i feel room temperature about this news

People who engage in the Hetalia fandom while openly disliking the source material and even Himaruya himself sound kinda like hypocrites to me. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but please stay away from me, this kind of mindset truly annoys me and makes me uncomfortable. Am I gatekeeping? No, not really, I just believe that being a fan of something should mean, you know, being a fan and liking the source material at the very least. It should be like, the lowest the bar can get. Below that, there's not being a fan.

Broke my tumblr silence just to sprinkle a little sad into your day! You are welcome!

Fine, I'll admit it. With long hair...

He's very attractive. He really is.

But, he's a harebrained trend chaser, who will butcher his good looks for fickle fashion.

He also looks like he should be wearing a kilt, not a cloak. Because of the long red hair, not David's nationality.

What is your favourite thing about Billie Lurk?

(Answers are obvious possibly but i love when people talk about her👍)

thanks for the ask!! YEAH ME TOO I love when people talk about Billie! I can't say I have a favourite thing specifically, but I can explain why she's my fav. apologies for not taking this qn literally, but -

short answer: she’s really cool

& you can stop reading there, or, for the maybe 2 mutuals who might have time to read this my thoughts on her as a character, her meta, and her character as raw potential...

long answer:

i considered making this entire thing a gush so you could read a gush about Billie. but, part of what draws me to her is that she’s not always well written, and in fandom she’s underrated for a literal protagonist.

since you ask...

billie is a cool character

when I played Dh2 (hadn't played Dh1), I was excited to see a black woman with disabilities who was captaining a massive ship by herself. wow.

then I discovered Billie’s backstory with Deirdre, the way she responded to that, then having to survive while living on the run, and her bisexuality. as well as her history with daud & delilah. fascinating!

she’s an outsider who has so much to lose, and knows what it's like to lose everything - having lost everything not once but three times - but nevertheless speaks truth to power. she's so brave! she went and helped Emily & Corvo and she must have known they might kill her! plus, she’s smart, she’s funny, she gets shit done, she’s gorgeous.

but... the meta

mild critique of fandom & arkane incoming.

skip this bit if you want - you've been warned twice now - jump to tired Hayao Miyazaki and read from there if you'd like my thoughts on writing her.

i thought Death of the Outsider was going to be amazing and then... well. *sad trombone* i've written about that before so i won't keep banging on. i figured others must be disappointed too, so I joined a few fandom spaces in hopes of finding camaraderie.

most people with complaints about DotO didn’t like how the Outsider and Daud were handled. which is valid & I agree. but it seemed like most paid no attention to Billie; when people talk about her it’s with respect to Daud, as opposed to in her own right. you could argue for fandom misogyny because people don’t talk about adult Emily Kaldwin that much either, but in Billie's case, it’s misogynoir (compare & contrast with the popularity of thomas, particularly the popularity of thomas portrayed as a white man for no particular reason that i've been able to discern - i keep asking around, is it in the books???).

i think this is a LOT better now than it used to be, which is fantastic. or perhaps i have found the correct echo-chamber? ha.

ultimately, The Fandom is a fraction of the entire picture, and not even the important bit since The Fandom is not who these games are made for. you can't make money relying on only your hardcore fans even if all of them spent a fortune on merch, this is true for any AAA game.

while it's true that Billie is underrated from a fandom perspective - but Billie as an underwritten protagonist is squarely Arkane’s fault.

it was reasonable when she was a side character - the lack of info in Dh2 makes perfect sense (if anything there was more lore in Dh2 which is kind of wild)-

- but as a protagonist in Death of the Outsider?

