vixenscratch

[vixenscratch]

So I didn't want to derail the reblogs of an OP who doesn't enjoy the show by reblogging from Tox's response talking about the themes in Dungeon Meshi and how the cooking isn't the core of the story. But. Thoughts happened, yanno?

While Dungeon Meshi isn’t ACTUALLY a cooking manga/anime to the point of that being the main focus of the overall story, I have to admit I am weak to aspects of the idea of it. Like… I love the characters, I love the monsters and how varied and dynamic the encounters are, and I love how Senshi cooks and cares so much about the process and ingredients. It also really slots in with my love for episodic baddie-of-the-week format shows (assorted crime drama, Supernatural when it's not laser focusing on metaplot, House MD, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. until it shifted gears to metaplot central).

Which is why I love the idea of an AU that leaves room for delving back down, tasting more monsters, seeing more dungeon wonders. Maybe have Senshi set up a restaurant adjacent to the dungeon. Have it be like Wong Fu's in Bones, where you don’t order, you let Sid choose. (And just like in Bones you CAN order off the menu, and it’ll be good, but letting Senshi choose will give you AMAZING. Unlike in Bones, making your own order doesn’t come with digestive regrets.)

I just want friends going down with an ingredient list and gathering what Senshi needs for his kitchen. I want friends getting slightly desperate when something takes longer than expected and doing some "okay what else can we use from this monster/these dungeon plants to make sure we get something nutritious?" bullshit. I want inventive takes on real world dishes, and fantastical dishes with no obvious real world equivalent. I want Marcille squeamish about a new dish one minute and shoving it in her face after reluctantly having a taste the next.

#oh god stop babbling #dungeon meshi #dunmeshi au #i do have a wip in an au like this but it's... not progressing very well #too focused on oc shenanigans atm

[vixenscratch]

Genuinely kinda mad that Tumblr mobile just... doesn't show me all posts from people I'm following. Like, I'm sitting here refreshing hoping to see something new and cool on my dash, and nothing, and then I get on my desktop and there's like TWO PAGES' WORTH of shit I never saw.

Can we please fucking not, Tumblr?

#oh god stop babbling #tumblr no

[vixenscratch]

ASSFGHKLJ as a cis-passing enby in a het-passing relationship… I both feel incredibly seen, and want to remind people that it’s always better to have a few cishet people find belonging in queer spaces, than to have queer people feel like they… don’t.

I’ve spent much of my adult life agonizing over whether I, a kinky, poly, bisexual, demiromantic enby, am queer enough for queer spaces. It’s only recently that’s started to calm down, and only after I sort of accidentally stumbled upon more masc presentation.

I went to Pride with my boyfriend a few years ago, wearing a genderqueer pride shirt, and it was so sad to see him squirming because he’d never been to Pride in a straight-passing relationship before and felt out of place as a result.

less “if you see a man and woman together at pride be nice! they could be bi/pan/trans/ace/aro” and more “stop gendering strangers to harass them anywhere, but especially at pride holy shit”

#quiltbag #oh god stop babbling #Pride discourse

[vixenscratch]

Having gender feels/mild confusion and realizing most of my inner circle consists of cis guys. Which is normally fine and whatever, but when I’m questioning whether something I experienced starting at ~13 was dysphoria or just something menstruating people go through IT’S NOT THAT HELPFUL.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate cis male friends trying to be supportive, but uh… you kinda have little to no relevant experience here, my guy.

#oh god stop babbling #gender is hard

[vixenscratch]

that ‘pakige?’ post but me, a couple hours after posting a fic, like ‘comints?’

#reblog #too real #writer’s woes #cats make everything better

[vixenscratch]

now more than ever it's blatantly obvious that people go out of their way to erase trans men from communities and queer history. it's always been happening, but it's way easier to watch it in real time now thanks to the internet and social media. we are watching people basically gloating that they misgender trans men and don't see them as men. we are now watching people kick trans men out of queer spaces because they are often "femme and them" or "nonbinary and woman" support groups, conflating nonbinary identities with womanhood, and denying trans men or transmasc nonbinary people places to go. many of them get told that their presence would "scare" the lesbians, women and enbies because they have trauma.

where do the trans men with trauma go, though? we can't go anywhere. when i was struggling with domestic violence that ended up destroying my right leg, i was denied shelter in queer spaces and even women's spaces even though i have F on license. domestic violence shelters especially will turn trans men away if we pass. even if we partially identify as women, we can't go in because 'our voices are deep and scary and we're loud and aggressive and threatening and might prey on the defenseless scared women'

finding transmasc support groups is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. i've seen numerous organizations across the US have transfemme support groups, nonbinary/genderqueer support groups, and then nothing for transmascs. where the hell do we go when they won't let us go anywhere?

