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#fandom for me is me and my group of friends' Correct Opinions.

runby2 · 1 year

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remembering the time abt 2 years ago i was in a small server of tight knit ppl and someone said they wanted to share some art but they couldn’t because they couldn’t find the owner of it for credit. like ,, sending it to friends was somehow the same as sending it to large numbers of strangers or reposting it claiming you somehow own it. ive been in many friend groups and usually it was normal to share art you find with a small group and say you’d have to find the artist later through reverse image search or trust the others to believe you weren’t a bad person or something for just,, sharing inspiration in passing conversation. so i explained i was sure it was okay if you just want to mention it in passing and share art inspiration you had with a small group of friends, even if you didn’t have the artist’s name immediately on hand. and oh my gosh i was fucking shunned from the group immediately and chastised for “supporting art theft” and it made me realize how,, weird,,, online friendships have become in fandom spaces specifically originated from tumblr. it was like everything had to be morally correct and perfect and NO ONE was cut any slack to just relax and talk like normal people so if youre in a “friend group server” or “fandom server” where you feel like you’re walking on eggshells like that for any reason, i want to tell you to please for the love of god find people who act like people. and please do not interact with perfectionists or people who deny the ability for you to have any differing opinion. that is the worst thing you can do to yourself.

#art

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nekropsii · 4 months

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Ask Game Speed Round!!

[For the Unpopular Opinion Ask Game!!]

These are all a bunch of smaller ones I thought would be too cumbersome and spammy to post on their own... Enjoy!!

Content Warning: Long.

While I do really like Dave's character as it exists in the comic- no clue what version of Dave most of the fandom is talking about, but I don't know him- I kind of like the themes in Davesprite's character more than I do Dave's. It's another Hal situation.

Dave's character tackled a lot of things very personally relatable to me in ways I'd never seen illustrated before, but Davesprite is more interesting to think about, and seems a little more fun to write. Dave was great representation for me, as someone who grew up in a very bad home, but Davesprite just has that extra oomph with his talk of humanity and individuality. Really like that guy.

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@lupinecalibrator

This may come across as crass, or stepping out of my own lane, but I don't think giving them either multiple sets of pronouns, neopronouns, or both actually rids them of the bigotry in their characters. Lipstick on a pig situation. It just seems like a lazy, incurious fix. Yes, trans headcanons are great, but more and more often I see people use it as a cure-all to the issues a character has, either in a Doylist or Watsonian way. Queer friendliness does not eliminate racism. If a character is a bigoted caricature of a specific group of people, then slapping on a leftist layer of paint by saying "actually they're a minority icon in this other way" doesn't actually... Get rid of the problem. It's just kind of... Tone deaf.

We see this often with Transmisogynistic Caricatures getting claimed as Gay Icons, and people just saying that because they've just claimed them as a campy gay queen, the transmisogyny has been nullified- you can't talk about it anymore, they're the real good leftist in the room, you're a killjoy, and they've defeated bigotry. Not how it works.

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Kind of tired of how some act like her only character traits are Silly Ditzy Furry Girl. Jade is an incredibly, incredibly intelligent young girl, an excellent marksman, and so, so deeply lonely. We need to talk about Jade's chronic loneliness more.

Also, I think she's some kind of Psychotic. One of the flavors. It just feels right to me. It feels canon-adjacent. Or, at least, a textually valid way to read her character. I have a whole post about it somewhere. Mituna and Jade shaking hands on the Psychosis.

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Taking this opportunity to defend Aranea. Some people really need to stop acting like she's worse than Vriska. We all know what Aranea did was justified. Maybe not correct, but justified. And fucking awesome to watch.

Like, look. She spent an unfathomable amount of years being shot down and ignored and belittled by people who were supposed to be her friends... Aranea had to literally pay Meenah, her own best friend, to listen to her infodump, and even then Meenah couldn't afford to give her own best friend enough respect to just listen to her talk about something she's passionate about for 5 minutes.

I need you to think to yourself, genuinely. If you spent thousands- and I mean thousands upon thousands- of years getting ignored and walked on by everyone around you, even your own friends... If you spent thousands upon thousands of years getting called boring and a doormat to your face by even your own friends... Wouldn't you go crazy, too? Wouldn't you snap? Wouldn't you want to do something drastic just to get people to look at you? Just to be seen as something other than weak and boring? Just to be seen as worth even an iota of interest, a shred of someone's time? Wouldn't you? Because I think any normal person wouldn't take thousands upon thousands of years. I don't think you would last a decade. I wouldn't either, and I'm a pretty patient person.

Y'all are just jealous you can't play billiards with planets using your mind when you're mad. That shit was so awesome.

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@searedtroutpeacharugula

This is not an Unpopular Opinion, or even an Opinion, I'm just pointing this out. Do you ever think about the fact that we hardly got any conversations between Rose and Jade? I do. This haunts me. This fucks me up so bad. We get plenty between John and Dave, and Dave and Jade, and Dave and Rose, and Rose and John, and Jade and John... But hardly anything between Rose and Jade!! This is so fucked up. We were robbed. I need to watch them hang out.

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Okay, this is less of an Unpopular Opinion, and more of an Unpopular Fact, but... Mituna doesn't just throw slurs at people. That's one of the things people jump to when they're talking about Defanging Mituna- they always say something about how he "calls people slurs every two seconds". He literally doesn't. That is legitimately not a thing he does. If you heard that before and believed it, you were literally lied to. That is straight up demonstrably not true.

Like, if you're trying to think of something Mituna does every two seconds unprompted, it's either sex jokes or apologizing. Slurs aren't a thing he just slings around casually. He said a grand total of one slur... To Meenah... And it's a fake troll slur. And then we get it defined to us... Aaaand it's the troll equivalent to "Cracker". That's it. That's the crime he's committed- calling someone a word that is immediately after defined to us as "Someone who is at the top of and benefits from the furthering of the oppressive Fuchsia-Down power structure, and the Lowbloods that help enforce it." That's the slur he used. That's what made people start declaring that "he would totally say the N Word" with full and complete confidence. Absolutely ridiculous. He's called no one else any kind of genuine slur. He just called Meenah a Wader once, and then she and Kankri got upset about it, because they are both, by definition, Waders.

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Leijon Hot Take Party Pack: If you think Nepeta shipping her friends together is fine, or even adorable, but then sneer at or get grossed out by Meulin doing the same thing, you're a hypocrite. I don't care if you say "Meulin's writing Friend Fic, though, that's weird!!" the problem with Shipping Your Friends and Writing Romantic Fanfiction Of Your Friends is at the same root.

The problem with these things isn't the presence of writing, it's the presence of, you know, shipping your friends? If you're fine with Nepeta doing it, you've gotta be fine with Meulin doing it. Be fine with both or neither. It's the same damn thing. I'm pretty sure both friend groups are fine with it, too, so it's not like this is a boundaries issue or anything. Both or neither. Pick one.

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Observation: I do think it's cool how Jane and Jake are related and have similarly opposing relationships with their gender. Jake's oft presented with Feminine themes and imagery, and Jane with Masculine themes and imagery. Very cool. Wish more people made that correlation.

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Okay, that's all for now!! Thank you for reading, if you did. Have a nice rest of your day. :)

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theboytatu · 23 days

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Omg I’m so happy you answered the Exo close ask because it is one of my FAVORITE topics!! This is ofc not to discredit your opinion at ALL I just like ranting about this. As someone who was a huge exo fan from like their predebut days to 2018 and then kinda left it behind- it has been crazy to see the dynamics change. ESPECIALLY following Yixing’s increased distance from the group ( I don’t think he’s in Exo but the dynamics definitely changed once he started to distance himself) in the early days I would definitely have said suho-Lay-Xiumin were the closest. Also Lay and Chen were well known for being absolute best friends, but that friendship actually seemed to fade after the others of China line left. Kai has gotten a lot closer to exo over the years imho. He was notorious predebut for not really getting along with exo outside of lay, which continuted sometime into debut. He’s always been interesting tho because out of everyone in exo he definitely gives the vibes that he’s not as dependent on the group and values his friendships outside of Exo. He is also the only member who Yixing has mentioned seeing in the past few years, and he even said on a reality show a few months ago that he speaks to Kai most frequently. Which is interesting considering they didn’t interact much during his last “active” years with the group. Kyungsoo and Baekhyun have DEFINITELY gotten closer over the years and it’s honestly been great to see. I would actually say Sehun and Kai have drifted apart over the years, and used to be closer back when they were lumped together all the time as the maknaes. Another notable pairing from the olden days is sehun and jongdae, which is interesting in today’s context. But I 100% agree that all of Exo has passed coworkers a while ago and that they are all friends!

Baekhyun being “Exo” is so true. He really has found a way to work himself into the hearts of everyone in that group though sheer persistence. CBX being incredibly close is so surprise. And neither is the former exo-m boys (jongdae and minseok) being close. I think all of your opinions are 100% correct I just wanted to talk about how the groups dynamics used to be back in the day lol since I was such a huge fan!

heyyyy tysm it's interesting to hear other povs about it - specially since you were here since the beginning lmaooo oh how i wish i could have been part of the fandom back then. i can't imagine how much everything has changed

very interesting to hear the lay side of the story! the kai thing is also a surprise to me cause I always felt the only thing they had in common back in the day was being the dancers of the group. just the other day i was talking to a friend about how to me the dynamic between ot8 and lay is like. seeing an old friend from high school you still have a lot of love for but if you met them for coffee it would definitely be weird and you'd find you actually don't have much to talk about at all. lol

#asks #exo

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twilightguardian · 1 year

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Lilith Fairen, Canonseeker, Dishonest Discourse and Fixing RWBY

Preamble

I'm going to preface this by saying I'm not directly part of the RWBY community. You could say I'm a genuine 'hater', or whatever, and that's fine. I'd be considered a legitimate one; though I'll disagree with you about what constitutes hate, as I'll discuss below. Had it been my choice, I'd have only ever interacted with RWBY after a friend showed me the first two volumes and I, an animation student and aspiring novelist, disliked it. I moved on with my life. But circumstances led me to seeking out critical content that soon led me into the Tundra Discord server where I eventually met my boyfriend. I don't interact with RWBY spaces because I don't (didn't?) consider myself a fan, but I do have a morbid fascination with it and all the issues I have with it and how frequent issues crop up. The only time I've ever interacted with broader RWBY fandom directly was when discussing Fixing RWBY on reddit (and that one time where I commented when someone compared RWBY to Digimon Adventure 02. But Digimon is my fandom so I commented as part of my space).

I have had many discussions, mostly negative, but also positive about the show itself and while I never cared to watch further in, I eventually watched V3, and V6-8. V4-5 were skipped due to a migraine one week and group watch party exhaustion the next, respectively, but reviews and criticism videos allowed me to know what goes on in them.

