Vanguard

lickety is basically the most classic thing to split

how quickly we forget the humble banana

A new Black Butler anime was just announced at the Crunchyroll panel at Anime Expo today. Announcing for a 2024 release produced by Cloverworks. Who is excited?! (Oh, btw it's a continuation after the Book of Atlantic, which premiered in theaters back in 2017)

Flow, with updated colours. The blue just felt like it didn’t fit anymore, and I like this version better. All of my products have also been updated to this version.

Do we have a franz kafka diary entry for july 1st, i want to know what he thinks!!!

happy too tired July everyone

TIL Many haunted houses have been investigated and found to contain high levels of carbon monoxide or other poisons, which can cause hallucinations. The carbon monoxide theory explains why haunted houses are mostly older houses, which are more likely to contain aging and defective appliances.

via reddit.com

correlation is not causation, ghosts are drawn to poison and weakened minds

I read this earlier today and tried to ignore it but I just can’t stop thinking about how absolutely terrible it is, so fuck it.

It’s a 16,000 word apologia for fandom’s racism and sexism with a bunch of extremely dubious “statistics” as evidence.

Choice horrors:

“It’s not unreasonable to think that some straight women are interested in m/m because they don’t find women erotically or romantically exciting. And, look, straight people don’t need anybody’s protection most of the time, but trying to shame straight women for their sexualiy isn’t activism.”

Het romance novels are a billion dollar a year industry. The most successful fanfic of all time is het. Lots of women like het romances. The question isn’t, “Why don’t women like pairings with women?” It’s “Why aren’t women who like pairings with women in fandom?”

“Why Are All The Slashers Sitting Together In The Cafeteria?”

What made the author think this was a good idea. Slash writers are not an oppressed minority. This is pure white fragility and entitlement, to imply that your fan fiction tastes make you oppressed and then take the name of a book about black people to explain why you need a safe space. I understand THINKING of this line. I don’t understand PUBLISHING it.

“Step outside of AO3, and you find a very different story. Media Miner, a major multifandom archive of the 00s that is (was?) a hub of Inu Yasha fandom, is 52% het, 37% gen, and only 10% slash…Media Miner: 52% het; 10% slash Wattpad: 89% het; 5% slash FFN: more het than AO3 and less slash, but percentages are elusive”

Media Miner has about 150,000 works. AO3 has over a million, Wattpad and FFN over six million. Comparing percentages across those populations is meaningless. More than FORTY PERCENT of the total analyzed fanworks are filed under “percentages are elusive.” The methodology for generating the stats across archives is not standard or randomized. These numbers are completely meaningless.

Cutting and pasting is a pain on mobile, so double fuck it. The race arguments include that American TV and movies are mostly white, so naturally fanfic and vids are white, but also, all of the shows with popular black actors are 90s sitcoms, and no one likes to vid 90s sitcoms; someone once complained that a vid exchange was too white, even though they themselves requested lots of white stuff, and this chaps the author’s ass because she made a vid of a black dude (as a personal challenge to herself to vid everything her recipient requested, of a canon she only watched for the challenge) and she thought the exchange was fine; diversity efforts in fandom are too “doom and gloom”; black characters like Sam and Rhodey aren’t shipped because they’re too emotionally stable; it’s too scary to write non-white characters because you might mess up and be racist (too late, friend!) and writing CoC is “defined by fear” with “no upside” (that is a really disturbing insight into this person’s writing process, actually) and an EXTREMELY creepy aside about how there aren’t enough hot black guys on OKCupid.

There are also a bunch of weird-ass arguments about het and fem slash that are basically, “Fans should stop complaining that there’s no fem slash in Fandom A because there’s fem slash in Fandom B” and “Fans should stop complaining that female characters in media fandom are sidelined because girls in boy band fandom write a fuckton of self-insert fic.” So I guess people who want to read Natasha Romanov/Maria Hill fic should just go read Xena/Gabrielle fic and readers who want Abbie Mills gen fic should just go read a 1D romance?

This meta is a 13-chapter disaster, is what I’m saying.

Apparently this author has been online for like two decades, which means they should have been here through Racefail 09 and the great interracial pairing slur cockup of 2007, AT THE VERY LEAST, ie, they should know better. And yet here we are. I’m sorry, everybody. This thing sucks.

This is a good take on the “meta” I basically refused to read last night and I see that it was basically worse than I expected. Ugh.

I couldn’t get past the title. This person is actively working to silence fans of color. It’s not going to work. 

I didn’t read the whole thing but I read Chapter 6: Race and Shipping. Where the author provides a notoriously known statistic results from dating sites to explain that POC aren’t seen as attractive = racist fans shouldn’t be blamed because this is a general problem,  and not just a fandom problem. Okay… And then they end up with:

Translation: ”I don’t see POC as attractive but I’ve written 3 fics with characters of colour, where are my cookies?!!”

