#but AV is just really good at playing characters as queer even if they’re not written like that and he doesn’t intend to make them like that | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

incarnateirony · 4 years

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In what season and episode did you realised that Destiel went from subtext to actual text?

Difficult question really. I don’t exactly have a magic switch of some weird personal set goalpost I have, and frankly, wasn’t even really a shipper, just defended shippers, until... 13.5/6. I think I started slipping after 12.19 because I’m not a moron, I don’t live under a rock, I have eyes and know what the fuck a mixtape means to Gen X. But I kept it at arms reach because even Carver era was so totally subtextual-- atop all the stuff that got cut S10 after the S9 blowout, I didn’t exactly want to invest myself as much as point out shippers weren’t crazy for seeing what they saw, especially S8/9+ and even prior the resonance of the hero’s journey over our entire human civilization and historical othering of queerness made earlier readings or notices of it completely fair even if not really like, directional by the crew?

But to begin, Carver era was when I saw /intentful and meritful construction of the body of text, via subtext, to subtextually tell a story with classic queer coding./ Because a lot of what this fandom calls queer coding makes me want to hide my face behind a quantum hole of facepalms and is often like, pretty much the reverse of what should be advocated or considered. All those retro old “he’s been written as queer from S1″ make me want to kick puppies or something because oh my god it’s Not Good, most of the content there is Very Bad And Hugely Problematic, and it’s an attempt to retroactively prove what old canon was doing without any substance.

Carver era was the shift to substance, but silent substance. Subtext that’s genuinely thematically scaffolded into the storyline in a way that while the events themselves were largely cued on subtext, consideration of that subtext was critical to understanding the full body of text and people that refused to grow into and adapt with that text as the tone shifted are the ones that got more and more confused and angry.

Dabb era was the threshold crossing into (often low-visibility) text. Fandom intentionally arguing points that require complete removal from social structures (which is everything from regional meanings of major symbols, social codes, language, or why-letters-mean-things) doesn’t mean shit doesn’t mean what it means. A mixtape isn’t subtext any more than getting on one knee and popping open a box is subtext even if they don’t verbalize the words. We know what these fucking things mean and anyone who doesn’t is in DESPERATE need of going outside and experiencing the real world before making any kind of social commentary on a body of text.

When it comes to dialogue text, Last Call is where Bi Dean or at least Queer Umbrella Dean was textualized. Again, it doesn’t matter if people don’t understand the long argued history that was put to bed about repeat sexual encounters with men, it doesn’t matter what the gender of the other triplets were, literally none of that matters. It doesn’t matter if the person understands it. It doesn’t matter if they know their queer culture enough to know their arguments were already buried. It is what it is.

There’s this disillusionment that unspoken physicalized shit like kissing or sex, or verbalized ones like “I love you,” but “I love you, in a gay way, specifically and only you, and want to be romantic with you” because every other statement of the like so far has people crying or arguing about it as not enough either.

These things are nice, but it is not the only way to deliver a textual romance. These are things we want and deserve, and people aren’t wrong for wanting them, the only wrong comes in deleting other text because it isn’t the style of text they want. 100% unhelpful.

Text in AV is complex. No matter how decontextualized people try to pretend this all is, throwing pasta at the wall and calling it an argument worth validating, AV media study doesn’t just incorporate social codes on shit like dialogue -- though anyone that applies those social codes wouldn’t be arguing anyway, as per my old post on that -- but visual language and TV literacy are a long studied topic and are just as relevant as understanding of textual/verbal language and having textual literacy. People trying to eschew these in the interest of favoring fanspaces to try to keep them equal within the canon, which is NOT what fandom space equality is supposed to be about, is just... lol.

When that soap opera reporter that doesn’t even watch the show wandered in commenting on the full mise en scene of the 15.03 breakup being classical “Dark Point in the Romance” framing, that’s not subtext. In a book, characters aren’t running around on a blank canvas. Their environments are the text.

What people may draw symbolically out of an environment varies, and if someone’s /interpretation/ holds up, that’s fine. But being able to digest the entire presentation of a work, that is to say, to read an entire scene in a book and understand their setting and the relevance of that setting is simply a form of text. And when literal fucking randos can spot classic cinematography, it’s time to consider what the full cinematic framework is telling you both in incremental minutiae of texts and in the full body of work.

So basically, I acknowledged lowkey text based on the most basic understanding of social codes, by 12.19, even if I was still kinda eyerolling about it. By 13.5/6, Castiel returned to Dean in something later echoed by Eileen for the zoom shot, but the rest of the arrangement was verbatim identical to the original ending of Swan Song with Lisa, with the only difference being “Never too late” wasn’t a verbal line, but an entire sound track they applied to highlight the scene.

Despite the Swan Song parallel ending reactives went up in arms about the fact that they weren’t having big romantic moments anymore and kinda failed to wrap braincases around the fact that the endgame reunion that was literally the ORIGINAL endgame shot, which ALSO didn’t include physicality (in fact, the text read, “this isn’t sexual at all. He’s a lost soul, and she’s his home” in the script for Lisa), and this dumbass fandom would go “SEE PROOF THAT MEANS THE TEXT MEANS IT WASNT SEXUAL AND HE JUST BECAME BEST FRIENDS THAT WAS HER BEDWARMER MAYBE SHE HAS COLD FEET AT NIGHT” and that’s not how this fucking WORKS. Common sense is NOT removed from fucking discussion and what sense is applied needs to be levelly-- again, social codes.

So at 13.5/6 I had considered it textually paramount to the original endgame arrangement. S14 was just... blatant ass domesticity. Dean got his happy ending. He had his family. He got his win, his everything. They spoke frequently in the kitchen -- only vaguely over cases, more slapping around idioms, eyerolling over barbarous eating, and occasionally discussing how to raise their son. In fact, if you look at non-research-non-casework S14 kitchen scenes I’m gonna let you sit there and map out what all those domestic moments in the heart of the kitchen was, minding 13.5/6.

It was something gained. It was their life. And it was something to lose. 14.18 already advert framed it, we all saw it. Troubled family. People delete history of what is connected where to pretend “we” is vague or makes the romance any less of a canon piece and lmao guys

And season 15 is their year long run where they’re spearheading a huge part of the plot and will be a critical final resolution.

Speaking of 13.5/6 and social codes, anyone remember that Jack hadn’t met Dave Mather and looked at one nonphysical picture of them and recognized “he’s her boyfriend”? SOCIAL CODES MEAN SHIT GUYS.