Note that I enjoy critical content as a creative myself, and dabbling in critical content is important for someone learning how to write and create. It's just as important to know why something does not work from a critical perspective to understand why other elements do work while also keeping in mind there is a level of subjectivity. Someone is always going to disagree with you. I lurk the r/RWBYcritics for critical discourse, and occasionally r/RWBY, though the actual discourse there is fewer and far between by comparison, and unless I come across someone mentioning Digimon or FRWBY, I don't comment because I feel it's not my place.

So as you can see, I've been on the outside looking in at aspects of this community and considering where my interests are focused, (Fixing RWBY being an interest) found myself overlooking a clusterfuck of nonsense.

The concept of "Hatedom/HTDM"

I'm old guard. Old fandoms and old engagement from a time when the internet was a wild west and niche anime communities were tiny. The days of geocities and fan shrines and webrings. Never in my life have I come across a fandom that shunned a big chunk of itself, gatekeeping being part of the community and saying that aspect of the fandom wasn't valid. Perhaps I was lucky in that regard, but considering I dabbled in quite a few communities, I doubt it. Digimon Adventure has been around since 1999 and there were a lot of hot-button topics that split the fandom back then. More than 20 years later, you tread these old, rusted buttons and under your feet a sinkhole will open with a warm, bubbling lava plume of strong opinions will greet you as you wake the sleeping beast. But not once was there any sniff of a concept that someone wasn't a 'true' fan because of their opinions and outlooks on the show, and that is just a single example of many.

So to see the RWBY community simmering in barely contained venom over the "critics" is certainly an unwelcome sight to behold, and one that has alarming implications. There has been elements of gatekeeping in all fandoms, sure, but this feels on a new level. To think that it would get so bad that it was even considered to ban an entire related reddit group for having critical opinions is frankly shameful, and yes, I was around for that. Anyone who thought that was correct should feel embarrassed.

This idea that having a negative opinion equals a hateful person is patently absurd. It has been stated time and again that having a negative opinion on something doesn't mean you hate it. There are many different types of people in the world, with different mindsets and different ways of engaging with the things that they enjoy or engage with. Some people do art or fanfiction. Others dissect or criticize. It can be a combination of these things and whether or not the criticism is positive or negative does not negate the passion behind the words. Labelling someone who criticizes the show, even if that is all that they do, a 'hater' or part of the HTDM, comes across as punishment for engaging in fandom in a way you don't approve.

The internet as a whole, and fandom space, doesn't just belong to you and people who think like you. It belongs to everyone who has passion enough to engage with the media they've consumed and there are plenty of options available for those who don't wish to engage with certain methods of fandom discourse and immersion. To dictate who can and cannot participate in the fandom and who is worthy of hate and derision for being an "other" or "outsider" is frankly disgusting. If you think that someone cannot engage in "your" space because you don't like what they have to say, get over yourself and for once in your life, look past your own petulant selfishness. Seriously, we got taught to share space in preschool.

Criticism As Art, Engagement, Growth and Study

Criticism is an invaluable tool in creative spaces, both positive and negative, and there seems to be a growing idea of what constitutes valid criticism or not as simply whether or not it is positive and the thought of that is quite disturbing. You'd think that I wouldn't have to talk about this, but there are quite a number of people who don't fully understand there is more to criticism than being nice and gentle - which can do more harm than good, by the way.

There can be an art to criticism, and there is no one way to criticize something as being the ultimate 'correct' way. Just like there are different art styles, brush stroke techniques, chord progressions, building methods, etc, there are different styles of critique. It's up to the personality of the individual what form that critique manifests and there is no right or wrong way to critique like there is no right or wrong way to paint a painting. But there is something to be said about whether or not the messages you're trying to get across are being understood properly; whether the critiques are in good faith and can be understood to correspond accurately to the work in question, and with that in mind, we can gauge whether or not the criticism is good.

Critique and criticism, whether good or bad, can open up someone to a piece of media they may never have seen or heard before. It is then that they can decide for themselves, as individuals with their own minds and relative free will, whether or not they want to further participate in the consumption of the media being criticized. To get defensive over the idea that negative criticism exists because it influences the sheeple, dimwitted and easily swayed as they may be, is insulting to the intelligence of others, Eren. Individual people can look at a criticism of a work and decide for themselves whether or not the work is something that does not interest them, or is something to look into for themselves and decide whether or not they personally like or dislike it.

On the more creative side, criticism, even - and I'd say especially - negative criticism, is an essential tool to help the growth of the artist. It helps you grow and learn the many mistakes and errors one can have in a piece of media and teach someone to grow past and learn to avoid those pitfalls.

When it comes to criticizing a piece of media like RWBY, some individuals within the RWBY community view the criticism not only as an attack on the quality of the work, but harassment of the writers themselves. This is patently absurd for the simple fact that these men (and woman) are professional writers and criticism goes part and parcel with the job. To show yourself as a professional in the industry you'd want to put your best foot forward, show that you have the skills to write, and be humble enough to take criticism when given and seriously reevaluate your work, no matter how difficult it might be. The concept of 'kill your darlings' applies to beloved concepts and scenes in a story that, while loved, might hinder the story you want to tell. When you are putting something out there, even as a job, the goal should first and foremost be to entertain the audience, and to do that, strive to create the best version of your work that you can. Passion for what you do is such a hard thing to describe, but most can see it when it's there and can point to when it's not.

I don't doubt there are a couple of individuals that do legitimately harass the writers and others directly. We've seen that with other franchises, and individuals like that can be in more than one fandom. But I specify individuals because there is a trend to lump everyone that some people (like Lilith Fairen and Canonseeker) dislike and disagree with as one and the same, as though the 'critics' are a hive mind, and that everyone is connected to every other critic and knows what they do or say.

But dissent allows an honest writer or artist to grow from where they are, a community who strive to help others to make everything better so that the media we consume is better and the artist will be more satisfied and fulfilled. That is the goal. That is what critics strive for, because they can have as much passion for that work as the artist, if not directly for that work itself, then for the desire to see a fellow creative flourish.

Canonseeker's Logical Fallacies

Eren is someone that I consider to be fairly innocent in intent. At least I don't consider him to be outright malicious, unlike Lilith, but the results of his actions in trying to rectify what he considers to be a toxic situation is in fact toxic in and of itself. Eren is someone who views the situation of the critics as being outright harmful, as though fans voicing their dissent is bullying. Fans have no power and very little means to influence the media they're passionate about.

Therefore, when someone criticizes a work, the main audience for their criticisms are other fans, people whom they can engage with and share in their frustrations and worries. There is always a chance that the writer or some creative can see their complaints, but it is a low chance, and often little in the ways of rectifying the situation other than in the future. When Eren criticizes the 'critics' he attacks their character rather than the ideas they present. When called out on it, he never acknowledges his own faults, instead doing a what-aboutism to deflect from himself.

Just because other people are assholes doesn't mean you aren't also a problem. And considering the fact that we can see you being a problem right now, and you haven't named individual people for us to also slap on the wrist, we focus on you as a problem community member. Critics attack ideas and competency, not the writers as individual people (for the most part. If the situation calls for it, then how the writers are seen in the public eye becomes fair game for scrutiny).

He puts Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross on pedestals, saying that they created RWBY. They did not. Monty is the sole creator and he picked them to fill in the blanks between his fight scenes. Personally I don't envy that situation based on what I've heard and I feel sympathy for that. But being 'hand picked' by Monty doesn't mean anything other than the fact that he was personal friends with these men. That doesn't speak to their skills as writers, as the romantic, lofty wording would suggest, and it doesn't mean anything beyond they happened to be available to do the job. Monty wanted to work with friends, that's all. Rooster Teeth runs on nepotism. Fact of the matter is, RWBY is now owned by a corporation, not an individual person any longer and when owned by a corporation, can be used and abused for whatever the corporations needs. If fans think that corporation shouldn't have the product any longer, then that's their opinion that they are allowed to hold. When they criticize RWBY for being the mess they think it is, they're criticizing Rooster Teeth as a company, its practices, and its willingness to allow or even encourage incompetence within the production through various means, some more terrible than others.

Eren's understanding of Death of the Author is tenuous at best and nonexistent at worst. Barring people's misunderstanding of the concept in question aside... The concept that once a work of media exists out in the public, it is out of the control of the owner how their work gets interpreted is something that Eren struggles with. An author or creator can do their best to convey their ideas to their audience as best as possible, but that doesn't guarantee that someone will see it in that exact way. Whether a member of the audience understands what the author is trying to convey is up to the individual person, and their understanding or lack of understanding is valid to their own experiences. Of course there are dishonest ways of interpreting a piece of work, such as misdiagnosing a theme of a work (especially when the theme is stated) and then saying its bad for poorly handling that theme. The themes should be looked at on their own and judged how well they're done.

Anything else that I could say about the man has already been talked about in a different document by SYTOkun, barely anything of which I am interested in talking about, as I'm currently more interested in the misunderstandings and mistakes that lead to someone who wants positivity in a fandom to become a poster child for anti-positivity.

Lilith Fairen's Dishonest Motives

Lilith is such a curious person, and I've tried to understand her mentality and see where she's coming from and where the misunderstanding starts. The main issue seems to be that she came into the fandom with dishonest motives from the start and has admitted to it. Her motivation for coming into the RWBY community was strictly to bully people whom she had ideological issues with, or people she deemed 'critics'. She was mocking people while having never watched the show herself, something that many people pointed out. She's claimed to have since watched RWBY and still finds no issue with it. I have no reason to disbelieve her and thus will not accuse her of still having never watched the show. But considering her starting point, either likes it more for ideological reasons or likes it to spite the haters. While her enjoyment of RWBY may be genuine, due to this history, it's very difficult for me to see her desire for this show as anything but sociologically political.

Lilith herself is a very caustic individual with a large chip on her shoulder. She has a preference for female-led stories, and ones that don't require the girls/women to have motivations surrounding men. While I think there's nothing wrong with that conceptually, it becomes a problem when viewing certain stories one has little preference for as problematic for not fitting into what she personally prefers. For the most part, women and girls are more motivated by social aspects of life, whether it be friendships or romance, and that's not inherently a bad thing, but Lilith has some issue with it due to said aforementioned chip labelled 'misogyny'.

She throws accusations of misogyny around like it's candy going out of style. Rarely does she back up her accusations with any factual evidence, randomly accusing this, that or the other of being misogynistic as though one should just accept or already knows it as fact when in reality is quite odd. Guns, for example, are considered masculine representations in her eyes, and not gender neutral items that can be used by either gender, and thus unsuitable weapons for magical girls, like in Madoka Magica, to use.

I've never seen Madoka. But I don't think I have to in order to see how silly this concept is. Girls can like guns and that doesn't make them less girly. I've never heard of guns as being a gendered item.

While I also don't necessarily disagree there's issues in anime and female representation, tropes and cliches can be overdone and become outright tired and boring, I believe Lilith takes it a step too far when she starts going after other people for their acceptance or ambivalence toward the things she's personally not a fan of. In attacking something like Madoka or other so-called 'deconstruction' anime, she infantilizes female characters by saying they shouldn't be subject to the same challenges and difficulties male characters often are, because they're women. She also claims anime shows girls as hysterical and overly emotional. As though teenagers - which most anime feature - is a foreign concept to her. Also stuff often gets turned up for drama. It's called fiction and literally all media around the world does this.