.... there’s lousy writing, and there’s whatever is going on with Billie Lurk, a black woman who mostly exists as a foil or saviour for light-skinned characters. In her own game there’s barely any of her own lore except where it's relevant to saving two dudes.

lore hints at, but barely touches on what race means in the Dh universe (xenophobia is stronger in Dh1; separate essay i guess), but Arkane has patted themselves on the back for portraying non-white characters, which feels like the same thing as the aesthetic of diversity we're seeing in advertising currently because it’s in marketing trend guides. it's self-congratulatory and it's a missed opportunity for deeper storytelling.

you can see an example of diversity at its most shallow in the way that Billie’s written: there’s little engagement with her as an entire person with history & wants & preferences, and the world she walks through in that game feels like it has nothing to do with her. you could make a case for alienation as a theme, but then, how do you handle the titular premise of 'Dishonored' without ever letting Billie make changes in an environment without a chaos system? it's disappointing from that angle too.

in my opinion, whatever it's worth, it was an accident Arkane created such an awesome character - they needed someone to betray daud. congrats billie.

all this said, it makes her an underdog as far as characters to enjoy & create art & stories for. it's nice to find so many like-minded, switched on people! <3

billie's character potential

she’s got a wealth of unexplored lore, being deeply intertwined with both Karnaca & Dunwall’s fates & criminal underbellies, as well as her connections to the witches & whalers, and three Empresses.

she’s lived a few distinct lifetimes and in the games we get to meet her at two peaks (KoD & DotO) & a low (Dh2 as Meagan).

her voice is very distinct, her dry & often dark humour is entertaining & fun to write. her perspective is really interesting - she’s had the widest variety of void-powers of anyone canonically, and she’s also lived through the highest highs and lowest lows.

she's got everything going for her :) i couldn't really pick a fav thing!

Hi I noticed you have been in the deathnote fandom for a long time. Do you know some changes the fandom/ships went through? I already know that the misogyny towards misa used to be terrible

Thanks 🙏

Hi! Yes, I've been here a long time lmao So from what I can recall things have actually stayed pretty remarkably the same when it comes to the popularity of the ships and dynamics in this series. Lawlight has always been the most popular ship, followed closely by M2 (Matt x Mello). However back in the mid/late 2000s it was different in terms of certain things, like the way the ships were referred to. For example, there was no such thing as a nickname for a ship as a whole back then - you didn't call it "Lawlight," you called it either "L/Light" or "Light/L." You had to specify which of the two you liked as the top by putting their name at the start of the pairing. They were treated almost like they were two entirely different ships, and people would definitely get upset if you weren't terribly careful about specifying this when posting shippy fics and things. This changed sometime between 2009-2012, maybe? Possibly around when "Brangelina" and celebrity couple nicknames like that became a thing in pop culture, lol. I am personally glad things are no longer this fussy about labeling and defining the ships, because I find it dumb and possibly a bit offensive towards gay folks to be that obsessive about their bedroom dynamics above all else. But I definitely still see people get very particular about their preferences for this stuff when it comes to their discussions of the ships these days too, so I might be the odd one out here. Overall I'd say tolerance towards diversity of the pairings and appreciation of the more minor characters has increased? Stuff like pairing L with Matsuda or having het ships like B x Naomi wasn't terribly common back then, from what I remember. People won't hate on you and fight with you as much for daring to enjoy depicting the characters with somebody other than their fave in a story or a piece of art nowadays, either (like "how dare you pair L with somebody other than Light!" - this was a very common thing to hear back in the early fandom days, and people would often act like you were "cheating" on a character by shipping them with somebody other than the character they decided they belonged with.) And fans have also started showing more appreciation for the female characters and attempting to be more inclusive toward them than they used to be. There is a bit less hatred of characters like Near and more shipping of him now as well. Many people were extremely dismissive of him back in the day, and he has definitely grown in popularity over time.

In general I think the fandom has chilled out and diversified and become more tolerant and deeper and more accurate with the characterization in its discussion of the series overall, but I still often will see the exact same takes and trends and tastes and arguments going on now as I used to see back in 2008. Especially when I step outside of the Tumblr bubble and back into a broader/more casual group of fans talking about the series and their faves.

okay but like actual real talk to anyone publishing their works on ao3: don't knock your work in the fic description!!!! "i wrote this at 3am so ignore how shit it is" YOU CREATED SOMETHING AND YOU HAD FUN. "english isn't my first language i know this is bad i'm sorry" DON'T BE SORRY YOU WERE BRAVE ENOUGH TO PUT IT OUT INTO THE WORLD. "this is trash it's my first fic" IT'S NOT IT'S BEAUTIFUL BECAUSE YOU MADE IT.

