#Also I thought there'd be way more content for this ship than there is

[selfproclaimedunicorn]

If my OC was Canon what God Awful Fandom Hot Takes would their be for them?

Ohhh what do you think they would perceive Aldreda/Alicent?

Not the ask I expected, & I'll be honest I've thought about this more with the Roycegaryens, so it took a minute but I think I've got a good thought process going here. I'm gonna tackle it first with Aldreda herself, because I think that's a lot of important context, & then I'll talk about Aldricent. [Also, content warnings for below the cut: mentions of sexual abuse, discussions of violence, mentions of emotona abuse, general unhinged fandom bs]

Aldreda would be fucking divisive. There's no way around it, I know she would be. Because she's only Gender Weird & not a man, she'd get viewed more negatively than someone like Daemon or Aemond, who are also divisive in their own ways but get more positive attention. She has all the makings of getting seen like a girlboss (she fights & raids, all her hobbies are masculine, she's “sexually liberated”), but she has way too much grit to get boiled down to that unless you want to be really fucking delusional (& trust, I know a lot of fans of HOTD are/can be because of how young a lot of them skew). She's mean & petty, early on in her arc she pretty obviously objectifies other women (regardless of how nice & respectful by comparison she is), she revels in violence if she's the cause of it, & she really quickly turncloaks in The Dance because wrong place/wrong time & getting captured & offered the position of Aegon’s Master of Ships in exchange for her & her remaining men's lives (nevermind she personally was determined to be neutral/wasn't really engaging with the war before getting conscripted by Team Green). Because she's not easily sanitizable & on the less popular side of the war, she wouldn't be getting any favors from a lot of fandom. And that's not even touching on how, like, way hard-core Team Green stans would feel about her, I cannot even fathom if it would be positive or negative (if anyone has thoughts there lmk, I'm curious).

So, just in general Aldreda would be getting hot takes about how she's not really one of the Ironborn & making up all kind of shit about honor & doing a disservice to her whole House & culture (like Sansa got/gets about Not Really Being Northern), & about how she should have either let herself get killed or have somehow murdered her way out of being surrounded by trained soldiers who'd disarmed her & were literally only leaving her unharmed/unacosted because they watched her rip a man's ear off with her teeth. Really vindictive Aldreda antis would come out with hot takes about her deserving all the emotional neglect & emotional incest & sexual abuse from her backstory & how it should have been worse, or that she should have “shut up & married her cousin instead of getting involved in the war & sticking her nose where it doesn't belong/betraying Rhaenyra [whom she has never fucking met].” There'd probably be a pretty vocal minority that ships her with her abuser/cousin just because he's “hot & possessive,” & that is a very rancid hot take. People would victim blame her & also claim she was the direct reason her murdered/not dead by happenstance brothers got murdered.

Aldricent, I don't think, would be super popular outside of tumblr. Like, Aldricent just is for the tumblrinas because it's “becoming less toxic yuri marriage arc,” & that would speak to the tumblr-flavor-chronically-online girlies (gender neutral).

I approach this next bit as a Rhaenicent Enjoyer, but a lot of hate for Aldricent would come from there, imo. Aldreda would get called “bargain bin Rhaenyra” due to the places their stories kinda overlap, & depending on which bias you approached the ship from would determine your hot take from there. It'd either be “Alicent is replacing Rhaenyra with Aldreda who's a lesser model, & she'd probably leave her in a heartbeat if she came to her senses & started supporting her girlboss one true love” or “Aldreda is sexually manipulating Alicent & is literally only one step above Larys or Viserys due to her issues/trauma surrounding female sexuality that she's obviously never going to grow from/improve upon. Criston should kill her.” Before the growth arc, there'd probably be hot takes/jokes about Alicent being a pillow princess & finally getting to nut, & some of them would probably come from a good place, but it's still a Bad Hot Take to me because Alicent's lack of active participation the first time they fuck is an Aldreda choice.

There'd probably also be hot takes about which one of them is fixing the other with their magic, problem solving pussy or w/e, because that's how relationships work 🙄 (whoever you think is fixing the other is determined by who you like more &/or whoever you think is worse, I suppose. Pick your poison/bad take).

#asks #oc: aldreda farwynd

[digitalcockroach]

Hang on hang on your tags on "reverse queerbaiting" are excellent, please if you have the energy go into more detail on them doing "fanfic" romance tropes vs true romance tropes bc I think that's Exactly what I haven't been able to put into words

for context: POST: “I feel like we're almost in an era of like, reverse queerbaiting. Used to be that you'd be tricked into watching a show because the story implied there'd be gay rep, but now they're using gay rep to trick you into thinking there'll be a story.” TAGS: #tbh :/ #all the gay shows are pandering to like not even regular romance tropes but FANFIC tropes #and it's hollow af

