tf2 fandom has been saying “wow people should pay more attention to demo” since the fandom started. it’s still true
demo is (probably) scottish nobility, has THREE dead parents, two of which he killed, AND an eternally disappointed parent, abandonment issues, a grudge against the loch ness monster, a history with magic, a cross-faction friendship so dramatic it became an entire event, an eyepatch, a drinking problem, lived in an orphanage, can play the piano and is emotionally dependent on the rest of the team whom he loves very much
he’s so goddamn interesting when will you appreciate him
you know now that i’ve watched mob psycho 100 in it’s entirety so far i’m going to say that actually i DON’T think mob’s parents know about reigen. i don’t think they know mob has a psychic teacher who is his boss. both mob and ritsu think they do, but they don’t cause mob forgot to tell them for four years.
reigen’s filled in at multiple parents evenings, he’s taken their kids on trips, he’s the BOSS of one of them and he employed him when he was a ten year old. having never been confronted by the existence of mob’s parents, he has never thought about them. somewhere deep inside he knows mob probably has parents, but it’s a thought that’s never cropped up so when he does find out he’ll be like what. what the fuck. what do you mean he has parents.
both reigen and mob’s parents go to his sports day event and mob completely bypasses his parents to be like oh shishou you made it and they’re like ‘hey ritsu who the fuck is that’ and ritsu’s like ‘i know right? he’s so pretentious. who does he think he is? he fucking sucks’ and they’re like ‘no. genuinely. who IS that?’
I am literally begging people to learn how to participate in fandom through a lens other than shipping
People have been asking me questions about the aromantic fandom experience at the same time this post, which I have come to have a serious love-hate relationship with, started picking up a bunch of notes again, so let’s talk about the intention behind it, because people have interpreted my meaning a myriad of ways and most of them are wrong! (Even some of the “positive” ones!)
First off, I should mention that while the post is short and flippant, I wrote a lot more context in the original tags. This was, ironically, because I wanted to vent without having my words circulated and thus risking the ire of the people who do the sort of thing I was venting about. Which. I’ve been on tumblr since 2013 and should have thought more about the fact that hiding my commentary in the tags was no guarantee of that, but it’s whatever. I’ve lived with things like this before, and inevitably will live with them again. So anyways. Here’s the tags:
You will note, what I was saying basically boils down to “Shipping fictional characters together is totally fine and cool, and I understand that it’s meaningful to many people! But oh boy is it hard to exist in fandom as someone who doesn’t want to participate in it for my own reasons, because people like to interpret my content as shippy even when it’s not, and that makes me pretty uncomfortable because it really feels like something I shouldn’t have to accept as an inevitability”
Which. You know. There’s a lot of Death of the Author that happens on tumblr posts, and sometimes that’s a great thing for fandom – I’ve seen threads that go ridiculous, wonderful places due to other people’s commentary, and even had people add some to my own posts that I have LOVED (as well as derailed more than a few myself, if I’m being honest). I for sure know I can’t control everything that happens with my content, and I know that there are a lot of people who really like shipping. However. Let’s talk about the reason this particular “inevitability” in fandom makes me so uncomfortable. Because in the months since I’ve made this post, here’s some of the responses I’ve had to it:
People telling me I’m homophobic
People telling me I hate women and their interests
People telling me that if I have such a problem with the content that’s out there, I should stop being lazy and make my own
People assuming that I hate “transformative” fandom
People telling me I’m a gatekeeper
People making harsh assumptions about my sexuality, my gender identity, my involvement in fandom, my interests, etc
(Most uncomfortably: adult cis women writing entire essays on my post about the “fact” that I am a gatekeeping cishet man with no reason to be interested in queer or other transformative fic – I am not, and a very quick look at my bio would reveal that I am actually a queer trans guy, to whom queer/transformative fic is very, very important)
People using particularly abusive language to say all of the above
Now, for people who don’t know me all that well – I am not cishet, I am not particularly inclined to gatekeep anything, I love transformative fandom, I regularly engage in making content uniquely catered the parts of fandom I love, I regularly help others do the same by offering my services as a beta/idea sounding-board, and on and on. If you want tangible stats, have 28 published works on Ao3, for many, many different fandoms, and more in progress – a large number of which deal with adding queer headcanons to less-queer source material, including one story that’s 25k words and counting!
