#which is why i mostly follow people who actually post meta if i follow a fandom blog
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The Final 15: Aziraphale's decision matrix in a no-choice situation
I have been thinking and reading about what happened since season 2 came out, and I think I have finally been able to put it all down into a logical sequence. This meta is the result of both countless posts I have read on tumblr and my own thoughts.
But let us start from the beginning, which is essentially Metatron's offer:
Notice how Aziraphale consistently declines the honour, as Metatron keeps pressing. When he says that Aziraphale is the perfect choice he also mentions that Aziraphale "is a leader, is honest and doesn't just tell people what they want to hear", which is of course a lie and they both know it. Initially, Aziraphale can't deny it because he can't just go "well, actually, I have been doing exactly that, stretching the truth in my reports and on a few notable occasions outright lying to my superiors and even God Herself". So he deflects to "where will I get my coffee?", preferring to highlight his attachment to Earth. In response to that Metatron makes his final move: he knows about Aziraphale's partnership with Crowley, and that means he knows about the lies.
This threat to Crowley gets Aziraphale to the following decision matrix:
Telling Crowley about the threat is useless. Aziraphale knows he will suggest running away together, and that puts them both in danger. Similarly, running away alone / hiding Aziraphale will not be a good move either because Metatron will not hesitate to harm Crowley and use him as a bait for Aziraphale.
So this means that Aziraphale's best option is not telling Crowley about the threat and persuading him to come with Aziraphale, his second best being going alone. Both of these offer best safety guarantees for Crowley, and this is something Aziraphale would not compromise on.
So our angel launches into this entire speech about making a difference. These are the only arguments he can come up with on the fly regarding why he took the position (the position he does not want! At a place he does not want to go back to!). And he is terrified that Metatron will come back and he won't be able to finish this conversation, won't be able to persuade Crowley. Add to this the fact that Crowley is clearly trying to have an important conversation with him too. A conversation they would like to have in private, but which Aziraphale knows can be interrupted at any moment. That's why he tries to stop Crowley, that's why he is constantly glancing out of the window.
Aziraphale is angry and frustrated, but this is mostly anger at Metatron who put him into this position, at the unfairness of it all, at himself for not being able to get Crowley to agree. It is the despair that just when Crowley confesses his love, instead of being able to say "I love you" back, he has to swallow it down again. Aziraphale's "I forgive you" is "I forgive you for not trusting me to make the best choice for us both", "I forgive you for not agreeing to go with me, I understand why you declined". And this aligns neatly with the theory about the Nightingale song in the car being a message from Aziraphale: it is his way of saying "I love you, I chose you, I chose our side, and that’s why I had to go".
And you know what? Crowley is a clever noodle and he knows Aziraphale well, so he will figure it out, he will spot this out of character, under-duress-only style of decision-making and start untangling that mystery.
We all know how it ends, and I can't wait to see it!
UPD: to put the above in perspective, see this meta with graphs!
#good omens#gos2#crowley#ineffable husbands#aziraphale#good omens 2#gos2 spoilers#justice for crowley#gos2 meta#good omens meta#gos2 ending#final 15#gos3 theories
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Hi there, I saw in one of your tags recently that "if you think the raven queen was being unfair, I'm not really interested in your opinions." I was wondering if you could talk a little more about that because I'll be honest, Vax isn't my favorite character but I've seen all of C1 and I really don't get why some people HATE the RQ, call her unfair, manipulative and pretty plainly say this moon conflict is mostly her fault because she took Vax and through a Domino effect Ludinus is releasing Predathos. Also, I enjoy your theories and analysis for CR so much you got me listening to Midst, so thank you.
Hi anon,
Great question! This is going to be a very long post, with a relatively short initial answer, because there is both the literal misinterpretation that indicates this is not someone with strong analytical skills nor knowledge of canon, and a number of potential mindsets that lead to this manner of thinking in the first place, none of which I respect. You happen to have sort of hit upon the foundational elements of my whole deal re: CR meta, so, buckle in.
The first part is simple: Vex died because Percy triggered a trap before she'd been healed up. We've seen this sort of trap elsewhere in non-divine contexts (Folding Halls of Halas); it's just a form of trap. A particularly nasty one, but this is for a very powerful relic she doesn't want falling into the wrong hands, and, moreover, the party could have likely disabled it either through rogue skills or magic had Percy waited. Vax, then, as the third part of the resurrection ritual, told the Raven Queen to take him instead of Vex. The Raven Queen did precisely as he asked. He did not need to offer this (Scanlan was going to make an offering, the other parts of the ritual had gone well, it was Vex's first death so the DC was low, and Vax could have made any number of other, less dramatic offers), and he did so with the understanding that he would die in lieu of Vex, right then and there. He did not. I think that's the only case, actually, where the Raven Queen was not 100% upfront with her intentions before Vax accepted something; but he offered it voluntarily. Vax was a person who formed extremely intense connections, to the point where it was perhaps unhealthy, and did not believe life without his sister was worth living, and was willing to sacrifice himself to a god.
Everything after that was extremely straightforward. Vax communed with the Raven Queen, who spoke very directly with him in his vision in the Raven's Crest. She was extremely clear when she met with him following his disintegration: he was given the option to refuse her offer, and he took it instead. It is not manipulative to give someone a difficult decision, and if a character you like makes a choice you don't like, it is not automatically the result of manipulation.
As for the moon conflict being her fault…that is, to put it bluntly, unhinged, and what's more, ironic given that that's the manipulative argument. Ludinus tried to commune with Ruidus using a random crystalline artifact beneath Molaesmyr, centuries before Vax was born. He was going to do this regardless. If he couldn't get Vax, he'd get some other sliver of divinity, and what's more, it's been all but stated that Vax is not actually supposed to be leaving the Shadowfell to protect Keyleth, and is disobeying the Raven Queen directly (and it's been stated that this isn't necessarily helpful for Keyleth, who is trying to grieve and move on). So: Vax made his choices with the knowledge of what they entailed, is trying to bend if not break the conditions to which he agreed with full knowledge in a way that probably isn't healthy for him or Keyleth, and it's bananas to be like "wow look at how the Raven Queen made Ludinus try to free Predathos." Like. Even if she had tricked Vax, which she didn't, Ludinus literally could have just kept on his racist imperialistic longevitymaxxing beat indefinitely and left the moon well enough alone. The domino meme is a meme. I mean, while we're at it, couldn't we trace it back to Vecna instead, for killing Vax with Disintegrate in the first place, since had he not done so, Vax would have either survived that fight or would have been resurrected normally? Or perhaps it's Percy for triggering that trap. Or the Chroma Conclave for being the reason why Vox Machina was seeking the Deathwalker's Ward in the first place…but that only happened because Allura and Kima didn't kill Thordak but rather sealed him, and because a priestess of Melora cursed Raishan so that she had reason to ally with Thordak. We can go on indefinitely; the point is, to assign blame specifically to the Raven Queen when Ludinus literally did not have to do a goddamn thing with the moon is a fucking stupid take.
Below the cut, I talk root causes behind why people might decide the Raven Queen was unfair and come up with the above nonsensical argument to support that, since I don't think people say stupid things just to be stupid.
I think one root cause for this mentality of this is that the person in question wishes Vax hadn't died and is looking for someone to blame because they don't want to blame Matt Mercer and Liam O'Brien, even though yeah, that's who to blame. The thing is, as we learned in Campaign 2, character death is quite literally on the table. Had Vax not made his bargain, either in episode 1x103 or his original one during Vex's resurrection? He might have simply remained dead. Had he not given his life for Vex's, he was pursuing paladin anyway with the Everlight, and we don't know what she'd have required of him. But more importantly, for all people like to bring up a PC-centric perspective (which, in Actual Play, is inevitable) Vox Machina's frequent use of resurrection spells was in fact a massive privilege most people in Exandria do not have. And, unsurprisingly for a table whose DM made up rules specifically to make resurrection more difficult, the Critical Role cast is open to a story where death exists. I do not think it's an accident that resurrection has been made even harder in the subsequent campaigns. I also happen to think that Campaign 1 is a far richer and better story with Vax's death, given the other events that occurred. Had Vax not been the sort of person who would offer his life for a god to take in exchange for his sister? Sure, he'd possibly have lived to the end. But he was, and that's the character those people who wish he were still alive loved. If he wasn't that person, they wouldn't have liked him in the same way.
D&D is fundamentally about exceptional characters becoming more powerful, and will be focused on those characters. I do not think D&D supports a story about characters who reject all power. They can give up political power (the Mighty Nein, for the most part, do this - certainly more so than Vox Machina, and Bells Hells is yet to be seen) but they will progress in levels, which is power. Even if unwanted, it is power, because most people in the world are commoners with 5 HP and 10 in all their stats. With that said, a lot of people desperately want a subversion of this power narrative. Vax is, I think, the closest we get. In D&D you are not going to get a player character who finishes a campaign and remains Just Some Guy. But you can have someone like Vax, who doesn't have any interest in power (compare to Vex, who very much is about power and who gets a much happier ending) who nonetheless ends up on the Tal'Dorei Council and the favored of a god…and yet, in the end, his equally powerful friends still can do nothing to save him. I think a Power Bad story is overly simplistic, but "there are limits to power, and ultimately none of us have complete control" is not. I think Vax's death gives the story of Vox Machina a finality and heft that it would lack otherwise.
