did anything or anyone influence you makings steve trans? aside from the obvious adam and steve jokes. was there ever a point where he was not trans or that you decided he would be? have you drawn him with top surgery scars or is he a no op/supernatural op guy?
Uhhhh honestly i didn't think about the Adam and Steve thing I just wanted to hit him with my trans beam. I think over like 50% of my characters aren't cis at this point (but I don't like... count so idk)
I also don't ever really feel like I "decide" characters are trans, it feels more like they eventually come out to me, honestly. So I don't feel like there was any point he wasn't trans, even if that might be objectively true haha
I didn't start talking about it til recently, though, cause I wasn't sure if I'd run into any issues making it canon, but obviously that's not an issue I was just really scared about everything when I first started my contract haha (And I mean Everything, at one point I was worried it wouldn't be okay for Steve to be??? hairy???? I legitimately asked if that's okay cause I was scared I'd get in trouble. I dont remember why anymore)
I didn't realize I'd basically be allowed to do whatever I want, and Steve being trans is very much something I want!
I draw him with top surgery scars in any human AUs, but I decided he's supernatural op in canon basically. Werewolves are shapeshifters, so why not?
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but fr outside of my contracted madness i absolutely refuse to give joe alwyn gold rush like how is that song at all related to their relationship the lyrics clearly spell out a relationship that either never existed or only existed in implication and fantasies and maybe-maybe nots and its so bitter and yet desperately soft in the bridge where it almost projects a sense of envy, of wanting to be them as much as you want them. It continues an interesting oft ignored lyrical trend of taylor wanting just as much to be her lover as to have them, envying their easy charisma (you were flush with the currency of cool/i was always turning out my pockets) or quiet dignity (your integrity makes me seem small) dating back to her earliest songs (the kind of flawless i wish i could be). Theres a projected self hatred and yearning to be better that twists itself into both romantic and sexual lust for her partners thats so fascinating and speaks to how all of her songs regardless of who theyre about are also an act of self reflection on who she is and who she wishes to be.
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quick question. but what is it with the trend to turn canon gay relationships into a m/f ship in fanfiction. like that lowkey feels homophobic?
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Explaining to a sprout why people have been doomsaying, since FanFest Vegas, a FF14 expansion not even out to play yet & it boils down to how much this fandom Hates a game & setting they spend so much money & so many hours of their lives interacting with for whatever reason.
Yes critical thought & analysis of media you consume is good. But assuming Bad of future content isn't the same. It's attention-seeking. Also makes me wonder why some of y'all play something you claim to ideologically oppose. Stop hate playing/watching/reading, you'll be happier.
-Me. Cuz while there is some cause for some concerns, much of the wailing and gnashing of teeth are the same people who loudly complain about everything that doesn't cater to them, specifically, and their fanons/headcanons, or assume 1 writer will make or break a giant group effort, and/or that mistakes in the past mean it will never get better cuz the devs are just ignorant bigots, etc and so on and so forth...
While still interacting with the game and fandom.
It's OK; you have all your pals' social media and Discords to stay in contact. Stop buying into the sunk cost fallacy, and if you actually hate the game and SE so much, stop paying them money and wasting your precious time in the game. There's other media out there, other games to play.
And if you do still enjoy the game, maybe consider how much of what you put out into the world is actually constructive criticism (are you posting concerns on the actual forums where the devs actually look for feedback?) or just salt for salt's sake to get Likes from your followers.
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✧ The Ardal stars ✧
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I think that the 2010's media landscape of Buzzfeed articles about plotholes in disney movies, Cinemasins critiques, and Watchmojo Top Ten scenes in movies that make no sense has truely ruined a lot of media. People are afraid that their work will be torn down if they dare leave a single thing up in the air, if they dare ask their audience to suspend their disbelief.
All too often nowadays I see stories (especially fantasy), take the time to explain how every small aspect of the world works and how it all logically makes sense. The constant time stopped to explain why an event happened, how this object works, or why this is important to the characters. It's just really not needed and it honestly makes a lot of stories worse.
I am of the opinion that the best stories truly just drop you into their world and explain nothing. They just take you through the story of this world and you just have to accept it and continue on. "When he became king, the land became barren." I don't want the story to stop and explain why this is, or how it happened, I want us to move on so we can just assume that the king has such rancid vibes that everything died.
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sometimes looking at like Self Help Strategies lists for the symptoms I'm having is always just like:
thing that I already do
thing I have tried 10 times
thing I already do
thing that I don't have the money to do
thing I already do
thing I've been doing since I was 10yrs old to no avail
thing that is impossible given my situation
thing that doesn't apply to me
thing that I already do
thing I have already tried
hrmm, oh wait, maybe finally- OH, yeah.. okay. thing that I already do but it was just phrased slightly differently
thing I have already done
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[cws: starvation/food insecurity, fantasy racism, psychiatric abuse, ableism, and Upsetting Pictures.]