So there’s no magic moment. There’s S8/9 coding and subtext. There’s S12′s tape and other elements -- tape is just the easiest to nail down but several through the year tbh -- there’s S13′s Never Too Late, and all things that followed that in waterfall. There’s S14′s established domesticity with Castiel having essentially moved into the bunker, something that wasn’t even entirely established in S12 yet even if he was more frequent there than Carver era.

Without social codes, I could argue that “Dean loves pie” doesn’t actually mean he loves pie. In fact, I could argue those letters mean nothing, because basic social codes are what even give words meanings. Without them these are just squiggly lines on a screen. If I eschew social codes, I could take a��“love me some pie” line from Dean and say it means he fornicates with children and make long convoluded excuses around it instead of the observable fucking fact that Dean fucking Winchester likes goddamn pie.

Waiting for your perfect personally dreamed magic moment for a landmark to call text generally disregards the full body of the text and merit of the work. The amount of time and effort this FUCKING shipping fandom has put into -- even Destiel shippers -- bashing down and calling blatant ass text subtext because it’s not the text they want -- just because they want to argue with people that threw the logic baby out with the destiel bathwater they thought was dirty -- it’s fucking embarrassing tbqh. Imagine if people’s competitive fandom BS was muted how anyone here would be addressing this body of text.

Like. “After Carver directed Misha to play Castiel as a jilted lover in season 9, Cain through S10 escalated it into Castiel as Colette, which was confirmed by both the author and actors, seating him as a lover, as Sam was Abel the brother; by season 11, pining and connected hearts becomes the driving theme of the show, repeatedly denounced both in text and showrunner commentary that it wasn’t Amara that was that romance, and instead, a different one rose; by season 12, domestic arguments were many, mixtapes were shared, coming into rooms and playing people for things secretly stashed under pillows were a hinging plot moment, by season 13 he was the Never Too Late Big Win as a far more powerful version of Lisa, by season 14 Castiel moved in, by season 15 their giant sacred marriage euchartist ceremonies on repeat are driving the entire body of the season while overtly making the straight pairing a secondary parallel to the primary Dean and Castiel pairing by 15.09 such as the AU scene, or the ending where they mimicked the same phrase, truncated by physicality. But anyone viewing this text is an adult not competing for their preferred fandom playbox to be considered in the text, and had eyeballs, saw Sam and Eileen were clearly courting, flirting, and/or romantically engaged for a long time before this.”

Can we hope for the equality in that, sure. I want that, sure. That doesn’t erase all the other modes of text before that though.

But there, I just addressed 4 consecutive seasons of storytelling as its stands in the critical themes, without breaking down the dozens of independent scenes themselves that have already been analyzed to death and yall have scorched in your eyeballs by now like angels have prophet names.

I’ve seen people desperately, desperately try to reinterpret this text, or this story structure, in inconsistent ways that fall short. They’re never held accountable for their entire shit falling flat on their face, they just keep building new shit that falls on its face too and keep using it as a base. People can *interpret* ~text~ however they want. Anyone that tells you that “true text is inarguable” is either an idiot or selling you something for your subscription to their blog. Anyone CAN make any jackass interpretation of anything they want.

So sure. You can make some nonsensical explanation around every core theme their relationship is shadowed by, removing all social codes and context from basic elements understood by adult human beings natively, whatever. You can take 200 pages writing around it and degaying it. Generally when I see this, I see unhinged, incomplete writings with no central thread, just a thousand disembodied excuses that don’t even make a story. They’re just that. Desperate excuses. Years of it at this point. And they’re free to /interpret the text like that/ if they want. But that’s their /interpretation/ of a /text/ and as-above generally in /intentional, willful, conscious denial and erasure of the basic social codes we all understand./

Just because they /can/ warp the most left field interpretation doesn’t make it not text. If I pulled an “I don’t know I can’t english suddenly” and threw those codes out the window that doesn’t mean that the shit doesn’t mean the shit it means just because it’s inconvenient to me lmao

And this isn’t necessarily at you, Nonnie, I just feel the need to expand on this because any single time I don’t nail down these conversational stakes, someone breezes through and intentionally hotboxes the conversation to go down these very predictable manipulations and extremizations of the conversation that I really am far too tired to repeat the arguments raging in my mentions again, so I head ‘em off before the shit ever reblogs.

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almaasi · 5 years

Text

reaction post typed while watching SPN 14x14 “Ouroboros”

conclusion: yes, apparently feet can look gay, and Dean and Cas are both queer by proxy

04:35pm

me: still v magnesium deficient, sick, dizzy

LET’S WATCH A THING AND THINK ABOUT IT WITH MY PUDDING BRAIN

any thoughts stated here are run through a pudding filter so please do not be alarmed if they are incoherent or a weird colour

okay it’s a Steve Yockey episode so i guess he’s gonna give us a great character and then kill them before the title card

04:41

hang on i need to eat and i can’t eat and think at the same time so i’mma go watch an episode of shaun the sheep brb

04:46

okay well i watched half an episode and ate half my food so,... yay

LET’S WATCH THIS OTHER THING THEN

04:48

sam’s “i believe in us” *PUNCH* still makes me laugh

04:49

the body on the AAAAAAAAAAAAA I’

M SCREAMING NOPE NOPE NOPE

can i just watch this whole thing with my hand over the screen

because that is what i’ doing rn

oh god i hate this

actually you know what

i just skipped to the title card

cause fuck that haahahhaah nope

oh lord it didn’t skip to team free will

how much of this do i have to take

oh okay tfw are here already

WELL GREAT NOW I HAVE TO FIGURE OUT WHERE TO SKIP BACK TO

ASJFSDFHSFHSJ

04:54

i fuckin love rowena and how much they ask for her help even though they’re “enemies” except they’re clearly lowkey Fond of each other

also i like how this ep started in the middle of the case

04:56

rowena: “hello castiel” ;) ;) ;)

okay well

this pleases me

because i know the only way this ends is that cas is not interested and that’s the Point

because he <3s dean

but also why the hell is rowena into cas....... surely she knows he loves dean. unless she’s just into starting shit, i wouldn’t be surprised

04:58

the way jack says “i’m not dying”

10/10

04:59

cas: “he’s now claimed the lives of six people in northern new mexico”

why does he say “people” like that

05:01

dean’s throwing a looooot of salt at rowna. maybe because she keeps flirting with cas

“everything means something”

YEAH EXACTLY

DEAN’S SALTY BECAUSE ROWENA’S FLIRTING WITH CAS I’VE DECIDED

05:03

sam says dean can keep michael locked in his head “because he’s dean and dean is dean”

yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah okay

expert closet curator, you mean

05:05

dean has a good feeling about bringing rowena in on this one??????????????? after all the snark????????????

cas: “they do have many books”

me: *squINTS REALLY HARD* i feel like they’re implying something else and neither of them are talking about the same thing. did dean set sam up on a date with rowena????????????

also?

