#like i see posts go around where content creators look for reactions! for responses! and just.. don’t get that

[aliahm]

“When I’m not with you, think of you always”

Crowley x Gender Neutral Reader

Summary: You wind up talking to Crowley about the unexpected reason you bought your new sunglasses.

Warnings: Mentions of crying and being overwhelmed

If there are any content warnings I left out, or I made any mistakes writing for a gender neutral reader, please let me know.

(Credit for the beautiful dividers used in this post goes to each of the creators here on tumblr. The images were found on google, and credit for each of them goes to the owners. The title is a lyric from, of course, “Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy” by Queen <3).

“Hey, love?”

You looked up from your laptop, towards the sound of Crowley’s voice, and saw him standing in the living room doorway.

“Hm?”

“Where’d you get these?”

Dangling from his fingers was a pair of sunglasses that somewhat resembled his own.

“Oh,” you responded, a bit reluctantly, “I bought them a few days ago. They’re for uh, going out”.

He turned the sunglasses over in his hands, observing them more closely. “We went to lunch yesterday and you didn’t wear them”.

You nodded, “Yeah, they’re only for when I’m not with you”.

“Well,” he scoffed, caught off guard by your response, “I suppose if we walked around wearing the same thing it’d get old soon enough”.

You smiled amusedly, and before you could stop yourself, you replied: “True, but that’s not the reason”.

“Then what’s the reason?”

“Damnit” you mentally cursed yourself for letting that slip.

Your eyes zeroed in on your sunglasses in his hands, and then started bouncing back and forth from yours to his, which were hanging from the neckline of his shirt.

“It’s not important.” you answered hesitantly.

“Honey-”

“You don’t believe me, right?”

“Not for a second”.

He walked over to the couch you were sitting on, and knelt behind it, as you turned around in your seat to fully face him.

“What’s going on?”

“It might sound kind of strange”.

“That’s alright,” he reassured you. “you know you can talk to me”.

You nodded, and told him:

“I bought them for when I’m not with you, because I don’t need them then”.

“Why’s that?” he asked.

“Cause you help me through it when I’m overwhelmed, but when you’re not there, all I can do is cry”.

“and you bought the sunglasses because you don’t want anybody to see you?”

You nodded again. “People don’t usually react well when I cry, but it happens so much. Even when I don’t want to cry, it happens, and I hate it”.

“Tears are nothing to be ashamed of,” he reminded you, “especially when you’re overwhelmed, and you have to put yourself first when that happens. It doesn’t matter what anyone else might think about you crying”.

“I know that,” you agreed, “but still, you’re the only person who’s ever made me feel like it’s okay to cry at all. When you’re not around, I go back to trying to hide it, cause it’s all I know how to do”.

“Sometimes I wish I could be there all the time.” He told you, a thoughtful frown crossing his face. “Makes me feel better to know I’m right there if you need me”.

“I know,” you replied, squeezing his hand, “but I won’t ask that of you. We both know I can handle myself, I’m just trying to figure out how to do that”.

“You’re not some problem to be “handled”, baby. You’re a person with feelings, and you already do a damn good job at handling those feelings every day, even when it’s difficult”.

A grateful smile tugged at the corners of your lips, and he continued:

“Even so, neither of us can control peoples’ reactions to what we do, and we both know I wouldn’t react well if anyone decided to judge you for crying”.

He nodded towards your sunglasses.

“If these help you when I’m not around, then good, but if ever they’re not enough, then you come to me, or just say the word and I’ll come to you, no matter where or when”.

“I promise I will”.

“Good”.

He smiled and pressed his lips to your forehead, and you smiled along with him, an idea suddenly entering your mind.

“Wanna see me try the sunglasses on?”

Crowley laughed, and gently ran his fingers through your hair. “Go for it, sweetheart”.

#good omens crowley x reader #good omens crowley fanfiction #crowley x reader #anthony crowley x reader #good omens crowley x gender neutral reader #crowley x gender neutral reader #anthony crowley x gender neutral reader

[tickle-her-senseless]

Reblogging vs reposting - a rant…

I wonder how long it’ll be before a certain someone decides to save and re-upload my latest bunch of gifs 😒 All I seem to see around here these days are re-uploads of my old gifs by the same person, usually with hundreds of notes on them. When their blog initially appeared, the majority of the owner’s posts were just copypasta of my gifs from the previous few years - not reblogs, to be clear. Giving her the benefit of the doubt (she was new and pretty young), I sent her a friendly message:

As you can see, her response was to block me with no reply - but it hasn’t stopped her from continuing to rip my gifs off, going way back to the days when I was still learning and didn’t know how to make them without a big “makeagif.com” watermark at the bottom right 🙄 I guess she either sees them in reblogs (which is how I see her posts everywhere) and saves them, or she views my blog in a browser window without signing in. I just had a look at hers using the same trick, and there are asks saying things like “where did you find that video? I’ve been looking for that for years” and she replies along the lines of “oh, it’s not available on the site where I found it anymore”. I doubt she’s ever even seen most of the videos I used to make the gifs. They were just lifted from my blog.

“But Swift, why get so precious about it? Aren’t you stealing from the original videos when you make gifs anyway?”

One or two people have asked me similar things over the last several years. My take on gifs can be broken down into 5 parts…

1. They’re ubiquitous on the Internet and seem to get a free pass as low-quality glimpses lasting a couple of seconds with no audio. Major entertainment studios tend to enforce copyright restrictions with an iron fist, but you never see them going after gifs. Official accounts can be seen posting humorous gifs that others have made of their films, shows, music videos etc etc. They’re just part of Internet culture at this point. I’ve seen gifs others have made of me tickling my friends out there online … I’ve even seen a couple of me being tickled, God help me 😱

2. I believe that enough work goes into making a gif for it to qualify as transformative content. Most of it is actually the time spent watching a video like a hawk (usually with the sound off for context) and waiting for a brief spike of beauty or intensity or excitement. Then I’ll replay it a few times, screen record it, crop out any black bars, trim it (sometimes trying to make it loop as smoothly as possible), convert it to a gif while adjusting the size, FPS, format etc, optimise it to get the file size down and finally post it with a caption. All of this was learned through trial and error … which is plain to see in my earliest posts 😅 If reaction videos fall under transformative content from which some people make a fortune, my little non-profit tickle gifs are OK by me.

3. As a hard rule, I never make gifs from videos that aren’t already available to view somewhere online. A lot of them are actually from preview clips posted by the studios themselves, since they put all of the best moments in there anyway! I’ve been known to pay for tickle videos, but I never use them as gif material.

4. I spend a fair bit of time telling people where gifs are from when they ask eg. “Oh, it’s from a free preview of this video by this studio, full version available on Clips4Sale here.” I reckon I’ve actually directed a lot of traffic towards creators by this point.

5. I’m just continuing a convention that pre-dates my involvement on Tumblr and will probably carry on for a long time. When I arrived here, I was more interested in well-drawn art, well-written stories and community meet-up/session videos which warmed my icy heart and really made me want to be a part of things here. To my surprise, the engagement on gif posts dwarfed every other type of content, even videos. Ironically, I don’t actually get much pleasure from them myself, I find them empty without the audio. I always want to hear how much the lee is suffering, sue me 😁 Still, I figured that learning how to make gifs would be the most effective way to integrate myself here - and I was right, it was 😉 I do think it’s crazy, though, that a gif of mine could get hundreds of notes in 24 hours when I was posting regularly, but talented artists and writers struggle to get a few dozen in total. They’re the real content creators.

Anyway, yeah, there you go. It’s also true that content takes on a life of its own to some extent once you upload it. I see a bunch of my stuff on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok … people regularly upload it to Discord servers that I’m in (or even help to moderate) and I just smile to myself and don’t say anything. Posting a gif on a different platform is one thing, but I do think that posting literally dozens of them on the exact same platform is shady as hell when the reblog button exists. Especially when I reached out amicably and was blocked with no response.

It’s been one of the factors behind my activity dropping off so much in the past year - motivation to make gifs is hard to find when you know that someone’s waiting to help themselves to anything you throw out there. The only reason I haven’t named this person is that she’s on the young side, although not a minor (as you can see, my original message to her was sent over a year ago and I never said anything in public to spare her any flaming that might ensue) but I have to admit, it’s beginning to grate on me - especially when I see people tagging her blog as the source when they incorporate the gifs into their own posts…

#tickle community #tickling #tickle gifs #reblog don’t repost #losing the will

[coochiequeens]

It's becoming increasingly common for women to film harassment as it's happening and post it online.

Insider spoke to several women whose videos about such incidents gained widespread attention.

They say their videos had unexpected consequences, including exposing them to online hate. 

It was a regular day in June when 22-year-old Yula Delcore got on a ferry in Larkspur, California, to visit her boyfriend in Santa Rosa. 

Delcore described the journey as an "easy-peasy" commute that she makes once a week, but she told Insider that this time, she heard a man calling out from behind her when she got off the ferry. He was following her, she realized. 

"I told him, 'Before you even start, I do have a boyfriend, so I'm not really interested,' and he said, 'I don't care,'" she told Insider.   

As the man followed and heckled her, she took out her phone.

"He literally made me so uncomfortable to the point where I thought, 'I ought to film this.' No one else was around us, so I thought if something were to happen, I could at least get proof of it," she told Insider.  

In recent years, it's become increasingly common to film instances of harassment or discrimination and post them online, especially on TikTok, where they often blow up — as Delcore's did — receiving hundreds of thousands of views.

Women told Insider that filming harassment is a response to a long history of women's stories being doubted and belittled; they see it as a way to collect indisputable evidence of their experiences. But gaining attention under such circumstances can have disastrous consequences — many women have faced unprecedented backlash when commenters dismissed their experiences, subjecting them to even greater levels of online abuse. 

Experts say the explosive and adverse reactions to these videos show how unstable social media can be when it comes to women's safety. And while posting harassment footage may feel impactful in the moment, more needs to be done to create sustained real-world change.

TikTok makes it easier than ever for women to expose their harassers

Now that nearly everyone has a smartphone, filming troubling encounters has become increasingly common. 

 "It's like saying, 'Hey, this happens. It happens every day. And now you see it, you can't deny it,'" Laurie Essig, a professor and the director of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Middlebury College, Vermont, told Insider. 

Delcore told Insider she decided to post footage of her harassment on TikTok so she could "expose the kind of stuff that us women have to go through all the time," adding that she did not expect many people outside her relatively small following of 43,000 people to see it. 

While most of Delcore's previous videos received between 1,000 and 5,000 views, her footage of the incident was viewed more than 530,000 times.

Delcore is not the only woman to gain widespread attention with such a video. Natalie Rose, a 29-year-old fitness trainer, shared a video of a man who followed her while walking in Birmingham, England, this past March.

Rose told Insider she reported the incident to the police but also wanted to post her footage of the man's face on TikTok to warn other women in her area. "I thought that if they saw my video, they could be a little bit more wary and look out for him," she said. 

Rose's TikTok received 6 million views, and the unexpected attention quickly became overwhelming. 

"A TikTok can go all over the world, and mine did. But I think if you don't expect it to, it can be a little bit of a shock," she said. 

TikTok's algorithm recommends content to users based on what they have previously watched, regardless of whether a user is following the creator who posted the content. Videos about harassment are often viewed by hundreds of thousands of people under popular tags about the topic. One such hashtag, #safetyforwomen, which Rose used in her video caption, has 124 million TikTok views. 

Many women who post these videos risk being discredited and  blamed for causing the incident 

Some creators told Insider they'd hoped to feel empowered by filming their harassers but found going public had the opposite effect.

Caitlin Wilkinson, 23, filmed a TikTok showing her confronting a man on a subway, who she says was harassing another woman in the car. The man is not visible in the video, as Wilkinson only filmed her own face during the interaction. She told Insider she was worried the man would get "angry" and lash out at her if he realized she was filming him. 

The clips garnered more than 2 million views. While the TikTok comments about Wilkinson's videos were overwhelmingly positive, with users praising her for defending the unknown woman, Wilkinson told Insider that she noticed some people posted negative comments about her on Facebook after her TikToks were mentioned in a BuzzFeed news article about her that began to circulate on the platform. 

Wilkinson told Insider she read through comments made by Facebook users and saw that many — who she said appeared to be men — were saying the video was staged because she didn't film the perpetrator's face or they thought she was only posting it for views. 

"I just felt gaslighted by these guys who didn't believe my side of the story," she said. 

Delcore said she was "shocked" to receive comments that defended the unknown man who was following her; these comments — which were seen by Insider — appeared to largely be from male users.