She's also a negative, salty, bitter person in general despite her preferences for happy, saccharine and light-hearted stories. It makes me wonder if she seeks out these fluffy tales because she has such a dark mentality that she desperately wants to get away from, but has the delusion that what she likes isn't respected for what it is, or liked. As though Sailor Moon or Pretty Cure aren't incredibly large, successful franchises in Japan. As though Sailor Moon isn't still beloved in the west. People in different countries can have different tastes and expectations outside of the niches of anime lovers who already understand and cherish these properties. That doesn't make them disrespected. Madoka was enjoyed by (some) people who had no concept of magical girls outside of cursory knowledge of watching Sailor Moon as kids and praised it as being the best despite likely never having watched before or since any magical girl anime. And these people are the ones she hates, but conflates all Madoka fans as these individuals.

Because of her perceived notion that magical girls are disrespected and dismissed due to misogyny, her attitude toward her original stories can also be quite cynical at times. Maybe if she took a step out of her self-loathing and victim mentality she would realize that a prospective reader seeing something like this on her blog might be a turn-off.

It's not like there are other factors that contribute to your story's relative obscurity like poor marketing on your part or the fact that superhero novels (which magical girls count as) in general are not very popular. Yes, even ones that feature male leads. You find more success with more visual mediums like comic books, movies and television. Girl. From one author to another... There's more to putting your work out there than simply writing and publishing it.

I'll get to Glints Saga another day, but from a cursory glance (at an old version, mind you) I can already tell that if you had gone to a writing meetup and got the story critiqued and they found little issue with it... you should find a better critique group because they were seriously doing you a disservice.

Gotta wonder if Faye said Monara's name often enough she'd eventually remember it. There's also a lot more wrong here, dialogue-wise and prose-wise. But that's more for a comparison between the old and new version if this section had been cleaned up.

But her bad attitude doesn't end there. She also has spite for anyone else that seems to have more success than her that she knows is 'touchable'. Instead of looking at a piece of inspirational messages by a writer trying to encourage others to keep going, she dismisses the critique because they're popular and it's so easy for them. Because it's not like an artist or writer could be popular because they've worked hard for it and were able to market themselves effectively in order to gain an audience and conduct themselves in a manner that wouldn't turn prospective fans away. No, it's just that they only got lucky. That somehow makes their altruistic encouragement meaningless.

Also notice how she never actually engages in arguments when people call her out on anything. Because she either knows she's full of crap or she wants to appear like a tough beotch on the internet and hide the fact that she has no counter argument and treats childishly typing out her laughter like some cartoon buttmonkey is a rebuttal instead of some obvious attempt at trying to hide her discomfort.

You know, completely missing the point of the original post that said if you create for the main purpose of getting recognition and acknowledgment, then you'll soon hate your writing and become miserable when your expectations aren't met. So the advice was to create regardless of whether or not you get any attention because you love to write, not because you feel owed anything for writing. But if she did that then she'd actually feel good about herself and her work and not bitterly lash out at everything and everyone. It's enough to make one wonder if part of the reason why she goes after critics is because she's jealous many of them do get attention and engagement and the main thing she manages to attract is people calling her out for her shitty behaviour.

By the way, both Lilith and Eren think that people going to their public blogs, where they post things that other people can see is somehow stalking. On a website where the whole point is that your posts will likely travel, especially if you talk about a franchise (even if you don't tag). Or that people responding to them at all is somehow stalking. They want to be able to say any kind of vile garbage about other fans they don't like and not have to face any repercussions for it.

One final thing because I know it's going to bug me...

"Critics" do not compare autistic people to robots. We compare ourselves to robots because when they aren't written to just be humans straight up are neurodivergent. They do not think like neurotypical people and in some ways even like humans do. That is the definition of neurodivergence - thinking and processing in a way that is outside the norm. Allistic people accept this and also headcanon many robots the same way in order to be inclusive. Lilith, if you aren't going to properly understand why people say things in relation to mental health and neurodivergence just stay out of it entirely.

Toxicity of FNDM, RWDE and Anti-RWDE

Here's where I'm going to get a little controversial, because members of all sides have done shitty things. Anti-RWDE is obvious, as they're just a salt tag dedicated to complaining about people who have negative opinions because how dare. But even the side I "agree" with more, I think have said some ridiculous and toxic things. Never mind anons here.

Accusations of "fascist", "white supremacist", "racist", "terf", "transphobic", "homophobic", "sexist", "ableist", basically anything under the sun that is a pejorative you can think of it was probably spewed out of the fingers of some member of RWDE or FNDM/Anti like a child throwing insults on the playground.

You have passions and societal issues that you want to address, and that's perfectly fine and understandable. But to accuse someone of being any flavour of 'ist' or 'phobe' over disagreements on whether a character in a cartoon does this action or interacts with that character in such and such a way muddies the waters, dilutes the impact the word has and even makes it easier for people to casually dismiss accusations and even real life and serious instances of these things due to how low the bar has been set for being labelled as such. You aren't engaging honestly anymore, you're trying to shut someone down by calling them names. Attacking someone or a work for miniscule things they do or say that you interpret as being bad without considering that there might in fact be a different reason why they said that thing is dishonest and harmful.

Hey Lilith, you wanna, maybe, define what an alt-righter is to you? Or are you just going to call out anyone who is right-of-far-left an "alt-righter" so that you can feel good and justified for shitting on someone else for literally no reason other than you had a temper tantrum at the concept that someone is unsatisfied with a cartoon? It's not like you have any evidence that Celtic is an alt-righter or anything you just made that shit up.

I've seen both sides do this, and I'm not calling out specific individuals because I've seen many act this way.

There are even certain people within the fandom who say it's your fault that you're upset with the show because you dared to have expectations that the show didn't meet. As though this is somehow a gotcha, that it's somehow wrong of you to have desires to see something you think is being presented in the show, only for it to fall flat with something you don't think is good in its place. You're a bad person for having an opinion that isn't positive about the cartoon. The show has either somehow done the impossible and achieved perfection or there is no amount of problems with the writing or anything else that can justify you expressing your opinion about it. It's best for you to shut your mouth because it personally inconveniences them.

It's gotten to the point where it's almost impossible to have certain discussions without devolving into a slobbering screaming match, because even the characters aren't saved from the pejoratives and some even attach characters and liking certain characters to certain mentalities and mindsets. If you dare like the wrong character you will be seen as x toxic thing. If you want to discuss a certain character you'll be dismissed as y type of toxic person. You also better watch how you dress your characters in redesigns or else you're z type of bad people because somewhere out there someone may or may not make a connection to a real life group you may or may not have taken a couple of design elements from and that is evil because there are 100728 different negative ways you can portray a marginalized group to the point that it would probably be better to forget those groups exist at all and only keep your fantasy series based on the standard big cultures and that's somehow more progressive despite also being a problem. Always watch your step. Always be ready to be seen as a monster, or fight a monster. Absolute lunacy.

On top of that, it makes you no better than the people you criticize. How hypocritical to call someone out for shitty behaviour, complaining about toxicity in the fandom and turn around and do shitty behaviour yourself.

Don't think I didn't notice when Judgmental Critter calls out Lilith for calling her misogynist for criticizing RWBY, saying that she just hates women, then turns around and casually accuses people who criticize High Guardian Spice (or some things about RWBY) for the exact same thing with no basis. I love Critter's sass, opinions, views and her work in general, become one of my favourite youtubers even. I can't wait for when my boyfriend shows me Madoka so I can watch her magical girl series and other videos. But I don't fail to notice when she blanket statements groups of people because she doesn't/won't understand their arguments.

Honestly there are many examples like this but I wanted to highlight an example from each "side" to emphasize my point and to show that I'm not just pointing to any particular side as being the problematic one. I think the worst example of toxicity has to be in the tags of this one post I found on tumblr ranting about hbomberguy's video. It's actually disturbing.

I was so flabbergasted by the idea that someone could actually say this, not because they disliked what was said, but because a video that didn't praise RWBY existed at all.

Backtracking a little, I wanted to talk about how quick people are to make connections and accuse others in the fandom of being something terrible.

We are pattern-seeking creatures and our pattern recognition is exceptional. But it also produces false positives in the pareidolia effect, the phenomenon where you see things that aren't actually there. The most benign and silly of the pareidolia effect is 'faces in places' and likewise, you can see patterns of behaviour, thought processes and ideologies in conversations out of context to the wider behaviour of the person. This is why I'd studied up on Lilith and Eren before writing this to make sure that there was a noticeable, repeated pattern of behaviour before writing all of this up. Lilith, Eren, and their ilk also suffer from this when it comes to criticism of rewrites that they have particular issues with, and I'll talk more about this in the next section.

There's an example of a man whom I'd had an argument with in a server I moderate for. I hadn't meant to get into an argument with him, more genuinely wanting to get his thoughts on a rewrite-heavy AU-turned-original-story idea of my own, as someone who liked RWBY. I thought I could have a fun, creative conversation, getting insight into how I did handling the characters in an AU setting and what I could do to expand on my interpretations. I find the idea of setting characters in different scenarios while still maintaining their personalities a fun exercise. Instead I was met with defensive vitriol.

I wanted the focus to be friendship between the girls rather than a mishmash of family and romance, which he hated. When asked why, it was because I said I didn't like feeling as though I was being lied to with the premise of the story, which was meant to be about four girls who became friends, and I felt it personally didn't satisfy me in that department. Then we got off on a long argument about lying to your audience, which eventually revealed a sort of sad element to the guy that I was talking to: that basically he felt that he had no right to be upset over anything that happened to him. If he was lied to, he shouldn't be upset at it. Not that he didn't want to be upset, but that he felt he couldn't, and eventually admitted to a deeper underlying issue with self confidence and worth he struggled with that seemed to manifest in being upset when anyone voiced dissenting and negative opinions.

While I think looking on the bright side is all well and good, there's a limit my dude, and trying to explain to him why I felt being lied to was a negative thing that I had the right to be unhappy about was such a foreign concept to him due to not feeling like he should ever be upset when people treat him poorly. Then he accused me of disliking him for liking a show I disliked. The whole exchange left me spiraling

But that interaction was telling, and while I can't apply that to all the members of FNDM who feel threatened by criticism and dissent, eyes can be opened about possibilities into the reasons why they find critical engagement so offensive. On some level, at least for some, it might feel like they get personally attacked because the show they love is picked apart, and in turn, picking them apart. RWBY is fundamental to who they are as people, and if you attack it in any way, you are threatening them, their worth and self-esteem.

What is 'Hate'?

Hate is a strong word, and one that, like all the above pejoratives, is used far too liberally. It's a strong negative emotion of loathing and disgust, and if kept too long can cause negative effects on one's mind and body. It takes some amount of derangement, I feel, to legitimately hate something passionately for a long period of time. Hate is usually such a strong emotion that it is temporary and fades quickly.

