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lesbiancarat · 2 years

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Hi 👋🏽 it’s new carat here again. I’m sorry if this is really annoying but thank you so so so much for su ha well written and comprehensive answer to my ask.

I’m super shy but the main issue I guess is understanding the whole Mingyu situation. I’m just so confused because on one hand I’ve seen people say the bullying and other allegations have been cleared up and it’s done and the painting he made was taken out of context.

But then I see a lot of people saying he’s problematic, a misogynist, he voted red and I’m just confused about it. I know he posted a picture that was ill timed but the people saying he’s a red supporter also defended another groups clothing colour. It’s overwhelming. Because I definitely believed a lot of the rhetoric about him a few weeks ago and took on a lot of what people said. He got really dog piled and I can’t find any objectivity because people rail him and then I see people getting defensive.

Another thing as a south Asian woman is the curry song but I know they won’t apologise for that because it’s not unacceptable in SK. So I am disappointed but I hope they just don’t do it again.

I thank you so much for all your help and explanations and I do agree that they seem to be far less problematic than people have told me.

i'm gonna put everything under a read more since this is a long ass post

i also ask that no one reblogs this post. it's just a lot of information that i'd feel more comfortable staying on my blog. thank you for your understanding!

So there's a couple issues going on here. For clarity I've separated this post into sections with bolded heading's. As I said, I've tried to make this as objective as possible in describing the actual events, but it's important to keep in mind that it's impossible to get rid of bias entirely. Where I shared my opinion I tried to make it clear that it was my own opinion.

Mingyu Bullying

This is by far the most complicated situation of the one's you mentioned, just because of the sheer amount of information (and misinformation) surrounding it, as well as the number of parties involved. So naturally this is also probably going to be the longest section in this post. I'm also going to link several things, including translations of forum posts and statements by Pledis. Reading these is essential to understanding and forming your own opinion on the situation. I'll reiterate some things in my narration, but I'll leave out some important details because I'm assuming you will read everything I link. Also, I'll go into more detail, but I'd just like to say upfront that he did get cleared of all charges.

It started with a forum post from a former classmate of Mingyu's from middle school (OP1). She claimed that Mingyu would sometimes say things like "what do you know" when she spoke and he and other boys would make sexual jokes around her that made her uncomfortable. For clarification, the sexual jokes were not directed toward her or about her, it was the equivalent of them making dick jokes amongst themselves, but she was around and those jokes made her uncomfortable. Here is a translation of this forum post, please read it for full context.

It's important to keep in mind what you actually just read in that forum post, and what the actual accusations were against him. It's also important to understand the misinformation that spread from it.

After the forum post popped up, pretty much all the major and trusted translators in the fandom who had heard about it decided to wait and see how things were going to play out a bit before translating anything, since at that time there was still a lot of uncertainty and confusion as to what was going on. Because of this, the first translation and news of this that hit the international fandom was from a minor (iirc she was somewhere between 14-16 years old) and it was majorly mistranslated.

The mistranslation, from my understanding, (I don't think I ever read it personally. I was in classes when this all came out and in the few hours before I caught wind of what was going on, people had already started to criticize the translation and spread better ones.) claimed that Mingyu had sexually harassed the poster, as opposed to making sexual jokes in her vicinity, and in turn some people interpreted that to mean that he had sexually assaulted her. The mistranslation was apparently so bad that people later questioned if the translator had intentionally mistranslated it, but I don't think it makes much of a difference whether it was intentional or not. In any case the girl got bullied off of Twitter later as far as I know.

As a side note, there may be an argument to be made that Mingyu's jokes could still count as sexual harassment even if they weren't directed toward or about OP1. However, when I say it was mistranslated as sexual harassment, I mean that people thought he was making sexual jokes about her/at her expense, when that wasn't what was claimed in the original post.

Even though, as I said, more accurate translations started being published in the hours after the initial mistranslation, word had already gotten out that Mingyu was accused of sexual harassment and/or assault and the news spread like wildfire even outside the fandom. In addition to the translation, there was also confusion because OP1's forum post about Mingyu was actually a follow up to another post they had made about their general experience being bullied (and iirc being sexually harassed) in middle school and the depression and anxiety they suffered because of it. iirc most of this actually happened at a different middle school, OP1 transferred to Mingyu's school because of the situations at their previous school, but I may be misremembering that. In any case that post had nothing to do with Mingyu, but people were using autotranslators to understand what was going on and ended up misinterpreting that post as also being about Mingyu.

In the following days, another post was made by a separate person (OP2), also claiming to be Mingyu's former classmate. In this post, they claim that Mingyu bullied and threw trash at a disabled classmate (some translations I had seen specifically said the classmate was autistic, others just said disabled. I'm sticking with disabled since I'm not sure and it's more general). It's worth noting that at this point, people were trusting that OP1 was actually Mingyu's classmate, since she had posted proofs that they attended the same school. On the other hand, people were more questioning of OP2's identity and there was speculation that the screenshots of messages they had used as proof were fake.

I want you to keep in mind this image of Mingyu that's currently in people's mind: that he's been accused of sexual harassment and/or assault and being an ableist bully. You may get why I'm asking you to keep this image in your mind already, but I'll come back to this later.

So it's been days since the original post (I think it might have been a week almost? I honestly don't remember clearly, it might have only been two or three days), in this time Pledis and the Seventeen members have all been radio silent. Pledis finally makes their first official statement. The highlights are that they're taking the original issue seriously and are in the process of investigating it. They are able to clear up the post from OP2 (bullying a disabled student). Both the disabled student in question and his mother were able to verify that Mingyu was not one of his bullies. So that's one accusation cleared off the list. Mingyu himself decides to suspend activities while the company continues to investigate. Here is Pledis's first statement, please read for full context.

There were some other posts that popped up either before or after Pledis's first statement. One was from someone (OP3) who claimed to know OP1 and claimed that she couldn't be trusted. It seems that person's goal was more to attack OP1 than to defend Mingyu (iirc they claimed to be a BTS akgae, though that's not super relevant). OP1 responded and it quickly turned into personal beef between them and OP3 that strayed away from anything to do with Mingyu. There were also some posts that were obviously fake and just posted for clout or to jump on the bandwagon of adding to his bad reputation. And by obviously fake I mean there was really just no details or evidence, and they were dismissed immediately by pretty much everyone. I mention these things to just paint a picture of how chaotic things were and how hard it was to keep track of everything.

There was one more relevant accusation, that Mingyu was a bystander when someone else was assaulted. This was the subject of Pledis's second statement. The person who posted it (OP4) originally made it sound like it was something they had just heard about, but it was later revealed that they were the victim of the assault. Mingyu did not recall the incident at all. Pledis also contacted the perpetrators and bystanders (including one of the victim's friends) who OP4 recalled being at the incident, and none of them recalled the incident as it was described by OP4. OP4 decided to drop the issue since no one was able to corroborate their story. Here is Pledis's second statement, please read for full context.

At this point I'd like to pause and take a look at the timeline. Pledis made their first statement on February 28, 2021, which as I recall was several days to a week after the initial post. The second statement was posted on March 21, 2021, a little less than a month later. During this time period, we didn't hear anything from Seventeen at all. Going Seventeen was also postponed until after the situation was fully resolved. And the situation wouldn't be considered fully resolved until Pledis's third and final statement on April 6, 2021 (exactly a year ago, as I'm writing this).

I'll get to the third statement in a minute, but the reason I bring up this timeline is twofold. One, it demonstrates that Pledis really seemed to put the time and effort into thoroughly investigating the situation. Kcarats who walked by the Pledis building noted that lights were on late into the night, especially in the first several days. This is also something you can see in the way they've written their statements. Them postponing Seventeen's content and promotions at the time shows a level of respect and seriousness toward the issue. People, especially Carats, like to talk a lot of shit about Pledis, but the way they handled this situation was received well by pretty much everybody still following the situation. Especially because, to my understanding, there were similar controversies with idols under other companies at the same time, which were handled much more poorly (either siding with the artist blindly or punishing them with no investigation).

The second reason I bring it up is because a month is a LONG time in the internet world. Remember how at the beginning of all of this there was a mistranslation that spread like wildfire outside of the fandom? And how I told you to keep in mind that before Pledis's first statement, the general impression was that Mingyu had committed sexual harassment/assault and was an ableist bully? For a lot of non-Carats and casual fans, that's still the impression they have. Because honestly, who's going to keep up with a month long investigation about an idol you don't even stan? Plus people feed off sensational news, which an idol being exposed as a sexual assaulter an an ableist definitely is, moreso than news that he's innocent of those things.

So anyway, on April 6, 2021 (Mingyu's birthday, coincidentally enough), Pledis posted their third and final statement, which addressed the initial post by OP1. Mingyu admitted that he laughed along and made jokes with the boys in school without thinking much of it. He apologized to OP1, and both he and OP1 mutually agreed that they didn't wish to cause further harm to the other party due to this issue, and was thus considered to be closed. The statement specifically says that OP1 didn't want Mingyu to "bear undue responsibility" which is likely referring to the fact that after the initial post, many knetz and even Carats were calling for Mingyu to be kicked out of Seventeen. Read Pledis's third statement here for full context.

So when I said at the beginning that Mingyu was cleared of all charges, there is a small caveat to that, which is that he admitted to making and laughing along with jokes that made OP1 uncomfortable (though he did so without without thinking and not with the intent to make OP1 uncomfortable). But to summarize the claims and conclusions against Mingyu:

Made and laughed along to sexual jokes that made OP1 uncomfortable: TRUE, though done without malicious intent, Mingyu acknowledged and apologized for the harm caused. OP1 wishes that the issue be considered resolved and Mingyu bear no undue responsibility for it.

Sexually harassed/assaulted someone: FALSE, this was not a true claim ever made against Mingyu, it was the result of a mistranslation that spread early in the confusion of the situation.

Bullied and threw trash at a disabled classmate: FALSE, both the disabled classmate and his mother confirmed that Mingyu never bullied him.

Was a bystander as another student was assaulted: FALSE, the story was unable to be corroborated by a multitude of witnesses, and the accuser dropped the claim.

At the end of the day, I think anyone is allowed to feel uncomfortable with Mingyu for the jokes he made in middle school. Ultimately it's up to the individual if they feel like they trust that Mingyu has changed his behavior since middle school. Though I will say that many Carats, including myself, feel that there's plenty of evidence that Mingyu has emotionally matured since then and has genuinely learned from his mistake, and that he has also learned to be more conscious of the impact of his words. I also think it's important for people to not conflate what he actually did with the accusations which were proven false.

As far as the misinformation and the misconceptions about what happened go... to be honest I can't blame non-Carats and casual fans for not keeping up with the whole thing. But it's also frustrating how just, utterly wrong the perception of Mingyu is outside of the fandom, which is why you see Carats get so defensive. Of course when the statements came out we tried to spread them as far and wide as we could, but after a month people had just lost interest and it's impossible to reach everyone. And of course there are some who believe what they want to believe or think it's in their own best interests for people to think of Mingyu as a sexual assaulter or an ableist. And after a certain point, Carats became more and more hesitant to continue talking about the situation since it seemed better to just ignore it and focus on more positive things than continuing to dig up an issue that was resolved.

I only wish that those people who didn't keep up with the situation would stop talking about it. They should recognize that by not being informed, they can't really claim to be an authority on what happened or what kind of person Mingyu is. That's my own personal philosophy for situations like this at least. There are idols and groups I've heard things about that make me uncomfortable, sometimes to the extent that I avoid listening to any of their music or even silently judge their fans for continuing to stan them. But I never say anything about it online because I know I've only heard things from word of mouth and not everything may be as it seems. If I felt like I needed to say something about it I'd do my research first.

In my ideal world, that's how everyone would act, but I know it's not realistic. And it's not to say I don't think idols shouldn't be called out when they do something problematic, it's just that I think those call outs should be informed as much as possible. No one gains anything by false accusations or misinformation. Not only does it hurt the accused, it also makes it harder for legitimate accusations to be taken seriously. Again, I can't blame people for not keeping up with the situation and viewing Mingyu poorly, but I wish they wouldn't speak as an authority on the issue.

Mingyu Painting/Collage

I'm going to be honest with you, I hadn't heard of this controversy until it got brought back up again with the recent voting/politics issue (which I talk about in the next section), even though to my understanding it was first discussed in 2021. The "painting" referred to is actually a pair of collages:

The rightmost collage is what was controversial, people take it out of context by separating it from the other collage, despite them being part of the same piece. Mingyu has never said anything about these collages or what they're supposed to be about or how they're supposed to be interpreted, so the issue comes down to interpretation. iirc the person who actually posted this picture was the person who framed them, not Mingyu himself.

From what I've seen, people who see this piece as problematic think that the imagery in the right collage is disturbing and violent and indicative that Mingyu is sexualizing or at least promoting violence toward women and/or is indicative that he's just generally unhinged. Again, people on this side of the argument usually don't address the left collage or talk about the meaning of the set as a whole, and sometimes go as far to crop the left collage out of the image.

The main interpretation of the piece from the other side of the argument is that it's a critique of the modeling industry, with the left collage showing the "pretty" side of it the industry wants you to see, and the right side being the dark side of it behind the scenes. A lot of the images used in the collage are from fashion magazines, and the logos/names of designer brands such as Prada and Chanel show up in both collages. Mingyu himself has experience in the modelling industry, so it's not a subject matter that's completely out of left field for him.

I will admit that I don't fully understand this particular issue. After it had come up again recently I looked up the image and stared at it for a while before I had read any real arguments from either side and to be honest I could not figure out for the life of me what the controversy could be. And after that I went to see what people's actual opinions are and I swear I read like 200 tweets criticizing the piece and they had little more depth to them aside from just labeling the imagery disturbing. If anyone else reading this has a better understanding of the criticism than what I managed to gather, let me know.

For complete transparency, this is the topic I sympathize with the critiquers the least. While the interpretation of it being a critique of the modelling industry makes a lot of sense to me personally, I can admit that we don't know if that's the actual intention for sure, and there are room for other interpretations. I can also understand that the imagery is uncomfortable. But on the other hand, I think it's disingenuous to both ignore half of a piece and to claim that an artist is promoting a subject matter simply because they portray it.

Mingyu Voting

So what happened with this is about ~2 days before the recent South Korean presidential election, Mingyu posted this post on Instagram (in case the link doesn't work, the first pic is a drawing Mingyu did of some glasses, second pic is a set of selfies of him wearing a red sweatshirt and some photos of the sky. the caption is a red heart emoji).

Either on election day or the day after (so about 3-4 days after posting) people starting talking about the post speculating that it was meant as support for the extreme conservative candidate (who ended up winning the election). The reasoning for this speculation is that red is the color associated with the candidate/party and to my understanding, as part of the campaign, supporters had also been using red heart emojis in their posts.