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one thing that fucks me up immensely about pericles before and after the asylum is how fucking skinny he is.
like. as much as obviously the two designs are Very Inconsistent in general which annoys me, look at him pre-timeskip. look at how he's shaped.
his head and face are way smoother and rounder, both in front and back, and the space between his cheekbones and his eyebrow ridge is filled in; his body is rounder in general and his belly is noticeably between his thighs when he's standing up; he has kind of a chubby butt; his chin and neck are softer and wider around, which you can really see with the width of the scarf compared to his shoulders and the angle where it meets his head. it comes up in front of his face more because there's not as much of an angle with his chin to hold it down.
now. compare all those things to this.
christ.
and like, you could argue some of these design differences are tiny things to zero in on in a show that's as loose with its models as sdmi is. but present-day pericles' design is pretty obviously supposed to be unsettling because he's physically built to be a Cute Roumb Little Mascot Creature--so much so that the framework has managed to stick around a little in spite of everything--and has become gaunt and haggard anyway. and you could also argue that the body type changes are just thanks to aging twenty years (and i don't doubt that's contributed).
except. he spent those twenty years in an asylum where the other inmates we see look like this.
christ.
(fun little fact that @thecottageinthedark pointed out also: remember how he literally got caught at one point because he couldn't stop eating sunflower seeds, even during a heist? a high-fat, high-calorie snack for birds? you know, exactly the kind of thing a starving person who finally has proper access to food would be wolfing down?)
(yeah.)
did i mention that this happened in a (fantasy) racially segregated prison, which is technically an asylum so the inmates can be kept there indefinitely, because in an actual prison you're required to have a sentence? did i mention that none of the human characters we see in human prison look any less healthy during or afterward, and on top of that are allowed to move around and socialize? did i mention the absolutely horrific treatment of the asylum inmates is implied to be despite the fact that the (physically abusive!) guard is playing up how dangerous and malicious they are? (you know. except for pericles 🙃)
did i mention the man who got pericles imprisoned--who he had not only done nothing to beforehand, but had helped--says he was there to 'live out the rest of his miserable parrot life in a cage, where he belonged,' and not only do none of the characters we're supposed to side with have anything to say about that, but the audience is clearly supposed to agree with him too?
(did i mention said man--who was in on the crime, singular, that pericles went to prison for!--spends those twenty years living a life of luxury in power while abusing the child he kidnapped as a baby and held hostage his entire life, and when we see him in prison he is not only chilling out and helping the authorities but reading a newspaper?)
did i mention the part where by the time we meet pericles he hasn't spoken in years?
like. man the 'ooooo scary evil abused asylum crazies' trope is bad enough, even when they pretend to lampshade it for a minute before playing it straight; i don't know how they added in All That and made him emaciated and expected no one to find it heartbreaking or even sympathetic. i don't care how bad he was before the asylum (and dear god was he ever), that is horrifying and no one deserves it. god damn.
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i genuinely don't think a story's worldbuilding and lore has ever drawn me in the way that check please did. it's been years and i still think about it every day. the characters and plot were always superb but i think what has stuck with me the most is the depth of the settings and how everything feels so lived in and tangible. everyone wants to make a fake world and town and university but no one else has EVER done it that well
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also idk why that last post reminded me of one of my favorite bellini fun facts which he shared in the podcast he co-hosted with scott back in like 2013 which is that he never played "rock, paper, scissors" until he was in his late 40s??? like he'd never learned how to and he was like "if i saw someone doing that i would leave a room. i don't need an extra thing to learn today" honestly king behaviour
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completely random observation but i truly love how so many of my notifications are from lesbian flag pfps/urls/etc. lesbians just fucking love dostoevsky!!! what is it about his work that resonates so hard with us. is it the existential struggle against repressive social institutions and expectations. is it the immense internal anguish & rage barely concealed by a paper-thin veil of politeness out of fear of impropriety that finally overflows explosively. is it the spiteful female characters tormented by the narrative. is it the murder
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Hello.
You and gay-jesus-probably have successfully made me question everything with your view that Tears of the Kingdom is imperialist propaganda, so that's been fun.
Anyway, I decided to share this discussion with the Zelda fans on reddit, and perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of them disagreed. Here is what they said (I'm Alarming_Afternoon44):
So what do you think? Have I and all these other people just been duped by the game's manipulative framing? Or do they actually have a point?
