?

Senates adjourned until may 7th on a tuesday.

Get to calling through the weekend and monday.

We can clutch this!

For this final Bad Batch Eve, I redrew my very first Bad Batch Fanart. When I had drawn this screencap from the first episode, I was still trying to figure out how to draw the boys. Armor was not my strong suit back then. But now, I actually love drawing it.

Its been three years of one of the best TV adventures I got lucky enough to be part of. This show started as an escape for me, I was so isolated when it first premiered, and this clone family made me feel less alone. Its funny, as we watched these "surface level character archtypes" evolve, I evolved along with them. Im in a much better place in life now, with my own found family supporting me.

I'm going the miss The Bad Batch, I'm going to miss seeing Omega growing up. But the thing I will miss the most, is this incredible, insane, hilarious fandom we have grown to be. You all are so wonderfully creative, funny, and supportive. I hope everyone stays connected after the show ends. You all have made Star Wars fun for me! I love you all and I cant wait to see what the future holds for us!

I'm glad self-inserts and mary sues have been (for the most part) accepted by fandom. Or, at the very least, they aren't as hated on and attacked as they were in the past.

In the ye olde days™, 12-year-old me was absolutely terrified of making a "mary sue," to the point that I wouldn't post anything I made. Even worse, the characters I did make were dull and boring to achieve "realism." God forbid would I even THINK of making a character that was anywhere close to me as a person. Luckily, I was able to grow past this and started making art that made me happy, no matter what others might think. But what about the other 12 year olds who saw that their OCs were "bad" and got discouraged? There's so many people out there who stopped engaging in art simply because they made an OP character.

Creating characters is about expressing your creativity and feeling a connection to your art. It's going to be a different, unique experience for everyone. For one person, that might mean making a gritty, realistic OC. For another, it could be making a perfect version of themself to ship with a character they like. If making that "bad" mary sue is what makes someone happy, let them do it! Focus on what makes you happy and thats what matters. (live and let live basically).

Basically, if you want to make a character, DO IT!! Make that Undertale self-insert that dates Sans! Draw your neon pink alicorn princess pony! Feed your inner-child and create what makes you HAPPY!!!

you may want to make your fan content public  fic it's actually so beauty you're hope

Internalized cringephobia.

Every now and then I think about how subtitles (or dubs), and thus translation choices, shape our perception of the media we consume. It's so interesting. I'd wager anyone who speaks two (or more) languages knows the feeling of "yeah, that's what it literally translates to, but that's not what it means" or has answered a question like "how do you say _____ in (language)?" with "you don't, it's just … not a thing, we don't say that."

I've had my fair share of "[SHIP] are [married/soulmates/fated/FANCY TERM], it's text!" "[CHARACTER A] calls [CHARACTER B] [ENDEARMENT/NICKNAME], it's text!" and every time. Every time I'm just like. Do they though. Is it though. And a lot of the time, this means seeking out alternative translations, or translation meta from fluent or native speakers, or sometimes from language learners of the language the piece of media is originally in.

Why does it matter? Maybe it doesn't. To lots of people, it doesn't. People have different interests and priorities in fiction and the way they interact with it. It's great. It matters to me because back in the early 2000s, I had dial-up internet. Video or audio media that wasn't available through my local library very much wasn't available, but fanfiction was. So I started to read English language Gundam Wing fanfic before I ever had a chance to watch the show. When I did get around to watching Gundam Wing, it was the original Japanese dub. Some of the characters were almost unrecognisable to me, and first I doubted my Japanese language ability, then, after checking some bits with friends, I wondered why even my favourite writers, writers I knew to be consistent in other things, had made these characters seem so different … until I had the chance to watch the US-English dub a few years later. Going by that adaptation, the characterisation from all those stories suddenly made a lot more sense. And the thing is, that interpretation is also valid! They just took it a direction that was a larger leap for me to make.

Loose adaptations and very free translations have become less frequent since, or maybe my taste just hasn't led me their way, but the issue at the core is still a thing: Supernatural fandom got different nuances of endings for their show depending on the language they watched it in. CQL and MDZS fandom and the never-ending discussions about 知己 vs soulmate vs Other Options. A subset of VLD fans looking at a specific clip in all the different languages to see what was being said/implied in which dub, and how different translators interpreted the same English original line. The list is pretty much endless.