Obviously none of my “credentials” prove anything on their own, but what I’m trying to point out is that I’ve had a lot of harsh assumptions thrown at me just because I expressed that shipping is basically treated as a prerequisite to being involved in fandom, and that makes me pretty uncomfortable – I don’t want to participate in it myself, but I do want to be a part of the community that fandom offers. Frankly, I used to be a lot more involved in it, but I have drifted away from fandom a fair bit in recent years entirelybecause it’s so hard to be involved in it as someone who really doesn’t really want to see much shipping content, and definitelydoesn’t want my posts and meta to always get turned into other people’s shipping manifestos.
(Also, if you want real nightmares: I am also a cosplayer, and I have had people make uncomfortable shipping comments directly to me while in costume at cons – it’s not just a tumblr problem, nowhere is safe!)
I don’t have a perfect answer for how to make people like me comfortable without, as so many people have accused me of since making this post, “ruining others’ fun.” I get that people aren’t always going to check an OP’s or author’s blog or tags before adding their own commentary to a post. And that’s genuinely okay! I want people for whom shipping is a comfort and a fun thing to engage in to enjoy fandom, too. But I also want us to have more conversations about the fact that the assumption everyone wants to be involved in the shipping side of fandom isn’t just wrong, it’s actively draining for people like me with personal reasons for not wanting to be engaged with it. I want to be able to participate in fandom too, and so do other people like me, and we’re really, genuinely trying to be involved in all the ways you’re telling us to, and under the current model? It’s not working. I feel excluded, and get abusive comments fielded at me, and have people who won’t put in the minimum amount of effort to get to know me speculate that I’m the kind of person they actively want to exclude from their communities – even though I’m not! – proving that voicing discomfort with the current way fandom operates is enough to have people assume you don’t belong in it.
TL;DR – I made a vent post to talk about how people’s putting shipping on a pedestal makes me feel excluded from fandom. And hundreds of people, at the most conservative estimate, took that as a sign that I deserve to be excluded from their vision of fandom. Something is really wrong there, and I hope we can all have some productive conversations about how to fix it.
A list of things I experienced before realizing I was asexual.
Why do people have crushes on celebrities? You don’t even know them?
I guess I have a crush on this one classmate? They are aesthetically pleasing to look at. That’s a crush, right? Since it’s been established you don’t need an emotional connection to have a crush.
What do you mean you’re dating in middle school? We’re literally children?
I’m just a late bloomer. Someday I’ll experience these feelings everyone is talking about.
I’m not going to have sex until I’m married. That just makes sense. Why would I bother having sex before I know I’m spending the rest of my life with that person? Sex should be special.
I feel the same about everyone, I must be bisexual.
Gosh, I can’t wait to finally be out of puberty and understand why sex scenes are titillating instead of either gross or boring.
Yup, totally a late bloomer. I’ll get there someday.
What is wrong with me? Why can’t I just experience these normal things like everyone else? Am I broken?
HOLY SHIT! I FINALLY GOT A CRUSH! I feel so excited and nervous and happy, I finally get it! Nope, not gonna think about intimate things. I’m just avoiding those because I am an innocent flower, no other reason.
I really SHOULD think about intimate things, right? That’s what everyone does, right? So why do I feel so weird?
Gosh, I hope they don’t want us to do those things with each other…
I’ve read porn, I’ve written porn, I’m out of school, I don’t think I can keep saying I’m late bloomer or that I’m too nervous and innocent for such things. So why am I still not feeling these things…
Actually, I’d argue that while OP is close to the right answer, that’s not quite it. I think it’s less about the children’s media as much as it is the fact that the refuse to engage with “problematic media” - which does, indeed, lead to people only engaging with children’s media in many cases, as it’s more likely to be “clean” and free of complications.
Problematic media is deemed morally evil regardless of the actual lesson behind it. I mean, you’ve got people on here refusing to read 1984 because “it’s misogynistic”, completely disregarding what role that plays in the story, and dismissing every other detail of the book, because this one detail is so deeply offensive, the rest of the story contains nothing of value. And then there’s the “Why do we have to read old sad stuffy books?” crowd to make things worse.
My point isn’t that the only way to learn is to read classics - many of the classics we have were determined by chishet white guys. There’s sometimes very uncomfortable parts, and I understand why people can’t always sit through them. But the solution to this would be to read more books by people of color, by women, by queer people, and that’s…not happening. Even asking young queer people to read queer history can be like pulling teeth, because it’s easier to get your information off of tiktok or tumblr in nice digestible posts and short, snappy videos. And why read something that might make you question your view of the world, or at least get you thinking, when you could read that mindless enemies to lovers coffee shop au that makes you feel happy instead?