- Mod P.

I read this entire clusterfuck, including the comments, and now I’m passing it on for anyone else who, like me, has managed to filter their fandom interaction enough that they didn’t realize this toxicity was still not just passively practiced but actively considered and played out.

None of these points are particularly new, but seeing them outright stated without shame in 2016 is an Experience.

I have to share this one quote about femslash:

Guys, this was the problem all along. I’m doing fandom wrong by falling in love with the wrong source text. If I’d only understood that this wasn’t my space to enjoy non-white and/or non-male characters, because the majority of characters are white men, imagine how much happier I’d be in my life.

franzeska’s been heavily involved in western media fandom, esp as a former board member of OTW (which runs AO3) and fandom challenges like yuletide and parallels. 

they’ve been spouting yt apologia while fetishizing asian culture for years, this is nothing new. i’m pretty sure i’ve read franzeska saying the same things back when racefail ‘09 was going down. like most of this isn’t surprising bc it is exactly what we saw yt lj fandom peeps spouting in 2007-2010 and i’m personally not shocked that these people learned absolutely nothing. they don’t want to learn and being accountable for their actions. 

Yeah I saw the same arguments during RaceFail. If anything it shows that the current toxic environment is one white fans are invested in and HAVE been for a while. It isn’t incidental as much as it’s an environment they’ve actively cultivated using the exact same strategies.

I want to highlight this thread of comments in particular because the “let me school you on fandom history” aspect of this meta is one of the most disingenuous, and it really reveals that the author’s intent is not to “improve civility” but to erase fans of color because she finds writing and vidding about characters of color “joyless,” “defined by fear” and to have “no upside.” I also think it was incredibly shady to roll an “analysis” of slash opposition, the lack of femslash in media fandom and racism in fandom into one post, because arguments about one start to indirectly act as arguments about the other.

Franzeska goes deep into the history of AO3 to talk about why slash is represented heavily there, with lots of links and documentation and references to how she was there and “we” did this or that. Her stated intent in the very first chapter is “to educate by providing historical perspective and non-AO3 context that is missing from most of the frothing rants on this subject,” rants that she believes “[depend].on an ignorance of fandom history” and “[do] little or nothing to stem the tide of so-called ‘whitecock’ juggernauts while making it unpleasantly fraught to write about people of color.”    

But in 16,000 words over 13 chapters, there is not one mention of Racefail ‘09. Not a single reference to the time a popular Harry Potter LJ community used a racial slur as a prompt in 2007. Nothing about the Supernatural RPF Big Bang story that used the 2010 Haiti earthquake as a backdrop for a J2 love story (THAT’S A REAL THING THAT HAPPENED). Nothing about the time in 2006 that comics BNF Te (Te! Te of the roses, Te of my heart. Te is amazing. I don’t know her personally, but she was a fucking LIGHT ON A HILL in Smallville and DCU fandom) pointed out the marginalization black characters faced on two then-juggernauts of white m/m slash fandom, Angel and Smallville.

ALL of those things were happening roughly concurrently with the founding of AO3.* Going into extensive detail about the history of slash fandom without ONE SINGLE MENTION of the history of fandom racism, including in slash fandom, is an effort to erase that history for the comfort of white fans. Rewriting the founding of AO3 and ignoring this history paints slash writers and fans as victims who need protecting from other parts of fandom or fandom spaces (which, by combining this sexism and racism argument, can plausibly be said to refer to “non slash fans” but is in fact primarily fans who are women of color and their allies) and who shouldn’t be disturbed in their safe space while completely ignoring the many, many fans of color** who have made themselves incredibly vulnerable over the past decade to talk about how fandom generally and often slash fandom specifically has hurt them.

*Which Franzeska attributes to wanting “a safe place to post our kinky porn.”  I have a REAL problem with that, because while providing a secure forum for slash fiction and explicit fiction was one reason the archive was founded, it was not the only or main reason cited in early discussions about the archive. AO3 was inspired both by the creation of a for-profit archive run by non-fans who hoped to monetize and then profit from the fannish gift economy and by a desire for fans to be at the forefront of any efforts to legitimize fanfiction, confirm its legality, and bring it into the mainstream. Not only was “protecting slash from the rest of fandom” not identified as a primary goal, in the post archive founder astolat links to in her call to found what would eventually become AO3, slash is specifically identified as one of the BEST possible test cases to establish the legality of fanfic as a transformative work, which was then seriously in question (you would not believe the disclaimers writers used to use). (The author of that post on legality, someone whose fic I read as recently as last month and who I had previously admired, commented approvingly on The Horrible Meta, proving that rewriting history is a group project, apparently, and that there is nothing white people won’t excuse from their friends).