On the other hand, Mingyu and other SVT members often match colored heart and other emojis to the clothes/color scheme of their Instagram posts. Compared to his other Instagram posts, it doesn't stand out. As I think you were saying, other idols also happened to wear red leading up to the election too, and some of the people accusing Mingyu were perpetuating a double standard. While it's generally agreed that it was a poorly timed post, several knetz have said it's a reach to claim he's was blatantly supporting the now current president with that post.

It's hard as international fans to judge whether it was blatant or not, since most of us don't speak Korean and didn't follow the election. But a part of me does think if it had no ambiguity that, for one, Pledis wouldn't have let him post it if they saw, since it's in their best interest for idols to be free of political affiliations, and for two, it would have been talked about more when he posted it, as opposed to several days later. But that's just my own thought process.

He ended up deleting the post not long after it generated a buzz. That's why I linked to my tumblr post instead of the original Instagram post. To me that says that one way or another, he doesn't actually want to be perceived as publicly showing support for the current president.

At the end of the day there's no definitive proof of who Mingyu voted for, or if he even voted at all. It's worth remembering that the vast majority of idols don't comment on politics in any way, because that's part of how they keep their clean, idol image. It's a Schrödinger's cat situation to me. Any idol that doesn't comment on politics could have any kind of political views and you'd never know. But people will tend to project their own views on their idol, because that's just human nature.

I disagree with people who claim with certainty that Mingyu supports the current president, because it's a fact that we don't know who he supports or what his political views are. On the other hand, I wholeheartedly sympathize with people who are uncomfortable precisely because they don't know what Mingyu's political views are. But I would also challenge those people to consider that they probably don't know any or at least many of their idol's political views. There is absolutely a risk that is taken in supporting people who's political views you don't fully know and that risk is something that needs to be considered.

(On a personal level, that's part of the reason why I probably won't stan another group besides SVT. I've decided to take that risk with them, but I'm hesitant to take that risk with the probably hundreds of idols I listen to casually. The bigger the pool, the more chances you have to be let down sort of thing. But that's just another thing people need to assess and decide for themselves.)

Mingyu Misogyny

This is just a short section to say that, as far as I'm aware, the only evidence that people use to claim Mingyu is a misogynist are the three situations above, which you can make your own judgements on from my explanations. Until the bullying situation, I don't remember seeing anyone call him that or even implying it.

As you said in your ask, he got dogpiled. I can't claim to know whether or not the collage or the voting thing would have been issues if it weren't for the bullying accusations last year, but I definitely don't think he would have gotten quite as much criticism if it weren't for that controversy being as big as it was.

Curry Song

(I won't go through a whole detail of what happened for this one, since it sounds like you're already familiar with it, but I'm just going to talk about some random points.) The curry song incident is actually one of the things I was referring to when I said I wish it had been handled better and I still wish for an apology. Though as you said, it's definitely very unlikely that they ever will at this point.

At the time, the majority opinion from South Asian Carats was that it would be fine if the scene was just cut out of the episode and then reuploaded. South Asian fanbases weren't even calling for an apology, just for the scene to be cut. Which the Going Seventeen staff has done before over way smaller things. It just seems ridiculous that they couldn't do that much.

The only "good" (I don't even know if I want to go that far) part of the whole situation is how many Carats were united along with South Asian Carats for calling out Seventeen and asking for the scene to get cut. It's honestly something I never would have expected to see from a kpop fandom given how much kpop stans usually love to bend over backward to defend their idols. And I found out from the incident that there are apparently a lot of idols who have sang the song before, since it's popular in Korea. But Carats actually managed to make enough fuss about it that it got on national news and Norazo, the original artist, actually did apologize for the song (though whether their apology was good enough is another thing).

But like on the other hand there were plenty of Carats who didn't see the big deal about it or were actively being racist toward South Asians, and it obviously still doesn't erase the hurt that happened or the fact that it was never accounted for by Seventeen. So I'm not saying Carats should be patting ourselves on the back too much. More just that it was definitely a surprising reaction from a kpop fandom.

It's one of those situations where I can fully sympathize with any Carats who decided to unstan because of it, especially South Asian Carats. As you said, it's just a situation where we have to hope that they won't do it again. For me personally, I have enough trust that they learned from their mistakes that it wasn't a deal breaker for me stanning. But I also fully recognize that as a white person its a lot lot easier for me to just go "Hey, that was bad, let's hope they don't do it again!" than it is for a South Asian person. Again, it's just one of those situations where people have to decide where the line is themselves, and I fully sympathize with people for whom it was over the line.

#melia.ask #anon #if anyone else is thinking about sending me an ask about this post please check if i already answered or talked about it in this post #this took me like 7-8 hours to write over the course of 3 or 4 sittings so i'd appreciate not having to repeat myself 😅#(anon that's not to make you feel guilty! i wouldn't have answered the ask or spent so much time on it if i didn't want to!)#but i just generally like to preemptively try to set some boundaries for these sorts of things

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aestheticseungmean · 3 years

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Can you do a idol au for ATEEZ jongho where him and hongjoong have the opportunity to work with a western artist (their main language is English but are learning Korean) and them and jongho hit it off and become friends, until one of them forms a crush 💞 (gender neutral reader please)

I Like You Very Much-Choi Jongho

As an upcoming yet very popular artist, when you suggested to collaborate with Ateez, KQ jumped at the opportunity. It just so happens that the maknae harbours feelings for you.

Gender neutral reader

Warnings: minor cussing

3.4K words

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You were an up and coming artist, sparking interest all over the world with your music. Radio stations and TV shows clamoured to get you into their shows and those who were able to get you, shot up in rating. You talked about all your interests, plans for the future, and the inevitable dating scene. Interviewers often chuckled when you say you are single and not ready to mingle, agreeing with you even though they were all married. The one question that you get asked the most is: “Who would you like to collaborate with on an upcoming album?” The answer is always the same, Ateez. You appreciated the few interviewers who knew the group, but more often than not, you found yourself explaining who they were.

On the other hand, Ateez, despite debuting in 2018, were finding their way into other countries, capturing attention alongside you. They typically get all the same questions from the same interviewers with the same reactions. In one interview, the radio announcer had asked how Ateez felt about you wanting to collab. To which they cheered and wished the same. Apparently, most listened to your music daily, while stretching, working out, lounging around, or even just to create a dance to. An insane amount of pride went bursting through your chest as you listened to them praise you. Ateez, especially, Hongjoong and Jongho, talked excitedly about you, your music, your aesthetic, and overall how you were their favourite English artist.

———————-

Your one year debut anniversary was coming up and you were planning a safe world tour featuring your first songs, as well as the most popular ones. After talking with your company, your plan was to hit a bunch of places, including: America, Canada, Australia, the UK, France, China, Germany, Japan, Brazil, and South Korea to name a few. Many fans sent videos of them showing their support for you. In the same time, Ateez also had a Korean tour as well, performing in some of the same places as you. Just the thought alone exited you. With your trusty manager, Sadie, your language tutor, Mina, and your best friend/personal hype-man, Jake, you were set to go.

Mina sat upon your bed, watching as you frantically pack clothes to practice and sleep in. “You know we have clothes we have to give you? Being famous means you have an image to maintain.” “An expensive one,” you rolled your eyes, knowing that the outfits designed for you were no less than a thousand dollars. “Alright, let’s brush up on your Korean. Sadie said you had the most interviews there so let’s not make a fool of ourselves.” Mina started listing off random words, leaving you to translate them. Between deciphering Korean and remembering what to pack, your brain fried worse than Kaminari after he overused his quirk. Of course you weren’t walking around with a dumb expression but on the inside you were.

Sometimes, you wondered why you released your song on YouTube and why you signed on the dotted line, but so far you’ve managed. Sure there have been haters, but the amount of support outweighs the haters. Besides, when you feel like quitting, you remember all the amazing artists who have encouraged you to pursue your dreams, and your career. With the likes of Lizzo, Ariana Grande, Meghan Thee Stallion, Lewis Capaldi, Billie Eilish, BTS, and Cardi B all supporting your music, you had no reason to listen to the haters. You only need to focus on a good world tour anyways.

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The tour finally made its way into Seoul. With an unfathomable amount of want for the tickets, your company decided to hold four shows, plus the ungodly amount of interviews. This week was sure to be a tiring week, and you might sleep 24 hours straight when you get home, but it’s worth it to see the fans cheering you as you sang your songs.

The first night, you performed your songs and interacted with the fans in your broken korean. The second night was the same, save for a few idols who came to your show. You were surprised to see a few members of NCT and BTS up in the stands, dancing and wearing your merch. The third night was the night your company decided to surprise you with a last-minute duet of your song “Weeping Willow” with Jimin. You two sailed smoothly through it despite the lack of knowledge of whether your voices would harmonize or collide in a train-wreck.

And last, but not least, the fourth night is where you went all out for your final concert. There were colourful explosions of confetti, pyrotechnics, backup dancers, a live band, etc. You were confused as to why the dancers were there, let alone wearing masks during your performance, but the show must go on, right? Through the night, different dancers came up and spun you around on the stage, baffling you at your skill of dancing while singing. Finally, the final chord of your last song ended allowing you to attempt to talk to the fans in your limited language.

“Thank you guys for coming out to see the show!” The crowd erupted in cheers making you smile. “This country has been very kind to me and I can’t wait to come back. I’ll be here for a few more days so make sure to keep an eye out for me on the streets!” You smiled, hoping you could meet a few fans in your last few days, maybe get some pictures with them. “This has been an amazing concert, although, I do have to say, the dancers surprised me,” you admitted, rubbing the fabric covering your legs nervously. All of a sudden, the crowd went crazy, chanting “turn around” at you. So you did.

Immediately, you dropped to your knees, hiding your face. Standing in front of you in the dancers’ outfits, holding masks, were the one and only, Ateez. You had been performing with them for the past few hours without realizing. “Your manager called us, asking if we’d come surprise you for your birthday. We couldn’t resist. I hope you don’t mind.”You recognized the voice as Hongjoong’s. Of course Sadie would do this. She knew how much you loved Ateez, but she went all out this time. You looked up, your eyes watering from crying tears of embarrassment, joy, and anger. A few boys rushed to make sure you were okay as soon as they spotted the tears. On the screen at the back of the stage, you caught a glimpse of your hunched figure, crying. “This is so amazing,” you managed to stutter out.

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After the show, you headed to the back with the boys to find the two managers talking with each other in hushed words. When they noticed you, they stopped their conversation and turned towards you. “So?” Sadie asked, waiting for your reaction. “I hate you…But I absolutely love you, Sadie.” “I thought so. Now, all of you, go get changed, we are going out to eat, company’s treat,” She said, holding up a card which you recognized as the company credit card. In an instant, you were rushing to your dressing room to change, stomach growling loudly.

The van waiting outside for you, was giant. Maybe a twelve seater. All eleven of you piled in, the managers sitting in the front seats while you and the boys filed into the other seats. “Would you mind doing a V-Live with us?” Seonghwa asked, pulling out a phone. “No, but I don’t know what to do.” “Just be you,” he replied, laughing. Throughout the whole ride, you were sandwiched in between San and Wooyoung who wouldn’t stop making you laugh while Seonghwa flirted to the camera. The others talked or closed their eyes for a little rest before you got to the restaurant. Not once did you feel out of place as well.

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It’s been a few months since you met Ateez on your world tour. You kept in touch through texting since San slipped his number into your phone without you noticing. Not that you were complaining anyways. When you mentioned you were working on a new album but struggling, some of the boys offered to call you, to talk of course, not figure out what the next song will be so they can get a headstart on learning it. Eventually, you took them up on that offer and Hongjoong called. You two talked for what seemed like an eternity, talking about concepts and themes.

The call seemed to help you majorly. You ended up finishing two songs and wrote the meanings behind them, a habit you had because you sucked at explaining things. Hongjoong, on the other hand, got some beats done for a few of Ateez’s future songs. You were still on the phone with him when you realized that you were writing the songs to the few beats you heard. “SHIT!” “When did you learn to cuss in Korean?” Your wooden pencil was slammed down on the desk, breaking. “That’s not the problem. The problem is, I’ve been writing my songs to your beats. I mean I know they can be for another beat but the producers are going to ask me how I want to sing it. I’ll just end up singing it to your beats,” You whined.

Hongjoong laughed. “Let’s hear it then.” “Hear what?” You heard shuffling on the phone before a few mouse clicks. “Let’s hear you sing along to the beats,” he said, hitting play on the computer, starting the music. You sighed and sang along with your lyrics, surprised at how well the music coincided. “You know what? I think I’ll send these beats to you. They sound better with your lyrics anyway,” Hongjoong complimented, hitting send. “You don’t have to,” You protested only to be met with the notification that Hongjoong had sent it to you anyways. “Too late. Can you imagine if we collabed on a song, or an album?”

“That would be amazing, but I know I wouldn’t be able to keep up with your dance skills. Even your least skilled dancer is freaking amazing. Oh wait...You don’t have one because who the hell is the least skilled dancer in Ateez?” you complained, yet complimented at the same time. “Please, you could keep up. You are a ball of energy.” “A ball of energy with two left feet, Joong.” You shut your notebook and put it away, cleaning up your desk. “I don’t believe you.” “You don’t have to, just know it’s true. Anyways, it’s 3am here. I need to go to bed.” He shifted in his seat and frowned. “Okay. I’ll talk to you later. Sweet dreams!” “Night, Joong,” you said before hanging up the phone and throwing yourself on your bed, falling into a deep sleep.

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The producers absolutely loved your songs with Hongjoong’s beats. So much so that the company immediately wanted a collaboration. For the next few weeks, before the release of your newest album, the executives buckled down on getting that ‘magic’ song that would take the world by storm. It wasn’t long before the people at KQ agreed, knowing that the collaboration between Ateez and you would bring media and attention to the latter. And soon, you found yourself on a plane, in business class (because first class was too empty and economy was too crowded) to Seoul.

A few people were eager to see you, but most went to sleep as it was five in the morning. Thankfully, you were granted a window seat so you could look out at the view. Most of the time though, you found yourself entranced in the movies they offered on flight, catching up on the new Tom and Jerry movie. And before you knew it, you found yourself landing in Seoul. Your manager, who enjoyed first class, got off the plane and waited for you. Many fans waited with Ateez signs as you walked by, confused.

On the other side of the crowd, Ateez waited patiently to surprise you with their presence. They begged and begged the company to go get you instead of sending one of their scary bodyguards to. Finally, they gave in, allowing the boys to go get you. Word got out though and that meant they had to keep undercover. Or at least try to, which was not Wooyoung’s strong suit. At one point, Hongjoong threatened Wooyoung to get him to shut up. It worked up until Wooyoung saw you, making your way out of the crowd. He and the others ran up to you, suffocating you in a hug. “Let’s get to the van before the crowd doesn’t let us leave,” Hongjoong commanded.