And that's … idk if it's fine, but it's what happens! A lot of the time, concepts -- expressed in language -- don't translate 1:1. The larger the cultural gap, the larger the gaps between the way concepts are expressed or understood also tend to be. Other times, there is a literal translation that works but isn't very idiomatic because there's a register mismatch or worse. And that's even before cultural assumptions come in. It's normal to have those. It's also important to remember that things like "thanks I hate it" as a sentiment of praise/affection, while the words translate literally quite easily, emphatically isn't easy to translate in the sense anglophone internet users the phrase.

Every translation is, at some level, a transformative work. Sometimes expressions or concepts or even single words simply don't have an exact equivalent in the target language and need to be interpreted at the translator's discretion, especially when going from a high-context/listener-responsible source language to a low-context/speaker-responsible target language (where high-context/listener responsible roughly means a large amount of contextual information can be omitted by the speaker because it's the listener's responsibility to infer it and ask for clarification if needed, and low-context/speaker-responsible roughly means a lot of information needs to be codified in speech, i.e. the speaker is responsible for providing sufficiently explicit context and will be blamed if it's lacking).

Is this a mouse or a rat? Guess based on context clues! High-context languages can and frequently do omit entire parts of speech that lower-context/speaker-responsible languages like English regard as essential, such as the grammatical subject of a sentence: the equivalent of "Go?" - "Go." does largely the same amount of heavy lifting as "is he/she/it/are you/they/we going?" - "yes, I am/he/she/it is/we/you/they are" in several listener-responsible languages, but tends to seem clumsy or incomplete in more speaker-responsible ones. This does NOT mean the listener-responsible language is clumsy. It's arguably more efficient! And reversely, saying "Are you going?" - "I am (going)" might seem unnecessarily convoluted and clumsy in a listener-responsible language. All depending on context.

This gets tricky both when the ambiguity of the missing subject of the sentence is clearly important (is speaker A asking "are you going" or "is she going"? wait until next chapter and find out!) AND when it's important that the translator assign an explicit subject in order for the sentence to make sense in the target language. For our example, depending on context, something like "are we all going?" - "yes" or "they going, too?" might work. Context!

As a consequence of this, sometimes, translation adds things – we gain things in translation, so to speak. Sometimes, it's because the target language needs the extra information (like the subject in the examples above), sometimes it's because the target language actually differentiates between mouse and rat even though the source language doesn't. However, because in most cases translators don't have access to the original authors, or even the original authors' agencies to ask for clarification (and in most cases wouldn't get paid for the time to put in this extra work even if they did), this kind of addition is almost always an interpretation. Sometimes made with a lot of certainty, sometimes it's more of a "fuck it, I've got to put something and hope it doesn't get proven wrong next episode/chapter/ten seasons down" (especially fun when you're working on a series that's in progress).

For the vast majority of cases, several translations are valid. Some may be more far-fetched than others, and there'll always be subjectivity to whether something was translated effectively, what "effectively" even means …

ANYWAY. I think my point is … how interesting, how cool is it that engaging with media in multiple languages will always yield multiple, often equally valid but just sliiiiightly different versions of that piece of media? And that I'd love more conversations about how, the second we (as folks who don't speak the material's original language) start picking the subtitle or dub wording apart for meta, we're basically working from a secondary source, and if we're doing due diligence, to which extent do we need to check there's nothing substantial being (literally) lost -- or added! -- in translation?

chip art??? from me???? no freaking way!!!

I'm really not a villain enjoyer. I love anti-heroes and anti-villains. But I can't see fictional evil separate from real evil. As in not that enjoying dark fiction means you condone it, but that all fiction holds up some kind of mirror to the world as it is. Killing innocent people doesn't make you an iconic lesbian girlboss it just makes you part of the mundane and stultifying black rot of the universe.

"But characters struggling with honour and goodness and the egoism of being good are so boring." Cool well some of us actually struggle with that stuff on the daily because being a good person is complicated and harder than being an edgelord.

