I know that a lot of people are upset that Quackity is not prioritizing communication, but with the absolute legal SNAFU that QSMP Studios has become it’s entirely understandable. This kind of situation, worker’s rights violations in multiple countries and the requirements of each country’s legal system, is a veritable minefield. Your wording has to be incredibly precise over every update, every reassurance. The absolute best he could tell anyone (including former employees and volunteers) is “we are still working on it” because any kind of promise, assurance, etc. could be later treated as a guarantee. Anytime there’s a potential for a lawsuit the advice given is to keep everything sealed up tight until an actionable plan can be implemented.
This is just from my perspective because I am very familiar with how lawyers in multiple industries operate, plus knowing that Quackity has a pre-law background it makes complete sense why this is the way he’s choosing to handle the situation.
TLDR: Yeah the lack of communication doesn’t feel great, especially for the former employees, but there’s actual legal reasons for it and in the long run it’s probably the best option, as much as we may dislike it.
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Even skipping all of the discourse
I'll never understand why Ai "artists" call themselves artists.
"but I've put the input 🥺"
What the fuck are you saying, if I go and buy a pizza and ask them to make changes that doesn't make me a pizza maker does it?
I don't go around and say "omg look I made this pizza guys" because I didn't make it.
Obviously with ai art is worse because you didn't even pay a human being and it's using stolen informations but.
I just don't see the logic. I'm not a pizza maker. You're not an ai artist
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Ramblings on Fandom: Peggy Carter, Steve Rogers, Delusional Shippers, and Alleged Misogyny
So with the release of Season 2 of What If…? emotions are once again running high, the outrage is outraging, and people are up in arms about the whole Captain Carter situation. While I do think that some reactions are a little overblown, even needlessly aggressive in tone to the unfortunate detriment of their otherwise convincing arguments, I share the confusion and frustration about the sudden centering of a long-dead & never excessively popular character, the sidelining of the Steve-Bucky friendship, and the as-inexplicable-as-it-is-total exclusion of Sam Wilson as Captain America. However, I’m not here to talk about the show because (1) I haven’t watched this season and have no plans to (why waste time torturing myself with something I know I’ll hate?) and (2) other people have already written dozens of metas about it, so what could I possibly add at this point.
What I do want need to talk about (lest I explode) is something that has irritated me for a long time and that is now happening again: Every time someone even mildly criticizes Peggy Carter, expresses doubts about her suitability as a heroine, or even just questions her disproportionate importance to the franchise post-EG, inevitably a certain section of fans will come out of the woodwork to immediately throw around accusations of misogyny and yell about how we’re all just a bunch of delusional Stuckies who are mad that she got "in the way" of our ship. Sigh.
This is gonna be a long one, so I’ll put it under a cut. Rant incoming. You've been warned. If you don't want to read, simply scroll on by.
First of all, let me state very clearly that I’m not debating the existence of misogyny and sexism in fandom spaces—or in the media from which these fandoms originate. At all. It exists, it’s a thing, I’m not denying that. Which is exactly why it frustrates me endlessly to see these accusations thrown around as a gotcha! argument to shut down any and all critical debate around a female character. All it does in the end is escalate rhetoric and radicalize attitudes.
In the case of Peggy Carter, specifically her treatment by Stucky shippers, I’ve always found 'misogyny as a motive' to be a largely unsubstantiated accusation.¹ Now, I neither presume nor do I want to speak for the entirety of Stuckynation, so I will not claim that there aren't corners of the fandom where people discuss her in ways that I find off-putting and deeply unserious, but I will say this: If you genuinely believe that disliking one (1) fictional female character equals “hating all women” and wanting to suppress and marginalize their presence in fiction and real life alike—then I think we need to take that word away from you until you’ve learned its true meaning.
You might also want to ask yourself how exactly reducing a female character to a mute trophy wife or a heroine who has to act out her love interest’s recycled storylines helps your feminist fight.
As to the “standing in the way of your ship” part of the argument. Very simply put: No character can stand in the way of something if there never ever was “a way” to that something to begin with. “Being mad” implies that there was a reasonable expectation that wasn’t met, a substantive hope that was crushed. Now, I’ve said this before and I’ll gladly say it again a million more times: No Stucky shipper in their right mind ever truly thought that there was even the slightest chance that Marvel Studios owned by the Walt Disney Company would allow Steve “Captain America” Rogers and Bucky “Winter Soldier” Barnes to be canonized as an explicitly romantic pairing in their billion dollar franchise. Be serious. That was never in the cards. I wish we all lived in a world where it was, but we don’t, and it wasn’t. The best we could ever hope for was for Steve and Bucky to get a good, satisfying, in-character ending. And if, in Steve’s case, that would’ve included hints (or more) about a possible rekindling of his, uh, aborted romance with Sharon—then so be it. But we never got any of that. The characters never got any of that. Instead they sent Steve into 1950s suburban hell, literally trapped him behind a white picket fence, and condemned him to a life of passivity and lies, all so he could be married to a woman he barely knew a long time ago in a completely different world; who built and ran a top-to-bottom Hydra-infested organization, but apparently never noticed that there was anything wrong with her life's work. For decades. Great. As for Bucky—well, we’ve all seen the devastatingly grim-faced, utterly lonely, and deeply sad version of him that was presented to us in TFATWS. Happy endings all around, I guess.
So. Am I mad that Steve didn’t get to ride into the rainbow-colored sunset with Bucky at the end of EG? No. Because that was never going to happen anyway. Would I have been mad had he ended up with Sharon or another female character in the 21st century? Also no. Granted, I wouldn’t have been ecstatic about it, but mad? No. But am I mad that Steve ended up with this specific female character under these specific circumstances as presented in canon? Fuck yeah, I am.