They rushed you to the van, ushering you in before clamouring in themselves. This time around, you were in between Yunho and Jongho. You greeted them politely, your korean better this time around due to talking with the boys constantly. “So, you’ll be staying at a hotel not far from us. We’ll be sure to always have someone to come get you,” Seonghwa said, relaying the information he had been given. “The whole someone coming to get me is extra.” “Nonsense,” Wooyoung exclaimed. “It’s rude to have a guest and not guarantee their safety. Besides some of our families would have our heads if they found out we weren’t doing the utmost for you,” he added playfully.

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The next day, you dressed in comfortable clothing, not caring about your fashion. The agenda for the day was to write a song with Hongjoong and Jongho. When you first found out you were only collabing with those two, you felt a little sad, but when Sadie told you it was a trial collab, to see how well it would do, it didn’t make it any better, in fact, you felt worse. You protested and argued for the whole group, but all the bosses said was, “If this goes well, you can have an entire album with them.” Sure, the excitement for an entire album with Ateez would be amazing, but what if it didn’t go well?

You thought about that the entire time it took you to get to the KQ building. Only then, it was Jongho who brought you out of your head. “Hey, ________! The studio is this way. It’s my first time watching Hongjoong hyung make the beats,” He said, smiling brightly. You couldn’t help but smile back. “Mkay, Jongho. Lead the way,” You mumbled, following the maknae to a secluded room. Inside, Hongjoong was already set up at the computer, messing with some beats.

You took in the room around you. The lights were dimmed, probably to help hongjoong focus. A sleek desk with a soundboard was pushed up against a wall with glass, allowing you to look into the other room. A few of the spinny chairs were worn down, a sign of heavy usage. In the other room, you could see a typical setup for a sound booth. A microphone stood in the middle, headphones hanging off of it. The sound-proof padding looked fairly new with a few different instruments lining the walls. It reminded you of home. Of the studio you usually work in.

Hongjoong greeted you as soon as he caught a glimpse of movement. “Hey guys! I was checking some different beats and tunes for the song.” “You’re good. Shall we get started?” You asked, pulling out your beat up notebook. “That thing has seen better days,” Jongho joked, looking at the binding peeling off. You giggled and nodded. “I’ve had it for many years. I need a new one, but I haven’t gotten around to it. Besides, this has all my songs. Even the unsung ones.” “So that’s your most prized possession then?”

“I guess you could say that,” you hummed. “But it’s not like I’m playing keep away with it. I don’t care if you guys read it because I trust you. It’s randomly leaving it in public and never seeing it again that I’m worried about.” “Understandable. My flash drive is always with me,” Hongjoong said, pointing to the drive that was sticking out from the computer. “ You smiled softly at Hongjoong and grabbed your pencil. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

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The next few days were tedious with the finishing of the song, the practicing of pronunciation for both parties, and making the beat. You found yourself growing closer to the two boys, even helping write a few of their future songs. In response, they taught you how to make beats and successfully break an apple, although that only happened once and you still haven’t been able to do it again. There was a different aura around them when you hung out. Hongjoong felt more calm and brotherly even, whilst Jongho had a more timid feeling. Like he was hiding something. You pushed it off, thinking it was him being a bit skeptical of you still.

When you finally thought all the hard work was done, Hongjoong dropped a choreography on you. The thing you dreaded the most. Thankfully, the duo were willing to take things step by step slowly with you, guiding you through the most miniscule things. A couple of the days, Hongjoong couldn’t make it, leaving you to practice with Jongho, who became more stand-offish.

Until you had enough of the ridiculous behaviour because it had come out of nowhere. “Are you okay, Jongho? Is there something I’m doing wrong?” You asked, taking a drink. “No, you’re dancing fine.” “I meant generally? You seemed fine in the beginning and now you look like you think I’m poisonous. Do you not like me?” Jongho looked taken aback, mouth opening and closing like a fish gaping for water as he tried to figure out the words he wanted to say. “It’s not that,” He managed. “Then what is it? I don’t want to feel like I have to walk on glass around you.” “Let’s just get this choreo learned okay?” You huffed and got back to practicing, angry that he ignored your question.

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“Okay, one more time,” the producer demanded, signalling you to start your verse over again. You did as he asked and cheered when he praised you. “Jongho, you’re up.” “You got this, Jongho,” you tried to encourage him. He gave you a nervous half-hearted smile and headed to do his part. He sang beautifully, even more than when you three were practicing by yourselves. You couldn’t help the cold chills that ran up your arms giving you goosebumps. “Woah,” you breathed out, in wonder.

You went to praise Jongho again, exclaiming how he was so amazing. An embarrassed smile graced his features making your heart swell. “So cute!” “Quiet, everyone,” the producer said, preparing for Hongjoong’s rap. You turned your attention towards the leader, preparing yourself for his rapping. Jongho took this chance to excuse himself from the room. As usual, Hongjoong owned his rap and you almost felt bad for Jongho missing it, but then you remembered that he could easily hear it again later.

It was a quick session after Hongjoong finished. Just a few harmonies here and there and you were done for the day. All of the boys wanted to go out for food to celebrate. Yeosang offered to go to the chicken place on the other side of town and Mingi agreed. Once again, you found yourself sitting by Jongho, except this time, you were sitting in the pair of seats in the second row, allowing it to be just you two. He pulled out a package and handed it to you, blushing. “I got you this.” You smiled and took the carefully wrapped package.

“Can I open this now or do I have to wait?” “Um, you can now,” Jongho said, his ears turning red. You opened the wrapping carefully to find a new journal. “Oh my god, Jongho!” You opened the cover to look at the pages to find a cute little note waiting. Jongho had written the words ‘I like you very much’ in english, with cute little doodles surrounding it. “Wait? Like-” “Like a crush,” he stuttered. “Well, I like you too Jongho,” you admitted, gaining a few wolf whistles from the surrounding boys that were watching the exchange.

#choi jongho #ateez #kpop #ateez fluff #atz jongho #ateez jongho #jongho fluff #Koop fluff #atz fluff #jongho x reader #ateez x reader

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dreamingofcrows · 3 years

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I’m Gonna Be The One That Let’s You Down

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish, Ronan Lynch, Adam Parrish, Joseph Kavinsky, Richard Gansey III, Noah Czerny, Mr. Gray | Dean Allen, Maura Sargent, Blue Sargent, this was inspired by idle worship and it was sort of just meant to be a quick song fic, I extrapolated it majorly on accident, so now there's two chapters, whoops, Ronan Lynch Has Feelings, Adam Parrish Is Trying His Best, there's, Angst Hurt/Comfort, Theres the iconic 'I can't fix his demons' line , its a meet cute, kind of, Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, Just Boys being dudes, in the break before they go to Harvard, what is Adam actually studying at Harvard, would love to know, Uhm, Niall Lynch is dead, Background Robert Parrish, He Still Sucks, grief group, someone get Lynch some therapy, no beta we die like gansey, which means somehow I keep coming back wtf, No Love Confessions, because they've only known each other for like two weeks, inaccurate translation of a classic language, Noah and Ronan brotp, Alive Noah Czerny, Minor Joseph Kavinsky/Ronan Lynch , Joseph Kavinsky Being an Asshole

Ronan is going to kill Kavinsky when he saw him next. The next time that fuckshit of a Mitsubishi rides up beside him, Ronan is going to box him in and wrap him around the closest tree. He’s going to watch the white steel and rubber crack and break and compact in one itself as a wonderful, sweet sweet act of vengeance.

K had known there was cops at the end of that street, the prick. When K had slid, turned and disappeared down a side road, Ronan had thought he had found and taken a shortcut. He was determined to beat Kavinsky at his own game so he’d slammed the pedal to the floor and zipped past a cluster of patrol cars going 35 over the speed limit.

It was only Dick’s Ganseying that landed Ronan here, in an uncomfortable plastic chairs, surrounded by pathetic fucking sobs, instead of in jail (“five traffic infractions this month, Ronan. What else do you want me to do?”). Ironic, that all of the things to have occurred in the past five years; dead dad, vegetable mum, his life and his failed attempt at ending it, that street racing was the thing that got him thrown into a grief support group. Two times a week. For the next 12 weeks.

Court ordered. Fuck that.

But Gansey had asked (begged, ordered, threatened to call Declan) so Ronan did, like he always did. He sat in the uncomfortable chairs, sipped bitter fucking coffee, ate tasteless squares of sponge cake, rolled his eyes at everyone’s damned sob story and—stared.

Everyone in the group was so uninteresting, including the leader of the group—some man dressed in all gray, like he was dressing for the part—except for one other guy. He looked to be about Ronan’s age, all Sepia tones and brown in contrast to Ronan’s black and pale colours. He sat beside the Gray Man every single week and nodded along when everyone talked. He smiled at everyone when he handed out tiny Styrofoam cups of instant coffee and helped The Gray Man fold and stack the chairs at the end of every session. He was damn beautiful.

Once he’d put his hand up (put his hand up, what the fucking fuck) to ask someone a question and Ronan hadn’t been able to tear his eyes away from it. His fingers were long, his knuckles protruding out slightly, and the jutting bone on his slim wrist poked out like he’d broken it at some point. The same freckles that scattered his face also splashed across the tanned skin of his hand, and his palms were calloused and dark, with a long scar along the flesh of one of them. They were fascinating, they were strange, they were beautiful.

The speaker had stuttered a confused and tearful ‘yes?’ and gladly carried on answering his question. Ronan only learned his name in the second meeting, Adam Parrish.

Adam Parrish sat by The Gray Man because he volunteered to run the program on the occasion the Gray Man would have to go away on business out of town. His accent was slight but still obviously Virginian, drawing out the words with a soft, honeyed drawl. He always encouraged people to speak, but never spoke himself, not in the time Ronan had been going.

He also never looked at Ronan or spoke to him. But maybe that had more to do with his complete disinterest. Arms crossed, scowl permanently on. The first time Mr Gray had called on Ronan to speak, Ronan had gone bright red and scoffed. No way he was going to start blubbering to a bunch of random strangers about his problems. He’d stayed completely silent, only glaring and baring his teeth at anyone who looked at him, barely holding himself back from walking out. Adam had seemed to take one look at him and decide ‘nope, not worth my time.’

Which, fine, he didn’t want Adam to waste time on him anyway. He only had to be here for two more months and then he’d be outta there, back to drinking and racing himself into a tizzy, and he wouldn’t come back here again. Besides, Adam is probably grieving or something, and including Ronan in that wouldn’t help at all.

keep reading

Idle Worship by Paramore

#say it with me folks #no one asked for this #and yet here it is #pynch #pynch fic #fanfiction #ao3 #Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish #please read

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galacticnova3 · 3 years

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Ok I had thoughts in the shower that are kinda serious/about something mature and I felt compelled to share. CW for discussion of prosh/pp/ng. If you do that and somehow found this, not sorry, this post isn’t for you, also stop doing that and get help. Won’t tolerate any clowning either.

I think the main reason “proshippers” get away with That a lot is because in many cases they’re warping actual fair arguments. Like, yes, there is not necessarily something majorly wrong with portraying unhealthy relationships, because they exist in real life, and ultimately all art reflects aspects of real life. It’s in the same boat as the fact that it’s not bad to portray bad people or horrific events. However, all of that hinges on whether or not these things are being shown for what they are; if you keep saying/implying a character is good or cool or “relatable” and that character is in a situation like that– victim or perpetrator– you are automatically glorifying that thing. You can’t write it off as “just a character flaw” if it is not being portrayed as a flaw; that’s how character flaws work, because ultimately the vast majority of flaws can also be virtues under the right conditions, and vise versa.

Then people make the argument “well authors/artists/etc don’t have to spoon feed what is and isn’t ok to their audience”, and while that is true on some level, that does not mean they have no responsibility at all. Not just to people consuming that content, but to themselves. If you write something terrible and put it in a good light, or what can be reasonably interpreted as a good light, you can’t get mad if people assume you are supporting that thing. In that situation you have not given any true evidence that you don’t; “I’m not x” isn’t enough, because people can lie. Generally, most murderers don’t answer honestly if someone asks them if they killed someone or not. Actions speak louder than words, and if your action is writing, you are responsible for what that writing reflects on you and your views. If people come after you for it, that’s a sign that you should reflect on what you’ve written, and what message it is sending. Even if you had good intentions, people don’t see your intentions, they see what you produced, and sometimes the two don’t line up. Cancel culture is a pain in the ass, but so is the fact that the proship movement allows legitimately disgusting people to thrive under the cover of plausible deniability.

In the case of fan content, there’s the simple fact that not all franchises are safe mediums for making that stuff. It’s not censorship for someone to tell you not to make that content if you’re making it with the characters/the universe of a children’s franchise. Because ultimately, that franchise is going to be majorly consumed by children. It doesn’t matter how well you tag things or how many warnings you put on it, because ultimately the internet is going to put that thing in front of eyes that can be harmed by it. I am saying this as someone who’s first exposure to porn, before I was even in highschool, was Kirby fanart on Google images, despite having safe search on. In the grand scheme of the Internet, the only control you really have is whether you put something on it or not, and where you put that thing, and this is a situation where that is an incredibly important decision. Do you post it on social media where it could very easily be exposed to people who should not be exposed to that, whether because of algorithms or others being less responsible? Do you post it privately in a place where you know(or assume) the other people there are responsible and not going to circulate it? Or, do you keep that content to yourself?

That is not you being asked to be a “second parent”, this is not a “think of the children!” argument. Or, rather, it is a case of the latter, but one that is justified. If you’re making that content with original characters, or characters from a mature franchise, thinking of the children isn’t a priority because the children aren’t supposed to be there, just like you’re not responsible if you’ve been made to share a house with a kid that ends up finding your stash of Mature Things. Whether it was them snooping around without permission or you told them to stay away from that drawer and they didn’t listen, that’s the kid’s fault either way, and thus you bear basically no responsibility. However, if you make that content in a franchise that is consistently, obviously, and intentionally made to be consumed by children, even if it can also be enjoyed by adults? That’s different. That’s like walking into a playground with a porn magazine; it doesn’t matter if people your age can enjoy some of the things there, like the swings or basketball court. You need, and are expected, to take into account that kids are not only likely going to be there, but are encouraged to be there. You walking in with that magazine is you willingly choosing to expose or risk exposing minors to content they should not be exposed to, no matter how you spin it. You could read that magazine anywhere else, and you chose the area with kids in it.