**I almost linked to some of them here but then I thought…why would I drag this bullshit back to their door? It’s time for this problem to stay in the family. White people need to start taking responsibility for each other, and hey, change starts with me. Please no one bother Te. My ask box is open.

This entire piece completely erases fans of color and their contributions to fandom over and over and over. When Franzeska says that anti-racist activism in fandom “prioritizes the ‘safety’ of fictional women over that of real women,” she means white women, because women of color have been expressing for YEARS, in very personal and painful writing, that they are hurt by the way fan culture works and that they are withdrawing from fandom because of it. Those women are completely ignored in this calculation. The dichotomy is between fictional characters of color and white female fans. Women of color in fandom literally don’t exist in this argument.

Further, Franzeska dismisses objections to racist tropes or erasure in fanfic as “a flood of precious nonsense” and “concern trolling” using “social justice terminology.” She also says that “[if] there’s one pattern I have seen over and over, it is that people who get up in my face about race and shipping do not produce many fanworks about non-white characters themselves. So why the aggro?” By completely ignoring the last full DECADE of this discussion, she implies that all of these objections are coming out of nowhere from white people who want to score social justice points or fulfill their “duty” by crushing other people’s fun. In fact, women of color have been criticizing this for years, and leaving fandom over it (in the 2006 post linked above, Te discusses withdrawing almost completely from several fandoms with marginalized black characters). EVEN IF the majority of the criticism at this point were coming from white women (which IS NOT TRUE; Franzeska just ignores everyone else), we aren’t concern trolling. We are doing what women of color have asked us for years to do, which is to call out the racism in our own communities in the hopes that eventually we will make it safe for them to return and have as much fun as Franzeska has apparently been having for the last two decades without a second thought about the people she’s hurt.

I’ve been watching this from the sidelines, but this in particular caught my attention from the post above (bold mine):

Look. I get being uncomfortable when someone questions your shipping behavior. HOO BOY do I get it, especially now. But there is a vast, vast difference between “stop shipping this” and “take a long, close look at yourself and recognize that you are part of the problem whether you intended to be or not”.

I’m reminded of the Jane Elliot post I reblogged yesterday: “I’m a racist. I was infected with racism at birth. I want to get over it. It is going to take me the rest of my life to get over it, but I can do it, but I have to choose to do it.”

As a collective entity, fandom can only get over our racism if we choose to do it. And choosing to do it means we have to first accept that we ARE racist. It’s 100% unavoidable in this culture. Saying you’re not racist is like saying you have no environmental pollutants in your body. You may not personally see/feel the effects, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Now is not the time for white fans to sit around congratulating ourselves on how not-racist we are because we wrote that one fic once, or to get defensive about acknowledging our own ingrained racism–cause you can’t fix a problem you’re insisting doesn’t exist. 

Yeah. It’s uncomfortable, even painful, to acknowledge you’re not as good a person as you assumed you were, but it has to be done if you’re going to start making improvements. And those improvements are hugely necessary, not just to make fandom a better place for everybody, but to make the world a better place.

listen hobbit pussy could be mediocre (doubtful) but even if it was it's still followed by a 17 course homecooked meal and the kind of weed that would make sauron scared. lithe beautiful immortal elven pussy has no power compared to the simple, hardworking hobbit. and it goes without saying that you cannot handle dwarven pussy.

you know her bush is adorned with elaborate braids representing a long family tradition of training a grip that could deglove your member if she so chose

dwarf pussy could shuck your foreskin off like a corn husk

Luigiiii ✨💖💖✨

Luigi and Bowser 💖💖💖💖✨✨✨✨✨✨

Absolutely bonkers that I'm now one of those weirdos you hear about on Twitter

I committed to the bit so hard that I also committed misdemeanor impersonation of a government official

hey. don’t cry. crush two cloves of garlic into a pot with a dollop of olive oil and stir until golden then add one can of crushed tomatoes a bit of balsamic vinegar half a tablespoon of brown sugar half a cup of grated parmesan cheese and stir for a few minutes adding a handful of fresh spinach until wilted and mix in pasta of your choice ok?

PEACE AND LOVE!!!!!!!!

pavlovs dog and schrodinger's cat armed with chekhovs gun and occams razor to take down freud. new hit movie coming april 20th 2069

my friend told me that her boyfriend got her a super cool rock while they were on vacation together and you would not BELIEVE my disappointment when i realized she was talking about her engagement ring

*holds your head in my hands* im sorry i let you down

Absolutely bonkers that I'm now one of those weirdos you hear about on Twitter

oh so when a bunch of roman senators kill their leader it's #girlboss but when i, macbeth,