And if you'd rather not answer this, or would prefer if I censored the usernames, just tell me and I'll delete this.
Hey! Thanks a lot for reaching out, and I'm glad it made you think stuff through!!
Honestly, as I mentioned in this post, I am not super interested about in-world conversations about who oppresses who, because what can be assessed from the game is super vague and more vibes-based than evidence-based. Within the text, of course that the Good Zonais are good and the Bad Ganondorf is bad! But that's my whole point! The narrative has been deliberately crafted so that the zonais and Rauru (and Hyrule) are as blameless as possible (and it's not doing a great job at it overall to be frank; we would not be having these conversations about how offputting it all feels for a non-zero number of people if it did do a great job). More importantly, I want to focus on what sort of real-life narrative it all parallels. Because people make stories, and people live in the real world.
Not going after everyone's throat here, gamedev is hard and the hydras that are AAA game production do end up doing super weird stuff, especially since the thematic ramifications are absolutely never prioritized (and it's also always the same kind of people who make the final calls and push out what can and can't be talked about also). And as fans, we tend to have trouble stepping outside the lens of lore and take a look at the bigger picture sometimes; not as an attack on any individual part of that decision-making process but to just pause, stop, and question our standards, our priorities and the kind of reality (or skewing of reality) the stories we tell each other reflect.
Again: do we want to take videogames seriously or not? If we do, then we need to accept they are a vehicle for ideology, just like any other artform. And sometimes, you push out questionable ideology, sometimes without meaning to, because you didn't unpack your own biases as you did. And it's even fine to do it, nobody is perfect, a 300+ people team spread over 6 years certainly will not be that. But that it wasn't prioritized is, in my opinion, a problem. As a narrative designer, I want games (at least the narrative side) to be held to a higher standard than this. It's literally my job to work with the industry so it can hold itself to higher standards of quality --so the whole TotK situation is quite frustrating to witness from a very pragmatic, work perspective where I already spend my days trying to convince people that things mean things. I have a vested interest here in not having the companies I work for being given a free pass by gamers to do literally whatever as long as it's fun, especially when we're talking about a billion-dollars company suing its own fans left and right for any perceived slight. Nintendo are not underdogs here. It's fine to point out they cut corners and maybe promoted messy ideologies, voluntarily or not.
So long story short: no I don't believe anyone here has a point in regards to what I think is actually important, which is why these choices were made in the first place. If you look at an imperialist text expecting the text to tell you that it's imperialist instead of recognizing a framing used for propaganda by yourself, you're never gonna find any imperialist text ever, obviously not!! I'm sorry if I sound a little gngngn here, but I don't know why audiences have, at large, this feeling that lore and story beat decisions materialize themselves already formed and without any human bias, meddling, intervention, internal politics or approximations (it seems that people can only conceptualize this part if they have actual names to attach to the story, but without clear authors it's like there are no authors and so no bias, which is... a very strange bias in itself). I can promise you that it does not work that way in practice: every narrative department on every big game is a battlefield --some nicer than others, but all of them very emotionally draining either way.
So yeah, I guess that on these grounds, I disagree with every point raised here. Sorry Reddit :/
But thank you for the ask and sorry if I didn't go more into details as to why. The big Why I Dislike Rauru Post and the Gerudo Post might have some more specific rebuttals, but I am not super interested in debating small detail stuff tbh. I feel like it's no use if the frame of reference isn't being understood in the first place.
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i say that i express my aromanticism and asexuality proudly and loudly but i still feel out of place and insecure about it, especially around my allo friends. don't get me wrong, my allo friends are super supportive and i love them so much to bits, but when the world tells you that your identity doesn't matter, isn't valid, isn't as interesting and cool as others, it's very hard to be open about it.
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love when my good posts about spn racism go around and i have to endure white peoples tags in my notes about how sad and angry this makes them and how unbelievable it is no one ever noticed or did anything about all the racism. and wow i guess things were just different in 2005. and then tie it into the homophobia for the beloved gay white angel. like well uhm first of all not only did i notice immediately but i had a visceral reaction to a black woman calling some white dude master and wearing a collar but i can see why you wouldn’t pay attention to that and second the 2005 part is probably the least important thing too because these stories were perpetuated into 2020 stories as well. sucks that makes you feel icky though! imagine that’s ur whole life!
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.
(tumblr cut off MOST of my tags in this, thanks Tumblr)
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"I want more YA stories where the adults are the ones saving the world so that the kids don't have to." Adult fiction what you want is adult fiction and at least half the shelf space in your nearest bookstore and local library is dedicated to it.
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