There were a lot of people who hated Twilight when it first came out. Those people quickly faded away after their rage subsided and the main people who stuck around on the Twilight 'hate train' were people who disliked it, but thought it was fun to mock rather than outright hate. It was silly, after all! Who wouldn't love making fun of something ridiculous and harmful and boring and dumb. Many critics of Twilight even pointed out aspects of what they liked in the book series, namely the side characters of the latter books. The vampires and werewolves helping the Cullens and the inter-species political struggles were more fascinating and interesting than the teen melodrama forced love triangle going on between Bella, Edward and Jacob. There were many more still who enjoyed Twilight knowing full well how trash it was, acknowledging it for its camp and bad writing but enjoying it for being bad.

Twilight is still criticized to this day, broken down and dissected to see what makes it tick, and why it ended up being as bad as it was. But it's not for hate for the most part, though there is dislike. But mostly if you're going to deep dive, pick apart or rewrite beyond an anger-filled review, that takes a certain level of passion for what you're doing. You see the good inside it and want it to be better. If you're going off youtuber's opinions you do have to be mindful that some of them play up their emotions for entertainment. Youtubers are entertainers, after all, and while those feelings might be genuine, there will be elements of hamming it up. Even positive youtubers do this and there's nothing wrong with that.

It's the same with RWBY and a lot of RWBY criticism. Most people who genuinely hate the show have moved on to bigger and better things. Those who stuck around either do so because they genuinely love it, or hope that it will get better, or at the very least need to see it to the end because it's been a part of their lives for so long.

Hate, ultimately, is a negative experience that can't birth anything creative. Hate does nothing but tear, break down and destroy. It's tearing down someone else directly to fill a void, or to make yourself feel better.

Hate, ultimately, is what many in the Anti-RWDE does to the part of the FNDM they don't like.

Fixing RWBY

Now comes the lengthy part of my post! Fixing RWBY or FRWBY is a project started by Raymond McNeil, as most people likely know, and started as a passion project due to his love for RWBY and his dissatisfaction with elements of how RWBY has been handled. If anyone says that he hates the show, you know that it's in bad faith and they haven't watched his content. He's said multiple times how much he loves the show, he's just frustrated it doesn't live up to the potential he thinks it has.

This section is voicing my rebuttals to larger criticisms of the show by people who admit they don't properly watch and engage with the project and purposefully look for things to pick apart, regardless of if it's true. While there are legitimate criticisms to be had about the project, they are harder to come by as they get drowned out by a flooding of this low brow shit flinging.

Some people think being dissatisfied is wrong, as I've previously mentioned

They, for some reason, think that having expectations for a show is invalid. I've already discussed how terrible that mindset is. But the main recurring criticisms of Fixing RWBY are mainly perpetuated by Eren and Lilith and a handful of their friends, which get spread around to others who think like them. We know Lilith is dishonest because she, by her own admission, skims his content and doesn't properly evaluate it, looking for things to take out of context or at face value to shit on. EngineGear at least has the decency to honestly summarize without comment. So let's go through some of their criticisms, shall we?

Special mention goes out to EngineGear, who had been one of the people throwing around the idea that Raymond kept Fixing RWBY behind a paywall simply because, as a youtuber, he had his discord as a patreon reward. When I calmly explained why his discord had nothing to do with FRWBY, and how his criticism cannot be put against Raymond without also demonizing non-critic youtubers and other artists who get paid for their fan content, he deleted the reddit post from his little saltmine, r/RWBYCynics. I appreciate his honesty in recognizing his mistake and deleting the post.

We're certainly off to a start here. The implication of this post is implying that Celtic Phoenix, and to a larger part his volunteer team - the Sketchy Huntsman - are racist.

Okay, so, there is practically no information about Oscar in terms of background or creation information to confirm anything other than what fairy tale character they could graft onto him. Who knows, there might be some obscure podcast or interview or tweet or however many different methods the writers have used to supplement their poor writing skills. I'm not about to go on a wild goose chase for something that might not even exist. His concept art says he has sunburnt skin. That makes sense, he's a farmer. He's out in the sun all day. So it stands to reason he has a farmer's tan. Even if he doesn't, the guy has my skin tone and I'm not what you would call non-European in origin.

Let's nevermind for a moment that this is incredibly American-centric thinking. This is an ancient relic of the past where we divided ourselves up into Reds, Whites, Blacks, and Yellows (... huh. I... didn't mean to sort them like that;; ) and sometimes Browns. It still has its uses in the modern day, and of course there is just acknowledgment of visual differences, but it should also be acknowledged that the terms are arbitrary descriptors of shades of the same colour (brown). All humans regardless of how much melanin is in your skin, is a shade of brown. Skin can have an underside of red, blue, green, yellow and determine whether their skin looks cold or warm. Europeans can naturally get pretty dark, being born with natural olive skin and there are non-Europeans who can be born with light skin. Europeans (or descent) can run between Type I-IV and non-Europeans can range from Type III-VI. What's more, we don't know anything about the migratory history of Remnant or whether skin types are random like faunus apparently are.

The main RWBY characters have ridiculously translucent, even glowing skin lighter than Type I that no actual human being would have. Blake and Weiss are beyond even anime pale, so someone looks at a character who has realistically coloured 'white' skin and all of a sudden they're poc. There's no problems with headcanoning that. But that's what it is. Your headcanon. And you're accusing Raymond of racism for getting rid of a character you headcanon as being poc. The same goes for Lionheart, who looks to have an (albeit sickly) ashy grey skin tone. Not dark enough to definitively be poc. It's a headcanon that you can choose to have, but should not weaponize to vilify someone you disagree with.

This is gonna be a general onsen post, one that is going to have some overlap with the faunus heat cycles section below. Mistral is meant to have vague connections to Asian culture. Onsen, or bathhouses/hot springs, are a very important part of Asian culture. Not only that, but they were and are also important to the Ancient Greeks, Ancient Romans, Turkish, and many other societies as places of community, healing and relaxation.

From a meta standpoint, an onsen episode, like a beach episode, is easy on the overworked animators to create, and thus become a staple of anime. But they aren't used purely for fanservice.

Fruits Basket used the onsen episode as another way for Momiji to pay back Tohru for the Valentines chocolates, further establishing his bond with her, for the characters in general to bond, another way for Tohru to show how much she thinks of her mother in everything that she does, and as foreshadowing to Ritsu's arrival by meeting his mother, who owned the facility. Ritsu's mother is one of the few zodiac parents who has a good relationship with their child and was able to give Tohru some insight into the family. Plus, another moment of Yuki showing his affection for Tohru and growing desires to see her as happy as she made him.

Outlaw Star's onsen episode is very raunchy to the point where American syndication cut the episode entirely from television. And because of that the American audiences missed out on an incredibly important plot detail. The episode was heavy in many establishing things, generally being wacky, but also an important, unskippable element to the story.

Blue Seed is an anime that I never got to watch, though my old video store had the sequel OVA Blue Seed 2, which featured three episodes. One of those episodes featured an onsen, and a bomb rigged to explode once the water level got too high or low or the timer ran out. It was a thrilling episode featuring a tense plot and showed the cultural differences between the characters and their one (American) gaijin friend.

There are other examples of onsen episodes in anime that aren't just for fanservice, so to suggest that they only exist in this way is absurd. The female members of the Sketchy Huntsmen, particularly the Asian members advocated hard for this scene, practically twisting Raymond's arm to put it in because it was thematically important, and culturally, for the character moments the cast (especially Weiss and Yang) would go through. By ignoring all of the context to what went on in this scene to say it was purely for Raymond to be gross is to wave away the cultural significance of onsen to Asian culture as being reduced to nothing more than stripteases and ignore when characters do have important moments between one another.

Roman also didn't say anything about Weiss being a man. He said she was flat-chested. He thought Ren was a woman because he was beautiful and had a gentle, feminine face and thin physique and justified it by talking about how women are varied. The joke is making fun of Roman for being an unobservant ass, not at Ren for being feminine and certainly not at Weiss. How badly did you not pay attention to this scene to get so offended that you had to make it about you and your expectation to be slighted. Again, pareidolia. Trans people, rest easy. Not every joke involving gender and being seen as the opposite gender is about you specifically or meant to slight you specifically. And I mean this genuinely. If you think that it is, kindly take a chill pill and reduce your ego before you hurt yourself. Your blood pressure will thank you.

Does this screenshot of a Rated T game upset you?

Faunus heat cycles were treated more or less the same as the onsen scene. Subverting the expectation that this sexual concept can only be used for cheap hentai games and anime. Realistically any trope or concept can be used in a more serious story setting, including sexual concepts like heat cycles. There’s no rules that just because something is used often as one thing that it cannot be used serve a different purpose. That’s the beauty of writing. In this case, Raymond used the heat cycles as one of many minuscule differences between the species to further exacerbate racial tensions and drive xenophobia, which would in turn affect the world on a global scale. Wow that kinda sounds like stuff that happens in real life! What a concept!

To those of you weirdos that think heat cycles are gross still, chew on this: Real life humans have evolved the ability to have sex and get pregnant 365 days of the year. If you think about it, our heat cycles never turn off. And the reason why we have periods is presumed to make sure that if we do get pregnant at any time we can attempt to abort a dead foetus before it potentially goes septic and kills us. Fascinating stuff, but that’s not all. Humans might actually have a heat cycle on top of that after all. There are days during the reproductive cycle where women are more receptive to the idea of sex, and finds normally unpleasant bodily odours more pleasant and men are attracted to the odours of women during this time.

Basically this means that women have periods of subtle extra heat that make them more receptive to sex on top of the fact that humans are basically horny all the time. This is something that is a biological fact within human beings and it can influence society of a variety of ways in the wider context of the world, so why is it so far-fetched and disgusting that a faunus would have a more non-primate mammalian estrus?

Now this is a new one. Ilia did turn away from her destructive spiral. Just like in real life that doesn't mean you get off scot free. She got a reduced sentence and some privileges for her help. She’s being rewarded by getting to go out and have fun at the festival and she said she’d rather be in the (presumably) solitude of a jail cell than have to deal with Sun (and his loud, boisterous energy). What’s offensive about that? Also hmm... 3 poc faunus. Well, faunus are all Remnant's version of poc so you can't mean them specifically do you mean... these three?

Those two on the right are looking pretty damn pale to be poc could it be that you're lying, Eren? And maybe that even if it weren't the case it wouldn't matter because it's a legitimate police technique at the very least seen in procedurals on television and are used regardless of the suspects' skin colour? You trying to slither the idea that Raymond is racist because he dares to have something at all happen to a non-white character is rather slimy.

A lot to go over here, so let's get started shall we? First of all, it absolutely tickles me that changing Shay D. Mann into Shiloh would cause Eren to go into such a big tizzy. Like, it's such a small thing and yet it's one of the main complaints they had about V5, which in my opinion means that Raymond was doing something right. Apparently upgrading a character from a tertiary to a secondary position if there's a need for it is blasphemy.

