proto-podcasts and websites and realised actually that's just...mean? Really mean? Not the way to nurture new generations of fanfiction writers. Definitely in no way encouraging), or were writing for themselves, or writing for like one other person, or writing for fun, or writing for free, or writing for personal reasons etc.

'Don't Like Don't Read' wasn't just about political stuff, it was also about just walking away if you feel the urge to slam a fanfic in the comments.

I've been in fandom for around 2.5 decades anon, and there were so many spaces that were not actually as shitty or mean-spirited as the ones you were in? Or ones that at least had a lot of different thoughts etc. Like, sporking (mocking/bullying badfics and sometimes the folks who wrote them) was disapproved of by a lot of people in fandom even while sporking was at the height of its popularity (the Fanlore page goes into more detail about this). It might have just been the fandoms you were in, or the people you were hanging out with (and that might have been dependent on your age or just if you were around people who wanted to be 'cool' back then - in the same way that being an 'anti' is cool among certain crowds today. It's possible to spend years in certain crowds and never get an image of broader fandom for example - we can all end up in spaces like that! I know I have.)

When I started writing fanfiction (which no one will EVER find lmao), generally giving positive comments was normal. Constructive criticism was actually pretty rare and there were already fanfiction aggregate sites that generally disapproved of it in their Rules of Conduct. People were encouraging and polite. And this was around 20 years ago on Livejournal and private indie fanfiction websites.

I would actually say there was never exactly an evolution from 'one to the other' because like thousands of people in fandom already believed this and argued in defense of supporting fanfiction and transformative works via accepting that people are labouring for free and that not everyone wants to become a 'better writer' etc. - the meta was there on Livejournal in the 00s. There were communities where sporking was seen as hip/fun, and communities where it was literally banned or at the very least, super frowned upon.

There were meta fandom communities where sporking was the subject of discussion and you know eventually in a lot of those meta communities, that's where a lot of folks decided actually that calling out the fanfiction of 16 yos as 'cringe' or 'badly done' maybe said more about us as human beings and what we wanted fandom to be, than it did about the actual fanfic itself. By the time AO3 came around, people built it with this in mind.

To this day on AO3 it's mostly considered appropriate to say you want concrit in your author's notes, and to otherwise assume as a reader it's never welcome if it's unsolicited. That started during the LJ era. And it was talked about at great length. There's obviously going to be people who disagree! But for the most part I'm a big believer in compassion and 'not everyone is here for the same reason' and 'they literally gave this to us for free and it's meant to be fun' (like yourself! What we do/think/argue 10 years ago on LJ is sometimes different to what we do 10 years later lol, I used to be against trigger warnings pre-AO3! Times change a lot :D )

So yeah, this was definitely something that was around before you and I came to fandom, and it was something that continued to grow as an attitude during, until finally it kind of won out on AO3. But yeah fandom as we know it was born in people literally not being canon compliant to make some gay dreams come true (Spirk shippers bless them all), at a time when there was no representation.

Even in the earliest days of fandom where comments could only happen via email, one of the earliest phrases authors used were things like 'flames will be used to roast marshmallows.' For those reading who don't know, flames are hate comments, critical 'this fic is bad because' comments etc. Except you emailed them directly to the author, because there was no place for comments on a fic.

And this started because authors in part got death threats for writing gay stuff.

So you know, from the very beginning, authors in fanfic have by and large had a very low tolerance for criticism / hate over something they're doing for free and making no profit out of, when they're changing/altering the canon as they please to create representation (or hotness lmao), that is literally a labour of love in a world of very little representation. From there, things have just grown. The whole 'flames will not be tolerated' existed even before Livejournal did.

Honestly there are still people who love sporking and you could probably find groups and Discords dedicated to that even now (actually you literally can, there's a Dreamwidth group for it), it's kind of wild but it started to get cool again. Just like 90s clothing :D (Which is also wild because I can just take that crap out of my closet and wear it again).

But yeah it also sounds like you may have been in some pretty crappy pockets of fandom! When I was on LJ in the 00s I avoided those places and still got to experience fandom across multiple fandoms (mostly NCIS, Captive Prince, HP, Profiler, The X-Files and some others) and communities.

I was super active in some fandom communities and saw a lot of meta happening, and my view during the early and late 00s was that sporking was largely pretty frowned upon after a very brief (like 3-6 month) era where it was cool for only some folks, and then everyone (including some - but not all - of those folks) was like 'heyyyyyyy hang on a minute.' It was something that the bullies did, and enjoyed, and otherwise folks kind of stayed away from it, especially once they learned people were becoming too scared to write fics, which is the inevitable outcome of mocking/bullying folks and fics that have been made purely out of love for something.

Like, publicly making a spectacle out of what a 13 yo (they were often teens - and it's kind of sad how many 40 yo women were doing the sporking :/ ) wrote out of love, just for fun/clout was not considered cool by everyone even back then, because like, a lot of us saw that as killing new generations of fandom (some folks who sporked considered it a win if a fic or account got deleted, this is not based behaviour), not actually creating good writing, internalised misogyny (Mary Sue hatred and self insert hatred), etc. It's hard to explain because I do really think we were in different corners of fandom at the time, but I don't know anyone personally from my time on Livejournal who actually liked sporking as an idea or enjoyed it or enjoyed listening to it or reading articles mocking fic.