"There were a lot of comments that were like, 'What did this guy do wrong?,' and I was shocked to see so many of them, because I'm obviously uncomfortable in this video," she said. 

Other comments seen by Insider appeared to be from men telling her she should have handled the interaction differently. She told Insider she felt they were suggesting the harassment was her fault because she chose to respond to the man's questions instead of ignoring him. 

The response to videos portraying harassment can be retraumatizing for victims 

Delcore described the online abuse she faced after her video circulated as "retraumatizing," a psychological phenomenonwhereby the symptoms experienced after a traumatic experience can reemerge when a new situation carries reminders of the original event.

Delcore said that the flood of skeptical comments she received from men caused her to relive and reprocess her experience with harassment. "For them to tell me nothing happened and nothing was wrong in the video, it was traumatizing, because they're enabling this kind of behavior," she said. 

Wilkinson told Insider that the high number of views on her videos, paired with responses from viewers who said they did not believe her account, made her feel anxious to the point where she would not want to post about harassment on TikTok again if she were to witness or experience it. 

See rest of article

#street harassment #Tiktok #Society dismissing women experiences

[isabellehemlock]

Promotion or interaction

I've been contemplating a bit about this aspect of fandom, trying to find the labels that most resonate with what I'm hoping to convey, and I sort of stumbled on them by accident yesterday as I researched some links about how to help build engagement for discord channels.

Basically the line discussed what you want your purpose to be: promotion or interaction.

Now of course you might counter, in a perfect fandom world it's a bit of both and maybe depending on the definition of each word to you, that could be the case. But the point they were getting at was a sort of performative reduction of your own content vs nurturing community.

Before I go on too much more, let me pause here for a moment to add a disclaimer: just like content creators do not owe anyone their content, fans do not owe reactions either. The moment it slips into these caveats of being made responsible for someone else's feelings, and/or shamed, guilted, into anything, we have filtered what was once a personal hobby meant to add to our lives, and let it fester into something akin to an unpaid internship you had never agreed to work for in the first place.

SO all that said - what I'm referring to are content creators like myself who want the interaction in forums, channels, platforms. And not in a performative way, but a mutual effort of encouragement, of sharing the process, of talking about WIPs, showing rough drafts, exchanging resources. Like our own personal little artist commune. And yet, we don't want it to be exclusionary, there are so many content creators who just haven't built up the courage to share their work (I didn't for years!). So it's not about being an "art club" with exclusive membership either.

But more like - building a little club house out back of a wider fandom space. One where you bump knees as you tell jokes, pass around new brush sets, and scribble on notebook paper that someone found from the stack in the corner.

It's waving others over, and encouraging them to join in simply for the sake of art, and art alone. It's for the laughs, for the creativity, for the community.

And then if there's a finished piece to share down the road, it's still something to celebrate of course - seeing something created out of nothing is a joyous thing and please allow yourself to enjoy it - but it's almost the icing on the cake at that point. You know, that sentiment where they say it's about the journey, not the destination? Yeah that.

Because for some of us, sharing the finished piece is like a sign post along the way of an otherwise winding, fun, exploratative journey of creativity. And for me, that road looks more fun when I get to do it with others.

And though there is nothing wrong if you do not want those things - I certainly am not here to suggest one way applies to all, that's not possible - I know I have spent months contemplating what it is I want in my shifting community. And who knows, maybe it'll shift again as I grow and evolve.

But right now, I know I want a playhouse, and an encouraging community filled with laughter and comraderie where some of us just happen to make art along the way. And I'm 100% ready to be the change I want to see.

#I'm very grateful for the platforms I've had to explore fandom spaces for the last two years as a content creator #I have been - and continue to be - part of some really lovely places that bring me a lot of joy #and I'm a varied creature like the next person lol #no one place can be the place to service all the needs #but I'm grateful for the opportunity to have praacticed building communities and nuturing friendships #and as I prepare for the long winter I am excited for things around the corner :) #fandom stuff #personal #eta also for my mutuals - I'll be getting to tags and asks throughout the day lol I just needed to write this out first 😅

[wepreeshjohnegbert]

SKJDMSJ THANK U FOR REBLOGGING MY JOHN FROM FOREVER AGO 😭😭🥺 thats such an old drawing but your tags made my day i literally almost cried,, i preesh YOU.

DHDBDN YOU’RE WELCOME DUDE!! I didn’t even notice it was forever ago holy heck!

Dude I am SO SO touched that my tags made your day and almost made you cry like that is so wholesome and heartwarming!! Your art has only gotten better too!! Like dang dude! I PREESH YOU BACK DUDE THANK YOU FOR MAKING MY DAY IN RETURN!!

#preesh ask #mod sky #not a john #AAAHH I ALWAYS GET SO HEARTWARMED WHEN PEOPLE BRING MY TAGS UP #like i see posts go around where content creators look for reactions! for responses! and just.. don’t get that #it’s so sad :( #i’ve pledged to always put effort and good comments in my tags!! #i don’t even lie in any of them because i have a lot of love to give!! #i don’t skimp out on tags on main either #i will tag any and everything very rarely not tagging at all #i aim to put smiles on people’s faces and i’m so glad i achieve that :D #like dude i was having a bad day and just getting this ask cheered me right up!! like thank you SO MUCH for sending this in!! #it’s amazing the kind of impact you can have on people :) #but i will stop because it’s 01:25am haha #like i’m prolly not making too much sense because of the time #anyway dude i preesh you so much!! #i’ll take a better look at your blog tomorrow add some john stuff to queue and even rb to main!! #stay awesome! #thank you for the ask

[tlbodine]

The Great Content Warning Debate

Horror Twitter has been aflame for a few days now with heated discourse about trigger/content warnings, and I keep seeing the same arguments and questions and points come up repeatedly so I wanted to collect all of it into one place because I feel like discourse can only get so far if people keep reinventing the wheel -- so perhaps having the full discussion laid out in one place could be helpful.

Of course, the folks arguing probably won’t see this post, but perhaps there can be some benefit from talking about it anyway. This is intended to be more of an overview of arguments and counter-arguments, collected and displayed as impartially as possible, but of course my own opinions are going to leak in and color some of this. 

NOTE: This is written specifically from the perspective of the horror book community, a genre that traditionally is associated with troubling, transgressive, risk-taking and shocking works. There are discussions to be had for content labels on other types of fiction, but as I’m unfamiliar with the norms and expectations of, say, romance, I’m not going to wade too deeply into that here. 

So without further ado, the arguments and counter-arguments and discussion points that I keep seeing hashed and rehashed and circled around when the issue of trigger warnings comes up! 

If you’re sensitive, you shouldn’t be reading horror 

“Horror is supposed to be horrifying! It’s not fluffy bunnies and kittens! You’re supposed to be made uncomfortable!” 

There are a few problems with this: 

“Uncomfortable” is not the same as “Sent into a panic attack/flashback/relapse” (ie, triggered) 

People with PTSD and other issues can and do engage with horror all the time and often love the genre for entertainment or therapeutic purposes

Many people are fine with some types of content but not others; blood and guts won’t affect them the same as rape, or they’re fine with adults dying but can’t handle child death, and so on and so forth 

Knowing what you’re getting into can help you prepare/brace yourself so you’re not taken unaware; people with the right warnings can mentally prepare themselves and enjoy a book that they would not have been able to read if they were confronted with it unexpectedly

Trigger warnings are censorship 

Some folks have an implicit/kneejerk reaction that “trigger = bad thing” and respond to the request to put warnings on a book as a moral value judgment on the book’s contents. I can see why they might fear that, especially because at a glance it’s easy to conflate the groups asking for warnings with the groups who say things like “if your characters have underage sex then you the writer are literally a pedophile.” But by and large the folks asking for warnings do not seem to be asking for folks to stop writing certain difficult themes, only to provide a heads up for readers about the type of experience those readers can expect from the book. 

There is an argument to be made that warnings could affect the sales of a book, in much the same way that an NC-17 film doesn’t get the same distribution opportunities as an R-rated or PG-13 film, and that authors/publishers will make marketing decisions to include or exclude certain types of content in order to avoid this. 

Trigger warnings will spoil the book 

While some readers will benefit from content warnings, others might have their reading experience ruined by knowing about major twists. This seems especially relevant with a warning like “child death.” It’s very important that people who have, for example, recently lost a child not be unexpectedly re-traumatized by reading about a child dying without warning. But it’s also important that people who want to enjoy the full, shocking impact of such a scene have the opportunity to do so without having it dulled by forewarning. 

Any kind of warning system needs to be opt-in for a reader. Some suggestions include: 

Placing warnings at the end of a book, where readers can flip to that page to look (not helpful if you’re ordering online) 

Placing warnings on the author’s website, where readers can search (not helpful if you’re buying in person)

Given the limitations, a combination of those strategies seems to make sense. It may also be unfortunately true that someone looking for one type of warning (ie, rape) will have their experience ruined if they spoiler themselves for another warning (child death). This may be unavoidable collateral damage. 

Authors/Publishers should be responsible for putting warnings in their books

There seems to be some debate over whether the onus of responsibility for providing warnings rests on the author or the publisher. It should be acknowledged that authors may not always have the power to make this choice -- and if the presence or absence of warnings becomes a factor for judging the quality/moral fiber of authors, those authors could be punished by the reader community for a choice that was largely out of their hands (although, there’s still nothing keeping the author from hosting those warnings externally - how successfully that is implemented is another matter). 

Additionally, the demand for warnings will be placed more consistently on small presses simply because those presses are more likely to heed the request. This could create a double standard where readers might be more forgiving of large pub works that forego warnings because there’s no expectation that they would have implemented them anyway. On the other hand, this could be a way for indie publishers to differentiate themselves on the market and appeal more to certain subsets of readers. 

External groups or communities should be responsible for warnings

There’s a line of reasoning that an author or publisher may not be sensitive to the potentially triggering/damaging things in their work, and some kind of external governing body should manage this work instead. This does sound a lot more like the censorship argument that people are worried about. 

Wiki-style sites and places where people can freely tag books (such as Storygraph) also fit this bill to an extent. They would presumably have less power over the market than a ratings board like the MPAA, but could still exert influence over how a book is received. 

Demanding warnings will negatively impact marginalized authors 

We’re already seeing some evidence that BIPOC and LGBTQ authors are affected more by user-generated trigger warnings on sites like Storygraph, and that these warnings can be weaponized against marginalized authors. Much like review-bombing a book before it comes out can affect its launch, labeling a book with inaccurate trigger warnings could damage its sales. 

Similarly, lists of “safe” and “unsafe” authors have already begun to circulate among some groups, and there seems to be a disproportionate number of marginalized creators on that “unsafe” list -- at least according to the anecdotal reports I’ve seen. 

Historically, it is true that any attempts at censorship or content moderation will be more harshly applied to marginalized groups (see: film ratings for gay sex vs straight sex). 

It’s impossible to warn for everything

One hesitancy that some authors have with tagging their work is they’re not sure what to tag for. Triggers are highly personal, and there’s no way you can possibly guess what might upset a reader. 

Here’s a list of commonly agreed-upon things that might make sense to tag for in a given work: 

Violence/gore 

Suicide/self-harm

Rape/sexual assault

Domestic violence

Child death/endangerment

Animal death/abuse

Drug use/substance abuse 

Racism/slurs 

That said, it’s still difficult to account for context. At what stage do you warn for something? If a character is drinking a beer, do you need to tag for that? Do you distinguish between the tone things are written in, such as being played for laughs vs seriously? If the rape scene is written artistically/metaphorically, does the same warning apply as if it were described act-by-act in a clinical sense? What if your blanket list of warnings gives readers a false sense of what the book will be like -- is it actually helpful at all, or is it just posturing/virtue signaling to include warnings that won’t actually be effective?  

Some would argue that this is dramatically overthinking it, but this does seem to cause a great deal of distress to authors who want to do the right thing but worry about getting it wrong. An argument could be made that trying and failing might be worse than doing nothing, especially if your attempts get you labeled as a “trustworthy” or “safe” author only for that trust to be “betrayed” by a warning you used incorrectly. 

On the other hand, many would argue that we all “pretty much know” what needs to be warned for, and that warnings are intuitive. These granular questions could be viewed as a distraction from more common sense issues. 

Readers are responsible for managing their own safety

Ultimately, because it’s impossible for every potential trigger to be identified and warned for, readers will need to remain vigilant. Of course, there are already ways to identify the content of a book without any kind of established warning system -- such as, for example, reading posted book reviews, asking a question on a book’s Goodreads page, reaching out to the author directly, asking about the book in a reading group online or having a friend/parent/spouse/trusted person read the book first and report back with their findings. 

