#this blog is actually starting to get some traction which makes me really happy! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

oraclekleo · 6 months

Note

Hellooo 🌻 Kleoo my impression of your blog is it's like a library with No Kids zone sign, peaceful, mature and cozy. By mature it's not only about nsfw reading but the ambience and the way you interact with your followers 💛💛 i can talk on and on about what i like of your blog 😂 thank youu kleoooo 🫶🏻🫶🏻 as for the celeb do i need to mention, my one and only girl 🤣

Hello!

I’m really happy my blog gives such a good impression. I love libraries and I dislike kids so this is exactly how it should look like here. 😂

No, I’m glad the blog gives a mature vibe. Even people who are already older or their soul is mature should have somewhere to go on Tumblr.

Thank you so much for your kind words and your constant support. It means the world to me. 💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝

Let’s get into your compatibility reading and make it as hot as possible. 😈

18+

@lovelysana + Sana (Twice) Compatibility Reading

Cards: 31 Surrendering (Sexual Magic Oracle), Mercury in Leo - Drama, Saturn in Leo - Generosity (Oracle of the Radiant Sun), XX The Judgement, King of Swords, 7 of Wands (Erotic Fantasy Tarot), 4 of Wands, III The Empress, 5 of Wands (Dark Wood Tarot)

Here we go! Right from the start I can see this compatibility to be somewhat of an explosive one. Great passions are in the game but both parties would like to maintain their autonomy. I see that you and Sana would probably feel strongly attracted to each other on a sexual and intellectual level. At the same time, it looks like none of you is willing to take the more submissive role in the relationship which might cause traction and in result epic fights ending with at least one side in tears. You might need to take breaks in your relationship when you simply don’t see each other as while the sexual tension is high in between you, the emotions might become too strong and raw to be handled when you are in each other’s company.

The cards strongly suggest an aspect of long distance communication. During these breaks, you might actually deepen your bond through some form of correspondence. It’s not necessary for you to write each other handwritten letters like the heroines in Jane Austen novels, in this day and age we have quicker and even more intimate ways. When I looked at the cards, I heard sexting in my head, which might become your favourite way to communicate when apart. Both your oracle cards are connected with the Leo sign which denotes a certain level of flirtation. Sexting and flirting through messages can be your way to better express yourself in the relationship without slipping into a quarrel.

No matter how long this relationship would last, it would be a life changing one for you and Sana alike. I see a certain aspect of apprenticeship in the cards which might mean you will learn a lot from Sana, who’s very likely signified by the Empress card in the reading. You might look up to her and really embrace the opportunity to work on yourself in the relationship. When you two are not fighting or f***ing, you are likely to empower each other a great deal. Sana is likely to share her vast knowledge of lust and pleasure with you in a form you will remember till the end of your life. You will never be the same after this relationship.

Although the cards suggest that it might not last for that long. It probably wouldn’t be your happily-ever-after one, but it would pave your path towards your soulmate.

Do you feel uncomfortable reblogging my content and you don't have the funds to support me financially through ko-fi? You can still show you appreciate my works and Czech and Slovakian shelter dogs. Click on the link bellow and the button. It's free! You can click every day! Your clicks will transform into Brit dog food every month and go to doggies in need.

CLICK AND FEED SHELTER DOGS

Have good karma and you will meet your Special Person!

Thank you for reading!

Hit the Like 💖

Comment! 💬

Reblog! 🔁

Follow for more! 💌

Any Feedback is Welcomed ✅

Consider supporting me on ko-fi 💖

#oracle kleo #1111 followers celebration #compatibility competition #tarot #tarotblr #free tarot #free tarot reading #love tarot free #love tarot #no anons

6 notes · View notes

aimmyarrowshigh · 1 year

Text

2022 Fic Roundup Meme

Total Fics Posted: 975 so far (two are hidden right now because they're for anonymous exchanges!) but by the end of the year, it SHOULD be 1,108. I've got three more exchanges due by the 31st, plus 40 #hanukkahbingo drabbles, and then hopefully daily drabbles are back now that the Star-Spangled Big Bang is over and my brain is being a little less eaten. We'll see if Fandom Trumps Hate starts eating my brain, though, because that's the longest of my remaining 2022 stuff!

Total Words Posted: By the end of the year, it should be ~175,000. Currently it's 150,181.

Total Words (of Anything Excluding Blogs) Written: Somewhere between 200,000-250,000, I think, which is pretty usual for me. Most of what I write I just kind of immediately post, but I do have some WIPs kicking around the ol' WIP folder. I didn't start using a comprehensive wordcount tracker until mid-October, so I don't know exactly!

My favorite fic story this year: Either Not In The Answer But The Question or Five Times Captain America Fucked A USO Girl & One Time Steve Rogers Got Fucked -- I'm proud of both, but in different ways. I think both really challenged some of my writing hang-ups and turned out well. I'm happy with all of the longer-than-a-drabble stuff that I wrote this year, though! And I mean, most of the drabbles, too, but there aren't any that necessarily stick out in my head as far and away better than the others.

My best story this year: Not In The Answer But The Question, although I do feel like I rushed the pacing on the last quarter because I had to make the BB deadline (hah). People seem to think it still sticks the landing, though!

Story most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion: I'm actually going to give a real answer for this one this year, which I usually don't, but I'm going to say that I thought both a smile on your immortal face and Gee, I Hope You're Ready for a Fic About Death would get a couple more hits than they have. I know neither is a massive fandom, but Beetlejuice The Musical DOES have over a thousand fics and there ARE a lot of WLW American Girl fans, so I thought both would get a little more traction than they have. But it's okay! I had a ton of fun writing them either way, and I'm really happy with how they turned out.

Sexiest Story: Five Times Captain America Fucked A USO Girl & One Time Steve Rogers Got Fucked is the smuttiest thing I've written in YEARS and I think the sex all turned out pretty well! I don't write many E-rated drabbles because it's difficult to create sexual tension within the word limit in a way that's ~satisfying, so there isn't a ton of competition haha. I am going to attempt the MCU Kink Bingo in 2023 though!

Most fun story: Ooh, good question. I'm gonna say Gee, I Hope You're Ready for a Fic About Death because it makes me laugh and because it was a really quick writing process because I was having fun. "Fun" isn't necessarily my brand when it comes to writing? For someone who only likes bubblegum pop and Disney Channel Original Movies, I pretty much only write super thoughtsy-feelsy quiet, meditative character studies, lol.

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters: To coopt myself from the 2012 meme, “if I write a fic and it doesn’t change my feelings on the characters or fandom in some way, then I don’t think I wrote it correctly.”

Hardest story to write: I'm going to answer this with one that isn't posted yet and say my massive shrinkyclinks longfic that I started in 2021 and had hoped to finish and post this year! It's been a much slower writing process than I wanted it to be, just because I want to get it Exactly Right and because longfic makes me super anxious about My Value And Worth In This World Hinge On This Story And Whether People Like It.

Biggest surprise: Reiterating from last year's meme -- "Actually sticking to the drabbling! In the past when I tried Three-Line Fic Thursday and Five-Sentence Friday, I failed miserably, and I’ve failed myself at drabble challenges, too. But for some reason this time it’s stuck and is genuinely working to remind me that I can get words out, I can have ideas, and I can get those ideas out in words. Yay!"

A story I want remembered: I mean, if I wrote anything this year that anyone remembers fondly, that makes me happy. But I do have a soft spot for Not In The Answer But The Question.

Resolutions for 2023: FINISH LENT FROM TOMORROW (TODAY WAS TOO SMALL FOR US). BE A FINISHER. FINISH THE THING. Also, do Femslash February and a drabble March Madness again because they were really fun this year!

#fic roundup meme #2022 fic wrapped meme #fandom #fanfiction #my fic #not in the answer but the question #gee i hope you're ready for a fic about death #lent from tomorrow (today was too small for us)#five times captain america fucked a uso girl #a smile on your immortal face

6 notes · View notes

foxlored · 2 years

Text

I'm seeing transfem Hunter get a lot more traction as a headcanon, and I'm happy because its been my personal headcanon since like—may. So here is my specific thoughts on how I think it works out! (Using they/them for Hunter in this because I don't have any specific pronoun or gender thoughts, bouncing around btwn trans woman and some flavor of nonbinary or genderqueer so. simplicity!)

Hunter definitely always gave off the vibes of a kind of trans person where they are so deep inside the mindset of "everyone feels this way about gender" that they do not really examine it. And like, even as the Boiling Isles is a lot more progressive in terms of gender/sexuality, Hunter did not have any sort of real stable support system outside of Belos, who is literally a Puritan from the 1600s, which makes it kind of hard to put two and two together that maybe not every cis person thinks like that when you don't have anyone to actually talk about it to.

A lot of their gender questioning imo definitely would've started post King's Tide, in that kind of inbetween period that the montage covered. After all that has happened, Hunter is given the time to actually reflect on who they are as a person, and as they're both able to actually process that stuff, and now have an actual support system, it becomes very abundantly clear to somehow everyone except Hunter that they are trans. Painfully trans.

They are all, very supportive by the way. Like you cannot tell me the entire Hexsquad is not going to be going out of their way to make sure they can experiment w their gender comfortably. Unfortunately this experimentation does NOT include getting better clothing taste, RIP.

Bonus points I am personally a believer in "Luz is non-binary and is the first person Hunter finally admits they're trans to", but honestly as far as coming out goes, I'm far more flexible on that.

And that is it that's my little ramblings I don't know if this post will appeal to anyone EXCEPT me but! It's my blog so who cares.

#dove rambles #the owl house #hunter noceda #i guess??? is that what we're using now #i am not tagging every single hunter lastname tag so i guess we're living with that

7 notes · View notes

steamedtangerine · 5 months

Text

Tumblr drama ahead...

Thought I could get through this year unscathed without encountering one troll. But NOOOOO! -there must be some clause that stipulates somewhere that every account has to get honked off by something crawling out from out of the woodwork.

The rundown: I make a post of a well-known erotic artist (known across -and over-three different platforms), and make clear in the text description who the artist is. I assume the artist is well-known enough (and that the majority of users are not feebs incapable of looking the artist up for themselves). I did my research before posting-there was a similar post by the artist put up years ago (when "nipple-exposed" was BAD), but the one I had was the restored, uncensored original one (probably as the artist intended) yet to be posted in it's entirety.