I’m all for fanfic! I’m all for comfort stories! I’m all for protesting the classics that have been determined by cishet white guys, and I’m all for finding discomfort in things like casual sexism and racism in books! But I don’t think the solution is ‘this story is inherently problematic regardless of whatever the greater message is, and I refuse to read anything but my fluffy fanfics.’
But now you’ve got a generation of kids that want a clean cut story with a nice, well defined message. The second you get into complicated issues like homophobia - even if you’re a queer author - your story becomes problematic. Better to engage with something affirming that makes you feel good, with morals that align with your world view. This is the generation of “Maybe the curtains are just blue!”, of rejecting literary analysis because it’s “ridiculous, the author didn’t have a deeper meaning.” So you’ve got kids who lack reading comprehension because they’re refusing to engage with anything that has any element to it that isn’t pre-approved. They’re not approaching anything with an open mind, they’re not going into something that might be complex, because it might conflict with their morals, and in their mind, engaging with something problematic is a reflection of your personal morals, and prove that you are a bad person.
So what you’re left with is children’s media, which often challenges greater issues at a comfortable distance, with defined “good” and “bad.” The good guys win, the bad guys learn, the message is obvious. Children’s media is the least likely to be offensive, and the least likely to be problematic. But that’s a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
tumblr SHIELD. for 3 bucks a month, whenever a blaze post would appear on your dash, a pre-loaded post of yours instead appears on the dashboard of the person who tried to blaze you
tumblr BLAST. for 5 bucks a month, whenever a blaze post of yours would be blocked by tumblr shield, it instead appears in all caps at the top of the shielded person’s dashboard for an hour and flashes violently whenever they try to block it
tumblr POSSESS. for 200$ a day you can post using another person’s blog, though you cannot change their blog in any other way nor delete their previous posts. at the end of the day they receive half of the 200 dollars
tumblr TRUE SIGHT. for 6$ monthly you can see when a blog is possessed. tumblr SCRY. for 30$ a day you can read other blogs’ private messages
tumblr POWER WORD KILL. for a one time payment of 6,666 bucks, you can delete another blog entirely. tumblr notifies all of that blog’s mutuals that you killed them. each user can only use this feature once, and thereafter loses the ability to use any of the other tumblr spells. you must have been a user for at least 10 years to use this feature
tumblr UNDENIABLE SUMMONS. for 35$ you enchant a blog such that they cannot post again until they answer your ask. alternatively, you can simply set a price point of your choosing which they will receive if they choose to answer the ask (though they are not obligated to)
tumblr ENTHRALL. for 4$ a month you can use gifs as your icon again
tumblr FAMILIAR. for 5$ a month, you summon a small, cute familiar—such as a crab, snail, owl or frog—which can carry small messages onto your mutuals’ dashboards for you. owning a familiar also protects you from being tumblr POSSESSed by anyone but your own mutuals
tumblr REFLECT. for a one time payment of 100 dollars, the next time someone attempts to use POWER WORD KILL on you, they are deleted instead. there is no way of knowing whether someone has this feature active
Thinking about Hunter explicitly being the youngest of the Golden Guards (which I think is true, even if a lot of things he was told about the position weren’t) and also about him very possibly being the only one to have been passed off as the Emperor’s nephew instead of just a particularly loyal subordinate.
Because yeah, that’s how you get people not to blink when you put a 16 year-old in charge of the Emperor’s Coven. It’s just nepotism, obviously. And that’s how you get a kid with that much responsibility foisted on his shoulders, in a worse position than even many of his doomed predecessors, to stay loyal to you. Tell him you’re his family – his only family – and it’s more than just your ideals binding you both together.
I’m not sure how serious Belos was when he told Luz “I really thought he’d last longer than the others,” but I think there might have been a grain of truth to it, and part of why is the realization that Belos hasdefinitely used different strategies over the years to keep the grimwalkers in line. Just a constant cycle of Ah, that one betrayed me too, I’ll tell the next one something different. It’s like a time loop to him, with a reset button whenever it fails. (Hence “It hurts every time he chooses to betray me.”) He never saw them as different people, just echoes of the same one, and I’m sure every time one rebelled, he took notes and plotted how to keep the same thing from occurring again. Cut off access to more of the outside world with this one, encourage that one to be more trusting, don’t let this one read about a certain topic. And he really might have thought he’d perfected his strategy with Hunter – promote him young, keep him particularly close, throw in a dose of supposed familial warmth to inspire devotion, emphasize his special role in the Titan’s plan (which might have been harder to do with some of the other Guards, without the Day of Unity on the immediate horizon).