DEAN AND CAS ARE ON A DATE. DEAN AND CAS ARE ON A DINNER DATE IN A DINER. ALERT ALERT ALERT

paralleling rowena and sam perhaps

05:08

concerned head tilt

oh god their love and mutual understanding and trust in each other is killing me with its softness

i’m so so so glad we get to see them in some downtime at fucking last

05:10

oh no jack’s coughing again

why can’t he have nice things

05:10

dean: “that’s what i’m supposed to say, right? i’m fine? keep on moving?”

cas: “no, dean”

the fact dean lets his guard down only with cas in private ;~;

sidenote, this episode is giving me my bloody valentine meets hunteri heroici vibes, which is nice because they’re two of my all-time fave episodes

but god i wish it would go easy on the cannibalism

05:14

dean: “i’m barely even sleeping” :D

THAT PAINED GRIN OH GOD

but also

i’m so emotional because he told anyone at all, but especially that of all people he told cas

of course he told cas, cas is his emotional sounding board

if this were a fanfic cas would offer to share the bed with dean and help him sleep

....but i mean, who knows, maybe dean was secretly hoping for that anyway

05:19

that’s the face of “dean doesn’t know what liturgical means”

05:22

jack: “what’s an av club?”

cas: “it’s a special club for people who do not play sports”

dean: *points at cas* “him. he’s av club”

mmmmmmmm yup

autistic nerd

dean’s baseball and track team, cas is av club and student tutoring

but also if dean ever got cas onto the baseball field cas would hit every ball first time

and dean would be swooning

BUT ALSO DEAN WOULD FUCKING LOVE AV CLUB ARE YOU KIDDING ME

he’d be in there with charlie every fuckin day and leaning seductively on furniture while cas does his nerd thing, until the point where something properly capures dean’s interest and then HE WANTS A GO and bats away everyone else’s hands and hogs the contraption for 3 hours. also he’d fix things when they break

DEAN TONE DOWN THE PROJECTION A NOTCH WOULD YA

JEEZ

look i’m just gonna count dean calling cas “av club” as flirting, because hello yes there is no way dean doesn’t find that interesting

05:30

i fucking knew it

the moment this episode opened and i saw the guy’s bare feet in the kitchen somehow i knew he was queer ??????????

i can’t explain it

but the fact there was a shot of his feet and his feet looked gay i can’t even

anyway this probably doesn’t even count as legit queer rep given he’s seducing guys and killing them so

stupid gay feet

sidenote: did ANYONE else get queer vibes from that opening scene? CAN PEOPLE’S FEET LOOK GAY OR IS THAT JUST ME

maybe it’s like... the sensuality of bare feet + cooking, breaking pointless gender roles n stuff, my brain has been coded by society’s bullshit to perceive sensual men as non-heterosexual

idk

but also. the foot-upward view of a new character... male gaze, right? and seeing the male gaze on a male character makes it queer

goddamn

it’s a thing

it’s a thing and the directing got the point across and it took me until now to work it out

GAY FEET

also

now i’m going back to cas’ line “six people”

my initial understanding of that line was that they weren’t all men

but the thing was the people didn’t need to be said that way if it was just men and women

my immediate instinct said the victims were non-binary, but i didn’t type it because i had no reason yet to believe that might be true and it seemed unnecessary to say it

but at this point, as the baddie hits on a guy at a truck stop in exchange for a ride, they’re clearly potentially queer victims

yeah that explains the inflection

05:41

on the one hand, i’m seeing a connection to that time dean was seduced by a siren

but see my problem with this is that the guy’s either gonna end up dead or saved and i don’t know which yet

i just want happy queer stories

so i’m pretty divided about this

but on the other hand, please, god, let this gorgon guy “sense things” about dean

ALSO WAIT

IS THIS THE FIRST GAY KISS ON THIS SHOW?????????? 90% SURE THIS THE FIRST GAY KISS. there might have been a background one once

PROGRESS HAS BEEN MADE

EVEN IF IT’S EVIL AND TWISTED AND MAKES ME FEEL WEIRD

05:44

i feel like there should’ve been an optic nerve attached to that eyeball.. and a lot of gross stuff

but also thank goodness there wasn’t

ohdfjfdg i really hate this

but also i’m smiling?

05:46

cas: “is this amusing to you?”

the guy called him sir!!! eeheheh

05:47

cas: “you’re not standing alone, why doesn’t he mention me?”

dean: “maybe you’re not his type”

i mean. guess he can’t see angels. BUT ALSO

CAN WE UNPACK HOW UTTERLY QUEER EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS

WE NOW UNDERSTAND THAT NOAH’S TYPE IS QUEER GUYS

AND DEAN KNOWS THIS

SO BY SAYING CAS ISN’T NOAH’S TYPE THAT MEANS HE’S IMPLYING THAT HE HIMSELF IS

BECAUSE HE’S QUEER AF

steve yockey, this is the episode i was waiting to see from you

team free will working a case together, dean and cas on a date talking about their feelings, on a case about queer stuff

hell fucking yes

05:52

rowena: “need anti-venom in case one of you boys gets sloppy”

wouldn’t that mean noah kisses either cas or jack

god i’m so glad rowena’s there too

this episode is great sdgsfkg

05:53

ROWENA AND SAM FAKING A RELATIONSHIP + A DOG OH MRJGJD IFUCKING LOVE THIS

WHERE DID THEY GET THE DOG

WHERE’S THE BIT LATER WHERE DEAN AND CAS ~FAKE~ A RELATIONSHIP PLEASE

05:55

OH MY GOD THE VET STUCK A THERMOMETER IN JACK’S ASS

OH MY GOFH D:

