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strawbearytae · 2 years

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NAURRR how could u end it like that 😭 I was hoping there’d be some more action or something after oc found out jk goes to yonsei :’(

Are they gonna introduce their friends to each other just to hangout together any time soon??? Cause I would love to everyone like 😶😶😶😶😶 Nd then shit blows up lolol. and then jk and oc realize that they’re falling for with their ex but it’s okay bc they’ve both changed over time and are good people who should stay together 😁😁😁 NGJSHD OMG WAIT WAIT who do you think is gonna hurt more when they realize each other’s identities? like jk, bc he fell for the girl whose heart he purposely broke and ruined—thereby breaking his ow </3—because he couldn’t bear to see her get dragged down with him for his mistakes? Or oc bc she’s falling for with her ex that she reallyyy liked (loved even, I think??) who broke her heart out of the blue (and according to her) bc of the very things she’s insecure about🤔

how did the high school people come to the conclusion that jk goes to yonsei? All namjoon did was post a picture of him

this is really irrelevant and literally nothing will change at all no matter how you answer it lol but it’s been bothering me tbh. is jaegguk’s name 재국? why is there an extra g 😭

and if I may ask a Korean language-related question: when are you not supposed to call an older guy 오빠? I thought it was it was a general honorific for a girl towards an older boy. Do you have to be close to use it? what about a stranger then. I assume it’d be (name)씨 but what if u don’t know their name?

-comet

LOVE BELIEVE ME WHEN I SAY I WANNA SKIP TO THOSE PARTS TOO😭😭😭 But unfortunately my stupid ass wants something called ”cHaraCtEr dEvELopMent” like wha🤧🙄

I WANNA SKIP TO THE ANGST BABY😭

AND A HANGOUT REUNION??? OH MY MY MY😭😭😭 I would love to write that but nooooo we need jk and yn to be deeper in their relationship 😭 Istg the logical side of my brain and my fan girl side are constantly fighting over pacing for this story🤡 Unfortunately, I am planning on making everything slightly more complicated than a BOOM HEY THEY’RE YOUR EX! So get ready for a real sh*tshow soon😌✨

I feel like yn and JK would be equally guilty, horrified and terrified when they find out? Like JK for obvious reasons while for YN???? Jungkook relates to a part of her life that she would rather forget (I.e. her obvious insecurities + homewrecker allegations), so meeting him again would remind her of the bad place she was in yk?

I don’t think I’ll really go into this but what I think would’ve happened was that those internet trolls (sorry I mean ex-classmates) would’ve found Jungkook’s Twitter through Namjoon’s and found the school he’s going to (probably he posted about it or he’s following the school’s Twitter). Which is also how the brutal ones are dm-ing him all that hate yk?

For Jaegguk: His name IS 재국 BUT I slightly went for the more romanized version of his name. Like yk how some army’s spell Jungkook as “Jeongguk”? It’s similar to that. Because depending on how the reader reads “guk” it can easily become “걱” instead of “국”, so the extra “ㄱ” insures more the “ook” sound ig. Tbh I just made him jaegguk to fit his Twitter username nfjdjfhdhd🤧

Now this one is tricky and I could probably write a whole essay on the formal and like more truthful implications of what 오빠 means. Truthfully and technically, 오빠 does mean older brother or anyone older than the female speaker… HOWEVER, there’s kinda like a flirty aspect to it… 오빠 kinda carries a similar meaning to “babe” or “baby”. kinda. It’s more like an very very very innocent version of “daddy” too ig. It’s kinda difficult to really express in a few lines the implications that 오빠 can have. But most the time, between friends, you don’t call the other person 오빠 unless you really think of them as a brother or you’re flirting with them. It’s like bro/babe in one word and you kinda have to figure out what that person means based on your relationship with them.

For example, I have a childhood friend that is 2 years older than me that I call 오빠, but we are 1000000% not dating. I’ve known this dude since I was a fetus and sang Dora the Explorer everywhere. There’s no way we’d ever date but we have a mutual respect for each other so I still call him 오빠.

However when I was first flirting/썸-ing with my ex-bf who was 20 months away older than me I started calling him 오빠. We called each other by names before but that quickly changed when we found a mutual interest in one another.

If you’re a girl and you meet an older guy that you’re legitimately gonna be friends with, you’d more likely call them [name]-ssi until you’d both agree to drop honorifics. When that happens you’d most likely call him by his name and if you start mutually showing interest then you might transition to 오빠.

It’s quite complicated and there’s some guys who tell you to “call them 오빠 because they think of you as a little sister” when in reality they’re flirting with you.

This turned out wayyyy too long, sorry.

In yn’s case I made her call JK “오빠” because she was making fun of him but she’s gradually showing interest in him. Plus, JK seems to hate it rn so it’s funny… ahhh the things I do for the crackfullness of my fics🥴

I should started a Korean-with-Minhee series or soemthing shfhdjdj but thanks for reading my very LONG explanation, I hope I didn’t bore you 😅

EDIT: The -ssi thing… hmm most of the tome the first thing people do is introduce themselves so they’re most likely to know each other’s names… Unless you’re like working with them in which they have titles like Director Kim that you’d refer to them by instead of [name]-ssi… So there really isn’t a situation that you wouldn’t use [name]-ssi. just like english, if you dont know their name: just ask😊

#papercuts #comet anon #I literally love your asks you ask so many questions that I didn’t even think about????#like I can feel your love for my story and it makes me go uwuwuwuuwuwu #Korean with Minhee💗

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gendercensus · 3 years

Text

On fae/faer pronouns and cultural appropriation

HOW IT STARTED

I had a handful, a very small handful but more than two, responses in the Gender Census feedback box telling me that fae/faer pronouns are appropriative. The reasons didn’t always agree, and the culture that was being appropriated wasn’t always the same, but here’s a selection of quotes:

“Fae pronouns are cultural appropriation and are harmful to use“ - UK, age 11-15

“I’m not a person who practices pagan holidays but, my understanding is that pronouns like fae/faeself are harmful because the fae are real to pagans and is like using Jesus/jesuself as pronouns“ - UK, age 11-15

“I know you've probably heard this a million times, so has everyone on the internet, but the ''mere existence''of the fae pronoun feels really uncomfortable for some of us. I'm personally not against neopronouns like xe/xim, er/em and the like, I am a pagan but apart from the, imo most important, reasoning of that pronoun being immensely disrespectful, I worry as an nb about people who banalize the usage of pronouns ''for fun'', and I'm quoting what some people have told me.“ - Spain, 16-20

“I don't agree with fae/deity pronouns just from a pagan perspective it's very disrespectful to the cultures they come from. Like Fae are a legit thing in many cultures and they hate with a fiery passion mortal humans calling themselves Fae to the point of harming/cursing the people who do it“ - USA, age 16-20

“only celtic people can use far/ faers otherwise it’s cultural appropriation, many celts have said this and told me this“ - USA, age 16-20

So that’s:

❓ Someone who doesn’t say whether they’re pagan or Celtic.

❌ Someone who definitely isn’t pagan.

✅ Someone who is pagan.

❓ Someone who doesn’t say whether they’re pagan or Celtic.

So, just to disclose some bias up-front, I am English so I’m not Celtic, but I do live in Wales so I am surrounded by Celts. The bit of Wales that I live in is so beautiful in such a way that when my French friend came to visit me she described it as féerique - like an enchanting, magical land, literally “fairylike” or thereabouts. Coincidentally I have also considered myself mostly pagan for over half of my life, and I can’t definitively claim whether or not the Fae are “part of paganism” because paganism is so diverse and pick’n’mix that it just doesn’t work that way.

To me the idea that fae/faer pronouns would be offensive or culturally appropriative sounds absurd. But also, I am powered by curiosity, and have been wrong enough times in my life that I wanted to approach this in a neutral way with an open mind. Perhaps what I find out can be helpful to some people.

So since we only have information from one person who is definitely directly affected by any cultural appropriation that may be happening, the first thing I wanted to do was get some information from ideally a large number of people who are in the cultures being appropriated, and see what they think.

WHAT I DID

First of all I put some polls up on Twitter and Mastodon. [Edit: Note that this post has been updated with results from closed polls.]

I specified that I wanted to hear from nonbinary Celts and pagans, just so that the voters would be familiar with fae/faer pronouns. I asked the questions in a neutral way, i.e. “How do you feel about...” with “good/neutral/bad” answer options, instead of something more leading like “Is this a load of rubbish?” or “are you super offended?” with “yes/no” options. I provided a “see results” option, so that the poll results wouldn’t be skewed as much by random people clicking any old answer to see the results. And I invited voters to express their opinions in replies.

Question #1: Nonbinary people of Celtic descent (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and Brittany), how do you feel about non-Celtic people using the neopronoun set fae/faer? [ It's good / No strong feelings/other / It's bad ]

Question #2: Nonbinary pagans, how do you feel about non-pagans using the neopronoun set fae/faer? [ It's good / No strong feelings/other / It's bad ]

The Twitter polls got over 1,100 responses each, and the Mastodon polls got over 140 responses each. With a little bit of spreadsheetery I removed the “N/A” responses to reverse engineer the number of people voting for each option, combined those numbers, and recalculated percentages.

Obviously this approach is not in the least scientific, but thankfully the results were unambiguous enough and the samples were big enough that I feel comfortable drawing conclusions.

Celts on fae/faer pronouns being used by non-Celts (561 voters):

It's good - 42.5%

No strong feelings/other - 44.0%

It's bad - 13.5%

Pagans on fae/faer pronouns being used by non-pagans (468 voters):

It's good - 47.2%

No strong feelings/other - 39.5%

It's bad - 13.3%

Here’s how that looks as a graph:

The limitations of polls on these platforms means that we have no way to distinguish between people who have more complicated views (”other”) and people who have “no strong feelings”, so we can’t really draw conclusions there. If we stick to just the pure positive and pure negative:

Celts were over three times as likely to feel positive about non-Celts using fae/faer pronouns than they were to feel negative.

Pagans were over three and a half times as likely to feel positive about non-pagans using fae/faer pronouns than they were to feel negative.

So Celts and pagans are way more likely to feel actively good about someone’s fae/faer pronouns, even when that person is not a Celt/pagan. That’s some strong evidence against the idea that fae/faer pronouns are appropriative, right there.

CORRECTIONS

To be clear, I haven’t done any research about the roots of fae/faer or the origins of the Fae and related beings, but my goal here was to get a sense of what Celts and pagans think and feel, rather than what an historian or anthropologist would say.

On the anti side, here were the replies that suggested fae/faer either is or might be inappropriate:

“I only worry that not everyone understands the origin of the word outside of modernized ideas of fairies.“ - pagan

“As a vaguely spiritual Whatever (Ireland), I think a mortal using "fae" as a pronoun/to refer to themselves is asking for a malicious and inventive fairy curse (on them, their families and possibly anyone in their vicinity, going by the traditions). I have not heard of this term before, so this is an immediate reaction from no background bar my cultural knowledge of sidhe/fae/term as culturally appropriate. My general approach is people can identify themselves as they want.“ - Celtic

So we’ve got a pagan who’s wary that people who use fae/faer (and people in general) might not have a fully fleshed out idea of the Fae. And we’ve got a Celt who doesn’t mind people using fae/faer personally, but based on what they know of the Fae they wouldn’t be surprised if the Fae got mad about it. No outright opposition, but a little concern.

There were not a lot of replies on the pro side, but not because people weren’t into it, judging by the votes. There were a lot of “it’s more complicated than that” replies, many of which repeated others, so quotes won’t really work. Here’s a summary of the Celtic bits:

“Fae” is not a Celtic word, and Celts don’t use it. It is French, or Anglo-French.

“Fae” can refer to any number of stories/legends from a wide variety of cultures in Europe, not one cohesive concept.

There are many legends about fairy-like beings in Celtic mythologies, and there are many, many different names for them.

The Celts are not a monolith, they’re a broad selection of cultures with various languages and various mythologies.

And the pagan bits:

Paganism is not closed or exclusive in any way. It might actually be more open than anything else, as “pagan” is a sort of umbrella term for non-mainstream religions in some contexts. A closed culture would be a prerequisite for something to be considered “appropriated” from paganism.

From my own experience, pagans may or may not believe in the Fae, and within that group believers may or may not consider the Fae to be sacred and/or worthy of great respect. (I’ve certainly never met a pagan who worshipped the Fae, though I don’t doubt that some do.)

And then we get into the accusations. 🍿

“this issue wasn’t started by Celtic groups or by people who know much about Celtic fae. It was started primarily by anti-neopronoun exclusionist pagans on TikTok.“

“[I’m] literally Scottish [...] and it’s not appropriative in the least and honestly to suggest as such is massively invalidating towards actual acts of cultural appropriation and is therefore racist. Feel like if this was actually brought up it was either by some people who seriously got their wires crossed or people who are just concern trolling and trying to make fun of both neo-pronouns and of the concept of cultural appropriation and stir the pot in the process.“

“It wouldn't be the first time bigots falsly claim “it's appropriative from X marginalized group" to harass people they don't like, like they did with aspec people when they claimed "aspec" was stolen from autistic language (which was false, as many autistics said)“

“It's been a discussion in pagan circles recently ... People were very quick to use the discussion as an excuse to shit on nonbinary people.“

“I think it would be apropos to note that the word "faerie/fairy" has been a synonym for various queer identities for decades, too. The Radical Faeries are a good example.“ (So if anyone has the right to [re]claim it...)

A little healthy skepticism is often wise in online LGBTQ+ “discourse”, and some of these people are making some very strong claims, for which I’d love to see some evidence/sources/context. Some of it certainly sounds plausible.

HOW DID IT START?

I had a look on Twitter and the earliest claim I can find that fae/faer pronouns are cultural appropriation is from 18th February 2020, almost exactly one year ago today. Again, tweets are not the best medium for this, there was very little in the way of nuance or context. If anyone can find an older claim from Twitter or Tumblr or anywhere else online, please do send it my way.