Lastly, while I could make the argument of what reasoning there may be for wanting to make That Stuff with characters from a children’s series and then share it online in the first place, that’s been done by plenty of other people. Besides, I have a better argument: there is nothing stopping you from making that content with different characters anyways, be they your own or just from a franchise with a mature audience. You are not forced or limited to only portray a certain dynamic with certain specific characters. If the setting/universe is a factor, just make your own version with the relevant things in common, maybe change some terms and names, and there, problem solved. It’s not plagiarism if it is going to be utilized in a vastly different way, and as long as it does not just flat out copy every single aspect of the original. Something something a lot of fiction is derivative. Doing this could also allow a place for others to make similar content in what could eventually be your own “series”, without nearly the same level of risk of harm. If it is truly a case of just wanting to explore the dynamic, you can do so without having it be inherently tied to content made for young audiences, and if you have the skills and critical thinking necessary to understand both what makes it “special” with those characters, you should also be able to recreate the same thing in a safer environment.

I know I kinda focused a lot on “kid’s franchises” with this but the same things apply with other content. I.E. don’t make content that depicts mentally ill folks as dangerous where it could hurt/offend real mentally ill people and misinform those who don’t know the reality of mental illness. “Common sense” isn’t real; all “common sense” is learned, and not everyone has learned the same things you have at any given point. How else would ridiculous rumors and such spread, if everyone knew the truth?

TLDR:

-The issue isn’t you making the content, it’s you glorifying the content. Whether you intended to or not isn’t the point.

-You don’t have to spoon feed morals to your audience, but if people reasonably interpret unhealthy things shown in a light that isn’t explicitly or implicitly negative as your quiet support, that’s on you. You need to be sure that the message your content actually sends/how it reflects your views lines up with the message you intended to send and the views you actually have. Don’t blame others if you were the one who failed to communicate effectively.

-In the case of franchises specifically aimed at children, you posting that content is you saying you value sharing that content over the well-being of those likely to see that content. You had the choice to keep the risk of harm at 0%, but decided not to.

-That fact is not a “think of the children” argument, it is simply making the same point as someone telling you not to bring pornography into a kid’s playground, even if that playground has facilities others your age also enjoy. You are bringing adult content into a kid-oriented area, you cannot act like it is the fault of a kid for finding it when in some cases they weren’t even looking.

-There is ultimately no excuse for making that content within a children’s franchise, because there is nothing forcing you to remain in that setting and use those characters; if the dynamic is something you really want to explore, you can recreate it without ties that could lead minors to it.

-Though I used kid’s franchises as my main focus, this applies to any groups that your content could potentially harm or misinform. “It’s just common sense” is not a defense for the latter, because “common sense” has to be learned, and not everyone learns everything at the same time or by the same age.

#ask to tag #rambling #cw proship #ok to rb #just my thoughts on the matter #lemme know if this needs more tags I’m tired af and just kinda spat all this out #also yes I know this is basically the same as taking a bat to a hornet nest no I don’t care #let the hornets come I’ll fight them #or block rather #I will not give the hornets my time or attention

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fmdtaeyong · 3 years

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restructuring update prompts

a prologue to officially re-introducing ash kwon // aka i decided to re-do this because i changed some parts of ash’s backstory and established career claims after i did this the first time and half of this wasn’t really true anymore rip

also there’s nowhere for me to put this in the answers anymore so i’ll put it here: circles is ash’s best song

content warning: mentions of alcohol abuse and drug use / abuse, but none of it is in-depth

assuming your muse has changed in some way, be it internally or as a result of a change of the external factors around them, how is your muse different?

for the most part, ash’s general personality and character has stayed the same. he’s the same angsty, creative, romantic dude at heart, but he’s a little more jaded in some ways.

ash moved around before he became a trainee now. he lived in san francisco, sydney, and seattle. when he lived in sydney, it was just him and his mom and he grew really close to her during that time. he doesn’t really feel like he has a home at all since seoul is the longest he’s ever lived somewhere, but he’s less happy so that’s not home either.

ash is a better technical singer now ig, being a main vocal. he focused more on singing as a trainee now instead of dancing. his ankle injury in 2018 was a little more serious now, which is why he doesn’t dance much in his solo music anymore. it’s also why he’s less interested in dance, but, at the same time, i think it leaves more potential for him to re-develop some love for it again.

he’s also now the maknae, although it’s a common joke in the fandom that he doesn’t act like it. he debuted a year and three months younger than before and he feels a lot more beholden to the industry now. has even less of an idea of what he’d be outside of it at this point, even though he got closer to actually leaving it than previous ash ever did.

he’s still had a couple of minor attitude controversies in titan’s early days caused by cultural differences. he was in public relationships in 2016 and 2019. neither were received well for their own reasons. his clubbing habit has gotten him into some controversy, though bc has never issued a statement on it beyond that one time they had to confirm the woman in a picture of him clubbing was his girlfriend because people were trying to accuse him of cheating. he has a passionate anti gallery and obsessive sasaengs that make his life a living hell.

since renewing his contract, ash has also had a few hiatuses of varying lengths due to his physical or mental health. this was true before with how he naturally developed, but it’s more tied together now as a result of generally poor physical and mental health he’s been experiencing for a few years now after his dating scandals and his ankle injury in 2018.

his image is more streamlined now too! he never really had the era of being pushed as a cleancut boyfriend that old ash had around 2018. he’s been marketed as a musical genius / sexy bad boy rockstar / artist with a tortured soul for as long as he’s been majorly pushed individually. this means he’s still very sexualized, but he hates his image a little less because he can be a little more himself as far as personal style and self-expression through tattoos and piercings goes.

what does your muse think of their company and their group?

this hasn’t really changed. ash has no real love for bc entertainment and wouldn’t really care if titan disbanded tomorrow. some of their music is good and some isn’t (though he considers less of it terrible without wolf and gorilla in the mix lmao), but he feels he’s mostly outgrown it as an artist. not that it’s below him, but it’s not what he connects with creatively, which is far more important to him now than it had been when he’d first debuted. he doesn’t hold ill will toward his groupmates unless he feels they’ve given him an individual reason to, and actually feels more guilty toward them for getting involved in scandals and taking hiatuses more than anything, but they’re also not his best friends. he views titan as a purely work endeavor and he doesn’t feel bad about the fact he got about as close as possible to leaving them without actually doing so that he could back during contract renewals. after all, they’d be fine without him. he’s a main vocal, but they’ve got two others. he’s a dancer, but they’ve got two others. he can write music, but titan has never been his main priority there and others are more than capable of doing it. he wants out of both the group and the company but is starkly aware of the fact that he did this to himself when he re-signed out of what he now perceives to have been impulse and greed.

since titan is the seniormost active group under bc, ash tries to be a good senior to his company juniors in general, but there are certainly more welcoming alternatives than him. he worries about them from a distance more than anything else.

is your muse on their first contract or their second? if they’ve renewed, what were their feelings around that at the time and what were their hopes for their second contract?

he’s on his second contract and he definitely regrets renewing. he hadn’t planned to renew for the longest time the lack of privacy and the public criticism and the hate he’d received were just too much, and he had plans that would require him to stop being an active idol, namely marrying his girlfriend of two and a half years at the time. their relationship wasn’t stable enough at the time for that to be a good idea and that was proven when they broke up shortly before final negotiations for contract renewals, but ash wanted an excuse to escape and the idea of a happy, normal life more than he wanted to be rational.

spite after the (very brief lmao) break up was part of his decision to renew, but bc entertainment also offered to support him as a songwriter and producer in addition to allowing him to regularly release solo music. he still really loved music and his first taste of promoting as a solo artist had been right before renewals as a proposal to sway him into re-signing, so he was swayed to sign on for seven more years. they followed through on their promises, but he struggles to weigh the recognition he’s earned as a solo artist and songwriter-producer against signing his life away again and doing a number on his physicla and mental health. most of his health issues and his hiatuses have happened during his second contract, as well as several behind-the-scenes situations that could have become scandals if they’d had any less luck, mostly stemming from ash drinking too much and his occasional recreational drug use, so he’s not sure bc even really feels the contract renewal was entirely worth it.

what are your muse’s goals and motivations?

if you asked ash this, he wouldn’t know what to answer. he doesn’t feel very motivated these days and pretty much feels like he only does anything because he’s contractually obligated to. making music as a form of expression has long been his main drive, and beyond that, the desire to make a mark on the world he can be remembered by through his music, but he often oscillates now between feeling like there’s not much more he can realistically achieve and the sense of hopelessness that he can try as hard as he wants, but his music’s never going to be what he’s defined by when he’s a public figure with an image.

he also feels a duty to make his parents proud. though i could argue that might be less now than it was in the previous iteration of ash, it’s still very much there. they let him come to seoul when he’d just turned thirteen to follow a dream that many never get to follow all the way through to the end and they believed in him fully. they express how proud they are of him when they do talk, but he doesn’t know that he believes them. he doesn’t feel that anything he’s done has been deserving of paying them back for everything they’ve given to him.

right now, he wants to be able to feel excited about his life and what he’s making again. he’s trying to better himself internally in regards to the way he views himself and his mental health, although he’s more prone to still taking steps backwards there than he was at this point previously. a lot of the ways ash has found to feel that excitement and creativity he wants (such as recreational drugs and excessive alcohol consumption and fleeting, sometimes toxic, relationships) do damage to his mental wellbeing, so it’s a balancing act at the moment.

what is one conflict, internal or external, that your muse is currently dealing with, has recently dealt with, or will need to deal with in the future?

i covered this partially with the last one, but one major conflict remains his internal conflict about his passion for music. this was very much where ash was before as well, but now that i’m really pushing songwriting and producing as his main career path, it presents a more equal professional and personal challenge for him.

more than having truly lost joy in making music, he’s burnt out. his latest album lovesick was emotionally exhausting because it was a partially rushed, deeply personal and vulnerable album exclusively based on an unhealthy relationship that had stretched its hold on him out over for almost six years, and then he went into making music that he couldn’t relate to at all and didn’t really fit his image all because bc thought it would sell well.

the burn out in his personal life has affected the burn out in his professional life he would be feeling anyway and made it ten times worse. it feels more hopeless because he doesn’t have much else going for him. in the past few months, his relationship with alcohol and drugs also reverted back to unhealthy after he was doing better with it for a while, not helped by a really bad stint with his mental health. all of this was at its worse in june before he went on hiatus, and in this universe, his behavior was more of a factor in his hiatus than him practically begging to leave the group because ash is more resigned to the fact that he chose to sign back on with bc and that that’s on him. instead, there was more of a push by his manager, who knew that ash was on the road to a major scandal if action wasn’t taken.

almost all of his conflicts are internal right now. he’s become successful enough that external factors other than the large umbrella of having to remain in titan can be negotiated, but he’s too tired to do so because of everything going on inside of him. there’s a lot of negative feelings going on inside of him, and he’s trying to deal with them one by one, but it’s hard to see the weight of them easing that way.

if your muse has established career claims, what are their thoughts on their career so far? if they do not, how do they feel about not having individual activities yet? what would they like to do in the future, if anything? if they don’t have ambitions for individual activities, explain why.

ash has been able to establish himself a little more as a songwriter and producer outside of his solo music. he wrote “universe” for titan in 2017, and after that, as promised, bc hooking him up with the right opportunities and connections to establish himself more. since then, in addition to his heavy involvement in his solo music (his 2020 album lovesick was entirely written/composed/produced by him alone), he’s worked on calypso’s “rollin’” in 2018, polaris’s “fake love” (a korean music awards song of the year!) and “the truth untold” in 2019, and lily’s “i’m so sick” this year. i’m planning on more being added there with these extra ecp and maybe some refunded since i think i’m going to drop some of his points claims to streamline his career better.

his canon discography creative claims reflect his progression as a songwriter, from very earnest and romantic to more sensual to very uhhh angsty and personal to developing a more polished and professional sound as he grew in experience as a songwriter and producer.

ash is praised for having several representative works as a songwriter that all speak to his individual style, and ash is happy with what he’s gotten to do since he does genuinely enjoy working as a songwriter and producer.

he’s planning to continue branching out in this direction, so look for quite a lot of ash dabbling in canon discographies in the future. before, i’d say ash’s primary push was solo music, but my plan for him is for songwriting and producing to be his main career path from now on with solo music as a close secondary.

#famedrstask1 #+10 ecp

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wordsnstuff · 5 years

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Guide To Political World Building

This is also available on wordsnstuffblog.com!

– This is a subject that I see brought up a lot in book reviews by readers, but not very often when it comes to the writing community. I decided to search the internet and my own experience for as many tips and as much advice as I could find to put in one place for you all. I also addressed a lot questions (in fact, more than usual because I know this is a weak point for most fiction authors) in the common struggles section. I hope this is useful to those of you who have a lot of trouble finding help on this. It should help me as well because I’m in the middle of tackling it for my own series. Happy writing!

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Know What Details Are Important

Not all aspects of a political system in a fictional universe are important to the story-telling, especially when the story is more character or plot driven, rather than driven by the world building. It’s important to deliver relevant information to your reader in pieces, and at a pace that enhances their understanding of events and meaning rather than their knowledge of trivial details.

Know Your Demographic & Your Genre

For certain genres and age-demographics, your world building in the area of political systems and implications should be matured or simplified. The majority of your readership should be able to understand what’s going on, and the way you makes sure of that is know who you’re writing the story for. Certain genres also require a lot less complicated detail in political world building. For instance, YA romance should have less political world building than, say, adult fantasy. Sure, maybe in the case of writing a YA romance, there could require some, but definitely not as in-depth as that of the latter.

Choose A Model to Alter

If you’re going to do it, especially as a beginner, you need to pick some form of inspiration or something similar to what you’re going for. There are so many governmental systems out there that already exist, and if you should research plenty of them and them mix and match, add and subtract, and twist until you have something that serves your story.

Think of The Implications of Details

Every detail that you make prominent in the reader’s mind should be thought out in terms of the implications. Ask yourself how this affects different groups of people, how it’s evolved over time, what it means for the system as a whole, etc. This will make your story more three-dimensional in the reader’s mind.

Find Issues in Power Distribution

Most government tension (throughout history, at least) has come from inequality in the distribution of power. Whether it be between races, classes, branches of government, figures in politics, or groups of people with different opinions, or all of the above combined, most issues stem from the struggle for power, control, and influence over others. Explore this and find new ways to think of how this could be interpreted from your story.

Think of Culture’s Impact on Politics

Culture has a major hand in how politics works. A society’s values, religious majorities and minorities, gender roles, environment, what an average citizen looks like, how citizens are expected to look, act, use their time, etc. These things all impact political situation and how it changes over time with culture, so explore this heavily.

Common Struggles

-- The common struggles section of my “guide to__” posts are general questions sent in by readers on the topic at hand. If you have a question that has not been addressed thus far, you’ll probably find the answer in this section. As always, you’re welcome to send other questions to my inbox if you don’t find the answer in this post. --

~ How do I illustrate the evolution of a society’s politics?... I would choose a few major events and make the causation behind them more prominent than the actual events themselves. History repeats itself, and that’s very important in political foreshadowing and often how a society deals with political situations.