Okay, so let's go over the concept of character hierarchies. Primary Characters (which there is 8), secondary characters (which there are at least 15), and tertiary characters, which outnumber the stars. Honestly these could be broken down further into Main Characters (Ruby, Weiss, Jaune, etc), Primary characters (Nora, Qrow, Oscar, etc), Secondary characters (Raven, Ironwood, Ace-Ops, etc), Tertiary characters (Whitely, Willow, etc) and then Quaternary characters (Henry Marigold, Dust Shop Guy, Background people).

A quaternary character being upgraded to a tertiary character... what a terrible concept. I also don't understand this predilection for playing up the severity of Shay's actions, acting as though he's straight up assaulted her. He was drunk and tried to flirt. When she ignored it, he tried touching her hair. I've had a more eventful night in real life at a bar dealing with drunk guys who didn't mean any harm and one of them stuck his fingers in my mouth (I had on vampire fangs and that blew his drunk mind). He returns, bruised from his punch and worse for the wear with friends and Yang makes him lead her to camp.

He's not a good guy, obviously, and Shiloh is still not a good guy. But he's more human. He has people he cares about and his own set of morals, even if they may be looser than our protagonist's. If you don't think terrible people can't also have people they care about, I don't know what to say. You're mad because a criminal character, along with the rest of his tribe, got nuance beyond 'bandit'. I do not see the problem.

Shiloh is also not married to Raven, Eren. You do know that people can have children out of wedlock, right?

Gotta ask how Vernal was ruined in FRWBY. He says a lot of basically nothing and doesn't explain himself, acting as though his incoherent rambles are meant to be enough.

Oh yeah, Vernal was such a unique character all right with how... there she was. Existing. I'm supposed to be impressed? Ohhh. Ahhh. Her hair is very pixie cut. Such non-feminine (except it totally is Eren you silly), much discount bargain bin Yang outfit. It's not like Raven isn't literally a palette swap of Yang anyway so I don't know why you clowns complain about Lily, who has different features than both her mother and Yang while still being unique and yet sleep on this.

Raven also didn't dismiss Vernal's death in FRWBY. She refused to outwardly express her grief or accept that her poor actions got her daughter killed. That whole scene with her trying to destroy and then hide the relic was her focusing her feelings because she's not a very mature person. Sorry, that bit of character writing might be a bit subtle for those who are used to blunt-force character writing so it's understandable if you don't get it.

Now this is a weird claim. Let's look at it shall we? Zooming in for the visually impaired on Ruby's face, we indeed do see her looking at Roman and she has a very light amount of colour on her. There's also a white shine that was popular about 7 years ago with a lot of artists. You know, the artists that would put what I like to call blushies/sunburns on cheeks, shoulders, breasts and knees all had this style of redness for parts of the body that are naturally darker in places or have redness. Though with some artists the breasts were a weird one, I've always thought. It's not a style I go for in my own work, but I'm not going to care if that's what an artist likes to do.

Also most blushes, even ones by the artist herself go over the nose to differentiate between a blush and healthy cheeks.

But they claim that Roman doesn't have the blushies so the idea that this artist puts them on everything is false! So let's have a look at the Clockwork Reject.

Well, how can you tell he has no blushies when his hair is covering his face?

Could it be...?

Darker discolouration right beneath his eye that lightens up by his nose? It's almost like... a blushie hidden in shadow!

That settles it for anyone still furiously grasping at straws, desperately looking for any tiny little thing they can twist and warp into being something problematic.

Also one final point that these people are implying that Ruby is being shipped with either Roman or Ozpin. As far as I'm aware RubyxOzpin is kind of a popular ship (heck... RubyxOzpinxRoman was featured in a recent fic we read in the Tundra). It's not Rosegarden or Whiterose, but it's still fairly widespread. Why you gotta ship-shame?

So there's this idea going around that rewrites always sideline the heroines of the story (as though canon RWBY doesn't do that already). I can't speak for all rewrites, because I don't follow any except for FRWBY and I'm starting to get into Remnants. So for all I know every single other rewrite out there features Jaune or some other male character as the protagonists instead of RWBY.

Roman effectively replaces Oscar in FRWBY. A criminal who has found himself in unusual circumstances and now has to work with his former adversaries to complete a common goal.

How does this lead to Roman taking centre stage? Beats me. The fact that he... technically does things, unlike Oscar, I guess.

Now, I happen to like Oscar. I think he's a cute little muffin that wound up in a bad situation. But I also don't deny that he's been squandered as a character and as much as I've given Raymond shit for removing Oscar from his place in the plot, I won't deny that at least he's done something with the character he's put in farmboy's place.

Also Ruby being "reduced" to Roman's sidekick is very interesting phrasing by Lilith here. She tries very hard to manipulate language to give the most uncharitable interpretations as possible. The context for the scene is that the characters are being proactive in searching for leads and Roman is going to go check with his sources and connections in Mistral. Ruby goes with him to keep an eye on him.

She's his handler, not his sidekick. There's a difference.

You... ever get the feeling that Eren doesn't actually understand RWBY or it's characters?

Like... I think Ozpin did nothing wrong in V6. Jinn had no right to air out his dirty laundry like that just to show that Salem couldn't be killed. But while he may be supportive, I don't know if necessarily I would call him kind. In some aspects, sure. But Ozpin is meant to be a calculating character, striving to do what he can to hold back Salem at all costs. He is meant to be a morally grey character, not quite as good of a character as Dumbledore, but he does have that theme of leading pigs to the slaughter. Except these 'pigs' signed up for this job and know how dangerous it is unlike Harry until the end so the analogy doesn't quite work for Ozpin. (By the way, notice his contradiction there by saying Dumbledore is made morally grey by making him evil. Those are two distinct concepts, Eren. Maybe you should look up what morally grey is.) But the terrible way the characters treat him and Oscar's body afterwards makes many of us more sympathetic to him than to be against him. He's morally grey, but we don't mind it, and view him as being someone who is still ultimately good.

"They removed another poc character"

Sweetheart... Gretchen has to actually be a character. She's just a name said on the lips of a couple of characters. We don't even get to see anything of her. Summer got the same treatment, but at least she got a gravestone and characters sort of talked about how great she was, attempting to characterize her post mortem but doing it poorly. Eventually she got a cheap palette swap model. We at least were interested in Summer and who she was and how she disappeared even if we might have only cared because Ruby did and she's the main protagonist. Is anyone interested in Gretchen? And I mean truly, genuinely interested in Gretchen to the same degree that we are interested in Ruby? What about Raven? May Marigold? Even Summer? Gretchen is a fridged tool who only exists as justification for Hazel to be a relatively nice guy but still align himself with the villains. She is not, in and of herself, a character. At least with Magnus, we see the shell that Osma resides in and it hits us that this used to be a person. A person who had family who loved him and miss him and that is why Hazel is here. Do we know anything about the body in canon other than he'd once been a farmer?

The concept that an organization has to be single minded in a goal, no matter what it is, or else it is no longer that thing, is funny to me.

No, Eren. The White Fang is still a faunus rights group in FRWBY. It's just that there are people within the organization who have very strong opinions about how to go about achieving their goals and don't mind stepping over their fellows to get to that goal. That's what we call politics.

I don't even know why this is an issue when the White Fang and the racism plotline were not well done in RWBY and that is an undisputed fact that M&K admitted to. There is nothing wrong with trying to bandage that up and adding human elements to behind the scenes stuff - things that M&K themselves tried to implement but were just too inexperienced as writers to be able to pull off. It really shouldn't be that controversial to say that they reached beyond their means with what they wanted to do with RWBY, which is partially why it's such a mess. And I want to emphasize that I don't think they're incapable of pulling it off just because of the colour of their skin. They didn't do their proper research or think about a complicated topic well enough and rushed through it because they didn't know what they were doing as writers. They also admitted to not knowing what they were doing in the writing department for the first several years of the show so it shouldn't be controversial to criticize them as inexperienced writers pushing out a subpar written product.

While we're on the subject...

In a big ol' rant titled "The Problems with Fixing RWBY" you would think there would be a lot more pointing out the problems with FRWBY and not... pointing out the differences between FRWBY and canon. There's no explanation for why these things are an issue. He just presents these as though they speak for themselves, but they don't. And most of his points are like this, by the way. I could be lazy and answer 'why is this a problem?' to most of them. But I'll do the work for Eren since he's so bad at argumentation.

I'm going to assume here that Eren is trying in a very roundabout and sloppy way to accuse Raymond of saying 'the N word' without actually saying it. One of the fans of his project had been the one to suggest 'Critter' as a slur for the faunus, and due to the similarities between the two words, Raymond thought it would be a clear parallel as being the harshest, dirtiest, derogatory term in his version.

Jockey makes sense as a mocking, derogatory euphemism for someone who is for faunus rights and is faunus friendly as someone who might not themselves be. We know what a jockey is so the imagery that invokes speaks for itself. That's how language works and we have non-offensive examples of it in real life of 'white whale' and 'foxy' and 'bought the farm'.

As for the claim that Raymond said there's no racism in America, that's quite the accusation. You better damn well have a link to a sound clip that isn't out of context or else it's best to just forget about the idea of that. Saying that as a throwaway statement to just hang there without any evidence to back it up leads to speculation and witchhunting. I strongly oppose anyone, even you, being accused of anything of the sort without strong evidence to justify it. Innocent until proven guilty.

Moving on to Cardin and Velvet. Again, I don't see what the issue is. As someone who partook in some Dramonie back in the HP days, I enjoy a good story about a racist getting humbled and humiliated by the fact that he falls in love with someone he considers beneath him. Though that isn't the case with Cardin and Velvet.

Cardin's whole arc is that he was a racist and held certain viewpoints and beliefs. Being forced to work with Velvet and spend time with her on a school project, and the lack of evidence to support his biases led Cardin to begrudgingly break out of his racist mindset and come to respect Velvet as a person, and eventually a friend. By the events of the Fall of Beacon, Cardin is no longer racist for the most part and views Velvet as an ally and companion.

Starting from that point, it's no wonder we can see these two growing close and eventually getting into a relationship. It's all in how the ship is handled, not the ship itself. However, it's not confirmed they'll even get together in the first place. Raymond has only talked about his approval of the idea.

If I can go of on a slight tangent for a moment... like, holy shit, Eren really has it out for the concept of smaller bit characters getting any kind of development. As though the very idea of characters being more than cardboard cutouts is a grievous sin. He claims that small bit characters getting any time to flourish at all takes time away from the main cast.

That isn't the problem, nor is that the ultimate problem with canon RWBY. (Like it's so very transparent what these people are trying to do is to criticize Critic Rewrites by saying the exact same things the critics say about RWBY. But the thing is that criticisms of both aren't 1-1 and so instead of engaging with the rewrites in good faith, they just regurgitate argumentative points of critics without understanding why we make these criticisms in the first place as a sort of 'gotcha' to try and shame critics into silence. A sort of 'how do YOU like it' thing. Nevermind the fact that most creators don't read the majority of the criticisms they get online and will never see it and the complaints are mostly for other fans to consume and agree or disagree with. Nevermind that critics are just fans with as much power and influence over the show as everyone else - which is none.