I have no idea how to navigate TikTok because I’m a nonbinosaur. (I’m 34.) I did find some videos of teens and young adults apparently earnestly asserting that they were Celtic or pagan and the use of fae/faer pronouns was offensive, but the videos were very brief and provided nothing in the way of nuance or context. For example:

This one from October 2020 with 29k ❤️s, by someone who I assume is USian based on the word “mom”?

This one from December 2020, that says “I am pagan and i find it rather disrespectful. It’s like using god/godr or jesus/jesusr.” That’s probably what inspired the feedback box comment above that refers to hypothetical jesus/jesusr pronouns.

If anyone is able to find a particularly old or influential TikTok video about fae/faer pronouns being appropriative I’d really appreciate it, especially if it’s from a different age group or from not-the-USA, to give us a feel for how universal this is.

For context, fae pronouns were mentioned in the very first Gender Census back in May 2013, though you’ll have to take my word for it as the individual responses are not currently public. The word “fae” was mentioned in the pronoun question’s “other” textbox, and no other forms in the set were entered so we have no way of knowing for sure what that person’s full pronoun set actually is. This means the set may have been around for longer. The Nonbinary Wiki says that the pronoun set was created in October 2013, as “fae/vaer”, later than the first entry in the Gender Census, so I’ll be editing that wiki page later! If anyone has any examples of fae/faer pronouns in use before 2013 I would also be very interested to see that.

IN SUMMARY

Obviously I can’t speak for everyone, as the Twitter polls are not super scientific and they only surveyed a selection of Celts and pagans within a few degrees of separation of the Gender Census Twitter and Mastodon accounts, but I can certainly report on what I found.

For a more conclusive result, we’d need to take into account various demographics such as age, culture, location, religion, race/heritage, etc.

As far as I can tell based on fairly small samples of over 400 people per group, a minority of about 13% of Celtic and/or pagan people felt that use of fae/faer pronouns is appropriative.

A much higher number of people per group felt positive about people who are not Celts or pagans using fae/faer pronouns. The predominant view was:

It can’t be cultural appropriation from Celtic cultures because fairy-like beings are not unique to Celtic cultures and Celtic cultures don’t call them Fae.

It can’t be cultural appropriation from pagan cultures because paganism is not “closed” or exclusive in any way, it’s too broad and open.

If your experience of your gender(s) or lack thereof isn’t described or encompassed by the gender binary of “male OR female”, please do click here to take the Gender Census 2021 - it’s international and it closes no earlier than 10th March 2021!

#fae/faer #pronouns #neopronouns #cultural appropriation

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anamatics · 3 years

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Your opinion on old fandom forums vs, fandom today?

I didn't answer this one last night as I wanted to be able to type out a proper response, and one that's partly adapted from an essay I wrote back in 2016.

As a fandom old, I’ve spent a long time in fandom spaces. I did my time with writing slash and het ships, but I always loved writing stories for me about people like me. I have witnessed first-hand the rise and fall of listservs and live journal as places where people who liked femslash gathered to discuss their favorite shows. I know a lot of fandom history. When I comment on the events in fandom, it still comes from my position as a fan, not as a creative. I want to preface all of these thoughts with this.

Fandom used to be something that you didn't talk about. It was secret, never mentioned in public, zines and stories mailed back and forth across the country. The internet changed that, people's attitudes toward things like queer and trans identity changed that, people's want to see diversity on their screens changed that. Yet, at the same time, there is a whole new generation of young queer creatives emerging onto the writing scene who have grown up witnessing the rise and fall of these great, monolithic fandoms that exist beyond the space of shows themselves. More and more, networks, writers, and producers are paying attention to what the fandom says and to what they react to.

This is why I don't really like fandom these days, because I've seen both sides. I struggled with this working on Carmilla as someone who had been, and in may ways still was, a fan. I know fans have power, I've done things because I know fans have power. And yet, I felt like I'd lost my place in a community - in old fandom - because of this realization. And I myself asking questions about my place in new fandom. Questions that, most of the time, had no answers.

Is it valid to be both grateful for the acknowledgement of fan desires within the creative side of television and web writing and a little horrified by the amount of entitlement that any capitulation by those productions seems to engender within fans? Am I valid in feeling trapped by this feeling of wanting to be the best possible arbiter of representation and knowing that I can never be perfect because the perfection demanded by the queer community isn’t achievable? Does my voice even matter in fandom circles anymore because I’ve “crossed over” to the other side? Am I allowed to continue to speak critically about representation in shows that are not my own because I haven’t “fixed mine yet”?

I struggled with this when Carmilla was airing. I still struggle with it now, too, because I see how trolls on Twitter and Tumblr have reacted to folks like me speaking out about problems we see in our communities or within fandom. People like me aren’t allowed to criticize fandom, or fandom culture, because we’re no longer seen as truly a part of it: by being creators who can’t always live up to fandom’s sometimes unreasonable standards, we’re now considered just part of the problem. We can’t critique behaviors and call things out within this fandom community that should also represent us because when we do we’re hurting the fandom community.

Every queer creative out there has shouldered some of this hurt, I know I have. I stand by what I’ve said despite the backlash. If you cannot believe in the truth you speak, what good are you to a community looking to you for change?

Those who speak to the internal problems of fandom culture are shouted down. People with years of fandom experience, who are far more knowledgeable of the history of fandom (and especially the femslash corners of it) and presence in media than the present-day narrative setters, are shouted down and told that we are part of the problem. Creatives who speak out and criticize other works are treated equally poorly. The problem is that in refusing to look at the problems within our fandom spaces, and saying that everyone outside the group is to blame for the problems of poor representation, we are sticking our fingers in our ears and refusing to look at what’s wrong with us. We eat our own.

The queer community – and by extension the queer fandom community – functions like an ouroboros as far as I can tell. That’s the snake from Norse mythology that eats its tail, representing infinity but also representing the inevitable crush of our own bullshit as it comes down around us with the hopes of becoming a better community. There should be a place within this community for everyone, and yet it’s this same space that is preoccupied with gatekeeping characterized by constant infighting, identity policing, and silencing or invalidating opinions that don’t perfectly align with this vision of what is considered acceptable in the eyes of the thinking of the day.

Queerness is messy. There’s a lot of nuance to it. And there will always be people who want their own community within that umbrella of queerness. That’s a valid want. You want to be around people who are homogenous, because it’s when variety is introduced that feelings get hurt. But the existence of a community for marginalized people should not come at the detriment and degradation of other vulnerable people, nor should it come at the expanse of dismissing intersectionality within our community.

But instead, we eat our own. We dismiss trans headcanons like people in old fandom used to dismiss queer headcanons. We're doing the same bullshit, just rinsed and repeated, directed at a new set of people whose voices are smaller than the small specks of power new fandom has granted (cis, white) queer people.

We fight ourselves amongst because we feel as though we cannot fight the forces of our own oppression. We censor ourselves to make sure that we don’t say anything to upend the proverbial apple cart. We do this not because we’re afraid of the problematic elements outside of the community that could come into our community, but rather because we’re afraid of those within our own community who have the power to kick us out from under our own umbrella and back into the rain.

So when I think about fandom these days, I imagine this moment of losing community. I imagine the hurtful message sent, the dismissive post on the forum, the hateful tweet, actions that cost nothing when they are directed at creators, fan writers, fan artists. These people exist to create content that is to be consumed. They aren't human. They aren't even real. They're just the producers of content that fandom sucks up like a vacuum cleaner without bothering to engage with the creators except to demand more or demand better. Nothing makes you feel alienated from your community like realizing you only exist to produce for it and when you don't produce to standards, you are attacked.

What's worse is that a lot of folks in fandom don't even think about this these days. There's no risk in blasting off a message or a tweet. But social media is an echo chamber. It’s a hive mind, and it’s a place where people can get hurt, very badly, and very quickly. Social media should not be used as a weapon to badger the people trying to get into positions where they can create change, which is what I feel new fandom has done. But at the same time, new fandom has also become a space where voices can be uplifted, where people can be seen and heard who maybe weren't before.

So TL;DR, I think social media ruined fandom, I have a lot of baggage/trauma from working on a show as fandom was transitioning from old fandom to new fandom, and like... we have to be better to each other.

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #writing #fandom #some commentary that I'll probably delete

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olderthannetfic · 3 years

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I really don’t agree with your post about “fantasies” in one hand I can admit that culturally society has caused harm by shaming people, yet if people have intrusive thoughts that are harmful not only for them but for other people too, then they should seek for help and not lead to believe that it’s something healthy.

And this is a very difficult and delicate subject because one can make arguments that “shame also harms people with intrusive thoughts” because it prevents them from talking about this problem and yeah but it if the person is struggling to the point of harming themselves and other people then this pathology shouldn’t be seen as “normal” and the person should be getting help to overcome it.

This is a very tricky and delicate subject to discuss

And this whole idea of “I wrote this because it helped me to cope” I understand writing can be very important in the process of healing, but why would anyone share personal writing which can have sensitive and triggering content for some people to the internet? Can they seek help or process it on healthier forms other than sharing this very intimate and personal information to the internet where people may attack them?

Since when are “fantasies” and “intrusive thoughts” synonymous?

God, you sound like a troll.

As for why they’d share stuff they are personally very sensitive about, honestly, plenty of people don’t. As for why I might share a fic you find triggering? Not everyone finds the same things triggering, and asking the whole internet to be “safe” means taking away other people’s fun.

You know what I personally find triggering? Those stories where a perfect partner with no needs of their own tenderly nurses a traumatized woobie back to health, saying “You’re worth waiting for no matter how long it takes!”

You want to delete half of fandom and a shitton of people’s go-to comfort fantasy just because I have some damage from overly needy partners? Come the fuck on!

Yeah, if someone is genuinely having intrusive thoughts and/or if they feel like garbage about their sexuality, whether that’s internalized kink-phobia or internalized homophobia, I encourage them to seek therapy when they’re able.

But you’re never going to “cure” people of their innate sexuality, and it’s dangerous to try.

#fandom meta #Anonymous

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chipper-asks · 3 years

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Any tips on how to grow your own blog by chance?

Aah man I've written a response to this kind of question many times but I always delete it because I'm afraid of coming off as self centered or arrogant, but I definitely have some tips on what works and doesn't work (on tumblr.)

I will say that I never believed I would get to the "Big Fandom Artist" stage. I've seen people drop my name in conversations or descriptions and just assume other people know who I am and that's still incredibly wild to me. I never really pushed to get a big blog it really just happened.

But! I do have rules and personal guidelines that might help if you are thinking of actively building your blog!

1: Keep personal information and vent posts to a minimum

It should go without saying that its not a good thing for your personal information to be on the internet. Once its out there its near impossible to erase. This is for your own safety.

Vent posts give out more information than you might think, but also some people who are following you may be going through difficult times themselves. I go on the internet to get away from my stressors and problems and i've specifically catered my dashboard to reflect my desires. I have no doubt others are the same.

I've unfollowed mutuals because they vented too frequently. I enjoyed what they made! But it stressed me out to read their vent posts because I couldn't help. I realized it was taking a toll on my mental health and I made the tough decision to unfollow.

It is very tempting to vagueblog because its nice getting out all the angry feelings, but a blog with thousands of people following it is not the place to do it.

2: Shitpost vs Quality Foley

I could go into a massive essay on this alone (ive even written out an outline already) but i'll keep it as brief as I can.

Throughout my time on Tumblr I’ve seen a number of posts of artists complaining about the lack of notes on their serious work compared to the abundance of notes on their shitposts.

This is because Tumblr IS a place of shitposts. It's like squeezing a clown nose and expecting it not to honk.

However! It's more complicated than that and i've broken it up into four parts organized by importance.

A. Relevance/Meta: Is it something that people are already familiar with? Is it something that's currently going on?

People want to enjoy things they're already familiar with. For example, people getting into Hollow Knight are more likely to follow a blog that posts HK content regularly over a HK blog that posted a picture of Grimm once and then is full of original content. It's not that people don't like your original stuff, its just not what they're looking for.

If you like striking while the iron is hot, meta jokes are the way to go. Making references to games like Among Us during the height of its popularity for example would get you lots of notes.

B. Hilarity

Is it funny? Does it subvert expectations?

Shitposts will always be more popular than a well drawn post. People like to laugh and share things that laugh. A cool, well drawn post is more often than not met with a "hm, cool. scrolls down."

This is a polished comic I made 10 months ago. I'm very proud of it and i'm pleased with the amount of attention it got. It took me 2 days to finish.

This is a shitpost I made 3 years ago that I still haven't been able to top. It took me 30 minutes to make.

That's not to say a well drawn post can get popular! It's just that people enjoy a good laugh over something shiny. This is a factor of knowing your audience. Some things land better than others and you'll be better off if you just roll with what you get.

I will say tho I appreciate the people who reblog my oc posts 200x more than people who reblog my shitposts and fanart. Those are quality followers and you must cherish them.

C. Appeal

Is it cute? Is it fluffy? Is the design easy to understand? Does it make people emotional? Is it angsty? Is it relatable?

People like cute shit. People like things that make them hurt (albeit not too much). People like things that they can see themselves in.

D. Skill

There is some merit in being good at what you do. People do like funny things more than shiny things, but shiny things are cool too.

If you post things that are funny? You're normal horoscopes.

If you post things that are well drawn? (its really telling that I can't think of someone right off the top of my head)

If you post things that are funny AND well drawn? Well then you're iguanamouth

3: Know your boundaries.

There's a difference between being understanding/tagging things correctly and catering to people who want you to be someone else.

I know that many people get upset with others who gender the vessels in Hollow Knight. While it doesn't bother me, I can recognize the misgendering of vessels as a source of dysphoria and I tag accordingly.

If someone comes into my inbox and tells me to stop drawing a character because they're "problematic," I'm just going to block them and go about my day.

4: This is your blog, its your rules.

I'm apologetically myself on my blog. I post what I want and what inspires me. The reason why I have so many AUs is because its my blog and I like AUs. If a large portion of the fandom doesn't like my AUs, its their loss, I make great AUs.