This is the system we’ve pretty much used as readers for years, before “trigger warning” became part of the common vernacular, and it does have some distinct advantages just because you can get a lot more specific information this way. 

It is possible that if warnings become more commonplace for books that readers may become less vigilant about their own safety, which could paradoxically put them at greater risk of finding troubling content unexpectedly. 

There’s also the issue of “safe” and “unsafe” author lists. At the moment, while the discourse is hot, it’s perhaps more natural to pick sides and disregard some authors for reasons that may be unfair -- for example, marking an author as unsafe or boycotting her work because she doesn’t want to include warnings, but she wants to avoid warnings because she strongly believes they will be detrimental to a reader’s safety. A reader may or may not agree with that perspective, but it’s certainly not the same motive as an author who would do something actively malicious to a reader (like, idk, emailing a screamer to a reviewer or something. that’s a made up example.) 

In the end, trigger warnings are a good idea, but the issue is complex to implement and some people do still have reservations about their overall efficacy. 

We simply won’t know one way or another until we try to implement it. But in the meantime, I do think it’s valuable to continue talking about this, as long as everyone involved remains civil and engages in good faith. Once people’s perspectives start getting thrown out the window in the heat of the moment, or strawmen arguments are erected that don’t reflect what anyone involved actually believes, the discussion ceases to be helpful. 

#trigger warnings #discourse #twitter nonsense #authors behaving badly #writing advice #writeblr #writing #publishing

[turneverybodyintopuppets]

Hi. The following is my attempt to systematically hash out the “Mr. Infodump” controversy in the TS fandom. It’s primarily for my benefit, but I’m posting it on the off chance it helps someone else who’s just as confused/dismayed as I was. I’m not attempting to argue for blind absolution (”Thomas is an angel who can do no wrong!”) or cancellation (“He’s no better than the likes of J.K. Rowling!”), just to present as intellectually honest an assessment as I can make of what happened and the degree to which the TS team is responsible.

Laconic: Thomas Sanders, a content creator on youtube, posted a skit in which a character calls an aspie-coded character “Mr. Infodump”. Several fans have expressed hurt and anger over the use of a trait associated with neurodivergence as an insult.

My own initial impression: I’m on the autism spectrum myself, and personally, “Mr. Infodump” didn’t register as offensive to me; in fact, as a huge Logan kinnie, I liked that a neurodiverse trait I see in myself was being explicitly linked to my favorite character. That said, there are many in the community who feel deeply hurt and betrayed, and it would be a) irresponsible and b) close-minded to handwave their concerns. Thus:

[Abridged version: Bolded]

Context for use of the word:

Line from Roman: “I was going for regal sophistication [in last commercial pitch], but Mr. Infodump over here [*gestures to Logan*] wasn’t cooperating.” Defensive tone, alluding to the fact that Logan’s commercial pitch included excessive product information that would leave buyers disengaged.

History: Roman regularly invents nicknames for fellow sides and employs them in a manner that can range from fond teasing to a juvenile way of insulting the side he’s presently bickering with.

Names previously directed at Logan include “Calculator watch,” “Egghead,” and “No-Funsen Honeydew… Doo.” They generally play off of Logan’s tendency toward being uptight, stereotypically nerdy, and eager to furnish the group with information in the capacity of a teacher.

In this particular instance, I doubt anyone would say the word’s use was “malicious,” but it wasn’t “affectionate” either. Roman is visibly preoccupied and defensive in the scene, throwing out a nickname offhand.

Power Dynamic: There is no imbalance of power between Logan and Roman that would indicate anything resembling a bully-victim relationship. Logan responds to the word in the same manner he does Roman’s other antics and displays no particularly hurt reaction.

In-Universe Response: No character corrects or condemns Roman’s use of the term. This may, however, be because Logan is the first to respond, armed with his own complaints about the others’ commercials.

Meta-Level Implications: The audience is not encouraged to agree with Roman’s sentiment that infodumping is a negative trait anymore than they are his other commentary on Logan via nicknames like “Egghead,” because Logan’s role in the story consistently proves it wrong; all that infodumping saved an unconscious Roman from his murder-happy brother, for one, and the audience knows it. Given the posturing and defensiveness that accompany Roman’s delivery of the line, it’s clear the creators were communicating that he was in the wrong to say it. That, and Logan will almost certainly reinforce this by verbally decimating someone in the next episode, as per usual.

I think that last point is key. People will accuse others of infodumping in a negative way IRL—I know I’ve been called far worse for failing to mask—and to pretend that such things don’t exist in fiction is misrepresenting reality. Instead, creators can and should include minority characters (race, sexuality, gender, neuroatypicality, etc.) *confronting* discrimination, dealing with it complexly, and showing both the misguided character and the audience how wrong they are. Logan resonates with me—and other aspies, I think—largely because of how he clearly struggles in dealing with the other sides’ occasional criticism of his eccentricities, but he ultimately remains committed to his identity and ideals. If the TS crew continues to write a show that reinforces the fact that his neurodivergent qualities are what make him strong—and god knows there's not much media that does this well—, they’re doing something incredibly important for us.

The issue here, then, wasn’t the show promoting ableism as a message, because its handling of the conversation here doesn’t. Rather, it was the use of a term that many consider inherently ableist as an insult. So:

“Infodump” the word:

I find this fascinating, actually—Science is discovered. Math is discovered**. Language? Language is unequivocally invented. We’ve create these words with combinations of mouth-sounds, and we’ve assigned them meaning.

But the thing is, people have different backgrounds and experiences that define both who they are and the nuances of the meaning they tie to those mouth-sounds

Basic example of varied mental prototypes: I live in the northeast USA, so when I hear the word “bird,” the first thing that pops into my head is a bluejay or robin. If you ask my friend who’s studying in Brazil, though, he’d likely think of a macaw or toucan. 

For me, “spring” = my mom’s pink zinnia garden and “chocolate” = a square of hershey melting against gooey marshmallow. This idea of memories and experience informing word-meaning mapping, of course, extends to a) more nuanced concepts and b) a more subconscious level of understanding. Poetry in particular, I think, tends to play with this to invoke the sensory experiences it does... I could infodump about translated poetry but that’s a whoooollleee other thing and I’m getting off track.

But essentially, an individual’s experience of any given word, to a degree, is subjective. Our dictionary definitions are merely approximations of a collective understanding of that mouthsound-to-meaning mapping, and we have to update those definitions as language evolves (remember when “Google” couldn’t be used as a verb?)

So, what happens if I look up “infodumping”? TVTropes tells me it’s a “type of exposition that’s particularly long and wordy”. UrbanDictionary says its “used to deposit large amounts (usually entire articles) of information in online forums without summarizing or paraphrasing the information.” I reach the resources that explain it in the context of autism and ADHD over halfway down the Google results. The word “infodumping” has quite a few circulating meanings, and the one associated with neurodivergence isn’t as visible as we’d like it to be.

From what I understand, Thomas Sanders and co. merely knew “infodumping” as the practice of talking at length about a subject, like closing a rant with a friendly “aw, sorry for infodumping on ya” and such. This was exactly how Logan opens his commercial, so they stuck it in as a—frankly, kinda feeble—nickname á la the creative genius behind “Mr. Smarty... Pants”. They had no knowledge of the term’s gravity to the autism and ADHD community, because they haven’t been exposed to settings that use that definition.

So, where does that leave us on accountability? If they’re ultimately not producing ableist content, do Thomas Sanders and his team have the responsibility to be aware of how an insult featuring this particular word might be inherently triggering to a community?

Many accounts show that the inclusion of the term caused real emotional harm and as content creators—particularly ones with a relatively young fanbase—the TS team should have taken more precautions. A more diverse staff/writing room may have caught this, given how egregious some fanders found the error. Furthermore, why shouldn’t it fall on neurotypical people in general to “educate themselves” on these issues, as in the cases of other minority groups?

That said, however, can any creative team be reasonably expected to know of any-and-all potentially triggering content? I’ve avoided speaking of Thomas Sanders’ personal character to maintain some impartiality, but a long history of promoting representation and careful content warnings does suggest a genuine commitment to self-correcting. Accepting the well-intentioned criticism of fanders—many of whom are so broken up by this precisely because of the amount of faith they place in the TS team—and taking active steps to change is ultimately the best course of action, and I, for one, will be sticking around to see the results.

#sanders sides #logan sanders #neurodiverse character #infodumping about infodumping #wow ive really peaked huh #ts logan #ts critical #ts criticism #ts discourse #sanders sides discourse

[softboywriting]

Yellow | Nathan Bateman |Ex Machina

Summary: Nathan tests a new AI robot. It doesn’t go as planned. [established relationship] [nathan being impatient] [F!readerxnathan] [no use of Y/N]

Word Count: 1k

|Masterlist in Bio|

Watching Nathan work is intriguing. Today is the first time you're getting to see him interacting with an AI. He has kept you away from them for safety purposes. You know it's because he is afraid they will appeal to you as a woman to let them free of the research room. You're fine with it. You don't want to interact with them, as they sort of scare you.

Nathan set you up on the computer in his office and set up the security camera to record his session with Dana, the newest model. You put your note book down and poise your pen at the ready. Nathan had told you to document anything that happens, anything strange she asks.

"Dana, we're going to do something different today." Nathan says through the computer speaker.

"Okay Nathan. What are we going to do?"

"I'm going to have you ask me questions."

"Okay, what should I ask?"

"Whatever you want."

Dana tilts her head as if she is thinking. "What should I not ask?"

Nathan sits back and folds his arms over his chest. "There are no restrictions. Ask whatever you want."

Dana stands and walks around the room. You watch as she glances at Nathan every few steps. "What is your favorite color?"

He chuckles. "My favorite color. Well, let me think. Black."

"You're lying."

"How do you know?"

"I can see it on your face. You answered too fast."

Nathan stands and paces the length of his contained space. "What is my favorite color then?"

"I don't know. It is not black."

"Fine. It's yellow."

She accepts this answer and pauses before asking, "Why?"

"I don't know."

"Lie."

Nathan looks up at the camera and it makes your heart jump. It's alarming the way his gaze meets yours through the lens. You know he's just doing it out of habit. You need to document her response. She's arguing almost. "Why is that a lie?"

"Because you looked down, your micro expressions tell me you are lying."

"Next question Dana."

"Why is your favorite color yellow?"

"Next question."

"Why won't you answer my question Nathan?"

He leans on the glass and Dana walks up to meet him face to face. You can feel the tension all the way from the office. Why is Nathan so defensive about his favorite color? It's not a big deal. Maybe he's trying to elicit a reaction from Dana.

"Next question."

"Why are you lying to me?"

"I'm not."

"Yes you are. Why would you lie when you asked me to ask questions and anything is allowed?"

"I'm allowed to lie."

"Then so am I."

"Dana." He glances at the camera again, and takes a seat once more. "Why are you pushing this?"

"I'm curious."

"You're curious? Do you know what that is?"

Dana sits opposite him on her box like ottoman. "Yes. It is the desire to know more information."

"Very good."

"So?"

"So what?"

"Why did you say yellow is your favorite color?"

He sighs and runs a hand over his head. "Because it's the color of dress my assistant wore the first time we met."

You remember that dress. A sundress that you wore with flats and a black sweater. You had no idea Nathan loved it so much.

Dana leans in close to the glass. "You have an assistant? There are other people here?"

"No." Nathan says confidently. "They do not work here."

"You're lying."

"Next question Dana."

"Where is your assistant?"

"Not here." Nathan is getting irritated.

"Where is your assistant?"

"Next question Dana!"

Dana sits back at Nathan's outburst. "Is your assistant female?"

"Next question."

"I assume they must be since you said they wore a dress and typically but not always, female humans wear dresses. Though the clothing is not limited to any one gender or sex."

Nathan stares silently.

"Do you love her?"

"Next question."

"Have you ever been in love, Nathan?"

You chew your lip nervously, leaning into the computer as if you might miss something if you did not.

Nathan stands and goes to the door, scanning his card and exiting. He walks through the halls on the cameras brought up on the live feed screen on your right. The door on your left chimes and opens.

"That was interesting." You say, pushing away from the desk. "I forgot for a moment that she wasn't human."

"I'm decommissioning her."

"What? Why? Her responses were incredible. That's what you wanted right? You want them to be as human as possible?"

Nathan pushes you aside on the chair and leans over the desk to stop capture and save the video file. "She knows too much."

"What? She doesn't-"

"She knows about you!" He stands and puts his hands behind his head. "She knows too much about you. You're not safe if she knows."

You push up out of the chair and he turns away from you. "Nathan, she doesn't know anything besides that you have an assistant somewhere."

"No. It's too risky."

You lay your hand on his back and he drops his arms to the sides. "You're scared."

