#no one expects the fannish inquisition

[solavelyan]

3, 5 & 22 for choose violence!

3. screenshot or description of the worst take you’ve seen on tumblr

lkaj;fdsf god. i think the most recent one was someone speculating on why of all the inquisition love interests, blackwall isn't as popular, and one of their guesses was that people don't like him as much because he's available to dwarves and qunari. as if people are so comically "prejudiced" against dwarves and qunari that the love interests that will fuck them are somehow tainted. that was pretty fucking stupid.

but one of the ones that really stuck with me was someone who said that... if you dislike cullen, you actually hate drug addicts in real life and you're a bad person. as if that's the only reason he might not be your favorite. pffff.

5. worst discord server and why

the one i'm not in anymore. :3

okay but realtalk, i'm not quite high or brave enough to give a specific name, but i will say that i think it's easy for writing-focused discords to get into a sort of feedback loop that it turns out i just really don't enjoy. some of that is definitely me, but i think i have similar feelings to some other people who were on the same servers as i was and left (the feeling of some spaces being a popularity contest, being unsure of how genuine feedback was at any given time because it could feel transactional, just not necessarily vibing with the sort of unspoken preferences of the group wrt canon interpretation/fanon/etc.).

i also just don't like servers that get above a certain member count because they're too active and i feel obligated to read everything and know everything and then i get anxiety lmao. my ideal server size is like... somewhere under 100 people, probably realistically somewhere south of 50. so that's just me.

most of my fannish group activities before 2022 were either just out in the wild on tumblr, or RP circles in IJ, so i had a bit of a discord culture shock after keeping to myself for so long. and i will say that while some people who are loud about being "live and let live" and being open to other people's opinions are being genuine, functionally... yeah, any contained group of people that gets to a certain size is going to start emulating the behaviors of wider fandom, but in ways much more specific to the driving personalities of those servers.

so you end up with some really wild, overly dramatic discussions of "fandom problems" that functionally only affect the 5 people having that discussion and the maybe 3 or 4 other people that got under their skin about it, so you end up with takes like... well, like in my last question, proposing that a straight white man love interest in a fandom historically pretty friendly to straight white men must be unpopular because he's marginalized somehow, and not because his competition was Ex-Templar Fandom Has Been Thirsting Over Since DAO, What the Fuck Do You Mean That's Freddie Prinze, Jr.?, Charismatically Voice Acted Gay Magic Man from Cool Fantasy Rome, and Tragic Elf Man Ianto Jones. people were just not as into burly bearded dilfy types in 2015 as they are now. it's not a mystery, but if your fishbowl is curved enough, it sure looks like one.

22. your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

oh, this is probably small and silly, but that bit of flavor text at the beginning of Inquisition for the human pc mentions that trevelyan is from a huge family with close ties to the templar order, is the youngest child of multiple siblings, and was expected to go into service to the chantry, either as a templar or in the clergy. i've seen a lot of religious trevelyans, but i rarely see them portrayed as templars or chantry clergy or something. i'm honestly really surprised, given how popular some of the templar npcs are, that we weren't awash in templar ocs during inquisition's heyday.

i don't mind feeling relatively unique (i think i've only seen one or two other templar trevelyans but that's about it), but this is one of those things that always surprises me when i'm the only one rocking up with an ex-templar oc in a given group. they're so interesting! i would totally read someone else's take on the concept.

[ from the choose violence ask meme ]

#asks #ziskandra #bog post #ask meme #fandom bs #obligatory 'i love blackwall i think everyone should fuck blackwall' disclaimer

[gurguliare]

Dear Pliny,

Thank you for your birthday wishes. I thought getting off Tumblr meant that no one would ever trouble to make a callout post for me. What, instead, is this?

Your friend, Gogol

#minipliny #no one expects the fannish inquisition

[gurguliare]

Someone dressed themselves as a bee and glued themselves to a lib dem battlebus in protest at what the lib dem policies would be on bees were they to form the government of the United Kingdom, theoretically

Can you introduce me to them because I have genuinely always wanted to be Reg Shoe’s [wait for it] beerd

#minipliny #no one expects the fannish inquisition

[gurguliare]

Let me offer you a very TMA omen: in 459BC, according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, there was a rain of flesh.

