#it's good to know we're all on the same page on this fandom and agree cal is down as bad as jules
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https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/746553097204203521/the-fandom-hates-women-response-to-lack-of-ff
The "fandom hates women" part of it comes from the fact that fandom as an entity just doesn't watch the kind of media that draws femslash, even if it ticks all of the boxes of things those very same people say they like. There are so many times I've watched a show that I've seen mega-popular Tumblr posts wishing existed, and then the fandom is so, so small comparatively and often in general. There have been superheroes, vampire/supernatural shows, fantasy shows, movies, books, the list goes on, that feel like they were generated out of Tumblr's desires for ideal fandom media, and everyone knows they're never going to attract anywhere near the same attention for fandom and fanworks because the common denominator just tends to be that if there isn't a full ensemble of attractive men to ship either with each other or with the women, fandom's not interested.
So it's not about prioritizing women in that sense, it's about people witnessing hypocrisy over and over again the second a show doesn't have a mostly-male ensemble. The people who are in these fandoms are frustrated that good faith attempts to get people interested are met with every excuse in the book that all eventually boils down to "I don't like watching stuff with women in it as much as I like watching stuff with men in it." And if that's how people feel about it... sometimes the conclusions are going to turn into the more uncharitable take of "fandom hates women."
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Maybe, but whenever I see a "fandom hates women" reblog of my stuff, one or two reblogs further down the chain I get an overt TERF. I just had to go block several people today, in fact.
The first person to reblog with a comment like that is usually subtle, but their friends and friends of friends are not. The rhetoric that very quickly starts is the fandom equivalent of that "All the butches are becoming trans men! We're losing lesbians!" stuff.
Here's the thing: I've been in ten billion fandoms that were so awesome and fit fandom's supposed tastes to a T and yet no amount of promoting them could get anyone to try the canon. This goes for canons that are all men or all white men or all majority ethnicity men or whatever else.
The default state of media is to not engender a big fic fandom.
I agree that the rare outliers mostly follow certain patterns, but we extrapolate too far when we say that a lack of those patterns is why a fandom is small.
A fandom is small because that's the near-universal default.
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Yes, a small slice of fandom consists of guilt-ridden queer fujoshi who say they want more f/f but don't make much of a move to make that happen. I tend to run into that a lot because of my own tastes and having friends who share those tastes.
Far more of fandom is people talking generally about how representation matters without saying they would personally join these fandoms if they existed.
Neither group is large enough to be the real reason some woman-heavy canon fails to take off to HP levels.
The real reason is not hypocrisy but the fact that most things don't take off like that. Most things without massive, massive audiences especially don't take off like that. And the very few things that do are flukes and don't actually predict that another similar thing will take off in the future.
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Go to AO3's tag search. Search for all canonical fandom tags. Sort by uses and descending order.
Right now, I get 64,390 tags.
The first page, 50 tags, goes from HP with 497,845 works to the Thor movies with 59,266 works. By page 6, we're below 10 thousand works.
By the end of page 10, we're down to Labyrinth with 3,906.
Somewhere in the top 500 AO3 fandom tags (many of which are just franchise metatags for each other), we go all the way from megafandoms to medium size and down to relatively modest ones.
That's not a lot of room for a big f/f-heavy fandom given the trends in mainstream media and that mainstream media is where most really big fandoms come from.
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I also notice that you're conflating a lack of desire to watch something that's primarily about women with a lack of desire to watch something that includes women.
There are tons of fans who want something more like The Mummy with a leading man and leading woman they love.
Granted, that's not me and that's not a lot of my fujoshi/slasher audience, but it's extraordinarily common. I know plenty of people who don't like canons that are only dudes, but since they also don't like canons that are only ladies and they don't ship f/f, this gets spun into "fandom hates women".
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Let me be clear:
Conflating "lesbians" and "women" is a radfem position.
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What I love about the Goncharov meme is how willing most of us are to break kayfabe, because - on the surface level, it's kind, it gives people the opportunity to opt out if this just isn't good for them, and tells people - the secret is that there is no secret, that's the joke, hop right in with a "yes, and"; all are welcome. It's likely to confuse future media historians regardless.
But as someone who really enjoyed House of Leaves I also love it on a meta level because, we are essentially creating a spiritual adaptation of that book, blurring the line between meme and ARG...all based on a pair of shoes. It begs the question, then, what level of this layered narrative are we on, exactly?
I'm not the first person to compare Goncharov to The Navidson Record and I know I won't be the last. It's a very easy, obvious comparison to make - this legendary piece of lost media that everyone has an opinion on, but no one can confirm it's even real? Yeah, at this point in tumblr's collective consciousness, Goncharov is very much like that - the only difference being, we're on the same page and can agree that it's not real and never was.
Except we will place ourselves into a narrative such that it is real. It's an unspoken rule that even if you break kayfabe in other posts, even if you tag your Goncharov posts as "unreality" for accessibility (as you should, especially your original posts), you don't add to a Goncharov meta post, or fanfic, or fanart, in such a way as to even insinuate that Goncharov may not be a real movie. In this layer, that makes you the fool, the uncultured swine. Everyone's seen Goncharov! What do you mean you haven't even heard of it!? What do you mean you doubt it exists!? What rock have you been living under!? If someone earnestly asks what it is, it is to be answered elsewhere - in DMs, in an ask, over Discord, maybe in the replies, but not as an addition to the post that exists "in that reality".
There are a few things we tend to agree upon about Goncharov:
It is a work of fiction. The events of the movie did not occur in the universe - the narrative layer - where we discuss it as a real film.
As stated on the shoe label that created the meme, it is a film directed by Martin Scorsese, written by someone named Matteo JWHJ 0715 (sometimes also written as Matteo JWHJ0715 or Matteo jwhj0715), and it is a mafia movie - namely, it carries the lofty claim of being "The Greatest Mafia Movie Ever Made."
It is about the relationship between Russian and Italian mafia families, set in Naples.
This movie poster is the basis of the canon; the characters listed on it exist and are portrayed by the actors listed.
There is an additional character, Sofia, whose reasons for being omitted from the poster are unknown.
Katya and Goncharov are married; this likely at least started as merely a marriage of convenience, but the full nature of their relationship is hotly debated in a way that highlights many common views of tumblr shipping culture¹.
Katya eventually betrays Goncharov, leading to his death at the end of the film.
There is significant homoerotic subtext between Andrey/Goncharov and Katya/Sofia, much of which plays into the film's themes; however, contrary to the impressions often given by tumblr's fandom culture, it is all subtextual, and while the relationships between Andrey, Goncharov, Katya, and Sofia can be read as significant drivers of the plot, they are far from being the central focus of the story.
Clocks are a major recurring visual symbol.
There is a pivotal "boat scene".
Most other details, however, are left to whoever is currently "analyzing" it. For instance, while many on Archive Of Our Own agree that the character of "Ice Pick Joe" definitely died in the end, with "no beta we die like Ice Pick Joe" being a popular tag for Goncharov fanfiction, at least one early tumblr post implies that the character's fate is undetermined.
The Goncharov meme is simultaneously a love letter to tumblr's fan culture, and a scathing critique thereof², but one of the most underappreciated fascinating things about it is that it forms a nested narrative.
On the innermost layer, we have the unreachable - the film itself. No one has seen it. No one ever will. We're all just trying to imagine it from the shadows on the cave wall. Maybe one day we'll create it, but it will still never truly be the original 1973 film we're all writing about. Making it even harder to recreate and make "real", the mythology includes alternate cuts and regional edits to reconcile the plot points written by different users that undeniably contradict each other.
On the next layer outward, we have the posts about the film. The deep meta. The fanart. The fanfiction. The content "from another universe" where Goncharov is a real classic film that everyone has seen. The layer where we don't break kayfabe. This is a layer we can see the reality of, and contribute to, but never truly live in - it is an imaginary construct. Or is it? The film we're writing about may not exist, but the story we're weaving together from these roleplay writing exercises is somewhat coherent, and the thousands upon thousands of words of meta and fanfiction we write about it are real; one could make a compelling argument that even if Goncharov the film does not exist, the Goncharov fandom is a real fandom. This layer is one foot in the real world, and one foot in a fictional one.
On the next layer, we have the posts about the meme. This can be definitively stated to be real, with no caveats. Posts that discuss how the meme reflects on fan culture, about the self-referential nature of the meme, about the little aspects of online fandom culture it plays with. This is the first layer that can fully be said to be rooted exclusively in the real world.
But even on a layer beyond that, we have posts such as this one, discussing the discussion of the fandom for the fake film - and on yet another layer beyond that (or is it the same one?), we have the future speculation. We have guesses as to what future historians will think of this phenomenon. We have discussions of the precarious and transient nature of information online, questions about what parts of this meme will be archived and which ones will disappear. Will there be historians desperately searching for this alleged lost classic in 50 years? Will it be assumed that the shoes that started the meme were actually a piece of promotional merchandise for a real classic film?