06:00

noah: “then he doesn’t have to die like all the other men”

hmmmmmmm

okay so all the victims were men

which makes me even more curious about why cas used that inflection on “people”

cas also looked like of amused? definitely a misha expression rather than a cas expression, the little lilt of a smile on his lips like the way he says any word starting with “h”

maybe some of them were transgender men and cas didn’t know them before they died so could only guess as to their gender? maybe some of the bodies they found were not gender-conforming

it also kiiiiind of sounded like misha changing the script after a discussion on set about it

but if that were true then that means someone on set doesn’t believe gay or queer men are men? maybe? maybe i’m reaching there

but i’m genuinely caught up on that inflection and the use of that word, it really stood out to me

and it stands out especially, now, because like i said, we know the victims were men, we know team free will found them all, and we know they were queer.

but also it’s not dean saying it, it’s cas

and i can’t imagine any scenario where cas would have trouble with non-binary pronouns

if anyone has further thoughts on this, please direct me towards them

06:23

my browser broke?? and i lost a chunk of this post, but i had the above stuff backed up in email

i'mma go back a bit and try and remember what i typed

idk i think it was just about the fact noah confirmed all his victims were men which further confused me

and then said he also eats ladies

and then said some feminist stuff which made me sad that it came from the bad guy

but also that i could imagine cas saying something similar, deadpan, and then reaching for dean’s burger

* schmooch *

whEN DOES DEAN GET TO DO THAT

06:28

okay YES

I KNOW WHAT I WANT TO SAY

NOAH SAYS HELLO TO DEAN

WHY JUST DEAN

WHY IS HE FIXATED ON DEAN WHEN THERE’S 3 OTHER PEOPLE IN THE ROOM? and why only write the letter to dean?

I’LL TELL YOU WHY

BECAUSE DEAN’S BISEXUAL AF

AND YES HE IS HIS TYPE

REPRESSED “STRAIGHT” MEN WHO SECRETLY LIKE GUYS

CAN THAT BE ANY MORE OBVIOUS?? I THINK NOT

i love how this episode refers back to some of the older episodes, in the best possible way

conclusion: dean is bi

06:32

noah took the bag with the snek inside but i guess the snek esckep

06:34

maybe true love’s kiss will wake dean up

CAS QUICK

MIGHT AS WELL TRY RIGHT

06:40

hurts my heart how cas has apparently made peace with the fact he’ll outlive dean and sam

i guess it’s good but

can’t help but believe deep down he would rather die than live without them

and now i’m crying because cas says the point is that you got to know them at all

suddenly catharsis for future pain

06:47

oh NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MAGGIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THIS IS THE WORST

06:47

rowena as michael??? okay, that i can get behind

ooh

BUT ALSO

OH NO

06:49

michael (about dean): “it didn’t work out. it was him. not me.”

flip of a classic dating line, making this QUEER AGAIN

06:55

JACK THE LIL HERO

WHAT DID YOU DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

//waits for the silence to be over

06:56

oh boy

06:57

OKAY WOW

WHAT AN EPISODE

i was really hoping it would turn into a plotty one, the way changing channels does at the end

this was really well done and i enjoyed it a lot!!!!!!!!! i mean, besides the squicks, and the fact the queer rep and feminist lines came from a bad guy

dean was 100% noah’s type

jack is the bestest baby bean

i feel so bad about the thermometer thing..... like, i’m not sure if it was meant to come across as funny? but there was no indication it should be... which is good i guess? but also i feel secondhand violated

DEAN AND CAS’ DATE AND TALKING ABOUT FEELINGS WHEEE

i like that this episode actually came full circle on that “dean vs michael” point, rather than having it be a one-off conversation and things aren’t resolved until a later episode

i think i’m gonna enjoy rowena as michael. and i like that she said yes because she does care about team free will

sad about maggie :c

but also all those other extra hunters were changed out pretty much episode so there was no real way to know who they were. they seemed pretty diverse though, across various episodes

i liked the asian lady vet!!!! she was fun. and i’m glad the asian gay guy didn’t die... where did he even disappear to though? who knows

overall 10/10? it had all the good shit i like so. yep.

I WANT MORE EPISODE LIKE THIS. QUEER CHARACTERS (PREFERABLY NOT EVIL), MORE ASIAN CHARACTERS, MORE TEAM FREE WILL ON HUNTS, MORE LADIES GETTING COOL ROLES AS PART OF THE TEAM AND/OR AS AN FRENEMY, MORE JACK SAVING THE DAY

MORE ROWENA IN PANTS

yeah

but more of all

MORE GAY KISSES FOR DEAN AND CAS

i love that the fact noah was fixated on dean put him in the “noah’s type = queer” category, and when noah kissed cas it did the same thing

so really, by evil proxy, noah made a point of showing us who’s queer

i mean we already knew

but HE SHOWED US

yee

no conclusion on why cas said p e o p l e though

#14x14 #ouroboros #spn spoilers #Steve Yockey #season 14 #Elmie watches things #post of postiness #Destiel #my meta #meta #Dean is bisexual

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queerofcups · 6 years

Text

giving the people what they want timestamps

my fingers slipped?

00:00 - I know some people feel like the thumbnail is a little clickbait (not queerbaity, don’t make me fight y’all about this) and I don’t necessarily disagree but goddamn did it work on me. I don’t think we’ll ever see them hug, which is fine, its not something I personally need, but it definitely makes stuff like this feel like a Big Deal. But also, less sappy, where the hell is Phil looking.

00:07 - 1. They’re fucking creepers who read every too deep post we’ve ever written about them. 2. They look, So! Fucking! Good! I enjoy Phil Lester, Adult Man with an Adult Haircut so much more than I ever realized and I just stan down for Dan and his Connor McDavid Franta cosplay. They look like real human adults who are in love and I just. Yes. Also, love seeing more of the flat.

00:28 - This post is gonna be long as fuck. I’m really fascinated with the PR work happening here to push us away from thinking of Dan and Phil as characters when they very clearly think of Dan and Phil as characters. It came through A Lot during TATINOF and if they’re trying to get away from that particular branding I think its super smart of them to address it head on (even if I feel like its bullshit personally)

1:00 - Every time they say something about giving the people what they want I think about the Janelle Monae song Given Em What They Love, which neither of them know because that’s way too cool a reference for them but its very distracting for me.

2:13 - Hey so can we talk about Dan straight up acknowledging that people were requesting they fuck and just…leaving that out there on the floor? Oh, no? We’re gonna let him have that one? Fair enough.

2:20 - This has got to be deeply uncomfortable for them.