The post gets traction....lots of it....the kind that makes me go "oh boy, it's already starting to draw too much attention from some of the more flippy, empty sus accounts here"----sort of like realizing you put too much of a higher wattage bulb in on your porchlight, and now it starts to attract every insect from the tri-state area. I'm sure just a visit to my blog will give the stats on what the exact post is.

Then this random account (that does not follow me, but to their benefit, appears to be "progressive"-not that they touch certain political topics, though they seem overly-argumentative about certain hot button cultural topics-and yes, they've been around a while) happens upon the post and chides me in the comment section (not in reblog fashion, mind you, but just the comment section) for not hashtagging the artist (though noone else seems to have problem finding the artist-I was able to see the post come up by basic search alone)- as if I never intended to make mention of the artist at all, which is obviously not the case. They include an "@" URL in their comment, which turns out to not even be an actual functioning URL to the artist's blog, which already clues me in that they are not the artist, nor are they affiliated with them in any manner.

I notice there are many other accounts on Tumblr who post the popular artist by text mention and do not hashtag, as well, yet, their posting is not as popular....so, why are they not under the same scrutiny as I am here?

I politely mention in a replying comment that if it's a matter of accreditation, I did mention the well-known artist in the text. It must've done the job, seeing by all the users flocking to it. I also mention there are better URLs (then the one they provided) to at least two of the functioning blogs by said artist. To be fair, I go back, and edit my post to add hashtags using the artist's name, if it makes that much more of a difference for the better. Everybody's happy. Right?

Well, the account then replies by taking the obtuse and exaggerated trademark tactic (used by so many Reddit trolls) and wrangles and angles things into this weird mocking of me as being some narcissist who feels they are the only designated conduit of promoting the artist's work....which is not what any single account here on Tumblr ever thinks when posting work from a well-known and aptly accredited the artist.

Keep in mind, no other accounts posting this artist's work (without any hashtags or a vast cluttering array of links going to what could add up to five different outside platforms) is getting this kind of criticism as I am getting here.

I have one of those "doing the dishes" revelations, I pull back, and calmly ask "how did they find the post in question". Up until this point, they never addressed why they posted a faux-URL from the getgo, as I pointed out, and now they are avoiding telling me how they found the post (because, seriously, what IS this really all about?). The next comment is another attempt to mock me of being narcissistic (again) over a post I supposedly "STOLE!".

Whoa whoa whoa Whooa! Theft!? You are going to accuse me of theft? That is a serious accusation. I never claimed this work as my own. This is not a repost of anything found here; I did my research before posting it. I gave accreditation of the artist in the description.

Anyone who has known me on this blog has known that-in the past-I have called out those that have reposted another user's work without giving accreditation to the artist-whether it be @nicholasklaw (who clearly left for IG), @n-lite , or @wax-pack-glam (seems a lot of A-holes on NewtTumbl ripped off his work and were posting it with out giving props on Reddit-and you can go there and see for yourself the kind of sh!t they are pulling by punishing someone for being creative). If I ever failed to give credit to an artist, I ask anyone to show me my mistake, and I will correct it. If I posted something an artist did not want posted here, I ask that that certain artist in particular to approach me diplomatically, so the matter can be handled in a civil fashion....and I also ask the artist to be fair and track down the other three (or so) sources out there online that have the same image (be it Imagefap, Deviantart, Reddit, etc.) and request the same treatment if they feel they are being misrepresented.

Which all boils down to....what IS this even about?

It''s kind of obvi actually. What we have here is some troll account with a "progressive-light" hat on (the kind that finds it easier to sow divisions and make microaggressions online about gender or anything else, then to actually address real critical outside issues about fascists trying to kill LGBT activists in some countries, promoting BS obstructive Freedom Convoys, invading other countries, or perpetuating conversion therapy in some states-y'know, the kind of incisive topics that most of us had no problem addressing here on Tumblr), who was drawn to this post by an algorithm, and is finding every ungodly means to get a foothold to be a contentious knob about it. It's a shame to think that some of the most persevering accounts on a platform like Reddit are these multi-trophy 8-year+ trolls that are embedded like a case of herpes. It was bad back when every single dang posting on Reddit had some obligatory sh!tposter on there to spew some dumb trash, but as for me.....here on Tumblr....I guess it takes me posting something so popular it attracts someone (with an obvious axe to grind with me for some reason-God only knows) being ugly enough to make the unjustified accusation of theft.

Seems to happen every year. Someone flips out that I-for posterity sake-linked an article about White Supremacists in Germany as an example of how they are covering such topics here, because, I guess they have a flipped-out hatred about American reporting, even as an example of what they were griping about. Another (avatarless) account accuses me of mislabeling a popular gif about Cecilia Lion-and though two other sites positively ID it as her, this account is unable to tell me who they think it really is. Once, I gave a supportive comment about someone else's gripes about empty accounts on Tumblr, and they flip out and demand to know how "I found their post" (uh-it came up by a basic search on the site), and before I can respond, they accuse me of "bad vibes", block me, and then spy on my with alt-accounts accusing me of being a porn/politics blog (just what about my politics upsets them?...Hmmmmm?) with "bad vibes" even (oddly enough, said account loved posting 4Chan stuff....and I'm the "bad vibes?!...OkaaaaAAY). The last example is exactly why I don't take the bait to complain along with these newbie accounts griping about "twue Cwime" (deliberately sic) posters flooding in and choking off the site with their ugly satirical sh!tposting love for school mass murderers....they are obviously colluding with the exact accounts they claim to hate because they want feedback on how toxic they've made a platform and also who they can keep tabs on to harass.

Right now, I just don't need this. I ate something with caffeine that caused a reaction in me, jacked up my blood pressure, and I had to call into work.

Again, if anyone has a problem with how I accredit an artist on a platform that is all about sharing and exposure of an artist's work (especially if I have done it in ANY different fashion than the way any body else here has been doing it here for-God only knows-over a decade now), approach me civilly and to the point. Do not dally around with jacking me on nitpicky protocol (which I was accommodating about, in regards to everyone's beloved hashtags), then look for any axe-grinding way to find an obtuse angle to chide me, and then go for the jugular with false accusation of theft.

#wise up Tumblr!#pray 4 me

1 note · View note

homo-sex-shoe-whale · 3 years

Text

Online shipping, the fetishisation of gay men, and the romanticisation of queer trauma

An essay by me!

Word count: 2.8k

A link to the Google Doc version of this essay.

A big thank you to my friends Nathan @themeerkatnate, Mav @not-mavv , and Duke @dukedark-ness for reading this essay and giving me their thoughts as mlms on the topic. Make sure to check out their blogs and give them a follow!

So I was on a lovely website by the name of Twitter.com yesterday, just scrolling through while having my afternoon cup of coffee, when I saw that viral post of a girl reading a Larry fanfic through a classroom projector. I'm sure most of you have seen it. It's gone viral on Instagram, TikTok, and likely Tumblr too, and if you haven't come across it I'm positive you will soon.

Now, after getting through my initial reaction to that post which was, holy fuck, that's so embarrassing, I had a second reaction of... wait, this ship is still around?

And after I had some thoughts on the incredible permanence of some online ships and the weird obsolescence of others, I did get to thinking of how lots of these popular ships seem to stem from the same types of perceived relationship dynamics and homophobic stereotypes.

These online fandoms often seem to have an obsession with objects of queer trauma, such as having to hide a relationship, lying about sexuality for self-preservation, and even social rejection. So, after some opinions from my followers and the great archive that is the internet, I've decided to discuss some of the most popular examples of online shipping and the particular nuances they came with.

NOTE: Out of respect for all these people, I won't be sharing viral images or videos of them in perceived romantic proximity (or even kissing, as is applicable for some examples), but I will be describing certain moments I deem to be relevant. So even if you're unfamiliar with them, you won't be confused as to what I'm talking about.

NOTE 2: Although not all people within these fandoms were/are toxic, this essay is focused on the overall toxicity of the fandoms, and how they are toxic more so as a "hive" than as a group of individuals. When I refer to a fandom I don't mean every person involved in the fandom, but rather the collective impact of the group.

1. Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson

This is arguably the most popular example of online shipping. The absolute permanence of this ship, and how its fandom never seems to fully die off even beyond the lifespan of One Direction as it once stood, is downright impressive.

I'm going to be the first to admit I was never in the loop with this fandom. My childhood best friend was actually a massive Larry shipper and asked me to beta read one of her fics, but that was before I even knew who tf Harry and Louis were! Not because I avoided the fandom or even because I rejected the online shipping, but just by coincidence, I delved into the world of pop punk music right when One Direction began gaining its popularity. I bought my first ever album, Riot by Paramore, in 2011- only a year after One Direction made their X-Factor debut. So, this fandom just bypassed me by a sort of weird coincidence.

But I don't need to be in the loop with this fandom to know the astronomical obsession with these two men, no, these two BOYS, was extremely toxic. In 2010, when One Direction made their debut, Harry Styles was only 16 years old. And Louis Tomlinson wasn't much older at 19! This made the two of them incredibly young when this unprecedented wave of shipping hit the internet, and although that must be traumatising for anyone, I cannot even fathom how overwhelming it must've been for two boys that young.

I'm 18, almost 19 now, and I cannot begin to imagine how scary it was for the two of them to have their every interaction nitpicked within an inch of its life by thousands upon thousands of people online. I do not know this myself, but from numerous recounts by some of my followers, this massively impacted Harry's and Louis' nondescript relationship in real life, seemingly driving the two previously close friends apart.

Now, before we move on, there's something we need to talk about. And that is the obsession with the dominance/submission dynamic within the world of gay shipping.

With almost every popular mlm (an acronym meaning man-loving-man) ship based on real people, it seems that fandoms have a particular fascination with power imbalances in these relationships. You don't even need to look at the insane amount of fanfictions based on BDSM to figure this out. In almost all of the examples I'll be citing today, there is an age gap within the perceived relationship and a person the fandom has seemingly decided to be the top/dominant figure.

Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are 3 years apart in age. Although it isn't all that relevant now, an age gap of 3 years when you're in your late teens is a lot more significant. In 2012, for example, when this shipping really started gaining traction, Harry Styles was 18 and Louis Tomlinson was 21. That power imbalance, albeit not that significant, is enough for a fandom to latch on to. We'll see this a lot more in the coming example with Dan and Phil.