A second possible cause is the "What if the gods are BAD" argument. I'm going to be totally honest: I did not see this in the fandom until Campaign 3, and honestly, not until EXU Calamity in any widespread sense, which does lead me to believe that most people did not come up with it as a reasonable idea on their own until characters started saying it, because it is so plainly in conflict with the themes of Campaigns 1 and 2 that to make this argument would be obvious projection. Do I think a nuanced view of the gods as flawed beings, rather than perfection, is warranted? Absolutely. Mortals, too, are flawed, and we don't kill them all for it. I think Vax's story makes them uncomfortable because it makes it clear divine favor is not, as Ludinus Da'leth tries to argue, the gods just bestowing and withholding their gifts arbitrarily, but rather that divine favor comes with a divine responsibility as well. Clerics and paladins do not study the way wizards do; but they must live lives in service, whereas a wizard can shut the book at the end of the day and do whatever. Clerics and paladins have powers that can be taken away; a wizard does not. That's the fundamental concept behind the Age of Arcanum - wizards trying to get around the fundamental rules of this world! Vax's paladin powers came at a price. His options are guided, but also limited, by the oath he took. He is far more fettered than a wizard, in the end, and I think that fucks with the narrative of the gods cruelly withholding their gifts from all but a select few, so they instead make their gifts into manipulative punishments…while still, contradictorily, arguing that characters such as Laudna or Ashton or Imogen were denied the mercy of the gods. Now, setting aside the obvious, that these characters have their backstories because Marisha and Taliesin and Laura decided they would because this is a story, and one in which someone had a perfect life would be boring and so the gods didn't intervene with Laudna because Marisha Ray wanted to play a Sun Tree corpse (see next section), it really is fascinating to see how people who hate the Raven Queen so neatly align with Ludinus. It's fine for sorcerers to have inborn powers, apparently, and Ludinus actually has himself tried to ape druidic magic; it's not about power, it's just about that power source. Honestly, they're not even above the gods as a power source - Ludinus used the crystal beneath Molaesmyr seemingly unaware if it were of the Archheart, and he's demonstrably using Vax, and everyone loves a resurrection from the gods, but heaven forbid you pay someone for the work you feel yourself entitled to. (Entitlement: this will also be a theme throughout the rant portion of this post.)
As a brief subsection to this: the idea that bad things happen to good people because the other side of that coin is free will is an ancient theological and philosophical discussion, and one we are obviously not going to solve here, though it is a little depressing I have had multiple rewarding conversations on this topic, thanks to an academically rigorous religious education, starting from the tender age of 9, and a lot of adults on Tumblr seemingly can't engage on the level of my third-grade classmates. I think, however, it tells a truth that fits in well with the wizard (and entitled fan) desire to control everything. People are terrified of random forces. Cancer, for example, is a matter of probability. There are things that can increase your chances of developing cancer, to be sure, but the simile I used when I was taught about radiation-induced cancers was that of lottery tickets: if you buy more, you have a better chance; but sometimes someone who bought a single ticket "wins" and someone who bought a ticket weekly never does. By believing the gods of Exandria are on trial for not intervening with every little hardship or for not taking Vax precisely as he intended, they reveal a profound terror of random chance and of the free will of people who are not them. Which is very funny when you consider we're watching Actual Play, where random chance is a deliberately induced element. I think the takeaway of all of this is "I think some of you guys are really mad this is a D&D game." But let's continue.
The third, and honestly most likely cause, is honestly sort of a continuation of the first but not centered around Vax so much as just a general, in my opinion deeply childish discomfort of any sort of tragedy or unhappiness in fiction. I've noticed this a lot lately, and I am not a cultural critic and don't have a high enough level view to pretend to be one, but as others have noted a lot of people seem affronted when whatever show they are currently watching does not meet their specific standards of "comfort media" or "hopepunk." It's a self-infantilization I don't care for, and it's certainly not limited to the CR fandom (see: any grown-ass adult passionately defending a choice to only watch children's cartoons and only read YA) or even fandom at all (see: the baffling popularity of the Mr. Rogers "look for the helpers" line which was intended for anxious young children, not for adults who can and should be the helpers). It really came into focus for me with CR when people referred to both EXU Calamity and to Candela Obscura's Circle of Needle and Thread as specifically "hopeless." They are, to me, deeply hopeful series. They are sad, and tragic, and many characters do not get a happy ending, but they are ultimately about how some people will endure, and will live on and find meaning after great loss. Calamity explicitly states that because of the actions of the heroes, while devastation will occur, total annihilation is mitigated. It's like the adage of how courage only means something in the face of fear; hope only means something in the face of darkness. Happy and fluffy tales are not hopeful; they are merely not things that require you to have hope. The root word of catharsis is that of cleansing and purgation and it originally related to physical excretion - cathartic stories are about getting those complicated and ugly emotions and fears out and feeling better for it by briefly feeling, perhaps, worse! Now, again, this has worsened with Vax's story with time. Shortly after Campaign 1, it was very common to see stories where Vex or Keyleth were utterly distraught, indefinitely, but those at least were engaging with grief, even if in a very shallow and unproductive way. But this has morphed into this idea that the fact that a work of fiction might make you even feel sadness makes it bad, and wrong, and hopeless, and the machinations of a cruel and heartless god. Which brings me back to the entitlement narrative: it's really as simple as "the story didn't give me what I wanted (whether that was a happy ending for Vax, or for Keyleth, or just a lack of sadness generally, or a narrative about the gods that validates my personal beliefs, or a way to justify Ludinus's actions), so it is bad." Which again is about being in control of the narrative, which again, in D&D, is simply not something anyone can claim. Why are these people here watching a D&D game? I don't know.
So that's really it: on a basic level, if you think the Raven Queen is unfair, you are profoundly ignorant of canon, so I'm already going to have to fact check anything you cite (if you cite at all), but there's a much deeper refusal to meet stories where they are and expand one's own comfort zone at play, and that means any analysis will never consider the possibility that your pre-existing beliefs were wrong (absolutely crucial in meta). You will always play it too safe and be uninspired and reactionary because the alternative is uncertainty and fear. I think a refusal to embrace tragedy in fiction is itself a profound tragedy; that is someone who is terrified to believe that life goes on.
#answered#Anonymous#cr tag#long post#candela tag#ngl i'm torn about not maintagging this; kind of want to but it does go somewhat far from the original topic
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Ok so I read awtdy au stuff in order according to a link you made and it gave me so many questions.
Like when exactly did they swap in the new timeline? Because it can’t be from their beginnings as Meta wouldn’t be sealed for the being too powerful like Galacta was so unless you can give another reason for the sealing then Meta shouldn’t be sealed if it was at that time. And other times have other complications due to be not being swapped from the beginning.
I know Gooey’s definitely dead because come on we know how Galacta’s been raising Kirby and while I am mildly displeased at Galacta causing the death of what I consider a very interesting character I know it definitely happens.
I know Necrodeus’s ambush on Kirby in the original time line definitely is a surprise for Galacta when it happens in the altered one as there is absolutely no reason for him to know it happens because why would he. He wasn’t summoned during the events of the game and who would know it that ambush happens? Marx definitely doesn’t know because come on why would he. Bandana dee probably know about from what Kirby told him during the original but as during the ambush no one was with Kirby; Bandana dee wouldn’t know what exactly happened like the exact when or where.
Does Stardream and other Ancient made stuff know of the timeline altering? Because I personally find it kinda weird if they don’t remember and that Galacta doesn’t use this chance to get another wish for something.
I hope that Galacta since he is more ruthless doesn’t kill Kracko after Kirby fights him. Because the Kracko has a kid named Kracko Jr. I am kinda finding some humor in that Galacta, the guy with a attack that has heart shape on it, is so heartless. Anyways I have liked the story.
okay, this is a pretty long ask with a lot of questions; i'll answer what i can! to start with, here's a basic timeline breakdown which will hopefully help:
the rest will be mostly text answers with one little drawing at the end!
when did they swap? how did meta knight get sealed?
during the events of the haltmann invasion. there is a little bit of wifflewaffle 'what's canon' here, but we adjusted the canon ending of robobot a tiny bit to allow galacta knight to appear (as he does in Meta Knightmare Returns) and for him to defeat meta knight and make a wish on star dream.
galacta knight wished for them to trade places; for meta knight to go into the crystal and for himself to be sent to popstar to enjoy meta knight's life. he did this to ensure his own escape and also to make meta knight suffer. strength, power, or being 'the greatest warrior in the galaxy' didn't factor into this in any way; the crystal is a magical prison and doesn't care who it's holding.
is ____ character dead?
probably. sorry.
this is not a lighthearted AU and galacta knight purposefully seeks out and eliminates kirby's allies in order to isolate him. there is a happy "everybody lives" ending, but if the (mostly temporary) existence of all this character death or the absence of your specific faves for any reason upsets you, then you do not need to read this au!
gooey in particular was actually already asked after in the comments section of this post! <- (cw: lying and psychological manipulation)
what about (events in non-mainline games)?
this au is dreamland four centric (+ magolor) and tends to follow the mainline games more than others. none the less, in response to Mass Attack in particular: this occurs right before galacta knight's entry point. so there's a chance that it would have been over before he even got there
would galacta knight know about (event)?
i really like the attention to detail you thought about on whether he is or isn't summoned or present in certain in-game timelines!
however for the sake of this au, there is a headcanon in place that galacta knight exists atemporally and outside of time, and has done for longer than many people can fathom. he can see and interact with events from timelines and dimensions to his liking; he was inhibited on doing this by being trapped in the crystal
this is implied a little in the ending of the another dimension fight comic, where he tells meta knight "to watch". from within the crystal, meta knight can see all of this new timeline unfolding, because the crystal is turning him into an atemporal being as well. there is also a specific connection between him and galacta knight at play, but rest assured; galacta knight is simply obsessed with meta knight's timeline and if he had arrived before necrodeus's ambush he would most certainly have been expecting it and would probably have just not let kirby take a nap that day.
what about what other characters know?
bandee knows what he's experienced first hand, and what kirby's told him. so sure, he'd know about necrodeus- and other adventures before his time- second hand from kirby.
marx (who is not present in base awtdy au) is also caught up by the "here's the new rules of the universe! this guy was always here!" that occurs when galacta knight assumes meta knight's place. however, he is capable of noticing that meta knight is missing because meta knight is part of galactic nova's timeline, and so he can put two and two together. if the wish had removed anyone else, marx would not have been able to tell. he is however very smart and extremely attentive, and does have ways to notice other shit happening; which is how he clues in during the clockwork heart variant of this au.
galacta knight heart motifs vs heartlessness
not really a question but yeah, it's delicious isn't it? this is why i love him as an eldritch, unfathomably relentless and unstoppable villain lmao. i actually find the version of him we have created in our heads so compelling and interesting; we have bucketloads of characterisation for him if anyone's ever interested!
wouldn't galacta knight try to get another wish?
have never said he is not trying to do this
does stardream or any other ancient made stuff know about the timeline altering?
the answers to this are important actually and tie into our headcanons for the wishing stars and how they work. stardream knows because it powered the wish. galactic nova does not know because the wish was not made by her; also she just doesn't care. several other ancient artifacts don't know, but have the means to figure it out.
some definitely remember better times, though:
#asks#awtdy au#that's right! i can even make the *sentient objects* sad!!!#no being nor thing is safe. anyway mwahaha etc.
