WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS 4.05 || 4.07

thinking about how peoples blorbos tend to be men on here (makes sense with the trends in fandom of men being prioritised etc etc) SO please reblog and tag your female blorbo(s). this is NOT the post to be like “[male character] becuz he’s a woman to me” i Will come to your house and bite you. anyway i’ll go first mine are susie and julie from dbd and carly jones from house of wax 🖤

This was how they spent the whole year in England

(ID in alt and under cut)

I got this comment on a story from my Other AO3 Account this morning.

(Info redacted because I prefer keeping these accounts separate but no one follows me on the side blog I have for that account.)

The story was posted almost a year ago and is relatively “popular” by my average statistics even though it has tropes and themes that are big turnoffs for a lot of people (hence separate accounts). This popularity is undoubtedly because it’s a Marvel Loki story and that fandom is massive.

So there is obviously an algorithm or a bot scrubbing ao3 statistics and leaving this comment on fics that meet a certain metric with the main character of the fic inserted into the comment.

I had a little time to kill this morning so I decided to investigate further. And y’all this is so predatory. Come on this journey with me. It made me mad. It may make you mad.

First, if you go to Webnovel’s website, you HAVE to choose between male lead or female lead stories before you can go any further. WTF?

And that’s weird, but this gets so much worse. This is basically a pay-to-read site that has different subscription models. Which… okay BUT! The authors don’t get paid! Look at that comment again. They’re promising a supportive and nurturing community, but zero monetary compensation. It’s basically, “post your stuff here so we can get paid and you can get… nice vibes?” I mean look at this Orwellian writing:

Using the phrase “pay-to-read model” in the same sentence as “qualitative changes in lifestyles for authors” deliberately makes you think that you can get paid and maybe even make a living on this website. But that’s not actually what it says and authors will not receive one red cent.

Oh but wait, the worst is still to come. In case this breaks containment (which I kind of hope it does) this is where I mention that I’m a lawyer in the US.

I don’t do intellectual property or copyright law but I do read and write contracts for a living. So I went to look at their terms of service. It was fun!

Highlights the first, in which Webnovel gets a license to do basically whatever they want with content you post on their site. This is how they get to be paid for people reading authors’ writing without paying them anything.

Highlights the second, in which Webnovel takes no responsibility for illegally profiting off of fan fic. This all says that the writer is 100% responsible for everything the writer posts (even though only Webnovel is making money from it).

Highlights the third which say that by posting, the author is representing that they have the legal right to use and to let Webnovel use the content according to these terms. So if a writer posts fan fiction and Webnovel makes money from people reading the fan fiction, and the House of the Mouse catches wise, these sections say that that’s ALL on the writer.

So that’s a little skeevy to start off with but the thing that is seriously shitty and made me make this post was that these assholes are coming to ao3. They are actively recruiting people in comments on their fan fiction. And they are saying they are big fans of the character you’re writing about and that they share your interests.

They are recruiting fan fiction writers and giving every impression that you can make money from posting fan fiction on their site and hiding the fact that you absolutely cannot but they can make money off of you while you try, deep in their terms of service which no one but a lawyer who writes fan fic and has some time to kill will read.

I see posts on here regularly from people who don’t understand how this stuff works, don’t understand that they (and others) can not legally make a financial profit from fan fiction. And there are tons of people who will not take the time to dig into the details.

Don’t deal with these bastards. Fuck Webnovel.

Predatory publishers trying to make money on your fanfiction WITHOUT GIVING ANY TO YOU.

Please read this.

So adorable

shout out to people who's family isnt entirely bad or entirely good, but something in between and you dont know how to feel about them. you feel angry but you also feel guilty, because you know they genuinely love and care about you, but sometimes they show it in a way you know its not okay. your feelings are valid, your anger and sadness and grief are valid, and you dont have to prove this to no one. bigger shout out to those with memory issues who know something isnt right but can't recall all of the bad events, only the feelings, which only increases the guilt.

if anything is to represent Europe’s political sentimens in early 2020s in the annals of history, I’d be glad for it to be this

baby girl i have avoided situations that don’t even exist yet

Sherlock Holmes, for all of the canon: "I'm not sure if it's normal for a guy to move into my apartment and start writing a biography about me, but I don't know enough about having friends to dispute it."

Nothing is scarier than a werewolf in a hat

Naming the female razor brand Venus is so personally offensive to me....you think Venus the goddess of love and sex and beauty was shaving her PUSSY? Go kill yourself

Cheery Littlebottom is actually the best fictional character ever, demonstrated below:

@conudrum Okay let me take a deep breath and try to explain this to you. You're not the first cis person to not get this and I'm sure you won't be the last.

It's long been established that dwarfish culture has only one set of pronouns* and nothing that could be described as gender roles. Gender is a social construct, and the only gender dwarf culture seems to have is "dwarf." As someone else put it, Cheery is the dwarfish equivalent of non-binary, except she's non-unary.

What tends to trip cis people up at this point is, put bluntly, that a dwarf's genitals are entirely irrelevant in their society except sometimes during courting. And there's still this cultural obsession with genitals, so people ignorant of trans issues tend to go "we're not told Cheery's got a dick, so she's not trans" when being transgender simply means identifying with a different gender to the one assigned at birth. Cheery was, as all dwarfs, assigned dwarf at birth. She identifies as a dwarf woman, so by the modern definition of the term, she is a trans woman. Whatever is under her armoured skirt is irrelevant.

*early books do sometimes have characters refer to dwarfs as "she", but this can be easily explained by it being translated that way from the dwarfish genderless pronoun, especially considering how casually homophobic society was at the time those books were written. Even if you don't buy this, it's still clearly retconned by the time the dwarf-cemtric books are written, so it's not really relevant either way.

My little pet theory (or ret-con I suppose) is that when dwarves first started learning human languages they got confused by the differently gendered pronouns* and the way they were being used. Assuming that "she" and "wife" referred to the dwarf you were courting/married to. So for instance, when Carrot writes letters home asking his parents to send his love to Minty he uses "she" because he is courting him. But likewise Minty (were he speaking a human language) would have referred to himself as he and Carrot as she.

Husband translated at first to "the dwarf who is this dwarf" and Wife translated to "that dwarf to whom I am married." So each married dwarf would be both husband and wife, depending on who's doing the talking.

Later this would cause some confusion among humans, but not much because they're all too stupid to be able to tell the difference anyway.

*at least those human languages that have gendered pronouns.

🩸🫀🦇 THE EMPRESS 🦇🫀🩸

i really should post art more often. anyway heres guillermo being a smoothie boy that i sketched on my lunch break

✨Life lessons with Nandor✨

How is the only foreign-language Wikipedia page on the Czech LotR parody dub in Welsh

I'm fucking weeping rn

rope monster

I love when they do this it’s always such a bad idea

They are discussing how they talk to the Wildmother