do you think there's anything to be implied about the quality of rwby's writing and framing in light of how much of the audience misinterprets salem/oz and the role of the gods? i see so many people reading the lost fable as a straightforward condemnation of salem and ozma as a pretty basic tragic hero that it makes me nervous about the future of the show and that IM reading too much into things when i see more nuance in salem. are that many people really that shallow when engaging with rwby? idk

nah people are—well tbh i think what it comes down to mainly is that fandom is not really centered around critical analysis, it’s centered on transformative engagement, and while these are by no means mutually exclusive endeavors they are in fact. Different. analytical vs transformative approaches to the text are different endeavors with different goals requiring different skillsets and can but do not inherently overlap. frankly in fandom spaces i think real textual analysis is not just ancillary but actively discouraged; nobody is quicker to respond to analytical discussions with “it’s not that deep” than a fan who doesn’t like the discussion and there is a noticeable tendency in fandom spaces for any analysis that isn’t 100% ebullient to be read as negativity or critical—e.g. note the frequency with which my reading of ozma is interpreted as character bashing—which isn’t to say that fandoms do not engage analytically at all, but in broad terms there is something of an unspoken… chilliness toward textual analysis in fandom culture. and i am saying this from the perspective of having written a lot of textual analysis and a lot of fanfiction across different fandoms; there is A Pattern. you write a detailed analytical breakdown of your reading of a character and see people tagging it fandom negativity while gushing about the detailed character study you wrote based on that same reading enough times and you start to pick up on the fact that maybe fandoms are not really built for analytical engagement. there is also the whole thing where fandom has an entire category of headcanon predicated on “this thing happened in the text but i don’t like it so no it didn’t” and a second entire category predicated on “this has no basis and is possibly out of character but i like it so happened actually” lmao [TO BE CLEAR THIS IS NOT A VALUE JUDGMENT I HAVE NONSENSE HEADCANONS ALSO ITS FINE.]

anyway this is all fine but! because fandoms devote the bulk of their collective energy into pouring out vast endless streams of like, fanfic and fanart and headcanon and “ship dynamics” [i still do not quite understand what these are] and incorrect quote mills and so forth you tend to get a sort of collective flattening of the text. there is a tendency for characters to be stripped down and reduced to small easily-manageable sets of tropes derived more from aesthetics and first impressions and for any moral complexity to be boiled down to simple black and white and for unique worldbuilding to be smudged a bit until it resembles its nearest recognizable trope. there is a sort of creative entropy. a smooth surface is easier to write on. also sometimes fans do not Obsessively Rewatch The Show four times in the space of a year and over time details get memetically blurred and this, obviously, is detrimental to the overall fidelity-to-canon of popular fanon.

and then like the thing to remember about rwby is it’s a very detail-oriented story, and one that respects its audience. the one downside of that storytelling approach is that fandom is uniquely ill-equipped for it (think about how many people Completely Missed that ironwood was on the express train to fascism land in V4-5 even though. the narrative made it like. hilariously obvious)

In Summary i lived through the fandom where the protagonist after two years of increasingly toxic behavior towards her bestie, charbroiled her friend’s arm into a shriveled blackened husk and not only did not apologize but had a whole episode about being mad at the friend for being upset and then 95% of the fandom was shocked when the friend went “fuck you” and stole the magical artifact whose power was involved in the charbroiling incident all of four episodes later; and almost two years later half the remaining is still Discoursing about how the friend “didn’t have a reason” for betraying the protagonist. tts was a show written with small children in mind. i have witnessed Actual Forty Year Olds insisting that this character’s betrayal was petty and childish. rwby is a lot more tightly-written and nuanced and not a disney princess cartoon and while it does benefit from its fandom not being mostly Disney People the fandom is still. A Fandom. doing what fandoms… do.

senshi fans: learning how to make nutritious meals for themselves

laios fans: down bad

marcille fans: lesbianism

chilchuck fans: putting that man in situations

idk man being violently hateful/resentful towards children for existing is weird. it’s legitimately just weird.

the mosquitos sure are big around here

“You wanna fight someone, you fight me” seemed like a silly rule at first. but after there was more than one batkid living in the Manor at the same time, suddenly the prospect of having to spar with Bruce on the mats because you couldn’t stop yourself from throwing a punch at Tim earlier is terrifying.

"all men are evil" is radfem/terf rhetoric, but clarifying "all cis men" because you want to signal that you're not transphobic doesn't work because it's still deeply rooted in radfem beliefs. It's saying you believe there's something inherently evil in being born/assigned "male", and you carry it over in how you treat ppl who transition in or out of that gender. "All cis men are evil", is gender essentialist and you can't get around that.

Fucking tired of ppl who think their terf soundbites with a fresh coat of paint are sooo progressive

i wanna be fishing right now part 3

Oakley the black bear and Traver the kit fox, she/her for both!

Thinking again about how Suzanne esentially subverted the "beloved famous man that is actually a horrible person in real life" with Finnick, who is the complete opposite of that.

Finnick has this whole image costructed around him by the people that abused him for years: the Capitol's darling, their golden boy, the sex symbol of Panem, the man that has countless lovers but leaves them constantly and doesn't look back etc. And you would expect, initially, to meet a man that retains at least a part of that persona in his day to day life. But Finnick doesn't, not even one bit.

You see instead a man that is deeply in love and completely devoted to the one woman he quite literally adores, a man that protects Mags, his old mentor and his mother figure, as much as he can, a man that wouldn't leave Johanna behind, a man that gathers whatever strenght he has left to speak publicly about the abuse inflicted upon him at the government's hands; the opposite of what the Capitol's media and reputation made him out to be.

Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".

Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"

And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".

Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.

At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.

So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!

Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!

Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!

Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.

I was rewatching But I’m a Cheerleader . Love the set design of that movie so much. Also rupaul in a straight is great t shirt

"Like stuff. Don't be someone that doesn't like stuff, and if you don't like stuff, don't be a dick about it."

- David Jenkins

I made some colored refs for my comic ~ And also some sketches because can you guess who is my favorite haha

gorgug “i’m in hell right? thank god” “what’re we playin’ for” “do you have a fucking warrant?” “i think i hate you” thistlespring u will always be famous and you will ALWAYS be loved

Quality bro time 🌱💅

What do you like about the Diasomnia boys if I may ask?

I always love hearing about the different reasons people enjoy characters.

I mean, c'mon. he has split custody over Sebek okay

also, Lilia in particular has maybe the best timeskip character development of all time

honestly it was a red flag when bbc sherlock went “well obviously the word written in blood isn’t the german word for revenge, it’s clearly the beginning of the name ‘rachel’, what absolute idiot would fail to see that” when in the original novel it is, in fact, the german word for revenge, which sherlock points out gleefully to a roomful of policemen who all figure it’s the beginning of the name ‘rachel.’

and by red flag I mean it was a clear sign that the adaptation was trying to one-up the source material, instead of engaging with it with love.