It really makes it all the more impressive that Hunter still ended up questioning what he was told. He’s the latest to be subjected to a cycle of brainwashing that’s been refined over multiple centuries, and while all the grimwalkers went through horrible things and met horrible fates, it seems like Belos’ treatment of them had to have grown even more abusive and restrictive as time went on.
As more and more of them died.
As Belos grew more frustrated.
As his brother wouldn’t stop haunting him. Every. Single. Time.
Given how the two guards we saw in the flashback didn’t look or sound much older than Hunter, and given that the empire has only existed for 50 years, Hunter may very well simply have been the youngest Golden Guard in the last 1-3 attempts. I doubt Darius was mentored by someone his own age or younger, so it’s pretty safe to assume that the previous Golden Guard lived significantly longer than all his predecessors (which, given the math of having at least 16 Guards over a span of 300-400 years is still not necessarily that old, on average).
You kind of implied it and I’m sure many people are aware of it already, but depending on how the “cloning process” works Belos may have very well looked at a constant, returning echo of his brother, not just his appearance, but also inherent personality traits shining threw, despite the radically different upbringing to the original. The cycle of abuse wasn’t just perfected to keep the Golden Guards in line, it was specifically perfected to keep one person in line, over and over again. A reason for why many earlier Guards may have failed, was due to potential differences they may have had to the brother.
The comment on, how Hunter is rather similar to the original compared to the other Guards, implies that there may have been some outliers. Guards that were shy and soft-spoken where the brother would have been energetic and outgoing, Guards that had darker hair, a flatter nose, an unfamiliar lilt to their voice they never grew out of. Their individuality may have made them less vulnerable to Belos’ very specifically targeted strategies, may have given them unforseen openings to get out - and therefore die younger. The ones that resembled the brother more may have made it longer, especially once Belos’ methods had been “perfected” for the most recent attempts. May have been doomed by their inherent similarities to the brother, a seemingly kind guy who managed to make a friend in an unfamiliar and dangerous world.
In September 2004, French police discovered a hidden chamber in the catacombs under Paris. It contained a full-sized movie screen, projection equipment, a bar, a pressure cooker for making couscous, a professionally installed electricity system, and at least three phone lines. Movies ranged from 1950s noir classics to recent thrillers.
When the police returned three days later, the phone and power lines had been cut and there was a note on the floor: “Do not try to find us.” (via)
nO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS ENTIRE CINEMA WAS HIDDEN BEHIND AN UNDER CONSTRUCTION SIGN THAT LEAD TO A CHECK-IN DISK WITH A FULL CCTV HOOKUP THAT WOULD TURN ON AND RECORD ANY UNREGISTERED VISITORS. AND IF SOMEONE SNUCK IN? A TAPE OF BARKING SECURITY DOGS WOULD BEGIN TO PLAY.
BEYOND THE CRAZY FRONT DESK AND THE MOVIE THEATER, THERE WAS A STOCKED BAR AND TABLES AND CHAIRS, MEANING THAT AFTER CATCHING A FLICK IN AN ILLEGAL PARISIAN CATACOMB THEATER, YOU COULD THEN EAT COUSCOUS AND SIP A COCKTAIL NEXT DOOR. THERE WAS A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICITY SYSTEM SET UP, AND AT LEAST 3 WORKING PHONE LINES. THIS SHIT WAS LIKE A BOND VILLAIN.
BETTER YET? IT WAS RUMORED THAT THE PLACE WAS SET UP BY THE UNDERGROUND FRENCH ART GANG UX “Urban eXperiment”, WHO NAVIGATES THROUGH THE PARISIAN UNDERGROUNDS AND ILLEGALLY RESTORES ABANDONED WORKS OF ART, ALONG WITH HOLDING FILM FESTIVALS IN THE BASEMENTS OF GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS. THEY EVEN RELEASED A SHORT FILM ABOUT THEIR WORK RESTORING THE ICONIC PANTHEON CLOCK OVER THE COURSE OF ONE YEAR. NO ONE SUSPECTED THEIR INVOLVEMENT, UNTIL THE CLOCK BEGAN TO WORK AGAIN AFTER 60 YEARS OF RUSTING.
IF YOU DON’T THINK CATACOMBS AND THE PEOPLE WHO HANG OUT IN THEM ARE SOME OF THE COOLEST FUCKING THINGS IN THE WORLD THEN I IMPLORE YOU TO EAT SOME COUSCOUS AND RECONSIDER.
I still think that this is a description of King’s predecessor fighting Belos’s cursed form, not Titan.