~ How do I write conversations about my world’s politics?... It depends on the tone of these conversations. The way casual conversations about politics are written can tell the reader a lot about your world’s political climate, and can be a very useful device. Heated conversations can be useful in showing different passionate sides of a political issue in your world. I would say, write them carefully and with intention.

~ How do I make the reader invested/interested in the world’s politics?... Show the reader why they should care, make them relate to it, and then make them relate your story to their reality. You have to use literary devices as well. Show, don’t tell works really well here. Don’t show the main character reflecting that the conflicts at the war front are bad. Show the war front. Show the severity. Make them feel the heavy emotions of the people. Show them the real stakes of the political decisions being dealt with in the story.

~ How do I create believable racial tensions?... Again, just mirror reality. Understand why racial tensions exist and mirror that in your story’s context. Racial tension is majorly caused by fear, prejudice, and response to the “other side”. It’s often a long, ongoing battle because it’s rooted in the way people are raised and the constant environment around them. Racism is taught, so show it’s bigger, more outstanding moments, as well as its less prominent ones. No political issue arises exclusively from large, explosive moments. It’s made up of a few big ones, notable ones, and then the many, millions of little contributing moments and factors.

~ How do I write reasonable opposition groups?... You’re the author, so you have the unique opportunity of setting the reader up to see the reasoning behind both or all sides. You can show the evidence and logic behind each one, and make the reader understand why each side believes what they believe, and the personal engagement that leads each side to fight so hard.

~ How do I connect a caste system to political tension?... Political tension within caste systems are commonly caused by people’s natural desire for power and control, which leads to dissatisfaction in cases of being on the less fortunate side of inequality. Caste systems are also typically a pyramid, which means there’s more of the underdogs. These things combine to create political storms because on one side you have few people and lots of power that add up to just a bit more than a lot of people with less power individually, but more when pooled.

~ How to I create a corrupt government without too many clichés?... The most cliché thing about typical corrupt governments is the one-dimensional evil figures that lead to corruption. Very few authors explore what leads a human who’s only job is to protect the people to turn against them. Explore their motivations and their personal struggle and justifications and you’ll have a more interesting and impactful corrupt government.

~ How do I illustrate a positive government that doesn’t come off as suspicious?... Work hard on perfecting tone, be very careful with what could be interpreted as foreshadowing, and show genuine goodness in not only the government’s words and actions, but actual results. Show your government talking the talk, and then walking the walk.

~ How do I set up the climax of a political issue?... Show the slow burn, and then the inciting events that set off the inevitable explosion. You need to establish to the reader that something is going to happen no matter what, but make the actual consequence and its place in time a surprise.

~ How do I develop a governmental system from the ground up for the sake of the plot itself?... As I said in a previous point, use a model or several to take inspiration from. In the case of world building being the centre of your story, build your world and your plot together so they complement one another.

Other Resources From My Blog That Help With This:

How To Write A Good Plot Twist

How To Foreshadow

Commentary On Social Issues In Writing

Tackling Subplots

How To Perfect The Tone In A Piece Of Writing

Tips On Writing About Mental Illness

A Guide To Tension & Suspense In Your Writing

Writing Good Villains

Tips On Writing Intense Scenes

Finding & Fixing Plot Holes

Resources For Crime, Mystery, & Thriller Writers

Resources For Writing Science Fiction

Resources For Writing Dystopian/Apocalypse

Resources For Writing Period Pieces: High Middle Ages & Renaissance

Resources For Writing Period Pieces: 1600s

Resources For Writing Period Pieces: 1700s

Resources For Writing Period Pieces: 1800s

Resources For Writing Period Pieces: 1900-1939

Resources For Writing Period Pieces: 1940-1969

Resources For Writing Period Pieces: 1970-1999

Useful Writing Resources

Useful Writing Resources II

Resources For Writing Sketchy Topics

Resources For Worldbuilding

Resources For Plot Development

Resources For Creating Characters

Mimicking Diversity In Science Fiction/Fantasy

Writing About Another Era

On Making Scenes/Characters Unpredictable

Info-dumping

Writing About Uncomfortable Topics

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jq37 · 4 years

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The Report Card – Fantasy High Sophomore Year Ep 10

System Reboot

What is up? Happy Year of the Double Crit to everyone and welcome back to our jailbreak already in progress! To remind you of what’s happening, Fig along with Kristen and Ayda went to Calethriel Tower to bust out Adaine. While all the hirelings (except for Gilear who is with the Van he is not allowed to drive) went to destroy one pylon and the boys went to the closer pylon with a plume of smoke coming out of it.

Ayda casts invisibility on her group and flies them to the tower (guess we have us a buff wizard here).Meanwhile, in the tower, things are still going crazy. As Anguin and Kier are confused, time goes wonky and Adaine sees a rift open to a live feed of Aguefort back at his desk. When Adaine confirms that she is kidnapped and her kidnappers have decided on the way of pain, Aguefort crawls through the rift, enlarges himself to 300 feet, declares war on Falinel, grabs the SUN out of the SKY, breathes fire, raises 1000s of Terra Cotta Aguefort warriors, and starts marching with them away from the tower.

All EXTREMELY wild things but, as you’ll notice, not things that directly get Adaine out of jail.

Adaine’s rescue party sees all of this and can generally tell this is Aguefort doing a thing that’s probably supposed to be helpful but trying to read him is always a total crapshoot. Ayda freaks a little at being in the vicinity of her dad but Fig helps to reassure her.

Back with the boys, they’re all Naruto running towards their pylon which is an elven smithy. It’s a stone building, covered in moss and, inside there are 3 braziers holding coal and 3 statues holding pitchers of water. In the center of the hexagonal room is a firepit with a helix of magic that is clearly the source of magic powering the permanent magical effects on the tower. There are channels going from the pitches to the pit in the center, not to the braziers.

On a 27, Riz sees that the braziers are super trapped with a Conjure Elemental spell. After aggressively emotionally supporting each other (“I believe in you.”), Gorgug and Fabian prepare attacks while Riz triggers the trap by shooting the mechanism since it is supposed to be triggered by a cantrip and they didn’t bring a single spellcaster. (Which was actually for strategic reasons but it sounds crazy when you actually think about it).

A fire elemental pops out but, with them getting the jump on it, they’re able to womp it with very minimal problems. Then, they break the corresponding pitcher of water so it flows into the center of the room. One down, two to go. The magic fire thing changes colors and they figure some alarm has been triggered but with all the Aguefort nonsense going on they hope it will draw the attention away from them.

They trigger the second elemental and things get a little hairier. People are on fire. It becomes very clear that not bringing a healer might have been a questionable decision. But then, lo and behold, Fabian springs into action, dancing around and putting out Riz and Gorgug when they ignite with an elven blanket which everyone knows puts out fire. He even asks to make an extra roll to do it all fancy which is something we haven’t seen from him in a while. And he rolls well!

They finish off the second elemental/statue pitcher and the indicator in the firepit is blinking. Plus, there was a flash from the other pylon earlier so they know the hirelings are doing well. That just leaves the last elemental.

Riz has the idea to put out the fire in the brazier before triggering the final trap and Fabian, citing the common knowledge that Brennan made up twenty minutes ago, says that everyone knows elven blankets put out fires. Brennan tucks himself into the bed he made for himself and has Fabian do an acrobatics check (DC 20 to not have something bad happen, DC 25 to have something good happen) and with +8 and advantage he hits a 24.

Fabian runs up to the brazier and triggers a trap that makes it erupt. The elemental bursts out and Fabian pulls it into his blanket and does one of those ballroom dancing dips. Brennan asks if he truly believes in the power of dance enough to take the damage from tangoing with this elemental. It’s Lous Wilson. What do you think he says? Fabian takes 22 points of fire damage, but holds on. It’s so beautiful that the elemental is stunned out of combat and Riz doesn’t attack it, breaking the last pitcher instead.

The elemental gains a more humanoid form and face, thanks Fabian, and kisses him for 8 points of fire damage, which he is SUPER into. As they kiss, the elemental extinguishes except for a spark that finds its way into Fabian’s chest. Wild. But that’s Spring Break bay-bee!

Now, back to the girls.

When they get to the tower, Kristen sees Kier, Anguin, and four green men-like magical constructs. Fig disguises herself to look like Aguefort (which is majorly distressing to Ayda), hoping she can do some intimidation. With the permanent magical effects on the tower down, they have no problem getting in and they clock where Adaine is being held immediately so they fly up and Fig casts Shatter. Time for Combat, part 2!

Fig Hexblades curses Anguin 100% out of solidarity/spite rather than strategy, which I respect. Anguin charms Fig to attack Ayda while still disguised as her dad which is distressing for both of them. Adaine messages Aelwyn and tells her to get ready for a rescue.

Anguin Dominate Persons Fig but Ayda dispels it so she’s back in it.

Kristen calls her grad student Spirit Guardians and Adaine, who is still super locked up and in the process of being rescued, takes the time to snark at them. Kristen and Ayda make their wisdom saves to not be forced to flee by Kier but Fig fails. Ayda dispels it with a, “Dad, don’t leave!” Yikes.

Fig hits all the green men with Burning Hands and they super don’t like that. Adaine uses her turn to send Boggy out to help Fig. Anguin tries Dominate Person on Kristen but she just makes her save.

She fires back with Blindness which Kier saves from but Anguin doesn’t. Kier tries to Banish Kristen but fails and then Ayda dispels Adaine’s orb and runs out to get Aelwyn out too. Adaine firebolts the most injured green man to death and then, in a very on brand move, almost immediately slaps her dad. Amidst all the damage, Fig asks Adaine whether she wants her dad killed or just maimed. Adaine, keeping the same energy she’s had all season, wants him dead. Fig is happy to help with the request. Kristen Banishes Kier who fails her save with a big ‘ol Nat 1. Then Ayda runs in holding a practically comatose Aelwyn.

Adaine tries to get a bead on her fleeing dad who’s gotten rid of his blindness and gone invisible (in a bitch move according to her) but she just singes the edges of his clothes. She can tell he’s probably going for the Vault downstairs. Which is why Kristen, the former chosen of Helio and current main party healer, in her infinite wisdom and with her -3 to Dex, decides to ribbon dance/rappel (????) down a ten story tower to catch him before he escapes. Brennan, decides to let the dice handle this one and she rolls a 17 minus 3 which is 14. Believe it or not, that is not enough to “use a dance ribbon to fly.” Brennan asks for another acrobatics roll (presumably to see how bad this is gonna go) and Ally, after totally Beyblading the die out of the Box of Doom, rolls a 2 minus three for a total of *Negative 1*.

Amazing.

Kristen slams into the ground, takes 36 points of damage (down to 3 hp), and snaps her ankle. She then casts Zone of Truth in case Anguin runs past her I guess. And, because she took so much damage, she loses concentration on Banishment which makes Kier reappears with the green men to attack some more. Ayda comes in clutch and, following Kristen’s lead (just not about the ribbon dancing insanity) Banishes Kier again. On her turn, Fig Dimension Doors herself and Adaine down to the Vault where all her and Aelwyn’s magic stuff is (while Ayda stays in the room, attacking green men).

Adaine finds a magical talking sword called Fandrangool which she uses as a glowstick to look around the dark vault (much to its annoyance). There’s a bit of minor retconning that happens here due to a redo roll that had to happen but I’ll spare you the backtracking and just give it to you straight. On the way out of the room, Anguin had to run past Kristen’s Spirit Guardians which made him visible. Which means he’s visible to Fig when she tries to trip him on his way to the vault (meaning no disadvantage on her roll, which succeeds) and he goes unconscious when he hits the ground.

Ayda comes into the vault to tell them they have less than a minute before Kier un-Banishes and they need to leave ASAP. Everyone makes rolls to find cool/important stuff. With a Nat 20 Arcana roll, Adaine finds her and Aelwyn’s spellbooks and the items taken from them as well as a bunch of top secret scrolls containing her mom’s research. On a 17 religion check, Kristen finds Adaine’s mom’s notes on the location of a temple in Sylvere (presumably to the Nightmare King) and, combined with what she already knows from the book in the pirate library, she knows where the temple is. On a 14 persuasion check to “make the gems dance” (idk y’all, I just record the things Emily says, I can’t explain them) she finds something about gem lore in the research and accidentally makes the tower self destruct. Oops. Ayda Invisibilizes everyone and they get OUT of there. And by “they” I mean everyone but Anguin because Adaine was serious about wanting him dead. Fig kinda wanted to keep him around to see if he could cast Planeshift but, Adaine gets the final word and the words she chooses are, “He sucks and I want him to die.”

Everyone meets back up at the Van and then they Teleport back to Fabian’s folks’ place. The elves there are very psyched to see Adaine, as a fellow elf, and her party members are even happier to see her. While talking to Telemien, they group finds out that he made the sword Adaine found and that it’s the sword of the North Star. When Gorgug suggests he should make Fabian a sword too, Adaine offers Fandrangool to him and he takes it.

Kristen pays Ayda to cast Sending to Jawbone for relationship advice. Jawbone is happy to help and agrees to find a way for them to have a longer conversation. I want to note that Kristen paid for two messages and the second just consisted of this exchange:

Kristen: Fuck yes!

Jawbone: Hell yeah.

Anyway, Fabian dances all night (sure) and Riz, Keeper of the Braincells, finds Adaine and asks what the deal with Aelwyn is since the last time the group saw her, she was super trying to kill them. Adaine gives him the short version of what happened and then Ayda comes in, carrying Aelwyn. Upon being given permission, Ayda lays Aelwyn down in Adaine’s bed and Adaine holds her. Riz reads the room and peaces out. As they trance, Aelwyn starts to regain some of her spell slots and unconsciously shields Adaine with an abjurer’s ward which is so cute and bittersweet that it nails me with 1d4 psychic damage.

From one sweet moment to another, Ayda finds Fig and they proceed to extremely frankly compliment each other. Ayda tells Fig that she’s loud, brave, funny, charming, and exciting. Fig says Ayda is direct, analytical, and has a very unique perspective. Also, she cries fire which is dope as hell. When Ayda says that she really doesn’t have any female friends her age on Crazy Pirate Island, Fig suggests she just join up with the Bad Kids and Ayda is very down. They do the slumber party thing and it’s all very cute.

After everyone else has turned in, Kristen gets a magic video-message from Aguefort who is looking messed up. Apparently, he OD’d on a bunch of experimental magic doing all the BS he did at the top of the ep, he seriously pissed off the government, and now he has to figure out how to move the sun back to where it’s supposed to be. Oh, and also Jawbone wants to speak with her.

