#I'm aware that it's just fanart. But how you interpret the details of a character that are very cut-and-dry in canon does say things. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

shjiyemis · 1 year

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There's something to be said about how so called "fandom brainrot" is influenced by and perpetuates white supremacist ideals. The idea of everything needing to be "canon accurate", except for when the characters are rendered as skinny, hairless, chaste white guys that said brainrot insists upon is heavily reminiscent. This happens even in groups that heavily purport themselves as progressive, and is to me a very concerning trend.

I'm talking about the issue within Homestuck specifically because it's actually way stupider and honestly ridiculous to me from most because most to all the characters are blank slates!!!! It's why I say fanon-brainrot bc basically they're all looking at fanon and perceiving it as canon when it's not!

Like I definitely KNOW it's a big ass problem in anime and fandoms in general, I even remember someone made a beautiful "OFF" fanart with the Batter and Alexander being black, so many comments disliked in small and or big ways. The many ppl I saw who did like it there was some who favored the batter but not Alexander because he was depicted more dark skinned!!

I'm extremely aware of depictions of many black folk simply playing around with characters from anime/media they enjoy bc once again there just isn't much representation of the variation of black people. All of the hate that manifests towards these things come from a place of racism and anti-blackness.

It's just extremely silly to me with stuff specifically like Homestuck and OFF because the characters are all extremely blank and their body types and heights fluctuate throughout the homestuck comic bc many of the more detailed artworks that usually are presented in the animated clips are drawn by different people whom are all fans.

I'm very well aware it's a general problem and it is a concerning trend but I feel like you may have interpreted what I said very weirdly.

#anon #anonymous #shye speaks #racism

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bookwyrminspiration · 2 years

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hey! I'm relatively new here :3 just wanted to say that I just got back into the kotlc fandom and I'm obsessed with the wings au- it's one of the first not-xreader fanfics I've genuinely enjoyed and gotten so invested in. I love the qpr-ish relationships between the characters and the way you wrote them all! the wing designs are just- *chef's kiss* and the story line behind it too- I could go on all day about it. You've honestly inspired me to try writing my own aus! I was wondering if I could post fanart of the designs? I'd be sure to credit+tag you ofc

You're such an amazing writer!

Oh my gosh this ask is so sweet I legitimately read it and straight up stopped what I was doing for a solid 20 seconds to smile at my phone. I'm sitting here like !!!!! and covering my face

Also welcome to/back to the fandom! It's fairly small overall and relatively stagnant at the moment (the two year gap between books has really changed things), but there's a solid handful of us who are here and refuse to let go :)

I'm absolutely thrilled that you love the dynamics between the characters because I think that was one of the things I was the most...not nervous, but unsure about? Not that I didn't want to do it, because I very much did, but it's generally a different dynamic than a lot of the other fics in the fandom. All the ship fics are wonderful, I was just very aware that I was intentionally flat out ignoring all romance in a fandom that loves it. I wanted to go for a "they're all a family and it's like they've always been a family and they trust each other and are there for each other without hesitation or awkwardness" kinda thing. I have one note from my original layout that just says "(domestic)" when talking about all of them.

The wing designs!! I love them all so much and it was so fun to try and figure out what to do for each of them. I was trying to do wings that were a little more obvious for the characters and wouldn't require anyone to really search up anything to figure out why they had them, more follow a mental association. Like with Linh's dragonfly wings, dragonfly you think water and Linh is a water person! The added detail of her wings specifically relating to dragons was a bonus play on words there, but do you get what i mean about the association? That's what I was going for.

The story line! It has developed so much since I first wrote it there are things happening that I never planned for and things that I meant to do that got completely ignored, but I love where the au has ended up and where it's going. It is still heading towards its original ending, but it's gotten there a different way and with different dynamics and important characters. Like Phoenix (the girl) originally was just a throwaway character from the first chapter that got the kotlcrew out of a sticky situation and made them face some things as they did so, but then someone asked about her and I went...wait a minute you're right why is she there? And now she's got a lot of relevance to like. Literally everything happening.

It's so cool that it's inspired you--if you ever do write/draw/make your own aus I'd love to see them! And if you ever have any questions on how I've made mine I love to talk about everything always, so you'll probably get a lot more information than you could ever want

As for fanart, of course!! I love seeing fanart of the au it always such a delight. Please do tag me, that way I can see it!! It's so cool to see how people interpret the words I've put down because I almost never have a concrete image in my head. I'm just going for vibes and then those vibes become different things to different people and it's so fun to see.

Thank you so so much for all the compliments this ask seriously made my day, I absolutely love hearing peoples' thoughts on the wings au. I was actually just writing for it before I answered this, so have a little teaser quote!!

“Here, this is a good example,” came Biana’s voice behind her, and she whirled back around, watching those flecks of light condense and merge and assemble themselves into the shape of her friend, her sister.