They don't want to see critics as fans because that means they can't build a boogeyman for themselves. It's a bullying tactic, straight up.)

The problem with RWBY's character bloat was that the main girls weren't being handled properly in the first place. People thought that if there were less characters to juggle, then there would be more time to focus on the characters that mattered. But I don't think that would solve the problem, ultimately. We've seen when they cut the cast and they still struggle with properly implementing character stuff. It gets better, for sure, but the problems persist.

Finding a balance between proper arcs for your main cast while sprinkling in quality of life things for your other characters is the goal. Not focusing on your characters doing basically nothing other than having technical screen time and bloating the rest of the time with splotches of cardboard zooming past.

A lot of people are interested in the side characters, Eren. It shouldn't be an issue for them to get a little attention on the side as a treat to the main plot and that should be the goal for RWBY.

The final point to touch on is the injuries the characters sustain. All I can say is... why is this a 'problem'? Yang lost her arm in canon. The presumption was the Fall of Beacon was a situation that was more than the students in training could handle, and many people (presumably) got injured or killed. But all of that is off screen and swept under the rug and forgotten about. It's hard to take seriously as something that is supposed to be the greatest challenge the students ever faced, even more than they can handle when we see no one struggling, no one getting their aura broken and having to fight differently, getting hurt or anything. All of that storytelling happens off screen and that is bad writing. Telling us people got hurt instead of showing us is bad writing. So again, I ask, if it's okay for characters like Yang to get injured, why is it a problem for Velvet, Neptune and Cardin who had been more prominent characters in Fixing?

Eren didn't understand the concept of volunteer work and how that differentiated between being exploited. Many of the artists came out in defense of Raymond on this, so thankfully, I don't think this argument is used anymore. From the look of it, this argument was the only time people who make these arguments tried to be nice to the artists. Now they're just fellow 'haters' who Raymond collected like Pokemon cards to work on his project. And I'd show a screenshot of calling the artists haters, but honestly I'm running low on my picture limit. You'd think there wouldn't be so many 'haters' but when anyone who voices any dissent toward the show can be considered a 'hater', they exist in abundance. The victim mentality knows no limits.

There were other criticisms about art, legitimate ones, and they were sorted out.

"The entire Brunswick Arc ... is now devoted to Roman."

Did Raymond say that? Or are you just pulling shit out of your ass? I've noticed a lot of people make baseless assumptions like this. Like how someone thinks Emerald is going to be killed by Ironwood when FRWBY V8 rolls around. Which is absolutely stupid. You guys comprehend that the point of the project is to stick as close to canon as he can, correct? That is a thing that can be understood by your goopy goblin brains? My goopy goblin brain can get that, so if not, what's your excuse?

Like yes, things are going to be different from canon. But they're not going into wild AU territory.

Changing Ozpin's host to Roman doesn't affect the trajectory of the story because Oscar was a thing in canon. Emerald isn't going to be killed in FRWBY because Emerald is going to be a thing moving forward that he needs to account for. Understood? Okay good.

As for the Brunswick arc, yes, a lot of it probably will focus on Roman. But that doesn't mean he's going to lean RNJRWBY against a wall to collect dust. This is a leap of logic that I can't comprehend, it's as if Eren thinks that scenes and scenarios that last an entire episode can only exist for one character. Maybe that's because that's what canon does.

I already actually ranted about Eren's apparent dislike of the side characters. So I presume that one of his so-called complaints that he says he does have about RWBY, but from my recollection he's never talked about because that is VERBOTEN, is the fact that RWBY has character bloat.

I think this is all that I really wanted to address, so I'll close this out on the, frankly nothingburger criticism that is 'How dare you title your project a thing I don't approve of'.

Some people like to argue that Raymond wouldn't get hate if he just titled it differently. But I hope that I showed you that with how they attack any and all rewrites, including SYTOkun's RWBY Remnants and other, usually unnamed, "Jaune Main" rewrites, that argument holds no water. These people dislike the concept of rewrites entirely and think it's okay to harass and criticize the work not based on how it functions, but for the fact that it exists at all. Ultimately the message is that this fan content is not Approved to be within their holy space.

They call Raymond arrogant for thinking he' better than other fallible human beings simply because they happen to hold jobs working at a company and Raymond does not. As though that is supposed to magically make them better as writers. Fact of the matter is, there are plenty of writers out there who are likely better than MKEK, and their personal credentials of whether or not they worked for Big Company XYZ doesn't matter. At the end of the day, this is opinion. Opinion that you're free to disagree with and it doesn't make anyone arrogant to think their skills are better. He put his money where his mouth is. But also no one is holding a gun to your head to consume fan content that you aren't interested in. If you feel that you have to because it appears on your dash and that just makes you the big mads, then maybe turn off your screen for a while. Read a book. Go for a swim (or don't if you're in the Northern Hemisphere right now it's December. Go skiing). Do something.

Its not arrogant of Raymond to call his work Fixing RWBY. Its merely a statement of intent with the work. If you have a problem with that then you are saying that is a problem with you. No work is perfect, no work is untouchable. There is always going to be something wrong with it and someone will always be unsatisfied and wish something would be different. That is the value we have as individual people.

Ultimately I am not saying they cannot dislike FRWBY. The work can be criticized. But it does need to actually be engaged with properly in order to be criticized. Critics engage with RWBY, but we aren't afforded the same courtesy.

It says a lot about a person who tries to control another fan into how to think, act, speak or consume content within a fandom space. If you want positive content in the fandom, then don't go after other fans with vitriol, and if you have issue with something they create, then look at it from a constructive standpoint and critique it with the desire for it to get changed. If an artist does not accept every single criticism, that is something you have to get over. They have the ultimate decision in the end.

I'm an old. I'm tired. I've said my piece. Thank you for reading my novella-length complaint and goodnight.

#rwby #rwde #lilithfairen #fixing rwby #canonseeker #frwby #fuck it #really long post #long long maaaaaan #terminal can't fucking read disease #celtic phoenix #sytokun #judgmental critter #I'm on a fucking rampage tonight holy shit #i won't hesitate bitch #gonna watch a lot of critters videos after this as apology for that small callout #I've been working on this for 4 days #help #final word count 10700+

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the-blue-fairie · 5 months

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hey, no worries at all about venting in the tags of... your reblog of my reblog of your post, lol!! as i mentioned, i was trying to find a completely different old post by someone else, and then ended up seeing your post in my search and i just feel that it's a great explanation of some of the issues that i have with the ending. i can totally understand why people who like the idea behind the ending and what the writers were trying to say with it want to defend it, to an extent, but i agree with you that they just didn't successfully say that. which only makes me more frustrated with the ending than i imagine i would've been otherwise. and i'm sorry people have been trying to group you in with frozen 2 haters when you didn't want to be seen that way! and to me, the posts of yours that i've read about the movie (including the one i reblogged that prompted this ask) never came off that way either. you always seemed like someone who had your issues with it and criticisms of it, but could also still see positives in it and things to celebrate about it.

Thank you for sending me this message. I apologize for not replying for a day; life got a bit busy.

Looking back on my old discussions of F2, I feel I was hamstrung by not wanting to make my friends angry. I have friends who are fans of F2 and, while I wrote those posts, I was cripplingly scared that they would stop being friends with me, or unfollow me, or dismiss my critiques as mere negativity. In fact, my fears were justified. Some of these people DID unfollow me and DID tell me I was being overwhelmingly negative. This broke my heart - especially because I spilled so much ink trying to balance every negative I discussed with a positive and celebrating the good elements, but it felt like it didn't matter. It didn't matter how anxious I was to be understood, it didn't matter that I was writing in good faith. And that hurt.

I also feel that I was intimidated by the extreme sides of the fandom. If, for example, I wrote a post criticizing Elsa's arc, anti-Elsa people could jump on it and say, "See, this is why Elsa is a bad sister."

So that's why, in my vent, I said I was too kind to the film. I was so constricted by being terrified of other people's reactions - terrified of having an unpopular opinion. So I qualified all my statements with, "Of course, I don't mean to be overly negative" instead of just focusing on my points.

I just want to shake people sometimes when they tell me the point of the film and say, "They followed through on their intent with very poor execution. They DIDN'T DO the things you are saying they did. They tried, but there are scores of reasons why they did not succeed - reasons that go beyond my personal preference, that have to do with characterization, pacing, story structure, etc."

It hurts because... I feel like, in the past, I tried to force myself to like the film more than I do. I've wanted to like it for years, but the last time I put it on I broke down crying and not in a good way and I just... I wish it worked. I wish that all the various thematic threads coalesced into an emotionally satisfying whole. And I know that, because of my emotional response, people might just dismiss all my discussion - no matter how nuanced I am, no matter how fair towards the film I am in my analysis, as, "Well, you're biased from the start."

No. I've spent years trying to see all sides, empathizing with a variety of people in the fandom, sometimes even at my own expense. I do value the parts of F2 that work and acknowledge the beauty of various elements including Anna and Elsa bonding with the Northuldra, the anticolonialist themes, The Next Right Thing, and more.

But at the same time, I argue that my case against other aspects of the film is robust, cohesive, and correct.

And to the friends that can see I am writing not to be a hater, but in good faith with actual analysis and discussion in mind - you mean the world to me. Thank you.

Sorry, this became kind of a vent in itself.

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outlanderskin · 1 year

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The Tale of Neutrality

I've been in this fandom since the beginning. Really from the start. This doesn't make me better than who arrived now, but it gives me something called: experience in this Outlandeverse.

Whenever a blog appears that claims to be neutral on the subject of Ship, I hardly ever let myself be carried away by its "siren song". Experience has shown me that one of the biggest Anti Blogs started with someone who called himself "neutral" and just wanted to find out and show "the truth". After that first Blog, others appeared and they always follow the same strategy: they label themselves as "Neutral", which means they are followed by people on both sides. They usually start with "light" analyzes and make it clear that these posts are just "observations"... and then follow the script by bringing "infos" from "sources" or from "exhaustive research".

Many of these Blogs really get a large audience of shippers, people in doubt and curious people who strongly believe in the "neutrality" discourse, even when within "neutrality" the arrows are pointed only in one direction.

But....there comes a point (and believe me this point always comes) when something happens and that something hits the blogger's nerve. And when that nerve is hit, neutrality goes into space and unceremoniously, the mask falls off and people finally discover that they are following an Anti or Only blog.

The fact that I've been in this fandom for a long time also made me meet a lot of people. Some of these people are no longer active in the fandom, some don't ship anymore, but they haven't become haters. One of them was showing me these days how thin the line is that divides Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and privat groups in the Outlander fandom. She is someone who continues to circulate in many of these spaces, for fun and curiosity. It's always interesting when she shows me how accounts that are here on Tumblr with a discourse of neutrality are connected with some others on Twitter that are not neutral at all. People who interact, exchange "infos", opinions and ideas with each other, just like we shippers do. The big difference is that we don't hide or lie about who our friends are.