we try to exist online and they try to erase us from here, too. bickering and arguing about how we're not real men, sending trans men death and sexual assault threats, acting like they're saviors for kicking out the "dangerous ugly men" from the queer community, as if we don't belong to it at all.

i refuse to be erased. i refuse to sit in silence while people tell me my problems don't matter because now i "have male privilege". I don't. once people find out what my legal name is they view me as a woman. strangers however view me as a cis man and will deny me help, either through programs, or because i'm a "strong young man, i should be able to pick myself up by my boot straps." i'm not white. i'm not abled.

i'm proud to be a trans man and i will be here to fight for other trans men's rights to have a platform to speak, and spaces to occupy. i will not rest until trans men & mascs have safe places to be and meet other trans men.

trans men are queer. we belong here. we are taking up the space we rightfully deserve and we are not leaving.

#reblog #quiltbag #it just makes me want to fucking cry #i don’t identify as male/masc but i am capable of enough empathy to see how fucked up this is #i can’t DO much but offer sympathy #i know i fall into the trap of centering trans women in discussions about transphobia #because that’s the discourse i see #i need to do better on that point

[vixenscratch]

My beloved fluffy hellbeast figured out that if she chews on cords/electronics, I stop ignoring her/pretending to be asleep. I sadly have found no solution short of banishing her from my bedroom. Cats eating cell phones and chargers not acceptable.

How did you train your cats to not wake you up?

By rolling over and stubbornly feigning sleep if they did.

Their brains are little cause-effect engines. If standing next to your face and yelling until you feed them doesn't actually produce that result, they'll eventually stop doing it. You just have to outlast them.

#oh god stop babbling #pet shenanigans

[vixenscratch]

Do you guys remember how kidnap fantasies were popular on wattpad because young girls and queer teens were both made to feel shame at the thought of their own sexualities, so the fantasy of being kidnapped totally against their will was a way for them to engage with a romantic or sexual fantasy without feeling morally in the wrong for doing so? Added bonus that the fantasy involved being whisked away from repressive environments like home or school, right?

Finding out that Bram Stoker was in a sexless marriage and that scholars believe that he very likely was closeted gay puts the entire book into perspective as to WHY it reads EXACTLY like a self insert wattpad Dracula kidnap fic:

“I TOTALLY love my wife and would never do anything that an upstanding Good Straight Working Man wouldn’t do but oh nooo, big strong man with broad back and strong enough arms to carry me back to bed like a princess trapped me and claimed me as his, completely against my will 👉👈 But he protects me against the bad evil sexual women (who I assure you, I am TOTALLY sexually attracted to, as any straight man with a choice would be) but trust me, I do NOT want ANY of this. What’s that? The Count is not capable of feeling love? Would be a shame if I had the special ability to change tha-”

#reblog #fiction meta #profic discourse #noncon discourse #would love to discuss this with one of my old English professors #being mean to characters for catharsis is my favorite vegetable actually #might meta about that at some point tbh

[vixenscratch]

me @ my mutuals

#reblog #no lies detected

[vixenscratch]

Sharing prev tags because fuck they're important.

And also, like... I'm not going to go into the full story because I do not have that in me right now, but... I was very close to attempting suicide because of a harassment campaign that started with a few somewhat socmed-popular people making gross allegations against me. I had a plan for it. The only part I didn't do was follow through.

Because I was that fucking scared and hurt and wholeheartedly believed that I was about to become shunned from the furry community for the rest of forever. Like... "if I try to commission an artist in five years, they'll turn me away because of the things being said about me right now." That's more or less exactly how severe I thought things were becoming.

I can't fucking go to furmeets anymore. There's too much trauma and I don't have the tools to manage it.

genuine question, do you think callout posts are inherently evil? like if someone's doing some weird shit and hiding it i think people would want to be warned about that at least. just try to discourage harassment as much as possible

The existence of a callout posts means that the targeted person will be harassed if enough people see it. There is no amount of "don't harass anyone mentioned in this doc/video" disclaimers that will prevent that. The post is now potentially a permanent record that anyone can cite for years into the future. You are now at the whims of unknown strangers to be banned from communities, kicked out of creative projects, or be blocked by friends, at any time with no warning. I would consider this to be harassment, but to people who don't know about how these things usually go down they would be seen as righteous whistle blowers.