#kotlc #kotlc wings au #shattered upside down #quil's queries #quil's queridos #nonsie #since we were talking about character dynamics I figured I'd include that quote :)#there are many other things that happen in the chapter I'm trying not to outright spoil #but let me just say...lore #wings au lore is happening #i've said it before and I'll say it again but seriously i love this ask so much #thank you for sending it and being so sweet #I hope you continue to enjoy the wings au!!#because things are all starting to come together but there is story yet to be told!!#long post

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honeylikewords · 4 years

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... they don't look the same. Or act the same. The characters are totally different? I mean, I'm confused. I find them all attractive, but they're not the same people, character or real life wise. Are people actually doing this??

Oh, there absolutely are people lumping them together and treating them like they're interchangable. It's really unsettling to see people posting about having a "latino fetish" in the character tags, posting about (I hate to bring up NSFW but here I go) threesomes with all three characters, making posts about how they "must have a type" by comparing the men.

There's a weird mentality that they're "the most attractive men in Star Wars" just because they all happen to be Latino, and people sort of treat them like a package deal: if you like one, you have to like all the others, too! Which is... questionable. Would people say that if these guys were white? I don't really think so.

Obviously, all three characters are great in their own ways, but they're definitely not supposed to be seen as crossover characters or parallel characters just because of their race, and I see an absurd number of people piling them all together as if they're a three pack of brown-colored Ken dolls.

There are also some really questionable assumptions about them all being passionate, hot-headed, sexually intense, mannerless, sexist, physically dirty or unkempt, dangerous, etc, that get floated around often, and people tend to write about them like they're all generally the same character, without any attention to actual details about what makes them the distinct people they are.

I go looking in the tags often for nice fanart or gifs of Poe, because he's my definite favorite-- I do really like Din and Cassian is great, but Poe's my favorite by a long shot-- and it's eerie the way people glom all three together as if they're the same guy, just with a different name.

I think all three are handsome in their own ways, but people really need to assess why these three are getting preference over, say, Finn, or Bodhi, for example. All three guys do deserve attention and respect and love from the fandom, but when I see that love being interpreted as just thirst, reducing them to just sex appeal objects, which is already a huge problem Latinx actors have to face across the board, I get frustrated, and I think rightfully so.

Few people are treating their characters as multidimensional, unique men with their own motivations, personalities, timelines, etc; they're just all kind of massed as one big Latino pool to dip into, and that's really questionable to me.

One example I'd cite is I saw a post saying "Mamma Mia but Oscar, Pedro, and Diego play the dads". It seems fairly harmless, but there's something about that which is kind of off; why should they be seen as a team of actors? They haven't worked together, as far as I know-- Pedro and Oscar are friends in real life, and have collaborated a lot, but as far as I'm aware, neither has really worked with Diego Luna before-- and they're not all musical performers, either. So why that film, that requires a trio set? Why those three actors? Why connect them through any thread other than, at the most innocent, Star Wars, and at the most unseemly, their ethnicities?

Add to that the weird factor of having three Latino dudes star in a film that centers around meaningless sex whims and having an unplanned child and you've got a recipe for problematic content, but that aside, the real problem is why people would assume they're some kind of three piece kit?

They're not a group. They're not a team. It's fine to be a person supporting Latino representation and showing the characters together in solidarity of that, but aside from that, these guys have nothing in common. And it's creepy for people to run blogs only about these Latino guys as if they're identical, to create content that uses them interchangably, or to present them as if they're a buy one get two free on "Latin hotties".

I understand that it's a bit easy to fall into this kind of behavior-- internalized racism can be hard to self-assess, especially when it's being mistaken as a compliment or as flattering-- but I want/need people to be more aware of how disingenuous this all comes off as, and how it can spread pernicious, toxic behaviors and normalize them. Be attracted to these guys, sure!, but don't couple them together like they're a package deal of interchangeable parts, or whittle them down to Latin Lover stereotypes. That's where the trouble starts.

#messages #anonymous #im being dead serious about this and if anyone has a problem about that the door's that way

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lost-kinn · 5 years

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That post you reblogged abt "types of fanfic writers" and you saying its a good joke in the tags. Like. Maybe I'm dumb (v likely actually) but what's the joke?