The thing is: I personally believe Steve and Peggy to be fundamentally incompatible when it comes to the way they view the world and their respective places in it; their morals and values; their capacity for compassion and empathy; their ability and willingness to compartmentalize, compromise, and collaborate with people and institutions whose ethics and/or politics do not align with their own. I have a real hard time believing that a relationship between these two (or worse, a hasty marriage) could be either happy or long-lasting.
I don’t believe Peggy to be inherently evil, I don’t hate her, I simply think she operates within a different moral framework than Steve (and even genuinely believes it to be a righteous one).² Your mileage may vary, but I personally happen to find that framework reprehensible, even indecent, and ultimately dangerous. After all, over the course of the 20th century, we have seen exactly where that kind of “the ends justify the means” brand of pragmatism leads—over and over again. Not to mention that the people who use this line of argument to defend characters like Peggy (or real-life politicians for that matter) never seem to want to look too closely at who gets to define what "the ends" are in the first place and who decides when they've finally been met.
(Never. The answer is never.)
And to be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with depicting, and even centering a narrative around a morally (dark)gray character—oftentimes it’s actually the more interesting option—but you cannot at the same time claim that they are purely good and should be only admired as such when their actions literally tell an entirely different story.
So, no. I will not accept Peggy Carter as the shining aspirational heroine that the MCU so badly wants to sell her to me as—while simultaneously continuing to reveal things that paint an increasingly darker picture of her character. And I will certainly not celebrate seeing one of my favorite characters of all time—whose defining trait was that he couldn't ignore "a situation pointed south"; who used to fight for the little guy and against the establishment; who once said about the very organization that Peggy Carter helped build that it was so corrupt, it all needed to go—rendered morally inert for some hollow happy ending that may as well be a conservative’s wet dream full of false nostalgia for an America that never really existed. I cannot find it in me to be anything less but mad about that.
But that does not make me a misogynist. It does not make me a delusional shipper. It makes me someone who looks at what the MCU has been telling me about Peggy Carter for years now—over and over again—and takes it at its own word.
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¹ If you’ve actually read a a fair number of Stucky(!) fanfics you will have noticed that the reverence afforded to and "page time" devoted to her character and her relationship with Steve is somewhat disproportionate to anything that's backed up by canon—well, up until EG, where she was suddenly reanimated as The Great Love of Steve’s Life—and in my experience, it's highly unusual for any fandom to put so much (mostly) positive attention on another character, let alone a potential love interest that is not part of the endgame ship.
² I also want to emphasize that if you love Peggy and she's your fave: good for you! I genuinely have no beef with you. People can agree to disagree. All I ask for is that we maybe stop willfully ignoring the less savory aspects of her character. You don't need to pretend she's perfect to justify your affection for her. I LOVE Steve, and yet I have no problem conceding that he is FAR from perfect.
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okay, so. let me be a bit clearer about why a lot of the stuff people have been suggesting i should do with lizzie in the joel persona au bothers me:
so like, it's not a great feeling to have a bunch of people are going "you should put lizzie in your au to be joel's dedicated love interest."
it's a problem with lizzie characterization in this fandom in general: SO OFTEN she is reduced to just being joel's wife or joel's dedicated love interest. and man, i like jizzie as much as the next guy, and maybe it's not my space to talk as someone who is much more of a joel main than a lizzie main, but it feels Bad. it feels Bad that very frequently the ONLY reason lizzie is in an au or a fic or something is because joel is there. because people see her as automatically coming with joel as a pair instead of like... as her own person to be involved in something by her own merits or not.
she has other traits! she does her own things! she doesn't just need to be here as joel's Cool Friend or joel's dedicated love interest! and she doesn't need to be here automatically because joel is, as though that's a requirement, either, because that starts to boil down to the same sort of "you see her as an extension of him" feeling. and i'm sure many people are just suggesting her to me because they really like her, and NOT because of this, but the number of un-posted "she should be a childhood friend of joel's" "what if she was the lovers" "what if she were this mysterious person joel has a crush on" "she should be his velvet room attendant"... you see how all of those are putting her in a role that is Inherently More About Joel? and i GET why you want her as a cameo and would be sad if she weren't, but like...
man. it just feels bad how often her ONLY character trait seems to be "joel has a crush on her", and i didn't want to contribute to that.
anyway i have come up with her cameo role that i think is funny but i am putting my foot down on "and her other important trait is of course that joel has a crush on her" because i just. this bothers me A LOT. and i know i'm one to talk given that i don't write her that often and given that, as i said, i like jizzie, but like, man. she's her own guy, guys. she's not solely part of a pair.
that's all i guess.
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I feel like a lot of folks who insist that the rampant purity culture in fandom spaces is "not a real problem", and something "an adult with a job" shouldn't deal with, fail to realize that if you simply engage with a certain ship or a certain trope you are exposed to cyberbullying in the form of insults, death threats, rape threats, suibating, self-harm baiting, attempts at doxxing, loss of your livelihood.
Your traumas will be stepped on if you have any, and/or treated as a joke. Your coping mechanisms will be deemed wrong, bad, harmful to yourself and other people, and you will be shamed for having them. The work you have been doing for your mental health, regardless if you dabble in the hobbies you like because of past traumas or because it's just a past-time you have, will be kicked into the dirt because someone is grossed out by them and they arbitrarily decided you cannot express your interest in them.
It is a real problem. Being an adult with a job doesn't give you an "exempt from this" badge that will protect you from harassment if you engage with anything that antis deem immoral.
And there are no "two sides of the same coin" and "two versions to hear" when it comes to this. I don't care if you think someone liking something is "unhealthy", that's none of your business what another person likes. Antis do not "have a point", they never do, their reaction to seeing a dark trope or an "unhealthy ship" are never justified. Hurting real living and breathing people over fictional content is never justified!
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