2. Dan Howell and Phil Lester

It's impossible to have a discussion about internet shipping without talking about Dan and Phil.

Dan Howell and Phil Lester, although being popular YouTubers individually, are arguably one of the internet's most iconic duos. The two creators published their first videos together in 2009, and while their relationship was already a motive of speculation back then, the peak of the "Phan" shipping definitely came in the 2013-2016 era of Tumblr.

Now, I'm going to admit… I was actually on Tumblr when that happened.

The 2013-2016 period perfectly aligns with my middle school days (I started middle school in 2013 and high school in 2016), and I was not only on Tumblr back then, but I was on Wattpad too! Again, this wasn't a fandom I had much contact with as I had a huge anime phase in middle school and I was on Tumblr posting mainly photography and Soul Eater content more than anything.

But I did watch some of Dan and Phil's videos! And the occasional "Phan" content did not completely evade me as one of my closest friends in middle school had a fanchat for them. I wasn't involved in the fandom myself but they were actually one of the few English-speaking YouTubers I watched once in a blue moon (back then I watched mainly Brazilian YouTubers). One thing I did in fact notice over the years, around 2014ish perhaps, was that the two of them seemed to grow increasingly "awkward" around each other, in a way that many folks on the internet thought was reminiscent to Markiplier/Jacksepticeye, two YouTubers who also dealt with extraordinary amounts of shipping.

I'm not the only one who thinks this. The change in Dan and Phil's relationship, at least to the outside world, was clear to almost anyone who watched their videos for a while. I cannot blame them at all. The shipping was nuts. Between the countless fan videos, speculative comments, and insurmountable number of fanfics, there's no way the two of them didn't feel the weight of the shipping. The term "demon phannie" made its way into internet vernacular and there it stayed for years. Even Shane Dawson, who was one of the largest creators on the platform at the time, made several videos speculating on the nature of Dan and Phil's relationship and their sexual orientations.

There was even porn made in which actors with similar appearances to the creators were made to have sex on camera.

Now, this is actually a rare example where the two people involved in the ship actually came out as gay once the shipping seemed to die down. I'm incredibly happy Dan and Phil both reached a point where they were comfortable being publicly out, but I hate to say I'm shocked this day ever came. If I'd gone through what the two of them did, I don't know if I'd ever trust the internet.

And again, this ship's fandom definitely had an obsession with the power dynamics they thought existed between the people within the ship. Dan Howell is 4 years younger than Phil Lester, and was only 18 in 2009, when they started making videos together. From my personal understanding, the shipping was often quite focused on this dominant/submissive dynamic especially in discussions from their early relationship. And this is in no way exclusive to Dan and Phil.

This general fascination with the older man/younger man dynamic, in my opinion, plays into the homophobic stereotype that gay men are predators. The idea that gay men usually seek younger men, and somehow "convince" them to engage in homosexual relationships, is popular homophobic rhetoric. The popularisation, exaggeration, and fetishisation of these power imbalances, in age and/or in relationship dynamics, is directly harmful to the mlm community.

Not only that, but the romanticisation of a "hidden/forbidden relationship" is also detrimental not only to gay men and the mlm community, but to queer people as a whole. Queer people face huge trauma having to hide their relationships; queer attraction is already a societal taboo. And acting like this is good, or even desirable, is harmful to queer people as a whole, regardless of whether or not it's actually applicable to the people being shipped. It normalises this trauma not only to cisgender, heterosexual people, but to impressionable queer youth who grow to believe this type of trauma is to be expected.

3. Frank Iero and Gerard Way

This is another example where the perceived power imbalances between the two subjects of the shipping were directly exploited online. Now, this ship did precede the others mentioned above. If we're looking at this topic chronologically, this particular ship did come first in the shipping timeline. It's closer to the origin of the shipping extended universe, if you will.

In case you aren't familiar with them, Frank Iero and Gerard Way are both members of the American emo band My Chemical Romance. This ship is the first one here of which I don't recall the full popularity. It really peaked in popularity around the late 2000s, circa 2008. And I don't remember this moment online as in 2008, I was only 6 years old and believe it or not, I wasn't really all that concerned with rumoured homoeroticism as a first grader.

However, the popularity of this ship did carry over into the 2013-2015 Tumblr shipping boom. The emo fandom (or "bandom" as it was called) involving not only My Chemical Romance but other similar bands such as Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco, and Pierce the Veil, found its hub on Tumblr.

During this time, I did in fact listen to this style of music, but was focused a lot more on the anime side of Tumblr as mentioned earlier. Of course, I wasn't 13 years old like, "hey, this type of content might be harmful and can inadvertently perpetuate homophobic stereotypes," I just happened to care more about my silly little anime and ended up not getting involved.

This ship does involve a discussion that the others don't, however. With Frank Iero and Gerard Way, there is quite often a certain sentiment of, "Oh, they brought this upon themselves!" as the two band members very famously kissed during a show in 2007. In my opinion, though, this doesn't really justify all the obsessive shipping. If you look at Green Day, a band often grouped in with MCR as another famous pop punk group, the members don't follow too different of a trajectory. Billie Joe Armstrong has, on numerous occasions, kissed both of his fellow band members onstage- particularly Tré Cool, the drummer. And Billie Joe Armstrong is openly bisexual, which none of the members of MCR seem to be but some, or even all of Billie's bandmates, are too.

You'd think Green Day would face a lot more shipping as the more persistent onstage homoeroticism and Billie Joe's openness about his sexuality would warrant more "substantiated" speculation. However, Green Day faces nowhere near as much shipping as My Chemical Romance. Why is this? I actually don't know. It might've been because Green Day has been around for over a decade longer and generally has an older fandom, but I really am not that sure.

It could also be because of the lower lack of potential for forced relationship dynamics. The members of Green Day are all less than a year apart in age and are even similar in height. However, Frank Iero is 4 years younger than Gerard Way, who is not only the frontman of My Chemical Romance, but also considered to be the group's intellectual and creative "leader". Even beyond that, Gerard Way is quite visibly taller, and the perceived power difference between the two of them definitely did not elude their fans.

This difference could even be partly due to the lack of a "mystery" with Green Day. There's not as much to speculate as, well… the members of Green Day are already open about their sexual orientations. It might be that shipping in the Green Day fandom has less of a forbidden appeal for most people.

Of course, I won't just keep repeating myself, but my previous points about forced relationship dynamics still stand.

4. Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch

Better known for their roles in BBC Sherlock as Sherlock and Watson, Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch unfortunately had their roles follow them well into real life. This is the example I know least about, so have these thoughts from a follower by the name of @indubitably-a-goblin, who had the following to say:

"the main issues i had with it were:

a) they were both married at the time, freeman to amanda abbington and cumberbatch to sophie hunter (in which both had children)

b) the main reasoning for it was their chemistry in the many projects they've done together. which is, shockingly, their Whole Job. They're actors! That's what they're supposed to do! if they weren't good at interacting then they wouldn't be good actors! i don't know how people can't understand this.

c) they're real people. we don't know them. we aren't friends with them. we aren't their family members. we have zero right to be pushing this onto them and ruining their friendship by doing so. (this one relates to most of the ships you've mentioned though)

d) healthy friendships between two men are ignored so plainly in most medias and in fandom. its obvious that these two men have a relationship, but that doesn't mean it's a romantic one.

e) its fine to ship their characters, but actors shouldn't be treated as less-than-human or some sort of prop. they're doing a job, and once they are off-screen, they aren't here for your entertainment."

I believe she did a great job of summing it up on her own, and for the sake of avoiding redundancy, I'll leave it at that!

5. Corpse Husband and Sykkuno- an emerging yet subtle example

I am absolutely positive you remember how popular the game Among Us was a couple of months ago. And with the popularity of this game, some of its most prominent content creators became the targets of online shipping- as is the case with YouTubers and streamers Corpse Husband and Sykkuno.

Although the shipping involving these two creators is nowhere near as strong as it was/is with the examples above, I do think there is once again a reemergence of a common theme here. Whilst Sykkuno is known for his happy-go-lucky, almost "innocent" persona, Corpse Husband is the antithesis of this, known for his much darker and moodier personality.

Do I even have to mention what the common theme seems to be?

Again, although the popularity of shipping - at least with real people - seems to have died down a bit since the Tumblr shipping boom of the early to mid 2010s, I do believe this example is worth mentioning. Even though the creators are still close, they have in fact expressed discomfort regarding the shipping, and I can only hope the internet as a whole lets their friendship blossom and exist naturally without obsessive speculation.

My final thoughts

As explored in the essay:

The romanticisation of objects of queer trauma as a part of online shipping normalises queer trauma to both cishet and queer youth.

Online shipping, especially at a high intensity, can end up negatively impacting the very relationships they pine over.

The relationship dynamics often forced on mlm ships perpetuate homophobic stereotypes about non-heterosexual men.

If anyone else has thoughts on this matter, do share! This essay is moreso an opinionated observational piece and isn't meant to be taken as fact but rather just as my thoughts on the matter. I hope it was useful as a reflective piece regardless!

Date of posting: June 16th 2021

#lgbt #lgbtq #gay #mlm #I cannot believe I said the phrase 'shipping extended universe'

439 notes · View notes

zgvlt · 2 years

Note

As a writer I wanted to ask if numbers (specifically likes or reblogs) matter to you? I want to start posting on Tumblr (reader-inserts for TWST too) but I'm scared I'll end up getting demotivated due to a lack of traction :( I know people say to just write for yourself but what would the point of posting it be then? I just wanted to know your opinion on this.

Oh my answer is going to be a little lengthy! I'll be answering this based on my own perceptions so it's totally fine if people think differently than me :>

Short answer: mostly yes, and i don't think it's a bad thing to care about numbers 😌 but dont let it consume you and as much as possible try not to let it discourage you from writing what you want!

Long answer: Personally, above all, feedback matters to me the most! Hearing what people think/if people enjoyed my fics is much more important that seeing numbers go up.