"I'm not scared."

"Yes you are. I can feel your heart pounding."

He turns around and cups your cheeks. "I'm worried, not scared. I don't get scared."

"Mmhmm."

He strokes his thumbs against your cheek bones. He looks scared, no matter what he says. "I'm worried about you. She started asking if I was in love and I knew if I kept giving her fodder, even if I kept lying, she would draw more conclusions."

"So are you?

"Am I what?"

"In love?"

Nathan takes his lower lip in between his teeth. "It's not that simple."

"Yes it is." You hold his wrists and he takes a deep breath. You flex your fingers against his skin and you can feel his tendons jump as he adjusts his hold on your face. So many late nights and long days have led up to this. Both of you have been dancing around the idea of being more than just employer and employee. "It's just us. You can admit it and no one will think you're weak or something."

"Do you love me? Will you say it?"

"Yes. I love you Nathan."

He brings your face in and presses a kiss to your lips. "I love you too." He drops your face and pulls you in by your hips. "Even if you drive me up a wall and make me want to scream until I lose my voice sometimes."

"You are pretty insufferable too." You smile against his lips. "I guess we make a good pair."

"Yeah we do."  

--------

Header by delicate-venus

Thank you for reading! Please reblog if you read or enjoyed and support content creators like myself - A

*****Note: none of my works should be posted anywhere outside of my linked accounts. I do not give permission to repost with or without credit to my accounts. Please notify me of any reposted works.*****

#ex machina #ex machina fic #ex machina movie #ex machina fanfic #ex machina fanfiction #nathan bateman #nathan bateman fic #nathan bateman x reader #nathan bateman fanfic #oscar isaac #oscar isaac fic #oscar isaac character

[itsclydebitches]

7. The toxic as all hell fandom. The other reason besides the show Twiin is stopping is because of the constant attacks/horrendous comments by the ‘fans’, leaving her no sense of satisfaction after doing a video.

I’d heard as much since I last made that post about why many in the fandom are leaving. It goes without saying that it’s an awful situation: no one should be leaving a fandom due in any part to others treating them that way. But let’s be honest, most fandoms of significant size deal with this. What strikes me more about RWBY in particular is this trend of justifying the harassment that I keep seeing pop up. Meaning, as various posts roll in about Twiin dropping the show, I’ve seen a couple comments that amount to, “The fact that she can’t handle a little criticism is ridiculous. Which is ironic because she’s a critic! Get thicker skin, or get out...” Now, as I mentioned previously, I haven’t engaged with any of Twiin’s content, so I can’t speak to her situation specifically, but there are three important takeaways here for the fandom as a whole: 

1. The “criticism” slung at other fans is not comparable to criticism leveled at RWBY. The crew, as professionals with their own lives to lead, are not going out of their way to watch random YouTube videos about their show, or read an insignificant blog post. (Or, if they are, they take responsibility for what they might find--AKA something other than pure praise for their work.) There’s a barrier there and that barrier is significantly different from someone posting a comment/sending in an ask/etc. when they know the creator will see it. Posting on someone’s video that they’re trash is not the same thing as saying RWBY is trash and... maybe the crew will see it if they wade through thousands of posts created daily? To say nothing of that second difference: critics critique the creation whereas trolls target the person. I’m not going to pretend that no one in the fandom has ever slung insults at the crew themselves (it happens quite a bit), but again, there’s that barrier. You cannot compare someone being critical of a webseries in a video the creators are unlikely to ever see is comparable to someone outright insulting the fan in a comment they are very likely to see. 

2. One of these comments was making fun of the examples Twiin reportedly included in vid (I think? Again, haven’t seen it) saying that if this is all she was dealing with, it’s laughable that she would leave. As someone who receives those sort of comments from time to time it’s worth pointing out that many people are unwilling to post the worst things they receive because they recognize how damaging that would be to many who engage with their content. To say nothing of how damaging it may be to them. I’ve posted some trolling over the years, both to make fun of the troll and, at times, try to reason with them, but the really heinous stuff I’ve gotten? It’s an instant delete. I read a sentence and once I know where it’s heading I’m getting it out of my inbox. I can’t imagine keeping that crap around, let alone interacting with it enough to edit it into a video, something I’d be reviewing before posting and then giving to a potentially impressionable audience. So often if you see a collection of trolling that you think isn’t “that bad,” know that it’s likely a lot worse than the creator has willingly shared. 

3. That being said, it doesn’t matter! Any amount of trolling is horrible. There should not be some subjective marker of flaming that’s deemed “acceptable” because certain people think it’s “not that bad.” It’s all bad. The fact that RWBY has a community where people are looking at constant harassment and accepting it as a given, claiming it’s not bad enough to warrant a reaction, is really very telling. It’s become far too normalized. Twiin is by no means a unique case. I can’t tell you the number of blogs I’ve seen posting about turning off anon, taking a break, or abandoning their content entirely because they receive so much hate. And no, that’s not just the groups we may be imagining. Everyone has a subset of the fandom in mind who they think deserves the harassment because their work is clearly horrible. Those evil critics who only insult the show. The evil critics who praise the show, but not enough to my liking. The evil critic who I just happen to not like the tone of. The fan that ships the ship I hate. The fan that ships the ship that I think is harming others. The fan who posts “cringy” fic. The fan who doesn’t roleplay the right way. The fan asking “stupid” questions. The fan who said something “problematic” three years ago. The fan who just posts too much about the same thing... it really doesn’t matter. The reality is that every fan is a potential target because this sort of behavior isn’t about the content. The trolls don’t actually care about getting better YouTube vids according to their standards, they just want someone to ridicule to make themselves feel big. Those RWBY fans who are more prominent are obviously the ones who attract the most shit, but no one is immune. The community is filled with people who think it’s acceptable to harass others, period, which means that any excuse will do. It’s not a matter of teaching that it’s not okay to do this in [insert situation here] because some situation (AKA that excuse) will always exist. You have to teach that it’s not okay at all. 

#rwby #mymetas #flawartist

[ao3-sucks]

An Archive of Someone’s Own: my experiences being groomed in fandom circles on AO3

TW: Childhood sexual abuse, grooming, mentions of incest and rape.

I used to be a big writer of fanfiction. It was the logical choice for me. I loved to write and create bold and immersive worlds, and I craved an audience who would enjoy my work as much as I did. Since my writing wasn’t actually good, I needed a community of other amateurs who wouldn’t mind that, and by tweaking my characters and settings into ones from canonical media, I got the audience I so craved.

I started writing fanfiction online when I was 14, posting initially on FanFiction.net and then moving to AO3 a few months later. As I got back into writing original fiction towards the end of high school, I lost interest in this community, and it’s been a long time since I posted anything much on AO3.

I’ve always struggled with the fact I display a lot of symptoms of CSA, and for the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why. Throughout my teen years, I refused to get changed or bathe when anyone was even vaguely nearby, constantly paranoid about being spied on; I developed a severe touch phobia, and would have frequent panic attacks from something as small as brushing arms with a passerby; I resolutely identified as asexual and refused to get into anything resembling a relationship with others because the very concept disgusted and repulsed me.

Weird, considering I had grown up pretty normal and all of these symptoms had started around my early teens. It was only when I told my friends about my friendship with a 30 year old I had met online that the pieces started falling into place for me.

Child grooming is usually discussed in the context of one adult going out of their way to befriend a child with the goal of lowering their resistance to sexual abuse, through normalisation and friendliness. I’d like to talk about how that worked on the fanfiction website AO3. Since it’s an open website and most communication takes place between anonymous users or accounts in the comments section of a work, there is very little delineation between spaces for adults to discuss whatever dark topics they like and spaces for kids to do the same.

This frequently leads to pretty inappropriate conversations between people of widely varying ages and life experiences, which is how I ended up talking sex as a fourteen year old with people ranging from a couple of years older than me, who were generally okay, to more than twice my age. The 30 year old in question listed on her profile how many pedophilic ships she loved, and she knew my age but pushed me to keep discussing sexual topics with her. Sounds like a red flag, yeah? Well. I was 14, and very stupid.

This 30 year old woman, who I will call Aku (because it’s similar to her screen name and because it’s funny to name her after the bad guy from Samurai Jack) would start conversations with me whenever I posted anything to AO3 and would refuse to take no for an answer when I tried to back out of conversations with her, and since these conversations were public and occurring within comments, I didn’t want to be rude to her since this was taking place on content I was trying to promote.

I told her my age multiple times and she would either pretend she forgot from last time (saying her memory is super bad) or continue as though it was just trivia about me and not a sign she shouldn’t have been pushing me. My primary objection to what she would say to me (since most of it was just her being annoying) was her insistence on sexualising everything I wrote, and her determination to push me into writing pornographic content, which I eventually gave in to.

Yes, she was a terrible person. She emailed me using her personal email address, so I know her full name and place of residence, because she’s an idiot. These emails also contain sexually explicit materials. Nothing much ever happened between us except for these very creepy interactions and the fact we remained online friends for a few years. But here’s the thing: she wasn’t the only person pushing me into creating sexual content. Lots of people would comment on my writing demanding that I show explicit sexual content when I really didn’t want to.

After a while it felt like I couldn’t write a longer, romantic fanfiction without including explicit sexual content. Like my work wasn’t valid without it. Other, more popular writers were usually sexual in their content, and I wanted to be like them and bring in the views, right? So, when I look at my back catalog of works, I can see how my content moved from completely non-sexual to featuring sexual content over time, and the views usually came with. In this way, I was in an environment that was encouraging me on many levels to sexualise my own work, which impacted the way I thought about my creative process.

Here’s another example I remember. When I was a young sprout, I remember reading down someone’s list of fanfiction recommendations and seeing a work called Hug Therapy, which I promptly read. While the work is marked as explicit and containing the Loki/Thor pairing, the use of relationship and rating tags on AO3 is so poorly regulated that it didn’t really mean anything to me to see either of those. People tag hardcore material as non-explicit and tag friendships as relationships, because there’s no motivation to tag properly. Plus, someone I followed here on Tumblr had recommended it to me.

Now, you wouldn’t know from the listing, but while this piece starts out as comedy, it turns out in the end to include rape, incest, and BDSM in very explicit terms. The fact it was tagged as being explicit didn’t slow me down, because the liberal use of these tags could mean that an explicit tag was just there because sexual content was implied or mentioned, which I thought would be the case based on the rest of the listing. Out of curiosity, I recently tried to report this work to the moderators for containing no warnings about incest or rape, and I got this in response:

“Selecting “Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings” satisfies a creator’s obligation under the warnings policy. Users who wish to avoid specific elements entirely should not access fanworks marked with “Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings”. Our Terms of Service note: “You understand that using the Archive may expose you to material that is offensive, triggering, erroneous, sexually explicit, indecent, blasphemous, objectionable, grammatically incorrect, or badly spelled. ….. This decision is in accordance with our policy of maximum inclusiveness; we have therefore closed this case and will not be investigating further.”

Which, yeah, I guess. The frustration comes from how ‘Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings’ is an extremely commonly used tag, and most things that it’s used on are totally harmless.

This fanfiction, which I was recommended by a friend, is hugely popular, in the top 60 most read fanfictions in the entire fandom. You wanna hear the kicker? The author, Astolat, is one of the founders of AO3. They’re not just some random author who isn’t following the rules. They’re a creator of the whole website, and they made the rules. This is pretty telling about how seriously the website actually takes protecting their users.

My final example I want to give is one of fetish content. People in fetish communities generally (not always) say that fetishes are probably something one should work up to after the onset of sexual activity, especially potentially harmful stuff like BDSM. In the circles I was running in, if you weren’t sporting a fetish or two (no matter your age) you were a boring bitch.

Maybe this isn’t true of everywhere in the fanfiction community, but I used to feel that bizarre pressure until I got out. Bear in mind that my main time in this community was from ages 14 to 17. I never made my age a secret, either. I told people outright I was that age, I was in high school, I was playing hockey and studying The Great Gatsby when I wasn’t online.

Since I was in the Avengers fandom and I liked Loki and the Asgardians, I was frequently exposed to incestuous content between Loki and Thor, and a lot of it came out of nowhere or was poorly tagged. This was considered the norm, and while I at first felt completely horrified and repulsed, within a year or two I no longer gave a shit. It’s only in the last few years as I’ve begun to unpack everything that I’ve started to get that strong revulsion reaction to incestuous content.

In the circles I was in, it was relentlessly normal. Normal to the point that people who disliked it were usually shouted down. Even to this day, debate rages on in fandom spaces about whether or not content like this normalises this kind of abuse. In my own personal experience, which I don’t usually like to talk about, it absolutely does.