No matter what you actually did, if your awkward interaction with someone was too sexual, or if you stated a shitty opinion about a complex topic, or if you misjudged someone's boundaries, or if you engaged with kink in a way that made someone outside the scene uncomfortable, you are now a predator. I have seen firsthand the game of telephone starting from "this person did/said something sexualized on an online platform where teenagers could have been present," to "acted creepy around teenagers," to "regularly sexually assaulted children," to "pedophile".

Callout posts do not actually stop the person from "doing weird shit". It depends on what you mean by "weird shit", but if you mean "secretly draws/engages with Bad Porn", which is what a lot of callout posts are about, I implore you to recognize that it is truly not your business to know every private action someone takes just because you follow them on social media. This applies to awkward interactions people have in private too. Sometimes it's patterns of abuse, but a lot of the time it's interpersonal drama that is not anyone else's business.

If by "weird shit" you mean that someone has demonstrated ongoing patterns of real emotional/financial/sexual/etc abuse, and it's something that cannot be handled by any other means (either privately or with legal action if relevant), then in those cases a callout post can potentially do more good than harm if it reaches the people that need to know about it.

The level of long-term mental anguish that a target can go through is absolutely no fucking joke. A callout post has the potential to be a gun to someone's head, especially if they're socially/mentally/physically disadvantaged to begin with, which conveniently describes the most likely people to be targeted with high profile callout posts. [This is because: 1.) Our communities are wayy more likely to self-police than the rest of the internet and 2.) there are groups such as kiwifarms that love when a trans girl does something they can suicide bait her with and they also love it when we infight, isolate, and attack each other.]

I don't think callout posts are inherently evil, but they do nothing to make the target not continue their unwanted behavior. The only good function a callout post can serve is to warn potential future victims. If there are no victims, no behavior that will DIRECTLY lead to someone being victimized, no scam being uncovered, no patterns of abuse being shared, then the only victim is the target of the callout post. Everyone else involved is just gawking at gossip and/or contributing to suicidal levels of anxiety to a stranger.

#oh god stop babbling #online harassment #suicide #i've had fucking flashbacks #but it's fine it was all online so the trauma's not real :V #i hate everything about that situation so much #i gave so much time to furry fandom and all i got was this lousy trauma

[vixenscratch]

As an adult I think me and all my friends should all have matching schedules and work like 20 hours a week and also everyone lives within 15 minutes of each other why is that so much to ask

#reblog #this is the life I want #I'm not saying everyone needs to move #I just need some space-bending shenanigans so I can visit without spending hours on a plane or whatever

[vixenscratch]

Like. I'm trash and want to play off of/build from this. Sorry not sorry, OP, no offense intended.

I feel like romance mechanics/options would be important to Marcille. Like. Give her Baldur's Gate 3 and she will make alts just so she can romance all of her fave husbandos (monogamously only, she's the romance novel kind of gal after all).

Someone has absolutely tried to introduce Senshi to Cooking Mama. Said person was later pulled aside and shown how to do the tasks involved in Mama's recipes IRL.

Izutsumi has gotten drunk and played mocap Fruit Ninja at a party a non-zero number of times. She was good at it and later denied enjoying it.

Thistle probably fucking loves Botania and thinks the changes Vazkii made to make it more tedious to the day/night flowers are brilliant. (I'm not salty IDK what you're talking about.)

Separate from people's actual gaming preferences, I want to see the party play Mario Party purely for the chaos.

some dungeon meshi gaming headcanons I have

Laios: He games. Adores single player RPG/action games set in a medieval fantasy setting where he can make his own character instead of playing one that is made for him. Makes his character a werewolf or equivalent whenever possible. Liked Darkest Dungeon. Disappointed with Spore, but loved SimAnt, let him talk to you about SimAnt.

Marcille: Huge fan of games that require a deep understanding of the mechanics combined with fantastic lore. Her favorite games combine the two along with character drama but she likes turn based games much much more than action/adventure. LOVED Dragon Age: Origins but didn't like Dragon Age II and Inquisition as much. She's the type of person who would play Rimworld but commit no war crimes.

Senshi: He doesn't game. Probably played Minesweeper or something a few times but it the hobby doesn't interest him.

Chilchuck: Has been playing Age of Empires II on and off since 1999. He heard a new version came out but he's uninterested. "A new game? Sorry, I already have a game."

Izutsumi: Isn't gaming, she may get hooked on a mobile game or two though.