You may notice, then, that the innermost layers are discrete, but once you get into the layers that exist in our reality, they become markedly less so.
This model gives us a structure that can be visualized somewhat like this:
[Image ID: a diagram of 5 concentric circles. The centermost circle is colored in dark red with a thick black outline and labeled "Goncharov (1973 film) - fictional, unreachable, unviewable". The next circle outward is colored in pink, with a thinner black outline, and is labeled "Goncharov fan discussion". The next circle is colored in light gold, with a black outline that blurs into the next circle, labeled "Discussion of the Goncharov fan discussion". The next layer is colored in light green, with a dark outline blurred so thoroughly that its only purpose is to provide some visual contrast for clarity of labeling, labeled "Discussion of all previous layers; note the blurring of the line between this layer and the previous". Finally, the outermost layer is colored in light blue, with a solid black outline, labeled "Speculation about the future's view of the Goncharov meme, including roleplay as lost media enthusiasts and media studies professors 50-100 years in the future". End ID.]
In fact, there are several rules the Goncharov meme has come to follow:
As stated above, any given post is constrained to its narrative layer, to the extent that those layers are discrete. Posts about Goncharov as a real film are not to have additions that break kayfabe. Similarly, posts about Goncharov as a meme are not to have anyone insist the film is real. This may be subject to change as the meme evolves, but it is the rule as of the time of this writing.
You may not add to a post to contradict a claim about the factual nature of what happened on screen, even if it directly contradicts a previous post of yours³. You are, however, encouraged to dispute its implications and get creative to try and reconcile the contradictions. The only exception is in the form of responding to a meme with another extant meme format (e.g., "I get what you're going for OP but x very much did y")
Posts about Goncharov the film are to be treated exactly the same way you would post about a real piece of media. Analysis is to be taken seriously, using real analytical frameworks and devices. Memes are to use real formats. Fanart and fanfiction are to have just as much effort put into their crafting as you would give any real piece of media.
Complaining about bad readings that do not exist, but you imagine someone might make, is encouraged.
You cannot break these rules. Not "you may not", but "you cannot". It is not possible. You can try. You will fail. Your posts breaking these rules will never gain traction, or if they do, they will do so only after being added to in order to make it fit them. The narrative is hungry. You cannot engage it without being absorbed into it. Your only escape is to walk away and not look back⁴.
In other words, the Goncharov meme is not just a meditation on fan culture, but a demonstration and discussion of the intricacy of the relationship between fiction and reality.
House of Leaves is beloved for its complex nested narrative, and again, the comparison is a common one. However, there is a subtle and potentially unsettling difference - House of Leaves did not include its author or its readers nearly as thoroughly as the Goncharov meme does. House of Leaves was written from outside the narrative; the legend of Goncharov is being written from within.
Every single person who blogs about Goncharov makes themself into a character in this story.
The narrative layers in House of Leaves bleed into each other to give a sense of mystery as to what is real and what is not in the universe(s) of the novel. The narrative layers in the Goncharov mythos bleed into each other because we traverse them freely - from the fictional reviews and retellings and analysis, to the semi-fictional drawing of comparisons to real media and the use of this nonexistent movie as a low-stakes vehicle to lightheartedly air one's real complaints with fan culture, to the fully-grounded discussion of Goncharov's impact as a meme, to the philosophical discussion of its multi-layered nature, to the once-again-fictional speculation of how it will be viewed in the future - the same person can visit any of these layers.
But their impact will always be bound by each layer's internal rules, because building a legend - a narrative - will not allow for anything else.
Goncharov does not exist. Goncharov is a narrative labyrinth that contains us all. YOU CANNOT ESCAPE ITS NARRATIVE.
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1. Tumblr shipping culture is as much of a microcosm of queer studies as it is of media analysis. It, like the Goncharov meme, operates on a minimum of two levels: the level of analyzing a story for potential queer readings, namely in the form of romantic relationships, and opportunities for transformative work; and the level of sociopolitical discussion of queer issues and stereotypes, and how they are reflected in media and the discussion thereof; the latter, particularly, in the form of intracommunity disputes and lateral aggression. For example, the dispute over the nature of Goncharov and Katya's marriage and its level of sincerity is implied in some posts to occasionally cross the line into bisexual erasure. While at the time of the Goncharov meme's emergence in 2022, the discourse within this subculture is much more civil than it once was, it is still very much an environment that stands as a constant reminder that there is no such thing as a truly apolitical space.
Of course, most everyone on this website knows that by now, right?
2. This meme comes at a time when a lot of us are terrified of going back to the way things used to be in tumblr fan discourse. We all joke about the Hamilton HIV fanfic catfish, or The JohnLock Conspiracy, or any number of other major scandals now that they're over; they are hilarious in hindsight, but it's all too easy to lose track of the fact that the human toll at the time was real. DashCon is a joke to most, but I've personally met more than one well-meaning volunteer who ended up with PTSD from dealing with attendees who thought even the volunteers were in on an intentional scam. We laugh at the absurdity of the incident known as Boneghazi, but it doesn't take away the fact that there are still people in Louisiana wondering if their relatives were the ones whose bones were stolen and offered up for sale online - though that one was only tangentially related to fandom, it's from the same broad sitewide culture. People have been stalked, harassed, doxxed, psychologically abused to the point of hospitalization and even suicide, there are even rumors of assaults over disagreements about which show is better, or which fictional characters have the best relationships. It's all petty, all funny in hindsight - but the human toll is real.
I got caught in an incident myself once*, before the porn ban. There was one guy, they and some real life friends of theirs got into my circle of friends in a roleplay community in the ■■■■■■■ fandom. They seemed nice enough. Normal enough. We had a few good chats. They played the same character I did, among a few others. Had a fun little concept we were throwing back and forth to start a thread with the doubled character. Accidental cloning due to a computer error, it was going to be.
Everything fell apart when a new ■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■ dropped. It gave us a nice scene of the most popular "ship" in the fandom - one that had been teased since day 1, and of course when it got attention the company wanted to milk it for all it was worth. This guy originally seemed cool with the ship, even though they didn't like it much; they preferred to pair one of the characters off with their self-insert OC. It was all a peaceful difference of opinion for a while, but after this ■■■■■■ dropped and people were excited about the scene, they went berserk. My then-boyfriend's ex started getting anonymous messages imitating him. My inbox started filling up with threats. Some of my more casual acquaintances started confronting me over threats they thought I sent. Meanwhile, this guy was melting down on main about how everyone had "betrayed" them. I found myself blocked by our mutual friends who this guy knew in real life - it turned out, because they were telling them that I was sending them hate and threats. "Someone" tried to convince my then-boyfriend to doxx someone adjacent to the circle for "abuse". I started getting hate messages that hit some of my deepest insecurities and almost ■■■ ■■ ■■ ■■■■■■ - the only reason I ended up okay was because I figured it out, because I realized this guy was the one doing all of it, and they were mining for ammo from our mutual friends.
All of this because a bunch of people, mostly strangers, were happy about the ■■■■■■. Because of a fictional relationship. Their fixation on me was just because we played the same character but liked different ships, and I was a little more known in the fandom. This wasn't even on a website where people could see follower counts, it was right here on tumblr, so they had to be pretty obsessive to figure that out in the first place.
Eventually the friends they lied about me to caught on and left them, but not before they stole a bunch of said friends' stuff. Last I checked on them, it was 2 years since the incident, and they were still melting down on main about how anyone who liked that ship was evil. By that point they had convinced themself that the entire fandom for that ship was a campaign to harass and persecute them personally; that there was no other reason to like it.
The last thing I head about them was that they had stabbed a family member over this and some other personal drama and gotten banned from Twitter and a few conventions for making violent threats toward artists and cosplayers. I don't dare look back anymore.
*Editors' note: Some details have been altered or redacted to protect the ignorant.
3. Ironically, this is one of the few tells that Goncharov is not an extant piece of media. In fandoms for real media, it is fairly common for details to be misremembered and corrections to be made.
4. "Don't look back", of course, is easier said than done. We must recall the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus, despondent at the loss of his love, arranged to be allowed into the underworld to bring her back to life, but there was one condition; one tiny, seemingly simple condition - he must not look at her until they were both back in the light. If he did, she would be dragged back and lost forever; he would not get a second chance.
Like many myths, the details vary from telling to retelling. Some say that she was never made aware of the rule and cried out in terror as her husband refused to look at her, and almost instinctively he turned to comfort her. Some say that he fell victim to almost a form of muscle memory in mid-ascent when he turned to make sure she was okay. Some say that his desire to see her again sooner rather than later was just too strong and outweighed his resolve and common sense screaming for him to hold to the condition. Some say that he turned as soon as he was in the light, blissfully unaware until it was too late that she was still in the dark.
Whatever the reason, Orpheus looked back.