In real life, this normalisation started to have serious consequences for my mental health and interpersonal relationships. In fanfiction, any occasion when you are alone with someone could become sexual, any familial relationship is possibly sexual, and it doesn’t matter if you like it or not. I became incredibly anxious around male family members for fear of being sexually assaulted, and my OCD, which I had been developing since I was a child, turned from thoughts of physical violence to thoughts of graphically sexually assaulted by anyone and everyone around me.

My fear of being touched got to the point where I would have panic attacks if anyone came anywhere close to touching me. I quit sports, fucked up my romantic relationships, and didn’t hug anyone, not even members of my family, for years. All the while, I had bought my first laptop and was consuming more fanfiction than ever before. I struggled with my sexuality growing up, as I am bisexual, and while fanfiction provided LGBT content to help me, the content was frequently so disturbing that I viewed any expression of sexuality as something evil and predatory.

The community on AO3, whether you like it or not, is often sexual, and provides no barriers between the casual user looking for content and extremely intense fetish material. It’s sometimes called the Pornhub of fanfiction, but considering the wide range of people who use it, it’s more like if you opened Youtube and saw niche hardcore fetish videos just on the front page, recommended and trending.

Sure, you have to click a little button to confirm you’re 18 before you can actually read a story, but the tags and descriptions of readily available works can be extremely explicit. Fanfiction also brings you into close contact with fellow readers and the author, and encourages you to become a content creator, which in some ways makes it more dangerous.

I was affected much more strongly by what I saw than most people would be, because I was already treading shaky ground. But I’m also not the only person out there who has been hurt in this way. Most of my friends who grew up in fandom can report the impact that fanfiction culture had on them. One of my friends from high school knew a panoply of porn terms at age 14 or so due to reading fanfiction, and another of my other friends at high school almost exclusively read rape porn because it was her favourite. I didn’t have friends who watched porn; I had friends who read fanfiction. These are just as troubling to me as any other accounts of young people consuming visual porn from a very early age.

It’s frequently cited that fanfiction gives minority groups the opportunity for creative outlet. It was a great place for me to cut my teeth as a content creator, and a source of acceptance and kindness when times were tough. Fanfiction communities have historically been the domain of women and minorities, and create a space for these people to tell their own stories.

It’s largely because of this that fanfiction communities fear censorship and strict moderation, as they have been attacked in the past on homophobic or misogynistic grounds, resulting in mass deletions of works or the shutdown of websites. But there must be some middle ground between total censorship and the kind of free rein that puts vulnerable people in danger, and I strongly encourage the board of AO3 to seek this middle ground out.

But it’s the community itself that needs to shape up; AO3 is, after all, a community-led website built by fans for fans, so the fact that this website has such issues is a reflection of the issues that run deeply within the people who created it. Aku didn’t talk to me with the intention of doing me harm, or so I believe at this time, and she didn’t pursue me as a lone wolf or in isolation.

She was simply a particularly brazen member of a community that was used to having inappropriate conversations with young people and sexualising everything they did. Even people my own age were jokingly pushing me into discussing and consuming extremely sexual content. It was just normal. That’s what I want to say here. Inside the world of fandom on AO3, the grooming of children with sexual content is normal. And that’s scary.

- Mod Daft

#mod daft post #ao3 discourse #fandom wank #fanfiction discourse #fanfiction wank #csa// #rape// #grooming// #incest//

[austarus]

Harrison Wells (Eobard Thawne) x Reader - Integrated Revelations (1/3)

**A/N: The picture/edit/gif does not belong to me.

*I attempted a thing where I try to get back into the groove of writing for my murder speed husband... It’s probably shit, but here goes nothing. Sorta another theory I’ve had and had all these scenes connect together. I’m a shit writer so... Also, I’m dying and crying. Hahaha. I literally am dying. My uni work online is being ridiculously overwhelming along with my work hours for school. I really need a week with no deadlines or work just to get caught up with three weeks of work for certain classes. I really need to take a break. But I can’t, started to loose sleep. Can’t even have time to write or play Pokemon Reborn. Anyway, that a bit of an update from me. I wrote this back in July, hoping to have written a fic a week (which turned out to not happen, but hey, I tried) until October to post things. Also this most likely has grammer errors. I’m sorry. Once again, a shit writer. Please don’t forget to comment, like, and reblog. It means a lot to content creators of all kinds!

Word Count: 3584

Part 2  Part 3

“Well...” Eobard’s raspy voice didn’t seem to alarm the two speedsters that had phased into the Time Vault. The futuristic speedster had sat with a leg crossed over the other, and elbow resting on the arm of the chair. “Things just got a lot more complicated, didn't they?” Eobard pushed from the chair, standing up and taking a few steps forward. Nora and Barry looked on, one adorned a look of uncertainty and the other masqueraded his rage and pain through the years. “Barry Allen.” Barry nodded along, gauging the black-haired man’s façade. “But which Barry Allen? Clearly, you're… from a lot later than this one.” Eobard maneuvered his body and pointed to the unconscious form of an earlier Barry Allen.

“Way later.” Barry simply answered, looking indifferent.

“Way later,” Eobard echoed the response, putting emphasis on the word ‘way’. The scientist nodded along, pursuing his lips as his electric blue eyes flickered to Nora. Before anyone could speak, could even move the Time Vault door dematerialized. Nora watched as an earlier version of yourself entered the Vault hurriedly and out of breath. You had entered looking over your shoulder with a tablet in hand. You had been scanning for the supposed Time Wraith that had attacked Barry, but not your present time Barry.

“Eo, I traced-” You froze in place as you turned your gaze forward. Fear crippled your heart as you saw a version of Barry, much older through the years, and a woman not too far off his from his age. You swallowed thickly, clutching the tablet tighter. There’s three Barry Allen’s now?? Who the hell decided to break time? A small throbbing sensation erupted at the back of your head, but you dismissed it. Eobard had swiftly moved to stand in front of you. His eyes connected with yours for a moment.

“You knew?!” The young woman spoke up, stepping forward towards you which caused Eobard to hold out a subtle arm out to the side to keep you behind him. “All those years.” The older man narrowed his eyes at what the female had called out to you. You frowned at her words in confusion. Who is she? An image flashed through your mind of the woman, smiling proudly at Barry while wearing a dark purple and white suit with a yellow emblem. She clearly knows who I am, but… What even happened? Are they from a different future? You pushed away the image to the back of your mind. “How could y-”

“If you even think about touching her, either of you, then you’ll regret ever running back here,” Eobard steely replied. You took a step closer to your speedster boyfriend in case something were to happen and he needed to speed you away to safety. Not that you needed saving, but you were still working on defending yourself via your lessons with the futuristic speedster. So, they’re from the future, and I’m guessing far off from this other Barry, but not too far for him to age too much. You spared a small glance to the cuffed and unconscious Barry Allen on the ground. It hurt your heart to see him vulnerable like that, but Eobard had confided to you his suspicions regarding this Barry Allen. One Barry Allen problem at a time. Taking a breath in, you remained silent and studied the two speedsters that confronted your speedster.

“Let it go.” Barry grabbed onto the speedster’s shoulder, holding her back. Oddly enough, Barry’s words coldly cut through you. 

“Now,” Eobard’s cocky attitude returned to him as he established the safety of your presence. He had that kind of affect, putting himself on the air of superiority and intellect with his attitude and words to belittle the person in front of him rightly so to get the desired reaction he wants and anticipates. Eobard knows how to tug on Barry’s strings. “Who's your friend? Let me guess. Jesse Chambers- No. Maybe Lawrence. Wait- Danica Williams-”

“-It doesn't matter who she is.” Barry cut off Eobard’s rattling of names.

You eyed Eobard’s deceptive small smile as he held Barry’s gaze then turned to the young adult. The female remained silent, avoiding Eobard’s icy eyes. “She's your daughter.” You scrunched your face in confusion before the neurons clicked in your head after a few seconds. Lemme guess, she’s a speedster that ran back in time and met a younger version of her father. Weird flex bro, but whatever. You do you. If I was a speedster, I’d do things differently. Obviously not up to scale what with the tampering that Eobard likes to do with the timeline to get his way with things. “You've brought me your daughter.” Your eyes flickered back to Barry before taking another look at the female and seeing a bit of resemblance, other than the fact that she was a speedster like him. Then the article Eo’s been obsessing about did reveal something true. Barry does take Iris as his wife. The West-Allen family. “It's, um... Dawn, if I'm not mistaken.”

“Nora.” The young speedster forced out after briefly glancing at her father.

“Nora. Oh, that's nice.” Eobard turned back to Barry with a smirk, “At least you still have one.” That’s cruel, Eo. “What- Nora- time travel's so weird-”

“Why did you come here?” You found the nerve to speak up, moving to stand beside the man masquerading as Harrison Wells. I’m not going to be afraid; I can’t always cower behind Eobard if something unexpected happens. I need to take things in my own hands. Even if they do find out about- You cleared any evidence of distress at their sudden appearance from your throat, “What do you want?”

“I need him to fix this for me.” Barry held up a broken tube-like device in his hand.

A thought hit the genius scientist instantaneously, his blue eyes widening. Turning your body, you saw Eobard take a few steps backwards, “No...” The headache didn’t go away, instead intensifying slightly by the second. Negative emotions flooded your system at Eobard’s crippling composure. He shook his head at them. “No, if you're here...” Eo turned to face the unconscious Barry, cuffed to his motored wheelchair, pointing to them and him. “And he's here... that means-”

“-You don't get home.” Barry simply stated. Your heart shook, terror and dread feeding into your system at his words. Uncertainty of the future- your future with Eobard- plagued you. How does this all end?

“I get home!” The yellow speedster whipped his head around in agitation, his voice raising with every statement. Barry smirked cruelly as he shook his head. You held your breath at Eobard’s spiking wrath, you hadn’t seen him this angry since General Eiling’s interference with The Flash and Plastique. Even then he’d mask his resentment to pull the strings in the game strategically. “I get home. I go home! I get everything-”

“-You don't go home, Thawne.” The Scarlet Speedster halted the Man in the Yellow Suit. Eobard clenched his jaw. You reached out a hand to rest it on his arm in an attempt to calm him. His eyes met yours for a fraction of a second. You felt the tension hang heavily in the air. “Unless… you help me.” Barry held up his broken device once more, mockingly this time. Your eyes flickered to the ring on his right hand. Similar to Eobard’s. A future version of Cisco must have been able to figure out how to use microtech to compress Barry’s suit. He’s the greatest mechanical engineer that I know. Eobard’s shoulders sagged a fraction as Barry held his ground. Turning around, the genius scientist rubbed his face before kicking the spare Barry in annoyance. Barry, all clad in black, winced because he probably ended up feeling that kick. You and Nora remained silent, eyeing the exchange between both speedsters.

Eobard shifted his body back, hands on his hips and fueled hatred present in his eyes. “What do you want?”

“Like I said, you're gonna fix this for me.”

“To do what?”

“Drain dark matter.”

What could Barry possibly need with Dark Matter? Hasn’t it done enough damage? “Whose dark matter?” You crossed your arms with the tablet close to your chest, a frown on your face as Eobard stepped beside you once more.

“None of your business.” Barry sneered at you. You narrowed your eyes at his demeanor, the young man who you gradually grew close to and considered as another brother like Cisco.

“Barry-”

“-It is our business.” Eobard retorted, taking your hand in his tightly. Both men were frustrated at the others persistence.

“No, it's not.”

Eobard started, letting go of you and rounding heatedly on to Barry, “There's no chance that I help you-”

You reached a hand out. “-Eobard, don’t-”

- It's none of your business-”

“-Cicada's!” Nora blurted out. Silence filled the room between the four of your, outbursts settling. You blinked a few times, taking a step back and resting a palm against your temple. Grimacing, you cast your eyes down as images of a half-masked man in green stood with a dagger. A glowing dagger with a look of emptiness and death in his eyes. That man looks dead to the world, as if willing to kill for an estranged purpose. It’s so cold. You shook your head subtly and stood your ground, unwilling to show weakness, but you saw Nora’s eyes shift when she looked at you. Barry eyed his daughter with a sort of incredulous look while a calculating and analytical look flashed through Eobard’s eyes.

“Cicada's.” The name seemed so familiar to Eobard as it easily slipped of his tongue. The hushed tone in Eobard’s voice expressed a calm before the storm. A deceptive man full of secrets and knowledge of many, many years to come. Especially when it came to The Flash. “The one who got away. You want to destroy Cicada's dagger, don't you?”

“We want to save lives.”

