favorite character from any media BUT it has to be a woman. in the tags now go (pls talk to me about your favorite fictional women pls pls pls pls)

Character: is a white man. That’s it.

Fandom: how dare you dislike this femme-coded female-coded gay-coded disabled-coded mentally ill-coded icon

Saw an op-ed that was on the surface a complaint about kids not wanting to take on family heirlooms but read like an elegy to dying traditions. The hardest part was the anxiety without recognizing that they didn’t pave the way for the decisions they assumed their kids would make.

(This is written entirely within the dominant white/western culture - about traditions that have neglectful stewardship rather than those actively suppressed)

The anxiety makes sense. You’re seeing, too late to do anything about it, that there’s no foundation - no space - for the traditions you expected to pass on. Your kids _can’t_ take your mom’s fine china. So now instead of enjoying what you have you worry about its future.

I see a pattern in these op-eds though - a pattern in what’s left unsaid. There were responsibilities tied to these traditions. You collectively assumed they _would_ be passed along. So collectively, what did you do to ensure those traditions _could_ be passed along?

Op-eds never speak for everyone, but it’s worth acknowledging the pattern in what speech is deemed worth sharing widely.  And in this particular pattern, there’s an answer: that answer looks like “nothing.”

You want the china passed down but your kids have no room in their rentals. You want grandkids but your kids don’t have the financial stability. You want that cross-country RV neverending road trip but you’ve had decades of wanting lower taxes more than you wanted infrastructure.

The bleak outlook for traditions is a direct result of the unmaintained foundations for them. The second best time is always now - if it’s important enough to op-ed about, what are you willing to change to get it back? What will you give up or re-prioritize?

I kinda think that world-defining assumptions are always gonna break without maintenance. So rather than getting mad at whoever’s next for not carrying on the norms we didn’t do upkeep on, when it’s my turn, I hope I’m introspective enough to help instead of externalize & blame.

Me, rattling my tin cup: Dark!Strawhat fics? Any Dark!Strawhat fics? Could you spare even a crumb of evil or morally ambiguous or actually pirate-y Strawhat fics? Oh, could you offer a humble begger just a single fic about the Strawhats being kind of evil?

I need a way to say this character makes me feel insane amounts of lust but not in a sexual or romantic way

What's the trope name for when someone finds out they're the Chosen One(tm) and is like "No, thank you" and goes and does something else

i think it's so so so great that beating someone up can actually injure and scar you. like from a symbolic perspective. every act of violence leaves a mark on you, chipping away at you with each blow until you're nothing but hard muscle and sharp edges. the hurt you visit on others shapes you in its image.

this may or may not be a fantasy writing exercise for me. please reblog

idk. i think fandom could use a lot less of “every person’s interpretation of a text is valid and true!” and more of “reading a text means taking all parts of it into account, including the bits you don’t like or the pairings you don’t ship, to consider what the full picture is and what the larger themes are.”

projecting your fantasies onto a text, hyperfocusing on the characters you think are hot/shippable and building entire theories based on micro interactions that don’t take other competing dynamics and plotlines into account isn’t “analysis” it’s projection and fantasy. which is fine, but take responsibility for your desires and your fantasies instead of making fandom inhospitable for everyone. some readings of a text are plain wrong, others miss or willfully erase vital context just to rationalize romantic pairings. these are not accurate readings of the text. doesn’t mean they should be attacked or shamed, but neither can you expect people to validate every single headcanon and shipper fantasy as a legitimate “reading” of the text either.

Alright, to ao3's soon to be arriving Wattpad Refugees, a basic guide to general user culture:

1.) Unlike Wattpads vote system that let's you like each chapter, the ao3 equivalent kudos only allows one per work. Everyone is generally quietly annoyed about this. To engage with each chapter, you're heavily encouraged to comment. Trust me, it makes people's day.

2.) Ao3 has no algorithm. By default it's latest updated work first. You can find things to your taste through searches, filters and tags.

3.) 'No archive warnings apply' and 'user has chosen not to use archive warnings' mean two very different things. No archives warnings means the work is free from any content that could require a warning tag (character death, graphic depictions of violence, non-con, etc). User has chosen not to use archive warnings means it could contain any of the warning content, be it hasn't been explicitly tagged. Treat it like an allergen. No archive warnings apply is allergen free. User has chosen not to use archive warnings, may contain traces or whole chunks of the allergen. If you're likely to have a bad reaction, maybe don't take the risk.