2:36 - And now 30 full seconds of them discussing their hair, vain bitiches

3:18 - “Kissing the lion”, mhm, your face/mouth region isn’t directly next to Dan’s crotch, we’re totally paying attention to the lion kissing.

3:20 - Jesus. The fucking cuddle that launched two careers and a billion words. Precious, awkward babies.

4:13 - So the choice. To include not one but both of the cuddles in PINOF 1 in a current day video when its entirely likely that there are people who haven’t bothered to go back and watch the other PINOFs is just. Their construction of their glass closet is sort of breathtaking? Because they just put it out there! They put it right in our hands. But then they just. Talk about something else. Because what this? Oh this isn’t a big deal, but I could have hit my head!!

5:08 - Finally! A flaw in this video! Give us Dan in the ice cream shirt, goddamnit!

5:39 - I don’t…have anything to say about this, they both wear clothes very well.

6:14 - Dan, baby. One, read better fic, because these descriptions are rough. But two, that’s literally not what monochrome means.

6:27 - Dan looks like the worst fucking hipster in the ladybird/bug shirt. Like he only reads what Pitchfork has to say about rap albums bad. Like he unironically quotes reviews from The AV Club bad. He only drinks IPAs and describes himself as a “sapiosexual”.

6:36 - “Everything is improved with a bit of glitter”. Gay! So gay. I love him.

7:01 - Plz stop calling Phil’s thighs thick. Please. I’m begging you.

7:43 - Y’all know they did a DITL in Manchester so you motherfuckers wouldn’t stalk them and find their apartment right? I just want us to all acknowledge that. And yes, you should feel bad.

7:56 - Real, sincere question for anyone who hasn’t seen the V-Day Video. Were you VERY confused about them talking about this damn wheel?

8:15 - Ah yes. A Manchester macchiato. That’s totally a thing outside of one very specific context. Ahaha. Hah. Hah. Everybody just be cool for one second.

8:22 - Phil……..is hot. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.

9:16 - If you exchange “challenge” with “discourse”, you basically get my and Mandy’s chats about Fandom These Days. But also give me more of Dan and Phil being the old farts on youtube who have Seen Things Change forever.

9:55 - “I’m just going to put my ass in the air and hope for the best”, sure, sure. But also, as he gets into downward dog, yelling about dogging. Phil is fucking filthy, y’all can’t take this from me.

10:13 - Dan’s shirt is v translucent. This is also not what I meant when I requested a yoga video but I’ll accept this.

10:21 - I was uh, genuinely concerned Dan was going to pass out. Y’all know he got a condition!!

10:32 - SO LETS TALK ABOUT THIS MOMENT. Phil is lovely and glowing and giggly. But Dan? Dan is down with your shit, my shit, our shit, he is d o n e in the way that only queers are done with your heterosexual bullshit. Stop asking who the woman is, Dan’s face says. Stop worrying about our sex life/ves, Dan’s face says. That shrug says I fucked asked, are you happy now you fucking creepers. I love it. I love him.

10:42 - But also, back on my bullshit, look at those clasped hands.

11:08 - If you showed any of this footage a year ago, we would have called bullshit and photoshopping and also magic.

11:15 - [redacted]

11:17 - [wow also redacted]

11:40 - I don’t care about dogs but I’m so happy for all of you

13:25 - “filling the hole with dogs”. Ah yes, that well known kink meme prompt. Or so I’ve heard. Listen fandom used to be a Wild West.

13:38 - I’m certain this is partly scripted or at least prepared for but I’m still so charmed by both Phil and Dan’s little “talk to me, Phillip Lester”. I really do genuinely appreciate Phil talking about why he doesn’t swear.

13:51 - I’m also utterly charmed by the image of Phil just randomly coming up to Dan and being like “CUNTS”

14:41 - You know that scene in Lion King where the lady hyena is like Don’t say Mufasa, just hearing his name gives me chills, and then the other hyenas do and she’s all *shudders and groans*. Its just relatable is all I’m saying. But also? What is this jump cut.

14:55 - Can we get Phil to say cunt now. Is that the next level up? I don’t have any emotional reaction to the word but I’ve been told its worse? Or maybe that’s just in America. Maybe I just wanna hear Phil curse, some more, don’t judge me.

15:10 - They’re sponning but friends. Countrymen. We gotta figure out how we’re going to record and document the events of every show. We need to get on our shit *now*. I lived through the summer of Glee Live, this could be so good if we just make it work.

16:19 - “We’re gonna talk about funny times in our lives” “and we’ll be on the road so I’m sure there’ll be plenty of stories we’ll be desperate to tell” I am so fucking glad we decided to do two rounds of tour fic prompts over at @phandomficfests. We’re going to have so much content to play with, I’m so pumped.

#phandom

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windofderange · 6 years

Text

Let’s talk about gender in Stranger Things 2!

So there’s a bunch of stuff happening in my life and I keep meaning to post something about that, but it’s serious and scary and stuff, so instead, I’m going to ramble a while about why I really love some of the subtle gender role reversals in season 2 of Stranger Things! Like a normal, well-adjusted person!

Also, no major spoilers ahead, but I will talk about things that happened in Season 2, so if you want to come to it totally fresh, please skip this.

So I’m still a little sad that there’s no queer representation in this show. Yes, I know it takes place in the 80s and queer people hadn’t been invented yet, but still. (I was SOOO hoping that the big reveal at the dance would be that Dustin was building himself up to ask Will to dance, but I guess that probably would have been genuinely too much for an 80s middle school to handle.) However, despite that, I was actually really impressed by some of the smaller ways the story undercut traditional gender stereotypes this season, and some of the improvements to how the girl and women characters were written.

That’s not to say that I thought they were poorly written last season - I just thought they were a lot more one-dimensional. Emotional mother. Brainy, goody-two-shoes girl exploring her sexuality. Even Eleven, who was by far the female character with whom we spent the most time, was sort of scattered - the writers clearly couldn’t decide how unaware of the world she should be, and in turn, what things about gender she should care about (ie, she didn’t know what ‘pretty’ meant, but she still wanted to be it), a problem I don’t think they’ve entirely corrected (more on that in a sec). The male characters were similarly archetypal - the drunk, broken-down town sheriff, the maniacal scientist, the lovesick teen, etc.