In fact, its just a good mindset in general to have. If some people don't like what you make, its not your problem. It makes you happy and it makes hundreds of others happy then continue to do what you do. It's impossible to have a large following and not have someone who dislikes you purely out of spite.

Make stuff for yourself, not because you want numbers.

5: Don't feed the trolls.

If someone sends you hate, take a picture of it, share it with your friends, laugh, block the person, delete message, move on with your life.

It's really fun to feed the trolls, but feeding trolls attracts more trolls and soon its not fun anymore. Just laugh when you get your first anon hate, maybe frame it in your room, and don't even acknowledge them with a "fuck you."

6: Recognize your position.

This is more advice for when you do get a big blog. You get to a point when you realize you have a portion of your audience who value much more than a regular human being and are willing to take up arms for you.

Do. Not. Weaponize. Your audience.

It's incredibly shitty and can ruin peoples lives.

7: Post Frequency/Schedule

Now this is one I can't do. It's normal for me to become incredibly active for 2 weeks and then end up posting nothing for a month. I don't have the patience to build up a queue of new things.

However! If you have more discipline than me, posting daily or twice a week builds up anticipation for your next post. You're dependable and people have the chance to look forward to seeing something from you on their dash on Friday.

Thats all I can think of so far.

There's no TL;DR you'll miss my important advice within these tips.

#nofandom #long post

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carriagelamp · 3 years

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Art of Aardman

I found myself a cheap copy of the Shaun the Sheep movie, so I was rewatching a bunch of Aardman films earlier this month and decided to hunt down some books too. For anyone that doesn’t know, Aardman is a British stop-motion studio that does fantastic work like Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, Chicken Run, Early Man… tons of cool stuff. They’re always quirky and funny and warm-hearted. This was just a very nice art book for anyone that’s a fan of Aardman stop motion and wants to see a bit extra; it shows some cool concept art and blows up the neat details in Aardman work, especially in their intricate stuff like The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!

Asterix and the Picts (Asterix and the Chariot Race, and How Obelix Fell Into The Magic Potion)

I decided to try a couple of the new Asterix comics that were done by the new team, just to see if they stand up to the old ones (that and How Obelix Fell Into The Magic Potion cause I’d never read that one before). They were pretty decent! Asterix and the Picts was my favourite of the two though I wouldn’t say either are going to contest for my favourite Asterix comic... but still! The art looks good and the stories felt like what I would expect, they made for a pleasant couple evenings of reading especially since it’s been so long since I’ve read a new Asterix comic. If you’ve never read Asterix it’s one of the biggest name French comic series in North America, as far as I know and very worth the read. It’s about a single Gaulish village that’s holding out against the invading Romans through sheer force of will, slapstick hijinks, and a magical super-strength potion brewed by their druid. Lots of fantastic visuals and cute wordplay, even in the English translations.

Bear

I found out about this bastion of Canadian literature via tumblr post that was losing its collective mind over the fact that some bizarre bear-based erotica novella somehow won the most prestigious literary prize available in Canada. Since I too found this hilarious and unspeakably bizarre I had to give it a read, obviously. And yes, the flat surface level summary is... a librarian moves out into rural Ontario and falls in love with a literal for-real not-supernatural-not-a-joke bear. And I have to say… it is actually worthy of an award, which I was not expecting given that I was there for a laugh. It has beautiful writing, and the subtextual story is pretty interesting… it kind of makes me think of The Haunting of Hill House actually in terms of themes. (Womanhood, personhood, independence, autonomy partially achieved through escaping the male gaze by claiming non-human lovers... listen if I were still in university I would right a paper comparing the two novels).

I dunno man, it’s fucking weird. Actually a well-written book, but sure is about a woman falling in love with a literal bear. Give it a read if you want something bonkers but like… high-brow bonkers.

Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites

Best book I have read in like… a while. A long while. I am not a fast reader, and I consumed 90% of this book over a weekend. It’s not at all like Terry Pratchett, but at the same time it scratched an itch for me that I haven’t had satisfied since Pratchett’s death. A very clever, hilariously funny poly romance between a disabled werewolf, an anxious vampire lord, and an incredibly powerful woman, with heaps of social satire, political commentary, and sinister undertones. The whole thing reads a bit like fanfiction and I say that in the most flattering way possible -- it is so easy to jump right in and be immediately taken over by the characters and the world and the plot, you never feel like you’re fighting to engage even though the world-building is fascinating and expansive. It welcomes you in right away, it was the book equivalent of a quilt and a hug which is something I sorely needed with all this pandemic bullshit. If you read any of the books on this list, go read that one while I sit here in pain waiting for the sequel.

Kid Paddle

I watched the cartoon of Kid Paddle as a kid and was thinking about it recently, so I decided to hunt down some of the original comics online. They’re fun and weird, with a cute art style and fantastic monsters designs. (My favourites are always about Kid either daydreaming or playing games that involve Midam’s weird warty troll creatures. It’s like a cross between Calvin and Hobbes and Foxtrot with the fun sort of quirks that I love in Belgian comics. Unfortunately, unlike Asterix, I’ve only come across these ones in French, but if you can read French it’s totally worth popping over to The Internet Archive and reading the ones they have available.

The Last Firehawk: The Golden Temple

The lastest Firehawk book. Despite being written for quite young readers, I did enjoy the early books in this series quite a bit. They’re about a young owl and squirrel who found an egg for a magical species that was believed to be extinct. With the newly hatched firehawk, the three of them head off on a mission to find an ancient firehawk magic that could save the entire forest. Very basic adventure story but a good intro to the tropes for children. Unfortunately the quality really feels like it drops with each subsequent book; this will probably be the last one I bother reading.

Lumberjanes: The Moon Is Up

I honestly think I enjoy these Lumberjanes novels even more than the comics just because it really gives time to delve into each story and examine how the camper are really thinking and feeling about everything. (Also I’m always weak for novelizations of anything.) The Moon Is Up is a book that focuses more on Jo, and takes place during the camp’s much anticipated Galaxy Wars, a competition between cabins that goes over several days. While the campers prepare for these challenges though, they also run into a strange little creature with a penchant for cheese and theft. Roanoke cabin needs to keep ahead in Galaxy Wars and somehow deal with the fearsome Moon Pirates that a closing in...

Lumberjanes v4 (Out Of Time)

One of the Lumberjanes comics, a cool, girl-focused, queer comic series. Honestly, this is just a fun series that I never got as into as I should have. My advice is honestly to skip book one because it gets better as it continues, and I’ve really been enjoying the later books now that I’ve given it another go. It follows five campers at Miss Qiunzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet’s Camp for Hardcore Lady Types (Jo, April, Molly, Mal, and Ripley) as they handle all sorts of challenges, from friendship to crushes, camp activities to supernatural horrors, getting badges to not being brutally killed. Great if you liked the vibe of Gravity Falls but want it to be queer-er.

Mooncakes

Another queer graphic novel, but unfortunately not a very good one. It really looked appealing and I had high hopes, but the book itself really didn’t hold up… I actually couldn’t even finish it, the plot was just too… non-existent. The art is fairly mediocre once you actually look at it, especially backgrounds, and it feels very… placid. Not much conflict or excitement or even a very compelling reason to keep reading. If you just want a soft queer supernatural you may get more mileage out of it than me, but it didn’t really do it for me. There’s better queer graphic novels out there.

New Boy In Town

One of the worst books I have ever read. My girlfriend had ordered a very different book online but through a frankly stupendous error was sent this 1980s pulp romance instead. Absolutely nauseating on levels I couldn’t even begin to enumerate here. Naturally we read the whole thing out loud. Probably took us 10 times longer to finish than it warranted because I had to stop every two sentences to lose my mind. If you like bad decisions, baffling hetero courting rituals, built-in cultural Christianity without actually calling it that, and gold panning then boy howdy is this the book for you.

(seriously, you better have patience for gold-panning if you attempt this one, because I sure learn that I don’t)

Piggies

This was a picture book I enjoyed as a kid and had a reason to reread recently. Honestly it’s just very cute and simple, and the art is completely mesmerizing. Wonderful if you know a young child that would enjoy a simple goofy boardbook.

Shaun the Sheep: Tales From Mossy Bottom

Related to my Aardman fascination earlier this month. I tried reading a varieties of Shaun the Sheep books — most of which are mediocre at best — but the Tales From Mossy Bottom Farm series is genuinely good. Just chapter books, of course, but the illustrations match the series’ concept art and each story feels like it could have jumped directly out of an episode. They’re just cute and feel-good! Kinda like Footrot Flats but more for kids, and from the sheep’s perspective moreso than the dog’s.

#aardman animation #shaun the sheep #lumberjanes #kid paddle #asterix #the last firehawk #hunger pangs: true love bites #marian engel #bear #canadian literature #canlit #queer lit #book review #book reviews #chatter

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bondsmagii · 3 years

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Chris Chan has got to be one of the most documented people in the internet. I can't imagine having almost every detail of my life for the whole world to see even though I haven't done horrible things like Chris has

god I know right. the idea of everything being that documented... it's honestly eerie as hell. no matter what Chris Chan does or tries, it's all being watched and documented and analysed and man. to think she could have avoided all this if she had just unplugged the internet in like, 2007.

right now I'm still in the early stages, like 17 videos in or so. at the moment I just feel desperately sorry for her. I'm not sure what fucked up shit she might do going forward, and of course I know about the incest charges which is yikes all on its own, but at the moment I can't help but feel desperately sorry for her. like, it's funny in a car crash way, but it's also really not funny at all. right now she's just this autistic young adult living with two abusive parents, who's being harassed by dozens of people online. because of her autism she's incapable of being able to identify trolls until it's far too late, and then more trolls befriend her and she falls for the exact same tricks again because she's inherently too trusting and can't tell when people are being sarcastic or when they're actually ridiculing her. at the moment her closest friend is a girl named Kacey, who's trying to give Chris "advice" to better her life, and on the surface it's all solid advice -- get a job, exercise more, eat healthier, etc -- but it's all designed to set Chris up for more ridicule, and no matter what progress Chris reports, Kacey twists it and uses it to ridicule her and trash her confidence. earlier on I listened to a phone call recording where Chris's mother was caught berating Chris and emotionally manipulating her in the background, and when Chris got back on the line to Kacey, Kacey took Chris's mother's side and started also berating Chris for the same thing. it's honestly so fucked up -- like underneath all the inherent hilarity that comes from a situation so fucking weird, it's impossible to ignore the fact that this is an account of the long-term emotional abuse of a deeply vulnerable adult. whatever Chris might have done in the future, I firmly believe that there's a strong case to be made for the fact she was driven to this point. the constant trolling and the fact that she cannot trust anybody in her life to be who they say they are has created a deep rift between Chris and reality, and I wouldn't be surprised if she's been driven to honest to god clinical psychosis because of all the stress and torment.

if it had just been brief -- a spate of the earlier trolling at the beginning, where they teased her a bit about Sonichu and convinced her she was in a chat with Billy Mays or whatever, that would have been fine. everyone was getting trolled like that back in the day. but at some point it veered away from trolling and went into literal torture. like, I'm going to go under the cut here because this got suddenly serious on an ask that's pretty casual (sorry about that), but it's been bothering me since I saw it and I have to mention it now. sincere warning for anyone reading my Chris Chan documentary chronicles just for the lighter parts, because in my mind what I'm about to discuss is literal, actual torture of a disabled person.

the other day I watched the video where the trolls hacked into Chris's PlayStation account, which had a lot of games and progress she was obviously proud of. being autistic, she's obviously much more attached than these trolls can appreciate -- video games are clearly one of her special interests, and she understandably gets very distressed when the trolls threaten to sell the account. there's a whole bunch of convoluted stuff that happens, but the main event is that they use the leverage of the account to get Chris into doing shit to "win" it back. they end up making her cut her Sonichu medallion (a comfort item that she wears constantly) into four pieces, and stick the pieces up her ass. on video.

the video isn't shown on YouTube, obviously, but the audio is. in it, the trolls can be heard urging her on, insisting she stick it properly up there ("until I can't see it anymore", is how one of them put it). also captured on the audio is Chris, making sounds of pain and also apparently crying, which she is then ridiculed for.

I mean. I was genuinely disturbed by this, as I'm sure most people with even a smidgen of a conscience would be. this is sexual abuse. this is torture. this is not trolling, this is not doing something "for the lulz". this is a small group of genuine psychopaths banding together long after the regular trolling is done, to torture a person who is incapable of defending herself and who has no responsible adult in her life to protect her from people like this. this shit, when compared to legitimate harmless trolling like Liquid Chris, who winds Chris up but never actively harms her (at least to what I've seen so far) and is so ridiculous that everybody can see through it (even Chris herself, who knows that Liquid Chris is a faker and isn't being deceived by Liquid Chris in any way), is night and day. Liquid Chris is genuine trolling, the kind that aims to get you mad and then goes no further. what these other people are doing is abuse and torture. they're clearly a core group of individuals who realised they had an easy target and decided to take advantage of it, and they're all honest to god sociopaths. they should face charges for this shit.

I apologise for getting serious on this post, but I need to be honest here. as much as I'm enjoying the drama and the more ridiculous and admittedly hilarious bits of this story, between all the tamer pieces of legitimate trolling is a serious case of ableism. vulnerable adults like Chris are abused like this every day, and the fact that this can be so well-documented online and still nobody did anything to help her is absolutely astounding. because Chris is "cringe", everybody seemed to collectively decide that she deserved this treatment, when really at the end of the day she began as an autistic teenager who was super passionate about her OC and wanted to upload comics about him online. like. that was her only crime, and it ended like this.

just... god damn.

#anon #asks #chriscourse

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spade-riddles · 3 years

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Submission:

Do antis and ex-Kaylors ever stop to think about how their perception of Karlie makes no sense?

We all know Jerklie is fake. But he’s toxic to her reputation now, and she could easily beard for someone else. So why wouldn’t she?