Jawbone and Kristen have a conversation where Kristen skirts the issue of what she hid from Tracker that made her upset (because, as you remember, it’s the fact that he was cheated on). Jawbone basically says that people can usually sense when they’re being manipulated and if Kristen got Tracker flowers just to make her not be mad rather than to make her happy, then of course she’s still be pissed. He also says that full transparency is important to Tracker and if Kristen genuinely didn’t realize that because it isn’t to her then she should explain that. Kristen seems to get it and also asks Jawbone to call back the next day at the same time (probably so he can talk to Sandra-Lynn).

In the morning, Fabian has a nice chat with his granddad. He would like Fabian to get to be a chill forest elf with him but Fabian knows he has a heroic duty. He does submit to eating a flower though. Elf stuff.

Everyone meets up except for Adaine who is still with Aelwyn who is doing poorly. She brings Aelwyn to the resident healers but refuses to leave her alone. Telemein offers to take charge of Aelwyn but Adaine says it’s up to her if she wants to stay. When Aelwyn comes to, she’s not sure if they made it out of the Tower via escaping or dying. Adaine lets her know that they survived and promises to protect her while she recovers. When she sees that Aelwyn is having trouble thinking straight, she gives her Boggy to hold and ritual casts Detect Magic which pings some kind of Enchantment deep within her mind. In response, Adaine casts Detect Thoughts and finds herself in Aelwyn’s mindscape which basically looks bombed to hell like the Blitz. Her metaphorical emotional walls are represented by literal walls and battlements which have been torn up and, though they are jumbled up, Adaine can see shared childhood memories from Aelwyn’s POV. She can see that Aelwyn has spent basically their entire childhood suppressing her natural protective instincts towards Adaine out of fear of their parents and hating herself for it.

In the middle of everything, Adaine finds a really powerful magical charm made of Aelwyn's protective energy and whatever Enchantment she sensed before. Adaine can tell that this is what they were trying to torture out of Aelwyn but weren't able to. On the charm, there's writing. It says, "Despite all of the torment and tribulation, let this be proof I always knew there was only one person clever enough to find this." Adaine senses that she can dispel it and it will trigger whatever effect Aelwyn intended. Adaine does so.

“I’m going to describe something very heartbreaking now,” says Brennan, causing me to add an item to my list of “Things You Seriously Don’t Want To Hear Your DM Say.”

Adaine is snapped out of Aelwyn’s thoughts and Aelwyn is briefly overcome with pain as her mind is forcibly rewritten back to its default state by the backup copy that Adaine just triggered. That’s right. No more soft-Aelwyn. The bitch is back. Eat your Goddamn dice, Brennan.

Detention

Kristen for Whatever the Hell She Thought She Was Doing With That Ribbon

You are the PARTY HEALER and you have NEGATIVE THREE DEX. Leave the parkour shenanigans to Fabian!

This was so funny though. I think I compared the Womping of Fabian to the Keyfish thing from CritRole* but this was the actual Keyfish moment because it was super dumb, unnecessary, involved a huge fall and sketchy grasp of physics, but crucially, was hilarious and not heartbreaking.

Never change, Ally.

*lol, Now Kristen can join the club with Keyleth and Bev from Naddpod.

Honor Roll

Fabian for Getting His Groove Back

Look, I don’t think this episode is the most competent Fabian has ever been or the most heroic he’s ever been or the coolest he’s even been. But...didn’t he seem happy? And open? And a little daring? This is the most Fabian that Fabian has been since The Wicklaw Incident. He did so much support playing in this episode and it felt so right. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets his subclass back soon or picked up some battle dancer or fire stuff (or maybe something totally different), at least for flavor.

He still probably has some ways to go (“I’m not sure about myself but the two of you have got this.”) but I think he was doing so much better this ep than when this little arc of personal growth started that I have to give him props. Welcome back Fabian Aramais Seacaster!

Random Thoughts

Note: Because of this ep’s title, we now 100% know that the canon spelling of Adaine’s sister’s name is Aelwen (not -wyn) but I’ll deal with that starting with next ep because this has already taken too long to finish.

Note #2: @jamiebluewind just put up this post with various character and location descriptions you might find helpful.

OK, so are we sure the alarms triggered at the end of last episode were triggered by Aguefort? Because they went off before he actually did anything. His recording played, they pressed a button, alarms went off, and THEN he video-called Adaine. It could just be that Brennan got the order a little off after the hiatus (or that making the video-call is what caused the alarms) but I wanted to bring it up.

Why the hell was whatever the hell THAT was Arthur’s play and not Chronomancy? Like, stop time, grab Adaine, and go. Simple. I understand the reason is that he is insane and beyond human comprehension but geez (and he has to be or else he would be the ultimate deus ex machina with no reason to not solve literally every problem above a certain level of severity).

“Why would I carry my dad in this battle he never carried me.” Aydaaaaaa.

With all the fun Fabian had playing support this episode, I wouldn’t be shocked if be picked up a level of Cleric or Bard. Or even if he just got the Magic Initiate feat which could easily be explained in story as him taking an elective or working with Fig/Adaine/Kristen to learn some basics.

Ayda and Fig’s little, “Did he see me?”/“No, because your Invisibility spell was that good,” back and forth was so cute. They were super cute all episode really. People were shipping Adaine and Ayda which I personally didn’t get at all from their interactions which I found just friendly but I would be a lot less surprised if Fig and Ayda happened based on that whole pre-sleepover scene. (Based on their convo it also seems like they’re close in age but even if Ayda is like in her mid-20s or something, she’d still be Fig’s most age appropriate relationship which is, como se dice, slightly troubling). Anyway, y’all know I’m not a shipper but I’m very invested in their relationship however it ends up.

Similar topic, Fig insisting Ayda be mad at her and not her dad for attacking her while Disguised? Gah, that was so much.

Emily’s line of the episode was casually summing up her entire character by going, “I usually look like someone else but I mean what I say.”

Also, LOL at her just rocking into the fight as Aguefort playing the bass. What a visual.

Murph’s Tomb Raiding 101 bit was extremely funny.

“I would like to toss The Ball.”

Did you catch when the group realized that they left the boys with no healers and Emily was like, “Oh no, I forgot you weren't a paladin,” to Murph? I figured that was a reference to the fact that Murph’s favored archetype (in his own words) is a grizzled old knight who has to do the right thing but now I’m also lowkey wondering if he’s playing a Paladin in S5 (or maybe in their homegame).

Ayda was also very endearing towards the other girls this ep. Asking permission to grab Kristen (“Enthusiastic consent!”) and running up and grabbing Adaine’s hands after dispelling her orb. I am so glad Adaine decided to make friends with her.

Valid choice for Adaine to give the sword to Fabian but Give Adaine A Sword 2020. She should have proficiency as an elf and she needs a way to physically attack people that will do actual damage. Alternatively, Adaine should take one level in fighter or monk so the next time she slaps someone, it does actual damage.

I know Jawbone is both extremely chill and a consummate professional, but wild to talk to your girlfriend’s uncle about falling out due to him being cheated on. I for sure would have found someone else to talk to

Emily’s face when the Ribbon Dancing sequence was happening was so bugged out in disbelief which says A Lot coming from Ms. Hilda-Hilda herself.

So they fully destroyed Calethriel Tower which seems problematic seeing as there were for sure other prisoners in there. Like, even assuming all of them were peak evil and deserved to die (which seems extremely unlikely considering the people we do know who were locked up here) that still seems like a political disaster.

“Where is she on the earth? Can we teleport there?”/”She’s actually in the next room.”/ “Extremely convenient.”

Curious about when exactly Mom Abernant’s (I promise I’ll learn her name as soon as we have an official spelling I can commit to) research was taken from, her. Was she working for the government and forced to abandon it or was it taken from her while she was researching privately?

“Your modifier is bigger than their total.”

“Describe the room to me.”/”It’s a vault and it’s on the first floor.”

Adaine shows up to Telemien’s BS high elven pronunciation of Gorgug and is immediately like “There are hard G’s in high elvish.” I love her. Zero chill.

“I have it too if I sleep goodbye”

I lost my favorite sweater recently so I was vibing with Adaine’s temporary devastation at having forgotten to get her jacket (no worries, Brennan said it would have been with the rest of her stuff).

I just wanna say, wild of the elves to basically put Adaine and Aelwyn in adjacent cells.

Imagine you’re just a normal ass resident of the world of Spyre and, one day, you wake up and the sun is a huge YES! Which is super weird, even for a fantasy world but you take it in stride and, eventually, it gets sorted out. And then, six months later, it’s the middle of the day and the sun suddenly lurches across the sky and just stays there. And then you find out that the dude who did it is the same dude who kicked Sol out of the sky the last time!

I thought Fig was gonna offer Ayda access to her dads when they were talking about how Aguefort is a subpar dad because she has two. At the very least she needs to see Jawbone.

As a lawyer (#2 demographic for FH after CEO’s) I was very into the Similar to But Legally Distinct From Blitzkrieg Bop track.

“I have much more money than you.”

One of my favorite D&D tropes is the group splitting up boys/girls and then the two groups having wildly different experiences.

I think it’s interesting that everyone in Adaine’s family talks Like That except for her. Like, Aelwyn does it, even when she’s brain-fried and not being a bitch so we know it’s not just that but Adaine talks like a normal teenager like 80% of the time.

I just realized, Adaine called her shot last episode when she cursed her dad and then let him die this episode. It’s easy to be an Oracle if you follow through on all your threats.

(Also, absolutely not convinced he’s dead until we see a body. Kristen fell 10 stories this episode and she’s fine.)

I find the grudging respect that Aelwyn had for Adaine, even at her most messed up extremely interesting.

I mentioned this already in another post but, as womped as I was by Aelwyn’s personality getting reset to normal, it really was the right thing to do, storywise. Like, I’ve really been enjoying vulnerable Aelwyn but that wasn't really earned. Even she said it herself. She can’t give a full apology if she’s not in her right mind. And, in this episode, we got confirmation for what I think we all pretty much assumed. Aelwyn wasn’t just “born bad”. In fact, if anything, it’s the opposite. She was born with such strong protective instincts that the entire way she is able to use magic is based around protection. In a better world with better parents, she would have been the best most Ride or Die older sister anyone could ask for. But, instead, she was ruined in the opposite direction of Adaine and built walls to protect herself instead of others. It’s so poetic I wanna eat my dice. But, I digress. Resetting Aelwyn back to her last save file is an extremely clutch story move because it feels like back to step one but it’s not because now, Adaine fully understands what her deal is and Adaine knows she has the capacity to be good and kind and just decent. Aelwyn might have reset but Adaine didn’t. And, like, after your sister who is barely strong enough to sit upright or think straight tries to magically shield you from nothing in particular because she feels like she should, are you gonna give up on her just because she’s retreated back to the safe waters of name calling? Doubt it. I really can’t wait to see what their initial interactions are like. Is Adaine gonna treat her with kid gloves knowing what she now knows or fall back into sparring with her? Is Aelwyn gonna be totally back to her old self or will she have enough self-awareness to know that if Adaine reset her (will she know that happened?) then she must have seen inside her head and know what’s going on in there? Will she understand that but still stubbornly refuse any attempts to reach out by Adaine and try to go fully walls up again? Don’t know but I can’t wait to see how it shakes out.

But seriously. How cute was Aelwyn trying to do shields on Adaine this ep? The first time she non-grudgingly steps up to the plate to protect her for real you are gonna hate me so much because I am not going to be able to shut up about it.

One last thing: We haven’t heard from the Shadowcat in a while and that Concerns me.

This episode, Fig, Adaine, Gorgug, and Riz each rolled one Nat 20. Fig rolled one Nat 1 and Brennan rolled two.

#fantasy high #fantasy high live #dimension 20 #dimension 20 spoilers #fantasy high spoilers

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butterflyinthewell · 5 years

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Blow this up big, everybody...YouTube is pulling some majorly ableist censorship.

https://www.change.org/p/youtube-reinstate-sbsk-comment-sections-immediately

Copy / pasted from the petition site.

Reinstate SBSK comment sections on YouTube

Special Books by Special Kids started this petition to YouTube

Video explanation here: https://youtu.be/Wy7Tvo-q63o

YouTube has taken discriminatory action against SBSK (YouTube.com/specialbooksbyspecialkids) and other channels that feature minors as part of an over-reaching effort to combat child predation on their platform. They have chosen channels at random and disabled all of their comments without any sort of transparency or real communication with creators. Their actions were not all encompassing, rather many channels (especially those tied to large corporations and advertisers) have been left unaffected. They have no information for creators/communities on how long the comments will be disabled or if the action is permanent.

We at SBSK are fighting this blatant discrimination and censorship of the disability community. Our impact as a channel and a nonprofit is greatly limited without our comment section. We are heartbroken and angry for all that we have lost due to YouTube's actions. Chris and I have advocated since receiving the initial notice last week, but our pleas and outrage have been ignored. We are asking you, our community across the globe, to rally around us and to fight this discrimination.

Please sign our petition and include a message demanding the immediate reinstatement of comments on SBSK's channel.

You can read our full open letter to YouTube below:

Dear YouTube,

On our channel, comments aren't just "an important way for our team to engage with our community"... they are as paramount to the work we are doing and the positive global change we are trying to promote as the videos themselves.

Our comment section is where the individuals we feature often hear and experience societal acceptance for the first time. They are a place where information and tips are shared; where myths are dispelled and stigma challenged. They are a place, (one of the only public forums) where someone can be acknowledged as more than their diagnosis.

Our comment section is where discord and dialogue happen. Where perspectives are challenged and widened. It is where empathy is found, fostered, and made commonplace.

To have lost our comment section is devastating for our team and our community. It is devastating to our mission and the neurodiversity movement that had found it's voice on YouTube.

I appreciate your response, and while I believe there is a need to further protect minors on your platform, there has to be another way. Half of our mission is to show those we feature that society will accept them if they have the courage to put themselves out there. So far, every person I have interviewed has been met with an abundance of loving and supportive comments.

I am incredibly proud of SBSK's followers and the empowerment and ownership they feel towards our channel. We have one of those most positive comment sections on the internet; one that is monitored by us and policed by our community who will accept nothing less than respect in those forums.

By choosing to move forward this way, YouTube will severely minimize our impact as a non-profit. In trying to do the right thing with an emphasis to protect your advertisers, you have genuinely hurt people and censored them. These individuals are not the pedophiles you were targeting, just collateral damage.

The disability community has fought too hard and long for it's voice. I know there has to be a way that we can work together to support the protection of minors on YouTube without isolating and silencing the disability community once more. We ask that you consider us for the group of channels who will be allowed comments while working with you to moderate them.

Sincerely,

Chris Ulmer and Alyssa Porter

Team SBSK

#youtube #ableism #disability rights #sbsk #special books for special kids #BLOW THIS UP #EVERYBODY REBLOG #SIGN THE PETITION #censorship

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ask-prime-starscream · 5 years

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Once more, I’m super grateful for your replies! Now for the analysis...