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2023 BL/GL/QL Round-Up Post
I thought for posterity I'd post a reflection on everything I watched that completed in 2023. For me, that means anything that started in 2022 but the last episode was in 2023 is on this list, but anything that will still be airing after 31 December 2023 11:59 my time (EST) is not on this list, even if the bulk of the show did air in 2023.
A few stats:
110 discrete pieces of content (series/films)
clocking in at est. 600 hours of NEW BL/GL content only
from 9 different countries (Cambodia [1], Philippines [3], Hong Kong [1], Japan [18], Korea [19], Myanmar [1], Taiwan [6], Thailand [56], Vietnam [7])
~50% of the content I watched on this list is from Thailand
~85% of my content was on YouTube [40%], GaGaOoLaLa [23%] and iQIYI [21%].
[Note that this year a lot of older GMMTV shows moved off of YouTube and onto Viki so if you're looking at these stats to decide what to pay for, this won't account for that.]
This doesn't include re-watches or catching up on old shows [e.g. I re-watched Love Sick, My Ride the Series, Semantic Error, ITSAY/IPYTM, Our Dating Sim at least 3 times lol, and anything with a s2 I re-watched s1 to prep, among others, watched Fujoshi Ukkari Gei no Kokuru (2019) for the first time] or non-QL [e.g. Heartstopper s2, Our Flag Means Death s2, Taskmaster s. 15 & 16, Uncanny Counter s2, One Piece s1, etc.] but does include films as well as shows, though I don't count special episodes separately (so Wedding Plan counts once, though I watched both the show and the special).
I hope you all appreciate that with this much content, and with my general brand of being unable to make decisions, I really struggled to narrow down a top 10 list. What follows is the best I could do lol
Top 20 Shows I'd Recommend From This Year:
Moonlight Chicken
Our Dating Sim
Bed Friend
The Eighth Sense
La Pluie
Sing My Crush
Tokyo in April Is...
Wedding Plan
Laws of Attraction
I Cannot Reach You
I Feel You Linger in the Air
What Did You Eat Yesterday S2
I Became the Lead in a BL Drama
If It's With You
Love in Translation
Our Dining Table
My Personal Weatherman
My Beautiful Man: Eternal
My School President
Be My Favorite
+10 I liked but I would only recommend with caveats:
Love Class 2
The New Employee [for the Rainbow Rice Cakes]
Let's Eat Together Aki and Haru
Never Let Me Go
Kiseki: Dear to Me
Unintentional Love Story
The Day I Loved You
End of the World with You
A Breeze of Love
Jack O'Frost
Bonus: Not a BL but worth calling out:
One Room Angel
Midnight Museum
Grand Guignol
The Warp Effect
Sadly, of the GLs that aired this year, I wouldn't recommend any of them. The best one was Show Me Love, which was not actually good but had very gorgeous women and a LOT of flirting.
The other huge thing that happened this year was that I stopped lurking! Thanks specifically to @lurkingshan and @bengiyo demanding everyone start talking about La Pluie, because they got me to post my first meta post. And because I started actually talking to people, I started making actual friends, and participated in organizing things like the Be My Favorite clown checkpoint for ep 11. I also disappeared a month because of life, and am still catching up on everything I intended to write this year. But it's been really rewarding finding this corner of tumblr with likeminded people who like good shows, like to think about these shows, and who are interested in talking about them in a way that's insightful and respectful.
It's been a long time since I felt comfortable enough participating actively in a fandom, and I just want to say to everyone I've interacted with this year: Thank you!
Full list under the cut for anyone curious! [Mostly in order it aired but may be slightly off].
Love Bill
Director Who Buys Me Dinner, The
Star Always Follow You, The
Cutie Pie 2 You
Between Us the Series (Hemp Rope)
Reason Why He Fell in Love with Me Special & S2 [international release]
New Employee, The
I Will Hit You/I Will Knock You
Individual Circumstances
609 Bedtime Story
GAPYuri / GAP the series
My School President
HitBiteLove the Series
Never Let Me Go
Moonlight Chicken
History 5: Love in the Future
Oh My God (ToDo) the Series
Warp Effect, The
End of the World, With You
My Blessing the Series
Our Winter (miniseries)
All the Liquors
Once in Memory: Let Me Be Yours
Shoulder to Cry On, A
Jack O'Frost
Our Dating Sim
Midnight Museum
Me, My Husband, and My Husband's Boyfriend
My Colleague at BL Shop might be My Meant-to-Be
Unintentional Love Story
Chains of Heart
Bed Friend the series
Bad Brother the Series
Stormy Honeymoon
Eighth Sense, the
Bad Brother the Series
Future Series
Tin Tam Jai the series
Crush on You
House of Stars the Series
Happy Merry Ending
Boss and a Babe, A
Pastsenger the Series
Love Mate
Love Syndrome the Series
Promise the Series, The
Day I Loved You, The
Our Dining Table (Bokura no Shokutaku)
Our Skyy 2
My Story the Series
Starstruck
Love Tractor
Naked Dining
Luminous Solution, The
Omai Series / Is My Roommate A Foreigner
Stupid Genius
Step By Step
La Pluie the series
Tie the Not
Sing My Crush / Follow the Wind
Tokyo in April Is .../ Shigatsu no Tokyo wa
Senior Love Me?
Be My Favorite
Show Me Love
Dinosaur Love
Low Frequency
Stay Still
Stay By My Side
Jun & Jun
Wedding Plan the Series
Laws of Attraction, the
Love Class s2
Minato's Laundromat S2
Hidden Agenda
Bon Appetit
Why RU the Series [Korean adaptation]
Be Mine Superstar
Star, The Season 2
Love In Translation
My Beautiful Man: Eternal
My Personal Weatherman
Bump Up Business
Naughty Babe Series
Only Friends
Grand Guignol
Dangerous Romance
If It's With You / Kimi to Nara Koi wo Shite Mite Mo
Y Journey: Stay Like a Local
I Feel You Linger in the Air
Venus in the Sky
Kiseki: Dear to Me
I Cannot Reach You
You Are Mine
Breeze of Love / Weather Forecast of Love
Mr. Cinderella 2
Let's Eat Together Aki and Haru
One Room Angel
Marry My Dead Body
Lucky My Love the Series
Pure Vanilla: Recipe for Romance
Absolute Zero
Memories, The
My Dear Gangster Oppa
Shadow
What Did You Eat Yesterday? S2
Middleman Love
Beyond the Star
Bake Me Please
You and My Stars
I Became the Lead in a BL Drama
#2023 round-ups#bl meta#multi bl#typed so i can stop thinking it#twig talks#top lists are so hard for me this is the best I could do#if anyone wants to know anything about any of these shows feel free to ask!#best of bl 2023#long post
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more tumblr meta in response to @alliered's post here
be warned: i am inarticulate yet verbose
on volunteer work
Tumblr has around 200 full-time employees. As of 2019, it looks like it had 16 million monthly active users. Two hundred people is just not a lot of people to run a social media site, which has to follow regulatory requirements and do moderation and all that shit. Volunteer work is going to happen and you can't really get around it. That's how scrappy teams operate.
Is tumblr chaotic? Yes. Could it stand to be more organized? ...Maybe? I remember the glassdoor reviews saying it was total cowboy culture and you were mostly left to your own devices. @jv (who works at tumblr) has also commented in late 2022 that tumblr is still very decentralized and you're encouraged to ask forgiveness rather than permission.
I don't work at tumblr so I have no idea how much of a problem this is, but it's worth remembering the point I made earlier: you can reduce chaos and thrash by adding process at the cost of making everything slightly slower. For tumblr specifically, since it's a remote team distributed across timezones, requiring people to come to meetings to make decisions can make things a lot slower because there will only be a few hours in the day that everyone can attend a meeting and limited overlapping waking hours. You're in the US and you wanted to ask your manage in the UK about whether you need to work on X or Y? Hopefully you asked in the morning, because your 2pm is their 10pm!
When you have a small enough team where everyone is very senior, it can actually be a huge productivity boost to do things in a pretty ad-hoc way. I personally have witnessed the transition from a ~70 person org to a 150-200 person org, and at 70 people we didn't need internal newsletters or super-fancy ticketing systems or dedicated project managers. Everyone knows everyone and can just ping each other directly. At 150-200 people, that starts to break down, and you get into situations where two teams might be working on very similar things without knowing.
Maybe that's something tumblr could do better, but it's also the type of thing that requires a shitload of concerted effort to get right: the worst thing you could do is introduce a bunch of middle management who end up wasting more time than they save because they don't have enough background information or technical expertise.
new features
also for bug fixing and new features.... the thing is that many users speak more on NOT wanting so much time spent on what seem like weightless updates when we want more focus in issues that have existed for weeks, months, and even years.
I think this point is really important for understanding a lot of the recent changes around tumblr that have occurred basically ever since it got acquired by automattic. Here's the bottom line: tumblr is not profitable and never has been. That means everything tumblr has been doing until now is not enough.
Tumblr needs more users and it needs to get more money from those users, or it dies. That's it.
The easiest and most reliable way to make money is to serve ads, serve a ton of them, and let advertisers pay more to target specific user demographics with their ads. In 2022, 90% of twitter's revenue was from ads. But tumblr's owners and staff don't want to do that, so they're exploring other options.
Which is why you've been seeing new features you didn't ask for: tumblr needs users, tumblr needs money; if the current features aren't cutting it, then they need to find some new features that will. Some features like the "live" thing are an attempt to get more users and/or engagement, to lure people in from other platforms like tiktok and instagram who are into that kind of thing. Other features, like the checkmarks and badges and merch, are more directly about getting money.
You may not like non-chronological timelines, but users coming from other platforms haven't had to curate their own feeds for like a decade now and just have no idea how to do that--tumblr offers recommendation-based feeds because it's empirically successful and helps you retain users. So you can see they're trying a lot of different things right now.
You might be wondering why this has only started happening within the last two or so years even though automattic acquired tumblr in late 2019. If public statements are worth anything, it's because they spent the first couple years rebuilding a shitload of backend infrastructure, probably paying down a ridiculous amount of technical debt, in order to make the platform stable and flexible enough for staff to work on a bunch of new features at once without worrying about extreme jank or bringing the whole platform down because someone removed a load-bearing print statement.
spam bots
Matt, CEO of automattic and the guy who's currently running tumblr as his highest priority, said last year that tumblr would need 2 million users to buy ad-free browsing in order to offset tumblr's running costs. At $40/yr, that's $80m annually to keep the lights on for tumblr.