There is no version of the story where he succeeded in not looking back. The narrative will not let him not look back. The myth has no room for an Orpheus who is successful.
He cannot escape the myth.
He cannot escape the narrative.
Orpheus will always look back.
#goncharov#unreality#heavier unreality warning than your typical goncharov post#i freaked myself out with this#so if you like horror about the nature of narrative please read this and make it worth it!#house of leaves#memeology#internet culture#astral originals
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Plot Bunnies
Fandom: Thomas Sanders, Sanders Sides
Pairings: None
Warnings: Imaginary animal death
Summary: There's too many of them.
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Roman lunged out of his bedroom and slammed the door shut behind him. His arms stretched wide across it, forming a human barrier. His eyes darted wildly from side to side, chest heaving, clothes in disarray.
Logan paused in his jaunt through the hallway. "What are you-"
Something slammed against the door from the other side. Then again, the force of it jarring Roman as he desperately held the line.
"It's the plot bunnies!" Roman yelled. "There's too many of them! I can't hold them back!"
"Plot bunnies? What sort of rabbit is a plot?" Logan asked.
Appearing beside him eating a sandwich, Virgil answered, "It's slang, L. It means Sir Doofus here has too many story ideas in the old noggin'."
"Excuse me! I am not old!"
"Seriously? That's what you got out of that?"
Logan ignored their bickering. "Ah, I see. Your creative inspirations have exceeded your ability to efficiently process. Therefore, they have manifested in corporeal form."
Another slam came from behind the door and Roman's body jostled with it. He winced. "It's not my fault I'm so amazing!"
"Thomas has been rather motivated as of late," Logan agreed by not agreeing at all. He pulled out a notebook and pen. "Do you think they would allow me to ask questions?"
Virgil looked bug-eyed over Logan's body, both front and back. "Where did you pull those from?"
"If you want to go in there, be my guest!" Roman said. "The pen is mightier than the sword, after all."
"Quite. Well, if I may then?"
Roman and Logan stood by the door, waited long enough in between the impacts, and then Roman quickly yanked the door open enough for the other to slip in. Immediately after, Roman slammed the door shut.
"So... bunnies can't kill people, right?" Virgil asked conversationally.
"I don't hear screaming. Also we can't die, Virgil. You know this."
"It doesn't stop the fear."
"Logan took a shurikan to the head and lived. If any of us can survive killer rabbits, it's Isaac Nerdton."
"Do the rabbits have weapons or would they just gnaw you to death?"
"Virgil, you're spiraling."
"Right, sorry."
It was about this time that Logan barreled back through in a flurry of paper scraps. His clothes hung in tatters. Roman barred the door again and demanded, "Good God man, what happened in there?"
"They've formed a union," Logan said weakly.
Virgil ran a hand down his face and blew out a gust of breath. "Yeah, I'm gonna go get Remus for this one."
Even Roman couldn't argue. Sometimes violence was the answer.
Logan stood there frozen, watching Virgil walk away.
"You okay there, Specs?" Roman asked in concern. Logan didn't often go quiet.
"No. I most decidedly am not."
"Good, just as long as we're on the same page."
They stood in silence. Or rather, they stopped talking and listened to the bangs of dozens of rabbits throwing their ravenous bodies against the door.
They heard him before they saw him.
"HEEEEEEREEEEEE'S JHOOOONNYYYYY!"
Remus sonic-ran down the hallway wielding a battle axe. His eyes were alight with murder and his lips stretched back in a too-wide grin.
As if they had planned it together, Roman opened the door at the exact moment Remus needed to sprint into the room without slowing down. Then he slammed it closed once more.
Virgil walked back at a more sedate pace. He joined the others as they stood outside the door and listened to the sounds of manical cackling paired with rabbit squeals and ominous squelching.
"We never speak of this to Patton," Virgil said.
"Agreed," they both replied.
#thomas sanders#sanders sides#roman sanders#logan sanders#virgil sanders#remus sanders#writing#fanfiction#animal death#imaginary animal death#plot bunnies#comedy
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Yes sjm did say that she would like to explore Azriel's character more, but she also said the same about Eris at one point. There's a lot of anticipation for the next book, and if Azriel's book is next, then that would have been a pretty risky and spoilery comment imo
SJM about the next ACOTAR book in September:
"I'm currently working on the next ACOTAR book and that's all I'm going to say about that."
SJM in recent official sit down interview with TODAY:
- Gives no indication of who the next book will be about.
SJM in fan-made bracket that doesn't have either Elain or Lucien:
"Azriel is someone I'm going to be exploring more"
Fandom: Azriels' book is next!
Lucien is given his own POV when Feyre slips into his mind in ACOWAR which everyone read.
Azriel is given his own bonus in SF which not every ACOTAR reader is aware of.
Fandom: Azriel's book is next!
SJM confirms Elain will be getting a book, confirms she knew who the first two spin-offs were going to be about but was unsure of the third, confirms she left hints for Elain's journey early on in the series, confirms her initial plan for the spin-offs didn't change, and indicated she had done research for Elain's book while pregnant with her son.
SJM makes comment about how when you get the end of SF, you'll know whose book is next (despite the ending of SF featuring Nesta with her two sisters, her placing Elain's rose on her fathers grave and Eris telling us that Beron, Koschei and the treaty are the current concerns) and Az's journey is one she's excited to explore.
Fandom: Proof Azriel book is next!
SJM includes Elain in the Az Bonus and makes her a major topic of conversation in the Feyre bonus.
SJM includes Az in the Bryce HOFAS bonus which also included Nesta.
Fandom: Azriel is next because SJM wanted to give him more page time and he's now been the focus of two POVs!
(it's odd that Az being a side character in Bryce's POV is such a big deal while Elain being a side character in Az's and the topic of conversation in Feyre's is often made out to be an insignificant thing. No she did not get her own POV but SJM added that she's got Az beat for secret keeping for a reason, it's possible Elain not getting a POV before her book was very intentional on the authors part).
SJM introduces the Elucien mating bond in ACOMAF and Lucien has spent 2.5 books dealing with the struggles of an unfulfilled bond.
SJM hints at an Az mating bond in his POV though as of HOFAS he still remains completely unaware which means there's nothing to resolve with his bond at this point.
Fandom: Az gets to be with his mate in the next book!
I apologize for the sass of my post but I agree with you. For an author and publisher who insist on remaining tight-lipped about whose book is going to be next, it's odd that anyone thinks she's going to confirm it by making the statement that Az is someone she wants to explore.
And none of the evidence from past interviews or even the bonus in SF has any more weight to it than all the things she's said about Elain's book over the years or the starting point from which Elucien's story has been laid out.
Az's bonus told us he feels like nothing at all? Been there, done that with Lucien in ACOMAF and ACOWAR.
Az is sad he doesn't have a mate?
Lucien has been struggling with his unfulfilled bond since ACOMAF.
Az has a mysterious connection to who TT first belonged to?
Lucien has an unknown father that we're still waiting to be revealed since ACOWAR and got our first hints of in ACOMAF when he broke the shackles the king had on him to get to Elain.
Az likes music?
We found out that Lucien camped often, can fish with his bare hands, used to read for pleasure but hasn't been able to do many of those things in a long time.
Gwyn needs to take the next steps to leaving the library for good and exploring her powers?
Elain has been waiting for her story to be told which includes all that and more for much longer and Elain is underestimated by so many which to me, means her book is long overdue. You can only keep a character misunderstood for so long and I'd say that after SF addressed that multiple times, it's time for her to shine.
Az and Nesta both thought negatively of Elain and what she was capable of handling in SF with Amren and Rhys pointing out that maybe they've all been wrong and that she is capable of getting her hands dirty. Wouldn't the book following that realization be the most logical one for showing us exactly what that means?
SJM has spoken of Elain and Az throughout various interviews through the years, even after being signed on for the spin-offs but you know who she's gone quiet on?
Lucien.
If SJM and Bloomsburg have truly wanted the reveal of the next book to be a surprise then wouldn't Lucien being one of the two POVs be the thing that was the most surprising of all?
E/riels believe Elain's book is next.
Gwynriels believe it's Az.
But very little is said about Lucien.
Could it mean he's the farthest thing from her mind? Maybe.
But it could just as realistically mean she's finally gearing up to gush about one of her favorite characters as she did when Rhys was revealed as Feyre's endgame love interest.
#elucien#pro elucien#elain archeron#lucien vanserra#pro lucien vanserra#elain x lucien#lucien and elain#pro elain archeron#lucien vanserra supremacy
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Hello hello! If it’s all right with you, I would like to vent for a moment: Back in the day, I used to be really into BBC Sherlock. I know it was bad, but it was “Be Gay (solve) Crimes” and I couldn’t resit. One of my favorite parts of the fandom was reading fan metas. I enjoyed reading your ridiculously long meta! I am not very clever and I enjoy reading people noticing things that I can’t. It’s fun watching people passionately pick up clues and put them together.
