#whenever we decide to revisit homestuck ao3 we just block the entire first block of Popular Ships

[mantisgodsdomain]

Very fun to be an dormant Homestuck in 2023. We saw a post with an aside about the mid-to-highblood bias present in the fandom and we took a moment to think "wait, what?" before remembering how much people posted about Mallek, Lanque, and Marvus. Obviously no one asked our opinion on the matter but we think that a lot of the bias here may just be because fandom people will jump at any vaguely conventionally attractive male character who can say something angsty, and we don't see 99% of this effect because we rapidly get fatigued with any character who is overly present in the fandom and any ship that has overrepresentation in the sample size and start blocking tags.

Very highly effective approach, admittedly, but it leaves us a bit out of the loop. We only really start encountering Issues with that approach in smaller fandoms when blocking any given popular ship will instantly shrink our mutual circle to Just Us and maybe, like, one guy who we dragged in here ourself, so we have to relax blocking standards somewhat and just make it "blocked for a week" or something similar.

#we speak #whenever we decide to revisit homestuck ao3 we just block the entire first block of Popular Ships #we have not seen a da vekat fic in years and this is vital for not burning out our tolerance of Them Interacting At All #we are censoring that tag so it does not appear in their ship tag also #we still have the mar vus tag blocked. we know this bc we have one specific clown mutual who likes him and will reblog him sometimes #but its been like a year since we've seen mal lek or lan que in anything and we like it that way #this has also made our character preferences skew like. OVERWHELMINGLY to woman and enbies over time #because fandom as a whole is EXTREMELY prone to focusing on men and setting anyone who is Not A Men as a background character #which results in a weird little loop where we'll get into something and get burnt out on like. Every Guy within a week #simply due to the sheer oversaturation That One Guy has #and then we only get time to recover on the saturation of Random Gals bc of the trends falling towards Just Men and nothing else #and then our Characters We Like portfolio ends up being like. five women used as background characters and one enby #sometimes we will also pick up a guy who gets villainized by like half the fandom or a popular character where the popular takes suck #but like. it's almost all background characters you see what we mean. we're a home for random blorbos that no one pays attention to #because in order to get into Actually Liking A Character Enough For Them To Hit Heavy Rotation #a high concentration of fans is like. an active detriment bc we'll get burnt out on them #and if people talk about them Too Much to the extent that theyre unavoidable then we will inevitably start to dislike them #we are but a simple beast and if we don't get recovery time we begin to run into Issues with random things & tropes #and then our recovery time once we've hit burnout is like. months to years #anyways this is a long tag ramble but generally if we spend the time to explore a character and figure them out we'll enjoy them in some wa #with the major caveat that if theyre Too Popular we may dislike them regardless #and the way that they're framed both inside and outside of the original narrative can heavily influence us if we run into it too often #bianca and jaune are utterly facinating characters who work with a set of tropes we would LOVE to do justice to #but unfortunately people who like bianca and jaune are the kind of people who think they did nothing wrong #so we can't just like. Talk About Them And Whats Going On There #without running face first into people that genuinely believe theyre a Good And Loving Family Who've Done Nothing Wrong In Their Lives #but we feel a lot like if we go into depicting them without making “THIS IS IN FACT BAD” incredibly blatantly obvious #that we will begin running into people who DO NOT have the prerequisite knowledge and will take it WAY off from intended