A cynical laugh leaves your speedster’s lips as you pursed yours, trying to tease out the logics from Barry. “You want to save lives.” Eobard chuckled mockingly at Barry’s response. “I bet you do. I bet you do. Especially your own, right, Barry Allen?”

“Look, that me,” Barry pointed to the other version of himself in the room, “he's gonna wake up soon. He sees me standing here, your whole timeline is gonna be blown to hell. You're never gonna get home. You know that's true!”

“I know! I know!” Eobard sighed, his facial expression contorted, and his eyes held a different motive as he flicked his gaze to Nora, who hadn’t stop taking glimpses of you. “Where are my manners? Can I get you a cup of water?” You rolled your eyes at Eobard’s ploy.

***

The four of you had moved to the small lab, far from the Cortex in avoidance of Caitlin and Cisco. The timeline was a fickle thing to speedsters, Eobard had told you that. But oddly enough, when it came to Eobard it seemed to be malleable to his every whim. Tools and spare wires littered along the desk your speedster boyfriend was working at. The monitor held a camera feed of the Time Vault where Barry’s unconscious younger version was still unconscious.

How hard did Eobard hit him? Like, how the hell is he still asleep even through all that yelling and seething??

“Here,” you handed Nora a bottle of purified water.

“Thanks,” she quietly spoke, you nodded at her. You really didn’t know what to think about someone who knew you in the future, yet you had no idea who she would be until a few years later. Would I even still be in this time period by then? Or would Eobard had kept his promise? … Nothing’s making any sense right now. You felt frustrated for not really being part of their conversations. You were… just there.

“So, who made this?” Eobard examined the piece of teach as he started working on it.

Barry answered with pocketed hands, “Someone smarter than you.”

“I doubt that,” You snorted as Eobard laughed at Barry’s statement. Leaning against the dark blue beam of the side lab, you crossed your arms avoiding Barry’s gaze when he glanced over to you. You chewed on the inside of your cheek. “If so, then why come here? Why go through all the trouble to come here when you can get help from the person who made it? Why then would you need Eobard’s help?”

“We-”

“It’s… complicated,” Barry sighed before Nora could finish saying anything, pocketing his hands.

“I think that’s an understatement to the type of trouble that seems to find you, Barr.” You crossed your arms. “At least a Time Wraith didn’t follow you this time. Which I’m still having trouble tracking down.” You nodded to his former self on the monitor. Barry rolled his eyes at you.

“You know, Allen,” the yellow speedster wheeled around, electric blue eyes meeting Barry’s green gaze, “for your plan to work, you're gonna actually have to have his dagger in your possession...”

“We've got that covered.”

The villainous speedster raised an eyebrow at the forensics scientists. “You got that covered. How’s that?” He humored them.

“With this.” Nora pulled out a dark piece of metal, holding it out for you and Eobard to observe momentarily.

“What is that?” You piqued up, causing Nora to look over at you. An odd emotion flickered in her eyes. Eobard reached a hand out to it only for Barry to pluck it from Nora’s grasp. Your eyes flickered between the two then back to Nora. She didn’t seem to be cautious around you and Eobard at all. Revealing the reason for aid and showing Eobard exactly what he seemed to want to see. You weren’t a genius, but you obviously saw the pointed looks that Barry subtly gave his daughter. The cogs were turning in your head as well as in Eobard’s. He masked his growing speculation about the two speedsters.

“Is that-”

“It's a piece of Savitar's suit, yeah.” Barry stoically responded, since Nora had already shown Eobard the metallic piece, to Eobard’s oncoming question before he could even finish. Barry knew Eobard recognized the object, shaking his head that that cat was out of the bag for this secret too.

“Savitar?”

“Savitar. The Future Flash and the self-proclaimed God of Speed, kitten,” Eobard simply explained as he worked. Images of a metallic suit flashed through your mind as it hummed with energy; a familiar face shrouded in shadows and a hauntingly course voice. “A twisted time remnant of the man you know to be your friend. Another big bad that Barry’s had to face in the future, primarily due to the mistakes of his growing unhappiness. Isn’t that right, Flash? The pain you’ve caused the people around you just for you selfish wishes.” Barry rolled his eyes but remained silent.

“Eobard, play nice,” you scolded the older man, “they’re still guests here after all.”

“Hmph. You know what's funny about your dad, Nora,” the futuristic genius caught her attention, “is he hates me. Hates me with a passion, and yet a version of him, this Savitar, is a much bigger jerk than I ever was. Did you see the face?” Eobard gestured to his own face, primarily to one side of his face while snickering “Did you- did you see the, like, pizza face-” Nora awkwardly stepped from foot to foot, looking away.

“-Pizza face?-” Eobard Tiberius Thawne you owe me so many fucking answers when we get home because these images aren’t making as much sense as they should.

“-Can you hurry up?-”

“-Yeah, I'll hurry up.” Eobard smugly nonchalantly threw the tiny screwdriver onto the desk. He picked up a different on. “I gotta tell you, Allen, using Savitar's suit, it's a smart idea.”

Barry tilted his head to his daughter. “It was hers.”

Eobard gave her a hard look. His eyes flickered towards you then turned around. “Clever girl.” You picked up an odd indication in his tone. The speedster narrowed his eyes at the tech as he ignited it, illuminating in his hands to signal its functioning aspect. On the monitor, the four of you noticed that the other Barry was coming to consciousness. Eobard inhaled silently. “Oops.” Eobard swiveled his body around to hand them the piece of tech. “Gotta go.” Barry narrowed his eyes, quiet hatred behind them as he took the tech from his nemesis. “I still look forward to seeing how this all pans out. Nora. Kitten, make sure they see their way out,” Eo glanced at you one last time before speeding away in a torrent of red-lightning to the Time Vault. The three of you watched as the villainous speedster reclaimed his rightful place, crossing his legs once more. An analytical look across his features.

You spoke before the two speedsters sped away in a torrent of lightning. “Cicada’s the one with the lightning-shaped dagger, the one that glows ominously? Heartless eyes? Breathing problems?”

“Yeah? How did you…?” Nora trailed off. Barry figured that your powers were still manifesting themselves and it seems that their run back in time has triggered sporadic post-cognitive images to be revealed through certain key words.

“It doesn’t matter how-,”

“Your powers are still developing,” Barry interjected, pocketing the tech safely. “It seems that our visit has amplified what you can do. Let’s just what it doesn’t shift anything else”

He knows about my powers… Right, time travel. “Just be safe. I-I don’t know too much and I’m not sure what the future holds, but whatever trouble you two have run into just be cautious. Not for me, but for the ones you love. The past will always have some sort of domino effect to the future. I may not be able to time travel, but Eobard has taught me a thing or two about it.” You stopped, looking off to the side while rubbing your arm. “Barry?”

“Hmm?”

“Just answer me this one thing.”

“… It depends.”

“I know, timeline and speedster stuff. But…” You took a breath in, “Is he safe?” The speedster avoided your eyes. You swallowed thickly, moving your gaze to Nora. “Does he live?” She opened her mouth a fraction, moved by the desperation evident in your eyes

“I can’t answer that.” Barry whispered without hesitation, an alien emotion behind those eyes, replacing the kindness and warmth the Barry you knew had. It was bitter. “Nora, it’s time to go back to the night it all began.” Barry flashed away to the pipeline. Nora remained.

“I’m sorry,” She whispered, your body felt numb at the absence of answers. You turned back to the monitor, running both hands through your hair before picking up a spare tool and frustratingly throwing it at the wall. Picking up the tablet once more, you ran some algorithms and diagnostics privately on your powers as you made you way to the Time Vault.

Eobard’s head perked up in question at your entrance. He remained seated catching your troubled look. You only whispered, “We need to talk after this is over,” before leaning against the wall and tapping at the screen of your tablet. He hadn’t missed the embittered look in your eyes, the prominent frown on your face. A peculiar emotion hidden behind those lovely eyes of yours when the speedster had been so accustomed to seeing lights and twinkling of stars within your irises.

Eobard rubbed his wrist as he attained messy hair due to Barry and Nora’s revelations. You speculated he had been running his hands through it in thought as he tried to decipher the truth and what his next plan of action would be. King vs King. Eobard and Barry. It was a dangerous game and it’s clear that Team Flash are Barry’s pieces to move while Iris was by his side. From the future’s perspective. But you… at this point, you hazard a thought of what Eobard saw of you as. Queen… or Pawn. Pursing your lips, you shoved those thoughts away as your mind reminded you of all you and he had gone through since he had revealed himself and his truth to you. But right now, you were feeling so conflicted and insecure at how everything would play out. He promised to take me home with him… That we could start a life together. I don’t want to be used up and thrown away again. I’m tired of being broken and alienated.

The restrained Barry shifted once more in abrupt confusion as he found himself slumped against the cool metal of Eobard’s motorized wheelchair. A prop to his act. His mind felt foggy and arms felt heavy, particularly his right hand. You stopped tapping and eyed him indifferently because you really had no idea how to feel, but you realized you need to be cautious with how you act and what you say until you and Eobard clear things up from earlier events.

Barry’s eyes darted rapidly to the seated, smirking speedster in front of him then to you then to the metacuffs before lingering back to Harrison. The Scarlet Speedster assessed the guarded expression on your face. You saw this Barry feign confusion, eyebrows raised as he eyed the metacuffs and Dr. Wells. You cracked your neck as Eobard did a little hand-wave gesture to Barry. The young speedster looked baffled, probably at getting caught, as he opened and closed his mouth.

“Now, who are you?”

#harrison wells x reader #harrison wells #harrison wells imagines #harrison wells fanfiction #harribard x reader #eobard x reader #eobard thawne x reader #eobard thawne #eobard thawne imagine #harrison wells imagine #harribard eowells x reader #harribard eowells imagine #harribard eowells #harribard #the flash #Nora West-Allen #barry allen #the flash x reader #the flash imagine #DC comics #dc #DCTV #dctv fanfic #Reverse Flash #the flash cw #team flash x reader #team flash #team flash imagine

[dessarious]

Misconceptions, Miscommunication, and Misinformation Pt84

Sorry for the erratic updates. The heats been making it near impossible to think about anything besides ice cream and sleep. :) Stress at work isn’t helping either but hopefully things will calm down soon.

Inspired by @ozmav Maribat AU

AO3   Beginning   Previous   Next

As they neared the front of the bakery Damian heard shouting. He shared a look with Luka as Drake continued ahead of them. He knew that voice. He’d been on the receiving end of it a couple times at this point. He had to wonder who was the current target of Sabine Cheng’s wrath. When Drake opened the door, Damian realized she was yelling in Mandrin but it was a dialect he wasn’t familiar with so he could only make out parts of it. The word ‘ungrateful’ made an appearance more than once.

Of all the things he’d expected, Sabine yelling at Marinette while Chloe was practically crawling into the wall to stay out of it wasn’t it. Normally she’d be going into protection mode. When he opened his mouth to interrupt Chloe shook her head violently at him. Marinette had her head down but he could still see part of her expression. She didn’t look scared or worried, more resigned. Chloe motioned them over to where she was, and Sabine didn’t even acknowledge their existence.

“What’s going on?” Drake’s soft question caused Chloe’s eye to twitch.

“Mari poked a sleeping bear and is reaping the rewards. Trust me, no one wants to get in the middle. It’ll just prolong the attack and possibly get you banned from the bakery for an indeterminate amount of time.” She kept her voice quiet and moved her mouth as little as possible. It was obvious she was trying to follow her own advice. Luka just nodded and leaned against the wall to observe. Drake still seemed torn so Damian decided to distract him.

“Why don’t you check over the chair while we wait?” Damian smirked at how quickly Drake jumped on the excuse to not help Marinette. The smirk disappeared when Sabine’s gaze came too close to him. The woman was terrifying and he still had no idea why. He noticed the four new Kwami standing on the other side of the room all looking at the woman in varying forms of awe. He had to wonder if it was because they could understand her or just the fact that she was yelling at the Guardian. Either way, the fact that none of them or Tikki were interfering was a bit telling.

“So do I want to know what triggered this so I can avoid a similar fate?” Chloe rolled her eyes at him.

“Trust me you do not know that woman well enough to cause that reaction. I honestly don’t know what Mari was thinking. I think her frustration at everything is finally surfacing.” Damian frowned as he considered that. Marinette had been extremely upbeat, which wasn’t unusual for her but he hadn’t really thought about the fact that he hadn’t seen her crack. At all. He just assumed she still didn’t feel comfortable being that vulnerable around him. He’d never considered she was keeping up a front in front of everyone still.

“Has she reacted at all?” Chloe let out a deep sigh and he saw what looked like guilt in her expression.

“Not in a way that matters. She’s too busy comforting all of us to have the breakdown she needs.” That certainly sounded like Marinette.