I don’t think I’m the only one getting superwholock flashbacks lately. Sherlock also tried an unreliable narrator in S4 and it was an absolute shit show. People thought thought the finale was fake, it was so bad. TBH, the entire show was a dumpster fire that thought it was more clever than it was. Moffat was a good writer for single episodes for DW, but a garbage show runner. And they called us crazy for picking up what they were putting down.
But Good Omens gives me a spark of hope. It is unashamedly queer, fun, drinks its respecting women juice, and, unlike moffatiss, I think Neil and the crew may actually be clever enough to pull something big off. I adore the Discworld series and Sir Terry, and I have faith Neil will to do right by him.
Good Omens is restoring my faith in nerdy queer fiction and reminding me why I love fandom so much. Please keep up the crackhead theories. I love them 💕
Thank you, that's very kind!
(Ended up writing a very long reply about the response to my essay and also about queerness in media. Idk why i am writing such long posts these days SORRY LOL. Anyway I'm putting it all beneath the cut so I can tag it without clogging people's dash or the tag pages)
It does make me sigh a little when I see people scornfully comparing my long essay to The Johnlock Conspiracy or saying that they're having Sherlock flashbacks, because the both the contexts of the shows and the methodology of the theorizing are VERY different. To my mind, a more direct comparison of methodology would be the Gravity Falls fandom's "Stan Has A Secret Twin" theory. Writers and showrunners DO like being sneaky and clever from time to time, and many of them are much better at it than Moffat is.
But whether or not my theory is right or not is... kind of irrelevant to me? I wasn't out to force anyone to agree with me, AND writing it was a really fun way to spend a weekend, AND I'm proud of the work I did and the story I told, AND it felt good to have a satisfying workout at the Brain Gym. So even if I'm proven utterly and completely wrong, I won't feel like I wasted my time. :)
Good Omens is a great show, and I am SO HAPPY to see it (and other shows!) embracing queerness, sharing the fans' enthusiasm for the story, and honoring and respecting the fans' love rather than punishing them for it. As more and more time goes on, I think we're going to see more and more shows like that, because some of the people who grew up reading tumblr discourse are going to be showrunners themselves one day, and they'll have learned serious lessons about what it feels like when the audience is met with love rather than disgust and disdain. In fact, we're ALREADY seeing more shows like that than we had 10 years ago! There is so much canonical queerness on-screen these days that the me of 10-15 years ago is ASTONISHED and feels wealthy beyond counting. Of course, there is so much further to go, but man... when i was a kid, we had to walk uphill in the snow both ways just to see two dudes making sustained emotional eye contact, and we were grateful for it. (Jokes but also.... kind of real tho)
We've seen the exact same thing happen in scifi/fantasy publishing in the last seven or eight years, too! (Went off on a long tangent about Queerness In Media from an insider perspective, continuing below a cut so I don't clutter everyone's dash)
Even as recently as 2013--ten years ago--you might not have even been able to get your book published if it was openly gay. Hell, you might not have been able to get an agent to represent it, even. It would have been labeled "unmarketable" and passed over; if it DID get published, the queerness would have been camouflaged and downplayed and hidden in the marketing as much as possible--you wouldn't have known by looking at the cover that it was queer, you wouldn't have been able to tell by reading the back cover that it was queer. In literally 2016, seven years ago, a few months before I got my first book deal, I remember having a conversation with a friend and being very very worried that if I wrote books as queer as I wanted them to be, I would be "pigeonholed" as "ONLY writing Gay Books", that I would be passed over for any of the publisher's marketing budget and publicity efforts, that I would be sidelined and ignored... In 2016, I thought I was facing a choice of writing stories with more "mainstream appeal" OR writing the books I wanted to write and potentially undermining the rest of my career.
That didn't happen, thankfully, because in the next couple years there was this incredible explosion of queer scifi/fantasy. You see, ten to fifteen years ago, a truly stunning percentage of my colleagues -- writers, editors, publicists -- were writing and reading fanfic, and they carried their tastes and story-hungers with them as they grew up and got Real Adult Jobs at publishing companies. And suddenly, as if out of nowhere, a lot of us came of age all at once and there was this absolutely enormous wave of queer SFF that in my opinion has brought us into a new golden age of the genre: The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir, The Chorus of Dragons series by Jenn Lyons, She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker Chan, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, The Tensorate series by Neon Yang, Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders, the Birdverse books by RB Lemberg, The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickenson, The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri, Reforged by Seth Haddon, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson, Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell, The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin -- and these only the ones I could remember off the top of my head in 30 seconds, and I have a flavor of ADHD that makes my brain go blank when people ask me to think of specific examples of things! It is harder for me to think of a SFF book published in the last 7 years that ISN'T queer.
And then almost exactly a year ago, my book A Taste of Gold and Iron came out with THIS COVER:
Which. Is not so much a step forward in openly queer SFF as it is a fucking gauntlet thrown down in challenge. I cannot impress upon you strongly enough how much I would not have gotten this cover 10 years ago, and that's if the book was even accepted for publication in the first place. This cover SCREAMS gay fantasy romance. There is no attempt to hide it or camouflage it. It is advertising exactly what it is, right up front.
I got the absolute privilege and honor of having this cover--and I do consider it an incredible honor--because of the work that all my colleagues put in with their own work. Each queer book that got published wedged the door a little wider for the next one, and then a little wider still for the next one, until finally someone could get their foot in the door and squeeze across the threshold, which opened it a little wider again. So when I look at this image, I don't just see a beautiful cover that I am delighted to have on my books--I see an entire history of slow, steady progress by so many incredible writers who risked damaging their careers just to drag us to a point where a book as gay as this one could get a cover as gay as that one and STILL get the full and enthusiastic support of both the publisher and the audience. And the most incredible honor and the most humbling privilege out of all of this is the fact that the success of this book meant that the door was wedged open another little bit, that I got to contribute in this small way to the efforts of everyone who came before me, so that ones who come after us will find the door flung wide -- or that there's no door left at all to block the way, because we've collectively torn it down.
So yes, @eyona, I think that having your faith restored little by little is a very good thing, and I am delighted that Good Omens is doing that for all of us. And what's even better is that even if Good Omens doesn't play out exactly how we want it to, that's... kind of okay? Because there is always the next one, and at the very very least, Good Omens is wedging the door open further so that the next one can have an easier time of it. We don't have to walk uphill in the snow both ways just to get a moment of emotionally charged eye contact anymore. We don't have to starve anymore, not like we used to back in the bad old days. And that alone is a wonderful thing. :D
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I agree with everything in your post about Megumi, I really wish Gege would remember to show more about the characters and what they're feeling. I don't even expect much because something shifted in his storytelling and he's been focusing on fights (and that weird love storyline because why do we have more insight on secondary characters rather than the main characters?) but a page here and there would go a long way. As a Megumi fan the fandom has been a blessing with everyone sharing their speculations or headcanons so it does hurt a lot but for anyone just reading the manga that doesn't really pick up the characterization crumbs Gege drops once every blue moon I really do wonder how much they empathize with the characters...
That Shibuya Yuuji scene still haunts me so we know he can write good emotional and impactful scenes ;;
You can definitely tell that Gege wants to wrap things up, but I think overall, there isn't really an overly big focus on fights compared to how earlier in the story or that we're lacking character moments. Shibuya was all fights and it makes sense that the Culling Game and final fight in Shinjuku would be like that too. We still always get a break though to not make things too monotonous. Like the Perfect Preparation arc, the beginning and end of different colonies, Kenjaku's whole plan with the international military and setting free of curses, Hana's & Angel's introduction and then the meetings to discuss the Culling Game before Megumi got possessed. It can get very exhausting on a weekly basis (with additional breaks), I definitely feel it with Sukuna's fight in Shinjuku at the moment, but looking back on it, Gege always makes sure to include a couple of chapters for characters to discuss plans, bring in more world building, reflect on what happened or just give backstory etc. Even with the final fight in Shinjuku we have Kenjaku vs Takaba as a break between two major confrontations. I guess you could call their meeting and comedy show a fight but only in a very abstract sense. It is a much needed break from the pretty formulaic fight Sukuna has going on, where he's essentially just standing around and waiting for people to jump him.
Similar with character moments. Megumi and Tsumiki definitely got the short end here. We saw Megumi kill for the first time and worry a bit about Tsumiki, but after the fight against Reggie, he didn't really get much focus or development and then he just became a sad damsel in distress for Yuuji to save. I'm sure we will find out more about his changed mental state in the following chapters, but there was very much a lack of groundwork beforehand besides "what Sukuna does makes him sad/suicidal". I mean, I would've guessed that anyway.