I knew about it from very lively 'is this okay' 'actually no it's not even if it's just for fun this is trying to hurt people and saying 'it's just the fic' is not going to be the bandaid a teenager needs to understand why older folks (generally) in fandom are mocking them for being new at a skill' discussions on LJ in meta fandom communities. So this is how much I could be in fandom and not be a part of it and also have like a wildly different experience to your LJ experience!

I think if I'd been a teenager during that era it would have seemed a lot more appealing (in the same way that many teens are antis now before they grow out of it), and fuck it if I was a more bitter person who was just around people who liked to make fun of what other people created, perhaps I would have enjoyed it too, I can see a lot of reasons why a person would fall into that in LJ -> but I was an adult on LJ trying not to be mean to people or what they were creating, so yeah I was maybe just in very different spaces! (Don't get me wrong, I have my giant fucking character flaws, but I was very scared of people hating me so like I didn't want to do things that would make that happen, lol, and also I was scared to put up fic myself during the era of active sporking. I know for myself that sporkers didn't just scare away writers of 'badfic' - they...intimidated a LOT of people).

Before AO3 I was on FF.net, posting fics on LJ, posting on Schnoogle, gossamer, and a couple of other archives. So I don't think my experience was that 'narrow,' I just think I wasn't around like... anime at that time or other places where it might have been happening. I also avoided like...Draco/Malfoy where CC drama was happening and I know sporking was popular in that specific arena / pairing for a while as well (er, as well as anything to do with Mary Sues).

So yeah! That's about where that is. Generally gatekeeping fandom is just seen as not a great thing to do to people, and that creates other kind of beliefs that are generally upheld as being more inviting/nurturing. After all, if someone truly wants to get better at writing, they can ask, or do courses, but as we all know, everyone has to write some bad stuff to get good at it, but not everyone wants to be good. Folks are in fandom for different reasons. I'm rambling now so I'm going to finish my lunch! :D

Any lovely witchy friends out there have advice for reaching out to a deity?

Some further chapter 235 thoughts

Alright, a little disclaimer before I get carried away: this may and chances are will in some ways contradict my thoughts from when I last talked about it here. Right after the spoilers came out my thinking was driven by emotion, and before I got a chance to sit down and shape my opinion properly, the emotion was what defined it. I guess I shouldn't have written it down in the first place, as all I really did was allowed my feelings to get the better of me and judged the situation biased. My bad, really,,

With that out of the way, my opinion has shifted since, and as I've come to see it, there's at least one important thing that Sukuna vs Gojo fight did, and that is precisely cementing Gojo's position as the strongest. It's already a pre-established truth when we enter the story, but it's put into question with Sukuna finding a way out of his seal through Yuuji consuming that finger. Sukuna merely being brought back to existence is already enough to challenge Gojo's title. Is Satoru Gojo rightfully the pinnacle of Jujutsu, or is he, as Sukuna brags, just somebody who is considered the strongest when the King of Curses wasn't around to provide a contrast? Is he the most powerful sorcerer of all eras, or is he simply the one of his time, comparatively mild and peaceful? Two characters getting to be named the only honoured one throughout heaven and earth is an explicit contradiction, so how could both statements be true at the same time? These were the questions hanging in the air from the beginning, looming over both the audience and the characters' heads, and Gege undoubtedly has been laying the groundwork for Gojo and Sukuna's confrontation since the very start. So as much as I or anybody else may dislike it, the purpose of this fight was never solely to rescue Megumi. The debate over who should claim the title of the all-time strongest had come into question long before the necessity to save Megumi entered the equasion, it's been a thread unravelling itself throughout the whole narrative. If Gojo's arc is about to reach its conclusion, that could only be possible with this uncertainty dispelled. Now that we have a concrete answer, the narrative can move on from there.

What's also been a reappearing idea in the manga since the outset, is the notion that the strength positions individual's value in Jujutsu society, brought to us from perspectives of various characters. However, it's not the strength alone which defines one's place, or rather it's not all kinds of strength that are accepted as valuable and deserving of admiration. In actuality, what really matters is how well the person in question fits into the conventional image, which is backed up by centuries of tradition followed by those in charge. Otherwise the instances when extremely powerful in their own ways individuals are driven out to the outskirts of society just because they don't fit into the mold of traditionalistic beliefs enough wouldn't be present in the narrative, we just wouldn't have characters like Toji and Maki. The moral of their stories is, essentially, that in order to be recognized as an individual and have at least some singnificant say when it comes to making decisions in the Jujutsu world, you need to uphold a standard.

And by whom is that standard set?