Windblade is uninteresting. I think, part of the hate Windblade gets is because she’s female. Not necessarily out of misogyny, in some or in most (?) cases it might be quite the opposite. As one of the very, very few female protagonists, she shoulders certain expectations. When people perceive her as just as uninteresting as a lot of the tons of male protagonists, she gets the full backlash alone whereas the male protagonists can take it as a group. Also nobody is that passionate about a male hero, since they are the default hero after all. They are background radiation. Nobody cares. Anyway. Backlash like that tends to happen to protagonists representing a minority (and I hate to label women a minority, but you know...). If they are not that well written, they seem to frag it up for a whole underrepresented group. Therefore the hatred a male protagonist with the same premise would never get. (And I’m talking here about the standard hero. I’ll better not start what abstruse amounts of hate male main characters get who aren’t strong, brave and so on...)

Windblade is a bitch to Starscream.

Everybody is a bitch to Starscream. He is alone. He has no friends and he doesn’t do much to change that. Rather he digs his own grave. Like Wheeljack said, you could almost pity him. Almost. I can’t really blame Windblade, but as I said before, I generally didn’t like how the comics were written. As an outsider, Windblade should have been the one to give him a chance and whether he takes it or not is on him... And since the writers normally want him to suffer... *sigh*

Windscream isn’t the problem. It’s the fans.

Never came across overly annoying fans with that ship, though... So I can’t say anything about that. I have my experiences with annoying fans though. Fans who ship pairings where one partner is underage, in a clear dependence and used by their partner. And fans treat it as the best, most romantic thing ever and are absolutely blind to how uncomfortable that pairing actually is... and I don’t talk about some obscure niche pairing. It’s among the main pairings of a fandom and everywhere!

Starscream is a bitch to Windblade.

Hmmm. You know, I never really perceived it as such. They were equally at each other’s throats and as a villain I expect to act a certain way, Starscream seems to go rather easy on her (when he could have killed her). Also Windblade has all the love and support from everyone while Starscream walks the lonely road. She isn’t oppressed by him, her only disadvantage is the fact Chromia fragged up majorly. And here it comes. Windblade and Chromia as a ship within the IDW context, makes me extremely uncomfortable. Because Chromia was being a whiny bitch who wanted back home, she killed a bunch of innocents and almost killed her best friend. This in turn triggers the events of them gathering another bunch of innocents who could have lost their freedom or even their lives for absolutely nothing. As a supposed good guy and as a friend one should be able to trust, she just fragged up. And nobody seems to care. Yes, Starscream fragged up tons of things, too. But he is framed as the villain and nobody brushes off what he did. When he confesses his crimes at the end of TAAO, they might have even executed him, instead he gets locked up forever. Chromia is still Windblade’s best friend and gets away with everything.

Phew. Well, that’s why I call it the IDW baggage. In other universes, I’d be fine with a Windblade x Chromia ship. And in the story I have in mind for Windblade and Starscream, the events of IDW never happened either. They are completely blank slates. But if the IDW baggage drags you down anyway and you cannot blind it out, you have all the right to avoid that ship.

#Starscream #Windblade

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nmcconnellportfolio · 5 years

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What Difference Does It Who Speaks: The Question of Gatekeeping, Privilege, Authentic/Non-Essentialist Representation & the #OwnVoices movement

If there is a form of immortality possible to humanity, stories may be the one way that keep those that are written about alive long after they’re gone. But if storytelling is a form of immortality-making, there comes two important questions. Who, by getting to be represented in the story, gets to live forever? And by extension, who gets to tell these stories and about the people within those stories? A revelation that has resulted in the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement that was born in 2014, a reaction to a book publishing industry that has lacked diversity and representation in both its books and the authors who write those books; the latter resulting in the #OwnVoices movement, where it’s encouraged for books featuring minority representation to have minority authors writing the story (i.e. a black female author writing a book with a black female lead etc). While the question for the unit askes for us to write about representations in and of themselves (aka the representation of Muslim athletes in America, representations of intersexuality in Australia etc), this essay is less interested with representations and more concerned with the ambition of analysing the natureof representation as presented by the #WeNeedDiverseBooks/#OwnVoices movements and mainstream society and the question of how those representations are effected by whom gets to create them within the media we consume. If non-marginalized authors write about marginalized communities, does that very fact make the representation essentialist – regardless to the quality and content of the representation? Are there limits and potentially bad outcomes to the increasing desire to see authenticity within the media we consume?

Before we can understand how representation of characters is linked to whom writes these representations, we should understand the concept of the death of author – and how #OwnVoices may be considered a rejection of this death. The death of the author, as first described by Roland Barthes in the famous 1967 essay La Mort de L'Auteur, talked about the separation between the text and the author and allowing the text to be purely cpercieved by the reader, saying ‘literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes’ (Barthes, 1967, pp. 2). Foucault also addressed the relationship between texts and authors, as addressed in the 1969 essay What is the Author (as displayed in a collection of essays published in 1980), saying in support of Barthes, ‘we would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse?...What difference does it make who is speaking?’ (Bouchard, 1980, pp. 138).

However, as John Farrell noted in the 2017 book, ‘when we read literary texts it is people we are trying to understand — people under varying historical circumstances; it is their creative actions we are trying to appreciate, not mere collections of words’ (Farrell, 2017, pp. 243). This central idea, that one cannot simply divorce literature from the humans who create them because that literature isthe expression (and therefor, an extension through words) of the creator, is an important idea that is arguably foundational to the #OwnVoices movement. An idea also compounded by an video essay by Lindsay Ellis, where she expressed the notion that a major fault of the death of the author concept is the assumption that all people of all backgrounds have the same equal opportunity and by extension, all texts have equal opportunity for exposure on the basis of their merit – despite the fact that texts are judged on whom tells what story, that storytellers background and why they are telling the story (Ellis, 2018). This rejection of the death of the author and this question that Foucault poses, what difference does it make who is speaking, matters deeply when storytelling is a matter of gatekeeping and privilege.

This comes to another major aspect of the #OwnVoices situation, addressing whom (and who doesn’t) gets to be the author; who gets to direct cinema, who gets to write music, who gets to write the books that express the world around them and, by doing so, gets to construct the narrative of the world for the audience. Of the publishing and writing industry, as published in a major report, notes that the majority of writers and publishers are white and male by the majority. Within the publishing industry, according to an extensive survey in published in 2016 concerning diversity of book creators in 2015 (and not just diversity within the books themselves), it was found that the statistics of the publishing industry overall is 79% white, 78% cisgender female, 88% straight/heterosexual and 92% able-bodied (Lee, 2016). Another report about the publishing industry supports this, Melanie Ramdarshan Bold going on to investigate the state of diversity within the British publishing industry by analysing all young adult books published from 2006 to 2016 – and who found that only 8% of all YA authors within Britain are writers of colour, 90% of British YA authors being white (Ramdarshan Bold, 2018, pp. 398). This is also reflected within the cinema industry, where a comprehensive report investigated the statistics of those who directed and wrote 1200 mainstream films from 2007 to 2018 – and found only 3.6% of film directors were women, 6% were African-American and 3.6% were Asian-American, the majority of directors and creators of cinema being white men (Pieper, Choi & Choueiti, 2018, p. 1-9)

So we have established the important relationship between stories and the storytellers and we have now determined that the majority of our media – which includes representations of marginalized communities – have majorly being created by non-marginalized storytellers. The last question needs to be answered” is storytelling outside of your identity (be it cultural, racial, sexual, gender or disability) a form of cultural appropriation? Such questions about the #WeNeedDiverseBooks and the #OwnVoices movement have come up with backlash against the publication of certain books pertaining to the identities of their authors and how it connects to content of their books; Helen Barr’s debut novel Blood Makes Noisewas called to be cancelled before it was even published, on the basis that a story about the AIDS crisis (which predominantly effected gay men) should not be told by a straight woman, one commenter called Jay Elliot saying that ‘a woman profiting off the stories and experiences of gay males during the AIDS epidemic is despicable, and I hope this entire project burns to the ground’ (Kheraji, 2018); the book APlace for Wolves, a self-declared #OwnVoices book,is ‘cancelled’ and prevented from being published on the basis that the author ‘appropriated’ the historical genocide of Bosnia as the setting for a same-sex love story (Rothstein, 2019); people call for the book Blood Heir to be prevented from publication due the belief of insensitive portrayals of slavery inspired by the slavery of African-Americans, despite the author saying that the depiction of slavery was not based in U.S slavery but on indentured servitude from her own country of Asia (Hoggatt, 2019)

These are just examples of what is believed to be a growing toxicity within the #OwnVoices and #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement, covered by Rosenfield where she discusses the growing pressure on minority authors to not just sell their stories that focus on diverse themes, but also to sell themselves and their identities in relation to their stories, even if it means selling private information about themselves – such as closeted sexual identities or mental illnesses, information that if released could create unsafe situations for the author – for public consumption. (Rosenfield, 2019). This situation of dissatisfaction between the identification of authors with their stories is also discussed within the New York Times by Jami Attenberg, where her article acts as a rejection of the principles behind the #OwnVoices movement where fiction becomes a reflection of the authors life, saying ‘how do you even explain the creative process, that there are all these little bits and pieces, that a work of fiction can be a kaleidoscope of your life, looking nothing like the original whole, just made up of shattered bits. Why can’t people let fiction be?’ (Attenberg, 2017).

One can argue that the overzealousness and toxicity of the publishing community, of cancelling books before they’re published and creating ever-impossible standards of whom can write what story, of not allowing fiction to simply be and allowing the author to die, is a reaction to the statistics that we just saw about the publishing industry – that the narratives about marginalized communities have always being the creation of non-marginalized authors, even narratives that have stereotyped and dehumanized these communities. But the belief underlying the #OwnVoices movement and the resulting examples discussed above all show a troubling underlying issue; that certain stories should only be written by certain people, that as Heather Heath says, ‘While we live in a culture that tries to tell us that some groups are so different from us that we cannot possibly understand them, this is simply untrue; we are all human beings and we can come alongside each other and learn from one another’ (Heath, 2018). Is the perspective of someone who is another race or another sexuality, according to some individuals within the #OwnVoices movement, so Other can no amount of research or work or sheer human empathy can cross the boundaries and have that story properly told? Is the perspective of a bisexual autistic immigrant woman – of myself – a perspective so different that it cannot be written or told or understood by others outside my identities, let alone be properly written?

In conclusion, while this essay was not concerned with representations in and of itself, we can conclude to an ideal of storytelling that Lindsay Ellis talks about with the famed novelist John Green, that by telling a fiction, it is human nature that we feel connected to that person that tells that story – regardless of who that person is (Ellis, 2018). The #OwnVoices and #WeNeedDiverseBooks is a long-needed and necessary reaction to the exclusion of minorities from the stories we tell in our books and television and cinema – but one that requires a sophisticated understanding that who tells what story is never black or white, but must always be considered with nuance. If the statistics do not improve behind the scenes of our media industry and if the toxic implications of gatekeeping are still maintained, if men are forced to write only about men and white people can only write white people and so on and for forth, we are far less likely to create empathetic and progressive stories of identity and diversity that are needed after decades of absence. Foucault once asked, what difference does it make who is speaking. For us and for the publishing community and for all storytellers, who can tell stories is a difference that means everything.

References

Attenberg, J. (2017). Stop Reading My Fiction as the Story of My Life. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/books/review/stop-reading-my-fiction-as-the-story-of-my-life.html

Barthes, R. (1967). La Mort de L'Auteur [Ebook] (pp. 2-6). Pittsburg: Aspen. Retrieved from https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf

Bouchard, D. (1980). Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (p. 138). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Ellis, L. (2018). Death of the Author [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGn9x4-Y_7A

Farrell, J. (2017). The Varieties of Authorial Intention: Literary Theory Beyond the Intentional Fallacy (p. 243). Springer.

Heath, H. (2018). 5 Problems Within the Own Voices Campaign (And How to Fix Them) [Blog]. Retrieved from http://hannahheath-writer.blogspot.com/2018/04/5-problems-within-own-voices-campaign.html

Hoggatt, A. (2019). An Author Canceled Her Own YA Novel Over Accusations of Racism. But Is It Really Anti-Black?. Retrieved from https://slate.com/culture/2019/01/blood-heir-ya-book-twitter-controversy.html

Lee, J. (2016). Where Is the Diversity in Publishing? The 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey Results. New York City: Lee and Low Books. Retrieved from https://blog.leeandlow.com/2016/01/26/where-is-the-diversity-in-publishing-the-2015-diversity-baseline-survey-results/

Kheraj, A. (2018). does it matter who writes queer stories?. Retrieved from https://i-d.vice.com/en_au/article/8xeg4b/does-it-matter-who-writes-queer-stories

Pieper, K., Choi, A., Choueiti, M., & Smith, S. (2019). Inclusion in the Director's Chair? (pp. 9-10). University of Southern California Annesburg School for Communication and Journalism. Retrieved from http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/inclusion-in-the-directors-chair-2019.pdf

Ramdarshan Bold, M. (2018). The Eight Percent Problem: Authors of Colour in the British Young Adult Market (2006–2016). Publishing Research Quarterly, 34(3), 385-406. doi: 10.1007/s12109-018-9600-5

Rosenfield, K. (2019). What Is #OwnVoices Doing To Our Books?. Retrieved from https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/04/228847/own-voices-movement-ya-literature-impact

Rothstein, K. (2019). Another YA Author Withdraws Book From Publication After Backlash. Retrieved from https://www.vulture.com/2019/02/kosoko-jackson-a-place-for-wolves.html

#representation #ownvoices #we need diverse books #own voices #literature #critical theory #essay

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truthbeetoldmedia · 5 years

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Good Trouble 1x10 “Re-Birthday” Review

In Episode 10 of Good Trouble, it’s Davia’s birthday and she’ll cry if she wants to — and make some poor decisions. After all, that’s what your twenties are for, right?

In true Davia fashion, she plans a huge bash revolved around trivia questions about herself. Each answer is a location on a bar crawl, in which the Coterie squad and their mandatory plus ones are split into two teams competing for a mystery prize. Points can be won by getting to the location(s) first and by taking part in various mischievous activities.

Callie and Jamie are bummed to find that they’re not on the same team, and Bryan is equally upset to find that Gael is on Callie’s team. Though Gael has “chosen” him, he still seems threatened by his boyfriend’s past fling and present roommate.

Mariana’s plus one is Raj, who she now seems to have a friend in, despite their awkward encounter a few episodes back that inspired Mariana to create a female support group at work. Alice invites Sumi whom she also has an awkward past with, being that they’re exes, and Sumi still seems to be stringing her along.