I don't think that's a general problem though, which makes Megumi's situation and Tsumiki's relegation to being just a cardboard cutout for Megumi to project his issues onto with no depth to her own character all the more frustrating. For example, the Culling Game was what made me care about Noritoshi and even put him in my top 10 faves. He was pretty forgettable for me beforehand. Maki also had a major focus on her with her own arc and character development both in Perfect Preparation and the Sakurajima colony. The Baka Survivor mini-arc did massive improvement for Takaba and Kenjaku's characters (killing Kenjaku was a ludicrous decision, but that's it's own issue, they definitely got some much needed character development). Same for Kashimo for example and by extension Sukuna. We learned more about Sukuna's philosophy and how hollow it really is, plus he has shown the first signs of reflection about his world view. Megumi's possession has kickstarted a big change in Yuuji's character too. He's become much more forward and self-sufficient, now even being the one to formulate and lead the plans to save Megumi. His first fight against Sukuna was also a big character moment (still kind of missing that energy in the current fight).
So I think generally we don't really have a problem with not knowing what certain characters, even main characters, are feeling or them not having enough focus. The only ones where I noticed this is Megumi and Gojo. With Gojo, Gege seems to have switched to Basic Shonen Battle Autopilot and giving us essentially no character focus in Gojo vs Sukuna besides Gojo's death scene. There was barely any focus on Gojo and his changed mindset (or not, not even that we can say with certainty due to how he was written) before or after his big fight. I assume it had to do with Gege not knowing what to do with him and just somehow wanting him out of the way, but I don't know what's up with Megumi.
I think the characterization crumbs we did get for Megumi aren't that hard to pick up on, but they're just that: crumbs. When they don't have to be. The glimpses we see of him do look very depressing and you can feel for his situation, but it requires a lot of heavy lifting done on the side of the reader, when you could've just shone his reaction during the Yorozu fight and things would look less like a one-dimensional "Princess locked in ivory tower waiting for rescue" type of situation. Megumi's predicament has given Yuuji a lot of development and I really like that, it's honestly what I care about most, how this affects Yuuji, but especially with the big moment we just got the lack of preparation for that from Megumi's side becomes pretty obvious.
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I mean, a lot of people don't like christianity for a multitude of reasons, such as homophobia, transphobia, & religious trauma
Here it is. We're back to 'it's ok to harrass you because you totally deserve it'.
Homophobia - believing God designed marriage (and sex) in a specific way between a man and a woman and refusing to engage in or support any deviation from that is not hate, it is a religious law. We do not deny you your right to sin, we simply will not do it ourselves or claim it is good.
Transphobia - believing God created us male and female with intention and that attempting to change that which He has made is both futile and harmful is not hate. We do not deny your right to view yourself as the opposite sex or anything else, we simply do not do it ourselves or claim it is good.
Religious trauma - do not place your individual experience over an entire group or else that group has permission to do the same to you. Trauma of any kind is terrible and painful and should be dealt with in healthy ways. It is true that some people who have been abused or otherwise traumatized by members of the church often paint Christianity as a whole in the same light. While I don't like using logic arguments to fight things that are mostly emotionally or psychologically driven, in the end the truth is; 1) The actions of one do not define the whole. 2) If a Christian abused, hurt, manipulated, lied to or otherwise sinned towards the sufferer, then why would directing anger towards Christians who actively avoid those sins be productive? And 3) If you need to judge someone based on your own past experiences with people the person doesn't even know, then you actually have NO good reason to hate them at all and you're either not thinking straight (so nothing you do in your anger is justified) or you're a hateful little hypocrite!
If you want to remove hateful people from your fandom spaces, you should! Block the people who say horrible things to you! If a Christian happens to bully you about the things you can't agree on go ahead and remove them from the situation by blocking and take the necessary precautions to remove the toxicity, but don't pretend this is the situation I'm talking about when I mention the amount of bullying, harassment, ostracization and hate that Christians get in these communities when they never did anything wrong.
Stop victim blaming and telling us that we deserve all the undue hatred we get.
(I'm being serious, a lot of Christians in fandom spaces who receive this level of harrassment happen to be kids. I've seen minors posting pages of depressive monologs after they received death threats because they offhand mentioned that they didn't approve of a gay ship. Not to mention the things I saw as a kid online just trying to make friends. So stop pretending to be the only one who's ever been bullied by someone who believes differently than you. People are getting hurt.)
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Lego Monkie Kid MK theory
Spoilers for season 4 and the season 4 special under the cut!
So we can all agree that MK is a Celestial Primate, right? We're all on the same page about that? Okay, good. Now that we've established that, let's get into the interesting question there.
Which one is he?
From what I've seen, most people in the fandom seem to agree that he's a new celestial primate, someone who's sort of a class of his own. But this is Lego Monkie Kid, and we all know how much this show absolutely ADORES reusing characters and concepts from the original Journey to the West at pretty much every opportunity.
I'm going to be using this article I found for most of this, but it's pretty much all from the book: https://journeytothewestresearch.com/2022/02/20/a-quick-study-of-the-four-celestial-monkeys-from-journey-to-the-west/
In Journey to the West, there are four celestial primates, two of whom are prominent characters in the narrative and two of whom are presumed dead before we get the chance to meet them.
Sun Wukong is the "Stone Monkey of Numinous Wisdom" (or Numinous Luminosity, depending on which translator you ask), who "knows transformations, Recognizes the seasons, Discerns the advantages of earth, And is able to alter the course of planets and stars." Macaque is... well... "The Six-Eared Macaque," who "has a sensitive ear, Discernment of fundamental principles, Knowledge of past and future, And comprehension of all things." We already know who these two are, so I'm not gonna get more into them.
The other two Celestial Primates are characters we've never met before, in the book OR the show. The Connected Arms Gibbon, who can "Seize the sun and the moon, Shorten a thousand mountains, Distinguish the auspicious from the inauspicious, And manipulate planets and stars," and the Red-Buttocked Horse Monkey, who has "knowledge of yin and yang, Understands human affairs, Is adept in its daily life And able to avoid death and lengthen its life." MK is probably a reincarnation of one of these two (if not some sort of bizarre combination of both?)
There's a case to be made for either of these roles. I don't think he's the Gibbon though, since MK's monkey form clearly has a tail (three of them, even, in his war form!) and Gibbons, as great apes, don't tend to have those. It'd be cool to meet the Connected Arms Gibbon, though!
Instead, I would like to make the case for MK being the Red-Buttocked Horse Monkey. There's a lot of debate over what species of monkey that's even meant to represent, so MK would be free to be a sort of... amalgamation monkey. The IDEA of a monkey, instead of any specific species, like Sun Wukong himself seems to be. (Plus, he usually wears red pants, so that covers the "red-buttocked" part of the character description lol)
Not to mention, that "understands human affairs" bit REALLY fits, since he's spent his whole entire LIFE living as a human! Not to mention, one of the very FIRST powers MK struggled with was invulnerability, something that was so powerful it had to be taken away from him (and something even Sun Wukong himself doesn't appear to fully have - he's immortal times a kajillion, but that doesn't mean he can't get beat up!) In a genre that has a lot of "invulnerable protagonist" as a basic element of the storytelling, that's a pretty clever way to hammer home that "avoids death" is an actual POWER of his pretty immediately
Plus, who's MK's BFF FOREVER? That's right, Mei the Dragon Horse girl. Who better to be the Horse Monkey's bestie?
But I wanna know what you guys think! Do you think MK is the Red-Buttocked Horse Monkey? The Connected Arms Gibbon? Or some completely new Celestial Monkey the showrunners made up specifically for the protagonist of their show? LMK!
#lego monkie kid#lego monkie kid spoilers#lego monkie kid season 4 spoilers#lego monkie kid season 4#lego monkie kid season 4 special#lego monkie kid season 4 special spoilers#celestial primates#lmk mk#long post#fan theory#meta#looney mooney rants
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Adrift Musings
Of course, the message for this episode has been coloured by too many shitty Gwen bash takes, but I'm still puzzled over what (or if) the writers were trying to say about Gwen in this episode.
Gwen bashers loved this ep because Gwen got so much shit thrown at her from different people.
They love that each person is complaining at for her conflicting stuff and she's in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation doesn't really matter. That she's got Andy telling her she's being too cold and Jack hinting that she's too emotional to deal with Stockholm (according to fandom interpretation) and Rhys saying he hates her because he thinks she's forgetting what matters like family but when she tries to respect a victim's family member's wishes by giving the family member what she asked for she turned around and changed her mind and treated this as Gwen's fault for some reason.
Ok that reason is grief and anger and the desire for someone to blame and while that's human and instantly forgivable, it's not just. In fact, if anything, it's terribly unjust. Out of everyone involved, Gwen was the person putting Nikki and Jonah's wishes first.
The message I really got from Adrift was that there are some problems that cannot be fixed, some situations which has no solution. But there's still this attitude that Gwen is somehow to blame for what's happened, although that may be the Gwen bashing view seeping in.