Ok let me see if I can get my thoughts into some kind of order on this lol 

I mean to use the most egregious offender as an example, let’s talk about Good Omens s2. Like we come from s1 and the book which operate on a huge scale of time and across the globe with world ending stakes, even when it’s focused on Tadfield or London. There is a whole cast of characters outside of Aziraphael and Crowly with their own motives and agendas that intersect with each other and you can imagine existing before and after the story being told. Then we enter s2 and they’re all gone. God is gone. It’s Aziraphael and Crowley, Gabriel (and Beelzebub), and their neighbors who exist purely to be a Functional Couple oppose A+Cs dysfunctionality. This is kind of the first sin of fanfiction in this case, the world gets smaller and shallower and so do the characters within it. It’s all just feels like props and dressing to get two characters together. The whole Gabe and Beelzebub thing? The only reason I didn’t “see it coming” is because I thought there was no way they would just rip straight from the crackships of AO3 because I have READ THAT PLOT BETWEEN THESE CHARACTERS TWENTY TIMES JUST LIKE THIS. 

Gomens s2 and also the other big recent Gay Shows, Our Flag Means Death and What We Do In The Shadows, really fuckin abuse fanfic tropes to death in more specific ways too though like - a sassy lesbian couple to set the oblivious gays straight, a will-they-wont-they with completely forgone conclusion, everyone is a shy sensitive guy even when they’re ruthless killers everyone is kind of stupid and woobie and seconds from crying all over their soft little love interest, everyone talking in this self actualized therapy speak - SO much very direct TELLING and the SHOWING is just eyecandy, fanservice. The second sin the formulaic predictability and the third is prioritizing fanservice/shipping over storytelling. 

Because that’s the main thing I think? These shows - which I wanna be clear I liked at least at some point but have gotten really disappointed by as they continue - feel like they don’t have a story to tell. They’re just vehicles to get a Gay Couple together, regardless of character consistency or the way more interesting things implied going on in the world around them, and they just shed more and more detail and quality and idk variety? as the main ship’s relationship progresses and the world narrows further and further. It becomes boring, one-note. 

And to cover my bases here I don’t want to be misconstrued as believing these things can’t be or aren’t also true of straight romance shows (or movies, books, whatever) because I think we’ve all seen plenty of Boring Straight Romance, and I am being somewhat generalizing for the sake of what brevity I can accomplish here. But I think the noticeable thing with specifically these new queer romance shows is that they are being aimed at and HEAVILY pandering to yknow 18 - 30 year old chronically online fandom queers because people like Niel Gaiman and Taika Waititi and whathaveyou have witnessed first hand (and made a lot of money from) the absolute frenzy this AO3 donating demographic with go into over this exact kind of content. 

In short, people figured out you can make more money off of really dedicated weirdos with bad taste than you can writing something with depth and substance.

Not everything can be as good as Homestuck I guess!

#that last part is a joke no one come for me #i hope this makes any fucking sense im really bad at putting my thoughts into words #ok to rb

[meiizumi]

Happy Yaoi Friday!

So I purchased a magazine about BL and otome games from 20 years ago because I'm actually very interested in the history of visual novels targeted at a female audience. I've seen people post pictures from old bishoujo game magazines and tag it with #animecore but rarely do images with early 2000's anime boys from visual novels get the same treatment. Since I'm really interested in this stuff I thought, why don't I archive some old yaoi game mags! I want to see inside them. And I ended up getting the oldest issue I could find for about over $30 including shipping. This is not my proudest purchase. My ultimate goal was to get one of the issues from 2002 (the year when B's log FIRST started serialization) but the listings I saw for 2002 issues ended with me getting refunded. Thrice

When I think of B's log magazine today, I think of it providing fun content on not-explicitly-romance games with male characters (i.e. enstars, mahoyaku and the like) but way back in its early days, the prime thing they focused on was BL games. There's a little bit of otome game stuff in this magazine but BL takes up like 80% of it. There's like, extensive capture guides to a couple of BL games and interviews with staff, fanart corners, product and software highlights and announcements. And visual novels being a medium full of romance and erotic content, there's yaoi sex images in here. Not very explicit but I don't know how I feel about the appearances of some of the characters depicted...

Also note that this is from 2003, and specifically about GAMES, so a lot of iconic yaoi isn't here besides maybe Sukisho. Have you heard of "Ouji-sama Lv1". Me neither, until I picked this up (This is a lie I heard about it before making this purchase because it's from Alicesoft's defunct BL branch)

I really want to archive this somehow though and maybe get more magazines (There's another magazine that has ran for a while that still has a focus on BL games today called Cool-B). Would it be worth it to pour $36 down the drain, melt the glue on the binding and scan the pages? I wish I could just press the spine on my scanner but this magazine is a lot sturdier and thicker than I was expecting. If I did that then there'd be a gutter shadow. I'm scared of damaging it but I know it's a sacrifice magazine archivers are confident in making.

Also there's a CD in here that has some music from BL games on it. I don't really know if it's worth trying to archive that since those songs can probably be found online pretty easily if you search them up.