This season, I feel like the characters all got a lot more flushed out, but more than that, the way they did so also made some really interesting choices about gender and gender roles. Also, I’m occasionally going to refer to the characters as sets because that how some of the storylines run - the adults (Joyce, Hopper, and Bob), the teens (Nancy, Jonathan, Steve, and Billy), and the kids (Eleven, Will, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Max).

1. Joyce and Bob: Okay, so I know I’m apparently the only person in the universe who doesn’t ship Joyce and Hopper, but I loved Joyce and Bob. Bob is a ‘beta male’ - he’s fat, short, into electronics, likes Kenny Loggins, makes corny jokes, and is too much of a scaredy-cat to watch scary movies. However, it’s made immediately clear that Joyce isn’t just dating him because she needs a man or in order to fill some hole in her life - the first scene we see of them is the two of them adorably flirting, and then hard-core making out. Bob is also consistently shown to be the less driven of the pair (a theme that will actually come up a lot in this post). Joyce is a fighter. It’s an important aspect of Joyce’s character, one that was established last season, but in the context of her frantically fighting to get her son back. In the grand tradition of the Aliens franchise and Poltergeist, Stranger Things holds that mothers are the toughest fighters, and this season makes it clear that that’s always been true of Joyce Byers - it wasn’t just the panic of losing Will that drove her; she’s always been like this. Bob knew her in high school, and makes it clear that he’s always admired her for it. However, the story doesn’t present Bob as emasculated (a term I hate!) - he’s jazzed as all hell to finally be dating Joyce Byers!

In setting up their relationship in these terms, the story gives us something we don’t often see - Bob is a boy-gal Friday. In fact, he’s Joyce’s boy-gal Friday. He’s competent, with a complementary skill set; he’s valuable, and Joyce clearly values him, and he makes a lot of connections and discoveries on his own, but he’s not capable of turning those connections into actions that drive the plot forward until he turns them over to Joyce. And he’s perfectly happy in his role - even when he shows up in her house covered in Will’s bizarre tunnel drawing and is told he can’t ask questions, he’s clearly having the time of his life, solving a cool puzzle with a woman he loves. Like every gal Friday, he can’t conceive of a world in which he could be the protagonist - he’s a superhero, but he’s not the Hero. That’s Joyce

2. Hopper and Eleven: Off the bat, I have to admit that I think the writers are still doing the worst with Eleven when it comes to writing gender, just because they have the most room to play with and they’re not making use of it. There’s no reason for Ele to have a concept of gender performance - she’s a lab rat. We know that the mad scientist raised her to think of him as her “Papa” (whether he was biologically or not), but we’re given no evidence that she had any concept of being his “daughter” or a “girl.” Again, I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but it’s part of the reason I actually really liked the episode with her and Eight (also because I’m a sucker for a coming of age story) because I think pairing her gender development with the punk scene is a potentially brilliant way to play with some of these ideas in a culturally-contemporary way (since gender non-conformity was a big part of punk), and it’s something I really hope the writers come back to next season.

That being said, I did really enjoy the relationship between Ele and Hopper, and in particular, the fact that Hopper is clearly raising a kid, not a girl. We never see Hopper force any gender norms on Ele (even though he had a daughter of his own and could potentially have those kinds of expectations for her), we see them sharing in not traditionally feminine things (building traps, eating garbage, watching scary movies - all things dads usually do with their sons in movies and TV), and even though it’s clear that Hopper knows about Mike’s and Ele’s feelings for each other, we never get any weird matchmaking or overbearing overprotectiveness from him - his overprotectiveness of Ele is always about keeping her safe from Hawkins, not keeping her away from boys. He even embraces her “bitchin’” new look, but clearly also helps her get ready for the dance.

3. Mad Max and the AV Club: So I love Max. I love Max so much. And I still love the AV Club. I do get the point of articles like this one that part of the nostalgia of Stranger Things is a nostalgia for nerds who are actually bullied and oppressed, but I think that’s over-simplifying things. To start with, Lucas is black, and this season they finally managed to engage with that a little, in the same way they managed to engage with Dustin’s disability a little last season. Also, I think the way that the AV club’s masculinity is presented is important. This is not the adorkable misogyny of the Big Bang Theory. They are not traditionally masculine and they are absolutely fighters, and those two things are never presented as being in conflict in any way. Indeed, the constant references to D&D, including their own nickname for their group as “the party,” sort of reaffirms this - for people who know the game, they know you need a balanced party. You don’t want all muscles, or all magic, or all rogues. In many ways, Will becomes the ultimate symbol of this in Season 2 - he is absolutely a soft boy (Hopper even asks if he’s gay in Season 1, to which Joyce rightly replies, “why would that matter?!”), and yet, he is both the major villain AND the one fighting hardest against that villain in this season. His strength to fight the mind flayer stems from his nontraditional masculinity - from his art, and ultimately, from his empathy, being kept in control of his body by the stories of love and affection from his mother, brother, and best friend.

Max is similarly nontraditional - we’re introduced to her by the traditional nerd trope of “girls don’t play video games!,” “girls don’t skateboard!;” however, if we’re really supposed to read the AV club as models for nerd culture, then the important element surely comes in their immediate reversal in meeting Max and seeing that she does indeed play video games and skateboard. Not only do they not gatekeep or question her love of these things, they are immediately more impressed by her because of them. They want to be friends with her because she’s a girl who skateboards and plays video games, and it’s clear that this is the root of Dustin’s and Lucas’ attraction to her, as well. Even Mike’s resistance to bringing her into the party is never presented as her being a girl or a “fake gamer girl” - the show does a good job of showing that he doesn’t like having her around because she can’t know about Ele, and that having her there without knowing means that things are moving on and the others might move on, as well. As soon as Lucas spills the beans and Max is fully on board, Mike’s resistance disappears.

4. Nancy and Jonathan: So I think the teens’ stories are where Stranger Things does the best with undercutting gender roles because these stories are so ingrained and so formulaic normally. These are also the ones that I noticed the most while watching it. Also, full disclosure - I don’t really ship Nancy with anyone, and was sort of disappointed that last season had a teen girl, two love interests, love triangle story line. However, I do think the lovestory between Nancy and Jonathan has some of the best gender reversals. To start with, Nancy is absolutely the Protagonist of their story. Nancy causes everything to happen in their story. It’s her acts that inadvertently bring them together (by getting drunk), but she decides that they’re going to do something to get justice for Barb, she takes them to find the journalist, she comes up with the plan to blackmail Hawkins. Even in the scenes of them getting together, we see her sitting up in bed, trying to decide what to do. She goes to the door, and Jonathan is there. All of the focus is on her as the decision maker.