Falin: Infrequent gamer. There's one or two narrative games that have really hooked her over the years but she's not a fan of games that require a large time commitment to either finish or learn the mechanics of. Has never drowned a guest in RollerCoaster Tycoon (okay, maybe one to see what happened but she reloaded immediately after.)

Kabru: He's playing competitive online games, usually has one main game that he focuses on for a period of time and then moves onto the next one. Enjoys playing against human players instead of NPCs. He's ranked in a higher tier in competitive modes despite not being online very often because he's good at coordinating teams in a way that lets him rise through the ranks quickly. Has saved a marriage via voice chat.

Mithrun: Doesn't game, hasn't gamed, likely will never game.

Thistle: He has a minecraft server with like 70 mods, you need to download his custom installer to join it. He is desperately trying to get people from going inactive and leaving. Very active in moderating the server from griefers and trolls.

#dungeon meshi #oh god stop babbling #gaming

[vixenscratch]

Anyone have tips for software/tool that's good for making family trees and charting character relationships?

Because, like... over on the Mastodon/Fediverse instance Aethy I've been a total wormbrained goblin about an OC that I transplanted from his original somewhat-typical fantasy setting to a modern AU where I could ship him with @prismatoxic's Nate because Nate is best angery problem child. And, uh.

Ferret's family is steadily growing as I explore his familial relationships more. (Every married couple on the tree save for Victor/Magdalene and Andrew/Savannah has 3+ children, they're just not shown.) I would love to be able to make a family tree for them, but I don't know what tools are out there and the one I used A Long Time Ago had some limitations that could end up awkward and also, like... I was on Win 95 at the time. I have no idea where the install media might be if it even still exists in the family.

#help me tumblr you're my only hope #fictional family tree #looking for software

[vixenscratch]

executive dysfunction is legitimately physically uncomfortable. i’ll be trapped between two things, weirdly caught on how-much-time-it-might-take-me. i take hours worried im going to take hours doing things. i’ll sit on the floor for the entire day, caught up in the middle of not-doing the chores i actually do want to be doing.

& the amount of mental energy that goes into it. & the legitimate amount of anger and discomfort and self-hate. is not “being lazy”.  it’d be a lot less work if i didn’t have to fight myself to just get up and do it. 

i just need you to understand it’s not effortless. it’s never effortless. it’s not “okay let me just get up and finally start doing this.” it’s more like. i am slamming my foot on the pedal but the car is in neutral and nothing is moving. it’s more like shouting instructions into a dying telephone. it’s more like being trapped in a small electric box, and someone who hates me is administering shocks. 

im trying. im trying. please help me get up.

#reblog #mental health #executive dysfunction #had a discussion about some related things with occupational therapists #conceptually I think maintaining a “5/15 minute task” list is a great idea #but then I go to the list and decision paralysis hits #so they suggested using a randomizer to pick a task #great idea! except it'll still require me to make the executive decision to go to the list in the first place #now the 5 minute task has taken an hour #can I have a brain that just... works?

[vixenscratch]

This has nothing to do with Dunmeshi, and for that I apologize, but I have the funniest ferret-stashing-things story that I feel needs to be shared:

So I used to have a pet ferret, Felix. I also had two ragdoll cats at the time, Belladonna and Clementia.

Clemmy would simply find high ground to avoid Felix when he was out. Bella didn’t - she didn’t really like him but she wasn’t going to just yield the floor to him. (She was also still intact when Felix was around, and would be absolutely enamored with him while in heat.)

Bella became Felix’s favorite thing to try to steal and stash. Imagine this young hob, grabbing a fluffy-ass cat several times his size by the scruff and putting his whole body into pulling her across the floor. Most of the time she’d just kinda let herself be dragged, lying on the floor making the most plaintive little tiny the-world-is-ending mews. I think the farthest he ever managed to drag her was like 2-3 feet, though I don’t remember if it ended because he lost interest at that point or because she got fed up and decided to kick his ass.

His goal was always the same, too; no matter where he started, he would drag her towards the cabinets in the living room, to stash her under there.

(To be clear, I was 100% supervising their interactions, and would have intervened if anyone looked about to be seriously hurt.)

yknow, ferret are known horders, which means weaselchuck would also be kind of a horder

he steals from marcille the most, keeps the stuff hidden somewhere, waits until she takes notice of the missing item and then gives it back

that's so cute... weaselchuck stealing things... but he's doing it instinctively so if you ask for it back he gives it... oughghhh i love him. chilchuck would be so mad to be beholden to animal instincts

#oh god stop babbling #Felix #Belladonna #pets do the darndest things

[vixenscratch]

writer’s block (dry) = no desire to write, no ability to write (bearable)

writer’s block (wet) = HUGE desire to write, no ability to write (very evil)

#reblog #writer’s woes

[vixenscratch]

ADGKHAKLDFJG so much all of this.