“Not everyone has a full scale breakdown you know.” Chloe just let out a sigh and began rubbing one of her temples.

“She hasn’t cried. She hasn’t gotten angry. She hasn’t talked about how this has affected her or made her feel. She’s been so busy trying to make sure the fallout from Hawkmoth is being taken care of, dealing with the Justice League, and keeping me calm she hasn’t been able to concentrate on herself at all. Add that to the fact that she’s been repressing her emotions for the last two years because the consequences if she didn’t were possibly world ending and it’s a solid bet that when the dam bursts, it’s going to be brutal.”

Damian could only give a non committal hum. Marinette didn’t seem like the type to just have a meltdown but Chloe had known her a lot longer. For all he knew she could have been an emotional wreck before Hawkmoth entered the scene. The way she’d allowed Lila to just destroy her civilian life said that she clearly valued others over herself and given the stories he’d heard about her from before that it had nothing to do with her being Ladybug. She would take care of everyone else and neglect herself and that could easily lead to what Chloe was worried about.

“It’s not just you that she’s keeping calm you know. The only one of us that she hasn’t been careful around to a rather extreme degree is Drake. She’s even been keeping Luka at arms length and that doesn’t normally happen. She feels that we’re all her responsibility so it’s not specifically your fault that she won’t let herself grieve.” Damian saw Luka wince out of the corner of his eye. They’d talked about this but apparently he wasn’t supposed to mention it to other people. Chloe looked like she’d been slapped.

“He’s not saying you’re any less important to Mari. Just that you’re not the only one adding to her stress. You’re the one that’s doing the most to ease her transition and the one she’ll eventually open up to. You’re her center.” Luka’s words didn’t really make sense to Damian, or rather he seemed to be talking on more than one level. Chloe’s tension eased dramatically though, so it was obvious she understood what he meant.

“It just feels like she’s locking more and more away. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help.” Her voice was filled with frustration. Damian had a feeling that Marinette wasn’t the only one repressing feelings.

“Maybe if you’re honest with her she’ll be honest with you.” Drake and Luka both glared at him but Chloe was frowning to herself in thought.

“I don’t just want to become even more of a problem for her. She needs to feel safe to let go. She won’t do that if she’s worried about me.” Luka sighed and hesitated before responding.

“Damian has a point. She’ll feel safer if she knows that any outburst from her won’t be harder on you. You’re both protecting each other from yourselves but at the same time it’s causing you to lock each other out.”

AO3   Beginning  Previous    Next

Ko-Fi

Tag List

@noirdots @valeks-princess @chocolatecatstheron @krispydefendorpolice @bee-wrecker @kanamexzeroyaoifangirl @northernbluetongue @paradoxal-occurance @scrumptiouslyelegantchaosqueen @sonif50 @thequestionablyhuman @persephonebutkore @elspethshadow @geekydragonyt @mmwolf1605 @da-tasuky @mjisntme @bluerosette23 @anjuschiffer @littleredrobinhoodlum @tazanna-blythe @resignedcatservant @schrodingers25 @seraphichana @persephonescat @punstoppablechatnoir @magicalfirebird @crazylittlemunchkin @corabeth11 @cyborgcandy @casual-darkness @shamefullove @miraculous-simmer7 @tamoni112 @cat181818meow @littleblue5mcdork @allthebooksandcrannies @enchanted-nerd @disneyfoxuniverse @fallinginthe-void @mandy984 @goggles-mcgee @fontegagrilledcheese @dorkus-minimus @theatreandcomicfreak @zerotosiki @ayuchan07 @mindfulmagics @urbanpineapplefarmer @winter-gardenflower @mooshoon @my-name-is-michell @melicmusicmagic @7-sage-7 @hypnosharkrebeldreamer @alicesangelofmusic @caffeinetheory @nataladriana9 @multplelifes @wanderingreader1019 @worlds-tiniest-spook-pastry @mvaree @redscarlet95 @storyteller-d @howabouticallyou @ginamarie1512 @kurogaya913 @tbehartoo @maddrag @two-faced-biatch @senyahgirl @unabashedlyswimmingtimemachine @iloontjeboontje @kakashixobito @welcometopradasa @amirahevens @amlesi @miraculousbelladonna @virgil-is-a-cutie @18-fandoms-unite-08 @cupcakeandkisses @angelofmusickaterinapetrova @book-r-the-best @dur55 @moonlightstar64 @fertileleaf @thequeenofpotatoeunicornss @thecaptainthunder @danielslilangel @novicevoice @nyaabinch @interobanginyourmom @welcometopradasa @charlietheepic7 @im-here-for-the-content @maya-custodios-dionach @throneoffirebreathingbitchqueen @starwindmaden @tired-butterfly @rogueptoridactyl @emeraldpuffguide @suzen23smith @yuulxd @animegirlweeb @alovelyocean @kris-pines04 @semaalcocer-blog @cadencehood @jardimazul-blog @shethecat @silent-storms-posts @simplysslytherin @tog84 @thesunanditsangel @dast218 @tall-and-angry @the-alice-of-hearts @captainmac6 @theyellowfeverexperience @chrismarium @alessialeone6997 @heaven428 @tinyterror333 @smolplantmum @lilyellowink @naoryllis @katiegardneriscoolerthanyou @magewriter @doodledeerest @athena452 @peachedpocky @tired-butterfly @risingmoonyue @lunammoon @mylife-demonstrates-murphys-law  @bobothyross @silvergold-swirl @loysydark @heaven428 @peachedpocky @hauntedwintersweets @awesome-starfish-and-tacos @silvergold-swirl @rosesgonerogue @castielsofficialtoothbrush @myazael @aestheticnpoetic @creator-josie @sturchling @snowstar1016 @myblacknightworld @kittycatwowmeow @midnightkaito @chylou34 @hufflejournals @indecisive-mess-named-me @uwuteamleader @sassakitty @jessigurl-design @demigodgirl20031 @freshbark @soup-served-chilling @elmokingkong @unknownvsworld @thatonegaybitchfromschool @tis-i-beanbandit @damianette-is-life @peachesbackup @nobodyw8s4evr @the-fusionist @iwantwhirlledpeasandlotsatrees @chocolateherringtacofan

#maribat #marinette dupen chang #Damian Wayne #bffmaridami

[dgcatanisiri]

So... something kinda hit me abruptly and pushed me to feeling about ready to snap, so... Have a word vomit. Kinda feels like a greatest hits compilation of  my “another angry queer rant” tag, but I need to get it out, so...

I know I’ve been over plenty about how I don’t feel represented even when I have something with gay representation. How I’d give dozens of Dorians and Iron Bulls to get even one run of Inquisition that properly has my male Inquisitor romance Cullen. How when I look at Mass Effect - this franchise that I love - I can only see how much it hates me for being a gay man who dares to seek content for me. How godawful it is that Gil’s story, a story that is explicitly a story centered on a gay man and the difficulties he faces BECAUSE of being gay, was written by a straight person who ABSOLUTELY does not GET. IT. And how fandom as an entity sucks, because so often it feels like the attitude of the people in it comes across as telling me that my desire to be represented in my media somehow comes in second to celebrating the advances solely for women, that my needs as a queer MAN (the emphasis usually theirs) are less important, because I can still see myself AS A MAN in other characters throughout media.

But... That doesn’t change the fact that this is a very real, very tangible THING for me to grapple with. And sometimes it feels like no one ever, EVER talks about this.

I mean, my go-to example is that after Inquisition dropped, you could not say A WORD in criticism of Dorian without people jumping down your throat, chomping at the bit to call you a homophobe for it. No matter what reason - but ESPECIALLY if you thought he was “too stereotypical” - you got hit with that label. Even if you were gay yourself, it was just your “internalized homophobia” that made you dislike him, or even being biased against the people who genuinely do lean in to the stereotypes, don’t they deserve representation too?!

Well, yeah. It’s not like I was saying they don’t. But that it’s a stereotype means it’s often still in media, still often THERE. It’s not always good representation, but it’s something. Meanwhile for those of us who AREN’T? It just meant further exclusion from the narratives. A continuation of our invisibility.

And sure, one queer character cannot represent every queer person, one individual who embodies one letter of the alphabet soup cannot be everything to everyone under that individual label. But, again, it still means that I don’t get to see myself.

If media representation is a life preserver, then I’m getting pulled out to sea while the lifeguards are busy with people who are closer to them than I am. Which, you can call it triage, cast the widest net to hope to get the most people, but when you’re one of those who are not even able to grab on to the net and use it to pull yourself closer, it’s not helping. And, because they’re focused on those who have grabbed on to the net, your struggle continues to be ignored.

Worse, sometimes they aren’t factoring you in the net they’re throwing (yes, I’m aware my metaphor is getting increasingly strained, just work with me here) because they think you’re not in the trouble they think others are - if you can “pass” as cishet, if you can exist without actively fearing for your safety, if you are the kind of person who can walk down the street and not expect to be harassed because you “present” gay, then you’re not as in need as those people who can’t, who are going to be threatened for existing while visibly queer.

But the truth is that you’re still suffering. I’m not gonna get in to the whole oppression Olympics nature of it all, but there is an element that those of us who “pass” as being “straight-acting” (and, for the record, I think these terms are bogus and bullshit, but I’m using them for the sake of simplicity in getting my message across, because I’m stream of consciousnessing this post instead of going to bed so you’re getting babble and word vomit so that this isn’t playing on a loop as I try and sleep) suffer that... I’m not going to say that it makes it worse, but it does have this level of SOMETHING that is a unique pain that you aren’t going to find from the people who are visibly and noticeably queer at a glance - it’s not just isolation, because this is something that you end up not talking about because no one around you realizes that you are queer, but also this voice in the back of your mind that starts questioning “are you REALLY queer? Are you queer ENOUGH?”

And that’s why it hurts that little bit more, is that much more a twist of the knife, when I see these people who push the “joke” of like “why did they even HAVE male Shepard?” or “the only way to play is as Kassandra.” Because it does reinforce this idea - that there is this attitude of this thing, this character that I was seeing as representation doesn’t matter. So that I take strength in that character, well, that’s just me latching on to REPRESENTATION AS A MAN, and we’re not here to protect your fragile masculine ego.

When all I’m looking for is a queer man like I am.

And sometimes, I don’t even feel like the other queer men I can look to get it. Like, there was that time about a year ago that I looked up issues of queer men in video games, and the three videos I found all got an “...and NOPE!” reaction from me - the first argued in math about how “queer people are a small portion of the population, we can’t realistically expect to be represented equally,” even though we’re talking about FICTION, which is, by definition, NOT reality, the second was clearly a cishet who compared not being represented as a queer person to not being represented as a Swedish person, and then a third who first had a thumbnail on a video of “good and bad representation” and Kaidan was the example of bad (so a negative mark against this video to begin with, but I was desperate), only to lead with Dorian as a good example, which... *vague motion above and at the “dorian critical” tag* I staunchly disagree with this stance.

Like... I have to struggle to think of who my role models in being a queer man are. It’s not just who fits my story, but who do I look up to, who inspires me. And, admittedly, the luster for any personal hero seems to inevitable wear off at this point, I’m in my early thirties, and most of the media I consume will have characters who are my age or younger PERIOD, so my queer heroes would have to be people I’d consider either peers or even someone who I am older than...

But then, that’s kinda the thing about being queer period - we lost a generation to AIDS, and for those who followed that generation, we’ve had to live in this world where our heroes don’t exist like us, while trying to pave the way for those who come after us, and who can’t conceive of what it is like to age - as in “go from adulthood to middle age to elder,” not just the matter of growing up from childhood to adulthood - and so even as they’re the one who we want to give all of this to... It still means we suffer because no one is there to offer US that hand.

And yet, try to explain this to media creators, and you get ignored or even shut down. Like, I about a year ago, I directly replied to tweet from Patrick Weekes, explaining how Inquisition failed me, how all bi LIs actually HELP me feel more represented as a queer person than the mix of sexualities that BioWare on the whole has said that they intend to do (re: the difference of LIs in DA2 and Dragon Age Inquisition). It got no response, not even a like to indicate that it’d been read by them. I could form in my head the response I’d have inevitably gotten from David Gaider when he still had an active Tumblr of what would amount to, nicest, “we cannot please everyone, enough people were moved by Dorian’s story to make it worthwhile, sorry.” Given some of my cynicism, I can’t help but believe that it would also have come with a “sorry you feel that way.” Particularly considering some of the comments he’s made about Cullen and Kaidan as LIs, both of whom being characters I connect to more than others in their respective games...