EDIT: Here's a post from another staff member who breaks this down in a lot more detail and explains the motivation for the Live feature.
Fighting spam is just a notoriously difficult problem that no one has solved. The current situation mainly boils down to: get rid of all the spambots, or avoid accidentally banning real users. Pick one. That's it! To put this into perspective, neither Facebook nor Twitter have figured it out either. And they're both huge compared to tumblr, not just in terms of headcount but also in terms of the engineers they attract: we're talking about the combined efforts of hundreds of smart engineers who have tons of resources to tackle this problem. They haven't figured it out. In 2019 when tumblr was acquired by automattic, it had a total of 200 employees, whereas twitter had 4,900 and facebook/meta had 45,000. All things considered, I think tumblr's doing a pretty good job both in their automatic detection and their reporting system.
This is also one of those areas where people will be very tight-lipped about the specific things they're doing to fight spam, and for good reason. Fighting spam is a constant battle where each side is updating their strategies and trying new things. I don't know if you've noticed, but these spambots come in waves (at least that's how I've experienced it). The influx of spambots come in, tumblr figures out how to prevent and ban them, the spammers figure something else out, a new wave comes in, rinse and repeat. Making public posts about how the spambot detection works is a great way to tell spammers how to evade detection.
would finding a way to make the sign up process more difficult for spam bots be able to clear up resources elsewhere?
Yes, making sign-ups harder can make it more difficult for spammers to make accounts. But it also makes it harder for people to sign up. And again, tumblr can't really afford to add friction to the sign-up flow, because friction means losing potential users, and tumblr needs users. Also you would be surprised how easily spammers are able to circumvent these kinds of things so you end up in a state where you have fewer user sign-ups but the bots are still everywhere.
user feedback (tickets)
I mostly ran out of energy at this point but with respect to whether or not staff knows about things users want and how they're keeping track: that's what the ticketing system is for! That's why cyle keeps telling people to make tickets! The support tickets are how tumblr staff keep track of problems users are having and feature requests. Those tickets are connected to a ticket tracker where they can keep track of spikes in user requests and bugs and spam bots. I know it sounds stupid and it sounds like they're just telling you to put your suggestions directly into the trash, but that's actually the for-real tracking system they use for monitoring bugs and feedback. Everything else, like the various official and personal blogs, are because they're passionate about making some of this stuff visible to users.
So yeah they could maybe make portions of their internal tracker more public so users can see what tumblr is prioritizing, but that introduces its own problems, up to and including making the tracker less useful to staff. (I don't know if you've ever seen the chromium tracker. It's a nightmare.)
---
anyways tldr:
money hard without ads
tumbler need money and probably has to get this money without a significant headcount increase (not sure how much runway automattic has, but it's probably less than in 2019 because of the pandemic and the econony and all)
maybe tumblr could benefit from more internal process and organization but it's really hard to say as an outsider
otherwise i think it's kinda hard to ask staff to do more than what they're already doing cause they're doing a lot rn
don't let that stop you from giving them feedback, because even when you feel like all your feedback is going into a black hole whenever you open a support ticket, that's actually how they track these things. nothing screams user feedback like 300 new tickets in the queue about the same thing and they actually have to close those things out
i really didn't appreciate that last bullet point until i started working at a company with a product. users would ping individual engineers about things being busted and it's always like DUDE you're supposed to email support so it actually gets seen!! otherwise it's just hanging around in someone's inbox!
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How goes the fma x albedo fic? I hope that doesn't sound pushy, I'm genuinely curious. And in that vein, do you have any little drabbles you may have written or want to write? Especially with your recent kny ocs/yourself and your siblings. That'd be super fun to read about! Your art AND your writing is so freaking good, the moment I see you've posted something new on your blog I'm clicking it so fast. Same with your ao3 account ❤️
Thank you for the kind words!!! Currently not working on any fics, since I just came out of 10 weeks of summer research where my days began at 8 am and ended at 9 pm for probably less than minimum wage hahaha (doing research is a Bit Sad but I get a whole month to relax before classes start again so thank goodness for that)
I do however!!! Have a lot of plans!!! If you’re interested you can read more below!
Plans include but are not limited to:
Finally working on Homuncular Nature again!! I definitely do have a lot of plans and cool scenes playing out in my head for the next chapter, it’ll just come down to when I actually put pen to paper (or stylus to iPad) to actually organize and write them all. The road block I think is that I have seen neither Albedo nor fmab very recently and all my concrete ideas are for around the 30 episode mark for fmab, the turning point with the first actual confrontation against father and the subsequent Briggs arc.
Rewriting Ten Thousand Maple Leaves! A lot of people have been very kind but I think I missed the mark with my first chapter to be honest. My writing has gotten a lot wordier and less succinct, which feels like I’m filling a chapter more with fluff and unnecessary description than actual content. I think I also dislike how I characterized Sanemi and how quickly Kazuha was willing to agree with things. Writing both of them is kind of a difficult challenge tbh! I think in rewriting it I want to give back to Kazuha more of his vagrant role in the games, where he is avoiding the law for reasons somewhat out of his control.
Ebisu siblings content! I think it might be fun to try having them interact with more of the canon characters in kny but I also think there’s some value in a complete sort of outsider point of view when inserting characters into a piece of media. I feel like whenever I see self inserts I see a lot of ocs making themselves indispensable and making meaningful relationships with existing characters that way and that’s totally valid! That’s a lot of what I do for crossovers as well. I think when it comes to my own ocs though, I want them to feel grounded in some form and the reality of it is that none of the characters I make based on myself or real people are that impressive or remarkable. But I also think there’s a lot of value in showing smaller scale things outside of the main interactions and plot to show that even though we aren’t remarkable, we still have our own meaningful connections and ideologies and stories :) in the end the Ebisu siblings are a lot more visual though so I may just continue making doodles and art without writing anything haha
Kirby & Meta Knight ageswap AU: I was mostly doing this on my ask-gikabi sideblog in short form comics, but I lost sight of what I wanted to do after making the discord and starting to interact with some of the people who followed it. I think a lot of people are inspired and have their own very cool ideas that I wanted to take into account but then eventually it was no longer my story or the story I wanted to tell, which is why I’m thinking of restarting it as a fic. This one is still in very rough idea stage though, I have honestly no clue how I’m even going to begin organizing it
Yanfei ace attorney crossover: this one’s just pure crack lmao I would definitely write it as crack taken seriously but I think this is fun to explore just for small ideas that pop up every now and then, i.e. yanfei is semi-immortal because she’s half adeptus so it would be Really Funny to me if she showed up in dgs era, got her attorney’s license, went into hiding after it became obvious that she wasn’t aging, and then re-emerged after rebranding herself as her own daughter or granddaughter. That, and I have a lot of fun imagining someone as pragmatic as yanfei trying to get through the sheer chaos of aa despite being otherworldly
Continuing winter weather advisory: I got to a really good point in that fic and was rereading it today like,,, damn I wrote that? And it would be fun to see where I planned on going with it so I do want to also try working on that a bit if I can
Kazuha & Kunikuzushi role swap au: this is something I posted about a Long While ago but it’s an idea I continue to be fascinated with :) I especially enjoy how these two characters could have had completely different roles and personalities depending on how their pasts happened (with wanderer being so nice and turning so bitter and kazuha growing up so spoiled (for lack of a better word) and turning out so weary and yet kind
Link click and mha crossover: this one is honestly just a very recent idea but I think it would be fun to make a drabble on how lightime photo studio would be able to continue operating even in another world and the trouble they might get into for illegal quirk usage and what using cheng xiaoshi’s powers in a world where being able to tell the future is canonically possible would entail
I have!! So many ideas!! And not enough time or motivation to actually write any of them most of the time :’)
But I’m very glad to hear that you enjoy them and look forward to my posts!! :D I really hope I can work on some of these over the last month of summer vacation that I have :)
#to this day I still get kind of freaked out when people compliment both my art and my writing#like wow!! thank you so much!!!!!! the art compliments I expect because I’ve been pretty bloated in my opinion on my own art since childhood#but the writing always comes as a surprise!#especially when people are like ‘oh I found you through your writing and found out your art is also good’ like WHAT#if anything I’m much more likely to be found for my art I feel like!!!#but thank you fr#people telling me my writing is actually good has done wonders for my confidence in classes for writing essays and such#and it really shows because when I’m less worried about how good my writing is and trying to make it sound good I get to devote a lot more#time and energy towards planning and figuring out ideas for what I want to write and my past few essays in humanities classes have done grea
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I joined Threads! Unfortunately my reach on Insta is still the most limited of all of my socials, and that’s the account Threads is directly attached to.
If you’re on either Insta or Threads, would love if you could stop by🙏
Direct linking to Threads doesn't seem to work...so here's
my Instagram
through which you can find my Threads account!
Edit: You actually can link to Threads, ironically through the icon at the top of individual Instagram account pages on desktop. Though Desktop viewing is currently limited to individual pages, and you can't necessarily scroll the feed. So here's my Threads page!
~~
Next, some initial thoughts on the platform for those who are kinda curious what this new thing is. Not at all an expert, just some info I've gathered myself, that I'd personally have liked to know before joining:
On Threads
・It launched July 5~6, 2023. Rollout varies by country.
・Twitter's already upset about it, apparently there's a lawsuit. So I guess it considers Threads a possible threat.
・It's run by Meta, same folks as Insta and Fb.
・The accounts are directly linked to Instagram, which has its pros and cons. You need an Insta account to make a Threads account, but if you already have an Insta account, it's very easy to make a connected Threads account. However, once linked, they're linked; you can't disable your Threads account without also disabling your Insta account. You can also automatically follow all the accounts you're already following on Insta, to be activated as they make Threads accounts. You can also share Threads posts to your Insta stories.
・Currently only on mobile app, hoping the'll make it desktop accessible soon
・The current audience mostly seems to be folks who have come direct from Instagram. This means yes, a lot of official/influencer accounts, but also a lot of artists/small creators too.
Functionality
・Right now, the "feed/dashboard" is a hot mess. It's just one massive algorithmic spew, no way to curate it, no way to see just the posts by the folks you're following, not even chronological. These are things that i personally require in a social media, so yeah it sucks rn. HOWEVER, they did state that they're working on a "followers only" feed, much like the one on Instagram. If they implement a Followers Only feed like Insta, it'll at least be much better than Twitter's current "Following" feed. There has been no timeline provided on when this may launch.