Of course, Gwen bashers will say Gwen should have learned to follow orders (while also not letting Andy down/forgetting the importance of normal people/not being "too good" to help out with Andy's case). I can't agree with this. Jack's orders went against every sound moral judgement. To blindly follow orders is rarely a lesson you want to encourage in anyone.
Because take away the sci-fi stuff, what you get is a missing son with a degenerative disease. And that's awful, for him, for his mother. But it's basic decency to tell a person that their loved one (who has been asking for them) is unwell and needs their support.
Except Gwen didn't know about Jonah's screams. She knew he had been aged and traumatised and he wanted his mum and his mum wanted him, and using that information, she made the best possible decision. A decision she made with her boss's go ahead.
You know who did fuck up? Who did have an obvious decision to make and somehow ended up not making it? Jack. Even if you agree or understand with his earlier decision to keep the patients secret, once he knew that the mother of a patient was about to be informed, he obviously should have given Gwen a full briefing, so that Nikki could be forewarned. There's literally no good reason for him to not to come forward with that.
The only possible explanation (that doesn't make Jack look like a dick) is that he thought Gwen knew. And even there, as Gwen's superior, anyone who works with vulnerable people knows that it's basic safeguarding to make sure that everyone's on the same page and all the necessary facts have been gone over to avoid situations such as these. Although here we're getting to a point of competency and that's fine, everyone on the show has an oopsie now and then, Gwen included. But in Adrift, the oopsie wasn't Gwen's. It was Jack's.
TLDR: Gwen was in a no win situation in Adrift, everyone was kind of mean to her, she was trying her best with what she knew, Jack should have told her about the screaming.
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joined the 911 fandom few months back and…has it always been this annoying or did something shift recently. someone on twt said maybe mehta coming back doesnt have anything to do w buddie at all and now they are getting cooked for “raining on people’s parade and being a negative nancy for no reason” …. this whole cycle of setting expectations and bullying people for not having the same enthusiasm then getting annoyed that the tv show isnt delivering the same expectation you set is just so annoying??? glad that your blog exists and you exist because this fandom is in heavy NEED of rational minded people 😭🫶🏽
I've been actively involved in fandom since the start of s4 (was a lurker in s3) and from my perspective...things get worse as the seasons continue! In s4, there was *some* hope for canon!Buddie, but Ana came back into the picture and TayKay soon followed so expectations were lowered (because we didn't know how long they'd stick around). Thennn...the shooting happened. Plus the change in guardianship. People were on board again AND we were introduced to even more new fans who couldn't believe "the gay firefighters" weren't together yet. Season five? Eddie breaks up with Ana, Buck breaks up with TayKay..."If Buddie not canon then why did they break up with their girlfriends?" And now season six is about how "all signs point to canon Buddie" no matter what happens. (ie They were convinced Eddie would be a big part of Buck in the coma to hint at feelings and when he wasn't they changed their theories to "explain" why his absence was a good thing; same with the sperm donor arc - all that non-communication was going to pay off once Eddie confronted Buck about a decision he didn't think through and now the lack of 6A content is going unmentioned because Oliver has (twice) emphasized that there's nothing for Buck to come to grips with, he knew what he was doing when he said yes.)
I think the fandom just really, really wants to be right about this one thing for two reasons:
1. It would be a game-changer. How many fans of a queer ship can say that they got the endgame they wanted? Furthermore, how many can say their canon ship started out with two straight characters who fell in love over time because a show thought that made the better story? (Not the SPN fandom, that's for sure. They're some of the biggest naysayers you'll find around here because "I've been where you are." Mind you, most us are old af and remember a time when queer ships stayed in fandom spaces because TV shows wouldn't dare take the risk of alienating audiences.)
2. Having Buddie go canon is an opportunity to get back at any and everyone who doesn't believe it'll happen; the ultimate "I told you so!" victory lap.
I do agree with the fandom when it comes to keeping opinions out of other people's inboxes unless they're open to reading it (obviously me :P), but expressing an opinion on your own page (whether that be twitter or tumblr) is what having a social media account in a fandom is for. You don't have to agree with the person. You don't even have to read it. But you can't stop them from feeling how they feel. And quite frankly, while having hope is nice to see (I do, too!), some people could use a reality check. We're not in the writers' room. We don't know what the writing staff is really thinking when they come up with stuff. Even when Kristen makes comments and Oliver gives his perspective, the fandom calls them "liars" or twists their words to fit a narrative that makes for (what they think is) a better outcome.
They'll also advise people not to read the articles, but...nobody actually lies in those because they don't give away all that much information, and the information they do give is to tell fandom when things aren't about Buddie, lmao. Kristen said the coma arc was about Bobby and Chim and there fandom was hyping up Eddie's importance only to realize she meant what she said. Oliver says Eddie going after Buck in 6x10 isn't hinting at anything and they're envisioning feelings realizations at Buck's bedside, which never came. They're TELLING fandom to not get its hopes up right now and the speculation has only gone deeper into "this can't be about anything other than Buddie" because everyone is too invested to turn back now.
As for Captain Mehta - I have my own theories about this.
Could his presence bring about a mention of the shooting? Yep. Could his presence inspire another conversation? Yep.
But *why* him and *why* he finally has a first name?
1. Is everyone at that table supposed to call him Captain Mehta or just Mehta? Nobody knows him on a personal level?
2. Is it possible that throwing some third no-name/relatively unknown firefighter into the scene (along with Capt. Williams and possibly Julie) does nothing to gauge the audience's interest? At least the audience will remember Mehta and there's a connection between him and both halves of Buddie whereas we've seen Julie in limited quantities (and not even as one of their friends off the job) and Miranda Williams was last seen in early s4.
I'm not saying him being back can't be the precursor to important things, but people also thought the Buckleys were coming back after two years so their kids could yell at them some more and they would decline to be with their son in the hospital (why else would they have returned right then, duh!) and we all saw how that turned out.
This fandom loves to say "Bestie, you're watching a FOX procedural" on the ~discourse~ days while routinely ignoring the fact that we're watching a FOX procedural. Sometimes what you see really is what you get when the show runners are (currently) pandering to an audience that includes everyone but us.
#they asked and i answered. you don't need to agree with me.#anonymous#tina speaks#tv: 911#tv: 9-1-1#eddie diaz#evan buckley#buddie
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Hi quick-catton!! First of all I love your page and I love your personality💕💕💕 I also LOVE Saturn and Felix and Oliver just-😫😫😫 I love it every time you post, it makes my day!! Right now I just really need your help. Today I had to go on another account just to send something to my ask box because since I started my account last year, I’ve gotten nothing and it really hurts.
I love how open and freaky you are in your posts and I’m honestly the same way with Saltburn and an anime fandom that I’ve shaped my blog around. I used to be a little calm and collected but you’re inspiring to just let go and let my freak flag fly but the problem is, with my fandom, I don’t think people are going to be very inviting. Like literally the only thing I wanna do right now is babygirl code my favorite anime character sooo badly but I’m afraid I’ll lose all my followers and when I try to I get no engagement.
Like I wrote three freaking paragraphs about how good he’d look with a navel piercing! That was this morning and I got nothing all day but four likes. No reblogs, no comments, I literally had to make another account and send myself some praise for that post just so I could post it to show people that at least someone else agrees with me.
And I know I should give it time but that’s the problem. Some of my other posts like that don’t grow. They just get five likes and that’s it and it sucks because all I wanna do is engage with people that want to see this boy in lingerie or a skirt or goddamn pregnant (told you I was a freak)
I just don’t know what to do. How do you deal that? I’m honestly this close to deleting my account coz it seems like I’m posting to a blank wall and it’s so embarrassing coz everyone can see it. Sorry this is so long! Thank you for quickcatton 💕💕
WAH ANON ur so sweet omg, thank you?? <33 honestly i feel like i don't have good advice because i only made a tumblr for the first time EVER at the beginning of january!!! i am 23 and had never set foot on this app, but i saw that most of the saltburn fandom was here, so i gave it a shot and i've just been learning as i go.
i think that's half of my 'luck' with having a good experience on this app, is that because this fandom is so fresh, it's super active, but it's also a very small fandom (relative to some others) so we're all kinda like a hivemind here LOL, and because of the source material of the movie itself being weird/freaky/psychosexual, we all know that anything goes and the more freaky the brainrot, the better! i'm in other fandoms where if i said half of the shit i say here, i'd be ostracized, so it's really a case by case basis unfortunately </3
ik i yap a lot here but i also hold back sooo much because even tho ik we're all weirdos here, i still get nervous about putting out my writing or not having people vibe with an idea– you're not alone in that, i promise. it helps forming friendships in your fandoms so you know that there'll always be people who you can get hype over ideas with, but i know that's easier said than done sometimes <3
i don't have advice on engagement because i honestly don't look at that stuff (which i know is so annoying to say lol but it's true); i made this account purely to have a place to dump brainrot/art etc and view other people's saltburn content and i didn't care about engagement, i just got lucky to meet some cool people and make close friends through it.
i think if people can tell you're having fun through your posts, they'll vibe with you! it does take time with the good ol' algorithm, i'm sure, but as long as your page brings YOU joy, that's what matters most. people don't have to agree with your takes, life is too short to be vanilla and water urself down for others :^) making fandom friends and gaining interactions will come along with being yourself, but if posting here and running the account feels more stressful to you than it is fun, it's okay to step away too!
if you're on ao3 and sites like that, leaving comments on your fave works can be a great way to get conversations going as well. i met my closest friend on here bc she stumbled across my fic on ao3 and then sent me a message; it was purely up to chance, but branching out and being brave starting conversations with your fave accounts can be a great way to feel more included in the fandoms you're in and maybe you'll meet cool people along the way!! <33
#if anyone else has other advice feel free to reply with it <33#because i'm not good at this stuff LOL#i literally just open this app say shit and then go back to yapping in a google doc#also this made me realize idk if i've ever put my name anywhere on this account#so i just added it to my display/pinned hi i'm sam#quick-catton asks
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What do you think about the tv tropes page on the Owl House What do you agree or disagree with?