Sure you can use fiction to explore the darkness of human nature and learn empathy, but the world doesn't actually suffer from a deficit of empathy for powerful and privileged people who do heinous stuff. You could literally kill a thousand babies in broad daylight and they'll find a way to blame your childhood trauma for it as long as you're white, cisgender, abled and attractive, and you'll be their poor little meow meow by the end of the week. Don't act like you're advocating for Quasimodo when you're just making Elon Musk hot, smart and gay.

[Twitter thread by Angry Black Changeling that reads: Low-key think any queer adult with DNI boundaries around ‘pro-shippers’ ought to do a detox consisting of education on queer history especially with respect to the fight against censorship + purity culture, and reckon with the way that - and fandom [especially terrible hot takes within spaces centred around fiction] - has furthered a surveillance culture where treating real world people like they are characters with a visible level of morality you can instantly assess + react to is the norm.

It’s not the norm. It’s purity culture at work.

You’re constantly surveilling yourself and others, and creating a level of psychological unsafety that will not keep you safe.

And let’s be serious for a sec, we know that abusers don’t come wearing “proshipper” badges.

Stats inform that they exist everywhere, and most commonly in heteronormative cultural blindspots such as family, schools, churches, institutions.

There could be overlap, but it’s a serious logical conflation to think it’s the 20 something with heart eyes over a fictional age gap you need to look out for.

That’s not to increase paranoia, but point out logical fallacies in that ‘shipping’ rhetoric.

Tbh on a personal level it’s so concerning because it’s so indicative of so many methods of coercive control: from cishetropatriarchy, to racism, to class based oppression - but it’s insidious in the way it’s creating pockets of surveillance within already marginalised + vulnerable communities who seem unable to realise that it functions on an insidious level that amounts to *thought control* + tokenistic morality.

It’s the opposite of safe.

It can be actually dangerous.

It’s doing the work of oppressors freely + willingly. /End thread]

Fandom has furthered a surveillance culture where treating real world people like they are characters with a visible level of morality you can instantly assess + react to is the norm.

It’s not the norm. It’s purity culture at work.

I started replaying fire emblem: path of radiance earlier this week after recently really only playing modern (awakening onward) FE for the past 5 years and it's really hitting home for me how much of modern fe's script is taken up by useless minutiae. camp conversations in por are the thing really hitting it for me. In more recent fe games, there's a lot of little bits of dialogue in the between-level hub but it rarely ever adds to our understanding of a character or interact with the story. It's just there because the characters are in the hub and therefore they need a sentence or two to say to the protag.

meanwhile path of radiance has these wonderful little conversations in the camp. they're not all like, peak fiction or anything but they almost always deliver on short nuggets of story that let you know how specific characters are reacting to what's going on in the story, or otherwise just something about them. I can count on my hands the amount of moments in three houses and engage where characters outside of the "main cast" of those games actually react to story events but they're doing it left and right in path of radiance.

this, along with the fact that most characters only have 3-5 supports means that the characters all feel sharper, more present, and like they're a part of the story. I'm not gonna pretend that every character in por is a masterful study or anything but even the weak characters in por feel less annoying than some of the strongest characters in three houses or engage because they're just inserted into the world more elegantly.

so much of the dialogue in the newer games just feels superfluous by comparison. xander doesn't have checks notes 12 romantic supports because the devs/writers felt that he as a character needed that much fleshing out. he has them because they needed him to have that many girls to kiss for the eugenics mechanics to work! part of the reason why characters in the newer games feel significantly more one note in comparison is that they're stretched thin. there's so much pointless shit they have to say, decided by quota before the writers even got their hands on the characters and it all builds up into a weaker end product

anyway this has been one elitist whinging about the new games that I like less

I don't get people who hate Omega.

I have not liked many of SW child characters, but Omega I do like. Don't know if it is because of being now older myself and just accepting some of her behaviour as just something that children are doing.

Or because she really does not annoy me.

I have genuinely loved her expressions, her ways of seeing the Universe for the first time etc.

Maybe it is because her back story is very easy to be absorbed? It is very solid as all of us, star wars fans, now know the clones and Kamino and the whole entanglement related to the relations there. As well as how they did grow up there.