・It functions much the same as Twitter, with options to create new posts, and like, retweet, quote retweet, and reply to posts made by others. (There's still a lot of floundering about the exact terminology to use, since it's not twitter so you can't "retweet" etc)
・500 Character word limit per post, which is much more than Twitter, ey!
・Up to 10 images per post, doesn't seem to cause image quality reduction either. Rather than being able to arrange the images like on Tumblr though, they're all automatically in a carousel that you can see by swiping.
・Your bio can be the exact same as what's on your insta, but currently only shows followers. In order to see who you follow, you tap "followers" and then when the menu opens, swipe to "following." Then, you can tap on the individual accounts to view their pages. This is currently the only way to ensure you see the posts from certain accounts, because there's no guarantee they'll show up on your feed, and it's a huge pain. But again, they're hopefully working on a fix for this.
My understanding is that the app rushed to launch now, since Twitter is a dumpster fire and people are fleeing. (why is it a dumpster fire? Well, Musk implemented a randomly fluctuating tweet view limitation, which is dumb af, but means it's essentially become unusable to folks who use the platform a lot)
I'm hoping that there'll be improvements to Threads and it'll become a viable Twitter alternative, but until then...yeah we'll keep an eye on it.
Now that I've probably completely turned you off from downloading the app, if you do, a nudge that again I'd appreciate if you stopped by my account, YukiPri_Art on Instagram, and/or YukiPri_Art on Threads!
#YukiPri rambles#Threads#social media#longpost#long post#Sigh yes another Twitter alternative#but unlike Bluesky I was actually able to make an account so that's one mark in its favor#plus Twitter is literally a hot mess rn I am getting like zero views on anything but RTs of popular accounts sigh#To be clear I'm not leaving Tumblr bc it's my home and i've always been here#but Tumblr and Twitter serve very different functions for me
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Two questions that I'm genuinely interested in your answer for (bc I love your metas ngl) but I totally get it if you don't answer.
What's your biggest unpopular opinion on Jason, and your least favorite popular/fandom opinion on him?
disclaimer: i’m moving blogs. still here to go through my askbox, but you will find me at @boyfridged most of the time.
i'm very flattered, thank you!! and sorry this took me so long to answer. and it did take me so long 1. because it’s really hard to tell what is actually an unpopular opinion (i did thankfully find myself in a circle of mutuals who mostly share the same intuitions when it comes to his character) and 2. because I mentally put a label on it “asks to get me assassinated.” and I guess the take that i have requires quite careful wording.
so, my unpopular take is that from in-universe point of view, jason shouldn’t be a vigilante, and it would be best for the storytelling around him to focus on this fact. and i’m not saying that in a mean, moralistic nor diminishing way. i just think that jay’s storyline is a story of everything that can go wrong with a sidekick, and of how vigilantism can traumatise people into oblivion, and completely annihilate their ability to function normally. part of it is a result of the fact that imo jason isn’t naturally suited for vigilantism (that is not to talk about his skills nor efficiency in it, i will get back to it shortly), and part of it is a result of the circumstances in which he was introduced into it, and of course the subsequent trauma.
you could say “uhm every superhero story is like that, he’s not special,” but typically, when you think about characters such as bruce wayne or dick grayson etc., the event that comes to mind when you think about their biggest trauma is something that… pushed them into vigilantism? and vigilantism supposedly helped them in some ways? (it can be argued against, but that’s an underlying assumption) (+even without a tragic backstory, characters usually have much more agency in their decision to become vigilantes). and in case of jay, his biggest trauma isn’t anything that came before robin, and his life was awfully fucking sad, so i think that it says something. his biggest trauma is associated with what he went through already as robin and then retraumatising events that followed his resurrection.
it’s really puzzling to me that this distinction is never deliberately written about nor truly brought up in comics…? i think the closest we came to this was, ironically, starlin’s run (when alfred straight up suggests that maybe robin just isn’t good for jason) and countdown (where jay intends to leave the superhero community altogether).
okay, so you can say: vigilantism is kinda shitty for you. breaking news, we’ve known this already.
except there's something, in my opinion, that makes jason’s case special and more nuanced. it seems, at first glance, that with all the love and compassion jason has, he should be great material for a vigilante still. but he clearly isn’t. why is that?
the crushing proportion of other characters have moral systems, coping mechanisms, and understanding of vigilantism that make this life at least possible for them. on the other hand, jason’s personality, his lived experience, and his moral stance makes vigilantism extremely unsustainable. i mentioned it before in my post about eoc, but most (especially 1st gen, but not only, i’d argue that most former teenage superheroes also came to this point as well) vigilantes, even if associated with love and compassion as the core of their actions, have understanding of vigilantism and moral codes that jason doesn’t possess. (for a long while i was on a “jason has a moral code but it’s casually bastardised by most writers” team but since then i have thought about it a lot and my current take is that he was good at following orders as robin, and has some provisional rules as the red hood, but they’re nowhere near an actual code. as i said in the linked post, i think morality is more of an on-going emotional practice for him). and it all makes sense! let's circle back to bruce for a moment. of course, the reason for which he doesn’t kill is grounded within his own beliefs, but he is also very painfully aware of the thin line that vigilantes walk on when it comes to the law and being trusted by the public. i'd argue he is very conscious of the fact that being a vigilante comes with responsibility of cultivating a certain ethos. he had a lot of time to think about it! in many ways, he invented it. and it’s practical. it's what makes this life possible.
jason doesn’t have it. jason’s idea of vigilantism isn’t carefully designed nor sophisticated, jason’s idea of vigilantism is that he is in the field and he has power to do things, so he has to do them. he has to trust his moral intuitions. and in many ways, he’s not wrong – it's not a flawed view to hold, especially not in the ordinary life. but that also means that there are no lines that he won’t cross if he thinks he can help or fix the situation. but in the world that batman introduces us to (a world in which, to quote le guin on an unrelated matter, there’s no ends, but only means), it’s self-destructive. to compare him again to bruce, bruce is self-sacrificial, but his conceptual understanding of vigilantism and his moral code protect him in some ways. jason’s moral judgements and actions are unrestrained and radical (not to say that they’re reckless or inefficient; he’s still a great strategist and can be even overly careful if it’s required). and that is set in a world where evil never stops. we already know that the joker will always come back, for example. what does it mean for jason? he will try to match the energy, of course, and he’s not stopping either. bruce is similar in that aspect, yet he has a whole insurance set that helps him deal with extreme situations. there's an offset. and jason doesn’t have any. he won’t ever hit the breaks. i think you know where i’m going with this metaphor.
so i guess my take is that… bruce’s outlook on vigilantism is, against the popular opinion, very rational. but jason just brings his heart into it and nothing else. and that’s just catastrophic.
this is really me just pushing the “love is his fatal flaw” agenda again tbh, but with additional emphasis on why the same trait isn’t that tragic for other characters who share it. also this is why it’s so crucial to me that he should have a civilian arc…
and as to my least favourite fandom opinion on him, i can't think of anything very specific right now, but my general pet peeve is anything that divorces his characterisation from his 80s personality. i think you can tell that i really dislike painting him as resentful towards dick, and all takes that indicate that he's always been cynical and distrustful toward the world. i think a lot of people want his storyline to be one of someone who has, from day one, been full of rightful anger, but the thing is that it has not been his story to begin with. he had to be pushed really far for this to happen. and this is what makes him so special compared with most anti-heroes – that his story starts from a genuine place of innocent and naive hope and love despite all he suffered.
#dc#this is a mess but it's been in my drafts for a while. and i don't think i have energy to say anything else#btw i think that my *actual* unpopular take is on batman!jason but i already talked about it lots
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On the Head Accessories of the Royal Family
There's no grand agenda to this post, more just a few observations I found a bit amusing in the course of research and wanted to share.
So, of the family that does wear head accessories, a pattern seems to emerge: they're mostly metal instead of the incredibly ornate gem-studded crowns IRL royalty liked to flaunt about, kings and princesses alike.
But taking a look at the fam, only Leonidas and Chelle (well, and Zethia, but I dunno how much of that is royal fashion vs Auspex religious-based choices) have any gemstone piece to their circlet/tiara/crown, and Leonidas' isn't even attached to the actual circlet itself. Chelle's also has one, which, for a women who loves to play up being a ditzy party princess to manipulate people into underestimating her, is a bit of a surprise she didn't go full display of riches to me.
Even King Aurelius' lacks ornamentation:
Here's where things get a bit more conjecture-y: given Aurelius seems to loathe vanity, seeing as how he hides away his coronation portrait for this reason, and whether he's following or starting a trend, I think he's tried to raise the kids to be 'modest' in presentation. Of course, this still involves looking proper, but I think he might not have taken well to ostentatious shows of wealth or encouraged beliefs that they were inherently superior than lowly peasants.
Regardless if this is part of the reason or not why everyone isn't porting gemstone-packed crowns, it's still funny that even my best friend WillofWinnie picked up on this enough in her incredible gift in the form of sticky-note fic art when designing a new little circlet for Zethia in its ending scene that I am shamelessly showing off again because it made me so happy to receive fic art!
(it also leads to my next point, being that she also picked up the tendency for the fam to be very attuned to pointy metal accessories!)
Now, I don't have any guess as to why they love plain pointy metal circlets, besides that maybe it's a demonstration of Alberia's militaristic pragmatic might. But it's not the only pointy plain metal head accessory someone in the family wears!
Yep, there's someone in the royal family that wears earrings. Who, Chelle, Zethia, you might wonder? Nope, that goes to Leonidas, who wears plain gold, if pointy metal earrings that disguise with his hair pretty well.
He has them it in all of his versions including his base one, but I felt this was one of the best ones to highlight the contrast that it's not just a weird parting of hair. You go, Leo!
I dunno what fashion expectations are for the royal court in Dragalia, ie, maybe it's considered a masculine (ex: Look at My Manliness for Having HOLES Gauged in my Ears!) or neutral accessory, but hey, it's not too often you see pierced ears in my experience on boys in video games in a more meta sense. Really, the only things that are suggested about court fashion is that Cassandra's clothes are considered inappropriate and Leif believes Gala Chelle's are, too.
But wait, there's more! In somebody else's Gala form, they too gain this. It's also pretty hidden in art, but as you can clearly see on the model...
Gala Emile has gained a singular earring on his right ear that's suspiciously similar to Leo's.