“But she likes Jerk” - I mean, does she? Because she looks dead behind the eyes during their pap walks. She’s been caught on camera arguing with him multiple times (1975 concert, 4th July party, etc) and it’s clear he keeps springing stuff on her she didn’t agree too, and resents. The sheer weirdness of the “wedding” PR rollout attests to that. Just look at her miserable face eating cake on the floor. I’m not exactly feeling the love here. Yeah, she slings her arm around him in a picture, but Taylor used to be just as OTT with the PDA with Calvin, and we all know she hated him. Pictures prove nothing.

“But Jerk is rich and well-connected and that’s why she sticks with him” - oh please. The Kushers are as sham rich as their in-laws. We joke all the time about how crappy Jerk is at business. Karlie is charming and well-connected in her own right. I struggle to believe she couldn’t find better business partners. Maybe she has poor management, but the number one reason for that is her connection to Jerk. Better management won’t touch her while she’s connected to him. They can’t sell this version of her.

The smart move for her career would be to dump him. If she’s so fame hungry and self-centered, why hasn’t she? Are we really supposed to believe Karlie would be selfish and cruel enough to put her career over Taylor … but not over Jerk? How does that even make sense? It doesn’t!

“Karlie toys with Kaylors because we’re the only fans she has left” - does not compute. First because Kaylor fandom is tiny now, and the subset of Kaylors who believe they’re still together (and pay attention to Karlie) is even tinier. It wouldn’t be worth her while to use us for financial gain. Half the Kaylors who even support her on Tumblr have made it clear they won’t be buying from her Adidas line or supporting her other endeavors until she leaves Jerk. There just isn’t any money to be made from us, pure and simple.

“Okay, then Karlie TROLLS Kaylors because she hates us and wants to make us look stupid!” - I mean, looking at the venom we send her way I doubt she loves us anymore. But why would she bother trolling us? It’s so unbelievably petty, and she never seemed to be that. Maybe I have her character all wrong, but even if I do … wouldn’t she get tired of it eventually? All the “trolling” ever does is bring more hate down on her head and reduce the amount of people willing to pay attention to her in future. It’s shooting herself in the foot.

Most of the people who get excited by her hints are the well-intentioned fans who want her to be free and happy. If her relationship with Jerk is fake (as it obviously is) then why would she be so full of hate for fans who only wish her well? You may as well say Taylor stunts with Toe because she “hates” Gaylors and wants to troll us. Why do we always give Taylor the benefit of the doubt and assume there were 1001 pivots on the road to her coming out, but with Karlie, we always assume the worst?

“Kaylor broke up and Karlie is just trying to stay relevant by mining the Taylor connection!” - yeah, I don’t know how to tell you this, but if a tree falls in the forest and only a tiny subset of internet fans notice it, it’s not staying relevant. Karlie wearing a rainbow sweater the day Fearless comes out is only interesting to us. Literally no-one else cares! These kind of obscure hints aren’t going to get her headlines or jobs.

Also, if Karlie really cared that much about using the Taylor thing for fame, there are a million better ways to do it. She could post throwback pics of their “friendship”. She could mention her all the time in interviews. Taylor is in a quiet phase with the media, and NDAs don’t cover EVERYTHING. As long as Karlie didn’t actually lie or expose their relationship as more than a friendship, there are a lot of ways she could have continued to tie herself to Taylor for publicity, and Taylor couldn’t do anything about it. But mostly Karlie hasn’t done that. Instead, she went dark. How does that fit?

Also, if they did break up, there is nothing to stop Karlie coming out. She’s good friends with Cara Delevingne. She could get loads of headlines about Cara “helping her find the courage to come out” or “helping her realize her sexuality”. She could be linked to other famous women. If Karlie was OUT, people would speculate like crazy about her being an ex of Taylor Swift’s, even if NDAs meant she couldn’t talk about it. If publicity was all Karlie wanted, she could have plenty of it. If she came out as bi, she could even go back to bearding later. It hasn’t stopped Julienne Hough, Harry Styles, or a bazillion other Hollywood celebs.

But instead she puts all her energy into presenting this image of herself as super straight. WHY?

You know who really needs Karlie to be straight right now? And to have always been straight, and in love with the same guy the whole time they knew each other?

TAYLOR.

If Karlie is married to Jerk and had “his” baby, then the Jerklie relationship was real all along. That’s what people will think. Kaylors are just a bunch of deluded, intrusive shippers on the internet. TAYLOR needs people to believe this. There is no other woman she can be convincingly linked to right now, and it’s hard for her to stunt with Toe, for a lot of reasons. One is that she picked a British beard and then an international pandemic hit, whoops! Another is that she set up this whole “private love story” idea with him. And anyway, its been four years. If she starts stunting more hardcore with Toe there are only so many stunts left to pull. If Karlie wasn’t “married” to Jerk right now, I GUARANTEE we would be seeing a Toe engagement.

Karlie is doing the heavy lifting for Taylor. It’s obvious to me.

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hoarder-of-stories-27 · 3 years

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So all I know about Homestuck I've osmosed from being on the internet, whereas you've actually read the thing, so I would love to get an expert opinion: I've been thinking Murderbot and Mensah are moirails. Do I have my pale shipping goggles on sideways? I would love to hear any thoughts you have to share about a Murderbot and ART moirailegence!

!!!!!!!!! *excited happy flapping* I would love to infodump about connections between the two things I’m currently special-interest-ing on, thank you. (This got really long, whoops. The short answer is “yes, I think both Mensah and ART are Murderbot’s moirails.”)

Okay, so, moirallegiance in Homestuck is a kind of relationship meant for people in a really violent society. One partner is supposed to pacify the other. From the comic:

A reasonable human translation would be the concept of a soul mate, but in a more platonic sense, and with a more specific social purpose.

Trolls are a very angry and violent race. Some are more hot-tempered and dangerous than others, to the extent that if left to their own devices, they would present a serious threat to society, or even to themselves. Such trolls will have an instinctive pale attraction to a more even-tempered troll, who may become their MOIRAIL. The moirail is obliged to pacify the other, to function as the better half. The two partners in a strong pale relationship will serve to balance and complement each other's emotional profiles, and thus allow their other relationships to be more successful.

The more dangerous partner also tends to protect the pacifying one.

A lot of people in the Homestuck fandom use a looser definition of moirallegiance, where it’s less lopsided and there doesn’t have to be a one-dangerous-person-and-one-calming-one dynamic. Basically just queerplatonic partners. I think both Murderbot/Mensah and Murderbot/ART fit into the official definition, though! From Network Effect:

I could say it was an accident, I’d meant to take him prisoner and he had tried to get away and—

Dr. Mensah would never believe that. My accidents were spectacular and usually involved me losing a big chunk of my organic tissue or something; she knew I could stop a human without hurting them, without even leaving a bruise, that was my stupid job.

She would never trust me again. She would never stand close enough to touch (but without touching, because touching is gross) and just trust me. Or maybe she would, but it wouldn’t be the same.

Fuck, fuck everything, fuck this, fuck me especially.

I opened a secure comm contact to Mensah and Senior Officer Indah and said, “I’ve caught a GrayCris agent in the Port temp housing block.”

Dr. Mensah wasn’t even there and that guy wouldn’t be alive without her. And from Exit Strategy:

I could take over the ship’s SecSystem before this human with the temptingly large familiar projectile weapon could blink. I could get that weapon before that human could blink. I wanted to do it, and it bled through into the feed.

Mensah turned, gripped the collar of my jacket with both hands, and said, “No.”

(...)

I sent, You have no idea what I am.

She tilted her head and looked more mad. I know exactly what you are. You’re afraid, you’re hurt, and you need to calm the fuck down so we can get through this situation alive.

I said, I am calm. You need to be calm, to take over a gunship.

Mensah’s eyes narrowed. Security consultants don’t get their clients into unnecessary pitched battles for control of their rescue ship. She added, Because that would be stupid.

She wasn’t afraid of me. And it hit me that I didn’t want that to change. She had just been through a traumatic experience, and I was making it worse. Something was overwhelming me, and it wasn’t the familiar wave of not-caring.

Fine, I sent. I sounded sulky, because I was sulky.

I hate emotions.

“Good,” she said aloud.

That’s... heavily reminiscent of the Karkat and Gamzee scene (arguably the most important portrayal of moirallegience in Homestuck). And obviously Murderbot protects her. Yeah, they’re moirails. :D

Murderbot and ART don’t fit quite as easily into the comic’s definition of moirallegiance. I thought at first that ART would be the dangerous one. I mean, it is dangerous. (They both are.) But Murderbot’s usually the one who needs to be calmed down and kept from going through with its bad ideas. There’s this (from Network Effect):

I was desperate. I sent privately, ART, tell them I need to go alone. Back me up.

ART said aloud, I concur, it will be safer if SecUnit is accompanied by two certified survey specialists.

Why am I even surprised. I sent privately again, ART, you asshole.

ART replied, only to me, It is safer. I’ve lost my crew, I won’t lose you.

Amena said, not helpfully, “Your face just got really weird. Are you all right?”

No, it was confusing. I was confused.

And while Murderbot 2.0 did end up happening, ART was against it until it was absolutely necessary.

I do think Murderbot and ART could be considered moirails! Especially if you use the looser definition that’s basically QPPs. Still, I like “mutual administrative assistants” better than anything else for their relationship. :D

I hope that answered your question! Sorry about how long it got. (Wow, I wish I could use this energy for things that aren’t my special interests.)

#also i think murderbot's classpect would be knight of doom #protective; masks its personality; unfortunate circumstances-wise; sympathetic to others in bad circumstances; good with technology #long post #homestuck #murderbot diaries #murderbot and mensah #murderbot and ART #death mention #violence mention #asks #theaicollective #-responsible

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dropintomanga · 4 years

Text

About Fans Telling Mangaka They Read Scanlations

When creators and celebrities attend fan conventions to meet with audiences that love them, it’s often a wonderful time for everyone. However, there’s still some cases where fans have to be reminded that while it’s okay to let guests how much they love them, there’s always a limit to how much a guest can take.

This past weekend, one of manga’s top mangaka, Paru Itagaki of Beastars fame, had a panel interview at the virtual anime convention Otaquest Connect. She talked about her thought process while creating the series, her inspirations, and what she liked about the 1st season of the Beastars anime. While this was a really good interview, it’s the final words that Itagaki says that stood to me. It’s all regarding an experience that many mangaka have been through when they use Twitter and overseas fans have a chance to communicate with them.

I’m talking about when overseas fans express their feedback to mangaka on social media about weekly/monthly chapters that aren’t published in Japan due to scanlations of them being released before official Japanese street dates.

Itagaki actually mentions this in the end of the interview. She said that she gets a bunch of responses on her Twitter account from overseas fans about the latest chapters of Beastars. While she’s grateful for the support, Itagaki points out that fans are accessing them through less-than-legal means and tells fans to buy official translations if they’re available.

This is probably the first time I’ve heard a mangaka actually say something a manga publisher would say. I’ve heard anime convention stories where fans mention they read certain manga titles online at scan sites in front of representatives at manga publishers’ booths. I recalled hearing a story from Toronto Comics Art Festival 2018 when Inio Asano came and someone in the autograph line for him told Asano straight-out that they read his work online.

Of course, it’s easy to say “Stupid fans and their entitlement over piracy!” I know there’s some trolls who think piracy is the true answer for exposure. But as a industry person I follow on Twitter was saying about how pirate sites like Kissanime/Kissmanga got huge in the 1st place, he believes that the majority of their users are innocent as those aggregator sites normalized fans’ desire to have a central hub for everything anime/manga related. The sites also diminish the value of anime and manga by raising user expectations to a somewhat insane degree. In a sense, many anime/manga fans that were using those sites were being manipulated. Add the fact that they’re usually young, impressionable and starving for attention and you have a formula that creates misunderstandings for everyone.

I do think most manga fans don’t know any better when it comes to talking to mangaka. Part of me does blame aggregator sites and also celebrity culture. Mangaka are celebrities in their own unique way, sure, but they are human beings like you and I. I think when we get a chance to interact with a celebrity via social media, fans would take any moment to express their love in all kinds of ways. Social media is supposed to reduce friction and encourage connection. However, it raises expectations in that the fan has to be satisfied at any cost. That expression of love can grow to stalking in the worst case scenario. Social media reinforces this expression with little regard to safety by continuously providing suggestions on famous people they might follow that’s relevant to their interests.

A lot of fans want someone they can relate to and or emulate. They’re not taught to look up to the people around them who make a much better impact than any celebrity can. I do know that close and immediate role models are hard to come by as many anime/manga fans tend to be social outcasts. I mean, those relationships take a long time to build, so why not go for the quick fix of building one with a famous person they like. I also think people want to appreciate someone badly and that can lead to awkward moments.

For Beastars, I know a lot of fans can relate to the struggles of Legoshi, Haru, Louis and the rest of the cast. A good part of the internet just filters out the true reality of official-translated manga versus scanlations, thanks to aggregator sites that don’t care about the anime/manga industries. All the platforms do is provide basic answers that don’t make you think. And if you don’t think, it makes you easier to control and not ask questions that you really need to ask.

I don’t have any easy answers on how to get fans to stop talking to mangaka on Twitter about leaked/early chapter releases. You have to challenge that mindset head-on. A good place to start is to ask them questions while telling them the truth about the manga industry’s perception of scanlations. Ask those fans what compels them to tell mangaka about their new chapters. Please don’t shame or guilt-trip when they give answers that you may not like. It just encourages fans to double-down on their behavior. Let them know that they’re capable of doing the right thing or take steps to doing so.

I also started to think about what it really means to have gratitude for someone. I’ve read stories from essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic that don’t want to be just thanked by upper-class workers who can work from home. What they really want is actual financial support that helps them survive. Words don’t mean much when gratitude is often used by the giver as a way to feel better about themselves. In a way, a lot of people who are technically higher up in large companies use gratitude as a way to justify not giving lower-level employees increased salary raises/benefits. How many times have we heard stories about notable media sites telling writers who aren’t paid well to be grateful that they have a chance to write for a big site such as their’s?