However in most cases feedback does count towards the numbers— other than feedback through asks, feedback tends to come in the form of reblogs (both reblog in text and tags) or in replies on Tumblr, which contribute to the notes count. Plus, because the tagging system isn't always... working, reblogs, which also contribute to notes and therefore numbers, are incredibly important in getting your work out there, thus getting feedback, which in turn usually gives fic writers the motivation to keep writing and posting. Likes, well, don't really do anything to get your stuff out there even though your notes will mostly be comprised of likes, but they're kind of cute to see, especially when it's a name you recognize like a "it's you again!" or a "wait that's someone i follow they liked something i wrote?"

Plus, I'm just a really big fan of looking at numbers, which is why I said my perception might be different. I like math and love statistics, so it's kind of satisfying seeing something go from 8 notes to a hundred.

Still, I honestly think the TWST community (even with some bad apples) has a lot of very supportive people when it comes to writers, who love giving writers attention, especially newer blogs. The community isn't perfect but it's a community consistently growing and a community that can never get enough of content, so there's always room for more fic writers, and artists in general, you know?

I think it never hurts to at least try and dip your toes in writing and posting! See I think the key thing when people connect writing for yourself to not caring about the numbers is to actually write for yourself and at your own pace? In my years of experience writing there were a few things that got me to stop. The first was just losing interest in the fandom, it's normal and it's okay, the second is lack of feedback, which if you've put out work you're happy enough to post it's on the audience's part to provide it, and the third is burnout from requests.

The thing is when you get requests, you work on it and there's this added pressure of getting it out quickly and making sure it has to be good enough for others to like it and not just yourself, and then if it gets little feedback and numbers, it feels like a double whammy? basically awful. of course writing for yourself doesn't mean never take requests, go for it especially if it's something that motivates you and you enjoy! but what i'm saying is try not to be too harsh or give yourself too much pressure so you enjoy the writing process and you have less regrets overall...

and well, sometimes you just have writing slumps and that's normal. If you ever encounter it I promise there's no harm in taking a break, maybe do other things until you find the motivation to write again. Most people do not have the motivation to pump out fics regularly without pause and you shouldn't pressure yourself to do so! Some days you'll probably find yourself writing a lot and some none at all and that's normal!

Anyway this post is getting long haha but yeah, I think just find a healthy balance— it's okay to care about the numbers but try not to stress too much over it, try your hand at posting, and if you do find yourself demotivated then remember to take appropriate measures whether it's to take a hiatus or writing for a different fandom or whatever you need to do

Plus, you know, general reminder that many writers leave due to lack of reblogs replies and feedback in general, and seeing people leave might discourage others from even starting, so as much as possible show your writers love even if it's just an ask 💖

#—nathyask #—anonnie #wow this post got long oops #hopefully my wording was alright #personally itd be a lie to say i didnt care about numbers #bc i do but mostly bc of what the numbers represent #like i enjoy writing for myself i still do write for myself above all #but its a wonderful feeling when something you wrote for yourself others also enjoy #but yk i also dont wanna be discouraging to say yes care about numbers only #just yk healthy balance care if you want but dont let it consume you #—banathyaqueue

50 notes · View notes

jinstronaut · 2 years

Text

every month of 2021

post your favorite or most popular post from each month this year (and it’s ok to skip months)

tagged by @kimtaehyunq and @thatredwine uwu

i only made this blog at the end of may, so there’s only six months worth of content, but i’ll still pick out some of my favorites ♥♥

june

get to know me meme, kim seokjin -- this was my first (actual) set, and it’s nothing too special or flashy, but it’s the first!! so it’s special to me uwu

get to know me meme, sope -- this was the first set to actually take off and get some traction (which is exactly what sope deserves) and i luv it still to this day!!

get to know me meme, maknae line -- this set was quick to follow the second one, and i specifically remember the kindness and praise in the tags of people’s reblogs, and it made me very warm and fuzzy inside :’)

july

random bangtan edits, kim seokjin -- this lethal set still makes me 🤪 when i think about it

get to know me meme, kim namjoon + jung hoseok -- i just really like the way these sets turned out, i think the gifs look really smooth and nice :)

get to know me meme, black swan -- the same as above, i think these gifs came out looking cool and smooth, esp the winged jimin one. i also tried a new coloring and even if it didn’t stick around, i think it fit the theme of the mv very well!

august

random bangtan edits, namkook -- i made this set on a whim after watching run bts, and it’s one of my most popular sets to this day. understandably so, too, since it’s literal comedy gold. (team mint choco all the way)

get to know me meme, dionysus choreo -- as a big choreography fan, i’m happy this set took off too. it’s absolutely what this unit of a song deserves. also, those dance practices are Not easy to color.

days of jinkook, day three -- i started this series for fun because i love jinkook’s dynamic so much, and this set still holds the top spot for the most popular one. look at them!!!

september

namjoon’s birthday event: mono, favorite habit, favorite looks, favorite relationship, intro: persona -- these are kind of all clumped together because they go together, but i’m really proud of what i did for this birthday event. it was the first one i participated in, and i experimented with some new content making styles (due to time crunch mostly), and i was so floored at how well received it was. ♥

october

jimin birthday event: theme one, cutie -- all of these sets somehow took off (which is incredible), but this one really took off. and i don’t blame anyone, because look at him. this was the second birthday event i did, too, and i had a lot of fun making content for a member i don’t usually create content for!

jimin birthday event: theme three, lovely -- this is my second most popular set on my entire blog (i think), and oddly enough this was the set i was the most nervous about. i wasn’t sure about how my gifs fit the theme, but everyone was so kind and receptive :’)))

pink seokjinnie -- another set i just made on a whim because look!!! at him!!! the cutest softest boy that ever was. this was also my first time using my New(tm) photoshop, so even if there’s not a huge difference, i was excited to try out another technique!!

november

random bangtan edits: airplane pt. 2 jin -- i made this because i love to torture myself :~) giving the people what they want, not what they asked for

jin’s birthday countdown -- honestly i just put the entire event i did. i didn’t see one that anyone else had made, so i took what little time off i had at the time and just made my own sort of countdown to celebrate the love of my life. i really am proud of what i managed to accomplish in such little time ;o;

ptd on stage: yoongi’s dancey dance -- this is the most popular set i’ve ever made! i don’t know how it happened, as i made it completely on a whim and posted it randomly, but i’m so happy people liked it. his little wiggles really just took me out.

december

jin’s birthday set -- i just love this man and i’m so happy i could do something to show that love okay. i’m not always great with words and i’m still shy and don’t know how to express all the things i want, but this really helped me :’))

taehyung’s birthday countdown: green theme -- this event is still on going and i’m really excited!! i was also super nervous about this set, i didn’t think it looked good but i didn’t have enough time to tweak it. instead, it was warmly received and everyone’s words of encouragement really inspired me to be less critical of myself ;o; thank you all ♥

i’m still learning and trying my best to improve every day, and i’m always thankful when people interact with the content i make. i’ve never been a huge worrier when it comes to notes or anything, i truly just like to mess around and make fun stuff, but when people are so nice and encouraging and kind, it really does make all of the hardwork worth it. thank you from the bottom of my tiny little heart 🥺

tagging: @bisexualrapline, @sugaftrm, @blueandtaes, @plaids, @taeunwoo, and anyone else who wants to c:

#tag games //#cc tag game #saved //#thank u for tagging me !! ♥♥#it's wild to go thru your own stuff over the course of half a year and see how things change and how people develop a certain style etc etc #i can really tell when i nailed down the coloring and aesthetic i liked and stuck with it !!!#long post //

8 notes · View notes

elitegymnastics · 3 years

Photo

Q: What is this?

A: It’s a flyer for a virtual fundraiser on June 4th that Elite Gymnastics is playing. You can access the show at quietyear.com

Q: Hasn’t Elite Gymnastics been inactive for like, ten years?

A: Yes. This is the first Elite Gymnastics performance of any kind since November 30th 2012, at the Horn Gallery at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

Q: Why did Elite Gymnastics stop playing shows?

A: Elite Gymnastics started out as me (Jaime) and a bunch of my friends agreeing to help me play my songs live back in 2009. I made a lot of weird demos in GarageBand and my friend Dominique Davis from the band Dearling Physique got tired of watching me sit on them. So, he booked me to play at a show he was curating as part of a small local music and arts festival called Clapperclaw. For several months that’s mainly what EG was. At some point the focus shifted to making recordings rather than playing shows, to participate in the emergent culture of new music distributed via MP3 file-sharing. The lineup winnowed to just me and Josh Clancy, who began creating digital EPs that we posted on this Tumblr page as ZIP files full of MP3s accompanied by a PDF of artwork. This is the incarnation of the group that most people are familiar with.

This was before Patreon existed. If Bandcamp was around, we’d never heard of it. Though MP3 file-sharing culture and file transfer sites like MediaFire and MegaUpload allowed anyone to distribute music freely across the world via the internet, it was still pretty difficult to get people to pay you for it. I think it was for this reason that a lot of internet music back then featured a lot of sampling. A lot of artists’ first forays into the world of DAWs and production took the form of mash-ups, bootleg remixes, and DJ mixes. Artists like Animal Collective, MIA, Kanye West, and Daft Punk for whom sampling was a pillar of their creative process were extremely influential. Elite Gymnastics was no exception - the first song of ours to gain traction online was “Is This On Me?” which made no attempt to hide the fact that it heavily sampled Faye Wong’s “Eyes On Me.” The fact that it was so difficult to make money off MP3s pushed people to make different creative decisions than they would have otherwise. It was sort of a free-for-all.

Eventually, all of this started to change. The major labels started getting a lot more aggressive about trying to destroy MP3 file-sharing culture. Platforms like MegaUpload were raided and taken offline. The replacements that sprung up to replace them were increasingly infested with ads and malware. Corporate platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud adopted Content ID filters to prevent the proliferation of copyrighted music there. Blogs and private torrent trackers being taken down meant thousands of hours of labor were wiped out in an instant. Some of the best archives of the history of recorded music ever created were destroyed without hesitation. Even the most devoted participants lost the will to keep repairing and re-making the stuff that cops and record companies kept obliterating.

Josh and I both dreamed of being able to make a living as musicians. We still do. Back then, we were willing to accept a lot of changes in order to make that possible, which seemed necessary. A lot of the stuff that we were great at just didn’t make any money. Once, we were asked to do a remix of a song called “Sa Sa Samoa” by the band Korallreven. I did the remix by myself, which was normal for us, and Josh was so inspired by it that he spent a week working non-stop to create a video for it. People loved it - the day the video dropped, Pitchfork designated the song as a “Best New Track” and New York Magazine wrote about it in their “Approval Matrix.” The video led to a ton of exposure, but from a financial perspective, it just did not make sense to put that much effort into promoting a remix of someone else’s song. The stuff we were personally excited by just seemed to have less and less to do with what actually makes money.

A lot of internet bands during this era began to palpably shapeshift in an effort to succeed in music as a career. Artists who’d first attracted notice for sample-based bangers they made on a laptop started posing with vintage hardware in their press photos and trading in their laptops for live bands and recording studios. It became harder to distribute DJ mixes or mash-ups that contained copyrighted music in them. Influential bloggers either closed up shop or were absorbed into the traditional music industry in some way. Feeds that once touted bizarre songs by laptop-toting weirdos with no industry connections started to become populated mostly by artists with labels and publicists. The bottom rungs of festival lineups started to consist mostly of new major label signings who have lots of money to spend on stage production but not much in the way of grassroots fan enthusiasm or media buzz.

Internet music and what people tend to refer to as “indie music” split off into two separate streams. Today, there’s a pretty intense firewall between internet culture and whatever you want to call the culture of vinyl records, mid-sized indie labels with publicists, and positive reviews from the few remaining websites that still pay people to write about music. I call it “publicist indie,” “lifestyle techno,” or “prestige electronica” depending on whether or not the music features guitars and/or vocals. The recent online kerfuffle about NFTs really emphasized this split. The worlds of digital illustration and game development campaigned aggressively against mass adoption of cryptocurrency - if you saw any Medium posts explaining crypto’s environmental issues, chances are they were written by someone from those fields. Every new announcement by an artist that they had minted an NFT was met with a swift and vocal backlash from fans. Though I’ve never really been much of an Aphex Twin fan, it was still pretty startling to look at the replies under his NFT announcement tweet and see hundreds of furious people announcing that he was now dead to them. That’s an artist who has seemed more or less unimpeachable for most of my life up until this point! All of that seemed to change in an instant.

There is a massive disconnect between the insular world of the industry establishment and the cutting edge of online counterculture. We saw this again a couple of weeks ago with the online response to the crisis in Gaza. We saw passionate advocacy for Palestinians from games journalists and developers much more often than we saw it from musicians. This is a very serious problem for music! I do not believe it is possible to please both sides - that is to say, I do not believe it is possible to be part of internet counterculture and the industry establishment simultaneously. The music industry is too conservative, too compromised, too corrupt. If it weren’t for the ocean of valuable copyrights that labels are sitting on, most of them would be bankrupt within a year. If the industry was forced to live or die based on how they handle what’s happening right now in the present, it would most assuredly die. The only people who don’t realize this are those who are being paid to stay ignorant.

Josh and I did not know this back then. From where we were standing, it looked like internet culture and established media industries were on track to converge. A career in the arts seemed genuinely, tantalizingly possible, right up until the moment that it no longer did.

In my case, I had really been struggling up until that point. My life had been this ongoing sequence of evictions and hospitalizations, and it seemed to be getting worse, not better. I donated plasma twice a week to pay for groceries and while I was sitting there with a giant needle stuck in my left arm for an hour I would see my picture in The Fader or my songs being recommended by one of the Kings of Leon on Twitter or whatever. Music seemed like the only thing the world thought I was any good at. It felt like my only chance at a peaceful, happy life was somewhere out there in a world I could only perceive through a laptop screen.

Gender, for me, was a big factor in all of this. The more invested in the craft of songwriting I became, the harder it was to repress or ignore my gender stuff. At that time I’m not sure I even knew what the word “transgender” meant - I just knew that when I showed up at a venue wearing a skirt, no one would talk to me or look me in the eye, and that reading about people like Anohni or Terre Thaemlitz or on the internet made me feel like if I could get out of Minneapolis maybe I could find a place where people would accept me. The internet was like, a pretty toxic place for someone in my position. When I tried to find people to talk to about what I was feeling, nobody tried to tell me to read Judith Butler or ask me what pronouns I preferred. The internet was just like, overrun with predators who just wanted to fetishize me and exploit me. Music seemed like the only way I’d ever have an actual life as myself. I was desperate for that. I was well and truly desperate.

Between all the big changes that were happening to us individually and the music industry moving farther and farther away of the anarchic free-for-all of MP3 file-sharing culture, the strain on us just got to be too much. We stopped trusting each other. We became the unstoppable force and the immovable object, crashing haphazardly against one another’s resolve in a dazzling display of youthful futility. Our partnership ended, and after finishing out the remaining live shows on the calendar by myself, I retired the name “Elite Gymnastics” and started making music on my own under other names. That was that.

Q: Why is Elite Gymnastics coming back now, then?

A: Over the years, Josh and I eventually started talking again. Though there was a lot we did agree on, and potential future projects were discussed, nothing truly felt right. We haven’t been in the same room since Summer 2012, and we’ve both changed a lot since then. We both have other projects and we’ve both developed other ways of working since we stopped working together. It’s a pretty big commitment to put all of that aside in order to join your fortunes together with someone you haven’t seen in a decade.

Recently, Josh decided to leave Elite Gymnastics. His reasons are his own, and I was very surprised by his decision, but after having had time to adjust, I’m really grateful to him. I had kept these songs at a distance for many years, because it seemed foolish to allow myself to get too attached to songs I didn’t feel like I was allowed to think of as mine, if that makes any sense. The songs felt like casualties of a conflict that I had to bury in the ground and try to forget about. Being able to embrace them again felt like re-growing a severed limb or having a loved one come back to life, almost. Feeling like it was safe to love these songs again made me feel whole in a way I didn’t expect to. I became really excited by the prospect of revisiting them, so that’s what I decided to do.

Q: Does this mean you’re going to put RUIN back on Spotify?

A: No. Taking the record off Spotify was the right thing to do. That record was only ever intended to exist during the era of MP3 piracy. I never envisioned a world where the music industry would be so aggressive about policing the way that copyrighted music is allowed to exist online. If we hadn’t opted to take the record down when we did, someone would inevitably have forced us to. If you want to hear those specific recordings again, you’re going to have to do it the way we originally intended: by downloading MP3 files from the internet. Try SoulSeek.

Q: What’s next for Elite Gymnastics, then?

A: Here’s the situation currently. There is no Elite Gymnastics music available to stream or purchase in an official capacity anywhere on the internet. It wouldn’t really be possible for me to put the old stuff on Spotify or Bandcamp now because of all the samples. Like I said before, it was a different time. Those records were created to thrive on a past version of the internet that no longer exists. They weren’t designed to be compatible with the 2021 internet.

Technically, Elite Gymnastics didn’t ever release a debut album. We had EPs, a compilation, and a remix collection. We didn’t make an album, a record that existed as the distillation of all that experimentation that contained all of the songs that fans of the EPs would want to hear, all in one place. It’s like we did Good Fridays but stopped before we made My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

So, I am currently working on the first Elite Gymnastics album. If you were following my stuff as Default Genders, you may have noticed me posting demos on my SoundCloud page from 2015-2018 that were all eventually reworked into the album Main Pop Girl 2019. The album I am making is taking that approach to all the old EG songs, including some unreleased stuff. I’m collaborating with others on some songs and I honestly feel like it has resulted in some of the best and most exciting music I have ever been involved with. It is a drastic reinvention, but iteration and reinvention have always been a big part of what I do. I want to make something that feels like the culmination of everything that came before, and so far, I think I’m succeeding.

Q: When will I be able to hear this new music?

At a virtual fundraiser on June 4th, 2021, where there is a suggested donation of $10. You can access it at quietyear.com

29 notes · View notes

tsarisfanfiction · 3 years

Text

21 Asks: Fanfiction Q&A

Well I got tagged by @onereyofstarlight @gumnut-logic and @janetm74 for this, so here goes (answering on fic blog, because... fic!)

This is going to take a while, but it’s also going to be fun, so let’s get started :D

1. What fandoms have you written for?

Uhh... several. In alphabetical order because that makes my brain happy, we have:

Published: Bleach, Boku no Hero Academia (My Hero Academia), D.Gray-Man, Detective Conan, Flight Rising, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Märchen Awakens Romance (MÄR), Mortal Instruments, Naruto, One Piece, Team Fortress 2, Thunderbirds, Twilight.

WIPs (Unpublished): Avatar: The Last Airbender, Dragon Orb, Flame of Recca, HunterXHunter, Inuyasha, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures (Part 7/Steel Ball Run), Kuroko no Basuke (Kuroko’s Basketball), MI High, Yu-Gi-Oh (Duel Monsters, GX, 5Ds), Yuri On Ice

A couple of those are only because of crossovers... which we’ll get to later. Similarly, a bunch of the unpublished I have no plans to publish, but I’ve written them so they count in my head.

2. How many works do you have on AO3 &/or FFNet?

AO3: 150 FFN: 149 (the difference is due to a co-authored fic with @lenle-g on AO3, because FFN doesn’t support co-authorship)

(Tumblr has many more because so many of those fics are actually fic collections)

3. What are your top 3 fics by kudos on AO3 &/or favs on FFNet?

AO3 Kudos:

Tales From The Heart (1449)

The Combat School (524)

Succor (348)

FFN Favourites:

The Combat School (681)

Tales From The Heart (185)

Succor (136)

4. Which 3 fics have the least kudos & favs?

AO3 Kudos:

Wishes of the Dark (0)

4am Forever / Leave Out All The Rest (2)

FFN Favourites:

A Little Fall of Rain / He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother, Leave Out All The Rest / See You In The Sky / Stolen Shadows all have 0

5. Which Fic has the most comments and which has the least?

AO3 Comments:

Tales From The Heart (618)

37 have 0

FFN Reviews:

The Combat School (608)

After Sundown / Heroes Made of Gas / Splatter / Stolen Shadows (0)

6. Which complete fic do you wish had gotten more attention?

I mean, I always like attention :P That’s a hard question because my fandoms vary wildly in size, so for example, while Tales is one of my most popular fics, it’s still pretty tiny in comparison to the big One Piece fics out there, but ones like Grounded numerically barely rate while actually getting the attention of a much larger proportion of the fandom.

Honestly the fic that’s getting less of a response than I’d hoped is still incomplete... but I think I’ll go with Vulnerabilities. It’s an older fic, and a drabble collection rather than a cohesive story, but it never really got any traction.

7. Have you written any crossovers?

Ah yes, crossovers. I’ve got three published at the moment:

The Combat School (Harry Potter/D.Gray-Man)

Vampire vs. Shinobi (Naruto/Twilight)

Stolen Shadows (Flight Rising/Thunderbirds)

As far as WIPs go, I have (who knows when or if I’ll actually finish or post these):

Alliance (Naruto/Team Fortress 2)

Black Phoenix (Harry Potter/D.Gray-Man)

Legend of the Exorcists (D.Gray-Man/Yu-Gi-Oh/GX/5Ds)

Untitled (Avatar: The Last Airbender/Thunderbirds)

Untitled (Inuyasha/Lord of the Rings)

8. What is the craziest fic you’ve written?

What even counts as crazy?

Okay, I say that, but Vampire vs. Shinobi is a stupid, Twilight-bashing, parody crossover thing so. Probably that.

9. What’s the fic you’ve written with the saddest ending?

Ahaha. There are a few. All of these have MCD warnings (two are canonical), two of which are suicide, so watch out if you’re poking around:

Deception (canon)

I Promised

The Fish and the Mermaid

The Light That Shines Twice As Bright... (suicide)

Torture (suicide)

Unwanted

Whirlwind (canon)

10. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Tsari likes positive endings. I’m not actually sure what the happiest is, though. I often write... hopeful, rather than happy? The happiest I can think of... is a WIP that I have the ending planned for but that’s spoilers~

I’ll go with Riding the Dragon, I think. But honestly just take your pick out of the family fluff.

11. What is your smuttiest fic?

Tsari does not post smut. She has written some, she has not posted it and will keep it that way.

Out of the posted stuff... there is kissing in Briefings?

12. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

I think when you hit 100+ fics, you’re lucky if you don’t. I’ve had a few here and there, but they’re ignorable

13. What is the nicest comment you’ve received?

Oh boy. I have had many nice comments, but I am going to highlight this one in particular because it’s the one that forever and always springs to mind when I get asked this:

Wow. That was pretty great. You writing managed to keep everyone in character, and still kept the story from falling flat. It's almost as if you stole a page from Cassie's story, and stuck it here. I really want to see more from you.

On: A Tradition of Pride

It’s nowhere near the longest I’ve got, and long comments make me super happy, but this one? Being told it fits in with the original book? Makes me beam like an idiot every time.

14. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

[insert eyeroll here]

I have had fics reposted, yes. Tales From The Heart and Whirlwind have both found themselves posted on sites I don’t use - I managed to get Tales taken down, but the site hosting Whirlwind isn’t paying me any attention.

15. How many fics do you have marked as incomplete?

Nine, which is both too many and not as many as I thought. Although if you ignore the collection fics - Tales From The Heart and Behind The Scenes, which are basically eternal wips - it’s seven.

16. Which of the WIPS will most likely be finished first?

Just A Bruise, because it’s already just about finished, @lenle-g and I just need to tie up the final chapter and editing the rest of it before it’s posted.

17. Which WIP are you looking forward to finishing?

Long Way From Home, because it’s going to be huge and finishing that will feel amazing. But it’s going to take a long time.

18. Is there a WIP that you’re considering abandoning?

Nope. I will, one day, finish all of them. Yes, even Uchiha Itachi.

19. Which complete fic would you consider rewriting?

Complete? None. However, the above mentioned Uchiha Itachi is being (very slowly) rewritten - and is actually on its second rewrite - because it pains me in its current state.

20. Which complete fic is your favourite?

Asking the hard questions I see. I have a soft spot for In Your Shadow, I admit, although I have several fics that I love (mostly my Military Bros stuff...). Also Tales, although that’s technically not “Complete”.

21. What’s your total published word count?

AO3: 956,962 (I aim to break 1 million by the end of the year... just watch me!)

FFN: 1,102,070 (FFN counts author’s notes, AO3 does not)

If someone is brand new to your writing, what work would you want them to start with to get to know you, your style, what you’re all about?

This is not a numbered question, I see, but it was on the post I copied these from, so I guess this is 21+1 questions!

I’ve answered this before, and honestly I think I’d stick with the same answer - Black Widow. It’s not my biggest fandom. It’s not my most recent work. But it does contain a lot of playing around canon without breaking it.

Although, if someone has the time, Tales From The Heart does great for showcasing the range of things I write. But that’s also 250+ chapters, so probably not a good one to start with.

And this is where I tag people, yes? Not entirely sure who’s been tagged already, but let’s go with @lenle-g @ak47stylegirl @thetwelvecaesars @gaviiadastra @willow-salix @scribeofred

#thunderbirds are go #and various other fandoms i am not tagging them all #ask me #tag game #fanfiction

11 notes · View notes

thegrinningkitten · 4 years

Note

How did you get so popular? I’m trying to grow big as a blog myself, but I can’t really do it. It seems like nobody likes my content.

The short answer is “I draw fanart, and I got very lucky”.

If you want a longer answer, then the brutally honest version of it is...

There are certain obvious rules to what kind of content would get more traction online:

1. Fanart is more popular than original art. The art will be more appealing to the viewer if they can connect to it on an emotional level, and if it’s fanart for a thing they’re already familiar with, the connection is already there. Original art, on the other hand, requires more work on the viewer’s part to establish that connection.

2. Comics are more popular than non-sequential pieces. Ideas are more likely to stick with people than visuals. Unless you have really strong visuals — as in, an art style that really stands out from the rest.

3. One-shot comics are more popular than long, multi-part comics. The reason’s similar to the one in the “fanart vs original art” point: One-shot comics are consumed all at once, while multi-part comics would require the viewer to go back and read them from the beginning to understand what’s going on in later parts.

There are also rules as to the best ways to post and tag your posts on different social media, but there are more than enough tutorials for that online.

While all of this should answer the general “how art blogs get popular” question, if you were actually asking about my experience in particular...

I started posting stuff online sometime around 2005-2006 — that’s when I started drawing too, I think. Had accounts on many message boards and social media websites over the years, but I don’t think there’s much to tell about them.

I first registered on Tumblr around 2010-2011 — and before anyone asks, TheGrinningKitten is my second blog; I did a huge thing where I abandoned all of my old accounts everywhere and started posting online under a new username.

Anyway, the thing is, I’ve been in different fandoms — big and small — for years, ever since I started posting online. My “main fandom” before I finally got into Undertale was Devil May Cry. I’ve spent around three years drawing fanart — and doodle comics — for it and even got a small following because of it. By that I mean that this blog had around 300 followers around November 2015, when I snapped my attention towards UT.

I participated in Fandom Kombat (Russian fandom event) with team Undertale and made some fanarts and stuff which went largely unnoticed by people. Heck, I even made Sans’s Happy Song, which did pretty well on YouTube, but people never made the connection — and even to this day a lot of people are absolutely baffled when I tell them that I made that video.

But then, inspired by CQ’s format for comics, I made this. It got reblogged by someone already popular within the fandom, it got spread around, and the reaction I got was overwhelmingly positive. So I decided to make another silly idea into a comic, and it got even more popular.

Things... kinda snowballed from there.

So, to put things into perspective, it took about 10 years for me (and 4 years for my Tumblr blog) to “get noticed” so to speak. You decide what to make of it. *shrug*

#Jass rambles #asks

274 notes · View notes

stillness-in-green · 3 years

Note

I'm not really active in the MHA fandom or blog- but I agree a lot with your points on OH. To be fair though- I don't think weekly schedule in itself facilitate great writing imo b/c Mangaka's don't have the time to revise their drafts (they get usually max 6 hours of time to work on each page- everything from name to final touch ups- monthly authors get up to 2 days for each page), there's literally not enough time to think, reread or to adjust things. But I think Hori's reaching a point where it's not sustainable for him to keep at the pace he started MHA with. So he's cutting corners to move the plot faster- but compressed plotlines will come with executional pitfalls. That's just the limits of the medium when you don't have a dedicated writer/ don't have everything pre-planned. It's getting more apparant now, because we're in the final arc- and people are expecting pay offs to start happening. And in considering that the 'conversation' deku and OH had was supposed to be payoff on OH's character thread? It's a lotta waffling imo. I'm over it at this point- because If Hori is actually doing this because it's for his own health- then I'd rather he do that. regardless of whether I like his story or not- it's still his story- so the priority imo is so long as he's happy with his work- that's what should matter more. It doesn't mean it's above critque, or that we should all like it, not at all, ones reactions are one's own, and genuine in their emotions. There's nothing wrong with expressing such on ones own blog, and tagging it in the fanom. Critiques ultimately for those of us doing so, is moreso for ourselves, either those who want to work on creating our own IP, or just want some benchmarks to keep in mind in reading future stories and anticipating what actually appeals to one's own tastes. I just want to make a shoutout of all of that, cause I can tell some of the people reblogging your OH post don't get it at all and are too busy in the "I'm right, you're wrong mindset"- which is-realistically speaking nothing new when it comes to internet fandoms- but still missing the point of what you were saying. Unfortunatly- Tumblr's reply function is pretty much ass when it comes to anything of length on an actual post though. So hope you don't mind the rando tldr from a passer by.

Heya anon, I definitely don't mind the passer-by message. You're right about Hori's ridiculous work schedule. I complained during the war arc about all the breaks, but now I definitely wish he would take a few more than he has been. Not just for the story's sake, but also for his own--it's been AGES since he had one, it seems like. And in fairness, I can hardly expect him to make the time to do a bunch of research on e.g. the detrimental psychological impact of solitary confinement on his schedule.

In truth, the rant was mostly to get it off my chest. Normally, I save my most annoyed complaining for Discord, but sometimes when it feels like no one else is saying the things I want to see said (about Deku's motivations there, about the PLF arrests, about the MLA's views on quirk supremacy, etc), my motivation overflows.

Ultimately, I've been making my peace with the idea of jettisoning canon pretty much since Chapter 240 dropped and featured a Re-Destro whose characterization I liked considerably less than Chapter 239's Re-Destro,* so the idea of writing off the canon after a certain point and just writing the fic I want to write is something I'm very prepared to do.

Still, it'd be nice to be happy with the canon itself, and I really am hoping to be! There's so much good and interesting stuff going on in the series, really challenging material, and like many others, I hope that this arc is about really pushing Hero Society and its defenders to the breaking point so that they can see that the system they have does have to change--just to pick the obvious example, I don't want to see Hawks proven right that a system that could produce him and Lady Nagant is worth salvaging just because Deku is a good person.

Thanks for the message, anon! I grew out of the phase of being bothered by people who willfully miss my point or read me in bad faith many, many fandoms ago, so I'm not too concerned with the people in the comments doing that--I've gotten some very thoughtful responses and much more traction than I'd been expecting, so I'm glad the rant reached some like-feeling people! Here's to hoping Horikoshi gets some rest, and we all can find satisfaction in the story he's working so hard to bring us.

(*Regarding 239 vs. 240's Re-Destro, while I have my problems with how the MLA is being treated in general, the canon has given me more good RD material. I will probably never be over him calling Shigaraki "savior and liberator" and getting indignant about Shigaraki's safety GOOD SHIT GOOD SHIT. Also Clone!RD talking about the relief of only having to present one face to the world and wistfully reflecting on his group's sought-after Liberation as he falls into nothing I am still shook.)

#stillness answers #bnha

14 notes · View notes

btsandvmin · 3 years

Note

I love how you answer. I love every analysis of yours. Because you don't try to push the vmin is real agenda. You make sure that your post doesn't look like you are trying to prove something but instead gives a broader meaning to vmin moments.. idk if I'm makung proper sense here lol but love your blog. P.S I hope you answer by music bank ask.

Thank you! <3 It warms my heart that you appriciate it, because I know some would prefer confidence and me just stating things as facts, especially when some theories look very possible and logical. (I can even see some tendencies in how the more “delulu” a post of mine sounds the more traction it gets and I totally get that... I am drawn to that type of posts too.) I am also glad that you seem to think my posts open up to how we could view Vmin moments in a broader sense. :) Really, thank you a lot.

I really think trying to stay as “non delusional” and not being confident in my theories is very difficult but in the end necessary. Because if I am wrong, but say something with confidence that might convince other peope... The ones suffering in the end are us who are proven wrong if we truly start to believe something (I’ve talked about cognitive dissonance before). Strongly believing or hoping for something and then to get it disproven can hurt. And for that reason alone no matter how convincing something might seem, I won’t become a person who 100% believes in Vmin being something other than platonic soulmates (unless they say something themselves to change that label).

I also know with the lack of full context we get that the margin of error becomes even bigger. (Not to mention all the other problems and difficulties that come with trying to do analysis of real people from far away that are part of a different culture etc.) I mean, there are different shippers for all pairs in BTS that has gone from just shipping to actually beliving their ship is real. Just this morning I came across some Jin/kook shippers who seem convinced their ship are together romantically for real. It’s not like all these people are idiots. In fact some of them are really smart, which makes it more likely for them to convince other shippers as well. It’s simply an example that shows how strong the power of our brains wanting to believe what we want to be real is. But all of these people also can’t be right, especially since most of them go against each other. That being said, we could all be wrong.

Even educated guesses are still guesses you know? So even when I feel confident in something (and it honestly might be very difficult not to turn too delulu... like have you seen the amount of stuff there is to find with the song analyzes and Vmin?) I need to hold back my words. I find Vmin suspicious for sure... But there are too many things that could be misinterpretation mixed with wishful thinking. I also look so much closer at Vmin that it makes it easy to miss other things. So, I have to be careful.

If Taehyung came out and had a girlfriend I would be suprised, and it would obviously affect the way I view Vmin. But I wouldn’t stop liking him or Vmin. The only thing it would “ruin” is all the hours spent on Vmin analysis. So, that’s why I need to stay open. For my sake, for your sake and for the sake of BTS’s lives being theirs and me not knowing even half of what might be going on in them. After all I rather see them be happy than me being right.

As for your music bank ask, I’ll get to it in a moment, but I am not sure I have too much to say. Still, thank you so much for your words and I am really glad you feel this about my approach to Vmin and doing analyses. :) <3

#vmin #bts analysis #shipping analysis #vmin analysis #btsandvmin ask #btsandvmin answer #btsandvmin

31 notes · View notes

bettsfic · 4 years

Note

do you know anything about like, the development of the purity rhetoric that now seems to be ubiquitous in fandom and how it got there? i used to be on tumblr in like, 2014 and only recently came back to fandom and i remember everyone being generally kind of cool with things like incest ships and morally grey characters (speaking specifically re the frozen fandom and elsa/anna here lmao) whereas now it seems like the conversation about those things has drastically shifted and i am..puzzled by it

this is what i imagine that experience was like for you:

according to fanlore, purity culture started in the homestuck fandom which. based on what i know of homestuck, that tracks. however i’ve never been in homestuck so i’m not sure what that transformation was like. all i know is my personal experience with the disk horse. afaik there’s no cohesive timeline of events across fandom, and i lack the time and resources to be able to make one myself. if anyone knows of one, or wants to make one, please let me know.

i do know that purity culture is a movement started by very young teenagers, who were maybe 13-15 in 2014 and are now 18-20. they were 8-10 when ao3 was founded, and therefore seem to have a limited knowledge of fan history, censorship, and critical thinking. i’m hoping that since they’re now entering college, they’ll get some insight and broader social awareness, and this movement will finally die out in the next few years.

on any other platform, at any other time, their toxic rhetoric would not have gained traction. but here and now, on tunglr dot com where anyone can gain a platform, where mob mentality thrives and inciting an anonymous dogpile is as easy as hitting Post, where the brokenness of this place makes it difficult to control the content you’re exposed to -- it’s the perfect storm. we live in an age of hopelessness. young people grow up with social media as an extension of their identities, tethered to devices that hold all the information in the world. i think it’s fair for them to be afraid of their futures, and i can understand the desire to control the online spaces where they have the most agency, where their voices are the loudest.

that may explain why, but not how. as in, where did they pick up this mentality at all? @freedom-of-fanfic (whose work is a necessity in understanding the disk horse) connected anti-shipping to TERF rhetoric. i’ve linked the fanlore page because it has all of the links and some of the responses. i honestly do believe that the language surrounding purity culture has its ugly roots in TERFdom. at its core, purity culture -- the policing of female and queer sexuality -- is misogyny.

when i started writing destiel circa 2014, fandom was as you described. wincest was a juggernaut on par with destiel. teen wolf was full of underage and noncon. a/b/o was on the rise. it seemed like fandom was a genre without restraint -- anything you wrote, if it found the right audience, would be celebrated unabashedly. people who have been following me for a long time know that i was addicted to adderall at the time and pounding out all sorts of manic nonsense. i remember living on the validation of comments (and at the time, there were lots of comments. not so much anymore, but that’s another story). i got critical comments only rarely, and they were the type that i admired -- readers without judgment thinking through the story, reacting to it earnestly. i made some of my best friends because they left long, critical comments on my work. sometimes they didn’t like it, sometimes they did, but ultimately, they were engaged, and that’s what counted.

i remember my first policing-type comment, i think at the start of all the purity nonsense. it was a destiel fic, and someone very angrily told me i should tag my bottom!cas because it was triggering. i’ve thought about that comment a lot over the years. top/bottom discourse is nothing new, but to say that bottom castiel is triggering? that was ridiculous. but then i realized -- there was a writer in fandom at the time i won’t name, who was known for being extremely sensitive (for bottom!cas especially, which they found triggering), and their very dedicated following offered fic that was safe for their fave to read. i have nothing against this person at all. they were not part of the purity discourse, they were up front about their sensitive nature, and as far as i knew (i believe i met them at a con once?) they were very kind.

but that commenter had been clearly influenced by this person and believed that a specific fictional character receiving anal sex from another specific fictional character was actual, real triggering content, and it was my obligation as a writer to tag for it. which i did, because i felt bad, and i was baffled by that request. at the time, i wanted more than anything to be liked, and conformed wherever i could. if i got such a request now, i would ignore it because it was rudely written and honestly kind of bonkers. i’d happily add a tag for something i may have missed, or even something i’d never considered before, but there’s no reason a person can’t make that request politely.

this situation isn’t about purity discourse proper (the commenter didn’t tell me not to write the fic, and it had nothing to do with morality), but it’s the earliest example i can think of where the process of policing had occurred: a person of influence on tumblr affected their follower’s thinking, and that follower felt entitled to command another writer to conform to that ideology.

i could be completely wrong about making these connections. maybe that commenter truly believed bottom!cas was a legitimate widespread trauma. they did not say the fic was triggering to them, but that it might be to some other people, in the same way purity police say “think of the CHILDREN” when in fact they don’t give a fuck about children at all.

after destiel i moved to stucky, which was, at the time, a juggernaut ship where anyone could write anything. this was also the time when the term “cinnamon roll” became incredibly popular, circa 2015. it was a fun and seemingly innocuous meme, but it positioned the ideas of “purity” and “wholesomeness” in sharp relief, and cemented these ideas by beginning to give it a distinct vocabulary. “trash” was pitched as its opposite. stucky is where i first came into contact with “antis.” in destiel, there had been ship wars, sure, but it was of a different flavor than antis. destiel vs wincest wasn’t about morality in 2014. it was about everything but.

in stucky in 2015, however, the disk horse was running rampant. the MCU had a sub-section of fandom called HTP (hydra trash party) in which steve and/or bucky have dubious or nonconsensual relations with various or many members of hydra. this is the first time i remember being aware of morality becoming a cornerstone of shipping. HTP was loathed by purity police. by the time i wrote a stucky bdsm au, i’d accumulated multiple nasty anons, rude comments from entitled readers, and other nonsense that all said the same thing: your filth is not welcome here in our space of purity. go away.

but the release of the force awakens is what really turned the tide. TFA offered three major ships: stormpilot (as it was called at the time, now finnpoe), reylo, and kylux. the fandom that developed around the sequels was firmly divided. franzeska wrote an amazing meta about this phenomenon which gives some insight into the seeds of purity policing. in short, stormpilot should have been the primary pairing of the sequels, but instead many of the badwrong writers from other fandoms (and HTP specifically, which was how i entered the fandom) flocked to the blank slate of kylux.