My thoughts keep circling back to what Gakuganji once said regarding the defining forces in their society which Grade 1 sorcerers are, whereas Special Grades are rather 'something of a misrepresentation'. I guess those who are assigned Grade 1 really do have a greater influence on the world around them, and that is not due to their strength, but rather because they're setting an ideal for those below them in the hierarchical order. They're better fit to serve as role models, and in society where climbing to the top is a way to ensure survival, younger and less experienced sorcerers have no choice but to look up to those who thrive, seeking a way to achieve it, too. The strong get to dictate the standard, yes, but it's still essential that they uphold said standard themselves, providing an example. This even finds a reflection in the procedure of promotion. One needs to be deemed worthy upon receiving recommendations, and that requires having characteristics which fall in line with what is conventionally approved of. So while Gojo is considered the strongest of his generation, he is not, paradoxically, the most powerful player in the field, not in terms of political and influential significance. Not when he displays a mindset that is a stand-alone against traditional beliefs held by the absolute majority. That is a contradiction pointed out by Sukuna in early chapters: he finds it amusing that someone so strong plays by somebody else's rules.

How is all that relevant to the importance of Gojo winning the fight?

As we know, Special Grades tend to be lone wolves, too vastly outnumbered for their voice to be heard clearly. For instance, who in the Jujutsu world knows of Yuki's research and what fruit it bears, what insight into the nature of cursed energy her investigation provides? She's stigmatized for being a delinquent (I think it's no coincidence that the only thing Geto heard about her was how she didn't carry out her duties as a sorcerer), the work of her life going unnoticed with her death. It might be a complicated way for me to get to the point, but what I'm trying to say is that Gojo, as recognizable within sorcerer's society as he is, probably isn't that different from Yuki. No one really remembers his goals when asked to describe him. He's the strongest, and that's the only lingering impression of him. By coming out of this fight triumphant and therefore cementing his position on the top of Jujutsu society, Gojo makes sure he will be remembered -- just like Sukuna is still remembered, even though centuries have passed since he was at the peak of his power. With surpassing the King of Curses under his belt, Gojo's name is now set in stone, and so is his example for the future generations. This means Gojo's ideology will outlive him, and even if his beliefs might seem delusional as of now, it doesn't mean this won't change in the years to follow. Because the adequacy of one or the other set of ideas can only be measured by the context of society they exist in, and now that society has a stimulus to reconstruct itself, adapting to the views of someone who's proven himself ultimately superior judging by its own standarts. So yes, in the end Gojo and Sukuna both fought for the sake of proving they could win, but while Sukuna was after personal gain in terms of self-affirmation and growth, I'd argue that for Gojo it was rather about setting an example.

Now, to once again address my previous thoughts and how they've changed, I no longer think it's Gojo's loneliness that should be breached in order to bring about change. Gojo's being lonely is converted into somewhat of a symbol by the narrative, and, using a little bit of metaphor here, symbols should remain static, unchanged in order to carry meaning. In that sense Gojo still represents the flawed past which the main characters of the manga need to break away from, making him the last strong sorcerer forced to fight alone and trapped in his own position. Gojo as a side character needs to stay at least in some ways inferior for the protagonists of the story to outshine him, claiming the spotlight back. After all, it's all about giving way to the new generation, and Gojo himself acknowledges it well. He as a sorcerer of the previous, older generation is too well-ingrained in that very society which the whole narrative focuses on deconstructing. It's about surpassing your predecessors, and if anything, making sure his students will do so is Gojo's main goal as a teacher.

He cannot be the same man unfollowing mason greenwood and firing jordan green within days of the accusation coming out lol now that its liam he suddenly deems everything ok it seems

I'm sorry if you don't see a difference between how you treat a celebrity you don't know who repeatedly brutally raped and beat their partner while threatening their life, or an employee who serially engaged in predatory premeditated grooming and rape of multiple minors VS how you deal with a situation with a friend who, yes, committed emotional partner abuse, both by being clueless about the impact of their actions and by directly manipulating and pressuring their partner.

But I don't actually think the solution to a friend doing problematic things is necessarily to say "ah well, we had a nice run but you're dead to me now" rather than attempt to help them be better (which can in fact look like/ mean supporting them) although yes, I am aware that in that I differ from the bulk of people driving online discourse culture. We don't know for a fact that that's what Louis does! But we don't know it isn't either, and I personally do feel that there might be grounds for hope that the man who unfollowed Mason Greenwood and fired Jordan Green and tried again and again to singlehandedly put Anthony Russell in a better place, as well as various other people in his personal life struggling with addiction issues, including Liam himself for years now, might in fact care and have something to say to his friend about it all (over the last months and years one assumes, since unlike us he's had a front row seat to this whole situation all along). And yeah, about that... you do know that Louis has to have known about all this since long before yesterday right? And yet the suggestion seems to be that it becoming public knowledge should be the breaking point... like in the named situations above, them becoming public was relevant because he found out at the same time as us! If I believed Louis knew what JG was doing and that he only fired him because we found out I would NOT be here, yk? But no way is that the situation here, like hell I assume him and Liam were on the phone for hours at a time with Liam drunkenly freaking out like I can't raise a fucking kid! So I told her... blah blah blah... etc.

when i exchange a message whether i receive or send one i have to immediately shut off my device & walk some laps for a few minutes to shake off the adrenaline rush