Gratitude can be used as a way to shut someone up in cases of bad situations. It prevents change that may need to happen. Think of all the times when someone with mental health problems and mental illness is told that they should just cheer up and be grateful they’re alive when they really need their negative feelings/concerns to be validated.

I sensed this with Itagaki as she’s bluntly pointing out what a lot of mangaka are unable (or don’t have the guts) to say on Twitter or at a convention. Honestly, if someone pirates manga, they pirate. I get it. If you can only buy a few series you really love, there’s nothing wrong with doing that. I just want fans to have better manners when it comes to talking to creators about reading their works online. You don’t need to always says thanks and/or even say anything at all. All those kind of “positive comments” do is make mangaka feel less of themselves as if their work isn’t worth paying for. As someone who dislikes the idea of chasing happiness, I think we have to discuss how positive thinking can get toxic.

In a time where everyone has an opinion about something, it’s perhaps a good time to learn what mangaka and every creator does - bask in the right kind of silence that leads to powerful actions that benefits BOTH yourself and other people with respect.

Photo Source: Otaquest Interview with Paru Itagaki (February 28, 2020)

#manga #mangaka #manga industry #manga culture #celebrity culture #fandom #gratitude #dark side #scanlations

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cutegirlmayra · 4 years

Text

When your tired after a 16hr shift yesterday so you rant about Sonic and explain why aggressive writing vs. neutral writing helps with sharing ideas

Me and my online Sonic friend talking about Belle. (I’m skipping some dialogue throughout the chat, this was lazily put together lol)

WARNING: It’s long, and it’s a rant. So please note that I’m blatantly aware of how wrong my aggressive, sleep-deprived rant was and that I’m stating “DON’T PRESENT YOUR IDEAS LIKE THIS!” because this is not a healthy nor effective way of sharing ideas.

ALSO, ALL THE MENTIONS OF WHAT I BELIEVE MY FRIEND IS FEELING OR THINKING DURING MY RANT ARE ENTIRELY MY OPINON. If she tells me to delete something or change it I will without hesitation but I find it funny, as I look back, to insert what I think might be going on in her mind XD She might have been oblivious to me but I’ll get her thoughts and change anything if necessary.

It’s also how most trolls and antis and even some ‘not experienced writers’ write their ideas out, and it can be easily avoided by using Neutral Writing Methods. So this is a ‘don’t do this, but try this’ post. Enjoy my badly written, sleepy aggressive rant~<3 (Also, my friend gave me permission to share this lol)

Me: She could be for entertaining little kids. But we already have too many OCs, and they're not 'dying off' any time soon so...I smell a mini-series backup plan...and I don't like what that means for Sonic. And it is cute, sorry, my brain is off the hook right now, I'll keep things to myself cause you may not like what I'm predicting and I'm getting sad thinking about it ;-; so, want to be wrong.

(Friend mentioned “Tinker Bell” spin on name.)

That's precious, but can I get a link to the reference sheet plz? Reference sheets can tell a lot about a chara's functionality if you compare it to the 'needs' of the casts. it can help predict their role. I think she's meant to help but also entertain the kids, maybe planted with a secret. Her goal could be to come back to Mr. Tinker but Eggman abuses that and tricks her into a new robot. I got a weird theory about her but I'll just say that she's probably gonna go a bit dark. But be cute and make the audience go, "Aww, poor thing! She's a cinnamon roll" at first, wonder if they'll equip her with 'happy backstory, tragic ending' kinda thing to switch the usual 'tragic backstory happy ending' but I feel this is a tragic character meant to pull emotion out.

(Friend understands my concerns but mentions there hasn’t been a ‘Bad’ Oc for the comic)

No one sets out to create a 'bad character' especially professional writers like these guys. But what makes a character 'bad' is if you ruin or oversaturate their purposes. If she's a main character that over-shines others with too much story then the audience feels 'betrayed' because they want that screen time for the main casts to express themselves and shine through. That's just an example. When working with IPs like Sonic casts, you HAVE to remember the fanbase is expecting things Do you like my OCs? be honest lol Not from my prompts. There's a specific way to handle a OC that helps the main cast shine and reveals their characters more. AU Ocs help Canon Characters in many ways.

(Friend admits they have not seen my OCs in some of my fanfictions, they’ve only really read my prompts.)

Oh, well, some of my fanfictions have OCs, not Lavinya, she's just a mascot. My Sonic OC that retried XD Sorry, I'm misspelling a lot but I hope you don't mind, my spellcheck sucks and I've given up on it lol Oh, so you don't know Harmony, Ol'Wizzy, and Data?Or the Metal Series? Well, there are specific Ocs that my readers like and they express/compliment the canon characters to where even though they're a main character, they don't intervene with the Main Cast's goals. They actually help. Then everything I'm gonna say won't have much merit so I'll just focus on waiting to see if my predictions for Sonic IDW will come true, but I really hope they don't do what it looks like they strategically might be pulling... I hate SEGA marketing-

(The beginning of my aggressive rant, please note that I’m not thinking about my image and am writing tired and lazy. This is an example of how NOT to express your opinions in negative ways. It doesn’t influence good at all.)

Their ploys are outdated and frankly, do not work for their IPs market. They target the wrong age group, they have no idea how to organize themselves, and they don't have a leading 'elder' so to speak (just a professional among them) to make good calls. So you have young adults (not super professionals, this might be their first real company job) trying to target internet culture and failing their IPs. They're doing outdated Nintendo tactics that only worked for NINTENDO! Also some other companies that have DIED so why are you copying their marketing strats!? stop! lol

Friend: Did you study marketing because this entire convo kinda flew over my head in terms of understanding (This should have indicated to me that my words were coming off too factual and had too many ‘jargons’ going on. I was losing my ‘reader’ through my rant, but my tired brain would not cease!)

Sonic's trying to morph into something he's not and they're following outdated college course books and it's not gonna help... they're leading Sonic further down and the creators in japan have no power cause all the power is in the stock holders who are stupid money-hungry americans who have lost faith in American SEGA leading SEGA of Japan to move on to other things

Friend: mostly just got you don’t like the marketing (Huge red flag! This means my friend is starting to tune my info out, it’s because I’m presenting my ideas in a slightly aggressive writing style. There are trigger words here that lead an reader to start doubting you. This is why, in most of my answer posts, I make sure to write Neutral writing methods, but I’ll mention that more after my rant lol XP)

It's just bad. Lol I have a Frankenstein degree, (Now I’m justifying myself, which was caused by my aggressive approach. If I simply stated this in a more ‘neutral writing method’ then I wouldn’t have to worry about creditability claims because I’m not trying to sell my idea as the high authority on it.) which means I have knowledge on many different fields. I never took a fully -dedicated- 'marketing class' I took a lot of different communication classes that went to my overall major. One was directly about how you present, sell, and look at marketing tactics. So I have my fingers in many different fields, my major was "Creative Writing for Fiction and Film with an Emphasis in Video Production and a Cluster in Theatre Arts." So I can be on camera, off camera, post and pre production, creative table and actual filming. Does that make sense? (I’m not fully awake to realize what I’m writing, but it’s clear at this point I’m starting to wake up and realize I’m ranting and tossing my ideals of how to present ideas out the window, but let’s watch my follies and learn from them, shall we?) I have theories on what SEGA is going to do, and I have my worries because it's all outdated. It worked for older companies but those companies also targeted a varying audience, which SEGA refuses to see themselves as for a 'teenage audience' which is exactly why they boomed in the 90s. Their target audience is now 20s.

Friend: There are Kids who also like Sonic, even if they don’t play the games though. (Due to my aggressive tactics from not thinking clearly about, not just the what, but the HOW I’m writing, it has turned my friend into a ‘contrasting neutrality’ which is amazing by the way that she did this! She noticed my writing was turning aggressively ranting, and being my friend, didn’t want to be rude about what she was noticing. -I’m guessing lol- so instead, she took the commentary approach, which is to state the good as well. This is a terrible position to put your reader into, and you should make sure to always have good examples and good praise mixed in to contrast any opposing or aggressive statements you ever make. -though you should avoid aggressive writing at all times- Sadly, this does put the reader, in this case my friend, in a very vulnerable position. It leaves them open for attack... but thankfully, she’s a wonderful friend and had trust that I wouldn’t hurt her on her counter-follow-up.)

So instead of using their 40 to 50 year old charts, start with looking at early millennial trends and desires. They tried for 'angst' to 'adultify' Sonic but it busted because we are STICKLERS for animation. Because their story was so scrapped together and had no actual character depth, motivation, or even emotional growth to develop for future game lore, they went for the 'easy made game' (Easy baked oven quote lol that’s just mean XD) We loved the trailer, it was well made, but they threw their animators elsewhere and made the programmers (WHO BLANATLY ADMIT THEY DONT KNOW HOW TO DO STORY/GRAPHICS) and made them do things they aren't trained in. Those micro-head movements and mouths took them A LONG TIME to figure out.

(My friend is now agreeing with me several times through my rant. This is a tactic that is used as ‘avoidance’ but also for ‘appeasement’. She’s probably tuned out by now, but respects what I’m saying but is also incredulous at it as well. It’s fair, I’ve cornered her into my sleepy-time rant, and being the lovable woman that she is, she is simply waiting for me to realize my follies lolol I wish she would have told me but I think she knew I was beyond ‘logical reasoning’ at this point and was just letting me get it all out lolol What a good friend TDT)

Animation can't be learned that fast AND expect them to program a game AT THE SAME TIME. Sonic Forces was a 'split up SEGA' trying to get those who survived and said, "Yeah, I'll stay in this job." to do things that THEY AREN'T EVEN TRAINED IN. you put a game programmer on animation and some other stuff they didn't know what to do with and expect it be a top-notch seller.

Friend: (in more attempts to join in and be a ‘participant’ of the conversation I’m clearly dominating -MY ABSOLUTE BAD- she tried to engage normal conversation flow into the discussion again. At this point, she probably did notice I wasn’t my usual self, and just decided to play along and enjoy the ride lolol I’m just guessing this tho, but it’s a good chance to reflect on what ‘wrongs’ I was doing and what ‘rights’ she was doing during this situation ;)b) My big issue with SEGA is that they rush everything. A lot of things would’ve been better if they had the proper time.

That was resolved actually.

Friend: Oh? It was? (Although this looks like an encouragement, it’s actually just another avoidance tactic to help me ‘get the venting out’ but it’s clear she’s not fully onboard anymore. When you write to discuss, you have to leave room for other’s opinions to shine through as well. Healthy conversation doesn’t mean forcing the other person to comply to you. A lot of this is educated guess based on past research, she knows this, and it’s clear she’s got her own research. Please remember to never shoot someone down when they try to engage you in your conversations. But again, this is the ‘don’t do this’ and me upset at my tired self for not waking up fast enough to contemplate how I was coming across in my wordings. Let’s continue to investigate and dissect the train wreck, shall we?)

That was an issue a few years ago but SEGA is taking their time, it's just that they can't organize themselves and hire the right professionals. They have old tactics, they have rookies that aren't 'Fresh Blood with professionalism' like they need. They don't need an old fart who knows his stuff, they need a new guy who is dedicated and passionate about their company who will remain there, learn them in and out, and knows his stuff SPECIFICALLY for the things SEGA needs. You have to grow that. You have to hire a very talented and young spunky and fresh professional, have him work with you for 10-15 years, and start training others. But SEGA is already recognized as a 'established' company.

(Friend is still agreeing with me, but is aware of my way of presenting it isn’t “As nice as I usually present it” so she starts mentioning the symptoms of Japanese Work Culture. A wonderful, insightful point to mention! But let’s see how I butcher this as well...)

It's not Japan though! (Again, shutting her down. Tsk tsk, sleepy me. Wake up, you lazy bum.) They won't let Japan interfere! They're all really rude to japan actually. The guys in charge, anyway. We all respect the officials, but SEGA of America people just want results. They are just funders, they don't actually work the company.

Friend: So you blame them for everything? (She’s trying to help me see that my writing is coming off as ‘hate’ which is because of my aggressive writing follies I’m doing so bluntly. Let’s please all admire my friend’s patience as she lets me rant and kindly waits for me to realize how bad I’m handling my 16 hr shift from yesterday lolol)

Look, business is really unfair, and I get that, but if I have to rant (I’m starting to wake up more, oh goodie.) I'd say they really need to humble themselves and ask Japan to please take ownership again. They kicked out people due to a money crisis but they need a game that will be 'safe to secure money but get enough excited momentum to help us push on and continue.' which isn't Japan's strategy usually. Japan likes risks, they also like money too. They trust America too much (especially in the beginning) because America is a HUGE consumer. For the world in fact. But I think they sacrificed too much for the company (common in Japan) and trusted America too much in making decisions. The officials are too nice to say that America screwed them over because America wanted full control. Well guess what? They have too much control now and their product is sinking..

Friend: You’ve got a lot of fire about this topic. (After I completely disregarded reading her follows-ups and continued to rant, my unconditionally kind friend finally threw in the towel, realizing I was no where near my usually ‘present’ self and was probably just flopped back in her chair smiling at my idiocy of not understanding her kind and subtly hints.) Go ahead and rant it out. (BOOM! Obvious right!? I should have corrected myself but at this point, I was writing like wild fire with droopy, waking up eyes and didn’t even read it during my long paragraphs...)

Sonic won't ever fade away due to it's fans, but the company is struggling to figure itself out for YEARS now. I just worry what they plan to do next. But I have a theory that they are really putting the next game in Japan's hands, a lot of activity is happening in SEGA of Japan, and they're spending WAY MORE TIME on the next installment of Modern Sonic (or Classic, still unsure which one it is yet.) I really think they need a remake game to give them profit, then use that profit for their next big installment. But so far, I think they are working on a game BUT corona might have effected production so I'm sure they are working but I'm concerned if Corona helped manage 'time and quality' or is helping to ruin it...That I can't investigate yet :( I just wish for the best (I’M FINALLY WAKING UP FULLY AS I STOP AND REALIZE-) Sorry for my rant! My theory talk showed through and I don't usually like doing that so forgive me. I'm tired and that's why T-T

Friend: It’s cool we all need to rant sometimes. (My friend’s going to make it to Heaven TwT she’s so kind.)