Malika brings her boyfriend Isaac, while Davia forbids Dennis from bringing a plus one and also goes by herself, since her married fling Jeff seems to be ignoring her. Little does she know, Dennis told him off when he showed up at the loft looking for Davia.

With the announcing of the first trivia question, the gang is off ordering their cars from “Coche”, an Uber-eque service. When Mariana and Callie get into their team’s car, they find that their driver is none other than Brandon, their older brother. (Side note, shouldn’t your app tell you who your driver is?)

We later find out that Brandon is driving because his successful wife Eliza, Jamie’s sister, wants to support him while he writes music, but Brandon wants to make his own way. Additionally, Eliza is on the road a lot, leaving Brandon lonely and in need of some human interaction.

He confides in Dennis, who’s in the same boat with his own ex-wife. Their divorce has left him high and dry, and though she’s offered to help him out, he’d refused when his pride got in the way. Talking with Dennis seems to help Brandon realize that he has every right to want to make his own money, and he shouldn’t have to hide that from his wife.

Meanwhile, there’s palpable tension between the love square that is Callie, Jamie, Gael and Bryan. At a gay bar, Davia announces that the players can earn points by kissing someone they’ve never kissed before. When Bryan kisses Callie, it visibly upsets both Jamie and Gael. Jamie confronts Callie asking what they are, and Callie doesn’t really have an answer for him. He tells her that if she wants to be friends with occasional benefits on her terms, he doesn’t want to play that game.

Bryan is upset because although Gael has “chosen him”, he knows that Callie broke up with Gael and is nervous that if she hadn’t, Gael wouldn’t be with him. In a sweet moment back at the loft, Gael promises his boyfriend that he’s with him for a reason and that he doesn’t regret anything that’s happened. Gael and Callie have also agreed to get to know each other as friends. (Yeah, right.)

Alice and her plus one also run into some drama when Sumi leads her on all night. Malika notices and immediately confronts Alice, reminding her that Joey, her blind date a few episodes back, is totally into her. Though Alice is afraid she may not be interested when she finds out Alice still isn’t out to her parents, she takes Malika’s advice and calls her, leaving her various voicemails explaining her situation. Unfortunately, Sumi overhears and seems hurt when Alice mentions she’s completely over her ex. Looks like there’s more drama on the horizon for these two.

When she’s not giving out relationship advice, Malika is forced to confront her own issues with intimacy. Though she’s in a new and drama-free relationship with Isaac, he wants to get to know her better and she’s a closed book. They turn Davia’s trivia themed party into their own game, and when Isaac wins, Malika has to answer a few personal questions. Though she hates talking about her family, letting Isaac in couldn’t have worked out better. It’s clear that this new relationship is built to last.

Mariana and Raj have a relatively fun night, even managing to steal the disco ball hanging from the ceiling at one of the clubs. Though they clearly make a great team, Mariana is leading Raj on big time, and her countless flirtations seem to leave Raj a little disappointed. Regardless, the two decide to give their coworkers something to talk about and post a picture on Instagram, using the ship name they’ve been given in the caption. It’s unclear if their relationship will go anywhere, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t ship them a little bit. For now though, they make great friends.

Davia’s party ends on a bit of a sour note when she texts Jeff and he immediately calls her, debunking her theory that he’s ignoring her and her birthday. She finds out that Dennis told him off, and when he admits that he punched Jeff and told him Davia deserves better, Davia retaliates by telling Dennis he needs to respect himself too.

The episode ends with everyone sending important texts and making important posts, with Callie asking Jamie for a second chance on his terms, and Dennis telling his wife he does want some money out of their divorce settlement. Meanwhile, Davia is hooking up with Jeff, and just as it strikes midnight and her birthday comes to a close, she realizes she can’t keep pursuing a relationship that’s going nowhere year after year. But in a turn of events, Jeff reveals that he’s leaving his wife. DUN-DUN-DUN.

This episode was like all the standout episodes of Good Trouble — packed full with drama. Even Brandon’s cameo was based on relationship troubles with his wife Eliza. It’s almost difficult to keep up with everyone and their plus ones and all the will they/won’t they relationships. Even those who aren’t dating their dates get into their own drama. And of course, alcohol doesn’t exactly help that situation.

So, we have a lot of relationships to dissect. Let’s start with the love square/rectangle/rhombus: Callie, Gael, Jamie and Bryan. For majority of the episode, it was difficult to tell if Gael and Bryan would be together by the end of the night. Going into their conversation back at the loft, I honestly assumed they’d break up and Gael would go straight to Callie and back to their old ways. But the writers know better than to give the audience what they expect. So even though Callie and Jamie hit a bump at the bar, it seems like they’re back on track.

Brandon was also thrown into the mix, and having had a relationship with Callie, I wasn’t sure what kind of role he’d play. But it seems like the Good Trouble creators aren’t ones for fan service, and Brandon and Callie might be a sunken ship at this point. Of course, there’s no telling what will happen in the future, and with his relationship with his wife seemingly on the rocks, anything could happen.

Now onto Mariana and Raj. I was so sure, probably along with every other viewer, that their possible relationship was over before it began when Raj got majorly rejected by her and understandably told off for attempting to kiss his coworker. But Mariana’s flirting is hard to ignore, and Raj’s pining is even harder. This could go one of two ways: either they’ll become an item and confirm their asshole coworkers’ speculations, or Raj will cross the line again and drama will ensue, especially given that he’s helping her out with an anonymous scheme at work. Let’s be real, it’ll probably be the latter. This is exactly why as much as I like Raj, I’m not committed to loving him yet. Like all the other men Mariana works with, he just can’t be trusted.

Meanwhile there’s Alice and Sumi, whose drama is getting old real quick. At this point, I get it. Alice is being strung along by her ex while helping to plan her wedding. It’s been 10 episodes of this though, and I’m ready to see Alice in a relationship, hopefully with Joey. It felt like they’d get together after Alice was a guest on her show, so this step backwards has me a bit confused and frustrated. Sumi hasn’t developed as a character at all, sans her negative reaction to Alice’s declaration that she’s over her to Joey’s voicemail box, and even Alice seems to be stuck in place. I’d love to see an episode more focused on her getting her sh*t together, and that includes finding some real comedy work and dropping Sumi altogether.

Speaking of dropping people, I can’t be the only one who hopes Davia kicks Jeff to the curb and gets with Dennis. It’s clear that these two care about each other. Their chemistry has been visible since their duet on the roof. So though I won’t be surprised if Davia entertains Jeff for a little bit longer, I really hope she drops the zero and gets with the hero.

The relationship drama in this episode was so entertaining to watch, just like always. It’s nice that Good Trouble provides a balance between the work drama and the relationship drama, never focusing too heavily on one or the other. These characters are juggling their love lives with their professional lives, and proving that both are equally as difficult and equally as important to maintain. I’m hoping that in the near future, we get back to Mariana’s anonymous list and its repercussions, and back to Callie’s trial troubles.

Although they are the true stars of the show, it’s refreshing to get to know the other Coterie members and their diverse stories. In the end, this is what keeps me coming back for more. Minor character development issues aside, everyone in the Coterie has something about them that has me wanting to see what good trouble they get into.

Good Trouble airs Tuesdays on Freeform at 8/7c.

Jessica’s episode rating: 🐝🐝🐝.5

#Good Trouble #Re-Birthday

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slightlycharredwitch-blog · 6 years

Photo

I’ve seen this meme being talked about by my sister and some of her friends, and there is a lot going on here. They were saying that something felt off about it but they weren’t sure what. What’s off is that it’s very poorly argued, and relies on rhetorical tricks. Let’s walk through it panel by panel, and then discuss the meme as a whole.

Panel #1: The assertion is that Biological sex is a social construct, which they attempt to support by saying that the motive was to create a society where one class loses out for the benefit of another.

The first problem with this argument is that biological sex does not describe our social roles. That’s what gender is. So the argument remains unsupported. The second issue is the over use of jargon. The majority of audiences are going to have a difficult time understanding what the author is trying to say here.

Panel #2: This is a logical counter-argument to panel one. There is scientific evidence to back the claim. It uses complex terms, so it could stand to be simplified for broader audiences, but there isn’t anything majorly wrong here.

Panel #3: This one appears pretty simple at it’s face, but there is actually a lot to untangle here. Let’s break it down into a simple argument pattern and work from there.

Statement 1: There are XX Men and XY Women Statement 2: Intersex people are are neither male nor female Conclusion: Human sexes are nonbinary.

With Statement 1, this one lives or dies based on how you define man/woman. If Man means “Adult Human Male” than there are no XX men. If Man means “Someone who identified as a man” than man describes a social role. Social roles aren’t a manifestation of sex. So either way, Statement 1 doesn’t support the conclusion.

Statement 2 is factually wrong. A biological sex describes the type of gamete (one of the cells needed to make offspring) an organism is trying to produce. Humans only have two gamete types, and a given person can only produce one of them. Intersex people’s bodies only try to produce one or the other, they don’t produce some third gamete or both. And all this is before the fact that calling them sexless is actually intersexist and discriminatory, but I’ll let someone who’s more well versed in the subject elaborate on that.

Since both statements are unrelated at best, and false at worst, the conclusion is unsupported again.

Panel #4: Notice the sudden shift in tone? In the previous panel, this guy was depicted as overly wordy and verbose just like the bearded guy. Now he’s speaking in plain language. His first line about “why the divide” would have been addressed in the first panel, had that panel been talking about gender. The second line makes no sense for him to ask since he already stated that biological sex was reality based on science, which would be why he learned it in school. So why would he ask that?

Because he’s been set up as a strawman. He’s no longer representing an actual opposing argument. He’s instead saying something bordering on irrelevant to set up panal 5 for an easy takedown, while discrediting the side he’s meant to represent.

Panel #5: The meaning here is absolutely drowning under jargon, to the point where it needs translation. Furthermore, this is a run-on sentence, which can be difficult to parse even when they have simple phrasing. So to understand, we’re going to need to break things down again. First, let’s suss out what the words and phrases mean:

Cishetropatriarchal Hegemony: Cishetropatriarchal implies “not transgender, straight, lead by males” and hegemony means a leadership, usually of nations, and often with expansionist goals. Binary Model: Here this means male/female biological sexes. Foregrounds: Usually used in visual arts, the antonym of “background.” It’s supposed to convey putting one group over another. Status Quo: Our society as a whole, at this moment. It has a charged implication in this instance, since it’s becoming political shorthand for “everything that’s wrong.”

We’ve got a bit closer to understanding what’s being said, but we’ve still got a hell of a run-on sentence to deal with here. Unfortunately, the phrasing makes it nearly impossible to tell how the author intended the sentence to flow. Interestingly, since this opens it up to reader interpretation, that gives the author room to claim that any given critique is misrepresenting the content. To try and leave the sentence as intact as possible, we’ll split it in two:

“Because the continuation and the success of the cishetropatriarchal hegemony relies on blind adherence of members of our society to”

Simplified: To continue successfully, our non-trans, straight male leadership needs people to follow blindly

“a binary model which foregrounds the maintenance of the status quo at the expense of minorities such as trans people”

Simplified: A Male/Female model of human biology is the basis that the status quo is founded on. The status quo is maintained in a way that causes harm to minorities, such as trans people.

That took so much breakdown and reassembly, by now it gets hard to remember what this was even a response to! But now we can stick everything back together and analyze what it actually being said. To summarize, we had Hat Guy ask “Then why is society divided in two, and why is biological sex taught in schools?” and the Beard Guy essentially says “Because to continue successfully, our non-trans, straight male leadership needs people to follow blindly (which supports the status quo.) A Male/Female model of human biology is the basis that the status quo is founded on. The status quo is maintained in a way that causes harm to minorities, such as trans people.“

With the haze of jargon cleared away, the argument doesn’t work, because it is still founded on the basis that biological sex is a social construct. The simplest test to see if something is a social construct is to ask what would happen to it if humanity lost self awareness and society. Does the presumed construct survive?

Without any labels, we’d have one type of human who could produce sperm, and one that could produce eggs and carry offspring. You can only make offspring when you match a sperm producer with an egg producer. That is what sex is, in the most simple and basic terms. Biological sex exists in absence of human understanding. So the argument would fail on that fault alone.

Interaction Between Panels #4 and #5: This is where we get into some pretty clear rhetoric, which merits close examination on it’s own. Rhetoric can be used to bolster a well made argument, but it can also shore up a bad argument, since the purpose of rhetoric is to just “feel” true.

We have Hat Guy, who is representing the opposing argument. His shift in tone and sudden use of simpler language is used to imply his arguments have failed, and he’s only resisting out of stubbornness and prejudice. We’re meant to scoff at his ugly ignorance.

Then we have Beard Guy, who is set in place to make that sick take down that the audience can revel in. The panel has an accusatory air to it. The phrasing, where it isn’t making things murky, is highly emotionally charged. Phrasing like “blind adherence” paints Hat Guy, and by extension, the opposing side, as feverishly devoted to a lie.

The undercurrent of the argument in panel five implies that by taking his position, Hat Guy is supporting a system that’s using and abusing an underclass for its own gains. Without saying as much, it evokes a similar gut reaction to being told you’re supporting slavery. It’s framed as a brutal and just take down.

So rather than dismantling the opposition with counter points backed by accurate evidence, Beard Guy has instead attacked the argument with pure rhetoric. He’s guilting the opposition, defaming their character by implying they’re stupid and/or immoral. The evidence provided, rather than being dismantled, has been dismissed and forgotten.

To get all of that information across, using relatively few words, and in a couple panels is the power of rhetoric, context, and framing situations. It’s a lot to take in, and very emotionally charged. This is why we need to look past rhetoric and into arguments, no matter which side they come from.

The Meme Overall: Alright, so we have a meme here that’s absolutely loaded with poor arguments, logical fallacies, falsifiable facts, and searing rhetoric. So what? Memes aren’t essays, they’re jokes, you aren’t supposed to think to deep about them right? Glance over it, laugh, maybe glance again as you share it and see it again as it passes through your group of friends.

But this isn’t really a joke, now is it? These claims are currently being asserted as facts in long-winded, even harder to digest essays, and trickling out into more mainstream activism. It’s more akin a snippet, a quip, or a piece of an essay that’s easier to swallow. It’s the same ideas, but repackaged in a format that’s easy to understand. We know how this meme goes, who’s right and who’s wrong, and why it should be funny. We know that we don’t need to think hard about what it says.

We have an image here, one that has a clear point of view that it wants the viewer to agree with. One that misrepresents facts, and hides that with buzzwords and jargon. One that paints it’s opponents as blind, irrational supporters of evil. And we have all of this wrapped into a pithy and familiar package for that asks us to take it at face value, don’t think to hard about it, and share it widely. It’s propaganda in meme form.

#radfem #liberal #propaganda #trans #critical thinking #formal logic

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