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mittensmorgul · 3 years

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For anyone interested in long-term residence in the supernatural fandom, please have some observations I’ve made over the decade I’ve been here. Take it or leave it as you will, but I’ve found all of this info useful over the years I’ve been here.

I wrote this yesterday, and it achieved its mission of identifying the sort of folks who would react negatively to it (i.e. a lot of block lists have been updated), so now that it’s been edited for content, it’s going under a cut (because that is how we do things on tumblr in general, unless we have a deliberate purpose for annoying readers with excessively long text posts) for the sake of people who actually do care about the fandom and its history. If that’s not you or your reason for being here, then keep on keeping on with your own thing, I guess. For those who are interested, there’s a lot of fandom resources some of us have been building for years that you might enjoy knowing about.

First off, I’ve been informed by a few friends who’ve read through this for coherency’s sake that it sort of reads like a *shakes cane from porch* fandom grandma complaint, but honestly... I earned this rocking chair and goshdangit imma rock now. So apologies for any “back in my day” vibes or faint aroma of tiger balm this post might give off. Then again, it’s loosely based on a similar post from 2012 so like... time is a flat circle anyway I guess.

1. There is no such thing as “tumblr famous,” unless you’re referring to the hilarious and delightful fic of the same name (please go read it, you will cackle). Posting Hot Takes for imaginary Clout™ on this site is kind of pointless in the long run. Sure you can post solely for the sake of stirring shit and getting notes, but the majority of the folks who do aren’t long term residents of the fandom. They’re just tourists moving through our little beach town for spring break. If you’re actually intent on moving to this corner of the fandom for an extended stay, please bother to really feel out the permanent residents and understand the culture and general mood of the neighborhood. It bears no resemblance to whatever’s going on across town where all the bars and beach parities are happening, and those loud, drunken revelers are, again, gonna disappear back to their regular lives or on to the next party eventually. That doesn’t mean the fandom is dying, it’s just evolving.

(funny how I had several comments implying that I’m just trying to keep the fandom from evolving with this post, because I sincerely do want the fandom to continue on for years to come, and that is impossible without evolution. We can evolve without self-immolating, though. mostly i included point 1 for an excuse to push ancient but hilarious fanfic on you.)

2. Once you post something here, it’s been unleashed to the fandom winds. You never know where it will end up, or who will comment on it or add to it. Remember that time Misha tweeted the link to the Epic Cockles Love Story post? No? It was wild. That was 2012. They all know we’re here, and how to find us if they want to. Please don’t take it to their doorsteps.

Obviously if someone is being a dick on your posts, please feel free to block them, but the whole entire point of this site is to engage people with your posts. Being big mad that someone reblogged your post with comments or supporting evidence, or happy headcanons or “HECK THIS IS GREAT BECAUSE (insert personal story about their experience or whatever else made them Feel Things about your post)” is frankly ridiculous. If your goal is to avoid any sort of engagement with your posts, then maybe try instagram instead. From what I understand, there is a SPN fandom presence there, and nobody can tarnish your original posts with unwanted commentary. But the ability to reblog with additional commentary is a FEATURE of tumblr that builds community through conversation. Otherwise we’re all just talking to ourselves in a vacuum, and that’s what actually kills fandoms.

(and for the folks who just want to blog how they want to blog and don’t want people to engage on their posts at all, please feel free to block anyone you want, as well... nobody wants to step on your toes, but most of us also don’t want to walk on eggshells wondering if this post is one of the “do not add comments for any reason” sorts of posts, either. This is a huge fandom and most people can’t even begin to keep track of every creator and their url du jour, and what their personal rules might be regarding interaction with their content. Including a “please don’t add comments” note at the bottom of your posts-- and not in your tags that won’t even show up on reblogs, but in the actual body of the post-- would sincerely help avoid any awkward or unwanted interactions, too. At the end of the day, you are in control of your own fandom experience and the block button exists.

For the record, I block zero fandom blogs (which is why I posted this, I wanted it to reach a wide scope... refer to the opening paragraphs as to why).

3. Since this post was partly inspired by a tag I left on that post going around about how “previous tags” mean fuckall on this site (which you can read here), just a reminder that if you like someone’s tags or feel they add value to the post, part of the Peer Review structure of tumblr encourages you to PASTE THEM INTO A REBLOG. If you do this, then at least credit the person who actually wrote the tags! Don’t just copy someone else’s tags into your tags on your reblog of the post without credit either. They were not YOUR tags. (I have had this happen to tag rambles I wrote and someone else got credited with them on a subsequent reblog and it is FRUSTRATING). Just... don’t even bother to write “previous tags” because WHAT PREVIOUS TAGS?! Nobody is gonna bother to chase back the chain of reblogs trying to find where the mystery tags came from, friendos. That way lies madness.

(for the record, since some folks seemed to focus on this point solely, writing “previous tags” on a post isn’t inherently a BAD thing, but for anyone who actually is here for more than one-off shitposting, then it’s sort of a pointless thing in the long run. This wasn’t intended to suggest people who ARE here for one-off shitposting are bad or “doing it wrong,” but for people who might actually want to preserve that hilarious joke or insightful comment. People delete posts and entire blogs all the time around here. Links break. I get that the upcoming generation just shrugs at that and moves on with their lives, but heck... you don’t have to accept that all entertainment is disposable if you don’t want to. There’s a bizarre sort of nihilism plaguing us all about the impermanence of pretty much everything that feels like something we should be fighting against rather than buying into wholesale, even in our escapist entertainment. I’m just exhausted by the complete loss of joy in community.

*shouts from the peanut gallery* IT AIN’T THAT DEEP, JUST GET SOME FRESH AIR AND LOOK AT A PUPPY OR SOMETHING

Yes... yes it isn’t really that deep, but bigger picture in the state of reality we’re all entirely disillusioned with, are we supposed to just give up on everything, including the things we cling to because they bring us a tiny spark of hope that we’re not all just trapped in this dystopian nightmare and things might actually be worth living for?

*peanut gallery clinging to burnt husks of peanuts in a barren peanut field* but this is how we have chosen to cope

Okay... you do you... I feel bad for you but if that’s the case then this post is NOT FOR YOU. AND THAT’S FINE. I honestly do not care if you don’t care! I mean, I’m sorry anyone has to live in a world that drives them to that mindset, but I understand. This post is for anyone who might look at their lives and their choices and think “no wait, I unironically enjoy this and want more from the experience of that enjoyment than I’m currently feeling.” Everyone else can continue with their lives as usual.)

4. CONTENT THEFT IS NEVER OKAY. PERIOD. Things like “credit to the artist” or tagging gifs or images you found on pinterest as “not mine” isn’t actually credit. If you can’t source an image or gif set, DO NOT POST IT! We don’t REPOST (i.e. save an image and then create a new post with it as if it was our own creation). We REBLOG (click the little square arrows and reblog from the actual creator). That goes for gif sets, fanvids, screencaps, meta, fic... everything.

(hopefully everyone here already understands this one, but I felt compelled to include some “these are stupidly obvious” reminders anyway, since this is ostensibly some sort of advice column. This is the equivalent of the warning label on your toaster reminding you not to use it in the bath. Like... duh...)

5. Close kin of item 4 is SOURCE YOUR SHIT.

(for 100% disclosure purposes, I specifically discussed this one in this specific way because of an influx of anon ask messages I received in the wake of the finale. Literally the inciting incident for creating this entire post was what I can only assume was a joking ask about a comment Misha made at a con years ago. Someone actually bothered to take the time to type out those sentences to me. I have no idea what they were expecting in reply, or what could possibly motivate them to send this comment about something so entirely random from, again, several years ago. Just a joke? No idea, but whatever... it got me thinking that there might actually be people who are new to the fandom who MIGHT actually care about the fandom history, and maybe they just don’t know where to go for that info, or how to even begin searching through 16 years of history for things they might actually find enjoyment in, rather than just hauling random out of context garbage out on main and pointing and laughing about it now. People are actually allowed to care about things. It’s not cringeworthy to actually care about things, and you are not alone in actually caring, and there’s this whole big room over here full of people who are thrilled to share in that with you. This post is intended FOR THOSE PEOPLE SPECIFICALLY, so if that is not you, please just continue walking by.)

Yes, I know lots of y’all are new around here right now, but dredging up stuff from years ago that fandom has completely debunked and presenting it as TRU FAX again is just exhausting. We’re not trying to be party poopers, but seriously, we have seen it all and are mostly done with extinguishing bags of flaming dog poop on our front porches for the umpteenth year in a row. I’ve seen a lot of posts that have the same tone as “I saw Goody Proctor dancing with the devil” or “I heard kylo ren has an eight pack” and just... the information is there for anyone who cares enough to find it.

This goes double for “why is nobody talking about this thing I just discovered while watching the show for the first time?!” And, oh hon, we have talked it all into the ground over the last fifteen years. We’re happy you’re discovering it again, but I promise we talked about it plenty when the episodes originally aired. We have such a rich meta history that lots of us have worked really hard to preserve. I encourage you to seek it out, if nothing else than as historical artifacts. The way we have discussed the show has been a 16-year evolution. People have written literal doctoral dissertations on this show. Your shitposts are fun! We love reliving our own experience through fresh eyes, and seeing your wonder at experiencing it all again for the first time! But y’all didn’t invent this fandom in the last six months, either.

Meta Sources and Minerals provided by our friendly neighborhood fandom archivist, @lets-steal-an-archive

Academic books and articles about SPN

A collection of Meta Essays going back to s1 and organized by topic (all of this has happened before, all of it will happen again)

SPN Heavy Meta Archive (s1-3)

Mel’s Dreamwidth archive of meta (s1-12)

Oranges8hands Dreamwidth archive of meta (s1-15, with many similar entries to Mel’s... though ymmv on viewpoint in a lot of these too)

Anyone remember Fandom Wank? Not the concept but the actual LJ... No? Okay have a link to SPN topics that ended up there. Through 2013. We have seen so much... including several fandom containment breaches.

for all your art sourcing needs, please see @theroadsofararchive, the repository for so much fandom art.

need to find a gif of something? canonspngifs is a vast repository of gifsets of the entire series. If the gif you want to use in your post happens to be the first gif in the gifset, in the tumblr gif finder thingy just paste the permalink to that post from canonspngifs (which is easily searchable by episode, character, location, situation, quotes, and sometimes even color and clothing items the actors are wearing... it’s really well organized, especially for tumblr >.>) and the first gif will be automatically linked with credit to the gif creator attached. It makes life easy that way. It’s also convenient when trying to remember something specific but can’t remember what episode it’s from. I’ve used the site to jog my memory before going to the superwiki armed with more specific search results to find episode quotes and references. Or sometimes I just scroll through all the nice gifs for fun, too.

Need a screencap of something and know exactly which episode it’s from? Try Home of the Nutty. You might not find the exact screencap you’re looking for, but they have a complete set of caps of every episode, and it’s an incredibly useful resource for quick reference checks and the like. Just give pages a chance to fully load before clicking on the next one. The site is easily overloaded, but it’s still free to use (and again, with credit... Pretty much every screencap on my entire blog is from HotN unless otherwise credited).

As you can see, this is a fandom built on preserving our history. You absolutely are not required to engage with any of this if that’s not of interest to you, but I can only assume that there are people who would be interested in it if only they knew it existed and how to find it. Well, now they do.

6. A few more notes on tags, and how they work on tumblr. The first 20 tags on your ORIGINAL posts are searchable sitewide, so if you want to be able to find something again, tag that thing first before going on general tag rambles. The only place tags on reblogs are searchable is on your own blog. So you don’t have to put 50 tags trying to get a post seen if it’s a reblog. You’re just spitting into the wind at that point. If you have a filing system for finding things again, then by all means add those tags (again, in the first 20, so they’re searchable), but you don’t need to tag a reblog “destiel” and “deancas” and “dean” and “cas” and “dean x cas” or whatever. Pick one for your personal blog’s filing system, that’s all you need.

(this was only added because tagging and searching on this site is so very broken... I get that a lot of folks don’t care about ever searching their own blogs again for anything, so this one only really applies if you do often find yourself trying to find old posts. If not, then it’s not really relevant. It took me years to work out a decent tagging system, and at the beginning of my time here I never thought I’d end up camping out here for a decade and falling this deep into the fandom, and I regretted my lack of consistent tags only years later when I realized I actually wanted to be able to go back and find specific old posts again. So... for anyone who wants to err on the side of caution, working out a sensible tagging system really helps if you’re here for the long term. I personally tag content by episode, because some of my other general tags are so large as to be practically useless as a search term. But whatever system you choose to file stuff on your own blog, it really only has to make sense to you. And again, if this is pointless advice for someone who has no intention of settling here for the long term. Please feel free to ignore it. I just wish someone had explained it this way to me ten years ago and saved me the hassle of retroactively tagging something like 30k posts... especially now that using the mass tag replacer is the fastest way to get your entire blog deleted... oops? so yeah, don’t use the mass tag replacer either >.>)

7. Tags on Tumblr DO NOT WORK LIKE TAGS ON TWITTER. If you @ someone in the body of the post, it will show up in their notifications (if they’re the sort of person who even checks their notifications... not all of us do. For the record, I generally don’t...), but putting actor or ship names in the tags on a tumblr post does absolutely nothing. It’s not the same as tagging the actor’s twitter account in a tweet. Nobody’s getting notifications about you tagging a post about Jensen here as “Jensen Ackles.” There is a difference. Please learn it. (and don’t take headcanons and ESPECIALLY RPF or otherwise explicit art or fic from tumblr to twitter and tag the actors in it. That’s just... not okay.)

(I have seen the pearl clutchers getting all in a huff about the mere existence of RPF or even explicit content of fictional characters if it doesn’t meet their purity standards, but tagging those things allows people who don’t want to see it to actively avoid that content here. Nobody has a right to tell people their fictional content shouldn’t exist at all, or that creators of that fictional content somehow deserve harassment or threats for having dared to create such “immoral” content, won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children... and no... you do not do that here. Don’t be the problematic behavior you wish to ban from the world. Learn to use tags to protect yourself from, as i have attempted to emphasize here, fictional content you are personally upset by. That’s a you problem, not a problem for the creators of potentially upsetting content that they tag appropriately for.)

8. General formatting stuff: If you’re writing long text posts, visually break them up so people aren’t faced with one long wall of text. The enter key is your friend. Also, if you put long text posts under a Read More break and send people to your blog to finish reading, please ensure that your blog is actually visually accessible (tiny text, or light grey text on a dark grey background, or a visually busy background might be aesthetically pleasing to you but nobody can actually read it. Loads of folks won’t even try. Which is great if you don’t actually care whether people are able to appreciate your content or not, but something to at least consider if you *do* actively want to encourage engagement with your work. Confirm how your blog looks on both mobile and desktop and make sure it’s actually functional in both, too).

And since I mentioned that most of my experience on fandom tumblr has been in the SPN fandom, here’s a bit of a reminder for folks who are new around here. With the reminder that I have been here more than a decade and still feel like a newbie myself sometimes...

This is an OLD FANDOM. There are many, many people who have been at this longer than some of you have been alive. The average age for creators in this fandom is older than you think (I think of my friends in their 30′s as young’ins okay? okay). With that understood, you are responsible for the content you consume and are exposed to. Curate your experience. Ship and let ship. YKINMKATOK. Don’t deliberately expose yourself to content you find upsetting for whatever reason. Tags and warnings are your friends, not targets for you to attack in some sort of purity war. People will ship things you do not like (or in specific ways you do not like), will say things you do not agree with, and will find their happiness in things you abhor. That is not your concern. Find what you do like, and support and engage with it, and ignore (or block, or unfollow) the rest. Tumblr has a feature that lets you blacklist tags so the content you’re trying to avoid won’t appear on your dash.

Remember the paradox of tolerance.

It is not your job in fandom to police how other people enjoy the fandom. It’s not *my* job to police how *you* enjoy the fandom, UNLESS your enjoyment is in actively harming other real human beings in the fandom. If you don’t like their take on the character or the show or the plotlines or their ships or anything else, you don’t need to engage with their posts at all! The necessary corollary to this is that clarifying misunderstandings or correcting factual misinformation is not “policing.”

(this is where the peanut gallery reminds me it ain’t that deep, and I plead with them to put down the social media and find just one (1) thing to actually believe in in this godforsaken life, find something other than disdain and cynicism and spite to live for. If those things motivate you to find a larger cause for yourself, then great, use them to your advantage, but use them to find something that makes you a better person or brings you a modicum of joy and connection to your fellow human beings despite living in a dystopian hellscape of a world)

I have seen a lot of posts lately that are founded on the sort of authority that comes with “I watched through tumblr for a few months and then watched the last three episodes of the series” and as such are just... missing the larger context of the entire show, and are unfounded entirely in canon. I 100% appreciate the new enthusiasm for the fandom that we’ve been living in here for years, and it’s wonderful to see new people enjoying the thing we love. Your headcanons are valid, you are valid, but recognize that your headcanons aren’t canon. All of us finale denialists have accepted this in some measure, so we feel you. We truly, truly feel you. But regarding actual canon, we have a resource for that: the Superwiki. Learn it, live it, love it, as Metatron would say.

(which you could discover he said in 10.17 Inside Man, thanks to the superwiki! accept no substitutes!)

(and again, there have been people who have been involved in fandom for years who haven’t engaged with canon in years, either! You can play in this universe however you choose, BUT FOR PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT CANON AT ALL, WHICH I AM AGAIN POINTEDLY SAYING MIGHT NOT BE YOU, READER, AND I’M NOT SUGGESTING YOU ARE WRONG FOR NOT WANTING TO ACTUALLY ENGAGE WITH CANON, but if you DO want to engage with canon, please have some useful resources. Why do people feel personally attacked by being presented a list of helpful resources? Absolutely baffling.)

(also: words have definitions. “Canon” is a specific thing, meaning in this case “the finished media product that aired on television.” Anything beyond those limits is secondary canon (think: john’s journal, which is not canon but canon adjacent at best...), word of god (i.e stuff said by the writers and showrunners), or headcanon (which includes actor commentary-- they may have helped create the show with their acting choices and whatever, but they are not in control of the story overall). If there’s something you dislike about actual canon, you can reject it and supplement it with your own theories or preferred outcomes-- that’s basically what fanfic is-- but that doesn’t make your theories canon (much to all our dismay, that’s just not how any of this works. This is not to invalidate how anyone engages with the show or the fandom, just trying to clarify what seems to have been a source of unintentional misunderstandings. Your theories do not have to be “canon” to be legitimate interpretations.)

***I am setting this section apart, and did make a separate post of just this following information, because this is where we go from being relatively chill about different parts of fandom choosing to interact in different ways and you do you and blog however you want, to “hey can everybody please understand that the way you are interacting with this specific material might be harmful for specific legal reasons, and stating that you do not care about the consequences of your actions does actively make you the asshole here...” Okay, now that we have that understood:

The spnscripthunt collective has been steadily acquiring new scripts (which are posted in full on the superwiki for everyone to enjoy, for free). The language around how some folks are talking about these scripts is... concerning. For very real legal reasons, actually, and not because we’re feeling precious about the collection and don’t wike it when meanies use them in shitposts.

-First off, these scripts are not “leaks.” They are all verified and legally purchased (or gifted, in some cases, but still acquired entirely above board. we didn’t whack anyone over the head in a back alley for these scripts, or swipe them out of someone’s trailer on set).

(in case anyone was unaware, these scripts are the copywritten protected property of Warner Brothers. So yes, how we use them and share them with the fandom could have legal repercussions. We present them as a collected resource of fandom history which SHOULD fall under Fair Use doctrine, but this is untested legal water. Insinuating that the scripts are somehow not entirely legally obtained, or that posting them for public access involved less than 100% transparent and entirely legal transactions is incredibly concerning.

Once again for the peanut gallery, if you don’t care about any of that and are just having a good time with it, at least be mindful of the work and expense a large group of people have gone through to acquire and present the content you’re all too eager to exploit for cheap thrills. Some of us do actually care and are not exactly comfortable with the fact that others don’t seem to care about burning it all to the ground. We can’t force you to listen or behave as we’d hope you might, but at least be aware of the potential consequences of your actions. All we’re asking is for you to not be the douchebag who sets the whole neighborhood on fire with your illegal fireworks display. Is that too much to ask for? more on that in a second, first... a psa)

-If you see a script for sale and are unsure if it’s legit (or believe it might already be freely available in our collection), please feel free to ask us for advice. Our goal is to make as much of our fandom history available to the entire fandom, and we absolutely do not want anyone shelling out money for stuff you can already find for free.

(seriously, we’ve seen a bunch of resellers cropping up selling printed versions of the scripts we bought and uploaded for everyone to enjoy free of charge, or scripts that are otherwise of dubious origin. We’ve been at this for years now and know what’s actually out there. We don’t want anyone to fall for a scam if we can help it)

-Also, the usual reminder that the scripts we acquire ARE NOT NECESSARILY THE FINAL SHOOTING DRAFTS. In fact, the majority of scripts in our collection are NOT. Changes are made daily to scripts, even during filming. Comparing a Production Draft (white pages, effectively the first “final draft” of what usually becomes a series of drafts before filming wraps) to a much later revision (say... green or goldenrod revisions, several of which we DO have in our collection for comparison) and how those earlier drafts often differ wildly from the aired version versus how similar a much later green draft is to the aired version, for example, can teach you a lot about the television writing process. The link above to the superwiki scripts page has a nice little explainer about how this process works.

Differences between our posted scripts (many of which are white drafts, aka FIRST complete drafts, which will likely go through multiple rounds of revisions before filming even begins) and the aired version of the show are not all “acting choices” or a director or editor just cutting whole scenes on a whim. It’s insulting to everyone involved in production to suggest that’s the case.

(and yeah, fine... whatever, make any sort of posts you like regarding how those changes came about, but at the very least understand that it’s not actually the truth about how any of this works. Don’t care that that’s not the truth and want to make the posts anyway because shitposting is fun and that’s the extent of your sense of humor? FINE! You’re entitled to do that! But at least you DO know the truth now, and hopefully so do the people who engage with your posts. Deliberate ignorance isn’t cute, smooth lions notwithstanding)

There’s probably a whole other post to be made on fandom tagging etiquette, but again I don’t really use the tags enough to know what’s going on with that whole situation. I’ve also probably left a lot of stuff out, so please feel free to add things I’ve overlooked.

Thanks also to @trisscar368 and @thayerkerbasy for help compiling this, too. They were kind enough to escort me through the park to feed these pigeons. Now I need to take them out for ice cream. :’D

So I guess welcome to the neighborhood. Make yourself at home, but like... try not to trash the place while you’re here. Some of us live here by choice, lol.

#this blue hellsite (affectionate)#fandom problems #kinda wish i'd made this post six months ago but here we are i guess lol #long post #now edited for the people who are actually personally invested in the fandom #thanks for participating in this little experiment and I hope this version is actually informative to those who are interested #meaning there's a lot more links to stuff and explainers and whatnot...#and one last reminder that for folks just swinging through for laughs absolutely none of this applies to you #if you are legit interested in fandom history and preservation as we move to the post-canon world then hopefully this is useful to you

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justice4falum · 4 years

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do NOT give money to tumblr user roboticwheelchair

Hi, so you’ve probably seen this post or some of its permutations on this website lately! (The old version of this post broke because I mistakenly deleted it. Let’s try this again, shall we?)

This is a “RAFFLE” for a Nintendo Switch Lite and the poster is asking people send them $10 to earn a spot in the raffle, of which there are 52. People have already sent money in.

This post was made by user roboticwheelchair and the name which currently displays on their paypal is “Mick Garcia” - it’s very possible you’ve heard their story already from several weeks ago. User roboticwheelchair claims that they were physically assaulted for being a transgender man, and that they sustained a concussion.

The BAD news is that roboticwheelchair is a blog which has been on tumblr for a very long time, and used to belong to someone named Falum Gibson. You may have heard this name from their #justice4falum campaign ages ago. They are a notorious scammer and has been doing this since 2016. LET’S REVIEW (LONG, LONG, LONG POST AHEAD.)

Part 1: #BieberMeetFalum and Meeting Ed Sheeran

In 2016, Falum ran a Justin Bieber fan account on Twitter called @bieberfreezer (account has since been suspended). They began a campaign called #BieberMeetFalum by posting a Twitter thread about their disability, cerebral palsy, and how they had intended to meet Justin Bieber personally because his music was important to them. However, the venue he was performing at was not wheelchair accessible and Falum uses an electric wheelchair. They were trying to get the attention of him or his team in order to ensure they met. (LINK)

This was a reasonable thing to post about! Accessibility is a necessity. We know this. And they weren’t asking for money. Twitter got this the attention it needed and they were able to meet Bieber despite the trouble. (LINK)

Later on, they gunned to meet Ed Sheeran and succeeded.

Part 2: #TaylorNoticeFalum

In 2018, Falum was on Tumblr as user taylorsgetawaycarxo. At this point they still say they have cerebral palsy, but has also said they have COPD (something they later will drop.) Claiming that they are terminally ill and has 2 years left to live, they talk about how Taylor Swift is their idol and they want to meet her before they die.

This came right after they had done the same thing with Demi Lovato fans, claiming they idolised Demi and needed to meet her, so on and so forth. They ran a GoFundMe for this.

The GoFundMe is now defunct, but the URL was “falumlastwish” I believe. Here’s where the plot gets a little lost, because the sheer number of different GoFundMes, donation posts, and meet-a-celebrity campaigns that Falum was running in these couple of years is... pretty wild. There’s a post from another blog here on Tumblr about the Taylor Swift fandom’s run-in with them. (LINK)

Here’s a GoFundMe they ran from a music fan account on Instagram, where they were asking for help escaping homelessness. They raised almost 5,000 dollars out of the 10,000 they were asking. (LINK)

At some point they also ran a GoFundMe for a PTSD service dog. I’m not sure how much they were asking for this one, but they apparently made $880 off of it.

Part 3: Ellie Elizabeth

This part is a little muddled, because the tumblr blog connected to it has been deleted and it’s really difficult to find archives of the posts, but at some point in early 2019 Falum started using the blog ellie-elizabeth21 to ask for money as well. The story was that they were being sent to conversion therapy for being bisexual by their father, who had them deemed legally mentally incompetent. Further stories they posted about were potential evictions, needs for grocery money, etc.

Here’s a link to an imgur album of some of the posts this account made. Many of them achieved their goal of over $200 or more. (LINK)

“Ellie” also ran a GoFundMe to escape conversion therapy. Although the person running the campaign was listed as Ellie Elizabeth, the “beneficiary” listed on the campaign is Falum Gibson, proving that Ellie was another pseudonym - just a better hidden one. Here’s the link to that GoFundMe, where you can see it for yourself. (LINK)

This was Ellie Elizabeth’s PayPal account at the time, I believe? And anyway, you might note that they apparently made nearly $6,500 on this account.

Part 4: #Justice4Falum

Now in November of 2019, Falum moved away from the world of Fan Internet and decided to try out something new. They made the blog roboticwheelchair in September of 2019 and reblogged a photoset of cats to it, which for a while was the only thing on the blog besides the donation post they initially made. They’ve gone through a cycle of reblogging and deleting things there, basically clearing out the blog every couple of weeks to make a new post.

At this point they were also @falumgibson on Twitter. The account has since been locked. This is when they posted a GoFundMe describing medical abuse they were allegedly undergoing at the Ottawa Hospital. Weird side note, this GoFundMe is still running and can be donated to, though obviously I’m recommending you don’t do so. (LINK)

They made several donation posts on Tumblr about this campaign, frequently linking it or their PayPal account and asking people to donate. Sometimes it was to go directly to their legal fund for this lawsuit, other times they were asking for money for medications or other immediate costs.

Side note, they had claimed to be in the hospital since August of 2019 due to suicidal ideation and claimed they had been psych warded. From what I can tell, the Ottawa Hospital General Campus they claimed to be hospitalised at does not actually have a psychiatric ward. It has a mental health team, but they appear to do outpatient work. It’s not really clear what they were in the hospital for at this point.

#Justice4Falum was originally about fundraising for a place to live because apparently they were in danger of being forced to leave the hospital due to homelessness. Later on they turned it into a legal fund to sue the hospital for mistreatment.

Part 5: Further Fundraising, Coming Out As Trans

While Falum was in the hospital, they started identifying as nonbinary. I’m not in any position to speculate about whether or not Falum is transgender, because that’s honestly not the point. Either way, they have started using their trans identity in much the way they use their disabilities - as a way to garner sympathy and trust, and to scam people out of money.

On their Twitter at this point, they did seem to have kind of a bizarre interpretation of how transition worked and appeared to be under the impression that the first thing trans men do is get top surgery? (LINK)

Shortly after this, still during the November that #Justice4Falum ran during, they began asking for donations to a different PayPal account than their normal one, because their stepdad was dying of cancer. There was a GoFundMe for this as well, but it appeared to feature their parents and was possibly not created by Falum.

No date on this tweet unfortunately, but right after that, they made a post about how they had been outed to their transphobic father and needed to escape living with him.

At this point, Falum has added several diagnoses to those they claim to have. In addition to cerebral palsy, they now claim to have multiple sclerosis and several mental illnesses. No more COPD, though! I’m very impressed that they recovered from a terminal illness!

Now that they’re out of the closet, in early December they begin making donation posts on Tumblr again and have now made a Patreon. (LINK: POST) (LINK: PATREON) Soon after this, they apparently left their home and became homeless, and started posting about this on Twitter and linking their PayPal.

In late December they posted on Twitter about having attempted suicide by taking 75 extra strength Tylenol. Warning for a photograph of their IV in this link. (LINK)

Not very long after, Falum returned to their narrative of being terminally ill by posting about how their multiple sclerosis (something they have only claimed since 2019, I believe) causes them over 20 seizures a day and will eventually kill them. (LINK)

Then they locked their Twitter account and decided to try something new.

Part 6: Connor Kay, “anontransman”

Enter Connor Kay. At this point Falum makes a new Twitter account called @ConnorIsTrans which eventually morphs into @anontransman. They initially link this account to their old main account, saying that they’ve switched in order to be openly trans on their new account because their transphobic father is stalking them. (LINK)

They continue asking for donations on Twitter, now with a Ko-Fi account called Connor Rocks.

They also post a story about an ex-friend of theirs spitting on them for being trans, apparently, and say they’re calling the police on her, which really doesn’t seem like something that’d be safe for a disabled trans person to do but whatever. (LINK)

On their blog at roboticwheelchair, they post stories about how they are being assaulted and mocked for being transgender. I should note that on Twitter they’ve said they are not out IRL and have not taken steps to transition.

Not only does this particular story sound kind of like the “down with cis bus” post, it’s also somewhat suspect that they allege they were called a tr*nny as an AFAB trans person, given who is generally targeted by that word. But. Moving on.

When the COVID-19 pandemic came around, Connor created a Facebook group for disability support. This was run by the Facebook account Connor Kay, which has since been deleted. It was the same account that they used to have and they’d not changed anything except for the name; prior posts showed it was Falum Gibson’s account.

It turns out they deleted this Facebook account because someone on Facebook posted about their years-long history of scamming people online. Here’s a link to an imgur album of some of the Facebook callout and the images the OP posted. (LINK)

So Falum, or Connor, decides to start anew with an all new PayPal, Ko-Fi, Patreon and Twitter account. At this point they begin to break away from linking these accounts to the name Falum Gibson and their past donation posts, although they are still using the same Tumblr blog. They change their Twitter handle to @anontransman and remove links to Falum. (TWITTER SCREENCAP) (KO-FI SCREENCAP) (PATREON SCREENCAP)

Then they tweet about how they have been diagnosed with cancer. (LINK) Then they begin asking for $100k to go to the US for treatment. (LINK)

Soon after, this Tweet has been completely deleted and they have instead started asking for money for top surgery. (LINK) I believe this is in reverse chronological order, but here are a week’s worth of tweets from them - all deleted at random times in order to make room for the others - asking for money for various reasons. Yes, this was all literally within the same week. (LINK)

Note the very last image of that album contains a reference to an “Amazon Raffle” - they were basically telling people that donations would win them a spot in a raffle for an Amazon gift card or something? It seems they moved on from the @anontransman account before the raffle could come to fruition, or possibly that they just deleted all references to it. Not sure.

In April of 2020, roboticwheelchair posted a specific donation post about being attacked for being transgender and sustaining a concussion. They said they did not see a doctor after the assault because they didn’t think it was important, so their concussion went untreated and because of it they were unable to get groceries. The donation post linked to Connor Kay’s PayPal account. It was deleted and reposted several different times, with basically the same text.

Part 7: Mick Garcia

This is a more recent post with the exact same story, now about their multiple sclerosis medication. The only difference is now that the PayPal link sends you to the PayPal of Mick Garcia. Mick Garcia has a different PayPal username than Falum, Ellie, and Connor did.

On April 12th, the @anontransman account deactivated after Falum, or Ellie, or Connor, or Mick decided to leave Twitter. Then yesterday on April 19th, it reactivated and they tweeted once again.

However, around this same time, another Twitter account under the name Mick Garcia with an icon @anontransman used to use and a very similar tone/style cropped up.

The Mick Garcia account has not tweeted yet, as it appears that they may be staying with @anontransman for their current purposes, but it appears that for some reason or another they’ve decided to start going by Mick Garcia now.

I guess it’s probably relevant to note that while I suppose there are probably some white people out there with the last name Garcia, Falum is really seriously white and it’s suspect they would pick out Garcia as a pseudonym, whether they list “white” in their Twitter bio or not.

More from the current state of the roboticwheelchair blog includes many, many posts where they’re either reposting their own petitions or basically grabbing for as many followers as possible. You can probably guess why. (LINK)

As of April 20th, 2020, there are 2 donation posts still standing on their blog. Here are both of them. (LINK)

Finally, The Switch Raffle

Literally today, April 20th, roboticwheelchair posted something that is allegedly a raffle. They claim to be giving away a Nintendo Switch Lite to a lucky winner. There are 52 slots in the raffle; they are asking that people send them $10 over PayPal in order to enter. They’re also claiming this is to further fundraise for their medication.

They are claiming their doctor has put them on an MS medication that costs $450 every two weeks. (Note that if they’re trying to make money for that right now and also going to buy a Switch for the winner, than they’d only have about half of that at the end? The Switch Lite is about $260 in Canada and their total earnings from a full raffle would be $520.)

You should not give money to them for this raffle, or for any reason. The reason I’m compiling all of this is because after months of seeing them pull this scam over and over again, they’re now promising people an actual product that given their history, I would say they are highly unlikely to deliver.

Given their past, it is most likely they will delete this raffle once they have the money they want, and refuse to allude to it ever again. Or maybe they’ll just disappear! Or hell, maybe they’ll have some kind of nebulous problem ordering the Switch when someone wins, and that’ll be that.

But it’s clear based on this history, I hope, that Falum or Ellie or Connor or Mick has a long history of taking lots and lots of money from strangers online. Like, a lot of money. My estimate is that they’ve made over $15k on this, and that’s exclusively based off of the visible numbers on their GoFundMes and Ko-Fi accounts.

Please do not give this person your money. They are not trustworthy. There are other people who need it - like you, or maybe like, someone you personally know and not some complete stranger who keeps telling people they’re terminally ill so they can meet a cool musician.

Disclaimer

I’ve compiled all of this information to the best of my ability, but I am just one person and it took a lot of digging due to the deleted accounts involved.

Falum is actually disabled; I believe they do have cerebral palsy and may have other disabilities. I do not know if they really have MS, but it’s hard to trust them because they previously lied about having terminal COPD.

I have no idea if Falum is really transgender or not. They have apparently taken no concrete steps to transition, which I know means very little. That being said, if they are transgender, they are leveraging their identity in dangerous ways against other people for money and sympathy. Their stories about being assaulted by strangers for being transgender are highly suspect, given their lack of transition and the fact that the scenarios they describe are highly cliche.

Finally, I’m not trying to harass Falum or threaten them in any way. I don’t know them. If they’re interested in talking candidly about what they have been doing all these years and why, that’s fine. I would honestly love to understand, but at this point it seems like the only thing they can do is apologise for their dishonesty and stop doing this.

Reblog this post if you want! The point is to get the word out there, because this person has been a pervasive presence on this website for some time and has not yet been called out.

#tumblr scam #signal boost #donations #falum gibson #roboticwheelchair #anontransman #connor kay #mick garcia #ellie elizabeth

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transhawks · 3 years

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I was tagged by @todomitoukei. Thanks!

Why did you choose your URL?

I was originally waxwingedhawks on here until June 2020 when a very kind mutual gave me the transhawks URL due to me really often talking about the "Hawks is trans" headcanon I have.

Any side blogs?

Yes! My main blog (but quite dead) is @baezetsu, my "personal aesthetic" blog is @bacchantis.

How long have you been on tumblr

I think it might be 10 years, though this is the second tumblr account I made. My old personal tumblr got deleted by me....five years ago?

Do you have a queue tag?

Nope.

Why did you start your blog in the first place?

I really wanted to talk about BNHA and Hawks with other people after stalking the tags for a bit. I was never "involved" in fandoms on social media, only forums, so this was a new thing for me.

Why did you choose your icon/pfp

This is by @lemongogo! I just wanted Hawks and Trans flag. Simple, gets to the point, yanno?

Why did you choose your header?

so on the 'main header', it's just a pretty image of Keigo. On the dashboard header, it's basically how I feel most of the time when I make my more inflammatory posts because I've had like.... hero stans, hawks stans, and villain stans upset with so frequently that it felt good to make a joke about it.

What’s your post with the most notes?

My badly made image making fun of Hawks being outed as a spy by the LoV.

How many mutuals do you have?

Probably several dozen.

How many followers do you have?

I lose a lot frequently so often for weeks I'll have a very steady number. Like I get several follows and unfollows a day. Currently it's sitting at 3150-ish, not as many as people think.

How many people do you follow

338. I want to follow more but I'm careful about who I follow since I just don't want to see certain things or rbs from certain people especially. Yes, I xkit and tumblr savior, but sometimes certain usernames on here just honestly trigger anxiety attacks from me.

How often do you use tumblr each day?

I scroll daily if I'm not busy.

Did you have a fight/argument with another blog once?

Too many. Some I feel were justified in having due to the...frankly disgusting actions of the people behind them. And some I think I could have let go, not gonna lie. I still clearly have very firm beliefs about things, but I was also in a place where I was very much trying to please my former best friend by following her lead or just being just as quick to argue and fight as she was, with little room for nuance or just letting go.

As much as it hurts that the friendship is over, honestly letting her go was probably one of the best things I could have done for my mental health. Sometimes I feel as if I was in some sort of cult where my every move was evaluated for moral righteousness and approval by someone who ultimately didn't know how to care about me as much as I cared for her.

A few months after I ended stuff last year, I came across a tweet from Contrapoints about how "women" show their bitterness and isolation by moral fanaticism, as opposed to cis men, who usually resort to violence (context was a discussion of incel-led violence) and it made me realize just what had been happening and why.

The constant fights, discourse, need for every iota of fandom activities align with some moral radical leftist code that had genuinely nothing to do with actual fucking activism - it was a product of bitter, angry women and someone who was socialized as a woman seeking to find whatever piece of power they could have since the world so often denies people like us any material power whatsoever. And that's not...who I want to be. I don't want to be domineering or aggressive. Even if I don't mind arguing itself (I'm Ashke, we argue!), the constant fights and constant feeling of having to justify even the smallest, silliest things wore me down.

In short, I was probably an incredibly unpleasant person to deal with for a long time. I'm sorry, and I'm trying to change myself for the better.

How do you feel about “you need to reblog this posts”

Definitely dislike them.

Do you like tag games?

If I'm not busy, I like doing them

Do you like ask games?

Sometimes! If I have time.

Which of your mutuals do you think is tumblr famous?

Quite a few within the meta-writing or villain/hawks stan community! @thyandrawrites and @moodyvoid and @scarletrain1724 and @linkspooky @todomitoukei and I'm probably forgetting people but if I see you a lot you're bnha standom famous I guess lmao.

Do you have a crush on a mutual?

Yeah. Two of them. I don't say anything though because I'm tired of internet relationships and am trying to meet people in meatspace.

#tag game

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beardofkamenev · 3 years

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When Adults Attack! (Teenagers)

(Sorry to everyone for dragging this up again, but some people are chronically incapable of letting drama die down.)

The last time I posted about this was 18 February. It’s now late-March. Despite repeatedly claiming to be “over it”, a self-proclaimed “respected history blogger” has been screaming into the void for over a month now. She seems to be under the unfortunate impression that she’s completely innocent of wrongdoing, all the criticism is unprovoked, she has been targeted by “white bigots”, and that she’s somehow the real victim here. So now I have to explain why that’s bullshit. Unlike her and her two friends, I don’t make extreme but vague accusations with zero evidence. I don’t make empty threats about “exposing” people.

The short story? She involved her own self in a situation that had nothing to do with her, downplayed her friends’ racism towards others, incited her followers to harass a teenager, repeatedly lied to her followers about the multiple POC who criticised her friends being “white”, and has continued to inflame the issue while trying to downplay her role in doing so. The long story? Well, I’ll let the receipts do the talking.

That’s Olivia’s first post at the start of February, days before I or anyone else had even said anything. “My anonymous Jewish friend said!” should have been a red flag to anyone capable of reading anything longer than 280 characters. I’ve already explained why Haley (lucreciadeleon/turtlemoons plus her 92849374 alt accounts) is full of shit and so have plenty of others (here, here, and here, to name a few).

Olivia claims that, as a Romani woman, she’s not obliged to engage with content that offends her. Fine. So why is a black teenager obliged to engage with Haley’s deranged anons? Why are her hate anons are so worthy of a response that not responding is an act of ANTISEMITISM that warrants Olivia telling everyone what an antisemite this teenager is for not responding? FYI, NO ONE is obligated to respond to anon hate, especially from people they’ve already blocked. And considering Haley admitted not once, not twice, but three times to breaking Tumblr’s TOS to circumvent a mutual block and send those anons (including how she did it), people are especially not obligated to engage with her.

I made my first posts exposing Taylor (lucreziaborgia/elizabethblount) and Haley’s lies and backtracking on 6 and 7 February. This was before I acknowledged Olivia’s role in inflaming the situation. In fact, I didn’t even know about her tweets until 8 February. Yet, here she is on 6 FEBRUARY already bitching about my posts to her Twitter followers. She has some nerve acting like I victimised her, just because I posted the screenshots of her bitching about me. And bragging about ‘gaslighting’? The word that multiple people have separately described what her two friends subjected them to? Classy.

I can’t “stalk” her public Twitter any more than she can “stalk” my public blog. What an exceptionally stupid claim to make, considering her tweets kept getting recommended to my mutuals whether they liked it or not. Have some integrity and own the shit you say, rather than backtracking, deleting your posts, and pretending that you didn’t say the things we saw you say. If you want to talk shit about others in public, be ready to answer for it in public.

I also wonder how this started over Henry VII. I specifically wonder how this discussion between myself and May (richmond-rex) triggered Taylor’s totally unprovoked racist comments about how we and Nathen Amin “simp for a dead white man”, and we should “simp for someone who actually advocated for the rights of others” instead. The implication being that Tudor history is only for white people like Taylor, and that only her fave is worthy of discussion (“AnNe BoLeYn WaS oThErEd BeCaUsE sHe WaS tAn.” Good grief).

When multiple POC called bootleg Regina George out for it, not only did she say she couldn’t possibly be racist because Haley approved of her racism, but also tried to argue that Nathen Amin deserved it because it was inappropriate for a British man to joke about Brexit. She then claimed we called her “anti-Welsh” (another fucking lie) to make it seem like a bunch of cRaZy blacks and browns were attacking poor, innocent white her (with Olivia coming to the rescue, of course). And as if that wasn’t enough, Haley then sent these bad faith hate anons calling Nathen Amin’s tweet ANTISEMITIC, for no other reason than to retroactively justify Taylor’s racist comments (though I didn’t see Haley getting offended when she was hate-scrolling through his blog before Taylor was called out).

That was the “antisemitic shit” Haley “privately messaged about” that Olivia thinks deserves a response. In case it's not clear: defending racism makes you complicit in racism. Being Jewish is NOT a get-out-of-racism-free card, and Haley trying to use it as one is absolutely dishonest, especially when NO ONE even knew she was Jewish until she finally admitted in February she was the anonymous ‘Jewish friend’ who sent those batshit anons. Other Jewish people also called Haley out on it, yet Haley and Olivia have conveniently ignored that little fact since it contradicts their narrative.

You think it’s over? Nope. Taylor then slunk into May’s dm’s with a half-arsed apology, where she admitted that the only reason she made those racist comments about Nathen Amin was because we “attacked Gareth Russell first” (“BeCaUsE AnNe FaNs CiTe HiS wOrk”) and she “just wanted to educate us about not lionising Henry VII” (even though anyone with eyeballs can read our discussion see she’s full of shit). At the same time, she and Haley were messaging other history bloggers, telling them that everyone who called them out were antisemites (including an openly Jewish mutual of ours) in an attempt to alienate them from the community. And this was just in JANUARY.

“I can’t be racist! My Jewish friend agrees with my racism!” That steaming load of backtracking horseshit is unfortunately the kind of nonsense Olivia has chosen to defend. FOR WEEKS Taylor ignored May’s messages, explaining why she — a black woman — found Taylor’s comments offensive. Did Taylor listen? Nope. In fact, she only replied in February: after she already started posting about how ignoring Haley’s hate anons was “antisemitism”. How convenient. Taylor might be a fucking idiot but we’re not. She only replied to May because she was afraid we’d use her own words against her. Clearly she never learnt a damn thing because here she is on 6 February backtracking on her apology. “Actually, I did NOTHING wrong! Also, you’re all antisemites for saying I did because my Jewish friend agrees with me!” And what made Taylor feel as though she had permission to start deflecting her vile behaviour onto others in order to get the heat off her? Olivia’s post about ‘their Jewish friend’ Haley: the one that followed Olivia’s “private discussion” with “her two friends”. Taylor is a racist hypocrite who hides behind the few minority friends she has to justify her racism, and attacks every other minority who disagrees with her. It’s no coincidence that the majority of the history bloggers who have a problem with Taylor and Haley’s nasty behaviour happen to be POC.

Despite Olivia admitting that she knew nothing about that situation other than what those two told her, she still took it upon herself to misconstrue and downplay to all her followers the extent of her friends’ racism, lies, and general nastiness (here she is on 9 MARCH). For her, our problems with racism are little more than “stupid drama”, “Henry VII drama”, “Gareth Russell drama”, “overreacting to a joke”, and “petty disagreements over dead people” because her friends are the perpetrators. Yet she demands everyone sympathise with her never-ending dramas and projects her behaviour onto others, despite the fact that she’s shown absolutely no understanding for why so many people have problems with her friends and has consistently defended the perpetrators. She’s entitled to be upset at whatever she wants to be upset at, but she is not entitled to tell her followers that we can’t be upset about racism directed at us, especially when that situation NEVER EVEN INVOLVED HER.

I agree. It’s disturbing that three grown women in their mid to late 20s have a vendetta against an 18 year old. Olivia acknowledged that her posts were reckless and that she would have acted differently if she just sat down and thought for one fucking second. But rather than correct the record on the same platform she made those accusations, she doubled down and took off to Twitter, saying that her anger entitled her to act that way. All with zero acknowledgement of the fact that the teenager SHE falsely accused and repeatedly mocked for her age was still being harassed by HER followers as a direct result of HER posts.

She might love the ‘clout’ that comes with a large following, but she evidently doesn’t care about the responsibility that comes with it. In Taylor and Haley’s case, it’s little more than a means to intimidate others into silence. Olivia might be a “respected history blogger” or a “good historian”, but that definitely doesn’t make her a good person. Far from it, if her behaviour is anything to go by.

This was on 9 February, 3 days after my first post. Bitching about me was all fun and games until the receipts came out, huh?

There’s nothing “insane” about keeping receipts, especially when Taylor and Haley are notorious for lying out of their arses and fake-apologising to people in the dm’s, only to continue mocking them on Twitter afterwards. You know what is insane though? Searching ‘romani’ on our blogs in a pathetic attempt to dig up dirt that doesn’t even exist (yeah, stat trackers exist). Do you know what else is insane? Haley spamming people with passive aggressive anons and sending anon hate to people who’ve already blocked her. She also “stalked” our WOTR group chat, though she’ll never admit to it, despite accidentally posting the dated receipts proving it. Oops!

It’s no secret that Taylor and Haley are cowards (as all bullies are), so it was no surprise when they eventually involved Olivia in their month-old vendetta against a teenager. They wanted to school a black girl on racism and Congolese genocide apologism, so they needed to get a “respectable history blogger” on their side. And Olivia happily obliged, kicking up such a fuss on their behalf that the teenager just offered to end it (despite the fact that Olivia vagued her first). Yet still Olivia continued, publicly mocking her age and calling her an “antisemite” long after the discussion was over (here she is on 24 February still carrying on). Either a teenager is old enough to be publicly shamed for being an “antisemite” and “antiromani bigot”, or she’s too young to be taken seriously. But at 25, Olivia is certainly old enough to know better than to participate in this kind of vile, petty, wannabe Mean Girl behaviour.

Olivia is not black. Taylor is not black. Haley is not black. So for the record, if you are not black, it is not your place to tell BLACK PEOPLE whether they can take issue with apologism for BLACK GENOCIDE. Multiple black history bloggers have already explained why they had a problem with Gareth Russell’s comments about the Congolese genocide (including the teen in question), yet that was less important to Olivia than not being able to call him a sexist weirdo because he’s gay. Olivia cannot speak on all minority issues — especially black and brown issues — and it is arrogant of her to assume that she can, especially since her understanding of the Gareth Russell issue came purely from “what she discussed with her two friends” by her own admission.

What a take. Here’s the “anti-Romani” post that I supposedly made. Precisely ZERO of my posts were about Olivia and not once did I even name her directly. So her claims that I mounted some kind of “vicious attack” against her is, uh, bullshit. Criticising her and her friends for their nasty, dishonest, and irresponsible behaviour isn’t “anti-Romani” just because she’s Romani. It’s no more “anti-Romani” than her erratic attempts to “expose” me are anti-Asian just because I’m Asian. It’s not any more “anti-Romani” just because the UK government has passed anti-Romani laws, any more than her telling deranged lies about me for over a month is an anti-Asian hate crime simply because there’s been an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes. I’m not British. I’m not from the UK. I have no control over whatever dumb, racist crap her government does. So she can fuck off and continue fucking off if she wants to make me personally responsible for that. The backlash she received had nothing to do with her identity and everything to do with how she purposely incited harassment against a teenager, defended her friends’ racism, and spread demonstrable lies to her followers. The “viciousness” of the backlash she received is directly proportionate to the viciousness of her own baseless attacks against others. She can claim to be more mature than an 18 year old all she wants, but do you know what the actual mature thing to do would have been? To not promote her friends’ lies and nonsense, especially when the other people they tried to involve had the sense to stay out of it.

Olivia, Taylor and Haley are fully-grown adults, but take no responsibility for their actions. Yet, they expect teenagers to have total control over not only their own emotions, but also the emotions and actions of others. Olivia thinks that a teen should be personally responsible for the behaviour of fully-grown adults, yet she’s close friends with Taylor — a racist, xenophobic bully who screenshots Tumblr people’s posts to mock them on Twitter (here and here from December), called Poles who’ve lost relatives in the Holocaust “genocidal loving freaks”, accused an openly Ashkenazi Jewish blogger of “internalised antisemitism” just for criticising her (a white gentile), said that people who like Mary I “resent their own siblings”, co-opted our struggles under Spanish imperialism just so she could bully ‘Spaniards’ (despite her being American and therefore equally responsible for genocide, by her flawed logic), and said that the black teen who called out her racism “really deserved to be bullied” and “needed to be policed”. Olivia is also close friends with Haley, who has a history of attacking people over posts that have nothing to do with her, publicly admitted to circumventing blocks in order to send hate anons, and likened me — a Filipino immigrant — to DONALD TRUMP and a neo-Nazi conspiracy theorist just because I posted the receipts exposing her lies, harassment of others, and projection.

Most of the people who have spoken out against these three didn’t even know each other until last month. Some of ‘us’ have actually blocked each other. Yet all of us agree that their behaviour towards others has been absolutely unacceptable. How is it that so many unrelated people from different corners of the ‘fandom’ have exactly the same problems with exactly the same people? If Olivia want us to take personal responsibility for “our friends’” behaviour, then she should first take responsibility for hers.

This is on 26 February, over a week after I last posted. As anyone with eyeballs can see, I called her British once. Not “repeatedly”. ONCE. So she can fuck off again with that bullshit. And why did I point that out? Because Olivia, a British citizen, made pejorative comments about “white Eastern Europeans!!!” just because she thinks some Polish people committed the heinous crime of... screenshotting her tweets. They didn’t even do it, and even if they did, how is that even relevant? Everyone knows that one specific Polish person lives rent free in Taylor’s head, so clearly Olivia just took Taylor’s word for it that it must have been The Poles who were “stalking” her. Maybe don’t take paranoid liars at face value next time?

Shameless, ignorant, tone deaf nonsense. Olivia constantly demands that people treat her and her identity with the utmost respect, yet here she was on 9 February already disrespecting the identities of others just so she can score some petty ‘oppression points’ against them. Why even bring their nationalities up? And why call them “white Eastern Europeans” instead of Polish since she knows they’re Polish? Is it because acknowledging that they are Polish would mean acknowledging that she doesn’t actually have a monopoly on a claim to discrimination or Holocaust trauma? Could it be that dismissing them as just some “white Eastern Europeans” was just another way for her to add credence to her own “pathetic lies” about the situation? There’s a word for that behaviour, and it starts with pro- and ends with -jection.

Let me reiterate: it is IGNORANT of her to use their identity against them, especially when hate-crimes against Polish immigrants have increased in her home country, and especially when the specific people she insulted lost close relatives (including Jewish relatives) in the Holocaust. It’s not “repeatedly mocking her identity” to point out her hypocrisy. Her being Romani is not an excuse for casual xenophobia. She might be able to hide her identity in the UK (though she shouldn’t have to), but Polish immigrants do not have the privilege of passing as first-language white British. I cannot pass as non-Asian. The black girl she and her friends tried to bully off Tumblr cannot pass as non-black. Olivia weaponising people’s identity against them just because she thinks they saw her public tweets is ignorant, petty, and completely uncalled for. She should be absolutely ashamed for using that pathetic argument, but based on her most recent farrago of nonsense, she probably won’t be.

Here’s her on 7 MARCH. And of course Taylor was the first to like it lol. Olivia may have deluded herself into believing she was just an innocent bystander, but unfortunately, enough people saw her admitting to inserting herself into the situation at the behest of her two friends. With every post before and since, her accusations have gotten wilder and wilder, falser and falser, and more and more irrelevant because she knows full well that none of her followers will bother fact-checking her. That’s the beauty of vagueing people. It’s how Taylor and Haley have been able to get away with pulling the wool over peoples’ eyes for so long. Too bad repetition, projection, and self-righteous outrage doesn’t equate to the truth because those are all those three have.

“SOMEONE NEEDS TO EXPOSE THE WHOLE DAMN LOT OF THEM! BUT IT WON’T BE ME!”

No one has said anything since 18 February, yet here’s Olivia publicly inciting her followers again. She’s “done talking about it”, yet she’s the only one continuing the drama. She is being ‘persecuted’, yet she mobilises her followers to go after others. She needs to be defended against critics, yet she also can’t resist bragging about big her Tumblr following is, how “piddly” our notes are compared to hers, how she got over 30 followers to report my posts (they’re still up lol), and how many people she can get to dig through our blogs to find anything to “expose” us. Olivia, I’m sorry that you require constant validation from strangers on the internet, but not everyone has the same priorities as you. Some of us just come here to have fun, but having shitstarters in the community is decidedly un-fun.

All my posts were directed at Taylor and Haley, but since Olivia insists on making this revolve around her, let me clarify: she is a hypocrite and a professional victim. Words have meaning, and those words are the most accurate words to describe her behaviour. It has fuck all to do with her identity. She and Haley are professional victims because they act as if their minority statuses exempt them from basic rules of online courtesy and entitle them to run their mouths about others with no consequence. And Olivia is a hypocrite because she demands the respect and understanding that she has repeatedly refused to show to others. She made ignorant, xenophobic comments against Polish people because she falsely assumed they screenshot her public posts bitching about others. She pretends that the many POC who have spoken out against her are just some “white” hive-mind because admitting that we’re not white will discredit the victimhood narrative she’s been peddling to her followers. And she arrogantly presumes to be ‘our’ voice in the community, all while mobilising her following to intimidate and silence the minorities who take issue with her and her friends’ vile behaviour.

It’s extremely telling that in every one of her unlettered rants, Olivia made the conscious choice to conflate us with “white gentiles”, “white antisemites”, and “white Eastern Europeans”. Why? Because in order to “name and shame” us, she’d have to admit to her followers that the majority of the people criticising her aren’t actually “white”, but are in fact black, brown, and Jewish. Having repeatedly demanded that her followers defend her, her reputation and credibility now depends upon people continuing to see her as the oppressed victim of “bigoted whites”. Unfortunately for her and her friends, the truth will always come out. That’s what receipts are for, no matter what they claim.

The history community didn’t side with “a white gentile woman”. We sided with a black teenager who Olivia and her friends repeatedly mocked for her age, publicly and privately spread false accusations against, and incited their followers to harass with their never-ending posts. We sided against white racists like Taylor, and her white-passing enablers like Olivia and Haley. Since being called out for racism by a black girl discredited them, they had to discredit her. And unlike the others Taylor and Haley tried to involve, Olivia was their willing accomplice. If she has now been “alienated by half the history fandom”, it is because of her own behaviour and rightly so.

The ideal course of action would be for Olivia to finally take some responsibility for her actions, publicly apologise for her role in inflaming this drama, and move on like the rest of us have tried to do. But unfortunately, she may be too far gone in her own pathological need for online validation to ever admit wrongdoing without some serious introspection. So perhaps, Olivia, if anything else, you should just take your own advice and, once and for all, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

#here's my fucking rent #seeing as i've lived in your head for a whole month #dumb and dumber #disk horse for ts #long post

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incarnateirony · 4 years

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i think there’s a distinction that needs to be made. i think those with power over dabb & co are the ones who are exuding more habits of queerbaiting, while dabb and co aren’t. and because those execs are more or less invisible, the blame/fault is put on dabb as he’s the perceived figurehead of everything in the show when he’s not. anything he may want to put in the show can be easily vetoed by a higher exec so

Okay so I said I wouldn’t touch related issues facing wanky-side, but while this runs the line this is such a genuine, and valid thought process it feels worth addressing.

So in short: Yes. But no. But yes. But no. But we’ll see.

What do I mean by that? I’m going to put this behind a cut. But first of all I want to thank this Nonnie for at least trying to critically think about where the problems lead to. This is FAR BETTER CRITICAL THINKING than I see in this discussion most of the time and this. More like this. Nuance, discussion, idea trade, history. Let’s do it.

Okay, so.

How can it be yes no yes no maybe eenie meenie miney mo?

Because it really depends on what part of this 15 year legacy show we’re talking about.

What I’m about to say isn’t going to be popular, but I’ve said it before, I just can’t find the ancient ass post discussing it.

We’re going to rewind. Like, a fucking lot. A lot, a lot. This is going to be a history ride, and you’re probably going to wonder how it connects to the conversation at first, but bear with me.

Ignoring any personal frustrations I have with the casting of season 4 – frankly a chapter of this FUCKING show that haunts me somewhere in the ballpark of, “If my friend wasn’t dismissed as not white enough and got the role, would we have Misha, Destiel, any of this, would the show be on, would she have been chased off as the other actresses?” – and frankly these are the things people don’t even fucking *think* about.

TLDR a bajillion years ago CW made a casting call and we got this super cute character named Anna that Dean was slated to bend over in two seconds flat, as old canon used to be before modernly growing. The actress expressed discomfort, and frankly went over with the audience about as well as wet cardboard. And like, while I agree that a lot of women were hated for misogynistic reasons in this show, she really was about as interesting as a plank of plywood to me once she got past her first performance or two.

At the same time, this handsome bastard named Misha Collins auditioned for a bit role originally intended for 3 episodes and quickly extended to 6. But, identified as lightning in a bottle and with on-fire chemistry, while Anna waffled for *several* reasons, summarily, their story ends swapped. That’s… not like *exactly* what happened but it’s *basically* what happened. Anna became the herald and contagonist instead of Cas, and Cas quite frankly took on the role of the goddess.

With Lisa already entered before Anna, there’s no evidence whatsoever she was intended as endgame. Story flip. Thank you for everything last night on earth fall by angel banishing almost like this was foreshadowed woohoo! But… don’t lend towards a relationship. No point. Given, they made a few jokes on set at that point, but it wasn’t really an idea *they thought anyone took seriously*.

Coming from a phase where most of the leads were introduced to “slash fandom” by Wincest, which they literally used to torture and prank each other, the idea of this being anything serious really wasn’t on their radar. The one I remember most was Misha choosing to sit on Dean’s side of the bed as Cas in the famous “What were you dreaming about?” and Sgriccia being like “that’s kinda gay” “nah keep it”

I mean, is that… queerbait at that point? I don’t think it’s fair to really call it that. They respectfully tried to scrub out the leading romantic edges from what would have been Anna’s story, but ultimately, the human psyche kind of recognizes 8000 years of storytelling history subconsciously when using the Hero’s Journey narrative, so it was resonant. Nobody was crazy for seeing it. That didn’t mean it was right, that didn’t mean it’s what they were consciously leading anyone for.

Hell, Jensen didn’t even know what the fuck Destiel WAS until season 7 (”Deathstiel?”) due to the way cons, circuits, and fansites kept the conversation force-muted at that point. Anything they had floated somewhere in the area of “hah that is kinda gay I guess”, and even that there’s no evidence of being frequent.

Kripke left, the show petered, social media was new, and summarily, Sera Gamble was a dumbass and listened to the wrong crowd that seemed super big back when big accounts were a whole 10K followers and you had 50 asshats screaming as a coordinated group about Ruining The Show™. Ratings tanked, somewhere between Misha being fired and the show turning into a parody of itself with dick jokes that made it seem like Gamble was trying to target 11 year old boys for her audience, and like, that’s it, that was the season.

Until that nosedive spiral essentially turned into a shorthand apology reversal, a panicked and roughly written script that was *SO GAY* that *EVEN MISHA FUCKING COLLINS* couldn’t seriously choke out the dialogue. It was cheap, it was out of character, and as Jensen put it, the dialogue might as well have had him petting and sobbing into Castiel’s coat while essentially being like I SLEEP WITH YOUR COAT EVERY NIGHT TO REMEMBER YOUR SCENT UWU and shit that just LITERALLY vaulted from alien fascinated staring into desperate teenage gay drama in the body of a 30 year old man.

So yeah. Did I consider it reasonable to change that? Fuck yes I did.

Was what Sera Gamble did queerbait? Yes, actually. And she did it again in the Magicians. You see, Gamble had fucked over an audience, and then tried to exploit that audience in reverse when she realized she fucked over the *wrong* audience, but had zero intent of fulfillment.

And then magically, Sera Gamble didn’t fucking work there anymore after a whole like, year and a half as showrunner.

Now, at the same time, Dawn Ostroff was leaving the CW. Jensen’s had some pretty fierce words about Dawn Ostroff not understanding the show and how to manage it, but whatever. Bye, Dawn. Hello… MARK FUCKING PEDOWITZ. But at the same time, WELCOME BACK CARVER and most of all HOWDY DO NETFLIX, so nice to make a guaranteed deal with you (that ended as of this year due to a CBS merchandising meltdown).

When Carver came back, he said a lot of things. He… very tactfully called Gamble’s era trash by phasing it like “:) Watching the show :) since I left :) I realized :) a lot of our mythology :) has been difficult to follow :) so I went :) back to basics :) please help”, and others, like mentioning he had a three year plan on his desk. So 3. Season 8, 9, 10. He had notes for his S10 finale in mind and everything! Great stuff.

Now the fandom, at this point, generally didn’t pay attention to the network or production. In fact, the actor worship around here is some other kind of wild and I don’t know how after 15 years people haven’t figured out that it isn’t how to go about paying attention. Either way – plot switches, showrunner switches, author switches, and NETWORK LEADERSHIP SWITCHES.

Now, this little part here is speculation – but I am 99% sure that when Carver was pulling SPN out of the cancellation toilet, he had bigger things to inform the new execs about than “btw I might make it gay.” Like “Hey, since CW just got its netflix deal, if you give us another year we can import fresh demographic while bringing back Collins’ old fanbase by setting him back as a regular.” SURE, SOUND GREAT, MAKE MONEY, THX.

Cool. Cool. Make sense so far, you still with me?

Because at this point, S8 into early S9, fandom had gotten itself into all kinds of a stir. It was about to go canon, rite nao, said a bunch of bloggers, who at that point WERE pretty much chasing wallpapers and Tshirts and making the most bizarre uncorroborated parallel interpretations like “IF U PARALLEL IT TO MOBY DICK-” WHAT WHY WHERE– ??? BUT cAS = fISH

Okay, my fucking annoyance at what counted as lit crit in those days aside, we’ll get back on track. Everybody started vibrating for this shit because, you know what, S8 did resonate pretty strong, almost like authors were toying with ideas. I’m not gonna get into stuff about Robbie, I THINK fandom knows the statements he’s made and I don’t just mean the whole Destiel being canon tweet both antis and bitters descended on him to eviscerate him about. About what? Calling it queerbait!

So here we go, the great advent. About a year after a dramatic network shift, a CW exec was like :))))))))) I’D LIKE TO LEARN ABOUT THIS FANDOM THAT IS SUDDENLY MAKING ME MONEY!! WHAT SHOULD I DO??? TO TWITTER! HASHTAG TALK TO THEM!

[logs in]

Beep boop. “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” the FUCK is a Destiel? Wait what no I don’t know what you’re talking about representation isn’t our intention with these characters. “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT”

And then the network exec got so slammed he deleted twitter entirely and everybody popped confetti and felt accomplished and did NOT realize how fucking BAD that was. And frankly, anyone that did kinda didn’t want to admit it, because taking responsibility for that tire fire was… not… attractive. In fact, several folks are still around to this day, bitter blogging or making weirdass meta or accusing other people of wallpapers and Tshirts because that’s what they did so *YAY, PROJECTION!*

My own frustrated bitterness aside, I’m going to place some questions down, and not so much answer them as, now that the reader has really taken history in, let them decide:

At this point… is this queerbait?

Because this is when the queerbait yelling began. It’s when every fan with even a moderate platform or site blasted it out there.

It’s when the fandom made DeanCas a big problem.

And it’s also literally the same time Carver left his very first recorded, known direction with a romantic tilt, “The note I got from Jeremy Carver was to play it like a jilted lover, so that’s what we played there,” on LGBT author Bobo berens’ very first episode. Everyone runs circles around that modernly, or goes “SEE??? QUEERBAIT!” without realizing what the FUCK just happened here.

So, SPN went from cancel rating line to their most successful show between 7 and 9. Suddenly corporate sees their successful product *ON FUCKING FIRE* so do you know what happens?

Fuck it this IS one line I’ll break: Corporate panicked. They changed their press packets. If you noticed a bunch of media-adjacent people and their friends suddenly get bitter as FUCK in season 10 after still surviving the S9 mess, here’s fucking why. Because now that everybody spent the last YEAR trying to burn down the product yelling about shit that corporate had been literally blindsided by, they added temporarily a new section to the packet that included sexuality. They were, at that moment, suddenly listed collectively as heterosexual men. SEE, WE AREN’T QUEERBAITING IF WE TELL YOU THEY’RE STRAIGHT *will smith pose*

Congrats fandom, you have now officially made Destiel A Huge Problem™ to the corporate behemoth behind the shiny pictures. The iron curtain dropped. This is what you could call “Protect the Product Mode” if you will.

Now again, at this point: Is it queerbait?

Because at this point, S9-10 was rolling out. We all know it, Cain, Collette, *gestures off into infinity* But let’s fall back to Carver’s statement. 3 years. 8, 9, 10. You know what else happened season 10?

A bunch of shit, including shit Carver *wrote himself for the season 10 finale* got filmed, then cut. Coincidentally, it was all very gay shit. Things that pulled forward the Crowley/Abaddon Cas/Colette Sam/Abel parallels, arguing over who was who’s boyfriend, Rowena mentioning about them both being shattered at the Altar of Winchester (15.3 is calling), the secret admirer dream, I could go on. I mean, this shit literally would have shifted the entire storytelling arc to full-frontal taking that parallel and addressing it right up in your face. First you’ll kill your mistress but you’ll get it done, and then you’ll kill your wife. He’s your boyfriend no he’s YOUR boyfriend. You’ve BOTH been shattered at the Altar of Winchester. Really, this is what you dream about? Your secret admirer Cas?

K? K. K?

Is it queerbait for Carver to have entered with a plan? Is it queerbait for Carver to have been interrupted on that plan despite attempting to pursue it? And is it queerbait for the network to still lock down on that plan so close after the event?

You see why this conversation gets increasingly complex.

S11 rolled around, Carver was half in half out, Dabb was stepping in, big gay heart songs, take what you will out of that entire mess, and by S12 Dabb entirely took over and we started entering the era we are in today.

So let’s address where we’re at today.

Now :) I can’t say anything for sure :) because anybody that’s been to or worked on marketing stuff definitely has an NDA :) but let’s play for a minute. Let’s say with the stone wall up, a set of creators still wanted to actually *go somewhere* with this story.

“But!” remembered the network, “Remember the tire fire?! And all the people that hated the gay?! What about our profit?!”

“No,” a creator might say, “Tides have changed.”

“We’ll see,” a network might say, “Take it to market testing.” At which point, one would enter a few years of polling how the general audience reacts to this.

Now, if they were seeing promising numbers, they might be given a bit of rope. Why, let’s … just pretend. Totally. Totally pretending. That Dabb pitched this idea to take up Carver’s mantle. Let’s say that started S12ish when he took over. Let’s say they ran through hiatus. And then… authors might be given a little bit of a line. “Looks good, but we’re not sure,” said a network quite fond of its split conservative/liberal demographic, “Try it out a bit and see how it goes.”

And so an author room that would be full of LGBT creators fed out good faith groundwork. They might even be like YALL ITS NEVER TOO LAAAAAATE TO START ALL OVER AGAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN and just throw their whole boy howdy cowboy into that shit and get great ratings.

What if even if the results came back positive leaning, the network ho’ed and hummed and stayed noncommital? Might the creators scale it back while still writing it lowkey just in case they got flashed a greenlight? I know I sure would, woudn’t you?! Or I guess would you prefer we drop the whole thing cold and stop writing anything vaguely in the direction?

Difficult question, in reality, isn’t it?

So in this TOTALLY HYPOTHETICAL SITUATION, this leaves the authors holding the bag, waiting for a sign, and being held with limitations. And just in case anybody thinks “BUT AUTHORS CAN DO WHATEVER THEY WANT!! AND!! OTHER SHOWS!!!”

K have we come down to reality yet? So, sure kids, try the gay, we’re interested, but you can’t like, go Full Gay Frontal with it. You gotta imply the gay. Wouldn’t want to offend conservative america! Besides! We’re totally exploiting marketing making this LGBT content for you over here! *jingles a carrot on a stick* LOOK AT HOW MUCH WE’RE FLEECING ADVERTISING PROMOTING ALL THIS GAY STUFF FOR YOU AREN’T THE RAINBOWS GREAT?

Some creator of limited LGBT content: How’s the marketing looking?

Some network: EH! We’ll see!

Some creator of limited LGBT content: K guys we’ll scale it back to not upset them but don’t drop it.maybe we can have them hold hands at the end or if we’re lucky maybe they’ll say we can do the whole thing

Some LGBT creators: K

Making sense still? STILL WITH ME?

So at this point… is this queerbait, or is this business?

Put aside the emotional reaction. Realize this really only hit scale in S9, hit front line S10, and hit potential corporate discussion in this TOTALLY theoretic universe around S11-12. We’re talking 3-4 years. Not 10. And we’re talking only a few of it really being tested.

So again I ask, history minded: Is this queerbait, or is this business?

That’s where the nuance and complication comes in, and let it be said I am in no way defending the CW. I fucking hate the network. They have literally personally screwed over real friends of mine and I hope they choke on a whole bag of dicks with their bullshit, but honestly, the shit I have seen and heard would make people stick their heads in the sand like scared and ashamed ostriches for every time they trumpet “BUT OTHER SHOWS” – you don’t know what’s going on in those shows. You don’t know how they’re getting hardballed on budget decisions, you don’t know what that show’s marketed demographic is about, you don’t know what they demand cast how, you literally don’t have a fucking idea unless you’re up in that disaster zone.

And even IF you’re in that disaster zone, unless you’re truly in the upper echelon, you only know so much.

Now let’s pretend, again, totally metaphorically, and absolutely not inspired by a real person at all, that someone worked with the crew for a while and, because they saw support inside creeping upward siiiiince mmmm gosh we’ll say season 12 since that’s our advent and totally not when anybody specific started working there and telling fandom ladder fans what they thought they saw going on, only to get sad and bitter and angry and eventually leave, and all those friends, still abiding old bitterness from S9~, now get angrier because of somebody else’s burnout on their ITK level and perspective, even if that was *probably* aggravated by other work stress conditions as well, but hey! WHO KNOWS!?!?! :)))) What a weird hypothetical though and I’m getting weirdly super specific on it aren’t I so LET’S MOVE ON.

We’re in S12-13 discussion category now.

So my question is, from this perspective… when do you call queerbait? When not swept up in misguided hysteria… at what point do you say “Yeah, you know what, yup, that’s all queerbait”?

So we’re gonna take a bit of a break here for a second and really process all of that hypothetical world, where a creator pitched going for it, and got it put into market testing, and was given enough rope to hang themselves on if the network changed its mind.

After only a few years of conscious thought on it… do you even think the network is truly consciously misguiding specifically those fans, or do they see it as giving the fans something they want while testing the idea of possibly truly giving it to them?

Because here’s what fandom misses – the corporate perspective. And again, I’m utterly not fucking justifying the CW as a whole, but people look at this from the angle of fans, and then argue what they think is representative dialogue from the angle of fans, often while missing all of this history. All that history up till S9? That’s all very real. But looking at history in perspective… who are you going to blame for that? Is it fair to hold S4-9 to that five year stretch of queerbait when that was… pretty much fandom manufactured from blissful ignorance to begin with? I mean if you want to go yell at Sera Gamble Specifically okay (please don’t) but beyond that like– that shit? Is that anybody’s fault? Do you blame a company for actually shutting DOWN the talk of it on a press angle? Can we call that and S10 queerbait then? Was Carver’s attempt at writing through it queerbait? Was trying to continue the story in S11 after theoretic shutdown queerbait? These are all genuine questions that are not asked enough. Most people don’t even realize they need to be asked.

So back to Totally Theoretic Land, where S12ish market testing would have been going on to see if people really thought it was Gay N Shit. Like a lot of people in an overwhelming majority after the amount of apprehension the straight old dude running the network has ever since the goddamn tornado of horse shit that happened like a year after he took over. Probably not the fondest fucking memory for him either. Probably also why he dismissively called most of that demographic “casual fans”, because in Smug White Guy Brain, “tru” fans would have all known, I guess, exactly the shit I’m telling you in history backtrack so, look at the silly girls wanting the gay shit :) Ahhhh girlllllls

Okay so, my impression of douchebags aside, let’s give it 12-13 hiatus to give the first test rope lead and 13-14 hiatus for the next, only to have at best noncommital and uncertain numbers and authors, theoretically, cautiously pulling back while writing it as generally established and implicit, as if it might, I don’t know, go from BIG GAY DRAMA to DEADASS DOMESTIC all of a sudden despite ITS NEVER TOO LATE TO START ALL OVER AGAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN cuz get it, they started over, after he came in his room and played him. *elbows* You all get it right?

K. So maybe numbers changed. Maybe they don’t. Maybe I’m not comfortable talking in this hypothetical, maybe I don’t have access to this hypothetical AU’s current marketing data as of this year, I just don’t know! We don’t know where those cards fell.

But if, at this point, after 2-3 years of market testing, and leading authors on, and giving them enough rope to hang themselves with to get themselves accused of queerbait just for trying to lay good faith groundwork for a cohesive narrative, because fans don’t care that 2 open closet LGBT authors are on deck or that there’s totally theoretically probably and in no way fingering anyone at least one closeted author on deck, or at least publicly so, their coworkers would probably know. But I mean. That’s just. :) statistics. Right?

K whatever moving on. If at this point they’ve been boggley bounced around… you know, I gotta say. At this point… I might actually call queerbait if the network stonewalls it. At this point, they’ve had a few years to really get their shit together, and if they’ve just used it to play yo yo with LGBT creators trying to make content then yeah, go suck a whole bag of dicks.

The problem being with the lack of nuance in this conversation, you’re right, Dabb and co would catch it rather than the guilty party, which is why I HATE faux activism culture. If you’re going to be an activist pay the fuck attention to what you’re being an activist in, don’t bite the hand that’s feeding you just because it was a PBJ and not filet mignon, go after the bastard 1%’er that’s eating all the goddamn filet mignon. But nobody will. It never works like that. And then everybody wonders why this continues – be it in this show, or on other networks.

But hey. Maybe this theoretic network got enough material to change their mind. Maybe another executive got promoted that might help one of the other creators argue it to corporate with their new shiny title. Maybe they can convince someone. Convince them of what and to what level, who knows. Maybe just continue telling the established story, give them a divorce, mention marriage, divorce, dead wives, breakups every 0.2 seconds while they go through a classically framed dark point in the romance everybody with brains and eyes understands because, again, historic storytelling we literally all recognize, but pretend we don’t when stomping about personal representation lines? Or hey! Maybe it’ll go further. (Don’t hold your breath.) Throw in some other shit that even a straight guy would look at and be like “two dicks one chick that shit’s gay bro” because WE LITERALLY ALL FUCKING KNOW WHAT IT MEANS EVEN IF IT’S IMPLIED BECAUSE THE NETWORK IS A BUNCH OF PUSSIES.

…*stops, breathes*

If you can’t tell this is a very long term topic of frustration to me, because nobody, absolutely nobody, wants to introspect and think, you know, maybe it wasn’t queerbait back then, maybe we SHOULDN’T have set a corporate exec on fire about it, that might have been fucking bad.

There are other ways to be an activist than to scream queerbait into the void at whoever is unfortunate enough to cross your paths. One of the best examples I can remember is Exorcising Emily collecting demographics on fandom, and testimonials from LGBT fans about resonating with the content – no fanfic, no fanart, no attacks – and sent copies of this to several powerful creative names.

Now… if with this history… if, from season 9 to 12… one of those names became a creator. If, by some FLUKE of imagination… he still had that book around… and even gave it to his freshly joined new employees like 2 weeks after they started working there–

oh wait and i oop

The mentions would be much as you expect, antis screaming and demanding her job (QUICK, somebody tell Andrew Dabb that she’s READING ANDREW DABB’S OWN BOOKS THAT HE CHOSE TO KEEP AROUND FOR THREE YEARS).

Has Dabb’s era seemed… more plugged in? More resonant? Better and stronger in its storytelling? More hooked into fandom?

See, that’s what well thought activism can do. Well thought activism can structure an entire movement. Poorly thought rioting thinking itself as activism can cause the literal opposite effect of what it wanted. That is how these things contrast each other. And that is something fandom needs to DEEPLY consider.

…but is it queerbait for him to try to continue the story? Even if, say, we drop the marketing talk, because TOTALLY nobody can ACTUALLY know because AGAIN anyone that DOES would have an NDA so we DEFINITELY can’t say anybody knows anything for sure, because anyone that said jack shit would probably get sued so hard their descendents down in whatever homo superior evolution 1000 years into the future would feel it, so you know. We’ll put aside this totes theoretical shit and ask

…If he just was told no– would you prefer to just drop the storyline entirely at this point?

Again. Genuine question. And difficult. And something poorly thought queerbait screaming can actually cause, too.

So here we are in the land of the final season. Whether you consider it network queerbait or not – again, they can choke on the whole bag of dicks at a network level for all I care for ANY number of reasons, even well beyond the domain of Supernatural, and may all their bacon burn from here into the next life – it’s a lot more complicated than fandom has ever let it on to be, because letting it on to be what it really is, in full perspective, also demands a lot of introspection and acceptance, and we all know nobody in this fandom can ever make a mistake ever and they’re all fucking perfect darlings.

It’s a complicated answer to a simple idea… and unfortunately I don’t think this fandom will ever really sit here. They’ll yell “VICTIM BLAMING” because it’s buzzy, they’ll yell “HIDING YOUR GAYS” which I mean, yeah, but let’s talk about what led us here. They’ll yell a lot of things. But they will rarely quietly think, and study, and hone down to what’s going on in the world out there beyond what they have, at this point, become obsessively hotlocked on.

Supernatural, as of 15.7, has already taken several steps further than it ever is before. No, that’s not a signal of me saying [Your Personal Goalpost] is going to happen. But it’s a sign that if they have a line, they’re testing it with every strength they have.

Going back onto the Fateful Advent: Cain. The mentor– who was never going to stop; I can’t stop samuel; he was never going to stop; I will never stop; Rowena, the mentor, never going to stop, shattered, at the altar of Winchester. Long ago, when Cas was human, Dean sealed him away, and now, he’s doing the same to him. So Shirt Of Bad Decisions Deanmon basically karaokes with his friend like the Crowley days, REPEATING the Crowley dialogue but infinitely harder to dodge, as if some sort of calculated method of cat’s cradle of How To Write The Gay was discussed. Man, whoever wrote that kind of shit would probably even publicly thank whatever big gay mastermind helped them map out THAT level of stuff. Wouldn’t it be funny if most of that shit had been written by a gay dude that’s still around and it’s still popping back up in the show louder and harder to dodge than before? That’d be fuckin’ wild, man. Oh, fucking WAIT.

And this is why I hate the way shipping culture thinks it’s doing activism. Most of the time it’s cosplaying as an activist and at this point it’s become more of a furry convention than it has any kind of organized rights movement. Nobody’s out here fighting for the rights of these LGBT authors this year, nobody’s helping them get a voice, and in fact, often scream at them or bury what voice they’ve had as not enough.

And I want to fix it.

Desperately.

And frankly, I don’t know how anymore.

But what we’re not talking about is some 3-5 year show that came in early and started intentionally fucking at you. We’re looking at happy coincidences, so let’s check with our gay king, the father of Wayward that everybody coincidentally accepted as canon with far less because of a (meaningful) third party line DeanCas had elsewhere but hey it didn’t have antis so suddenly it counts; let’s check with him about that.

That’s my king. That’s my king that wrote the first recorded episode to be intentionally directed as jilted lovers. My king that gav eus Colette. My king that gave us the mixtape. My king that gave us the PR framed breakup. My king that gave us Cas leaving Dean. That’s my King. That’s my gay king who has been fighting his ass off, only to be hung out to dry by a fandom that doesn’t even care to look where or how to scream, or maybe consider that perhaps screaming isn’t the option.

Is he yours yet? Have I broken through to a single soul on this?

That’s my king who wrote about the necessary evils in 2003, before the youngest in this fandom were born and while many were still in diapers or kindergarten; about the unfortunate necessary evils that he loathes and acknowledges about moderate queer content gaining exponential amounts of platform compared to whatever is considered hardline aggressive at the time, about how that incrementalization is what helped our media landscape evolve to this day.

And he isn’t wrong.

And he’s getting roasted for doing just that.

And I really wish I could just psychically make everyone fucking stop.

But I will say one thing.

“It’s network queerbait!” I mean

Yeah

That

Because… realistically? like 99% of modern queer content is queerbait, even stuff with canon queer content.

ESPECIALLY on the CW.

If you’ve noticed CW panicking the last year and trying to slap rainbows and DARE TO DEFY on everything, it’s because their entire fucking ecosystem just got fucked over by CBS wanting 100% merchandising profit like it already took 100% digital profit and Netflix was basically like “miss us with your bullshit” and broke the CW contract which was *HOW PEDOWITZ BANKROLLED MOST OF HIS NETWORK*. Now? Now CW has to carve a niche. So LOOK AT ALL THE FUCKING PRIDE COLORS ON– OUR– STRAIGHT–CHARACTERS??? BUT WE HAVE GAY ONES LIKE LEGENDS OF TOMORROW AND *flips notes* THAT SIDE CHARACTER LESBIAN ON SPN.

*gets a whisper* What they killed her? Shit. Maybe bring her back. AND THERE’S THIS PERSON OVER ON JANE THE VIRGIN oh that just got cancelled uhhh VAMPIRE DI-wait fuck. Well we’ll just make one of the chicks in this shitty charmed reboot CBS just forced down our throat and killed Wayward over, that’ll fix it *jazz hands*

TV is a business. Businesses make money. The entire LGBT battle is basically us industriously proving we can make money. It’s about rights and visibility on our end, but on their end it is *always* about money and I really don’t think anybody really groks what that really means.

So “it’s the network! Queerbait!”

…yeahhhhh.

…welcome to working in television. Now you just have to sit and think about how many other times this has completely missed your radar.

The network will never get a shit about you, they give a shit about your money, and that’s just the reality of capitalist america whether we like it or not. When it’s 2143 and bernie sanders’ floating head in a jar is president and andrew yang’s base income shit is in effect and we’re all a socialist country and the world has figured out how to run high cost businesses like TV on the power of unicorn farts, they might actually give a shit. But they don’t. There may be a few advocates WITHIN the company that do, but as a whole body, the network will never give a shit. They don’t care if you’re black, white, straight, gay, disabled, male, female, beyond what, explicitly, that totals to in dollar signs depending how they feed you, when and where.

So it’s not like... *just* a queer rights issue, it’s an “Anything Trump’s America may consider offensive on their television” issue. It’s businesses weighing who they think pays their bills while making it and beyond that who they think is the safest investment to make the most money.

As a side note: Personally, I’d consider it dumb as fuck to not do it. SPN will taper within a few years down to just trekkie-esque addicts unless they find a way to get a new burst of viewership and boy howdie do I hope so, but how much Pedowitz overvalues the conservative US demographic, or certain international markets, I don’t know. I’m not in his head and I don’t have this year’s marketing numbers beyond basic live, +3 and +7 ratings, and digital calls. And just general nielsen released demo. But how he’s added that all up? Can’t say. And I sure ain’t gonna bank on him not being a dumbass, when he’s famous for it, so don’t go get your hopes up either.

#supernatural #representation #queerbait #intersectionality #business #corporate #marketing

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incorrecthousamoquotes · 4 years

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IncorrectHousamoQuotes in 2020

read me first please

so the blog anniversary was like... April 16. circumstances in 2020 made it so I feel like I owe an explanation for what I’m doing, and at one time I wondered if it’s necessary for a dumb meme blog but I know people care about this dumb meme blog. so this will be mainly 3 parts:

how narwhal had been feeling about the game in 2020

the future of incorrecthousamoquotes

closing remarks about the Tumblr community

how narwhal had been feeling about this game earlier this 2020 (spoiler alert: bad)

ok before I continue I want to say that I’ve been doing fine for myself in real life. I do acknowledge that I have the privilege of remaining financially stable this year and I am happy that I was able to keep my job I was just hired for in the beginning of the year. that being said please let me be internet melodramatic.

if you’ve known me personally and talk to me frequently in Discord servers then you may already know how I’m feeling in 2020. there’s a lot of people that don’t, though.

as part of me being internet melodramatic I do express the anger I felt toward the game and the fandom (outside of Tumblr) but I do not feel or say that the game, the fandom or anyone in particular did anything wrong. my purpose is not to criticize anything or anyone but just saying my feelings.

other than that, some of these feelings may be exaggerated and I do not guarantee my explanations of my feelings will make sense or be sufficient explanations for myself (then again since when did feelings make any sense)

basically me in 2020 was a result of major burnout in this game and the fandom.

my burnout technically began back in Christmas 2019 aka Mistake Christmas (I have feelings about this event but I choose not to elaborate right now) but I think the first thing that got me feeling burnout was late January with Main CH10 and translated CH9. until this point I liked to make self-deprecating jokes about how I haven’t read story yet but this was when I first began feeling I didn’t have a place in the fandom. like... who knew self-deprecating jokes could have a negative effect on my psyche if I think about them enough. how I can explain it is... in the past I wasn’t particularly crazy about new content in particular but I felt like I can vibe with people who were and I did have an interest towards new content. but CH10 was the first time I actively disliked new content and I took it really personally the fact I didn’t try to catch up with main story, so I started to mentally separate myself from the fandom even though I had no reason to. mostly because I held myself to more expectations than anyone would ever put on me.

so after Mistake Christmas & CH10 I ended up losing a lot of enthusiasm especially towards new content. I ended ignoring Val Timeslip completely but I did really like the Great Gendarme rerun. but my burnout hit an all-time low in April during New Semester 2020 which I will refer to as Worst Semester. now at this point I wasn’t looking forward to anything new at this point and the worst part about Worst Semester is that it was basically CH10 Part 2: about half of each banner was characters directly from CH10.

and this was when I started feeling angry at the fandom like an old entitled fan who hates change and can’t stand when people are having fun; basically it was a mix of envy and self-hatred that I couldn’t find anything to be excited about at that time. how could anyone like any of these characters, is what I felt.

that was even without considering the thing that tanked my mood for my blog in particular: summosnap. like even without considering the self-deprecating jokes about being cancelled it forced me to look back about how I’ve been running this blog and how I haven’t made a single new quote in 2020. long story short I kept comparing myself to the high expectations I put on myself and it ruined my motivation to work on what I’ve planned for the anniversary. so the blog anniversary passed completely burned out.

now I have been feeling better because the next few months weren’t particularly new content: May was just rerun month, and June was technically new but was basically from an old game that I liked a lot, so nostalgia has helped me feel better. now it’s July and we have completely new content and I’m feeling anxious over whether I’m willing to accept new content or not. right now in early July I’m actually focusing on other games right now (and reading main story on the side) so I’ll gradually start making more stuff for the fandom.

the future of incorrecthousamoquotes: the Tumblr

if you followed this blog in the past year, then you would know I didn’t have a regular schedule of making quotes in 2019, even though I did in 2018. in 2019 I did make quotes but it was released in batches every other month or so.

even in 2018 I’ve always made other Housamo content, so I’ve always given the impression that this blog is for whatever I feel like making (at least I hope I’ve given that impression) so when I remake my info pages, I will be taking the focus off of incorrect quotes. I can still make them when I get the motivation (and to clear my drafts of submissions I’m sorry) but my info pages won’t mainly talk about incorrect quotes as much as me just making whatever I want for Housamo.

I would like to make more personal posts like I did in 2018. For some reason I held off on the personal posts in 2019, but I think that contributed to my growing mental self-isolation and my eventual burnout. on a related note I’ve been ignoring my askbox and I’m sorry for that. one of the major reasons is that some of the asks I’ve been sent I have no answer to, but in the future if I have no answer to them I might just publish them anyway hopefully to start a discussion and have other people respond if they like.

I’m also going to be more open to just reblogging things because that’s something I’ve always been hesitant to do on this blog for some reason.

what hasn’t changed over the years is that I’ve always covered game news and game info and have taken time writing guides for this game. this will not change and I’ll continue to cover news in the future.

I still have unfinished projects in general and I hope to get them done this year.

the Twitter

as for my Twitter, I have mentioned before that I opened it again this April and will be using it just for uploading the video memes I make. growing the Twitter is not a priority for me, so I have no plans to change that right now.

--which is what I said before I clowned myself trying to make tweets that never took off so I’ve deleted them, sorry for trying to be an attention hoe

starting this month I’ve also permanently changed the name of the Twitter to summemepedia, which better fits the content I make.

closing remarks: I am so grateful for the Housamo Tumblr community

despite how I felt about this game in 2020 I’ve honestly never felt happier for the Housamo Tumblr community posting and writing about what they love. Tumblr as a blogging platform that encourages creativity is a website I will defend with my life and even though Japan mostly uses Twitter so it’s natural Housamo will revolve there, I will still be happy for anyone that still decides to use Tumblr.

I’ve made a list of blogs here that I’ve been saving for anniversary before I had my burnout so you can check out the list and suggest additions to it if you’d like.

#tokyo afterschool summoners #housamo #personal

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thisstableground · 4 years

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five reasons why five of the ITH crowd are awake at 2 in the morning.

benny is awake and on the night shift, a cab driver for a boss that isn’t kevin rosario since the dispatch was sold. he keeps the driver’s side window open tasting 2AM on the air and letting the cool breeze keep him alert: he is not cut out for night shifts. this is only temporary, covering for a colleague who needed to work days for a while, and in a broader sense it is temporary because one day he won’t be driving cabs at all, if he has any say in it. it is temporary, the eavesdropping on couples arguing in the backseat and bearing silent witness to frantic rides to the emergency room, temporary the fifteen minute friendships he makes with customers who like his taste in music, and the slurs thrown through the glass divider that he never responds to, and the relative quiet of the road in the night between jobs. he eats breakfast before he goes to bed in the earliest light of creeping dawn, temporarily nocturnal.

even as he jiggles his legs in agonised restlessness and rolls over for the hundredth time hoping to find the magic position that will finally let him sleep, as he does most nights, usnavi does not consider himself an insomniac. he assumes that this is simply a natural part of the sleep cycle for everyone, to be kept awake by a terrible, itching silence. the silence that isnt silent of a noisy city, where he can be dead on his feet all day from exhaustion but the second the lights are out and his head hits the pillow he’s crowded with the noise of every siren and shout and streetlight pollution. the silence of stopping, finally, and it’s when he stops that the stress and happiness and hope and hopelessness and all the thoughts he doesn’t give himself time to think about during the day flood in like a dam breaking. even all these years later, he can’t help but hear the silence of an apartment that was once full and is now empty.

sonny, whether by genetics or bad luck, is as restless as his cousin. unlike his cousin he does not simply drown in it till sleep submerges him: he has always been inclined to take action over freezing. but he’s a teenager and still in school and still figuring so, so many things out, and so a lot of the time the only action he can take is to throw his thoughts out into the world before he can think better of it. he sits up and writes and writes and writes, messages of friendship and affection and stupid memes in groupchats, blog posts of world-changing ideas, showerthought tweets, a million different platforms for all the different noises in his brain, attempting to sort them into some kind of order. in the wakeful self-awareness of morning he will groan at his own semi-coherent rambling, delete tweets and edit blog posts and tear pages out of his journal, but it is not morning yet and so what becomes embarrassing later is still fresh enough to simply be honesty.

vanessa almost never suffers from insomnia, at least not when she’s in her studio and safe from the insomnia-by-proxy of usnavis fidgeting sleeplessness. if vanessa is awake at night it’s because she has chosen to be, that time of day where there are no expectations or problems or stresses, there’s just lights and music and the burn of tequila and the heat of a dancefloor. that time where she doesn’t listen to catcalls and doesn’t listen to whatever she’s saying in drunken bathroom conversations with a group of girls she doesn’t know. she developed a taste for it when she was young, when nighttime was the best time to sneak away, slip through the shadows and down the fire escape leaving all the weight of her mom and the fighting and the drinking in her room up above her, and she holds onto the late night even now as a moment to be purely vanessa and nothing else.

nina neatly stacks all her work and books and laptop away before she goes to bed, in order to draw a line between study time and sleep time. it has never been successful. she lies in bed and thinks about all the work she could be doing, should be doing. in her pajamas and only in the light of the desk lamp, she takes out her notes and boots up her laptop and does none of her work, staring at the screen and thinking of how she should be asleep. she thinks of all the things she did the day before that she might have done differently, not always because she did them wrong but simply because she made a choice and she doesn’t know which part of her life she has shaped forever with that choice, however innocuous it feels right now. nina’s life is a constantly growing flowchart with branches on branches of maybes and what ifs and what if nots. it is only late night in california but it is almost morning in new york, in puerto rico, and nina is awake.

#in the heights #character: benny #character: usnavi #character: sonny #character: vanessa #character: nina #is this a fic #it was supposed to be a headcanon post but it sort of turned into a fic #fandom: in the heights

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mercuryonparklane · 3 years

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An attempt at objectivity on the topic of Tayliz/a summary: Part 2

(Kind of...)

I’ve been busy with irl stuff the last week, so I haven’t been posting much lately. I finally have a day where I have nothing else to do and I’ve been considering making a post about where I currently stand on Tayliz/Gaylor in general for a while, so I thought now would be a good time to do that.

Disclaimer: I don’t know any of these people personally and this is all my own interpretation of publicly available information. I apologize for the length of this post...

I’ve been a Taylor fan since 2006 and a Gaylor since at least early 2009 when I was posting fanfics on LiveJournal (I stopped writing rpf a long time ago, btw). I’ve been in and out of the Gaylor fandom since then. I’ve created and deleted multiple blogs/accounts in the past 12+ years. I was mostly active between 2009 and 2015, but I did a lot of lurking during that time and only engaged when I felt I had something to contribute. 2015/2016 was a crazy time and I was going through some of my own stuff, so I stopped following Gaylor as closely for a while. I listened to reputation and Lover, I read the Gaylor theories, made a couple comments, and moved along. When folklore was released it drew me back in.

I created this blog in September 2020, before I even had an inkling that Liz might be more than just another name that has been thrown into the potential exes list, along with Claire C. and Kellie (I don’t believe either of those two had anything beyond friendship with Taylor). I had never looked into it too much because it seemed like there was not as much information as there was for the main 3 (Emily, Dianna, and Karlie). Now, after researching Tayliz for 5 months, I believe there is at least as much, if not more, to go on as there is for the main 3.

As for Taymily, I believe that, at the very least, Taylor had a massive crush on Emily. I don’t like to get too in-depth about that because there is a very suspect age gap. I’m not saying that those things don’t happen, but I will reiterate my statement from an earlier post that I am not comfortable essentially accusing someone of committing a crime when all that can be deciphered is that Taylor seemed to really care about her. I do think there are multiple songs about Emily.

I also believe that Taylor did date Dianna and possibly had some kind of relationship with Karlie. I think both of these possible relationships are long over at this point. Taylor may have been looking back on those relationships (along with others) in her last few albums.

I still personally think it is possible that Taylor is a lesbian, but there are reasons to think she might be bi and I understand why people think that she is. I don’t really talk about the guys Taylor may have dated, but I will say that, to me, all of the boyfriends she had after high school seem like beards. I could be wrong, of course. There are way too many signs that she is queer for me to not think that she is at least bi.

There have always been sapphic themes in Taylor’s music, even in early songs like “Me And Britney” and “Angelina”. Her entire discography is littered with sapphic themes. In recent years, she has seemed to hint at being some form of queer in other ways as well. This has all been examined by others, so I won’t get into that in this post.

Anyway, on to Tayliz…

There is some compelling “circumstantial evidence” suggesting that there may have been something beyond friendship between Tayliz (a lot of this was covered in my first post and all of the information has been mentioned at some point on my blog):

They met multiple times between December 2006 and February 2009, when Liz first performed with Taylor, but it is hard to tell how well they knew each other at that time. Based on the information available, I actually think they might have even been close, or at least friendly, before Liz was hired, but I could be wrong.

The “official” story is that Liz met Taylor at a meet and greet in December 2006 and again in July 2007. She asked if she could sing for Taylor and Taylor gave her advice, including suggesting that she enter a talent contest and that she should move to Nashville. Some accounts say that Liz sang for Taylor in her dressing room, but I have never found a source for this part of the story.

Taylor wrote the following sentence about Liz in her blog on February 5, 2008, after performing on the competition show that Liz was a contestant on: “It sounds strange, but there was always something different about her that stuck out in my mind”. That is super suspect to me...

Taylor was the only musician to perform on the show, btw (although they did have the touring cast of HSM on the next week). Taylor allegedly said, during the interview portion of her appearance, that she knew Liz and that Liz had gone to “all” of her shows and meet and greets… whatever that means.

According to Liz, she moved to Nashville in June 2008 and sometime within the next 6 months she received a call to audition as a backup singer, but did not know for which artist she was auditioning. I feel like it would be an incredible coincidence that Taylor suggested she move to Nashville two years earlier, they met multiple times after that, and randomly Liz got a call to audition for Taylor without knowing it was for her within 6 months of moving there. I don’t know, maybe I’m being too skeptical, but it seems almost more of a reach to say that Taylor didn’t somehow have a hand in her getting that audition.

Liz already seemed very comfortable around Taylor in that picture with George Strait taken on the day of her first show with the band in February 2009.

At the one-off shows after Liz joined the band, there was a little skit between Taylor, Liz, and Grant during YBWM, where Grant played the love interest and Liz played the “Cheer Captain”. There was even a talking bit. During the Australia one-off shows, there was a talking bit before F&A where Taylor introduced Liz and they had a little conversation that ended similarly to the one Taylor has with the interviewer during the Fearless Tour. After this, they rarely interacted on stage.

Taylor seemed to allow Liz’s input during the auditions for the Fearless Tour dancers, two months after she joined the band, and Taylor ended up hiring two of her friends.

Liz went with Taylor to visit Abigail at her university in Kansas two months after joining the band.

Taylor took Liz with her to see Britney Spears’ Circus Tour show in Chicago right after the Kansas trip.

Taylor said in an interview for Oprah’s website, released in May 2009, that Australia and Lawrence, KS were her two favorite places to visit, which just so happen to be two of the places she had recently been with Liz.

The fact that they shared a hotel room in London a few months after Liz joined the band. Caitlin, who had been in the band for a while at that point, and her mom were both there for that trip. Maybe Taylor was just happy to be able to hang out with another woman around her age. It seems strange, but it could be a completely platonic situation.

Taylor and the band, including Liz, recorded a cover of “American Girl” by Tom Petty (one of Liz’s favorite artists) in front of the Rose Garden in Portland, Oregon in May 2009. The secret message for “Sparks Fly” is “Portland, Oregon” and she mentions the Rose Garden in “The Lucky One”.

Taylor mentions going to dinner with Liz, seemingly just the two of them, in her vlog from May 29, 2009, which was around Liz’s birthday (May 27).

The amount of Liz content in the vlogs. Plus, the choice to put the line “I like where you sleep, when you sleep next to me” right before showing Liz sleeping on a couch (this was the trip where they shared a hotel room, which does make that fact more suspect, imo) and including the song “She (For Liz)” in another vlog, in which she dedicates a whole section to Liz’s habit of falling asleep “All. The. Time.”

In fact, in both of those vlogs, which were posted a year apart from each other (May 2009 and April 2010), Taylor wears a black dot shirt, in clips that include only her and Liz, that is similar to the one she wore in the IKYWT mv.

Honestly, just go watch the video she made for Emily and then watch the vlogs after Liz joined the band… I just get a similar vibe in the clips she chose to include of both women.

They went to a Paramore concert together the weekend before Taylor hosted SNL in November 2009. At the concert, they were filmed by other attendees dancing next to each other on the balcony. One of the songs they were filmed dancing to is “That’s What You Get” and Taylor asked Hayley to perform that song with her (and the band, including Liz) at one of the Nashville shows on the SN Tour in 2011. In November 2019, Liz released her own song called “That’s What You Get” that sounds like it could be the opposite side of the relationship much of Red is about (and a couple other Taylor songs from other albums).

In Taylor’s Glamour interview published on 10/5/2010, she mentions that she designed the two guest rooms at her Nashville condo with Caitlin and Liz in mind.

After tweeting about attending the Katy P. concert in Dublin with Taylor (and Grant and Caitlin) someone asked Liz what her favorite KP song was and she responded “Thinking Of You”. This is suspect because at the time Liz did have a bf, but she may have just liked the song and didn’t necessarily relate to it personally.

There are tweets from people who are either not really well-known or aren’t in the industry at all that mention Taylor and Liz hanging out outside of touring. They are mentioned together in quite a few tweets actually. They seemed to have a good number of mutual friends during that time (spring/summer 2009-fall 2012). After Liz left the band, Taylor stopped hanging out with most of those people, while Liz continues to maintain some of those friendships to this day. This could be explained by the fact that Taylor began spending less time in Nashville.

One such friend is the photographer who Taylor hired for Red. She is actually a longtime friend of Liz. Supposedly she took some photos of Liz that Taylor saw and Taylor hired her after that. There are some pictures from Taylor’s Red photoshoot that are similar to Liz’s photos.

There are rumors that Liz was fired, but the “official” story is that she left to pursue her own music.

Liz did not wish Taylor a happy birthday on twitter in 2012, which she had done in previous years. She did not tweet @ or mention Taylor for almost a year. Taylor didn’t respond to any of her tweets or mention her until October 2014.

Some of the songs Liz released in late 2012/early 2013 have similar lyrics/themes to Taylor’s music and may be about Taylor.

The lyric video for Liz’s song STFU&HM includes polaroid pictures with the song’s lyrics written on them and neon signs, which is basically the 1989 aesthetic. The actual mv has some potential parallels to the IKYWT mv. (side note: Liz specified in an interview that the kind of “sour candy” she is singing about in the song is Watermelon Sour Patch, which Taylor mentioned in the June 2008 issue of Teen Vogue was something that she “couldn’t live without”)

The love interest wears a key necklace in the STFU&HM mv and Taylor wears one in the IKYWT mv.

The bridge of IKYWT is very similar to lyrics from a song by Patty Griffin called “Nobody’s Crying”. Liz once said that Patty is her favorite singer (this was when she was still in Taylor’s band) and has mentioned her and that particular song multiple times over the years. Side note: Taylor mentioned last year that another one of Patty’s songs was the inspiration for “betty”.

Liz played the other woman in the mv for TSOU and in the photoshoot for SN. At the end of the mv for her song “H8U”, Liz interrupts her love interest’s wedding and kisses his tall, blonde, curly haired bride.

This one could be a crazy coincidence, but Liz recorded the backing vocals on a song called “Dear John” that was written by the backup dancer who came out to Taylor during the Fearless Tour. Btw, by no means am I saying DJ is about Liz because that would make zero sense.