4.) Speaking of warnings, ao3 has very few restrictions on the type of work that's allowed. Whatever your personal thoughts or feelings on that are, thats how the site is. You're likely to run across some dark subject matters and a lot of people are uncomfortable with reading that. You're well within your rights not like these works and have your opinion on whether they should be allowed, but harassing the authors of such works (or any works) is more likely to come back on you than them. Ao3 operates on a strong policy of 'don't like, don't read'. Use the tagging system to your full advantage to only engage with the kind of works you want to see.

We look forward to welcoming you all and seeing the fantastic works you create. Happy writing!

Oh.

To call WT's actions "antics" would be reducing the severity of what they're doing to creators. This is unacceptable behavior and it should be all the more reason for creators to start exploring other career paths outside of WT. For years they've been meticulously crafting an environment where people believe that WT is the only path to success, where WT controls the degree of success creators can achieve, from the manipulation of the promotional system to the lack of tagging and proper search functions on the app. Now that they've boiled the frog to this point, they're cashing out by flooding the platform with cheap imports, implementing AI tools, and of course, trying to use their contracts as a way to trap creators and keep them from owning their own IP's and maximizing on their own success.

I said it before and I'll say it again - Webtoons is planning to go public with their IPO this summer, so it would be a real shame if creators spoke up about the underhanded tactics used by WT to keep them from finding success in their own works. At the very least, it should serve as a reminder to all of us that companies like these can't amass billions without exploiting people along the way.

We can't even use "they're creating jobs for comic creators" as a reason to want to see WT succeed in spite of their flaws anymore because they're literally ruining people's careers, cutting them off before they've even started. That's not the platform being "flawed", that's the platform and the system it's built on being broken, full stop.

People who have an issue with how Whitebeard adopted Ace just. Baffle me. How dare this criminal pirate who is guaranteed to be amoral by nature do something that wasn’t the legally ordained moral choice. Whitebeard would have been fully within his rights to just kill Ace and the Spade pirates outright. Hell, he would have been within his rights to actually kidnap Ace and keep him in the brig or something. Instead they brought an injured man on board their ship after that man had already made it clear he intended to enact violence on their captain, gave him food and medical treatment, treated him with kindness, let him get away with repeatedly trying to murder their captain as well as in general just being kind of an asshole to everybody and there is zero evidence that Ace ever at any point actually tried to leave the ship — to the point that after months of this bullshit somebody had to look at him and be like look man you can leave whenever you want to, you’re more than welcome to stay if you want to stay but if that’s the case you gotta stop with the murder. It’s your choice.

But somehow a chunk of the fandom still act like the Whitebeards like, kidnapped Ace and brainwashed him into joining them. I think maybe you guys should go rewatch those episodes.

fascinating to me how quickly we forget that the cycles repeat. people treating 5-15 year olds like this breed of superchild created to do evil and taint the world. that was all of us. "they're wrecking sephoras" you would not survive a 2015 hot topic with this mindset. "they're falling for the stanley cup thing" buying on trend overly robust camping gear for every day use is like. a middle class tradition in this country. our glorious kånken backpack vs their wicked stanley cup.

So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????

I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.

Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?

most of the talk on this website about Game Changer is how Sam Reich psychologically tortures his contestants, but I want to make it clear to the uninitiated that he's actually extremely ethical about it

He sends out a company wide email and asks them to choose episodes based on a chili pepper rating system

meaning he doesn't put 🌶️🌶️ people into 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ episodes

they're also big on consent ie cast and crew have to be okay with it before they'll do nudity or something like that in an episode

it's like the bdsm of psychological torture. safe, sane, and consensual.

the contestants know what they're getting into, and they're full down

Y'all make fun of the outfits from Kingdom Hearts (2002), but fail to realize that they were PULLED FROM THEIR HOMES on a day that they were playing at the beach.

They HAVE normal clothes. They were wearing beach attire. Imagine being pulled through a dimensional portal while you're swimming and building sandcastles. Congrats! Your only clothes are these now: