a moment of silence for aymeric please

Disclaimer: I ship AkuSai, XemSai, and all three of them mashed together.

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I wonder where the break happened that such wide swaths of younger fans don’t grasp fandom things that used to be unspoken understandings. That fic readers are expected to know fiction from reality,  that views expressed in fic are not necessarily those of the author, that the labels, tags and warnings on various kinkfics are also the indication that they were created for titillation and not much more, please use responsibly as per all pornography. The ‘problem’ isn’t that so-called ‘problematic’ fic exists but that some of the audience is being stupid, irresponsible, at worst criminal, at best not old enough to be in the audience to begin with. And that’s on the consumer, not the author who told you via labels, tags, ratings, warnings and venues what their fic was about and what it was for.

I can’t stress enough how important this post is

Tumblr. Tumblr is what happened, with its never-ending scrolling, with its lack of nested contents (or ANY comments, when fandom sailed here from the old world), with its tags instead of membered communities.

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

When Authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers, new fandom members never learned to care.

“When authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers”

Well that reframed my view of every fandom I’ve touched for the last five years, and it explains a lot.

I really cannot emphasize how the lack of comments and nested comments impacted fandom. It turned fandom into a series of one-way relationships. Social media is extremely uninteractive compared to mediums like journals and forums.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans react to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

Keep reading

This is an excellent read on Tumblr fandom, and encapsulates some of the things about the platform that give me pause before posting.

I think that what we’re experiencing now, as a reaction, is a resurgence of individual communities. More often than not these days, I see that individual fandoms or groups within fandoms have a Discord or other place to talk away from Tumblr.

I think that may also explain why some people tend to like more than they reblog. Reblogging means leaving yourself open to (often extremist/purity-motivated) criticism of your choices - or leaves the OP open to similar criticism from your followers, with you as the involuntary middleman whose reblog made that connection possible.

Likes and drafts are private - you can collect posts in a place where no one sees them but you. It doesn’t have to be a public statement. It can just be a thing that caught your interest for whatever reason, that you wanted to be reminded of.

I strongly encourage anyone who hasn’t already to read this essay on how web 2.0 has changed fandom

it’s not just tumblr, or twitter, it’s a fundamental shift in how people act online in the era of social media and algorithm-driven interaction towards advertising revenue

@anamatics

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Anon Hate IS Illegal.

Guys, I’m not kidding.

Suicide-baiting, cyberharassmemt, cyberstalking, death/rape threats, and hate speech are illegal in all 50 states as well as Australia and the UK.

Some places include school suspension or expels. Some even include jail time for multiple years.

And yes, they can find someone by username or IP alone.

Also, yes. There are methods of catching someone’s IP. Even under a VPN.

So.

Next time you get hit with anon hate?

Casually remind them you can very easily take this to the next level. And they can earn jail time while you lay back in your chair, having saved yourself and everyone else from a violent criminal.

Your online actions have real life consequences.

Make sure they learn that.

(Just in case there’s a “the police wouldn’t do that” - Yes. They absolutely would.

Or a “I can handle it.” No. That person will continue to harass others as well. And one of them may not be as strong as you. So do it for them and everyone else.

Or a “It’s not that severe.” Yes. It is. People have died because of this. It really is that severe.)

Take action. And make sure the lives of these bullies are truly wrecked.

You guys better fucking reblog this.

Don’t just like it, reblog it. So people know.

Hey gang, if you’ve had trouble or seen someone have trouble with you-know-who, here’s a friendly heads up. - mod rose

From firsthand experience don’t try to tough it out, go ahead and report because this is a criminal offense. If someone walked up to you and started wailing on you and threatening you you would go to the authorities then, yes? This is no different. 

-FemaleWarrior 

time for another one of these ooc nonsenses where i refuse to learn to panel and create eyesores instead

Okay so about Lexaeus...

Listen, guys. I see A LOT of posts in the Lexaeus Tag about Lexaeus beating a child to near-death (in order for him to learn about Limit Breaks, mind you) But I feel like no one ever really delves deeper into the rest of Roxas’s experience with Lexaeus in 358/2 Days. For Starters: In the original DS game after enduring almost every organization member (Saix, Larxene, Zexion, Marluxia, Xigbar, and ESPECIALLY Vexen) treating you like an absolute idiot (aside from Axel) you meet Lexaeus. Not only does this large, hulking monolith of a man have the patience to explain how to use the Limit Break without treating you like an imbecile he has the GALL to tell you that you are valued:

Which like…. BLOWS Roxas’s MIND to the point of him saying:

To which Lex bluntly responds:

And even in the manga he says:

(In the actual American release he says that they’d beg him for 3 days and 3 nights if it meant having Roxas on their team)

But that Manga panel about him “Becoming passionate” is something that holds true in the game. When Roxas asks why they are trying to complete Kingdom Hearts, Lex looks wistfully into the distance and says:

This poor fucking guy doesn’t even quite REALIZE what he’s doing… he just knows it will make him whole. That’s all he wants. It’s what ALL of them want.

and when your day with Lexaeus is done Roxas postulates:

or MY FAVORITE….. the original DS version:

[Our group had its good apples, just like it had its bad. But everybody wanted the same thing: to complete Kingdom Hearts.]

SO LIKE. LEMME BE REAL HERE: WHEN PEOPLE BOIL LEXAEUS DOWN TO A BIG, SMASHY MAN WHO BEATS CHILDREN I REALLY WANT TO CRY BECAUSE HE’S ACTUALLY A BIG, PATIENT, SOFT BOY WHO WANTS ROXAS TO KNOW THAT HE’S VALUED AND JUST WANTS TO BE HUMAN AGAIN AND DO HIS JOB. 

(And don’t even get me STARTED on Lexaeus picking up odd jobs that the other team members put onto him when they slack off.) Lexaeus/Aeleus is the real MVP of the Kingdom Hearts series and I genuinely love him to pieces.

i don’t know where else to post this but as of this past weekend i have finally, after years of rigorous training, achieved a level of kingdom hearts shitposting hitherto unknown to mortal man

at anime iwai in florida last friday night, @freeshooterxig hosted a “kingdom hearts 3 roast” panel for people to come and take potshots at this blessed fucking mess of a franchise. in attendance was vexen’s voice actor derek stephen prince who agreed to participate in character as vexen and i got to write the script for his segment

for obvious legal reasons there couldn’t be any recordings taken of the panel or his part in it, but now that the event’s passed i figure i can at least post the script online if anyone wants to try to imagine what it was like to listen to him go off

just….just close your eyes and picture vexen going absolutely full ham on the below rant and you will have some idea of how disgustingly funny it was. dsp you legend

Keep reading

Hey so remember when I said last year that I’d repaint these? Yeah, me neither. I finally got around to it and I am so thrilled with how much better these all look. Click on the pics for animal and flower choices.

Sketches/Jade’s scales/Asch and Guy’s feathers by @jeredu Lines/Colors/Backgrounds by me

Love

“I love you.” They weren’t new words, it wasn’t even new to hear them coming from Lea’s lips. He was always the one who was happy to wear his heart on his sleeve, bearing it to the world along with how he felt about everyone. Well, maybe not exactly how he felt, but it had always been close enough.

It was, however, new to know the context of those words. It was new for Isa to feel the love permeate his skin the way it did every time Lea said those words to him, it was exceptional. Isa didn’t feel like he’d done nearly enough to have truly earned those words that bounced around his heart, warming it through contact. 

“I love you too.” It was hard to get out. The words felt like a double-edged sword that could easily turn on him. Isa knew Lea would never use words like that against him, but sometimes it felt like the world could. Even if Lea loved him to the end of the worlds and back, the worlds didn’t always love Isa enough to keep the truth from hurting him. Admitting to something that he felt that strongly was something he had to do, though, it would kill him to have Lea saying it in such a heartfelt way and not respond with reassurance that he loved Lea too.

Timed almost as if he could feel every nervous thought that was shoving its way through Isa’s mind, Lea reached over and gently took Isa’s hand. He held through the fully expected flinch, rubbing his thumb over the back of Isa’s hand gently as he waited for the other man to get comfortable with the touch. It would’ve been easy to shove Lea away instead of riding the waves of revulsion over touches, but at the same time Isa couldn’t. Fear and discomfort easily beat how touch-starved he was, but Lea’s soft warmth beat fear. Isa turned his hand over and intertwined their fingers, leaning his head against Lea’s shoulder.

Lea smiled.

They were finally safe, no matter what his anxieties told him.

Keep reading

i’m one of those people who liked that kh3 “her” reveal.

dialogue from 358/2 days

hhHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhh