Ever wanna not blacklist a ship ‘cause then you’ll lose ALL content ‘cause nothing gets to exist as platonic fluff and non-sexual/romantic intimacy?

…y E A H.

(screenshot to avoid unnecessary discourse, don’t worry nonny)

Yeah, glad I’m not the only one who felt that was weird. Could’ve just had her be space elf aged of hundreds or thousands of years old, yet mentally a young adult. I mostly hc’d her as, like 23, especially because I was watching this show in my early 20s, saw her and was like, “Ah, yes, I can see this functioning young adult raised to be a diplomatic leader.”

The youngest I could allow was 19 because...like.............what was the point other than y’all didn’t know who to write her with since y’all wanted Shiro gone

It just felt...like they were deliberately reducing her. Started with not having her lead the team in his absence, then this weird age thing, punishing her for daring to want to reconnect with her heritage, they stopped referring to her by her title, and finally.....sacrificing her life.

Just all around............icky. So, we ignore that here. The show only had 2 seasons.

I really wanted to ignore the vld wank and hoped it would die off.But ffs, no-one ever said Klance was pedophilic. Klance shippers who were the big antis in the vld fandom. They were the ones who called sheith “pedophilic” and by extension, any ship involving Shiro with one of the paladins.Klantis (klance shippers who were “antis”) were the ones who harassed other fans and the crew of the show. They played a big part of popularizing age discourse, harassment, and the “anti” mentality. (vld 1/3)

--

The only comments on Keith’s and Lance’s age difference happened when the ages for the paladins were revealed in an official book. Antis used to argue that sheith was “pedo” because Keith was a minor and Shiro was an adult. But according to that book, Keith was 18, and Lance was 17. So some people pointed out as a *joke* that now Klance was the ship with a minor and an adult.Of course antis claimed that it was the age gap that made sheith “pedo”, and continued their harassment. (vld 2/3) Later, due to weird space-time stuff, Keith aged 2 years while the rest of the team didn’t, so at the end of the show his age gap with Lance was pretty much the same as with Shiro. Antis twisted themselves into pretzels to justify that Keith’s additional 2 years “did not count”. As for the “queerbaiting”: the producers stated twice in interviews that klance would not be canon. Antis insisted the klance would be canon anyway. Meanwhile in canon Lance clearly had feelings for Allura. (vld 3/3)

I don't know where people get any version of VLD fandom history other than: Klance fans sucked.

People are exagerating. Sure Engage has a plot that is less complex than 3 houses, more light hearted and clearly cheesey but the lore around Sombron is pretty solid. He isn't like the Agarthans who themselves lacked a bit of in depth since Arval/Epimenides lore was never further explored. But compared to Grima and Anankos, Sombron is good damnit.

Ok this reply got long and maybe a bit off topic

Counter-intuitively, the fact that Engage has a much more solid, comprehensible plot and clearly defined lore and character motivations is what makes it less interesting to talk about. At least on a metatextual level.

There is no need to debate "why does Alear go to Firene first?" because we know. Alear goes to Firene first because they were the first to ask for help. There's no need to debate about "how much of the evil done in the game was Sombron's fault?" because we know. All of it.

And really, you can see this in, like, every fandom. How many people spent years talking about the plot of ATLA? Now how many people spent years talking about the plot of Voltron? I don't have numbers, but I've watched ATLA at least a hundred times and spent many years in fan-communities for it and I've hardly seen any extensive discussion about the plot. Meanwhile I've never even seen an episode of VLD but I can give you a rough overview of its plot just based on all of the discussions about it.

With everyone on the same page the only thing to debate is how well it was executed, and that's going to be down to personal taste 100% of the time. On some level we all know that so once you've said your piece there's really no reason to continue arguing about it.

Think of all of the most enduring Fire Emblem wank. It's like, Ike sexuality, Edeldiscourse, and ship wars. So something that was left intentionally vague and ambiguous because homophobia, something that was intentionally muddied by the developers for marketing the waifu purposes, and something that is either not discussed at all in canon or is left completely player-determinant with no canon confirmation.

Like honestly I think 3H just broke our sense of what is "normal" for discussion about this series. Awakening and Fates did see some discussion, but the transformative side of the fandom, at least IME of those games' fandoms, faaaaaaaar outweighed the metatextual side.

Some people liked them, some people didn't, some people explained their positions. The people who liked it stuck around to make art and fic and whatnot, and the people who didn't moved onto other things.

In addition to being a mess, I think 3H was also just kind of got trapped in its own feedback loop/death spiral because of circumstance. With previous games, for the most part, if you didn't like the game you played it, maybe talked about it for a little while, and then moved on. You know, you found another game or another show or another hobby or something that held your interest. 3H came out right before the pandemic, and if you played it and didn't like it... you were probably still talking about it, because what the fuck else were you doing in 2020 while you were trapped in your house with nothing to do and no new games or shows or media coming out? And now it's like everyone has wasted so much time talking about it that Sunk Cost Fallacy is out in full force.

I mean it's anecdotal but I felt like, despite all of the wank, 3H discourse was largely winding down by the time we were hitting January/February of 2020. I might've even observed as much back then, too.

Unfortunately it's another one of those things where I can't create an alternate reality where COVID didn't happen, or where 3H released on schedule in 2018 and Engage was our Pandemic Fire Emblem instead. But given trends in every other industry (e.g. most youtubers saw a huge influx of views in pandemic times that tapered off as people got back to their lives, Netflix saw a huge jump in subscriptions in pandemic times that tapered off as people got back to their lives, heck, even pets got adopted at record rates and then taken back to shelters at record rates after the pandemic) it'd be silly to assume it couldn't have happened to FE as well.

And I'm sure I'm going to get That Anon that insists that 3H is the most specialist game ever and I'm just butthurt because games I like better didn't sell as well or get as much fanfic or whatever. But we, like as a species, have a tendency to believe that when we (or something we like) succeeds it was based on merit, and when we (or something we like) fails it was based on circumstance. But the reality is that it's usually a little bit of both. If 3H was a completely dogshit game with no redeeming qualities then all the pandemics in the world probably couldn't have saved it, but there were no doubt circumstances in the game's favor. Because frankly, it's rather mediocre and unpolished in many aspects, so who knows if it would have garnered the audience it did without being in the right place at the right time.

breathes

Anyway if you ask me, I think what Engage really lacks is a solid, un-permadeathable side character or side characters to draw the audience in. Like, Fates had the siblings (especially Takumi) as strong supporting cast that were likable and sometimes tragic and involved in the plot throughout. Tellius had its Laguz royals, Soren, and Ranulf to create drama and intrigue outside of Ike. 3H had the lords, obviously, but also characters who weren't recruited could shuffle around the various plots and play different roles.

Engage treats pretty much every cast member besides Alear and Veyle as disposable, even the royals (I mean IIRC Timerra barely speaks after you're done with Solm and even Alfred, Diamant, and Ivy start getting pushed to the sidelines toward the end). Which means there's not really a lot of time to get invested in them before they disappear. Which is very much a problem with FE as a series and how it handles its death mechanic so I can't exactly blame Engage for it, but there were games that did it better in the series, too.

You realize that when people call Zutara fans "toxic" they mean you 90% of the time right... and it ain't because you hate aang and mai, sis. You're just extremely rude and shitty to people and never mentally aged past 7th grade and take it out on all the actual teenagers that interact with you

A few things:

If I'm so rude and shitty to people as a general rule, one wonders how it is you even saw my (totally innocuous and not really deserving this level of vitriolic response unless you have a vested interest in reading everything I say and do in the worst faith imaginable, but I digress) post, since surely you would have had me blocked by now, to avoid potential interactions? Curious.

'never mentally aged past 7th grade' is a very funny allegation, considering I'm not the one camped in someone's inbox yelling at them completely unprovoked, which strikes me as far more middle school-esque behavior.