(Then I profusely apologized a billion times cause I realize how badly this all went down. lol)

(But the terror hasn’t ended... she mentioned some youtube videos mentioning other opinions as well. -which I’m usually cautious of cause some of them can be fanon.-)

OHhhh did he mention the arcade crash??? the literal WORST event in SEGA history??? That's literally where they sank the titanic, SEGA has never recovered from selling off their stocks. (I’M BACK AT IT AGAIN. -facepalm-) Shareholders are everything now and it's the biggest loss ever. Also, the problem is that kids don't play the games, (Rereading my follies and wanting to answer but still only just waking up...) but SEGA can't figure out why they like the characters and can't seem to take the FREAKIN' TIME to learn their lore. (Overwhelming the conversation again.) My easy steps: Re-establish Sonic lore CANONLY AND CORRECTLY, Re-gather the Japanese Officials original plans and notes, guides and study art, Re-make some popular games with the most details on Animation, Fluidity of motion graphics, and with modern Technology incorporated into the game. Once that is accomplished, they will have enough money to then- Create a continuity. Only with a flowing story and relevant past lore can they start moving forward. Animation will target their audience, Story and character re-established arcs will bring nostalgia and new blood to the field of their games, and then Japan's influences will keep it authentic for the continuities so we don't have fandom mixing with canon NEARLY AS BADLY as before anymore. Ugh, it does matter their sales, but I literally bought a book on the history of SEGA, and read a really compelling history article about more then just the Console Wars... I know SEGA has survived literally the edge of extinction on multiple fronts, but someone needs to take charge of their Sonic branch, and it's... it's just too outdated. kk, sorry for the rant.

Friend: (After being multiple times ignored, even after my brief moment of clarity, is still an angel. Frustrated, maybe, but an angel.) And your steps sound really good. Also mostly just listen to his vids if you ever do. It’s ok we all need to rant. (THE WORLD DOESN’T DESERVE THIS GURL T-T)

I'm tired so my 'angry' is showing and it's not professional XD do you mind if I post my rant? lol Actually, no. (Realize how awfully I delivered my ideas, this is where I begin to see my errors and where the clarity comes into play. -we all have our off days lol- )

Friend: Go for it

I want to but it's too aggressive. I'm too lazy to rewrite it out so I'll just save that for another day XD You got a rare treat

Friend: (This is actually interesting and fascinating to her. But she realized then that I finally did see my error.) Concerned you’ll get aggressive responses back?

Honest opinion is sometimes too blunt and I need to be careful about that

Friend: I mean it’s always good to try and get most of the anger out so you seem more professional (Saint. Literally. A saint. She’s puts up with too much of my crap XD)

That, and also the war of 'But this is Cutegirlmayra? She's so sweet and constantly puts her answers in supportive, positive lights so that if SEGA were to see it, they would feel empowered to try it instead of threatened and throw it off as hate or something unprofessional.' I have an image too. I can't post something super aggressive or I'll lose trust. You're right.

Friend: I’m glad you put a lot of thought into everything you post

I apologize for it tho T-T I didn't mean to dominate with such opinions...lol I worry who I influence, you know?

Friend: Most people don’t and trust me they get into trouble cause of it. And yeah.

I don't want to create trolls or heated arguments. I want to teach people they can safely express an idea without using such awful communication. Exactly, it's professional fanism. lol Positive writing is what companies and their employees actually read. (I’m almost fully awake now lol, realizing my blunder and starting to explain why I was in the wrong. Good on me, pat on the back, admitting I was coming off as aggressive is the first step to changing and getting better lolol Also, I’m including her more, and I’m saying “You’re right.” and she’s going “And yeah.” which is a indicator that the conversation is slowly returning to an enjoyable and healthy one. ;w; happy endings lol) That's why I skip the aggressive stuff, even if it's passive, I write in a neutral setting so everyone feels safe to read, even someone who works at SEGA.

Friend: (Mentions some nintendo youtuber rant and also news as well, then says-) It was honestly very professional sounding and not rude. (MY HEART, YOU KNEW THAT WAS AN AGGRESSIVE RANT lololol So nice to me TDT)

Lol you had to have seen how slightly aggressive it was tho. (I’M CALLING YOUR BLUFF, BESTIE lol) You literally asked, "You blame America for it?" which is not always true but semi-true. They were way too prideful (Aggressive word) and haughty (Still aggressive terminology) about their success in other Japanese products that they wanted to completely change Sonic to their own wishes, pushing out Japan's creative "licenses" (I use this word loosely, and this gives a slightly aggressive feel but is also more dumbed down so it's more 'passionate' than just aggressive)

Friend: Yeah I saw it was slightly aggressive (Either is starting to realize it or at last admitting it now that I am fully aware of how I was coming across. I also used indicators to show what words were aggressive to help illustrate my point. This is showing I’m much more awake now :)b)

Gotta use those neutral tactics or no one will feel comfortable just reading your idea and instead, will constantly look for a place to intercept with aggression back, whether they agree or not, they're looking for ways to self-insert their aggression if you are also aggressive. I can't write something that doesn't somewhat support and uplift SEGA of America. Why? Because like I said, they literally have survived EVERYTHING and have stuck around. Without them, there wouldn't be an American branch and the money issue would have ended SEGA. Some might say, "But they've done so much harm than good! Why is the money thing such a thing to be praised for?" But it's huge, it's so big, it kinda does offset the wrongs. (Now I’m doing the healthy thing, doubling back and mentioning the good to try and recover. The damage may be done, but she did recommend some videos for me and was polite, so I’m just trying to smooth things over and leave on a ‘wrapped up’ conclusion. But... I should have just left it there in all honesty xD Some things you can’t double-back and correct lol) America is a great business-influenced mindset. None of us would be fans of Sonic without them.

(Friend continues to agree but realizes I may slip into ranting again. She just asks if I can watch the videos.)

America does have it's advantages in some fields and areas, but their biggest most redeeming quality is that they saved SEGA which gave us our biggest love and obsession: Sonic. Now, my usage in that writing was still off neutral, but combined with the slightly aggressive statements, made a GREAT contrast. It's still slightly praising

Friend: And they stopped Japan from giving him a human girlfriend right away.

Me: Exactly.

Friend: I will always thank them for that. (She’s still a sweetheart, working herself into the conversation so it stays healthy. lol Such amazing follow-ups too!)

So although I don't like what's happening, I'm also grateful... to a degree lol We need SEGA of America, which is why I think Japan just ignores them now lolol they know they owe them a lot.

(Friend mentions videos and as I go to save them to my ‘watch later’ sees that one of them is about Nintendo.)

Yeeeahhh I've noticed that Nintendo is starting to trail into 'cash grab' tactics and that's sickening (MORE AGGRESSIVE WORDING??? HAVE YOU NOT LEARNED YOUR LESSON CHILD?! It takes time to fully wake up lolol) cause before, I literally thought, "Nintendo can do no wrong" their marketing was ON POINT! but the stuff they said about Peach and now... I think new, unprofessional blood (like SEGA) has entered Nintendo and the older guys are either 'training' or 'retired to other ventures'. Nintendo is having it's own 'we used to not be prideful but now we're getting a little too pompous (Another aggressive wording... This can easily trigger people to comment with further aggression either against you or for you, but no aggression is the ideal. Which is continuing to show my lack of remaining conscious lol) about ourselves' and they're starting to act like Disney before their big crash. Disney also had 'limited time offers' with their VHS movies. Now, Nintendo is doing that. They'll make money, but at what cost? When you lose your costumer's trust...

Friend: And yeah the 35th Mario thing immediately reminded me of the Disney vault

Me: Yep. I'm worried for Nintendo. Don't get me wrong! Disney is really good with money grabs, but they... they also act high and mighty (More aggressive statements, wake up, darn it!!!) and their fanbase literally calls them 'an empire' so the fan-trust is gone. That makes you 'lame/outdated' and fans begin to look for 'what's cool?' instead.

(Friend is now re-realizing I’m ‘in and out’ so is trying to use a effective avoidance tactic by asking about different things to help my ranting fully stop.)

Sorry, I'm tired, I get on these rants and I don't mean too. (Trying to shake myself awake again.) I'm sorry.

So we returned to a healthy conversation, but I hope this interesting insight has revealed how to and what not to do about Aggressive Writing. Always stick to Neutral writing if you can, putting in a compelling counter-argument. In this aggressive writing demo, you saw that I tried to cover up my follies by saying counter-praise, but praise writing can be just as bad as aggressive writing. Passive writing can sometimes be annoying (aggressive word choice) too if you come off as disinterested or uncaring, which can still result in negative comments coming at you, or someone overly praising in their writings.

This has been all I’m showing you cause it’s kinda embarrassing ^^; but I hope it helps you in what ‘not to do’ while writing your ideas out :)b

Learn from my sleepy-time mistakes! lol

#cutegirlmayra #aggressive writing #what not to do #sonic #nintendo #marketing #sega #commentary #rant writing #an example to help teach #sonic the hedgehog #sonic idw #sonic comic #sonic rant

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seymour-butz-stuff · 3 years

Link

One of social media’s most notorious alt-right trolls in the 2016 election—known then as “Ricky Vaughn,” hiding the identity of a 28-year-old Vermont man named Douglass Mackey—was arrested Monday by the FBI on charges that he and others schemed to interfere in the election by convincing some 4,500 voters to use a fake text-message system, thinking they were submitting their official ballots. Predictably, there were immediate cries of outrage from the white-nationalist far right.

None were quite as predictable, however, as the defense of Mackey that was broadcast nationwide by Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show that evening: Beyond mere gaslighting his audience about the threat of white nationalism, as well as who Mackey is and what he did, Carlson unleashed on his audience a deluge of straight-up lies about the case.

youtube

The indictment of Mackey is noteworthy, not least because Republicans have claimed—without any evidence—throughout the past four years that Democrats have engaged in massive vote fraud, and yet we are presented with yet another example of very real vote fraud undertaken on behalf of Donald Trump.

It details how Mackey and his cohorts—which included Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, another alt-right troll who was arrested last week for his role in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol—coordinated an online scheme in which they targeted Democratic voters with a scam convincing them they could vote online. The voters were told they could vote for Hillary Clinton simply by posting a specific hashtag on Twitter or Facebook, or by sending a text with her name in it to a specific phone code.

Mackey, an unrepentant racist on Twitter, made no bones that his personal agenda was primarily to “limit black turnout,” the complaint says. As HuffPost’s Luke O’Brien details, Vaughn was working with some of the worst of the worst:

The complaint lists four co-conspirators referred to only by Twitter “user IDs,” a unique string of numbers assigned to each Twitter account. HuffPost can report that one co-conspirator is a prominent alt-right botmaster who goes by “Microchip” and was instrumental in making pro-Trump and anti-Hillary Clinton hashtags and content go viral on Twitter during the 2016 election. A fascist accelerationist who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and Nazism, Microchip claims to have been involved in the early spread of the QAnon conspiracy cult and repeatedly told this reporter that his goal was to destroy the United States.

“Ricky Vaughn” was not just your average troll, either. As the DOJ explained in its press release on the case, he had a large Twitter following of about 58,000, but his influence was very broad. It notes: “A February 2016 analysis by the MIT Media Lab ranked Mackey as the 107th most important influencer of the then-upcoming Election, ranking his account above outlets and individuals such as NBC News (#114), Stephen Colbert (#119) and Newt Gingrich (#141).”

Then in November 2016, Twitter banned “Ricky Vaughn,” along with a number of other white-nationalist accounts, and his influence vanished practically overnight. Then, his identity was revealed during a spat with white-nationalist politician Paul Nehlen, and in short order his past as a Middlebury College grad, his employment in the financial sector in Manhattan, and other personal details all came to light in a HuffPost profile.

“What Mackey allegedly did to interfere with this process—by soliciting voters to cast their ballots via text—amounted to nothing short of vote theft,” remarked William F. Sweeney Jr. of the FBI’s New York Field Office in the DOJ press release. “It is illegal behavior and contributes to the erosion of the public’s trust in our electoral processes. He may have been a powerful social media influencer at the time, but a quick Internet search of his name today will reveal an entirely different story.”

Unsurprisingly, Carlson’s instantaneous defense of Mackey after his arrest Sunday omits all of this information, and tries to portray Mackey as a harmless meme-wielding prankster and the scheme as simply “making fun of Democrats.”

It was a performance not only perfectly aligned with Carlson’s running claims that the threat of the white-nationalist right is a “hoax,” but likely as well a preview of how Republicans and conservatives will be approaching the issue: namely, by gaslighting the public into believing that what happened on January 6 in the U.S. Capitol didn’t really happen.

But Carlson’s defense of Mackey, as well as his general campaign to convince the public that white nationalists pose no threat to American democracy, is also veering into the same kind of self-own that conservatives used—successfully—in 2009 to trample an earlier attempt by the nation’s law-enforcement apparatus to tackle the radical right. That was when the Department of Homeland Security released a bulletin to law-enforcement agencies warning of a resurgence of radical-right organizing and recruitment, and right-wing media (led by Fox News) shrieked hysterically that the bulletin was an “indictment of conservatives” and an “attack on the tea party.”

Carlson has been saying essentially the same thing this week, identifying ordinary conservatives and Fox News watchers with the white nationalists who invaded the Capitol on January 6. On Monday he ran a clip of Congressman Adam Schiff commenting on the need for a swift response by law enforcement to the takeover:

Schiff: We have been urging for some time that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security raise the priority to domestic terrorism to white nationalism as it threatens the country. And we’re going to continue sounding the alarm and make sure they’re devoting the resources, the time, the attention, just as we did after 9/11 to the threat from international terrorism, we need to give the same priority and urgency to domestic terrorism.