This role reversal comes to a head in the final showdown with the mind flayer. I loved the call back to the last season when Hopper asked Jonathan if he could shoot a gun, and Nancy took it instead - they had already established that she was the better shot, and again, this scene wasn’t presented as her emasculating Jonathan in any way (and Hopper doesn’t hesitate for a second in handing over the riffle) - it’s clearly just that their lives are at stake, and of the pair, she’s the better shot. But the best is the scene in the cabin - this could have so easily been the teary-eyed girlfriend hanging off her stoic boyfriend (which, to be fair, was a lot of how Jonathan was written last season). Instead, we got Joyce, raging and holding down her son, who was clearly in pain, as Jonathan screamed hysterically and cried, trying to stop her, being held back and finally comforted by Nancy.

Let me be clear - this scene only makes sense this way, given what we know about these characters. Joyce is driven and direct - she’s going to make a plan and stick to it, come Hell or high water. Jonathan has already been shown to be way too invested in Will and his well-being, and it seems completely believable by now that he would even fight his mother if he thought Will’s life was in the balance. Nancy is an outsider - she’s not family, and her concern is mostly for Jonathan. However, even as exciting as this scene was, I couldn’t help but step out of it a bit as I was watching it and realize how weird it was to see a young man portrayed as hysterical, rallying against a woman with a plan, and then being comforted by another woman, who was relatively calm and unaffected. It works so much better this way, but there are so many show where this scene would have had Nancy freaking out for no other reason than because women are hysterical.

5. Steve: Oh, Steve. heart eyes I am so in love with Steve after this season. Obviously Stranger Things is a show that loves its parallels, and Steve’s stories move increasingly into roles played by women in the original as the season goes on. The initial story with him and Dustin have parallels to Stand By Me and Gremlins, but by the big showdown with the mind flayer, Steve opens embraces his role as “the babysitter,” a role that actually has some decent echoes in 80s movies - Adventures in Babysitting would be the obvious, but Steve’s role in the group also directly parallels Mary Plimpton’s character in the Goonies, as the third wheel to the big brother and girlfriend (except in this case, those two had buggered off to go do The Omen instead), who also delivers the incredibly quotable line, “I feel like I’m babysitting, only I’m not getting paid.”

However, again, we’re not given any hint that Steve has any problems with his new role. After the rest of the adults and teens leave, he directly parallels Mr. Mom, the movie the Byers were watching earlier, wearing an apron and slinging a kitchen towel over his shoulder after doing the washing up. But whereas the entire premise of that movie is how embarrassed Michael Keaton’s character feels to be a stay-at-home dad and how bad he is at household tasks, Steve seems genuinely proud of himself for tidying up the Byers house, and proud to serve as guiding voice to the remaining kids left in his care. Even his use of a traditionally-masculine sports metaphor to explain why they have to stay put reaffirms how much he’s internalized his role - he clearly means for it to be rally speech, as he’s presumably delivered to his teammates, and he shows his own confusion when it concludes with, “and that’s why we’re on the bench.”

The episode briefly looks as though it’s going to offer Steve a redeemingly masculine role of protector with the arrival of Billy, Max’s big brother. We get some macho posturing and a fist fight, and although Steve does get to come to Lucas’ rescue, he’s still soundly trounced by Billy. Again, this is completely in keeping with the characters - we’ve already seen that Billy isn’t just up for a fight, but abusive and dangerously violent. However, it’s Max, the only girl in the room, who puts down Billy, again in a series of gender undercuts - first, she beats him subversively by drugging him (poison being a woman’s weapon and all that), but then, in another reversal, she takes the opportunity as he’s weakened and blacking out to threaten him with Steve’s baseball bat, extracting protection for her and the AV club using the same oath as we’ve seen used previously by Billy’s abusive father. The rest of the episode is clearly The Goonies, with Steve-as-Mary-Plimpton and the kids running around underground, and Steve reiterating that he’s there because he’ll be held responsible if anything happens to them.

Even in the final denouement at the dance, Steve gets the same final appearance as Joyce and Hopper, the other two caregivers, dropping off his ‘kid’ and driving away. (Interestingly, of the teens and adults, only Nancy gets a denouement at the dance - Jonathan is also there, but just gets to smile and wave from the sidelines, the same ending as basically every supporting girlfriend from every teen movie, again highlighting that it’s Nancy who is the Protagonist.)

So why do I care about all of this? Well, one of my biggest frustrations with a lot of TV and films is that I feel like writers still suck at writing women - in particular, women as protagonists. It seems like way too many writers can’t understand how women can make choices that drive the story forward, and that means way too many stories fall back on traditional tropes where women are the backups and support. It’s cool to see so many of those tropes not only avoided, but directly reversed, and so effectively. Bob, Jonathan, Steve, and the AV club are cool, interesting, likable characters. They’re not diminished by not being the protagonists, or not being traditionally masculine. Like I said, I would love to see the writers do more with Ele because there is so much opportunity there for a truly agender character, which is something else sorely missing from modern TV, but I also hope they continue to present women who are ambitious and driven, and men who are emotional and empathetic because it’s super cool to finally get those kinds of stories.

#stranger things #stranger things 2 #jessica over-analyzes things!#spoilers stranger things 2

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cookinguptales · 7 years

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Omg with TokyoPop 😂 Please share the early 2000's anime days this is new to me and sounds hilarious.

they were dark-ass times, my friend

TERRIBLE AMERICAN PUBLISHING (idk how it was in other countries; I went to Paris many years later and was impressed with their...everything when it came to different kinds of comics but) Tokyopop which was basically run by people who only half knew what they were doing, Viz which mirrored manga for a long time bc they assumed Americans were too stupid to learn how to read the other way (which was particularly annoying in comics where like a right arm or something was important), ADV which probably couldn’t actually release an entire series if their goddamn lives depended on it (yes, I’m still mad about MaLoki), and various other publishers that would publish like one title ever

No legal streaming!! Which meant you either had to buy super expensive DVDs or pirate them online. (BACK IN THESE DAYS, CRUNCHYROLL WAS A PIRATING WEBSITE. NEVER FORGET.) This was right at the end of VHS days, though, so it could be worse!! If you got a VHS, it would be subbed or dubbed. When I watched Evangelion it was on bargain bin VHS tapes so it was like 70% subbed and 30% dubbed and it was a painful time.