I got a weird feeling from reading this & couldn’t figure out what it was, but I just now realized—it’s uncomfortable to receive an “expired” omen and not the catastrophe that goes with it

#lactose sans lactaid #clodia-metelli #no one expects the fannish inquisition

[gurguliare]

okay FINE top 5 badworst TMA opinions

I’m not sure what you mean by “badworst” given that my opinions are infallible. I’ll present 5 TMA opinions selected totally at random. 

Jonmartin insipid

I dislike the writing choices made for literally every female antag bar Jane Prentiss and Not-Sasha, who is only opportunistically female, so no points

You cannot make your ironic racist takeaway horror less racist by… no, in fact, the sentence ends there

“Everything is capitalism” makes me feel: 

I truly do blame Jon for some of his choices along the way, but I MOSTLY blame him for being so thickheaded that Jonah felt compelled to rewrite his prayer with shorter words.

#clodia-metelli #no one expects the fannish inquisition

[gurguliare]

When will you ,also, write Gertrude/Elias

so my only gertrude/elias WIP concept rn is “time loop agnes snaps and goes to his office to try to ‘convince’ him to ‘kill’ gertrude because she will ‘cause’ problems later and he’s like, dreamy sigh, you don’t say; agnes takes the -1 debuff Too Much Information” 

#minipliny #no one expects the fannish inquisition #but i'm open to prompts.

[gurguliare]

subtweet: people who write bitchy posts about books and then delete them

Local blogger caught with fist stuck “Scathing But Sort Of Unnecessary Remarks About Male Authors” jar, attempting to fish out those pennies for use on anything else

#clodia-metelli #no one expects the fannish inquisition

[gurguliare]

For a minute I thought that shrew mummy was some take on the duct tape banana thing

duct tape banana w i s h e s

#sacredpools #no one expects the fannish inquisition

[gurguliare]

(ok to reply only after 160 is officially out, im an early accesser myself) why are you unhappy with the finale? genuinely curious

I think I’ll just reply under a cut—if it doesn’t work for people on mobile, vaguely-worded TMA early access spoilers below the asterisk, keep scrolling:

 *

I’m not actually that unhappy with the finale. This season simplified and streamlined big metaplot beats at the expense of interesting pre-seeded details about the world, but I would rather the big beats land hard than have the story get bogged down in maintaining consistency with suggestive throwaway lines from earlier in an evolving concept. In this case, I don’t think the beat did land, because of the silly Hussie-style recap from Elias and the incredible nambiness of the prayer, but there were some nice touches and at least a clear course was laid for the final season.

At the same time, this is an execution of the Watcher’s Crown that does its level best to minimize the exceptional, “protagonist” status of the Eye among the powers, and it’s kind of… silly… How can I put this? Um, there have always been two strands to the fear the Eye supposedly represents. One is a fear of a sadistic observer—the fear of stalking, the fear of someone else’s malign enjoyment of your pain. Okay. The other is a fear of indifferent, destructive surveillance which itself gives pain, simply by stripping away privacy and private meaning. The first one is the more obvious and visceral fear; the second one is a bit post-modern. Still, I am more interested in the second strand. Also, I think the second strand is deeply encoded in many apparently arbitrary decisions about timeline and points of historical contact in the story; i.e., Jonah Magnus is a Victorian because the Eye is tied up with the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment, the drive to “civilize” the unknown by cataloguing and conquering it, the drive to make spreadsheets, etc. But 160 gives precedence to the first strand, and promotes the Eye, not to harrowing institutional matrix, but to a more visible petty voyeur. I mean god-king. Sorry. Of course, god-king.

There’s a wannabe kernel of a moral in there about the smallness of the men who make empire happen, ofc, but it’s a cheap solve that sidesteps the cataclysmic damage done by idealism, if you pick the wrong ideal. So I’m not very sympathetic to that, or rather, I’m pulling hard against revealed authorial intention right now and it will take a while for me to come round. I also have a kneejerk resistance to any narrative that seems to moralize, however tacitly, about “unenlightened consumption,” by which I mean an audience that takes too much pleasure in unwholesome content matter—the whole Princess Tutu “oh shit! we were villain-aligned all along!” gotcha. Sorry, sorry, that’s also a reductive take on Princess Tutu. I think. It’s been a while. 