I wonder if he wanted to try and emulate Leonidas but chickened out immediately after his first ear was pierced and then pretended it was a deliberate fashion decision instead of him not wanting to be poked again.
So yeah, two of the royal family wears earrings, and it's Leonidas and Emile, of all people.
#dragalia lost#dragalia#granted the crown of light wyrmprint says that Alberia has no hereditary crown#so it may be a way to cut down costs/displays of vanity to discourage everyone from needing umpteen gem-studded crowns#also I know there's a few more earrings on dudes in dragalia like Ramiel and Vixel too! And the sylvans which have more of developed cultur#regarding that but like the crown observation it's still interesting to note I think.#Maybe I'm just biased though especially since I'm often looking up royal fam things for Scaling the Walls of Mystery anyways haha
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(meta discourse fakeblr)
🃏 luckysixes Follow
I'm so sick of people being gross! And Bad! And Evil! If you do things, you're fucked up!
[long meandering diatribe on the many reasons why If You Do Things You're Bad]
.....
[tangent]
.....
[diatribe continues]
🃏 luckysixes Follow
Oh yeah! People who stand back and do nothing! And let people do things! They're! Just! As! Bad!
[three full-screen lengths of diatribe about how people shouldn't just be let to do things]
🔞 kinkcourse Follow
look op, stop trying to pretend your bullshit is an actual attempt to help people, a good half the posts on your blog are varying forms of religious apologia, which! Includes Doing Things! Like you're rallying against here! Really, what's your plan?
🟢 me
(wow i fucking love seeing ten pages of someone being an asshole before figuring out why i got this reblogged. oh, look, no tags, guess i'll just block the person who reblogged it)
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(fakeblr ends here)
tbc i mostly hate that the ui that doesn't surface information like number of participants in the rb chain, number of total messages, tags, etc at the top before i start reading a thing
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on the whole kudos/comment thing. I'm an artist and I havn't posted art on instagram in 2 years, that is both og art and fanart. its not worth the 2 mins of my time to post after only to get 10ish odd likes from mostly people ik irl when I can just send it off to my friends and get wayyyyyy more personal and happy responses. yes creatives are not entitled to engament but don't be surprised when they disappear
if its not worth your time to comment then its not worth THEIR time to post.
I'll admit im a hypocrite saying this as I don't comment all the time (mixture of no internet when reading and good old mental illness leaving me with blank brain fog) but I stil try. its not a matter of which is good enough or conveince but if its a good day for me. speaking of trying while I'm here I freaking love dhd, started following from she ra but I love your orginal stuff and you're so sweet. <3
I hope people stop being rude in your ask box
Yes, I hear this a lot. Also, it seems people are willing to discuss about things with their friends or fandom fellow groups but not give the same comments to the person who created that thing. I have a personal experience of this.
Years and years ago, I used to write fanfic with an url no one knew about. It was my secret little account. I was a part of a fandom group for the said fandom I was writing these fics about. The group was lovely and active, and they openly loved to discuss about fanfics and fanart.
Whenever I wrote a fic and posted it, the very same day someone within the group noted the whole group about it. Those who wanted to read the fic went to read it, and then they eagerly discussed about the fic with each other; what did they like about it, what thoughts they had, if they had any metas or ideas of what would happen in the next chapter, how the fic had made them feel like and what was their favorite part of each chapter.
I followed these conversations without anyone knowing they were talking about my fic. It made me happy to see that what I had written was well received, and people waited for more!
Did any of these people leave me a comment on the said fic they were gushing about? No.
So, the lurker me knew that my fic was well received and liked, but the author me didn't know, because no one said anything. All the conversation was held in a private place among readers but the author was not included in it.
It would have been really easy for any of these fans of the fic just copy the same thing they had said in the private group and post it to the author me under the fic. Very easy support and a very easy way to let the author-me know that yes, this is what we wish to get more! I only know this because I was lurking in the fan group and saw these conversations.
Another experience I've got and it still keeps happening is that if I join a Discord group or any event group, there are always people who know me due FUZZY. They say that they read the comic and loved it. I have no idea just how many people actually read FUZZY, know it and liked it, because the majority seem to be lurkers who I encounter at random like this :D It's always a surprise when it happens, a happy one mind you! I don't know how many readers and fans FUZZY actually had but I think no one can really ever know the full scale of their fans and influence.
I've got IG which mainly operates now as an art gallery for those who wish to see just my art (excluding long comic updates due image limit). Engagement is small in IG and Twitter, where things are fresh for 20 second and then they are forgotten - albeit IG's positive side compared to Twitter is a better search system where you can go through old posts and like & comment them (no, it's not creepy, why the hell giving support for someone would be creepy when we talk about supporting fandom people).
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THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEPEOPLE FAQ
What is the League of Extraordinary Gentlepeople?
The League of Extraordinary Gentlepeople, or LXGP for short, is my current writing project: an AU of the 2003 movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which is in turn a loose adaptation of the series of comics of the same name co-created by Alan Moore and Sir Kevin O'Neill.
The basic synopsis of both comics and movie is as follows: a somewhat dysfunctional superhero team composed of nineteenth century literary characters go on politically charged adventures. The comics and movie are very different, and... very much acquired tastes. Albeit I recommend watching the movie! It's extremely cheesy. Fun too!
Ok, but- what is LXGP really about?
Glad you asked!
In the late XIXth century, a mysterious type known as Agent M sets off to recruit various individuals which he calls Extraordinary People and forms the League, claiming it is the key to preventing a world-wide war! But as events unravel, the League comes to realize M is not who he claims to be...
The LXGP stories are out of order, focusing on both retellings of scenes from the 2003 movie and original stories set after the events of the movie canon. While it is mostly based off the movie, there are elements from the comics, some dramatic changes, and the character designs and personalities are taken from my literary crossover "world", Candyverse! So they will be, in some ways, very different from what you have seen in the LXG franchise.
Hold on- Candyverse?
Candyverse is the name of my literary crossover setting! Expect most of the cast to consist of public domain literary characters (and some not so public domain ones). Don't mind the silly name- the character designs are mildly inspired by sweets in the sense that they are colorful and spunky! But don't be fooled, Candyverse is a pretty dark world.
In Candyverse, Earth is actually a fantasy world, in which elves and fairies and all sorts of mythical creatures used to live... but as people stopped believeing in magic and replacing it with science, it started becoming a science fiction world instead, with amazing technology that is downright futuristic. During its nineteenth century, it is at its most unstable, with gothic literary characters and events "bridging" the supernatural with straight up mad science. And that is precisely the time I am centered in, so expect some gaslamp fantasy and steampunk tech!
Once we delve more into the lore, expect meta stuff, too!
Which not so public domain characters?
Wait and see!
How much time have you spent on this?
If I'm being honest? The concept of this AU came to me around 2020, in which I realized I had enough classic literature characters designed to cover the LXG roster with it- and I decided to jump to action. It has undergone a few changes since, but so far I'm satisfied with it. Also, don't be scared if a soft reboot comes along in a couple of years- I'm indecisive like that!
Why did you create it?
Do you want a honest answer? Just kidding.
I really like the LXG franchise, particularly the movie, though I'm aware it is an acquired taste. This project is meant to be a reply to all the missed opportunities in either comic and movie, and to common criticisms too. I make it with love and a little bit of anger (because SO MANY MISSED OPPORTUNITIES!), and I ride the inspiration unicorn as far as I can.
A shorter answer would be that the gothic lit fandom loves to spread misinformation about it and that drives me up the wall.
So... What's with the title?
The League's roster is only 2/6 men. It's only fair.
And the roster is...?
Mina Murray Harker (she/they), Captain Nemo (no pronouns), Irene Adler (she/they), Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde (he/they/it), Harlow Griffin (he/him), and Alice Byrd (she/fae). I will make -and post- official character bios as soon as I can!
Wait. Alice? From Wonderland?
Yep! She's in her mid-twenties here!
In which year is this set?
In the year of 18??, more or less.
Where is Jonathan? My good friend Jonathan?
He's at home! Technically he is a member of the League, but he is not in Mina's team, but in a second "backup" team that I still have to fully develop!
(This is mostly an excuse to not have to write him. I think he's a pretty boring person. Sorry!)
Where is Tom Sawyer?
He's also in the backup team!
Where is Dorian Gray?
Wait and see!
Where is Allan Quatermain?
He's dead.
...I'm sorry?
Do you have any biases?
*hiding Hyde behind me* Haha, noooo, not at all, what makes you think that, hahahaha.
Are the League heros?
Collectively, they're heroes. They do good. Well, attempt to do good. After breaking bonds with M, they set off as a rogue team of mercenaries. Individually? They range from heroic to villainous. And, honestly, for old-timey superheroes, they're ratther floppy. Their missions often go wrong or do the opposite of saving the day. Whoops!
Will there be queer stuff in this?
All League members are transgender. Does this answer your question?
...I meant like, romance...
Sheesh! Yes, yes there will be! Just be patient!
Will there be... steamy stuff?
I suck at writing NSFW so yeah, "steamy" is all you're gonna get lol.
Will you post art?
I suppose I will- when I make it.
How often will this update?
WHEN. I. HAVE. FINISHED. A. STORY. THEN. I WILL. POST. IT. THAT'S. WHEN. IT. UPDATES.
Can I make art?
Sure you can!
Can we collab?
SURE!
Can we kiss?
Ew. No.
#the league of extraordinary gentlemen#the league of extraordinary gentlepeople#lxg#lxgp#loeg#lxg au#gothic fiction#gothic literature#gothic lit#dracula#jekyll and hyde#the invisible man#sherlock holmes#20k leagues#alice in wonderland
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Wait wait, can I hear more about the itachi not using shisui’s eye thoughts? Because honestly, for a character that’s supposed to be a pacifist, itachi seems to be written much more like an Angel of Death esque serial killer?
Uhhhhhhh okay I'll try to get this down before tumblr makes me wanna gouge my eyes out (why is dark mode just as painful to look at as light mode make it stopppp)
-It is very clear that Itachi was originally intended to be a Pure Evil character with different motivations. In Naruto OG we *really* have no reason to think he is anything other than a nutjob who murdered his family and tortured his brother for the lols. NOW. This isn't actually an irredeemable factor for him as a character, with a show as long as Naruto it is perfectly possible to rewrite him and tweak him into a tragic villain or even the tragic hero Kishi wanted us to later believe he was. *IF* proper work is done to explain why the so called pacifist resorted to so much violence.