She has a slot in the universe where she fits in.

I know many people had issues with Ahsoka as she first arrived, because her part was not as clear. We needed a whole Clone Wars ans a part of a complete own show to get her backstory.

But then on the other hand.

Many people had issues with Anakin.

And we all KNOW who he was going to become. And still people were whining. The acting naturally was not that good, but it kind of is not fault of an actor in many cases. And it was not all that bad, but still there were a lot of people who hated young Anakin to the guts.

It makes me wonder if that actully is a sign of the general recentment towards children. It should not be mixed up with not wanting kids.

I want to stress that it is ok to not want kids. It is ok to not want to be around kids. But still.

Hating a young character should be based of them to actually be bad characters.

Writing them as a child and them being childish is just natural. If they annoy you because of their childish qualities, that is actually because you might not like kids. Right?

Most popular fanfiction fandoms by state

There's a specific kind of PR spam I get a lot that involves marketing firms coming up with cool quirky topics to look up on Google Trends, finding out what the data is on a national level, and then turning that data into a cute trend graph.

While discussing one such trend search, I started wondering what the top fanfiction fandoms were on a state by state level, so i did it myself.

The results were honestly not what I was expecting!

Methodology: I searched Google trends for "fanfiction" by state and then noted the top related queries for the past 12 months. If not enough data could be generated for related queries, then I looked at the top related topics. If those results were wonky, I searched top related queries from 2004-present.

Harry Potter is universally the #2 fandom behind Naruto, with the exception of Iowa, in which Harry Potter was ranked 1st, and trailing at a very distant 2nd was.... NCIS Hawaii, and Colorado, in which the top 3 fandoms are Miraculous Ladybug, RWBY, and Percy Jackson.

RWBY, My Hero Academia, and Percy Jackson were generally the most popular third place fandoms.

Wednesday Addams is by far the most popular related character topic. One notable exception is Pennsylvania, where the top related character is, uh, this random gentleman from General Hospital?

AO3 was by far the most-googled related fic archive ahead of ff.net and wattpad. (Though to be fair, Wattpad tweens aren't googling Wattpad, they're just opening the app.)

Another related query that kept popping up from state to state was this (imo basic) fanfic kink test that got popular thanks to this tumblr post, so well done everyone!

[Image description: An anonymous tumblr ask, edited whiteout-poetry style. Resulting text is as follows—Anonymous said, "hi. fanfiction is inherently art, and the act of creating it is indulgent. even when it isn't nsfw, the person creating it is doing so because they enjoy fantasizing about certain concepts and characters. use ao3."]

---

indulgence (affectionate)

from this post by @mrspider

TOXIC FAN PRESSURE

So a lot of us saw this exchange yesterday between Krist and a toxic fan who got flatly shut down when they tried to make Krist choose between GawinKrist and KristSingto:

I made a whole thread on Twitter to provide context about it (that I might also put on here).

And, y’know, even though this gives people like that more undeserved attention, I’m sharing these other tweets to show people outside the fandom the level of nonsense Krist has been putting up with for months just because he’s still friends with Gawin and won’t pretend he doesn’t exist for the sake of their fantasies.

Krist is twenty-eight now, and he’s clearly ready to set some boundaries with fans who try to take liberties, but I want to take this as an opportunity to point out that he’s been dealing with this and worse since SOTUS aired while he was still in university.

He’s famous for being a people-pleaser, kind to all to his own detriment, so it shocked and pleased a lot of long-time fans to see him finally clap back yesterday. And it’s fitting that he did it to protect the people he loves.

And these are sock puppet accounts posting publicly, so I can’t imagine what they’re sending to his DMs.

All because he found a friend.

I’m glad he stood up to them.

its like so fascinating how drastically people’s view of rick and morty has morphed over the years. i look through a lot of like old blogs that were active around the time the first 3 seasons were out and that seems to be the time where it was really just considered like. another fandom. like it was so regularly grouped in with stuff like gravity falls n steven universe and i find it So interesting bc what happened to get it from that to fuckin. pickle rick 200 iq reddit show. it just interests me a lot how divided the audience for a single show can be