Carlson then launched into a tirade that directly identified his audience with those domestic terrorists, claiming that Schiff was talking about ordinary Republicans:

Got that? Vote the wrong way and you are a jihadi. You thought you were an American citizen with rights and just a different view. But no, you’re a jihadi. And we’re going to treat you the way we did those radicals after 9/11. The way we treated Bin Laden. Get in line, pal. This is a war on terror.

… Keep in mind, they’re talking about American citizens here. They’re talking about you. But nobody seems to notice or care.

On the same broadcast, Carlson offered a similar defense of the QAnon cult, portraying their counterfactual and reality-bereft conspiracy theories as mere political beliefs, and attempts to expose and counter their smears, falsehoods, and violent agenda as part of a liberal scheme to enforce a kind of thought control.

“Once politicians attempt to control what you believe, they are no longer politicians. They are by definition dictators,” he intoned, and then went on to charge that “they have all, almost every one of them, joined the mob of censors, hysterics, and Jacobin destroyers, all working on behalf of entrenched power, to take total control of everything.”

Carlson’s rhetorical gambit on Monday was essentially a kind of hard-nosed gaslighting, insisting that what ordinary people see emanating from the radical right can all just be explained away if you frame it in benign enough terms. But on Tuesday, he didn’t simply whitewash the reality, he resorted to outright baldfaced lies in rising to defend Douglass Mackey.

His opening line, in fact, was utterly false: “Mackey is a 31-year-old conservative journalist from Florida,” Carlson said. In fact, Mackey is not any kind of journalist at all; he has never published any piece of journalism at any publication, having in fact been an economist at John Dunham & Associates until 2016. Carlson clearly wanted to make this all about the First Amendment, even if the facts inconveniently did not fit.

He went on:

At 7 a.m. FBI agents showed up at Mackey’s house. They threw him in handcuffs and they dragged him to a cell. He now faces ten years in prison. His crime? He made fun of powerful Democrats on social media.

As the federal criminal complaint puts it, ‘Mackey made coordinated use of social media to spread disinformation relevant to the impending 2016 presidential election. The disinformation spread by these individuals, the Biden administration solemnly proclaimed, often took the form of memes.’

Yes, memes. Online mockery. Mockery online is now illegal if it’s aimed at the wrong people. Doug Mackey hurt their feelings, so they put him in jail.

According to Joe Biden’s Justice Department, Doug Mackey violated 18 U.S. Code Section 241. He did this by tricking people, like the dastardly trickster that he is, into not voting in the presidential election. What’s interesting is that prosecutors showed no evidence whatsoever that Doug Mackey actually tricked anyone into anything, voting or not. Not a single person.

This is just risibly, utterly false. Right in the DOJ’s press release/statement on the case, prosecutors explain that a substantial number of people were gulled by Mackey’s scam: “On or about and before Election Day 2016, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted ‘[Candidate’s first name]’ or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which was used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by the defendant and his co-conspirators.”

And of course, it would not be a complete Tucker Carlson episode without completely whitewashing who and what “Ricky Vaughn” was, as online entities go: “By the way, we have no ideas what Mackey’s views are,” he sniffed. “We don’t care. What CNN is telling us is those views are a crime.”

In fact, the crime with which Mackey is charged only incidentally involves his views, and of course revolves entirely around his efforts depriving Black citizens of their vote by deception, which is a federal felony. But it also is important for the public to understand what depraved beliefs motivated Mackey to commit these crimes along with other white nationalists—particularly the vicious anti-Semitism and relentless racial and ethnic bigotry.

Media Matters’ Nikki McCann Ramirez provides a number of examples of the ugliness of Mackey’s memes—the same memes that Carlson laughs off as harmless pranks, and dismisses as insignificant. These memes ran the gamut of bigotry: misogynist, homophobic, nativist, racist, and deeply anti-Semitic.

As Sarah Posner and I noted in our Mother Jones report on Trump’s interactions with the alt-right and other extremists, he was among the top influencers spreading the white-nationalist “white genocide” hashtag. Meanwhile, three members of Trump’s inner circle followed “Ricky Vaughn” on Twitter, and his son Donald Trump Jr. sometimes retweeted him.

But Carlson saved his most hysterical rhetoric for the end of his rant:

What, you may be wondering, does a case like this mean for the First Amendment? Well, it means that it’s effectively suspended. You can now be arrested for saying the wrong things. And at 7 a.m. this morning, one journalist actually was arrested for that. Almost no one tonight seems to be defending him. ‘He had bad thoughts! He deserves it!’ They think it’s OK. And that shouldn’t surprise you. Because we’re clearly living under some form of martial law at the moment.

This new version of democracy is a democracy where everyone fervently agrees with the people in power or else they go immediately to jail. Doug Mackey’s problem, it turns out, is that he doesn’t properly understand what democracy is.

… You may have thought you were a decent American in good standing. Ten years ago, nobody in this country would have called your views extreme. They weren’t extreme then. You don’t think they’re extreme now, you’ve always considered yourself a pretty moderate person—live your life and get along with others. Oh ho, that’s not possible now—because the rules have changed. You are now a dangerous insurgent. You are no different from a bloodthirsty Pashtun in Helmand Province, or an ISIS terrorist in Erbil! You’re part of a guerrilla insurgency.

So there you have the essence of the gathering Republican response to any kind of effort to confront the right-wing extremism that fueled the January 6 insurrection: When you crack down on white supremacists and far-right domestic terrorists, you crack down on ordinary Republicans.

Carlson has not been alone. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul attacked Joe Biden’s inauguration speech, in which he called for confronting domestic terrorism, as “thinly veiled innuendo” targeting Republicans. “Calling us white supremacists, calling us racists, calling us every name in the book,” he said on Fox News.

It’s a strategic response, in fact, that—despite its seemingly obvious self-indictment, not to mention its complete estrangement from the actual wording of the accusations—worked well in 2009, when Fox News-fueled hysteria forced DHS to ultimately withdraw and apologize for that domestic-terrorism memo that turned out to be so prescient today. And there’s little question that the law-enforcement failures that subsequently ensued over the next decade were directly related to that counterfactual hysteria.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who was a congressman at the time, told USA Today that the letter foreshadowed the events unfolding before us.

"When we decided as a society that we were going to just simply not address violent right-wing extremists, we simply allowed that movement to grow. We allowed that movement to flourish,” he said.

If you get upset when someone threatens a white supremacist, you might be a white supremacist.

#2 #tucker carlson #white supremacy #white supremacists

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maverick-werewolf · 4 years

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Folklore Fact - The Asrai

Here’s one that prooobably won’t be super popular, but hey, I find them super interesting, so I’m going to tell you about them!

So, there’s an entire unopened can of worms on this blog insofar as folklore as concerned, and that’s the fae. Faeries. Fairies. However you want to spell it (I generally go for fae and faeries). Pretty much the only time I’ve really mentioned faeries before on this blog was in this ask about elves.

Faerie folklore actually fascinates me and I research it a lot for Wulfgard, one of my primary fictional settings. Thing is, fae are extremely complex and researching them takes a lot of time and work and absolutely mountains of notes.

So I won’t get too into the whole fae thing in this post, seeing as how this post is about a particular member of the fae... the asrai, from English folklore.

Now, there’s a big question about the asrai: did people actually ever believe in them? That’s, of course, a question with a lot of folklore things. In the asrai’s case, firstly, we have no known etymology. Yeah, none at all. That’s a little troublesome. Though most sources also say they are also called “ashray.”

Secondly, we do know that - obviously - there are plenty of “water spirit” legends out there. Heck, asrai have some aspects in common with even things like mermaids and nix/nixie/etc in a lot of legends. It could very much be that “asrai” is just another term for any number of other legends of similar nature.

Possibly the first surviving record of the term “asrai” pops up is in 1872, in a poem by Robert Williams Buchanan. He also wrote a sequel to the poem called “A Changeling: A Legend of the Moonlight,” which connects back to their fae nature (changlings are associated with fae; more on that in another post sometime!). To Buchanan, they are spirits that love nature and die in the sunlight.

There is another record of the term asrai, used by a writer who may or may not have been citing accurate information, as the author was citing only stories told by word of mouth that were supposedly passed down through generations. The problem with citing “local stories” or “stories your grandma told you” is that it’s like playing the telephone game over multiple generations and literally hundreds and thousands of years, and some of those generations don’t even care about it, either. The stories get so distorted over time that they’re basically useless information and no one actually believed any of it. This is why reliable folklore sources come from recovered written works, not from word of mouth - because we can’t trust the collective generational memory (unfortunately), but writing does not change with people’s extrapolations and failing memories. As such, you won’t see any professional citing “local stories” that don’t have a written source, or things a relative told them. It’s kind of like asking a random American for some American history and then taking everything he says as the absolute truth, just because they’re an American. There are late night skits that make jokes about that.

Wow, that was a slight tangent. Anyway...

So we don’t know much about the actual folkloric sources of the asrai itself, but we do know it’s very similar to a lot of other legends and is almost certainly just another take on several other stories, like things about mermaids and other nature spirits. Or the name could’ve been entirely made up by Robert Williams Buchanan. We don’t really know - but he probably got it from somewhere. That being said--

What is an asrai, anyway? They cannot exist long in the sunlight. Does that mean they’re undead?

No, not at all. Many spirits and things couldn’t stand the sun, such as trolls in Norse myth. They are defined as “water spirits,” more often than not. They are described in a lot of different ways, but my favorite source I have on the subject describes them as women, tall and lithe, with translucent skin. Sometimes they are just water, sometimes they have actual bodies of some kind. Generally, they are hundreds of years old.

In Cheshire and Shropshire, there were almost identical stories of fishermen capturing asrai in their boats. The asrai beg to be released, but no one can understand their language. The fishermen in both stories put wet weeds on the asrai even as it groans in the bottom of the boat. By the time they reach the shore, however, there’s nothing left of the asrai but a puddle of water.

In one of the stories, the fisherman handling the asrai tries to tie her up, but touching her burns his hands and scars him for life.

And... that’s it, really! That’s pretty much all we have on asrai in particular... but definitely not on general water spirits and other such nature spirits and water beings. That’s a topic for another time, though. Same for the fae - there’s so much to say about fae I honestly barely know where to start!

As for pop culture: looking around on the internet out of curiosity, I found out that the wood elves in Warhammer are apparently called “asrai” sometimes. I find that weird and interesting, given I know next to nothing about them. Do they turn into water sometimes? Like, water spirits? I don’t even know. I do know they look quite cool and creepy. But hey, either way, that’s cool that they’d use the word.

So there you have it! Curious about what an asrai might be like in a story? Maybe you’re thinking they’d just be water elementals, like in a fantasy video game? I had a different thought. You can find an asrai in my upcoming novel Wulfgard: The Hunt Never Ends, available online on Amazon October 30! Be sure to check it out and keep an eye on this blog for the release post and order link! Here’s a preview:

Didn’t take long for his eyes to adjust, then to adapt, thanks to that potion. Faint moonlight spilling in let him see limestone walls slick with condensation and a violently gushing spring, churning the water on the far end of the cavern at the base of the wall. Spitting it out straight into the reservoir, the flow of it turning gentle by the time it left the cave.

Heavy mist hung in the air here, maybe kicked up by the water. But something didn’t seem right.

Then he realized why.

Fear washed down upon them like frigid rain – so much fear that, for half a second, it froze every muscle in Caiden’s body. His nerves pulled taut, ready to break and snap down on him like a whip, hard enough to leave a few more scars on his back. Hand shooting to his sword hilt in a white-knuckle grip, he drew in a sharp breath and fought the chill that ran fast up his spine and forced him to be afraid.

This wasn’t natural. Gwen, from the way she was suddenly fumbling with her gear, seemed to know it.

Asger, on the other hand, didn’t. He bellowed out a hoarse shout, nearly fell spinning around to face the exit, and ran for the cave mouth.

All around them, a shrill voice echoed, “Leave this place!”

It spoke the words very clearly – not the gibberish he’d been told about.

Everything happened at once. A rush of air ripped by him, trailing cold in its wake, like off the surface of the spring itself. Asger screamed, his heavy boots scuffing the stone as something made him stumble and fall. Caiden charged forward at a surging shadow, blade ready to swing.

And an arrow lodged itself in his upper arm with a hard lance of pain and a meaty thunk.

Caiden coughed out a grunt and staggered from the impact, the arrow locking up his sword arm and stopping him mid-strike. Whatever had come past him and attacked Asger seemed already gone, moving faster than he could even understand.

Gwen appeared beside him in an instant, hand on his uninjured left arm and sputtering apologies. “Caiden!? I – gods— I shouldn’t have tried to shoot it, it moved so fast—”

The cave around him was far from silent. Asger swore as he scrambled to his feet, Gwen kept on apologizing as she tried in vain to tug Caiden out of the cave until he, halfway in a stupor, finally staggered along after her.

Boots against stone. Grass under their feet, bright moonlight overhead. Plenty of pain in his right arm that twitched useless and limp at his side.

These sensations stayed, but something was missing...

Find more like this on Wulfgard.net - and be sure to keep an eye out for the release of The Hunt Never Ends on October 30.

(If you like my werewolf/folklore blog, be sure to check out my other stuff! And consider supporting me on Patreon. Every little bit helps and helps me run this blog, and you get goodies and a chance to vote on the topic of the next werewolf fact!

Patreon --- Werewolf Fact Masterlist --- Twitter --- Discord Server --- Ko-fi)

#folklore #folklore facts #english folklore #asrai #water spirit #nature spirits #mythology #fae #faerie #faeries #fairies #fairy #The Hunt Never Ends #Wulfgard #writing #fiction #fiction writing

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a-merman-not-a-guppy · 4 years

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What I love about your Muses and You

A positivity post by me (Lena) with some commentary by my muses

MK:

You do an incredible job with all kinds of characters, and I love that you do a good balance of good and evil, but you also know how to find that gray area. I think working in that gray shady area is a lot of fun and you really pull it off. You come up with some wild plot arcs and you always find a way to keep people guessing (personally am thrilled about the polyamorous relationship. Nice one!)