-Which obviously never explicitly happens even though with how Itachi's backstory is set up it honestly wouldn't be that hard.
-Moving on from the meta perspective may I put forth to you this answer to All the Itachi Questions:
-Danzo.
-No seriously. I already suspected this when I was reading just the fanfic, but actually watching the arc where we see Itachi's spiral there are some Key Things I noticed happening that are literally never mentioned or expanded on that would make Itachi choosing Massacre over Brainwashing make perfect sense.
-Gonna have to backtrack just a bit for this, but when I say that Danzo wanted the Uchiha dead, I *mean he wanted them dead*. Not just in a "the village and the Uchiha were starting to butt heads anyway and he took preemptive murder action" way but like- "intentional years long plan to kill off this entire clan" way.
-One of the big things that fueled the rumor that the Uchiha were at fault for the Kyuubi attack, other than the old story of Madara controlling the Kyuubi, is that the Uchiha were not present for the defense against the Kyuubi. A lot of clans took heavy losses trying to fend the biju off or drive it out of the village until Minato could arrive, but the Uchiha were literally not there, and people got suspicious as to why. The answer is literally Danzo. Fugaku was planning to marshal the Uchiha *because* he hoped he and his clan would be able to mass genjutsu the Kyuubi into being docile, but at the last minute he received orders from *Danzo* through one of his Root, to instead take his clan and.
-Guard the civilian underground shelters and the village outskirts "in case an enemy tries to sneak in in the chaos". I'm sorry but uh. YOUR CHUUNIN COULD DO THAT WHILE THE PEOPLE WITH MIND CONTROL POWERS HELP WITH THE BIJU PROBLEM? But no. Danzo specifically ordered them to the two places they could not help against the Kyuubi and would be mostly out of sight/would be accused of using civilians as an excuse to save their own skins.
-No explanation is ever given to the general populace for why the Uchiha were not there, even though it was a direct order from the man who was, at the time, Sarutobi's known SiC and primary advisor. All Sarutobi would have to do is say 'they were following my orders' and it would clear up. He does not. Which indicates that Sarutobi *possibly* did not even known Danzo did what he did, and the Uchiha never told the Hokage because Danzo is his SiC and this would not be the first time people just assumed Danzo is operating on Sarutobi's orders/permission.
-We see multiple mULTIPLE times in this arc that over the course of literal years, starting from the Kyuubi attack and on to the Massacre, that Danzo was intentionally orchestrating the tension in the village. The isolation of the Uchiha compound wasn't Tobirama, it was Danzo, who had them relocated post the Kyuubi attack for "better reconstruction of the village". They were so far removed they were outside the chakra barrier/radar thing that Pain used Itachi's passcode for in the Pain Arc. That's how far removed they were from the village proper. They were under 24 hr, intense surveillance, cameras on their streets, watch towers hidden around their compound border, cameras even looking *into* the windows of their houses. And they were aware of it, because the Uchiha are not dumb and also have really good vision thank you. They can see that. Their one foundational position in the village, the Police Force, was being forcibly and slowly taken from them with Danzo pushing Sarutobi to insist they take on officers from other clans like Inuzuka and Aburame, and some of their traditional patrol beats were being straight up reassigned to ANBU. You know, the guys who are supposed to be busy assassinating Konoha's enemies, not breaking up bar brawls.
-I could go on with this but if you actually watch that arc and watch Danzo, he is very intentionally *trying* to force the Uchiha to plot a coup. He is trying to get an excuse to kill them all. AND on top of that, we already know he has a sharingan eye already, yes even before Shisui. In fact he steals Shisui's eye because his current one is going blind *presumably from overuse*, which means he's already spent who knows how long subtly influencing/genjutsuing Sarutobi and other high ranked shinobi into looking the other way or agreeing with him on policy stuff.
-Enter *Itachi* and Shisui, who are trying to juggle this entire situation at ages like- 11 and maybe 14 when this starts and later Itachi at a lonely 13 by the end. Every time they come up with advice on how to help lower clan tensions to Sarutobi, Danzo railroads it and makes the situation worse instead. There's literal dialogue for it, where he'll interrupt them or just later on dismiss the idea and bully Sarutobi (who lets himself be bullied) into doing something else that is clearly just going to make the Uchiha madder.
-Somewhere about ... halfway I'd guess? Halfway at the earliest through this train wreck, Itachi gets pulled from Kakashi's ANBU squad and given, by Sarutobi, *to Danzo* and his ROOT shinobi, who at the time were not only known about by Sarutobi but implicitly approved of, they've worked alongside normal ANBU for several missions in the past. So now Itachi, the pacifist, the clan heir, the linchpin to this entire disaster, is directly under the command of Danzo Eye-Stealer and Genjutsu User Shimura, is within his reach and probably in his presence for *long periods of time* to receive orders/get pontificated at. Remember that point.
-Okay so now, NOW we get to Shisui's eye and Itachi not using it. To start with, Itachi was fully on board with Shisui's plan, he *wanted* this plan to work, he and Shisui were gonna meet up, go to the Clan Head, and do the thing. But Shisui, poor naive soul, reported to Danzo first, to inform him that "hey we're going to fix this problem". Danzo's response is to attack Shisui and rip out his eye to replace his now mostly blind current sharingan. Shisui runs, suicide by dramatics yada yada, his dying words are for Itachi to take his remaining eye and DO THEIR PLAN.
-Itachi straight up ... does not do it. In canon there is no actual reason stated. I don't thing we even get Itachi doing a long-winded monologue (which Kishi usually adores doing to kill us with boredom) about why he thinks the plan will fail. Instead we hit a *timeskip* of anything from a few weeks to possibly a few months, and then we have Itachi approaching "Madara" for assistance in the massacre.
-Madara who, iirc, Danzo is also aware of, I believe he bargained with Madara at least once in canon for something but I don't remember where that shows up.
-Funny how the guy who now has a fresh new brainwashing eye suddenly is not going to be responsible for the final blow to the Uchiha. Funny how the 13 year old who is under his direct command and influence goes from wanting to fix the problem without bloodshed to *recruiting a rogue shinobi* to help kill everyone, and then handily removing himself from the village entirely to go spy on the Akatsuki and make himself Konoha's enemy #1 for years to come.
-Funny how no one ever heard the massacre take place, and how the Uchiha compound was already conveniently outside the barrier radar so no one would notice the Uchiha chakra signatures going out en masse.
-Funny, how the first people on the scene of the massacre? Are Danzo and his root agents.
-Funny, isn't it, that the man with years of experience using a stolen eye to influence people in secret suddenly has everything he wants, and the talented but much less experienced *child* directly under his command goes against all his previous ideals of pacifism to do something that will fully benefit Danzo and then removing himself from the situation entirely to serve as a spy against Danzo's other potential problems.
-Funny isn't it that the one thing Itachi loved enough to defy orders for, Sasuke, almost *died* from the trauma of the Tsukuyomi anyway (iirc he was in a coma for a few *days*, but that could be fanon I'm misremembering).
-Funny that, over the years, this one single loose end of Danzo's, this one last thing Itachi would be willing to destroy Danzo for even after all he has done and abandoned, is systematically isolated and then later hunted by a missing ninja who *also* spent a lot of time in the past working for Danzo. Including being able to send the Sound Four in to get him in the heart of the village without any alarms going up in the barrier radar thing. For which Danzo has the codes for his root ninja who are also now not supposed to exist.
-Funny how this one loose end keeps running into circumstances that by rights should either kill him or make him *also* a missing ninja that Konoha should hunt down, and the only thing that keeps Sasuke from being declared an enemy of the village and slaughtered for a bounty is the unanticipated attachment of Tsunade to Naruto, who loves Sasuke enough to beg for clemency for him.
-Funny how one of the *first* things Danzo does after becoming temporary Hokage is put out a bounty on this one boy that survived his plotting and was the only threat left to him from Itachi, even after Itachi has died.
-But sure. It was all Itachi's idea to massacre the clan and never use Shisui's eye to fix the problem. No sir definitely no brainwashing of a baby Uchiha involved there, nope. Nada. What are you talking about. Itachi totally did this all of his own choice and volition.
#SE asks#anon asks#Secret Engima Rambles#SE Rants#uchiha massacre#naruto#danzo shimura#hi i have thoughts and today i will be saying them.#can you tell i have issues with how ppl in canon and fanon characterize Itachi and the massacre#when danzo is#right there#with canon mind control powers
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I saw a post awhile back that was up in arms at the idea that fandom meta could be considered literary criticism in any sense, without giving much in the way of arguments for why that's wrong beyond "how dare!!! your silly shipping manifesto isn't literary blahblahblah."
It's obviously deeply akin to the gasp! horror! at comparisons of prestigious literature that re-purposes specific characters and events from other sources to fanfic. And the way in which the responses are mostly akin, IMO, is that in nearly all cases, they use vague scorn in the place of substantive argument. The argument is usually phrased along the lines of "how dare!!! your silly A/B/O slash fic isn't literature blahblahblah."
Both arguments (basically the same argument) rely on a) using very specific subtypes of meta/fic that the speaker obviously holds in contempt to stand in for the entirety of the broader genre (e.g., just going with AO3, ~146,000 of its over 10 million works are tagged with A/B/O, while less than half are m/m slash). The point isn't that the genres used are actually representative; rather, they're used to provoke disdain or disgust in place of some kind of coherent criteria for literary criticism/literature that could consistently distinguish fanworks from prestigious works or genres.
I actually agree that some commonly-cited works are not really fanfic (especially religious texts written by adherents of the religion in question), and if you've followed me for awhile, you probably know I have a lot of issues with a ton of popular fandom meta and fanon takes. At the same time, the idea of a hard line between (say) meta and literary criticism in terms of approach or quality just seems kind of absurd to me.
Let's be real, if you're in literary criticism, you know that some of it is really bad, and if you're in fandom, you've probably encountered very insightful meta at some points. There's a lack of quality control as with fanfic, sure, but that doesn't mean that meta is intrinsically inferior or fundamentally different from all forms of literary criticism, just that a higher proportion is likely to have problems that would often (though not always) be caught through peer review. At the same time, it allows people (including literary critics) to reach others without the problems of the journal system (inaccessibility/paywalls, glacial turn-around, etc).