I get a bit of a laugh out of asks like these. Not because they're dumb or not understandable but because they're kind of unreasonable. Like any ask that is just bluntly "How do I make a good character" will get a thousand yard stare at me because people likely have done multiple part series on how to make a good character due to the nuance and complexities of character building, especially since different contexts shift how you would even have to start building a character.
This to me kind of hits the same niche. If we're just going by the front page of it, that's semi-reasonable as all it is is a pitch for the show more than even a synopsis. The only one that stood out to me looking at it was saying Luz is a part of the macabre interests trope which... Yeah, that's a rough subject because of how honestly main stream Luz is. There's a reason ANY nerd can fit into her. Otherwise, we run into the real issue:
For ever ten tropes, of the hundreds if not thousands the show uses because people have tropes for EVERYTHING at this point and the show uses PLENTY, I maybe would have even one to talk about. Even at that rate though, a blog covering the entirety of the tropes in TOH (and I don't even use TvTropes so I actually don't know how to do the research for this) would be... long. To put it mildly. And admittedly more mean spirited than I'd want because I feel like it'd be more about dunking on the fans than the show itself.
The blog I made earlier today wasn't meant to be meanspirited, just a fun joke at the fact that the fandom really does tend to overlook a lot of elements, especially in S1, so even when someone is trying to be comprehensive, large swathes get missed. I think a lot of TOH analysis suffers from this (and I sure as hell won't say I'm perfect), in part because a lot of it tries to be short. And that's fine because we're all just trying to talk about a show we like.
I do NOT want to read every dedicated trope page for TOH though because that doesn't sound fun in any way, let alone arguing with them. I do try to not just be an outrage merchant after all.
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I have a public Discord for any and all who want to join!
I also have an Amazon page for all of my original works in various forms of character focused romances from cute, teenage romance to erotica series of my past.
I have an Ao3 for my fanfiction projects as well if that catches your fancy instead.
If you want to hang out with me, I stream from time to time and love to chat with chat.
A Twitter you can follow too
And a Kofi if you like what I do and want to help out with the fact that disability doesn’t pay much.
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I almost sent you this ask a few days ago, but after seeing your latest anon, I'm definitely going to send it now: an actual thank you for outlining how Fang & Vanille were written as sisters. As someone that's been in this fandom for as long as the game has been out, I find myself both leery and weary of everyone that claims that F*nille is "basically canon," and the implication (or the explicit accusation, in your last anon's case) therein that everyone who doesn't agree has failed some arbitrary morality check.
This is the only qualm I have with F*nille shippers - a lot of them are pretty chill, but I sure wish the rest of them would stop spreading fanon interpretations like wildfire and then harassing people that don't conform!
Thanks for this! I appreciate it, a lot actually. ^^ It's nice to get one that is on the same page.
I'm right there with you—stuff like that has been around for a while, though in the early days more people were outspoken in how they felt they weren't romantic, even still after LR. I've met some good shippers as well, but in my experience, they are eclipsed by the ones that share the same commentary as the last anon.
All in all, it's "typical fandom" as some say, but I'll never condone it. It just isn't necessary. If what you ship or interpret isn't the truth or isn't based on the tangible evidence, it's fine. Like, it's fine. It's not about how people see things between Fang and Vanille as romantic, whether it's about personal experiences or feelings about their actions, but rather, it's about realizing how limiting those two things can be on the ability to understand and accept when it's something else. There has to be a settle point of what we're actually dealing with. And we can just, talk about it in a real discussion.
Although media can, at times, make it difficult to tell what's what (usually on purpose artistically), these points exist and can still be agreed upon—of what can be considered truth, personal interpretation, open-ended, whatever is the arguable stuff of "this is supported/not supported", etc. When it comes to media, I don't think people realize how easy it is for these lines to blur, especially when there's motivation to do the blurring ourselves—we make it hard, when it can already be hard enough to figure stuff out. Or worse, we make it hard when it's EASY to figure stuff out. So, when the media gives you what you need to understand it, I don't think that should be taken for granted or made irrelevant just because of personal desire to make it so. And sure, there are points outside of just personal that can be made—but recognition of the limitations of said points should still be recognized when discussing possibilities, and THEN weighing the possibility against direct information that supports it. Context and execution still matters.
Fang and Vanille just haven't been treated this way. They haven't been REALLY talked about.
FFXIII fandom has had years to do it, but the forefront of the characters isn't treated this way. There are things said, but never explained completely or logically, such as the points I made in my original post. Those things are regurgitated over and over, but never a real discussion of the actual context and logic surrounding them. "Fang and Vanille slept in the same bed"—you have people say this and spread it around, but not at all, formulate a real discussion about it. But, misinformation and misconceptions spread VERY easily in fandom, like no joke, and they can be treated as truth even though it factually or even logically is not quite right. Certain interpretations take the forefront, even if they're not completely in regard to it's origin. Every fandom probably has stuff like that, I know personally of points in the Kingdom Hearts and Dragon Ball Z fandoms.
Just keep it simple—if what has been described for them allows understanding of everything between them, why SHOULD it be wrong or less viable than something that, well, has not been described? If no conflict exists, why create it? Knowing this shouldn't be hard, it's just when we reach the road blocks based on limitations of knowledge, experience, just personal motivation, etc.
And, if you think there IS a conflict based either on the material itself or your own experience, okay let's actually talk about it. Sure, understanding can still meet it's road block from the above, but even a "agree to disagree" is still better than whatever that anon was. At least the right information is in the atmosphere, where THEN discussions of perspective and understanding can be had.
It just hasn't happened enough, if at all.
In general, the FF fandom suffers with these things a lot from my observance, it definitely isn't just for Fang and Vanille or XIII. It really shouldn't be such a fight to say "Fang and Vanille are like sisters" because all avenues of information and logic are available for this to be understood. It just sucks because, yeah, while I definitely don't want people to feel like they CAN'T ship them, at the same time, I wish the full information and understanding of the characters was at the forefront. Especially when it's actually something that can be appreciated and enjoyed too, and to a lot of people, platonic relationships are something that need to be recognized more often. Not in the casual "oh they're sisters, of course they love each other" way, but rather in what otherwise is a REAL depth that matches, if not, is even sometimes greater than some romantic depictions. And actually have a genuine appreciation of that depth, and not see it as "less" because it's not romantic.
I feel like we could get there for Fang and Vanille, but it just depends on how many more years will there be people willing to share and discuss what pertains to them.
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(This is another post but they're both versatile about topping and bottoming in my brain, okay? Okay. But you do you.)
oh lol no i completely agree with you, that's why i put "bottom" in quotes. i just mean, a lot of people in fandom have very old fashioned views about same sex relationships, and one of the most common is that gay couples are just remakes of straight ones - with a "man" (top) and a "woman (bottom) - and therefore q, being the skinny one, is the woman which means he's the bottom, which means he must be short too. it's like an ourosborus of homophobic stereotypes. and so we end up with 4876847684 fics where q is now tiny just because people want to write him getting railed by a great big hulking manly bond.
We're definitely on the same page. Sorry, my little "you do you" line was aimed at the more general "you" 😊
So, obviously Bottom!Q and Top!Bond isn't a homophobic take just because it exists (I know that's not at all what you're saying anon, but I wanted to clarify in case there are any anons ready to jump into my inbox and accuse me of having that opinion). The specific type of writing and characterisation that gets padded around Bottom!Q and Top!Bond, though? It can absolutely be indicative of persistent stereotypes. Sometimes I don't think it's getting all that much better as time goes on, either. Even years after people stopped expliclty warning for M/M in their fics like it was something gross (RIP LJ and slash warnings and *lemon starts here* line breaks), I feel like reading through fandom slang often feels like a game of Wait is This a Joke, A Reclaimed Slur, or is it Actually Homophobia? Obviously it's also a problem IRL. People see a skinny gay man and immediately think "bottom" which is tragic.