Louie: yeah Lou’s been a real cool dude. A R T man. I may not be skilled, but he was always fun to learn with. Someday I’ll learn more. Ashley: Belle like is literally saving my ass with this job. Seriously my favorite person at the moment.

Avarick:

man I’ve always loved writing with you. We always clicked well with that, and I’ve loved all the characters you brought into the rp. I was so so so excited to see that you were coming back and that you wanted to bring RIKU! I couldn’t believe it! I loved it when we wrote horse buddies back in the day, and I’ve loved every other opportunity we’ve had to do stuff. I’m so so glad you’re back to writing with us.

Sora: =DDD RIKuUUUUU. I missed him so muuuuch. Roxas: yo who the f is this Riku guy?

Mckala:

You have always been the backstory queen, and I tip my hat to you. You do the level of research that always blows my mind. I just do not have the time or the energy for it, but you have all these lists, giant ass family trees, you know the works. It’s really impressive, and one can see the dedication that you put into your characters.

Louie: so Elena’s like a sick Crown PrincesS? That’s dope! When you gonna take back the kingdom man? Queen it uuup!

Finn: Adella’s always been nice to me when I would visit Ariel. She’s really talented.

Wilbur: (imagine a happier time) mum’s great! She’s always there if I need her to be, and while she won’t buy me everything I bloody want, she knows what I really need.

Ashley:

honestly such a great person and great rper. I think the most memorable thing for me lately has been Ashley popping in occasionally when she thought I might be upset or bothered by something and checking in. Talking things out and venting together. She’s honestly such a great listening ear, I think we’re really lucky to have her in this rp. I may be slightly biased toward Ashlee T. and Ollie, but all her babes have nuance and I love them. Ashley: Ashlee!!! One of the only people in this world that matter!!! <3 We made it through some nightmares. Things look up from here babe. Wilbur: duuude Ollie I didn’t realize you were adopted too and it’s the coolest fact I got to know about you. It’s awesome to have someone to relate with.

Pet:

I feel like we used to have a harder time connecting writing wise and things were awkward, and I’m so happy to say it doesn’t feel that way at all anymore. The things we’ve written have been so fun, and I feel like (correct me if I’m wrong), but I feel like bringing Chickaroo together allowed for us to start having more conversation and plotting and just. It opened doors in some way. I think it’s awesome because I love your writing and I love getting to connect with your babes more. As you know, Al has my heart now because he just does, and Barrel has also managed to steal my heart. But all of your babes are so great, and I’m glad that we’ve managed to connect better. I look forward to more time spent writing hilarious things like Dipper and Roxas at the bar, or Al teaching Arthur about the internet.

Louie: yo Al’s like the chillest boss I’ve ever had. He’s also the only boss I’ve ever had but still! Cool dude!

Roxas: Dipper’s a nice guy. I hope I can get to know him more.

Sora: Dipper is Mabel’s TWIN BROTHER =DDDD that’s SO cool!!!

Wilbur: duuude. Barrel is like the person I didn’t expect to ever care about in a billion years, but if anyone did anything to him...like...die.

Alex:

I feel like we also used to not really vibe and were awkward with each other, and I’m super glad that’s changed because you’re literally so cool and you send such fun stuff and we just have a great time! I love Nyx, you know that I have an appreciation of Arista from afar, and Haley is just...great. All your babes are. I’m so happy we’ve finally made that writing connection because it’s been so fun to talk to you and get your perspective on things. Ahh it’s great. Can’t wait to see what you come up with in the future.

Ashley: Haley was like...almost cool. It’s a shame she’s such a goodie goodie two shoes.

Dot: Haley’s a good dragon? What the hell? She seems okay, but I’m still not sorry I shot her in the foot. She totally deserved it.

Clarion: Nyx has been my constant companion for some time now. I’m so grateful for her presence.

Bee:

Bee my big bro, my wife, my partner in ridiculous here too. You’re such a great joy to write with, and I love the way you tell your stories. I’m still so impressed by your take with Hera, and how she is as a sorceress. That’s so damn cool! And of course you’ve got the lovely Marie who’s charming and vain and I love that about her. Marie is a gift, your writing’s a gift and I’m grateful you’re in the rp. Not to mention you and Chloe are our resident British experts and that’s great. Thank you for joining the rp and for bringing the perspective you bring. Look forward to more crazy storylines with you.

Louie: yo nerd! Just kidding, wassup Huey? You’re the best big bro a guy could have. Keep it real, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

Fflewddur: Marie! My beautiful wife! Love of my life! The world must envy me for having the most amazing wife in the entire world.

Sora: Kristoff! Best roomie ever !!! =DDDD hope you don’t mind if my best pal Riku stays with us. Thnx dude <3 <3 <3

Becky:

I mean where do I begin. We’ve had such great stories and ridiculous teen hijinks and theatrics. It’s been such a good time. And of course, there are few people I’d be sure about doing a big plot like the one we’ve got going with Ashley and Roo, but we’ve managed it, and I think it’s been a really really fun story to tell. So thanks for taking that leap with me and letting us tell a ridiculous story together. It’s been awesome. Glad to have you in the rp.

Ashley: well, you’re an alright guy I guess Roo.

Bryer:

we’ve only really had a little bit of time to write together before with Dash, but it was super fun, and even just observing, I’ve loved seeing your characters on the dash and seeing where they’re at. Hatter’s awesome too. It’s great to have him around in the rp, and especially with such a different take than we’ve had in the past. Love the werewolf storyline, love to see it.

Chloe:

I feel like you’re a person after my own heart. Mitte often makes me think of my old Shego muse, and that just makes me happy because I just love the chaos that she brings. I love all of your babes of course, but that just makes her a bit more #1 in my heart. You’re also so chill to plot with and to come up with these crazy schemes. I mean remember how we sort of pitched Mitte turning on a bit of a whim and now here she is? It’s literally so good and you went with it and I just...ugh. I truly love it and seeing the growth. All your babes tell such awesome stories, and this just tells me I need to find a way to plot with you more when time/work allows. Keep up the good work. You’re kicking ass.

Anthony: what a brat. As long as this girl doesn’t cause me any more trouble though I suppose she’s tolerable.

Dezi:

We haven’t been able to interact much writing wise, but I hope to change that someday soon/when time/work allows. Charlotte is honestly such a great character, and I think it’s awesome to see her and Tiana around, I think it’s the first time in a long time...if we’ve ever managed that before? I don’t know. It’s seriously so cool and I love reading your stuff together, and just Charlotte’s stuff in general. Keep cool and carry on writing a great babe.

I wish I had things my muses could say but I don’t think I’ve had the chance to interact with Charlotte. Just Judy before ;-; Forgive me. I still think you’re swell.

Emma:

Boy do I love that you swooped in with your kids. Phineas, Tiana and Aquata are such dynamic characters. It blows my mind, truly. I love them all. I love how ready you are to plot and to throw out great ideas. Phineas has the kind of chaos energy that I love (obviously, as Louie is my chaos energy). You’re so chill with me trolling your babes on twitter, and a joy to write with. Thank you for coming back as well. I’m glad we’ve gotten the chance to write together. <3

Louie: duuuude we gotta do something crazy again soon? Operation dumbass commence? Jk jk Operation Too Cool For School.

Wilbur: what is with that twitter lady tho? Too old to be arguing with teens on twitter don’t you think?

Ginny:

Ahhh i mean we’ve done so many fun things and continue to do. With so many connections and stuff it’s hard not to! I’m so glad you rejoined as I have and that we got to bring these characters into the rp that vibe (and/or fight each other). To each their own. Our kids have an energy what can you do? I think your characters are all awesome, and I love seeing them on the dash. I love writing with them. Two besties, no wait THREE now with Kairi, isn’t that just wild? I love that best friend energy our babes have. Support it, thanks for writing all kinds of good things with me. You’re a gem.

Finn: I love you Ariel. You’re the best of friends. I’m so lucky to know you =]

Ashley: Ashle B!!! Babe you are a rockstar. You’ve kind of been the glue of our friendship I think. I love you babe. Stay true to you and kick some ass in college!

Wilbur: (in happier times) DADDD!!! Best dad to ever dad, person that gets me cool things. Coolest of dads. You rock.

Sora: ????!!! KAIRI???!!???

Hannah:

Hannah Hannah Bo Bannah Fee Fi Fo Fannah HANNAH...I couldn’t resist. You’ve been so great to talk to and write with and honestly it’s been so great to love our babes together and talk about BTS together and talk kpop in general. I’m so so so glad that we’ve gotten to know each other more over these last few months and stuff. You’ve really been so great, and our plots and characters are such a good time. So glad you got my brother, and my best friend. It’s awesome to have and to write with you.

Louie: DEWEEEEEEEEEEY. DEWFORD. DEWEYYYYY….hi.

Louie: TAEEEEEEE. Bro. my dude. Sorry I make memes outta you all the time. But in my defense...your face is kinda funny. Love u dude =]

Sora: Mabel!!! My GIRLFRIEND =DDDD you’re great! I love spending time with you and looking at hot boys! Speaking of...I have a friend you might think is hot…

Finn: Tae! Thanks for being so nice to me and allowing me to open myself up and get to know you. I’m so lucky that Nemo introduced us. You’re a really great friend =]

Jaby:

JABYYYYYYYYYY. Man we always had muses that vibed and our writing just clicked and that always brought me joy. I’m so glad you came back, because your characters are great, the stories you tell are great, and I really really missed having you around. I know we’ve both been busy lately with our own work stuff, but I definitely want the chance to connect some muses again, because I love your babes and you and I’ve been so happy to see you. Let’s figure something out someday when my schedule stuff evens out a bit better.

Jean:

you haven’t been in the rp long, but boy have you made an impact already. Lachlan is amazing!! Truly an icon and I’m so glad that you brought him in. And so glad that you’re here. We’re all lucky to have you. I really think you’re bringing in such a unique take and writing and it’s just awesome to see and to see Launchpad driving around, and driving people a little wild on twitter. It’s beautiful.

Louie: soooooo did you really nearly kill my bro?

Kiara:

We also don’t really have any interactions right now but that is a-okay because you are living a life doing the real life hero work. Truly I’m amazed by you, and I think we’re all lucky you’re around. I hope you take care of yourself and that you do get to enjoy that time to just write and love your characters. They’re all truly fantastic and I love seeing where you take them. Especially Georgette. I think her journey has absolutely captivated me.

Kit:

man you are awesome to plot with. The pirate au was such a good time, just brainstorming some ridiculous ideas. And your ladies are so truly dynamic and powerful and I am so excited to see where you take them. I don’t think we really have had much interaction besides the au, but I look forward to a day where life is less stressful and we can do some more stuff. That’d be great. <3 Keep doing you, you’re killing it.

Lauren:

Man I love your characters so much. Greg is such an icon on the board and otherwise. And I love pushing your characters buttons almost as much as I love agreeing with them. They’re just such joys to have around. Lol well I’m sure Roscoe would argue about that and be all Roscoe, but I’m glad to have him around. It’s been great talking to you and having debates over milk being a capitalist scam. I am glad you’re in the rp, and I continue to look forward to seeing what new things you and your characters bring.

Lauryl:

This go around of me rejoining the rp I feel like we’ve gotten a lot closer and that makes me really happy. =] It all started with a Jimin, how did it end up like this? It was only a...just kidding. I know exactly why. Nemo and your brilliant writing and his connecting with Louie drew me into this BTS zone and then before I knew it there was Finn and Lunch Squad and and and. The list really does go on because we’ve just come up with some really ridiculous and fun stories and it’s been great. Thank you for bringing Olaf and teaching me a lot more about aromanticism, for Atta and that sister bond that I am stoked about (reminds me we gotta do another thing for them that yes). I’m so glad we’ve connected more and that you are in the rp <3

Louie: Neeeeeeeeeeemo I have a crisis of boy things! CRISIS. WEE OO WEE OO chop chop and help me out. Also I’ve got cookies.

Finn: Nemo, I can’t believe how close we’ve gotten in so short a time. You’re one of my very best friends. I love you lots.

Finn: Hyung, you’re so warm and kind. I’m so lucky I know you.

Dot: did you drink water today Atta? You better not be going anywhere crazy without ME.

Lins:

You’ve just joined but I’m so stoked we’re already talking and talking about TORTALL of all things. Like WOW! I didn’t think anyone out there appreciated those books the way I did. It is so nice to be wrong, and to have a source to discuss my fave childhood books. It’s also exciting to have Eilonwy, and I’m excited to interact with her. <3

Sav:

I know life keeps you pretty busy, but you push through and you bring your babes and keep steady with all of that and I think that’s really admirable. You’ve got the older gentleman muse energy and I respect that. I think it’s great that you have your niche. I myself have the teens as we know. I’m sorry we haven’t had much chance to interact, but I hope to improve that in the future. Especially with Seamus. That’s my rich uncle. I wanna do something about that when life gets less hectic. Either way, you’ve got great babes and you’re doing a great job. Take care of yourself lovely.

Louie: soooooo gonna buy me a motorcycle Uncle Seamus?

Sid:

man you’ve got a great bunch of characters and they’re all so different and dynamic and I love that. Ratigan is complex, and he was especially good fun in the pirate event I have to say. Truly loved the take we had on the ship and everything. He’s so great. I also love seeing Eric on the dash, and am excited to interact more with him cause I think he’s just groovy. They’re all groovy. I can’t think of any whimsical things to say but you’re doing awesome and your babes are great. Take care lovely.

Sierra:

I have not had a chance to interact with you or your Tod yet, but I look forward to the day where I can. Tod’s a great character, and it’s exciting to see that he’s come back. I know I saw him connecting with some of the other Swynlakers and I think that’s even better. Love a character with history, and Tod definitely has that. I hope you take care of yourself, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of Tod in the future.

#ooc #some positivity for my bdrp gang #i love you all loooots #there may be darkness #but there's plenty of light too #i'm thinking of you all

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