it took a long time for the ship to gain traction. a friend told me that kylux had started with angry star wars racists who hated that there was diversity in the sequel trilogy. and i told them no, i was there, there were twelve of us and a cornchip, and all we cared about was the dirty/darkly comedic potential of these two ridiculous villain characters in one of the biggest franchises of all time. it wasn’t that complicated. i don’t mean to dismiss the discussion of race in fandom; i think it’s important to acknowledge that racism, as franzeska describes far better than i can, plays a huge part in fandom, particularly in star wars, and it’s an important and ongoing discussion to be having, especially given what kelly marie tran has gone through, and how it affected (presumably) rose tico’s extremely limited presence in TROS.

the early fics of kylux weren’t particularly taboo. they were post-TFA hurt/comfort mostly, then slowly the bdsm and power dynamics crept in. those of us who wanted to get away from purity discourse had finally found a new home. for a while. 2016 was the golden era of kylux. we were all very happy.

i remember talking to a friend about how there were certain things i couldn’t write in certain ships. being from ye olden days of fandom, she was appalled by this idea, and told me i could write anything for any ship i wanted, wasn’t that was the whole point of transformative works? and i agreed! but i tried to explain, if you post badwrong for a fandom of purity police, you’re going to, at best, get dogpiled in your comments/inbox. at worse they will find you, call your employer, and try to ruin your life. people will tell you to kill yourself. they’ll report your tumblr and try to get your blog shut down. there are real-life, harrowing consequences to writing taboo fic, and many who write fic as a hobby don’t have the emotional energy to field these risks.

around this time, discord became popular, which offered a private space for badwrong writers to congregate. i had started grad school and didn’t have much time to write fic. metoo was happening. tromp got elected. kylux was slowly turning mainstream so a lot of us turned our attention to gradence in fantastic beasts. some went on to hannibal and other fandoms that hadn’t yet caught the attention of purity police (but it was, as it is now, just a matter of time). kylux, i feel, was specifically decimated by a single fan creator, who was like a police chief. they would get wind of someone writing underage or noncon and write a call-out post about them, and that writer/artist would get pitchforked. a few times, my comments or posts got screencapped, and posts were written urging people to stop reading my works because of how heinously immoral i was. this happened to several of my friends too.

the great tumblr tittyban of 2017 happened, which only added fuel to the fire and further legitimized the purity movement. i shifted hesitantly to the 100 fandom, which seemed small in comparison to supernatural, marvel, and star wars. i thought it was a chill place. i was wrong; it was just as toxic as other fandoms. but i also didn’t care anymore, and i appreciated that i was mostly left alone. more importantly, i found a lot of support from other people who were as tired of the purity as i was, and @the100kinkmeme was reborn.

the state of things is pretty abysmal. there are some really amazing writers out there writing under multiple sock accounts, keeping their fandom identities shattered so as not to call attention to themselves. as much as i understand why writers do that, and i respect that decision, i also think it’s sad. it deprives readers the chance to read that author’s other works. it limits the sense of community and our ability to make friends. it fractures the future of the genre.

what’s most important to acknowledge is that none of this is happening solely in fandom. i went to a writers’ conference where 2 of 3 panels were about the history of moral policing and censorship in art. it is worth noting that of the 40-ish visiting writers on faculty, only one (1) was a woman of color (jaimaica kincaid). naturally, older rich white people who have spent their life in the arts are all about death of the author, separation of art and artist. they’re on the total opposite side of purity police, and they won’t acknowledge at all that racism and sexism are a problem in the creative world. they don’t have any nuance on the discussion, or modern perspectives in light of metoo or popular culture.

this went on longer than i anticipated. i neglected to mention YFIP (your fave is problematic) an old blog that started the idea of call-out culture by pulling receipts on celebrities, and how call-out culture led to cancel culture, which also aided in the purity disk horse. i think a lot can be said about how some of this stuff is genuinely good (metoo and holding men accountable for their bullshit) while also being profoundly toxic (punishing criminals via mob mentality, ruining their careers and livelihoods through social media, rather than giving them their due process in court. i understand it -- the judicial system is built by the hands of the very predators we seek to condemn, but still. the jury of the internet is never a fair trial).

if you want to read more, my tag is tsatp (the sacred and the profane). i’m sure i’ve left out a lot, but i can only speak to my experience. i think it would be good if people would share their experience dealing with purity policing, too, so we might get a cohesive timeline in place. feel free to reblog and add your story.

#tsatp #my fic #Anonymous

510 notes · View notes

camelotcinematicuniverse · 3 years

Text

About Harry and Maple

Well, this is gonna be a really strange little thing that I write, but I'm still excited nonetheless.

In a Mario Golf 64 Twitch stream clip, the awesome speedrunner MetalYoshi ProGamer (yes, that's his alias. No, it's not lame, shaddup) asked the following question to his chat:

"Do you think that Maple has some kind of relationship to Harry?"

And that got me really thinking to the point that this very blog was made. So thanks, MetalYoshi. If you ever read this, I really needed that boost to put my thoughts out there.

Anyway, I actually have a few headcanon theories relating to Maple and Harry, but first we need context. Both Harry and Maple are the final characters from the Camelot OC bunch to be unlocked (without the Game Boy Color Mario Golf save file), thus making them the "best" of the Camelot OC golfers as character progression is measured through how far you get in the various modes of Mario Golf 64. Harry is the final Camelot Character unlocked through Get Character, while Maple happens to be the first character unlocked through earning 50 Birdie Badges. Technically that makes her the weakest of the four final characters (Maple, DK, Bowser and Metal Mario), but out of every Camelot OC she's probably the best alongside Harry.

Metal Mario may topple everyone else in stats and control alone, but don't let that discourage you from checking Harry and Maple out either. They have their own little quirks and low points, but they're still really good choices if you want something different from Bowser and Metal Mario.

Now for the fun part: my headcanons! I have three ideas to throw out in the ring, so you can decide for yourself which headcanon you'd like to go with. Hell, make your own and let's see what we can all come up with! Now then, let's begin!

_________________

Headcanon #1: Maple is Harry's daughter/little sister/family member:

This is an extremely cute idea to me because both of these characters look similar in a way, but they definitely have a difference in behavior with their mode select screen idle poses. Here we see Harry, with his alt colors, doing a semi serious crossed arms look. Like he takes himself a bit too seriously, but you can tell he loves the game of golf:

As for Maple, the screenshot wouldn't be enough, but she's dancing and just generally being cute:

Do you all notice anything about these two? How they have almost the exact same alt colors, how Harry's older, more seasoned presence kind of trickles down to Maple's eagerness (due to her dancing)? They're both blonde, and even the small things like the structure of Maple's nose kind of seem like a natural feminine version of Harry's being smaller and a lot less prominent, but it's still more than Plum's to me.

All this to say I have the theory that Maple could be Harry's daughter or even younger sister. It's just something about Harry that gives me this "older and wiser" vibe to Maple, and with some of the similarities pointed out, I like to imagine that Harry is a proud dad or brother to a young lady (honestly have no real idea of Maple's age, but I go with young adult/older teen vibes) who is as interested in golfing and competing to get even farther drives than before -- Maple. She looks up to him heavily and even starts to wear some of the same things as him but in her style. Note the first (1st) and third (3rd) alternate colors on the pair: the former is an orange shirt, and the latter is a red shirt. Hell, Maple goes so far as to change her shorts color to red as well, instead of the usual blue/purple. Look also at the hair color from Maple to Harry's hat color. The second (2nd) alt on Harry has an auburn-esque color, and Maple has her hair color changed to Auburn too!

I know that the more practical response would be "that's just how the game works in alt colors," but in universe, why else would Maple go out of her way to change her hair color and wear similar color coded outfits to Harry? Could she be extremely happy to emulate his behaviors and style from the extremely healthy bond the two have shared? Could he have been the closest thing to an exceptional male role model she had in her developmental years, so she trusts him and loves him to the point of having the same colors as an alt? That's something I like considering. Imagine if we had Harry console Maple on things that she's going through in her personal life, giving her a man's perspective on relationships and friends, and them enjoying their time together and being super close. When it comes time to golf, though, they are both competitive!

Headcanon #2: Harry is Maple's mentor:

A lot similar to the dad/brother one, Harry still is able to give Maple advice and pointers on her life, but it's about as much time spent as an average evening of golfing practice, typically a few hours at most. This is really the one I spent the least amount of time thinking about as it's not as interesting as the other two points, but I still thought this would be cool to share alas.

Headcanon #3: Maple and Harry are dating:

Ok, ok, here's the one I think MetalYoshi was hinting at with the way he worded his question. "Do you think Maple has some kind of relationship with Harry?" is probably something I figured he meant as a romance thing...well, I'll explore this one here.

From the first headcanon, we can see they have things in common physically and hobby wise, but what else do they like to do? Maybe Harry secretly likes cooking and Maple does too. Maybe he takes her out when she's upset. They would cuddle every night with a glass of wine (dare I say...Sherry?), and for Harry, Maple is what he needed in his life to keep him from taking everything too seriously. Loosening up to let her in after he puts up his own barrier to his emotions and probably has some puppy eyes thrown in.

Maple really likes Harry in this case because it gives her a sense of security, safety, a feeling of trust and realistic love that no one she had ever been with had before. She's unafraid of letting her walls come down and being more social and being herself around Harry. Her cute, tomboy, dorky self is what he truly cares about.

Hell it even goes through to golfing. Maybe the fact that they foil from each other and compliment well together is what makes them strong as golfers with a good drive and above average control. (Clearly not the best, but for them, that's ok)

________________

When it's all said and done, I do really like the idea of Maple and Harry together in some way. I think it's all too coincidental for them to nearly match in their alt colors, have some of the best stats of all the Camelot OCs, and how much they really do seem to mesh well together. In my eyes, the headcanon I do like the most is the familial one, but the romance option is such a cute option as well, and not to mention in my personal fanfics all three headcanons are interchangeable. The mentor/family friend one is used more often in my writing blurbs, but I liked the other two so much more that I'll have to implement them a lot more!

Ay, thanks for reading this. I really appreciate the traction since I don't usually share a lot of my headcanons on Tumblr...ah well. Enjoy!

#camelot cinematic universe #mapleXharry #mario golf #unironically #golf harry #golf maple #headcanon

3 notes · View notes