#yaoi #txp #retro magazines #game magazine

[kari-izumi]

Man, I wasn't expecting these ByaIchi feels when I watched this movie 👀❤️

Seriously, Byakuya is like...so good in this scene. Ichigo is very obviously freaked out and in pain and Byakuya is reminding him that his friends obviously trust him with their lives; that he can still rescue them.

Like, man, this is legit one of my favorite interactions between the two of them and it show they both have a mutual understanding and respect for one another.

#Byaichi #ichigo kurosaki #byakuya kuchiki #Bleach hell verse #bleach anime #Hmmmmm #Also I thought there'd be way more content for this ship than there is #It used to be everywhere on lj

[liodain]

Oh hey! Consider this a humble request for J, L, and O from the writer asks. And if you’re feeling extra generous for X, a prompt of ‘strange beauty’ with whatever fandom/characters/ship strikes your fancy.

Hey you 💙 thanks for the questions!

J: What does writing mean to you?

My first foray into writing was kind of nonstandard in that my hobby was writing room/item/npc descriptions for a MUD (the text-based telnet precursors of the modern MMO). Back then I didn't even think of it as "writing" as such, since they were separate if interconnected chunks of text that averaged about 50 words a piece, so like... not exactly a book, was it? (I figured out eventually that what I was doing was environmental storytelling, don't worry 😅)

My satisfaction with it wasn't so much the narrative anyway though: it was the freedom to build a world that I wanted my character, and my friends' characters, to inhabit. The admin side of this particular MUD was largely hands-off, there were no specs and barely any documentation and the guy in charge was bordering on Timecube levels of weird (and retrospect, was some kind of unwell) — builders were given free rein to generate whatever content we liked so long as we could figure out how and that it fit the aesthetic of the game, which was kind of nuts in retrospect. Someone would go "hey lio (this mud is the lio origin story btw) I want to explore some caves", so I'd build some caves for them to explore, and die in, more often than not — there'd be a bunch of clues scattered around that suggested they should probably get out of there before high tide. When was high tide? The fisherman on the beach would tell you, if you took a moment to talk to him. Writing meant an ability to shape the world into one I wanted to spend my time in. And boy, did I.

This was back in 2000. I didn't write any narrative prose until 2009, when I fell into my first real fandom at the tender age of, uh... 27. I'm not particularly good at quickly converting my feelings into thoughts and articulating them, as 1) anyone who's tried to talk to me in real time and/or irl and 2) how long it's taking me to reply to these asks will attest, lol. Writing is an effective way to share what it is about a character or ship or canon that grabs my attention (/obsession), and a way to satisfy that urge to talk about them, only instead of trying to have a conversation or writing meta, I can write a story instead. Show, don't tell, quite literally. So for me, as well as a way to get lost in a world and characters I enjoy, writing is also a way to...idk, feel part of a community with people, but with a buffer that can compensate for my fumbling interpersonal skills, thus saving us all a lot of embarrassment, lmfao.

L: What advice would you give to other writers?

I'm not sure I can say anything here that wouldn't be regurgitated Le Guin or just straight up hypocritical 😂 I don't think I'm in a position to be imparting any words of wisdom in a general sense.

But for writing in a fandom context specifically — this. AO3 has done a lot to protect freedom of expression for fans, but also visibly quantified success and/or popularity, then made it sortable. Hits/kudos/comments are far from an objective assessment on the quality of your work but it's still easy to lean into that external validation and get the value of it all tied up in that shit, and that's a miserable place to find yourself. I 100% recommend getting rid of those numbers.

O: What motivates you to write?

I have an idea in my head and I cannot rest until it is not in my head any more, and about 50% of the time, have inflicted it on everyone else like a cursed videotape. Sometimes it's a(n often stupid) joke or dialogue exchange that I pack a fic around, other times it's a scene that expands itself naturally because I want to hang out with the characters for longer, or it's a trope that interacts with the specifics of a canon/character in a way I find interesting. The rest of the time it's just habit; I write excruciatingly slowly, but even 200 words a day still results in a fic a month on average (recent months are an outlier adn should not be counted). I love exchanges in theory, but tend to stick to treats or game for art requests as a safety net because I don't trust myself to finish something on time. Like many writers, I put a not insignificant number of skill points into procrastination. Psst hey wanna see my spreadsheets?

I will cop to a degree of contrarianism as well, but I think it's fair because while I love a good old well-worn trope, I do genuinely prefer a few things that fall outside of wider fandom preferences as well. When I read something that makes me go "oh, this again?" and then write the opposite or a subversion, I'm doing it because that's what is more interesting to me, and it's what I want to read.

X: (strange beauty)

I WILL GET BACK TO YOU ON THIS ONE 🤣

#answering the ask #wow i still have all my building files!! #tempted to yoink the setting for some original work #an ancient citadel full of secrets on a hidden island that can only be reached through a portal of no return still belts #long post / #deep queue sea