So there are differences on the gatekeeping front, sure. And there are different conventions and certain theoretical approaches that tend to be treated as gospel more often in fandom than in some areas of lit-crit (fandom meta tends strongly towards anti-intentionalism, for instance). I'm not saying that formal literary criticism and fandom meta are customarily identical in style or perspective, but that they are fundamentally related. At the end of the day, they are sustained interpretations of stories, whether they're particularly good ones or not, and the distinction is more of a spectrum than a line anyway. I don't think fanwriters are wrong or mistakenly defensive in seeing a connection there when there so obviously is one.
Additionally, the argument-by-cultural-disdain (in addition to being just generally poor argumentation) is often extremely presentist. It's grounded in contemporary assumptions about the nature of literature, interpretation, and originality, for both meta and fanfic, that are wildly ahistorical when applied to things like early modern English drama. And people who use that argument tend to also be completely uncritical about the modernity of their assumptions, so there's that, too.
Usually, the argument seems to be "and don't mention Shakespeare, that's different" without any evidence or argument for why, beyond sometimes, again, falling back on vague contempt ("so you're saying fanfic is equivalent to Shakespeare now?"). Like, why should originality be a defining quality of literature for some things but not others? Deflecting onto the question of quality doesn't answer that.
(It especially doesn't when you consider that early modern "quality control" for works in English typically involved patronage from aristocrats or being one yourself, and the ability to navigate heavy state censorship—which I assume the "fanfic is not literature, somehow all early modern storytelling of any quality is tho" people are not advocating for.)
Now, I don't personally think Shakespeare et al. wrote fanfic, but for me, it's not a matter of quality but of the fandom context. Fanfic, in my view, intrinsically rises out of fandom, and though it can overlap (sometimes very heavily) with other kinds of derivative works in terms of tropes etc, it has to be part of a fandom's activity (not necessarily Western media fandom, but something recognizable as a fandom) to really "count" as fanfic. It also has to be intended as fiction, even if inspired by real life. Many of the usual examples don't satisfy those criteria for me, so I don't consider them fanfic.
These don't mean that fanfic can't ever qualify as literature, can't be analyzed in literary terms, whatever, but that a lot of other things don't qualify as fanfic. It's a stricter category. And that's my own definition—other people's may differ, though I think mine is pretty common (if often unspoke
#anghraine babbles#general fanwank#fanfiction#anghraine's meta#though this is more#anghraine rants#i actually wrote like four more paragraphs but decided that was probably enough. just maybe.#long post#ivory tower blogging
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i've been feeling a little put off by the newer orym-laudna-ashton crew episodes, but it's a weird feeling that people in the fandom seem to share re: the whole godly plotline
as someone who is religious (polytheistic; i call it norse heathenry), the way Matt is approaching gods and sprinkling in smaller non-god divine spirits (such as the werewolf one that possessed chetney) is interesting, but i'm mixed on how the players are reacting to it. tbh i think they're just very culturally christian, but i wanna try and work out how i'm actually feeling about it all, though i've seen other, better meta posts on the subject
gonna put this under a cut because it's getting long
i think i'm mostly annoyed that the gods' followers are taken as the same thing as the gods doing a thing? i know in a d&d world these followers are literally getting magical power from their gods, and that certainly has to mean something, but at the same time, humans and other d&d sentient species have free will. that's the whole point of an improv game. the gods don't control their every action, and i would hope that the gods don't take your power away if you aren't a cleric/paladin in the One Approved Way there is to be a cleric or paladin.
i suppose that some of this relies on how matt sets stuff up (the mention of dawnfather *missionairies* really threw me, because that's a *very* christian concept), and partly how the players react. the players, who i assume are largely not very religious irl (idk about sam who's the only one i've heard discuss his religious background), tend to react like "well, that won't really affect me".
hang on, i've had a realization. i realized the main thing my brain is stuck on is we've listened to so, so many people talk about how the gods are bad, whether rural people who want to be left to their own worship or the "release predathos" gang, but we've had very few people who have a thorough, passionate, POSITIVE opinion of the gods. we haven't been presented with the option of the gods being good and helping. THAT'S why it feels weird. the players are ambivalent and only orym seems to remember that ludinus had to murder people to get away with his plan without people disagreeing with him, the guests are largely ambivalent about the gods (even deanna, which is fair), and matt has presented them with a lot of very strongly anti-god people.
it's not that any of these characters are wrong for their opinion. it's not that the gods *have* to be actually good and morally pure. it's that all these characters, NPC and PC, making the choices that seem right for them to make, have skipped over the part where they try to figure out what role the gods actually play in the world, be it the living world, afterlife, or basic function of the planet's biome (this post: X has a great take on that laid out more concisely than i could)
honestly, i think "are the gods good or bad" is reductive at best, but if i were at the table, i'd be asking things like "well, if the dawnfather gets eaten, does the sun go out, because we need that" or "if the raven queen gets eaten will there still be an afterlife"
#critical role#meta#working out my feels before monday when i catch up on the newest episode#i wanna know what matt is trying to set up here#does he have an endgame idea for how the gods are going to be portrayed?#also i wish people were nicer to the dawnfather purely because he made vex his champion back when and vex is my ultimate fave#don't be mean to vex's boy#(among her many other boys lol)
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Why is Goncharov 1973 funny:
I saw something like the goncharov joke stands in direct contrast to the “sometimes the curtains are just blue” post which made me go hm…. Also saw people confused by the joke so now I thought too much and made a three parter on my take
Part 1: shoe movie funny
The original joke is that a pair of shoes invented an obviously fake movie, which is funny because why would a pair a shoes do that. The derivative joke is a person going “wow loser you haven’t seen this fake movie?” Which is a joke stressing how ridiculous it is by pretending it’s normal for shoes to advertise a niche obviously fake scorsese film, who isn’t known for gimmicky advertising, BUT ALSO a joke on how bullies could use fear of missing out to make people just pretend to have seen something that doesn’t exist rather than reveal ignorance (like the classic made up band name jokes).
The next step of the Goncharov joke, and from what i can tell launched it all, is a person making up a poster about the movie and going oh yes this very real movie. It has jokes about the mafia genre tropes (“ice pick joe”, a hot lady side character, mostly male cast, scorsese actors) as well as being funny because it commits highlights the same two juxtapositions as the previous jokes, FOMO and shoe movie funny, while adding the inherent funniness of someone putting in way too much work for a bit. Things like the soundtracks follow on this (they’re mostly funny because they take the shoe movie too seriously) and thus should be categorized as part of the third wave.
Part 2: sometimes the curtains are just blue
The fourth wave of goncharovism, which is the bulk of the posts and the subject of most discussion, is media criticism, content, and derivative works about Goncharov, a movie that doesn’t exist. There’s posts that read like actual film critics, lines that seem like surprisingly good dialogue, themes about time because Film Shows Clocks Means Deep, bad overwrought dialogue, and most critically, the typical tumblr engagement with a piece of media including meta, gifsets, fanworks and snide comments about how other people are misinterpreting the movie. A movie that isn’t real. It’s fake.
The joke here is obviously a love letter to and scathing critique of criticism- the fact that analysis of something that doesn’t exist reads like actual analysis that people unironically post mocks that a lot of analysis doesn’t engage with text but overlays existing biases over it regardless of content, and also that a lot of movies are the same movie tbh. Katya is being held to unrealistic standards makes fun of shallow stock feminism, “homoeroticism” points to tumblrs obsession with gay stuff that isn’t actually that gay, and all the fake and often bad quotes show how we love to feel deeply about stuff we don’t really engage with. It’s also pointing to how silly it is to put in this much “anger” and effort in and how enjoyable it is to do this, regardless of whether it makes sense. Sometimes curtains are just curtains, and sometimes a clock doesn’t fucking exist, but it sure is fun to say what the curtain really means is that humanity is inherently sinful and that the clock means that Goncharov and Andrey, two characters that don’t have personalities because the movie they’re from doesn’t exist, wanna fuck.
The joke is that it’s fake deep, but it’s fun to do anyways. The joke is that people are getting mad about “people” who don’t exist being sexist etc because they’re making fun of tumblrinas who don’t look at nuance and assume a very specific form of oppression without evidence AND that people would say that shit because scorsese bros ARE sexist. The joke is that we know it’s fake but people find themselves taking it seriously anyways because it’s fun to make up a movie together and fun to make fun of ourselves. I love it!! It’s great!!! But it’s not a declaration against that the curtains are just blue, it’s a satire making the same point much more joyfully.
Part 3: the reality of goncharov
The fake goncharov movie has trended a fairly specific ways: it has defined characters and relationships, a fairly limited cast in terms of people who matter, homoeroticism, hot girl with a gun, and a lot of foreshadowing. It’s very invested in Katya and Goncharov’s personal narratives despite the wide array of people on the poster. Other than that very funny post about a (fake) shoot out showing the destructiveness and hollowness of nationalism, it’s not all that engaged in systems or the mafia specifically.
And sure, our Goncharov is so narrow partially due to its fake genre- mafia movies are tropey and hero obsessed. It’s fake. We’re making fun of the “best movie” by making a fake tropey movie!! But half the joke is being earnest, and our fake movie is chock full of the tumblr beloved tropes of obsession with romantic relationships, with “themes” that emphasize tragic endings for mutual obsessions, of an absolute lack of engagement with systems while insisting we are engaging , and of a focus on two or three characters instead of an ensemble cast- a million people are writing a movie and yet it has no breadth.
And GET THIS- Goncharov is a real movie. No, I mean it. Goncharov is probably a Google-translate-error-caused misprint of the movie Gomorrah, “presented” by Scorsese while not being directed by him at all. Egbert’s review, so mercilessly parodied in Gonch-posting (or goncharosting, as I like to say), calls it “a curative for the romanticism of The Godfather and Scarface”. Rather than deifying a specific man, it is a series of vignettes about horrible violence that seems unavoidable for its rotating characters. It’s based on real killings, and many of its actors were actually arrested for mafia activities. Forget hollow themes- it’s a movie that’s harrowing due to its reality.
Which is very very funny. Like i genuinely can’t believe we made a fake mafia movie that’s accidentally about a realest mafia movie ever made that proves how much we don’t mentally engage with the important oppressions and systems in our world while insisting that we’re self aware the irony the thematic parallel the sheer “oh fuck for real”ness of it all i was going to try to say something deep but like can you believe it??? God playing is playing 4-d funny chess with every last one of us. Long live goncharov
#goncharov#no one’s gonna read this but istg goncharov is the funniest joke ever made#goncharov meta#goncharov explained#long post#i was going to put a read more but no. this is funnier
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