None of the above is really meant to be the final word on this statement, since there were a lot of odd gaps and handwaves—somehow, in this longest of villain monologues—which left the door open for other ideas to return to the fore. I’m excited for next season! But I didn’t want next season to be full of minibosses.

#universemademanifest #no one expects the fannish inquisition #peter lukas was right 2k19 #the magnus archives

[gurguliare]

Is your health okay, I usually get sick whenever I hear bad news too technically trivial to guard against.

DKSJFSDLKGJSDLKGS ANON THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR CONCERN, I HAVE BEEN HAVING AN ALLERGY FLAREUP

#'bad news too technically trivial to guard against' is a spectrum though #like #the watch casting: too technically trivial to guard against for ME but not for clodia wise in the ways of the world #until i got to her. #Anonymous #no one expects the fannish inquisition

[gurguliare]

gogol have u heard about homestuck 2. i don’t know anything about homestuck myself i just felt morbid curiosity.

Oh, is that what it’s called? I thought it was “Fool Me Twice”

#vardasvapors #no one expects the fannish inquisition

[gurguliare]

hi! so i dont know what a magnus archives is, and suddenly there appears on my dashboard Shiny Big Eyes plus Old Lady With Scroll in Hand. and my mind immediatelly goes... "oh athrabeth" and now i'm here bc i need to know if i'm totally wrong / partially right / totally right / should read/watch/whatever mangus archive? please i am so afraid to send an ask off anon but anything for athrabeth i guess

This is a really painful question to be asked for reasons you could not be expected to divine, UNLESS YOU’RE A FUCKING GABE SOCK, which you aren’t. Probably. 

Anyway, uh, old lady with scroll in hand: the Magnus Archives features a major character who bears a passing resemblance to Andreth, if Andreth’s solution to evil gods had been to track them individually to their homes and murder them there, as opposed to simply practicing armchair psychology on the parents. It also has some patronizing immortals and, indeed, some shiny-eyed naifs, although the venn diagram of the two is not a circle, unlike with Tolkien. I can’t tell you if you should listen or not; there is thematic overlap.

#highfunctioningghost #no one expects the fannish inquisition

[gurguliare]

is snuff bad? sorry i dont know things about a disc world

Snuff is bad although it’s not REALLY bad it’s just on the thoroughly crap side of mediocre. Raising Steam is REALLY bad, but I admit the title is not as funny. I can’t remember why the hell Snuff is called Snuff. Snuffboxes are not as far as I know involved. 

#vardasvapors #no one expects the fannish inquisition

[gurguliare]

In the transformers comics Bumblebee 'dies' and then ends up as a ghost haunting Starscream. He keeps trying to tell Starscream he's real, but Starscream thinks he's a stress-induced hallucination and keeps trying to catch him out. Sort of the opposite trope reversal from what you were saying?

Late: thanks for the reminder that I live no more than an inseam away from the trouser of time in which this is a 24hr transformers blog

#neveralarch #no one expects the fannish inquisition

[gurguliare]

rincewind the wizard looks like linguini from ratatouille send tweet

What the fuck, guys, I said I “wasn’t going to say horrible things”

#ALSO LINGUINI SEEMS REALLY REDHEADED BUT WHAT DO I KNOW. TERROR. #i never pictured rincewind as blobby animated softboy tbh more uhhhhh aging mustaches #hundred-separate-lines #no one expects the fannish inquisition

[gurguliare]

i just realised that the homestuck epilogues have a larger female cast than male, and yet the male wordcount is 30,000 higher than the female. #embarrassing

I THOUGHT THE EPILOGUES TOTAL WERE LIKE 30K… DREAD

#Anonymous #no one expects the fannish inquisition #unless that's the joke. in which case you got me. cosigned. ba dum tsh.