(for people just coming to this conversation, the post can be found [here].)

oh no! youre not dumb and this is a very nicely worded message. i’ve been trying to answer this message for several days, and I really want to be able to do it on this blog because i feel like you deserve an answer and i don’t have another way to contact you, but i’m not sure that i can.

how do i say this–in the very short time that i’ve begun running this blog and wound up with a number of followers (and the idea that this blog has more than 0 followers is already beyond the scope of the intention of this sideblog, because it was originally meant to be only an archive for fanart), there’s already been drama in the inbox, and i’d rather just not host or perpetuate drama on this blog, even if that means that 1) i don’t write meta anymore, or 2) i just keep my opinions and interpretations to myself.

but to get to the point: there’s definitely more than two different ways to write a fanfic, and there’s more than two different ways to create a fanwork, and there’s more than two different ways to engage with interpretation and transformation of a text. i would like to say that i know this for a fact. but i’m not sure how to explain it.

the post i reblogged puts up a binary of “type 1: wing it” and “type 2: stringent adherence to factual detail.” it’s a black and white option. the third type is “somewhere in the middle”–shades of grey.

this is a spectrum that only goes one way.

to extend the color metaphor, the spectrum includes white, black, and grey, and doesnt even consider the fact that there might be colors like red, orange, green, blue, purple, etc.

on a scale of “i stringently adhere to canon and all of canon’s details” and “canonical details can go fuck themselves,” i would be hard-pressed to place the fanwork that i do.

i would not know where to put, on this spectrum, a fanwork that considered the premise of a show to be better than its execution, and wrote an AU that revised the second season to honor, respect, and engage with the premise of the show better than the actual show-writers.

i wouldn’t know where to put on this spectrum a fanwork that rewrites characters as queer or people of color. (a lot of the fanworks that i’ve seen with half-japanese, half-black naruto have been genuinely very compelling in regards to highlighting the ways that black children are treated in america. and the ways that naruto is treated in the show, for that matter.)

i wouldn’t know where to put on this spectrum a character study that tries to unpack a backstory that’s never explained in canon. no matter how well-sourced, no matter how detail-oriented the work is, it will still always be an interpretation. to come up with entire missing chunks of canon will always be a statement on trying to insert a missing piece into the entire rest of the fabric of the work.

let me try another way.

i did some theatre work as an undergrad. in theatre, it’s essentially taken for granted that your work will be an interpretation of the original script. as it stands, the scripts that are replicated arent actually the original script that the scriptwriter wrote; the scripts that are replicated and reread are actually the stage notes, meaning that it has additions from the stage manager and director.

i’ve seen and participated in the production of maybe five different versions of hamlet.

one of them intended to replicate hamlet of that particular era, with stringent scrutiny to detail, as best as possible.

the second production involved TV screens, electrical wiring, and heavy edits to the script. it was a commentary on surveillance states, self-surveillance, internalized state surveillance, and the ways that people go mad under it.

the third production was a comedy. the scene where hamlet found out that ophelia was dead had the audience in actual stitches. i think i laughed so hard i cried.

the fourth production was a genderswap. ophelia’s character had all the same lines and was somehow fresh and new and interesting by virtue that ophelia was now a man. hamlet was a disaster garbage goblin woman whose disaster, often chalked up to hamlet’s femininity, was somehow even more gender-nasty than it was in the first place.

the fifth production was a modern day adaptation, in which hamlet is an heir to a big business (very common adaptation), and the set included varying fake ads spoofing starbucks, amazon, and college application ads. hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech was minorly modified to reflect the theme of “i labor/i shop, therefore i am.” the director had a very difficult time keeping in conversation with previous adaptations that had done this very premise, because it’d been done half to death.

i would say that all of these productions engaged meaningfully with the source text, said something new about it, said something new about our current day situation and us as an audience, and did, in fact, take stringent care to stay true to some aspect of the text, right down to its nitty gritty details. each one of the directors slaved over research, from trying to figure out the details of the original period production, to details of productions since, to hamlet’s long history of being butchered by shitty actors, to shakespeare’s prevalence in the theatre community that effectively silenced new plays for a whole century, to the pushback against shakespeare, to the revival of shakespeare, and what that means for our current state of, so to speak, the “shakespeare fandom.”

i’d say meaningful, detail-considerate engagement with the source text was done with all of these productions.

even the one with the TV screens and surveillance state.

even the one with the genderswap.

i think what i’m trying to illustrate is that it takes more attention to detail, an even closer reading of the text, to be able to play with the text and speak in conversation with it. i’ve never known fanworks to be purely reflective of canon, of simply giving a purely uncritical, unchanged interpretation of canon. fanworks (when done right) have always been creative, experimental, and transformative of canon, and that’s why i’ve liked it.

fanworks, in a lot of ways, have always been about speaking back to a text, rather than passively accepting it.

details and close reading are good. they are so good, in fact, that i have a career in teaching young people how to do it.

but to me as a fan creator, these are not the point.

so i suppose that the joke, anon, is that a binary of “i rigorously attend to every detail of canon” vs “details of canon can go fuck themselves” is… a strong bastardization of what fanworks and fanfiction actually do, insofar as i’m aware.

i hope that makes sense. i did my best.

#anonymous #talk #personal #long post

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