As I said in my previous post, I think a person can be a fan the way they want to be. A person can be Shipper, Anti, SamOnly, CaitOnly, anything they want to be and believe in. This isn't the problem. The problem is hiding behind a label of neutrality that doesn't exist.

As much as I think differently from people who have Antis or Only blogs, the fact that they make it clear what they are is something I think is correct. It's okay to be authentic and stand up for what you really think, as long as it doesn't violate human rights.

The problem is hiding, lying, trying to deceive. The problem is having an agenda from the beginning, but only showing your true face when something hit the nerve and was so bad you couldn't hold back.

#outlander #ship #fandom

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dreamylyfe-x · 9 months

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I don't know where else to go to complain about fanfic comments, so I guess I'm going to do it here. Because I woke up to one today that annoyed me.

And ironically, I'm doing it on the second day of my summer vacation, which I had set aside anyway as a "day to attend to the fandom things that I need to attend to" -- of which there are several.

The first thing I need to say is that I'm desperately grateful for every single comment I receive on anything I've written -- fanfic or meta -- 99.5% of the time. This is just a vanishingly small sample of what I hear about stuff I've written.

But it's still so irritating.

Some background -- I wrote fanfic, a prodigious amount of it, in my very early 20s. For about three years I posted nearly daily. These were long WIPs and they got a fair amount of attention in that fandom, which means I also got some criticism. And I engaged the criticism fairly cheerfully. It's hard to be too insulted by someone who has still read hundreds of pages of your work, even if they are upset about something. It was also really normal, at the time, to tell a fic writer then their story was annoying you. And even an upset comment was better than no comments -- the absolute WORST thing you can experience -- so I was pretty ok with them.

But anyway -- life happened, I left that fandom and I stopped writing fic.

A good friend of mine still was and one day, in a fandom I never participated in but certainly knew a fair bit about, she had a bad experience. Her fic was nominated for a ship-centric fandom award (this is livejournal era) and some random group of fans took umbrage at the existence of these fandom awards and went through and gave snarky reviews of all the fics that had been nominated. Anonymously. My friend had not wanted this review and let it be known that she didn't like it. That violated some sort of fandom rule at the time and she got dragged for it. Authors were not supposed to object to criticism. Even if it was mean-spirited.

More years pass. It takes a good long while for a piece of media to grab me enough that I get sucked into a fandom again. But when it happens we are long into the Tumblr era. And I discover that the worm has turned and it is no longer considered good fandom behaviour to leave negative or critical comments.

As a fandom old, I find that I little curious. I don't leave negative comments personally, but it's such a shift from the livejournal era that I take note. And I'm not sure I feel all that negatively about receiving critical comments on fic. As I'm writing it for the first time in a decade, I get to test that out -- and I don't actually have a lot of opportunity to do that, because indeed, people tend not to leave negative comments. But ONE TIME, on ONE story, ONE person left perhaps the longest and most detailed comment I have ever received, all about how much she absolutely HATED the story I was telling. And I did, honestly, love that comment. Same principle as before -- I couldn't be mad when they were so passionate about it. It was flattering.

But today I was reminded of the type of comment I really don't enjoy. It is not that it's negative -- though it is. It's that it's withering. It's the type of comment designed to make you feel like this person thinks you're a vending machine that they put a dollar into and then got the wrong product. It's the "I hope you don't think that this thing you put into your fic is actually, you know, The CORRECT way to look at this."

I've only gotten a couple of these because in general I think fandom is nicer these days and certainly the corner of the Gallavich fandom that I occupy is filled with really smart, thoughtful, funny and interesting people who tend to SAY smart, thoughtful, funny and interesting things. And this is something of a void scream, because I don't think people who leave comments like that would ever bother to read this.

But. Like. Just in case.

Fic writers put thoughts and opinions into characters' mouths that are not their personal take all the time. Because they have reason to believe these pre-existing characters think that thing. You can disagree with it. But it's probably bad practice to assume anything about the fic writer because of it.

If you ARE going to leave a comment like that try to say at least one other thing about the story so that your comment isn't entirely just you being unaware of the concept of an unreliable narrator.

If you are STILL going to leave your eye-roll in comment form on someone's story and not even bother to hit the kudos button on the way out, then I will probably respond to you like you're an asshole. I just have no other context to draw from.

If you are still determined to do all these things, could you try not to do it in the middle for the night so that I don't wake up to this stuff in my inbox?

Anyway. I know I'm blessed to even get snarky comments on a two-year-old fanfic, but, you know. I have feelings to share. Happy August.

#no one asked #fanfic writing #my fic

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skaruresonic · 5 months

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I just wanted to share that I relate with you, a few years ago I posted that I really hated Sonic Forces, bad game bad story and everything, I then ended up getting someone who send me numerous messages on how wrong I was, I ignored them but they kept going, then they made fun of the way I drew Sonic and I suddenly a week later I got messages on my personal blog mocking me for my post regarding depression thoughts, thinking about suicide and missing my cat who passed away . That really hurt, not helping them was that they constantly told me I drew Sonic out of character, a hobby that helped me cope with my feelings, all this beause I didnt like Forces. I just disabled anon messages for six months. When this year I expressed mild dissapointed with Frontiers gameplay but that I still like the game, I got 4 messages on how wrong I was. I dont get this with the Pokémon fans. It just makes me think there is something fundamentally wrong with the Sonic fanbase.

Jesus. You shouldn't have received that kind of treatment for posting opinions online, and this is coming from someone who leans more towards neutrality on Forces.

It's also funny, not "ha ha" funny, but in an ironic way, as a contrast to our experiences, because once people caught onto the fact that a few of us didn't think the game was utter dogshit and it does have a few good points, they proceeded to double down on their cries of "Pontaff apologist." Apparently saying "No, Forces is not the equivalent of '06" is enough to get people on your ass, but it also seems disliking it garners you harassment.

Plus, they were all too happy to dismiss Frontiers criticism as "you just hate Flynn and are using this an excuse to bash him again and not give him a chance" because Flynn Haters must never have independent thoughts, their hatred of him is just a mindless reflex. They implied this, even though some of us stressed repeatedly that Flynn's involvement ranked pretty low on the reasons we just didn't like the game.

What does that tell you about how mercurial the environment is? At this point I can't imagine being a part of the in-group, how stressful it would be to keep biting my tongue, stifling my real thoughts, just because at any moment someone could arbitrarily decide they don't like my face that day and proceed to use my "shitty opinions" as an excuse to fling abuse at me. If one of my friends says "I don't like SA2, it's overrated and the story sucks," the most I get is annoyed for a while. Then I move on. It's not something I hold against them because ultimately their opinion doesn't have to affect mine.

Somehow, though, this fandom acts like you have to hold the Correct Opinions or else, which just makes you wonder at the insecurity underpinning everything. If they really believed what they believed, they wouldn't have to resort to these tactics. If we're "desperate," as they often say, they're insecure.

---

I then ended up getting someone who send me numerous messages on how wrong I was, I ignored them but they kept going, then they made fun of the way I drew Sonic and I suddenly a week later I got messages on my personal blog mocking me for my post regarding depression thoughts, thinking about suicide and missing my cat who passed away .

I'm so sorry. Again, that should have never happened. That kind of behavior is reprehensible and unacceptable. There is no opinion you can express online which merits such treatment.

This? This is what harassment is. Idk what they're on about when they complain they've suffered "harassment" because one of us reblogged their post with commentary on The Reblogging Site. They are absolutely not the same thing, and you (general you) are insulting harassment victims when you do this.

---

It just makes me think there is something fundamentally wrong with the Sonic fanbase.

There is. I can't exactly pinpoint one cause because it seems to be a melting pot of interrelated issues. It's like a pressure cooker of conformity borne of the desperation not to be seen as cringe by the mainstream - hence all the diatribes about "you guys are making the rest of us look bad," like, who are you performing fandom for? why are you performing fandom? - with anti-games bias stemming from that since the games aren't considered as "deep" as the comics. Unlike the book which improves them, the games are childish, and we wouldn't want to be seen as childish, taking something as inconsistent and puerile like Sonic games too seriously.

Then you add a dose of purity culture, the intense focus on parasocial relationships with ascended fans (I find IDW staff's conduct unprofessional and really skirting the line wrt its fandom), and outright abuse apologism (the stuff with Emi Jones is sickening), and the mixture becomes toxic.

#asks

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einsteinsugly · 6 hours

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I'm sending this to three T70s blogs! What are your very most controversial/unpopular That 70s Show opinions? To get the ball rolling, I'll confess a few of mine since I'm on anon and can't be attacked :) 1. I always shipped Jackie/Eric to the point where they're a true OTP of mine. I have no idea why. Usually when I ship non-canon couples, it's because they're very close friends whose personalities seem incredibly compatible to me...but Jackie and Eric aren't especially close (despite being in the same general group), and they don't seem very compatible or even to care about and respect each other that much. (Though Jackie's "hero" line melts me!) Tbh, it probably just comes down to the fact that Jackie and Eric are by far my two favorite characters. I love analyzing, writing about them, and envisioning how they might have worked if I conveniently ignore 97% of canon. I'm pathetic :) 2. I wouldn't really like Hyde in real life and don't think he was a particularly good romantic partner at all. (*ducks*) I mean, he was an improvement over Kelso, but who isn't?! I just think fandom idealizes him a bit too much. It's a matter of taste, though---the super 'edgy, rebel, proudly rude, 'duuude, I shoplift and smoke a lot of weed and would rather set myself on fire than eat in a mainstream chain restaurant' kind of guys just aren't my personal type :) 3. Sort of related to the first two confessions: I don't think Jackie and Hyde would make each other happy long term. They had some wonderful moments on the show, but I really just don't think they'd give each other what they want. 4. I don't really get how some newer fans turn Laurie into this root-worthy 'girlboss' who's just misunderstood- she's supposed to be unrepentantly, hilariously terrible, and she is! Sometimes it really is as simple as that :) 5. (*whispers*) More often than not, I enjoy Kelso. Obviously as a boyfriend to Jackie, but as a character who - for me - really does add a lot of humor and energy to the show. i can't wait to read yours, and please don't hate me for mine!

Don't you mean, obviously not as a boyfriend to Jackie?

To your points.

1. Jackie and Hyde can work long term, to me. They're stubborn, but they give eachother what they want. Love and stability.

2. I do think Laurie was mistreated by her mother and was unrightfully slut shamed. However, she goes beyond this, and willingly home wrecks. Ultimately, she falls back into her old patterns whenever things get hard. She has potential to be better, but she is morally grey, if you will. She is willing to do almost anything to get what she wants.

*****

Okay, now mine.

1. I've said this before, but I think T9S is worse than season 8. If only because season 8 is way easier to fix.

2. I tend to regard season 8 as canon, if only because it logistically meshes (unfortunately). Both post-season 8 and post-season 7 verses are canon. T9S is not, since it logistically clashes with both, in a huge way (*cough* sixteen year old Jay *cough*).