I see evidence of it all the time in fic comments and tumblr tags where Q is described as either cute or adorable, and Bond is described as the hottest, most irresistible, most jacked man in the world. And it's not just Q's characterisation that suffers! If fic writers only see Bond and Q as those things it removes a lot of their agency as characters to act in really interesting and unexpected ways.
All this isn't to say people can't have their preferences, but as is the case in the wider world of dating and romance, preferences don't exist in a vacuum. When you see these assumptions over and over again, you start to see a pattern and it's clear what's driving the thinking behind it (which is, to be clear, centuries of cultural and social conditioning around gendered constructs and homophobia).
Anyway, I happen to think Q's really hot, and would occasionally be quite domineering if he was in the right frame of mind. He can be that way from the top or the bottom, IMO. And there's space for him getting railed too. But even that doesn't have to be written just one way. I often wish it was written with a lot more bantering/bickering.
There's a wider point to be made here about sex in fic often not feeling anything like sex in real life, which is messy and intimate and and (if it's good sex), starts with wanting to feel good, and not with implicit assumptions about who's doing what. Because we're all WAY more complex as individuals than media ever reflects us to be, and put two or more complex people in a room together to have sex? If you're doing it right, it's not going to feel like rote stereotyping. I sometimes wish both fic writers and romance writers had a better understanding of that.
Okay I feel the need to clarify if you've got this far and your opinions are different from mine and anon's, that's okay, we can all disagree. You can still want to see Q get railed, I promise.
Thanks for the ask, Anon! ❤️
#also i have 1000 thoughts on q's canon personality and traits#all of which i LOVE#but some of them go against the grain of queer-coded characters we're used to being exposed to#and i think that makes people uncomfortable#but being gay/bi/queer doesn't involve a fucking template#sometimes you like rugby and engineering and opera and weird little hairless cats and you have a terrible fashion sense#and you still want to suck dick baby!#ask box#unpopular opinions#ugh i've started Discourse haven't i?#00q
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Hey I'm the anon who asked about sad murdoc discourse and thanks for the answer! I can understand that yeah maybe to old fans murdoc changing a bit could be another example of gorillaz going more "PG" and they probably also rightly feel like their losing something else that was nostalgic to them(one dimensional evil murdoc) but while I agree with that I also agree with you that I'm here purely for murdoc and I'm one who enjoys redemptive/healing arcs across all media so this progression was great to see and sort of poetic for the character! As I said earlier too is that murdoc changed "a bit" in that while I see him slowly mellowing out in some fields with the other band members I still am of the belief that murdoc was always a chaotic neutral person just now with some chaotic good moments, not all that diffrent and I hope to see more healing and progression as that was just a small but needed start!(if gorillaz can remain a bit consistent with his character😓)
Yeah, no problem! We're pretty much on the same page re: Murdoc. I never saw him as completely "evil," even during P1 and P2. He's always seems like a complicated, sad little man, but I've also always gotten attached to morally questionable characters, so part of that is just me, and how I interpret things.
Sad Murdoc was such a refreshing change for me because of the points you brought up - redemptive/healing arcs are so satisfying with the right characters. For me, Murdoc is the right character. The descent of Gorillaz embracing capitalism complicated matters, and one could argue that Murdoc was "redeemed" for the wrong reasons.
However, when you place Murdoc's development in the context of the fandom community from 2017-2019, I find his " arc" (calling it that for brevity's sake) unintentionally meta and powerful. I think a lot of new fans don't know or forget how awful certain groups of fans were to Murdoc fans - not even shippers, this was toward anyone who liked Murdoc even a tiny bit. It was hard to have any sort of discussion about him, or share any kind of fanwork without someone reminding you that he was evil and that any nice or neutral thing you brought up about him had to have a disclaimer that none of that actually mattered because he was an irredeemable person who didn't deserve any happiness in his life, ever. So, fast forward to the end of 2019 with TLC video where we see a character who's not this one-dimensional villain receive acceptance in the most straightforward way possible and shatter all the past arguments that he's "evil and you're all just watching Gorillaz wrong." It was incredibly validating for a lot of fans. So, yeah, I understand the perspective of critical fans, but I’ll always be on the side of "Murdoc fans deserved this W."
#asks.#Anonymous#well certain murdoc fans at least#ik other murdoc fans wanted him to remain 'evil'#but yeah I don't agree with them#murdoc fans who are also critical fans are also valid
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Feeling just a wee bit torn re: attempting to heal the rift in the fandom. For, like, several reasons.
Not the least of which is the matter of theory vs. praxis. Everyone I have personally spoken to in this fandom has seemed to be on the same page. Racism is bad. Pedophilia is bad. Transphobia is bad. Etc.
But we're gonna have a damned hard time getting to the praxis bit if we can't even agree on how the stuff above actually manifests in a harmful way.
Not liking the casting for the new show doesn't automatically make you a racist. It simply doesn't. There are many non-malicious reasons for being hesitant to accept Jacob!Louis ranging from "I don't trust white showrunners to handle his story with the level of care it deserves" to "even from what we've seen of him in the Louis garb, he just looks like Some Guy™️ (I feel this way about Sam personally--I really think the only one ethereal looking enough to be a convincing vampire is Bailey tbh).
Shipping is not pedophilia. Can it squick you personally? Sure. I'd it well within your right to not want to engage in it? Also yes. There are ways to block things tagged for content you don't wish to see. But exploring power dynamics in fantasy is not the same thing as condoning real life abuse. Full stop. I've already reblogged a great break down debunking the notion that fiction negatively affects reality in any meaningful way and while the post is written in the aggressive tone of someone sick of having to have the same tired argument for the umpteenth time, it is worth a read.
And from what I've been able to gather, most of us are aware of and have blocked that one fuckhead TERF. Good on us for immediately agreeing on something and no, that's not sarcasm. Good job team.
And as far as praxis goes. Well. Again we're gonna have to reign it in and be realistic about what the "how" is going to look like.
Which is where I should probably address my own role in all this. Because I know as discussions continue, this post will make it onto the dash of someone I have long since blocked and they will immediately see it and think, "that's rich, coming from you".
And perhaps. We've all seen the callout post I made a while back. And it's hard for me not to continue to stand by everything I said. I still think that a lot of the white folks who were most vocally calling others (on this platform specifically) racist aren't great at allyship work. With the clarity of hindsight, I think that stems from being young, growing up under surveillance culture, and living in an era where slacktivism feels like the only thing available to them. The cause isn't malicious, even if the effects are.
Do I regret some of my phrasing and things I overlooked? Yeah. When going over the "listen to POC bit", I should have delved deeper into the fact that, quelle surprise, POC aren't a hive mind. You'll hear differing opinions. There's a lot of nuance there and you're going to have to cast your opinion net pretty wide, listen to all these different opinions, and extrapolate from there. Because having 1-2 black friends who agree with you means fuck all in a world where Candice Owens exists. People with opinions that are ultimately harmful to themselves exist in every group, sorry to break it to you. Allyship is hard because it requires building a very nuanced lens through which to view the world. It requires you to acknowledge the Candice Owneses of the world while recognizing the pain and fear that led them to having the opinions they do, as well as listening to and engaging in meaningful, educational discussions with people who hold opinions you view as ignorant. It's work. That's what makes it work. Screaming at someone will not change their mind. Trying to rationally 'debate' someone with illogical opinions will not work because they didn't use logic to form those opinions. And that's hard work! But it does work and it's worth it.
And I don't know that I drove all of that home in my original post.
Do I regret dunking so hard on SM at the end of that post? Yes and no. Working on yourself as a person is a continuous journey and while intellectually I know that the "bully the bullies" approach I took in high school (and that post) stems from growing up in a carceral society where punishment is in much higher a regard than harm reduction and education, I also won't lie to you and claim that deep down I don't sometimes feel like a good tongue lashing isn't earned on a 1:1 basis.
Which is another sidebar point, which is we should all be honest about where we may have individually dropped the ball here, and be honest with ourselves about why we did it to prevent such instances in the future.
At the end of the day, if I'm being 💯 honest, the only way in which I feel remorse for the end of that post is the constant wondering I've done since publishing it about how my vitriol may have impacted SM's friend group. Could they have otherwise seen him as being a disingenuous snake before having to ultimately oust him for treating his friends poorly? I may never know.
Yes, I have been told about that. Alexa, play Everybody Talks.
Anyway. Praxis.
Whatever we all decide moving forward, we all need to be on the same page if we're going to make this thing work. But I think before we get to that point, we're all gonna have to bury the hatchet, whatever that's gonna look like for those involved in whatever beef.
🤷♀️
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