If I'm the worst form of 'toxicity' you have encountered in this fandom, then count yourself lucky, you absolute fucking walnut. I've gotten sent death and rape threats for mild Aang criticism, and I've been accused of horrible things for the crime of enjoying the most vanilla ships imaginable, nevermind what gets flung at me for my spicier entertainment--believe me, if the worst you've experienced is me being 'rude' to people, you have it easier than most!

And as a final point: I've only been active in the atla fandom proper since 2018 or thereabouts. The fanwars and fandom hostility were legendary long before I ever watched the show, nevermind became involved in the fandom. And in my experience, the toxicity with which the fandom is currently rife didn't really start picking up speed until 2020--when atla got put on Netflix, and the former VLD fans caught wind of it and brought that brand of vitriol with them, for which I definitely wasn't responsible.

Anyway, considering the fact that I reserve my snippiness for assholes, I'm not really taking your wank all that much to heart. I will happily engage in meta discussions and disagree with people who are fandoming in good faith, but yeah, I'll be an asshole to crosstaggers and people who attack me or my friends first--that's just how I'm built.

Luckily, this is tumblr, and if you never want to see or hear from me again? The block button is right there.

those of u who dropped lotura and screamed abuse post s6 and who are scrambling back now... we see u villains

“Fuck antis”

Hey, if you're part of the LGBT community and comforting cis-straight people's feelings about their homophobic outbursts, kindly stay the fuck away from me.

…should I watch the newest TDP season?

Because s2&3 (especially 3) just. Really ticked me off. Watched like a dumpster fire with all the Doyalist Issues utterly breaking containment, to put it mildly, and doubling down on brutalizing the female, queer, and poc characters (especially if they were at least 2/3. Like the Lesbian Queens and Sun Elf Queen.) An utter implosion of the world’s internal logic.

Did…did they fix it? (Is Callum less of a mansplainer I wanna dropkick off the side of a mountain without a deus ex machina saving his Self-Insert Ass this time?)

I'd like to say, the fact that people say that VLD was crap when it was a goddamn delight for most of its run really pets my peeve. Yes, the final chunk of it was sub-par to say the least, but c'mon, you can't say that it was bad overall.

Y'feel me, Breezy?

Let me be clear that there were definitely some really interesting and nice things this show provided. And if you found joy in it, more power to you! Don't let my opinion sully it for you and I mean that sincerely.

But, unfortunately, I don't agree. Ignoring whatever fandom does for the moment, seeing how Allura's storyline and treatment and how she was talked about by the showrunners was NOT a delight. Not to mention how they viewed Shiro and his laundry list of traits, i.e. his mental and physical issues. And that's only 2 of the characters who's management I disagreed with.

S1 and half of S2 was fun but it starts getting abundantly clear who the writers' favorites were and it was.........very disheartening. Plotholes and plot threads unresolved, showhorned characterizations, missed opportunities for character growth, etc. etc. Add that to the unchecked fandom racism/ableism/bs, it was very....very hard to enjoy. I could not bring myself to watch the final season.

I've tried to avoid talking about my issues with the show and the fandom because I want my blog to be a positive space for myself and others. But mostly because I don't wanna have to deal with unwanted opinions. I've seen enough gaslighting in my years here.

Again, you can absolutely enjoy the show! To each their own! You can full on disagree with me! This show did give me opportunities to grow and form relationships I could never dream of. So, I just focus on what gives me joy and it's my two favorite characters. I make the content I want to see.

i don’t wanna hear a word about lotor’s uncomfirmed “genocide” when sendak literally started work camps on a planet he wanted to destroy

my feelings atm about the last season are

disappointment about how they handled shiros character in the end. especially his friendship with keith that they basically just forgot about

anger over allura bc they could have ended that conflict differently

and just genuinely sad about how lonely and horrific lotors life was and how it ended. i was not prepared to see a melted/rotting corpse

Kla.nce is just dest.iel for sucrits