Fansubs online were a huge thing. Legit companies had pretty slow turn around (you were lucky if something like the Anime...Network? I can’t remember. or Toonami or Funimation picked it up, bc they had tv channels -- though you’d usually have to put up with a shitty-ass dub) and you’d usually have to wait for a large-chunk release. If you wanted to watch something as it aired, you had to watch it raw or depend on fansubs. These were uh. Of varying quality. They’d usually have a 2-24 hour turnaround depending on the size of the group, with Shounen Jump titles having the fastest turnaround. Those were anime that were already published in manga form in the US via Viz, so they were already mostly familiar with how they’d go, plus...lbr, a lot of those shows were....easier to translate. If you catch my drift. (They tended to be dumb and repetitive. That is what I’m saying.) Also a larger fandom, so greater pool to get workers from and a greater reward re: downloaders. (And people usually torrented new fansub releases bc there were fewer online streaming sites, so popular shows downloaded faster.)

So like, picture if you will, a group of tween-teen nerds sitting around a computer watching fansubs of suspicious quality and shrieking the theme songs in unison because a fansub wasn’t a fansub without bouncing karaoke at the top. We got a DVD player that could play avis at one point and that was kind of mind blowing. Otherwise, you could use an AV cable or buy a DVD.

You bought things legit if you wanted to really support the industry or you really loved a show, not because they were always better quality. I’ll leave it at that.

There were also a lot of scanlation communities, which were basically fansubs but for manga. These were also of extremely variant quality, and there were a lot of rules for a very weird online translation subculture. I always kind of got the impression that most of them hated each other. A lot of these groups required IRC use, which was confusing af, and I honestly believe that’s the biggest reason why most of these ended up getting put on online manga reader sites. There were fewer of those back then.

Most anime fandom was very strongly demarcated. Most of the fandom I engaged with was on livejournal, which meant it was like...maybe 95% female. You’d get more men on forums, which is why we all fled the forums and went to LJ. lol. Trash spaces. Trash.

The whole yaoi/shounen-ai/BL situation was very different. LGBT stuff was considered more niche and still something you needed to “warn” for in most environments. For a long time, the only legit published stuff was like. FAKE and Gravitation and CLAMP and maybe Eerie Queerie or Loveless or something. So basically, it was shit. lol. (As a young teen, I was particularly attached to CLAMP/Kaori Yuki stuff. Thank god my parents never caught on.) Anyway, to get to scanlated BL works, you usually had to go to special communities/sharing circles online or figure out the prominent scanlators and follow them. Very, very little doujinshi was scanlated. Very few (English-speaking) people ventured onto pixiv. There were a lot of arguments about the differences between yaoi, shounen-ai, and BL. Don’t let anyone nowadays fool you. When I was a teen, 90% of all “yaoi fangirls” were queer, and half of that annoying sex-focused excitement was because it was the first gay sex we’d seen in any publication anywhere. It was a different time in the media landscape. BL has a lot of shitty-ass tropes, but we were basically starving in a desert. We took our Gravitation and we liked it. F/F manga was very rarely translated, and I guess that’s still the case today. There’s less of it, and I think we’ve all been trained to prioritize male sexuality. (Plus most of the shoujo-ai that got posted online was like uber-innocent schoolgirl stuff.) People make fun of “yaoi fangirls” and “fujoshi” and all that now, but I can honestly say I would have never understood my own sexuality without that subculture. Like the anime clubs were full of obnoxious little weebs, but let’s be straight about something, no pun intended. They were full of obnoxious little gay weebs. People are all about gay (western) cartoons nowadays, but when I was a teen, they were all about that anime.

Because almost all published anime/manga was in hard copy, you’d get mini congregations of fans in stores. See: hordes of manga fans sitting in the manga aisle of the book store, fans chatting with each other in...suncoast, or wherever they could find DVDs/VHS. The level of social skills in these areas was...not high. Also, a lot of fuckin creepy predatory dudes going after girls. Hooooly shit. I was so glad when they started releasing anime/manga online. Y’all livestreamers on Crunchyroll don’t know how good you have it. You used to have to deal with the fedora bros who were a good 10-20 years older than you but still following you around in stores, conventions, etc. any time you wanted to get new stuff. Like it was a legit problem.

LIKE I’M TRYING TO CONVEY HERE THAT JUST GETTING ANIME/MANGA WAS A PAIN IN THE REAR END. not as bad as the dark days when people had to physically mail each other shit, but it was still definitely a subculture and you’d definitely be thrown in with a lot of people you wouldn’t want to be around. (Similar to how things are in modern western comics fandom...)

Fandom itself was basically a tire fire. In every possible way. Like I’m nostalgic for it in some ways, because in some ways I really miss how text-based it was. There was a lot more meta and conversation, and fanfic was much better supported. Comment culture was a lot stronger and you’d become friends with people who read your work and/or people who wrote stuff you liked. But on the other side of that, there was a lot of weird fanfic gatekeeping. Sporking communities and flaming and fic rating communities were much more of a problem back then. You release stuff to crickets nowadays, which is demoralizing, but back then there was a solid chance you’d wake up to an inbox full of hate mail, especially if you wrote slash. It definitely happened to me a few times as a kid. I think they really targeted teens, too. So writing fic could be shitty. There was less fanart in American spaces, too.

I do agree that to some degree things have gone too far with the whole virtue-signaling/issuefic thing, with a lot of people yelling very loudly about things they may not always understand very well, but you gotta understand. Fandom was a hateful place in many ways back then. Sexist, racist, homophobic, you name it. Female characters are still ignored now, but they’re typically treated less horribly than they were back then. People try to be more educated about other ethnicities and sexualities and such now. You’re less likely to get bullied because you were gay. I think the big problem is that sometimes people hijack important movements to be giant dicks, and a lot of people, especially younger people, get swept up in that.

There was a very specific kind of anime badfic back then. I could write literally an entire post on that. Like god. Where do I even begin??? The bluenettes? The super kawaii fangirl nihongo? Script fic? “Tell me what to write next!” fic? lolololcrack fic? I mean, there were a lot of varieties of suck back then.

Weird subcultures. Like...really weird ones. Things got kind of cult-y relatively often. Just say no to cults.

if you want more details on anything, I’m having particularly painful flashbacks right now. ugh, the free hugs signs.

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