I have a very few characters that, if there was actually a fandom to address, I'd maybe respectfully ask "hey, this character is 100% gay/straight/ace and I'd kinda appreciate if you don't write them as anything else." (Off the top of my head, Roxeen, Aesuan, and Myen. (Maybe Socks, though technically I think his sexuality is more along the lines of indifference than acespec; he's definitely some flavor of romantic whether that be het/bi/pan/demi.) I have plenty other characters who are mono/asexual, but those three are... IDK. I can't articulate why I don't really want them portrayed off-canon sexuality-wise.) Would I be terribly upset if someone decided they really wanted to ship the three/four of them as a weird allosexual polycule? Nah, not really. Crackship your little freaky heart out if that's what your heart desires, and I'll still appreciate that you like my characters enough to engage.

But yeah. Bi/pan/foo representation is both difficult with monogamous characters (especially since many stories with romantic elements aren't long enough for serial monogamy to become a factor), and something that, like... I'm not terribly invested in representation. But bi erasure is pervasive enough in queer communities already, we don't need it in fandom discourse.

It probably doesn't hurt that I'm a sucker for If It's You It's Okay. I've got multiple characters who, canonically, have The One Exception type relationships in one way or another (in one case it's more pragmatism from someone who thinks there's no fish in the sea for them, but it's understood to be just that by all parties and they do care about each other). In general I tend to like writing relationships with… sexuality being something of a minimal concern. Like, it affects whom the character is attracted to, but they go for the object of their attraction because of that attraction, not because the person matches their sexual preference. Maybe that’s splitting hairs or maybe I just don’t get how romantic attraction works for other people, IDK.

In a similar vein, if you write a character as gay after Season 1, and they unequivocally declare themselves as straighter than a laser beam in Season 2, far as I'm concerned you didn't write them off canon; at worst you're canon-divergent. Because going by the canon as it exists at the point of writing is the most anyone can do.

(Hell, in the case of Chilchuck, I have one AU where the separation from his wife was a bit more mutual, and “more gay than he realized” was a factor. Because, like… that’s a thing that happens, and for that particular AU it was what I wanted.)

there is always going to be something a little off-putting to me about claiming a definitive canon sexuality for a character that doesn't actually have one.

like, we all have our headcanons, of course. and that's fine. but there's a world of difference between "i headcanon this character as gay" and "this character is gay in canon", and so frequently the latter isn't even true. if it's not stated in the source material nor by the creator, then it isn't canon. and that's okay!!

like, okay, it doesn't affect me anyway because no listed sexuality could ever stop me from shipping what i want to, but also... this is so often just an excuse to be mad at people for shipping "the wrong thing". it also tends to dip really uncomfortably into biphobic/panphobic territory.

to use a relevant example, unless ryoko kui has officially stated marcille and/or falin are lesbians (i don't think she has?), you cannot act like they are canonically. not only do they have no in-canon definitive romance (because dunmeshi is not a romance story), but even if you interpret their bond as queer (and like, most of us do, i certainly do), that doesn't for sure mean they only like women. you can headcanon that they do, but you can't harass other fans for not treating them that way. you have to accept that they will both be shipped with men, and it's not homophobia unless the shipper in question is actually, you know, being homophobic about it.

nothing another fan does will ever change what happened in canon, nor alter your own fanwork. you can do whatever you want forever. if someone making your fave blorbo a sexuality you don't agree with pisses you off, block them. if they ship things you hate so much that it makes you mad, block them. you're allowed to. this is your space to curate as you please.

people on the other side do it, too. "ummm chilchuck has a wife" is something i've seen slung at m/m ships for him. not only does his canon wife (who, you know, left his ass, stop acting like shipping him with anyone else is unreasonable on that alone) not preclude headcanoning him as gay if you want to, but it ABSOLUTELY doesn't preclude him being bisexual. for fuck's sake. gay and straight are not the only sexualities. i'm going to drop the contents of a dirty litterbox on your head.

like... genuinely, headcanon whatever you want. you could make everyone in the cast the same exact sexuality if you wanted to. what you shouldn't be doing is acting like anyone else is beholden to your ideas. or, hell, even canon's ideas. fandom is about the freedom to do what you want with your blorbos. have fun with it and stop blaming other fans for not making the content YOU want.

#quiltbag #fandom discourse #retagging later probably #oh god stop babbling