3. I do not think Jackie can truly overcome all of her conservative biases via Hyde. She would really struggle to accept a child that seriously strays from the norm. It sucks. It's one of those things where she outwardly accepts it, to be politically correct, but it's obvious that it's not how she really feels. She'd ultimately accept a gay or bi kid, but it would take her years to accept a trans/gender non-conforming kid. And even then, she still wouldn't get it/understand it.

4. Okay, T7S takes place in the past. Blatant historical anachronisms, to adhere to modern standards, do way more harm than good. It leads some readers to believe things were better than they actually were, which is a fucking disservice. I strive to be historically accurate, not just in material things, but in attitudes too. It varies from character to character, but still.

5. Jackie, for the most part, would be awful irl. I've met good Jackies in the past, but a lot of bad ones, too (*cough* family members *cough*).

6. Only Jackie, and maybe Fez, would be a Swiftie.

#that 70s show #that 90s show #jackie burkhart #i answer a thing #laurie forman

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ego-meliorem-esse · 3 days

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shit I hope I didn't sound offensive because I'm also mentally ill and seeing characters with these issues actually helps me. And yeah it's not canon just something for fun? Can we call it fun?

Absolutely we can call it fun!

And you have all the right to shape these fuckers as you see fit and if it helps you, even better. I think i might have sounded too harsh, im sorry. What i was getting at was that im not gonna outright call it mental illness, especially since the the whole shtick of hetalia is to satirically stereotype groups of people. And people who come across page my might not know that them being nations is not even a secondary trait to me, but barely a tertiary one.

But i do agree that talking and giving them disorders, like adhd, autism and whotnot, brings a sort of normality of such in everyday life. I guess i just really want to focus more on what they actively do and how the fuck the deal with it, than come out and label it.

I keep discusing this with friends and im gonna put this out here: Tumblr is a melting pot of good and bad opinions, especially in the fandoms. But i truly believe thatultimately, its about creating characters that feel relatable. If you find comfort in Alfred and Jack being adhd buddies, then by all means, let them have that 30 min conversation about 77 different topics. Mental health is arelatively nuanced spectrum i think, and certain labels can and dont have to apply.

In short, i am very sorry for sounding mean, i truly did like talking about that. And i dont think you were at all offensive. My way is different, but not the only correct one. Ofc. Just have fun.

#brother in christ i have no idea what the fuck is canon anymore ive adopted these cunts and gave them serious shit to shovel #dont worry about offending me lmao do what you like and what brings you joy #im emotional #i do really like anons ask #ask meli #hetalia #my headcanons

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archivalofsins · 11 days

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It says in your bio that your hope upon finishing Milgram is to finish it with an appreciation for all it's cast instead of a select few. That has me curious, how have your opinions on the cast changed from the beginning of Trial 2 in comparison to it's end?

Well, when I started trial two, I was really only invested in Futa and Mu.

They're the first two I wrote stuff on casually. I liked how both of their narratives handled and highlighted bullying online and in real life. I thought how they were used to highlight how bullying is still bullying regardless of where it happens or on what scale refreshing and interesting.

So, that's the first thing that really caught my interest about Milgram. I also really liked how both of their stories subtly highlighted the concept of betrayal from the jump. It showcased the very you're either on top or on bottom mindset of bullies. Along with their need to control the environments there in either through seeming infallible or morally correct in Futa's case or weak/in need of help in Mu's.

Honestly it was very reminiscent of old shojo anime. Like some of the characters in Peach Girl and the way they manipulate situations. So, as someone who's read and watched a good bit of messy shojo both of their narratives were a bit nostalgic in that way.

I wasn't too surprised with where things went with Mu trial two. Ultimately, I was more disappointed by the response to the reveal than the reveal itself. I really hope for a day to come where bullying is taking as seriously as people pretend it is. Because never addressing what causes people to become bullies ultimately hinders society from having better preventative measures and intervention skills in cases where bullying is occurring.

It's easy to go it's tit for tat but that doesn't really stop the cycle or discuss the systemic issues that lead to these things. In the same vein just going everyone online is like that and we're not really much different from Futa doesn't address the real issue. That simply being, people shouldn't treat others like this.

So ultimately I came into this like these two a good deal because of what there stories covered.

Now, since I'm only human I do have some vendetta against Mu's character due to the behavior I've experienced from the fandom. That simply is not present with Futa. So, I have to constantly remind myself none of the characters are their fans. In a way Mu taught me the pitfalls of guilt by association and not judging others by the company they keep or the sort of people who support them.

In an age like this one where the divide between an individual and the groups they move inhabit are getting harder to distinguish between it's important to take a step back and recognize a person cannot solely be defined by the people they know or the privileges they have. Mu's complacency highlights this idea. Having her say you should just let friends do what they want in her second voice drama highlights how passive she can be within her situation.

Yet that doesn't exactly absolve her of anything either. It just highlights the don't rock the boat mentality of high schoolers where it's easier to let bullying happen than stand up to it and possibly be bullied yourself. Even easier to partake in it because it's guaranteed safety even for a little bit.

My opinion of Futa really just turned into wow I can't believe he managed to get away with that impressive. I was very proud honestly. Because he seems to be just as messy and like drama as much as Mu does. Possibly even more than she does given the salamander cover and comparisons to Kotoko within the text.

So, I'm very excited for what will happen next with him. Plus really interested in what would have happened if he and Mu were innocent at the same time. I think it would have been very messy honestly and they probably would have wound up working together if anything.

I wrote a lot about Mikoto because his case was the most narratively engaging for me and I do relate to his character a lot but it's mostly in a recognition of self derogatory way. That's still there fuck that guy. Glad he's innocent because it's so funny that he got away with that shit. Can't even hold you he is lying by the seat of his pants. He should not have succeeded. It was through thirst alone that he coasted to innocent.

I like dishonest men stubborn men who will be like you will eat this lie I'm feeding you and say it's good. He really came in here like I can probably gaslight my way out of this how do you know any of that was real and won. Fucking eight murderers before him and that worked solely because people like him. I hope it goes to his head so hard. I hope that shit hits him and he gets sooo fucking cocky his unrestrained as starts jumping people.

Trial one hated this guy didn't want to see him. Trial two fuck it I appreciate the grind and the commitment. Kazui trial one I know exactly what you did and it's funny you're innocent. Trial two

Me: Go on stay innocent until you say it bitch go on-

Kazui: Please just find out my lies just say them please?!

Me (a sadist and a masochist): No because I know it hurts more that you can't say it with your coward ass- So, you want people to figure it out for you to free you from that hell you meticulously made for yourself. Say it or burn bitch- Admit it or die on fire I don't care we can both suffer. I can do this all day-

Kazui: I fucking hate it here-

I just don't want to give him the satisfaction of being found being guilty would probably make him better but his bitch ass went and did that shit he can at least admit he did that shit. He's choosing to lie. He can't be mad at other people buying into the shit he decided to sell. He can stop lying at anytime this only has to go as far as he wants it to and he's enjoying the fucking lie. Given Cat.

I have great respect for Kazui's character because it embodies lying so well. It embodies it to a t. It's like it's not even about if this is good or bad anymore. If it's healthy for me or anyone around me I just gotta keep doing it why I don't know because maybe I've lied so long nobody will accept the real me- if their even is a real me. What if the feelings I think are true are just more lies and there's not one real thing about me. I tried being honest to people I cared about and they didn't like what they heard and if I can change up and put up this act to please them were the feelings ever genuine to begin with.

Is the lie on them for only wanting what they wanted to hear or is it on me for being too big of a coward to tell them what they didn't want to hear and stick to it. When do other people stop being convenient excuses for me to continue not to change because I'm afraid of what I'll really be if I do. Is it a lie that I lied for you or is it a lie that I lied for me? WHEN DOES A LIE START TO SERVE NO ONE?! WHEN DOES IT START TO HAVE NO MEANING? DOES IT EVER HAVE MEANING?!

I just really like him because he always seems to be suffering deep down in very compelling ways. Just like Kotoko. I've actually gotten to the point of liking most of the cast. I like Kotoko because I actually am a firm believer in letting women be evil. I am so much like unnecessarily, so I just also like to see them face consequences from time to time and did not wish to usurp Es if I'm being honest.

The only thing they have is a love for their job. I have feeling about Es but like they are trying their best at their job. I don't think it would be cool for any of the prisoners to take that away from them. It's their job. Sure they didn't choose it and wasn't their dream. Yet, it's something of importance to them and they've shown that consistently. Even if the choices they've made don't have the best outcomes. They take responsibility for it.

Now could Es stop resorting to physical violence as much as they do. I personally think so. My only issue with Es is just they can be condescending, rude, and don't treat prisoners equally. All of these are kind of the point of Milgram and Es is like a teenager so. I just generally think it's unfair to hit people simply because one knows they cannot hit them back. That's an abuse of power and wrong. So, I don't like that. Outside of that Es is pretty cool and tries to be reasonable even when taking in the audiences input.

They don't ask the best interrogation questions. I feel as though they could grill certain prisoners a bit more than they have and this has led to their authority being questioned. Ultimately making their job more difficult and prisoners take them less seriously. It's a hard job.

Yuno she'll always be best girl I while I don't really discuss her often. She's one of the characters I actually have merch for. She's great and not in the yes go off she's so innocent way. Yuno is an incredibly compelling character who's narrative discusses the nuances of abortion in ways I haven't seen much media imply to from based of what I believe is occurring. I like how the line in undercover implies that she was coerced into getting an abortion or contractually obligated to do so.

A concept that isn't as heavily discussed in media as it should be are forced abortion or miscarriages caused by men against the desire of the woman. Along with how being forced through something like that mentally and physically impacts a person. Because it takes a thing that everyone agrees should be a woman's choice and turns it into something done for a men's benefit. Something that happens a lot in the black community that I would like to see discussed in media more.

Mahiru is Star's favorite. She's a good lady my opinion hasn't changed. Other than she's a good lady she's needs to go to therapy for her low self-esteem immediately. She has to take more time away from dating to appreciate the person she is and can be by herself. None of the things she did were healthy and I am worried about her deeply.

The only ones I'm still really on the fence with when it comes to appreciating are Haruka and Shidou funnily enough I feel like I still don't know enough about either of them to fully appreciate them. Like not in a I don't like them at all but I don't really think about them all the time yet individually. I still only think of them in context to the relationships they have with other prisoners in canon. Which when I really appreciate a character I can think about them individually. Without it feeling forced.

And like it's still kind of forced. I feel like I appreciate them but it still feels surface level. I don't know I've written a good amount about them but there hasn't been that firm click yet. Of oh I like and understand you somewhat. With everyone else it's like naw I like you, you did that shit but I like and appreciate you on some level.

Then there's Haruka and Shidou who are just here kind of like friends of a friend. So, I'm hoping trial three takes them to that point for me. Because I still feel like there's just not much I know about them. Or much more I could know to really just make me go yeah. I can get that now.

I don't know if that makes sense. Yet, me appreciating a character is dependent on how much I can discuss them outside of relating them to someone else. I feel I do that with Haruka and Shidou the least. Which is a disservice I admit but thanks for asking!

#gunsli rambles

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