Liz’s birthday is on one of the board games in the “Lover” mv that reference “Cruel Summer”. Most people think CS is about Karlie and that makes sense, but it also seems to reference “Love Story”, which was potentially written sometime around when Taylor performed on the show Liz was a contestant on. I don’t know if LS is about Liz and I am not trying to claim that, but it is interesting. Even if it’s not, they performed that song together a lot and Liz helped out with the onstage costume change during that song. CS could be about her experiences with both Liz and Karlie. Or it could just be about Karlie and the date in the “Lover” mv has nothing to do with Liz’s birthday.

In “the 1” and “dorothea”, Taylor potentially references Liz’s song “Never Know” and by reference, I mean that she essentially uses the exact same lyrics: “I guess you never know, you never know” = “I guess you never know, never know” and “I guess I’ll never know” = literally just the same line. Not to mention in “dorothea” Taylor also sings “Do you ever stop and think about me?” and in NK Liz sings “I wonder if you think about me” right before the line “I guess I’ll never know”. I am not saying that either of those songs are about Liz, but it is interesting, especially since Liz tweeted about “the 1”, which was the thing that really sent me on my deep dive into Tayliz.

The “cardigan” looks like the cardigan she wears in the first vlog she included Liz in. It could be nothing, but it is interesting because I have a theory that Liz is the first woman she had a “relationship” with and that “cardigan” is about Liz, Dianna, Karlie, and possibly some other women she might have dated/been with.

These are just some of the highlights and are more focused on the facts as opposed to some of my more tinfoil hat, fun, crack theory stuff or just some of the things that are loosely related to Liz or might involve a little (or a lot of) reaching to connect them to her.

Everything I have mentioned could just be a series of strange coincidences, even though there appears to be quite a few of them. Whether anything ever happened between them or it was just one of those intense, romantic friendships that some women tend to have, I don’t really know. Based on what I have seen, I tend to think there was something going on there beyond friendship, but possibly it was never anything official.

Liz seemed to have a boyfriend most of the time that Tayliz were working together/hanging out, which is one of the main things that makes me question my own theory. Of course, it is always possible that she had something with Taylor, while she also had a boyfriend. There are many reasons for that (poly, closeted, etc.), so that does not exclude the idea that she may have actually been involved with two people at one time and one of those people could have been Taylor.

If they were together in some capacity, while Liz also had a boyfriend, it could explain the messy relationship that Taylor seemed to write about during that time. I think it is possible that Emily was just a crush and Liz was her first actual experience with another woman where the feelings were reciprocated to some degree. OR they could have just been really good friends and I am utterly, completely wrong.

Maybe Taylor is just a straight girl, who doesn’t realize that she’s been sending signals that she is queer for years. Whenever that thought crosses my mind, I think about all of the things she has said and done that imply she may not be straight and I just can’t help thinking that it is intentional. I don’t think she is queerbaiting or unintentionally signaling that she might be queer. I think she is queer and has dropped multiple hints to suggest that over the years.

Anyway… Liz has a bf right now and seems to be in a good place, so let’s let her be, please. I hope we get some more new music from her soon.

As far as researching Tayliz goes, I’ll probably keep looking into it when I have time, but at this point I think I have seen pretty much all there is to see (of the content available online currently). I’ll be waiting for the songs from Taylor’s “vault” to drop to see if there are any potential connections there (at least in the “vault” songs for Fearless, Speak Now, and Red).

In conclusion (TL;DR)...

My personal opinion is that there is enough “circumstantial evidence” to include Liz on the list of Taylor potential exes. For me the Gaylor timeline looks something like this:

(Fair Warning: this is all total speculation based on song lyrics and other information that is publicly available)

Summer 2006-December 2007: Taylor develops a crush on Emily. Emily possibly finds out somehow and it doesn’t go over well (OR it does). She is fired from the band AND maybe she is paid off to pursue other interests…

2008/2009- Spring (Summer? Fall?) 2012: Taylor has an on/off relationship with Liz, while Liz also dates men. The relationship may have even started developing as early as the first time they supposedly met back in December 2006, but Taylor definitely was feeling something by the time she posted that blog in February 2008. It’s complicated and non-exclusive. Maybe Taylor wanted more of a commitment and maybe there were promises made that things could/would change, but they never did. By the time she started hanging out with Dianna she was ready to move on. So, she ended things in March/April… but still met up with Liz a couple times after (possibly as friends).

Taylor may have also dated Julianne H. at some point in 2008/2009.

Spring 2012-Fall 2013 (?): Taylor has an on/off relationship with Dianna that may have ended, in part, due to interference from Taylor’s team. Maybe it is the one relationship with a woman that could have actually developed into something more concrete, but maybe that also scared Taylor a bit.

Winter 2013/Early 2014-Fall 2016: Taylor has an on/off relationship with Karlie, while Karlie is also involved with Josh (hence my comment about how CS could be about her experiences with both Liz and Karlie because they may have been similar circumstances, where sometimes they were single and other times they had a serious bf).

Fall 2016-Present: There are at least a couple potential girlfriends within this timeframe. I lean towards Tily being a thing from at least fall 2016-Summer 2019. I am open to Zaylor and I do find it interesting, but I’m not as sold on that one. I personally do not think Taylor is with Joe nor do I think that Joe is WB.

The straight explanation could be that Taylor gets into really, intensely close friendships with other women and eventually they grow apart and move on with their lives.

The funny thing is that I remember Taylor once saying something about how after a breakup, she completely cuts that person off. That fits with her relationships (whatever the nature) with Liz, Dianna, and Karlie. With each of these women, Taylor shared a friend group with them, but Taylor seemed most interested in them. She has had a few friendly/cordial interactions with them, but she seems to have completely separated her life from them after their “friendships” ended. In fact, she moved to entirely different cities on opposite sides of the country (and in one case a different country, with a whole ocean in between) after she stopped hanging out with them.

That’s where I stand and it’s not really much different from where I was back in October when I posted my first summary on Tayliz.

Although, I do have more information now than I did then that leads me to think something was going on. 70% of the time I am convinced they had a relationship beyond friendship and 30% of the time I think they were only ever friends. 99.9% of the time I think I am a clown.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I am inclined to believe that Tayliz is more likely to have had some sort of relationship than Taymily and is slightly less likely to have happened than Swiftgron and Kaylor. Other Gaylors might think they were only coworkers or friends. I’m not out to convince anyone. I am just presenting the information I have found and I don’t mind a friendly discussion/debate if anyone wants to talk about it.

#tayliz #random tayliz thoughts #random gaylor thoughts

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sherlollydramoine · 4 years

Text

Welcome to the Tumblr-Dome Bitch! Pt 2

Warnings: Language, anonymous fake Tumblr death threats, some hilarity, and idk.. Just enjoy!

So here is part two. I hope you all enjoy because this was way too fun to write.

Word Count: 1823 (I really should have just written this as a fic, but I was feeling lazy and I’m tired) this part two. I’m going to have to write a third part to this and it’s going to be funny and hopefully we’ll get on to some sexy times in part three

(PART ONE)

You wake up several hours later and the first thing you did was check your phone. Unsure if you dreamt or hallucinated last night. Did Rami Malek really come to your apartment, find your smutty fanfiction and then get addicted to Tumblr while sitting on your couch?

Checking your Tumblr notifications you see you had several messages from Rami’s blog ItsMeRami.

ItsMeRami sent a post.“Wow people are so creative. I’ve never said or done shit like that in my life.”

“I just got six messages from people asking if my blog was the real Rami. I said ‘as if’. I’m cackling.”

ItsMeRami sent a post “Holy hell that was kinda hot, I think we should try something like that. Or maybe you aren’t into the possibility of calling me Daddy?”

“ItsMeRami sent a post. “What in the actual fuck is this weird shit?!”

It’sMeRami sent a post. “This is.. I have no words.”

“This Peen blog is fucking hilarious. I might have to specifically start wearing no underwear all the time, and whenever cameras are about start thrusting my hips.”

“Wow. I never realized just how visible my dick is when I don’t wear underwear.”

“Omg Free-Rami’s blog is hilarious. Some of these people on here are crazy but I love her sarcastic responses.”

“I hope you don’t mind. Since we follow each other now I started looking at some of your other blogs you follow… wow. Just wow.”

ItsMeRami sent a post. “This is pretty interesting, maybe I should role play as Snafu for you, that could be fun. You seem to like a lot of posts about Snafu. This piece was interesting. Maybe we should find a train and… “

ItsMeRami sent a post. “I’m.. what the fuck.. You warned me about this place being a hellsite, maybe I should quit while I’m ahead. This is too much.”

“I hope to God we’re still on for later because I want to try some of this stuff with you. By the way, I really loved the pieces you wrote. The question is do you want it quick and dirty or slow and sensual? Maybe both? We could do both right? Shit, I need to get off of here for a while and actually go to sleep. This is why I don’t do social media dammit, and damn you woman, what did you do?”

“Hope you are getting some good sleep. Good night..er morning.. I’ll message you in a few hours. XOXO”

Finally having read through a majority of the messages you type a response. “Your responses to this place of Tumblr hell are the best things the internet could ever offer. I just woke up and I can’t stop laughing. I will look at all the individual posts later. You can always deactivate your blog later if you don’t want to keep it. Noone will fault you for that. As for tonight.. Bring it however you want, Daddy..or Sir.. or Rami.. whatever you want to be called. It’s alright. We can figure it out when you get here. What time were you thinking? I can make or order us some food and we can chill for a while.”

Your phone alert lets you know that there is another notification, thinking it was from Rami you picked it up. It wasn’t though it was from your friend @free-rami

“Hey girl, have you seen this new blog ItsMeRami?”

You almost choke.

“No. Why?”

“There is a rumor going around that given the title that maybe Rami is really on Tumblr.”

“I highly doubt that, it’s probably just someone trying to stir some shit or something.I thought Rami doesn’t do social media? Though Tumblr is fairly anonymous so if he were to pick any platform to actively use this is the best one do so undercover.”

“Yeah that’s what I thought but some of the stuff that’s been posted on there is interesting. It’s almost written as if it really is him or someone who knows him.”

“I’m about to shower, but I will def check it out when I get out”.

“Cool, let me know what you think. I’m curious….”

“Will do, though it most likely is just some crazy fan or something.”

“Probably. People on here are crazy as hell sometimes.”

You finished your shower and ended up checking out the ItsMeRami blog. What you found had you laughing your ass off. For someone not very savvy on social media, Rami sure took to Tumblr quickly.

A favorite thing of his, is apparently to go search for fan photos and reblog with random commentary about ‘I don’t remember this’ or ‘You look so happy’ or ‘What the hell is that guy wearing?’ or ‘Who the hell does this guy think he is?”

You are apparently going to have to have another conversation with him about the meaning of anonymous. Damn his inbox and message box must be full.

It wasn’t until you started to find his fanfiction reblogs that his comments really became hilarious.

``I don’t think I’ve ever ripped someone's shirt off with my teeth, but maybe I’ll have to try it. Any volunteers?@yourTUMBLRurl’

‘Why is she calling me Daddy? I’m not her father. That would be really inappropriate.’

‘Yeah sex on a beach is a no-go for me. Have you ever done that? Sand gets everywhere, including places you don’t want it to.’

‘My eyes are beautiful, aren't they? But I’ll never tell exactly what color they are, I like reading about other’s hilarious descriptions of them.’

‘Holy shit, you wrote about a character you guys haven’t even met yet?! That’s so cool, and maybe, just maybe, your characterization of this… Detective Cutie Pants is almost spot on.’

‘Wow. Benjamin fanfiction. This is.. That’s some old stuff right there!’

‘You all really love Snafu don’t you? He was a fun guy to play. I’m glad you all think he’s sexy.’

‘I’m not gay, but this is beautifully pornographic’

‘Wow that was quite a read. Personally, I’ve never actually had a threesome but it sounds quite exciting, and exhausting.’

‘This is just perfection. The setting, the writing, except those leather pants did not come off that quickly or easily.’

``I'm pretty sure my homie Elliot probably wasn’t as bold as he is here, but very creative fresh take on things. I’m going to pass this along to Sam to see what his thoughts on this are.’

Deciding to message your friend @free-rami back, all you had to say was “Whoever this is I highly suspect is just trying to do an impersonation. I mean isn’t his username for this the same as that email from the Rami Undercover Online piece from the end of the summer? Honestly, I just think it’s someone trying to rile people up.”

“I think you’re right, it’s just weird. Why would someone do this?”

Likes, attention, followers? Who knows? I’m pretty sure that it’s fake. There is no real information in the profile so it’s hard to tell, I think. No telling with the loons that are out there.”

“Did you notice that they reblogged nearly your entire masterlist?”

“Yeah I woke up to a ton of notifications. I’m going to send them a message and see if I can get to the bottom of this.”

“Let me know how it goes.”

“Will do! :)”

You message Rami again and hope that he will see it under the millions of messages that he may likely be receiving now.

“WTF!!! I thought you wanted to remain anon? Seriously? Those comments were fucking gold though but you’ve got the whole internet in a tizzy now! I’m sure this shit has already been tweeted, facebooked, snapchatted, or instagrammed. CALL ME WHEN YOU CAN AT 555-730-0054”

He messages back with “I’m not really sure what’s going on here but I have a ton of notifications and messages, I barely saw yours. Thankfully you are the only person I follow so I figured out how to message you that way. I see your other message now. I’m going to call in a second but yeah… I might have actually gone too far on some of those comments.”

He obviously hit send and then immediately called you because your phone started vibrating in your hand.

“Hey you!”

“Hey you too! Sooooo.. What the hell did I do last night?”

“Started a fan frenzy, a shit storm, a kerfuffle, chaos. I’m on my laptop right now and I’m watching my notifications go off like crazy all of a sudden. I’m thinking that people may have figured out that I’m the only one that you follow, and they may suspect that it’s me doing this. Hold on, let me pull some asks.”

Your ask box suddenly had 596 asks.

“Are you pretending to be Rami?” “How do you know Rami?” “Are you Rami?” “Wtf is going on?” “Are you Rami’s girlfriend?” “Eat shit and die bitch.” “You know Rami and you didn’t tell us?” “I think you are a slut. You should probably go slit your wrists.” “THIS IS INSANITY! RAMI JOINED TUMBLR AND RANDOMLY FOLLOWED YOU? WHY YOU? MY BLOG HAS BETTER CONTENT!”

You just let out a deep sigh as you talked to Rami for a little bit longer. He agreed to come over later and you’d make him dinner. You read some of the anon messages that you started to receive and he just kept apologizing.

You told him your plan and he agreed that hopefully it would work, but you were unsure if people were willing to take the bait.

The post you made said this:

I, yourTUMBLRurl, swear that I am not the individual going around and impersonating Rami Malek on Tumblr (ItsMeRami). I do not condone that behavior, but I think that it’s also best that at this time to withhold any speculation about who this individual may be. If it really is Rami Malek then let him make that known when and if he chooses to do so.

You then hit your inbox and deleted the hundreds of asks that you’d received mostly anonymously some full of hate and others just curious.

Okay, I had to break this up again (PART THREE)

@the-real-ramimalekpeen @mrhoemazzello @xmxisxforxmaybe @txmel @spacedustmazzello @ramimedley @hissom1933

#rami malek #rami malek fanfiction #rami malek fluff #rami malek hilarity

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