BE KIND TO YOURSELF.

there’s been many times in the last few years when army was so divided i thought we’d never recover but none of those times hold a candle to what’s going on right now. genuinely there’s no coming back from the way these anti-boycott, anti-DOING-FUCKING-ANYTHING armys have been acting

once again saying that the way people focus on how ~well book accurate rhaenyra was fat~ but literally never talk about aegon or helaena being *actually drawn as fat in official art* is so so weird

“lmm popscare” is so unoriginal y’all. write some new jokes. it’s just boring at this point.

I really am getting frustrated with how little artists are being supported in this fandom. It’s frustrating to see talented artists who have notes only in the dozens because a ton of people liked the art but only one or two people reblogged it. And I don’t think you should be pressured to reblog every single art piece you see, but I am begging you to consider being a bit more lenient in art you will boost??

Art on the internet is dying in some ways. We are losing the websites that catered to our work one by one- Deviantart, Instagram, Twitter, many more. Tumblr is among them, but at the very least it is not the site’s algorithm that is against us, and there are plenty of active people, and yet still, no one actually wants to put in the effort of supporting the creators they like or helping them feel seen, and I feel like at least to a degree that is a major problem specifically in this fandom- Because we have an active fan base on this app, and I can see how many people flock to funny text posts I’ve reblogged, but my art and other people’s art will continue to go entirely ignored and it’s becoming increasingly frustrating because despite the influx of new people on this app, I’ve seen a DECREASE in interaction somehow.

I don’t know for what reason you would want to follow me but for art, for my own and the work of others that I reblog, so can you please actually support it instead of looking at it for half a second and then moving on with maybe a like if we are lucky? Because I’m exhausted of trying to make work that will actually be valued by anyone and other artists have been saying the same things for months, and although I’ve tried to be nice and not too forward about my frustration with this, I’m getting to be at my limit. I don’t want to post art that much anymore. Many other people don’t want to post art much more. What’s the point if no one shows any care?

Everybody learns at their own pace everybody learns in their own time everybody everybody learns at the time best for them everybody-

ao3 kudos stats: a fun fact

so the other day as one of my fics approached 500 kudos (!!), i got curious as to how many fics on ao3 reach that benchmark. a little while back i ran the numbers for 100 kudos (which makes up around 1/3-1/2 of fics depending on fandom, but it’s WAY more common than expected), and i wanted to look into it a little further. this is because i think the numbers are interesting and i will admit i get a little bit of dopamine from comparing my stats to other people even though way too many things affect stats for it to really matter. but yeah, let’s go.

today is june 26th, 2023.

the archive is closing in on 6 million users and has over 11.3 million works. bonkers numbers btw. anywho.

there are 651k fics over 500 kudos. out of 11 million! that’s a bit under 6% of ALL of the fics on the archive!

i think this is a perfect example of the hits:kudos ratio and how messed up it is. let’s look for a sec at fics with more than 1k hits. that seems like a good number to weed out people who clicked out, people who finished but didn’t like it enough to kudos, and people who forgot because it’s 3am and they’re falling asleep. oh, and rereads!

so, uh. fucking ow. five MILLION works? gang, pls. i’m not here to guilt anyone or convince you to kudos every fic you finish, but damn.

i was going to keep going with stats, but i’m tired so maybe some other time. just wanted to point out the exact numbers if we’re talking about the ratio.

“i don’t have to tolerate [x thing that is actually harmless/group of fans who like x harmless thing] in this fandom just because it’s fiction”

i mean. you do, actually. you do have to tolerate us, just like we suck it up and accept that you aren’t going anywhere either. that’s the fandom experience in a nutshell.

Personally I believe there's not rly a good way for an artist to interact in depth w the fans of their work. You have to draw a line between yourself and them, you have to be a little bit of a hermit. I just don't think it's healthy to immerse yourself too deeply in what other people think of your work, neither is it constructive. Additionally, many artists have limited experience with the way fandom works online and will have a hard time with boundaries or understanding unusual interpretations or subcultures. As someone whos been on tumblr for time immemorial I know that the best way to enjoy something is to do it by yourself or w a small circle of friends and let the fandom at large alone. And if I do interact w a larger fandom ik how to live and let live. I think a lot of artists don't have that skill. They just need to keep out of fandom. It's not good for them.

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