And like... Gaider is a gay man. Weekes is nonbinary. But they are from that generation who view being able to exist openly as queer as a revolutionary statement, which... It’s a statement I want to make, sure, but it’s not a revolutionary one to me - “existence” is the bare minimum. To me, focusing on existence as a queer person is to say that the queer character must justify existing as queer in order to be a part of the narrative. But what is revolutionary to me is to give the queer person a story in the narrative that has NOTHING to do with their queerness.

Like... Fantasy world here, Inquisition drops with Cullen and Cassandra as same-sex exclusive LIs, while every other aspect of their stories are the same. Women can’t romance Cullen, Men can’t romance Cassandra. Other than that, we have Cullen with his addiction/redemption arc and Cassandra not just struggling with her faith but even getting the chance to be Divine. Yes, fandom would FLIP. THE FUCK. OUT. But here’s what it says - the things that these characters go through in the course of the game are not defined by their sexuality. Hell, with these characters specifically, you get characters with MASSIVE relevance to queer stories that AREN’T exclusive to being queer - addiction is a real issue in queer communities, given how many of our safe spaces are bars or clubs, places where alcohol (and thus alcohol abuse) is easily obtained, and, by extension, drugs as well. Meanwhile, there are SCORES of queer people who struggle with the question of faith in the wake of their queerness manifesting.

THAT is revolutionary. To take these stories that straight people get all the time, that certainly have meaning as queer stories for the queer audience... And yet, when they go to these (hypothetically) queer characters, it has that subtext without making the story ABOUT their queerness, while still making it clear that, in this version of things, they are queer - players couldn’t pretend that it’s only in some parallel universe that they are queer, they would only be attracted to the same sex PC. THAT is revolutionary.

Or, y’know, take it back beyond BioWare for a little bit here - all the characters I feel the most connection to emotionally in TV shows are straight. All these men who are my role models only ever get shown being involved with women. At most, they’ll get queerbaited as MAYBE being queer, if you just keep watching! Inevitably, of course, they are not queer by the end of the show - the closest to date is the debacle that is Supernatural.

Yeah, there’s representation for ya.

And then there are those who end up looking at what I see as thoroughly inadequate and... They’re happy. They praise it. They look at this thing that hurts me, that excludes me, that can, when I’m in the bad headspaces, even make me question myself... And they have found something they like with it.

Which, for the record, good for them, genuinely and sincerely, I really am glad that someone is getting something out of this, but... Well, see above: life preserver, isolation, “sorry you feel that way.” Everyone else is getting what they needed, but what about me? When does my representation get to appear? Why am I always being left, scrounging for the scraps of the scraps? Why does other peoples’ representation always seem to get shoved to the front of the line, leaving me languishing in the back.

That’s the real thing about all of those lines of “if you don’t like it, go make your own!” At this point, even if I did manage to get something in my to-write folder cleaned up and ready to go, in reality... How am I supposed to feel like anyone other than me WOULD proceed to read it? That the audience would exist? Because... no one seems to care about this audience. Hell, how would I get anyone to publish it if it is only going to appeal to me?

I feel on the margins of the margins, where no one really cares. Hell, even here in my own blog, I feel afraid of backlash - I’ve had the assholes show up in response to like little brief comments that are off-the-cuff rambles, not worded in a way that makes them a full, detailed accounting, and either take them as evidence that I, personally, represent all that is wrong with fandom at large, or that I am a target for their trolling. Because saying that “I find the jokes about male Shepard not mattering to be diminishing of me as a queer person, can we please stop this?” is somehow not just lesbophobic, but VIOLENTLY lesbophobic. Or that saying that I don’t care that bad things happen to a fictional species is somehow advocating for violence against actual women. Or even explicitly calling out BioWare for lovingly lingering the camera on Miranda’s ass is slutshaming her. And of course, there are the assholes who responded to me saying on the BioWare Twitter announcement post for the Legendary Edition that, if it didn’t have a full trilogy male Shepard/Kaidan romance, I wasn’t buying it, and proceeded to a) call me entitled for it (like, read a dictionary, the very fact that I have to call for this content that doesn’t exist in the game proper is the OPPOSITE of entitlement...), b) tell me that I “shouldn’t deny [myself] a great story just because it doesn’t have gay people in it” and c) just generally be homophobic. Even in rolling with it on the basis of “the trolls are gonna show up period if you make it clear that you care about something, especially if you are trying to get representation for some group that is in the minority... It gets exhausting. It can be harmful. It makes it clear that you’re not welcome, even when you’re supposedly united by the fact that you and these people supposedly love the same piece of media.

I mean, among those examples, I’ve given the statements that inspired those responses no tags other than my own organizational tags, but SOMEHOW they find me anyway, so it wouldn’t surprise me if I got accused of like being another White Gay™ with this post, that I simply want to center the conversation wholly on myself at the expense of all other intersections of queerness and other identities or something for saying all of this, even though this is, and it says so from the start, a vent post, which, by definition, is centered on myself because it’s about me and my experiences and emotions. *sigh*

Anyway...

And, y’know, when BioWare actively refuses to even ACKNOWLEDGE that the absence of a full trilogy M/M romance option is a bad thing, it just ends up saying that the trolls are actually the audience they’re willing to court. That Supernatural ending with a brothers only focus that doesn’t even allow Cas to be mentioned other than offhandedly while suppressing ANY kind of emotional fallout to his admission of love says that they don’t care about the queer people who at the very least the actor was trying to be respectful and representative of. That every piece of media that says that to have a queer person in it, their presence must be explained and justified is saying that there needs to be a REASON for queerness, a reason that is not “because people are queer, and queer people come in as many stripes as cishet people, and so media should reflect that spectrum just as much.”

Even when the numbers of queer characters in media goes up, it doesn’t really move the needle. And that’s not even getting to the difficulties when you are any mix-and-match combo under the queer umbrella, or any other identity that intersects to marginalize someone in our society. It just...

Y’know, it doesn’t feel like “it gets better.” Rather it just feels like being stuck in position, just with a changing backdrop. Sure, things look different by the end of the day, but that doesn’t change that you’re not getting anywhere.

#dg gets personal #another angry queer rant

[rnegitsune]

Ok so I thought I'd put together some horror stories from my time as a babymetal fan bc of how drastic the shift in the fandom has been the past year or so. For context I got into babymetal in like june of 2014 (all 3 girls were still underage at the time, I was 22; when I first got into them I thought I would be considered an older fan lmao the naivete, the innocence of new fan me wow I know now I'm not at all in the older half of the fandom esp considering I was born the same decade as su and moa), and I made this blog in I think may of 2015.

I've had people say I should compile men being gross into a post and I just couldn't do that out of fear for my own mental health but this will be pretty close. These are all my experiences with this fandom over the years; I'm definitely missing some but what I do remember should do well to cover most of how this fandom used to be vs now. It's gonna be a lot and tw for men being gross about minors.

Back in my first year or so of this blog I on multiple occasions got dms from men asking to be friends. At the time my bio only said my name and my pronouns. I've always been cautious of dms so I'd ask their age and every single one was considerably older than me. I wouldn't usually answer after that bc no thanks but they would generally try to continue convos til I blocked. The only one I still had was this one

After I put my age in my bio, which was 23 at the time, I never got a dm like that again; take from that what you will. But if you're young please be wary of this hell fandom even now. And if you're an older fan and esp an older male fan reading this, don't dm people trying to be friends. I was over 18 and it still creeped me out to no end.

One of my real first men in this fandom are disgusting moments was a blog back in like 2015 or 2016 who I had some contact with due to common interests; he was a huge yui stan and made bm content. He was like 28 or 29 at the time and I eventually noticed he would tag idols, mostly kpop girls, by their body parts (legs, butt, etc) which is disgusting enough as it is but then I saw him do the same for literal minors, like tzuyu from twice. I messaged him asking what the hell he was doing objectifying women but also actual children and he blocked me lmao. He later unblocked me to let me know that's just how he tagged things and it was my fault he had anxiety and then he blocked me again.

Back before the tumblr purge this fandom was repulsive to a degree I cannot even begin to describe. Someone would reblog something from me, I'd go to their blog and it would be underage jpop idols and japanese p*rn all the way down. I even stumbled upon a man editing underage su into p*rn gifs. Obviously no proof of that but I did go find my initial reaction to it

The number of times I'd get a follow from someone then go to their blog and it would be as mentioned above or their bio would be the most misogynistic trash I'd ever read was staggering. I genuinely considered giving up and deleting this blog so many times bc i felt oberwhelmed and outnumbered by these gross old dudes; and so the fact that this fandom has evolved into a bunch of chaotic wlw?? Amazing, I could cry.

Fun phenomenon of women running bm blogs was men sending messages asking if we liked babymetal. No joke. I think this happened to me two or three times but I spoke w other female creators at the time and it had happened to them as well. My entire blog is babymetal, and yet???

He said the weird guy idk bc he sent some random ass messages vaguely insulting me and when I responded coldly, he acted confused so I said you're some guy idk, hence the above message starting as such. Also that pic and the one up above that has my current pfp bc I just took those screenshots. Like I said I typically blocked weird dms but I guess these passed me by so I still had the messages.

Most people know the sub reddit is the worst and don't need me to tell you but it's a hellscape and I highly recommend avoiding it. A short list of things I've had to see as a result of going there: men discussing at length kano and momoko's appearances and how they look in costume vs in normal clothes. Men discussing at length the hope that the girls would marry men who aren't Japanese, a thread that was from when all 3 girls were underage. They aren't gonna marry you dude they're really not.

The insulting of billie Eilish, a 17 year old at the time, was horrible too. Su and moa got to meet her, something they were extremely excited for, and they posted a pic; the comments were disgusting as you can imagine. The yui rumors were terrible too, fatshaming, slutshaming etc all based on nothing. Some man saying the rumors about yui leaving bc, no joke this was a real rumor, she "got too fat" couldn't be true bc "look at saya." Saya being a barely 18 yo back up dancer who covered the third spot after yui left but before the avengers. Not to mention the upskirt shots from when they were minors, the constant editing of their faces onto explicit photoshoots etc. I remember being a new fan looking for a su pic on google and being horrified at the fact that one of the top suggested results after her name was “bikini;” she was 16 at the time. Also, the uptick in massively creepy posts and messages sent to bm blogs as each girl, but esp moa and yui, approached 18 was disgusting.

Now for some personal nonsense. A big reason why I haven't touched my youtube channel in months is bc I got tired of dealing with the men of this fandom. I poke fun at metal and get told I deserve to die. I say ped*philes and creepy men are gross and get a swarm of middle aged men cursing at me. Had a guy cry about how men are shamed for liking bm and then he turned around and said some gross shit about wlw. Had a guy call me racist for liking a band he also likes (and despite him having no way of knowing my own race) and tell me the babymetal fandom doesn't need my kpop feminist bullshit, which is honestly a great description and I thought about putting it in my yt about lmao. Had a middle aged man unironically say he'd never seen a man be creepy towards bm but fans su and moa's ages calling them hot was creepy. The disillusionment....the level of unawareness is astounding. If you want to see screenshots of some of these comments they are fairly recent in my don't mind me tag; I don't want to see them anymore tho bc they're infuriating so I'm not going to look at them to post here.

Essentially I haven't looked at my channel since may bc men are exhausting and rude and refuse to examine the fandoms they're a part of no matter what. They're told by a woman of the fandom that she's had bad experiences personally and they all start crying about how it's either a lie bc they haven't seen it or unimportant. I did stop reading comments in may and I will never read another one again probably as a result of this shit. Trash men being trash are not worth my time and I refuse to give them anymore of it. I do plan on making more videos tho and let my ~feminist kpop bullshit~ live in their minds rent free.

I will also continue to make fun of metal and the creepy men in this fandom bc it's important and I'm a spiteful asshole who likes disrupting these dudes perfect bubble of a fandom. It genuinely brings me so much joy seeing all the new fans recently (which sidenote if you got into them recently I am kinda curious as to how you found them; I've gotten tons of new followers and considering how inactive they are rn I'm curious). People sending messages about how they finally feel like they belong or that they have a safe space....like I don't even know what to say and I never feel like my responses fully convey how genuinely wonderful that is and how thrilled I am that this is where we're at now and I have had at least some part in it. As this post shows, my experiences have been negative for the most part so the shift recently is such a relief I cannot even begin to explain my gratitude.

So to anyone who read all of this and hasn't disintegrated from the male bullshit, thank you. Keep being yourself and fighting for your place in this fandom, esp if you're a young woman; keep making fun of the creeps and keep making wlw memes!! Babymetal's music is in such a huge way meant for girls and to see more and more finding their way to this previously hellish beyond belief fandom is incredible.

#babymetal #don't mind me #this is long ok