And I think King’s father/family are dead. Belos came after them because they are the evolved Stone Sleepers and he needed their lungs. Good thing he didn’t know there was an egg.
following that, there’s also nothing wrong with liking some gendered terms and not others!
it’s okay to use she/her pronouns but not want to be called a girl! it’s okay to use terms like brother or father for yourself but not go by he/him! it’s okay to be fine with “sister” but not “daughter!” it’s okay to use a title like “mr” but not want to be called a man! it’s okay to be a woman and not go by she/her!
it’s okay to use language that seems to contradict itself! language and gender have a complicated relationship but you’re the boss! bend it to your will!
So as most of you know, I have a more personal connection to anti-shipping than most: for about two years, I was arguably the nastiest and most vicious anti in my fandom, so much so that I gained a certain level of infamy for it.
Starting to ship Reylo was a wakeup call the likes of which I’d never encountered before — not only did it cause me to examine my own past behavior and confront the extremely difficult revelation that I’d been the villain all along, but it also made me think about anti-shipping as a whole, and the things I wish I had understood when I was knee-deep in that mindset.
Things like:
1. People’s enjoyment of things that hurt you is not blithe mockery of your pain. It is not a personal slight. You are allowed to be hurt by something. You are not allowed to belittle, degrade, and shame others for interacting with it. You are not that important, and your pain is not a weapon.
2. The moment you commit yourself to a movement devoted to hatred, you have ceded the moral high ground. You have gone to the Dark Side. You are not fighting the good fight. You are an emotional terrorist actively attempting to break people down for disagreeing with you.
3. You also cede the right to be a victim. No one deserves to be suicide baited or doxxed, and neither do you. However, by aligning yourself with hatred, by actively harming others and laughing about it, you forfeit your right to be upset and morally outraged when you receive hate, when others comment in disagreement with your posts, when you are cast as a villain. You are not being bullied. You are receiving back just a taste of the pain you have caused others.
4. You. Are. Miserable. You really are. Happy, fulfilled people don’t marinate themselves in hatred. They don’t drink acid and spit it at others. You’re so desperate to avoid looking at yourself and so afraid of what you’ll see there that you’re directing all of that hatred outwards. You found a group of people who like something that makes you angry, and it’s so easy to attack them, to hurt them because you’ve convinced yourself that they’re “bad” somehow and they deserve it. But it’s not about them. It’s about you.It’s about all those dark things you hear at night. It’s the fear that you’re worthless. And it’s the high you get, the ego boost every time someone cheers you on for attacking the “bad” shippers. It’s the feeling that you’re so smart, you’re so popular, you’re so lovedand you’re so, so right for everything you’re doing.
But those people aren’t there for you at night. They won’t be there when your world falls apart. All that’s left is you, and your misery, and the desperate need to make someone else hurt for it because you can’t handle it.
5. And most importantly: you’re wrong. You are wrong. Your thought process is wrong. Your behavior is wrong. Everything that you are doing as you torture and harm others and convince yourself that you’re morally justified IS. WRONG.
One day you’re going to realize that, and you’ll choke on it.
And if you did that a thousand times, it still wouldn’t be equal to all of the harm you caused.
And you can distract and deflect and justify all you want. In the end, all of those people who cheered you on will be gone. Your popularity will be gone. And all you’ll have is yourself, and every ounce of misery and self-hatred you tried and failed to run from, that you drilled into others, and the realization that even though you thought you were the hero of your fandom, in reality, you were the monster you were trying so hard to protect everyone from.
“Do not interact with my stim blog if you’re [group]” =/= “People who are [group] don’t deserve to stim”
“Do not interact with my stim blog if you’re [group]” = “I do not feel comfortable with having people from [group] around me”
All neurodivergents deserve to stim, and people are allowed to have comfort levels and boundaries. Simply searching for a blog that welcomes you is respectful and beneficial. And if none exist*, evaluate your beliefs.
*You will never encounter this. There are a TON of “anyone can interact” blogs.
there needs to be a learned, palpable difference between using clothes as art and using clothes as identity. where im seeing TRAs and libfems slave away to get clothes that express their “true selves”, im also seeing radfems steer dangerously close into saying you shouldn’t experiment with clothing at all, and your clothing should be for comfort alone. there IS a difference between a 36 y/o butch lesbian painting her denim jacket with renaissance-style sapphic art and a 17 y/o gendie buying $200 of shit off shein to represent their “true queer self”. there needs to be a conscious differentiation between styling clothes as an art form and styling clothes as a blind grab for an ephemeral, undefinable identity constructed on pinterest boards.
