being a fan of a character is sometimes “look at how complex he is. he’s so intricate and his story is so tragic and he’s so much more complicated than people give him credit for” and sometimes it’s like “haha look at this failure of a person. I wanna throw him off a cliff and see what happens”
I keep seeing people suggest it's mean to blacklist tags when your mutuals post stuff you don't like. It is not. It keeps you from resenting your mutuals!
I cannot recommend enough that people blacklist tags for things they don't like. TLOU is not for me - I haven't watched it and have no specific criticisms, but it's not for me. I blacklisted tags associated with it and **poof** peace on my dash! I also have "gore" blacklisted. I blacklisted Hannibal for a while. Nothing against either of those things. But they were not my scene personally so ON TO THE BLACKLIST.
What I'm saying is. Your fandom is not my fandom but your fandom is okay. I take responsibility for curating my dash when I can. I can't curate for microagressions (and macro agressions!) because people don't tag for that. But I can curate for stuff I don't like for personal reasons.
And btw this is one of the reasons I tag things and will add tags if people request.
#this is literally the reason that if I’m getting into a new fandom I try to TELL people what my tag will be#so they can blacklist it!#I would absolutely rather my mutuals be able to blacklist something#because ‘neph is on her bullshit again!’#than to have a mutual LEAVE ME because I went on a four day straight Danny phantom reblogging binge and they hate the fandom!#I am like 90% sure ALL my mutuals would rather I blacklist their fandoms I cannot deal with than just LEAVE them because I can’t handle it#I have a friend who is SUPER active in a fandom I loathe#our friendship predates tumblr’s fucking existence#I guarantee she isn’t hurt by me blocking the tag and not interacting with her posts in that fandom#and guess what!#SHE DOES NOT EVEN KNOW I HAVE BLOCKED THAT TAG#BECAUSE I DO NOT HAVE TO TELL HER THAT I DID!#this is a fairly awesome hellsite where no one knows what you like or don’t unless you’ve TOLD THEM!#no one can see my blocked tags!#no one knows!#it’s great
#depends on the art the fandom the characters and my mood tbh#but for the sake of answering what I think is the real question:#which is how explicit is too explicit for fan art in general?#im gonna say go to town#like please don’t draw oddly anthromophized dicks in the style of beloved childhood characters#because I still have nightmares about the penises that were made into actual ATLA characters INCLUDING APPA I found over a decade ago#but otherwise dude you do you#if I don’t want to see two specific characters having extremely graphic sex in fanart that is what blacklists and shit are for#at the end of the day you do you my dude and everyone else can either block or blacklist but their dash is theirs to curate#you shouldn’t cater to the people who want to censor your art!
"you can't pick and choose what you like from canon" common misconception! yes you can
but please do not get this very true concept confused with “you cannot pick and choose what is canon”
they are two very different things.
thank you for this addition seriously
#I can and will pick and choose what I like from canon at the same time I ignore what I don’t like and refuse to acknowledge it as canon#IN MY OWN WRITING!#I CAN also refuse to read things that acknowledge those parts!#but my favorite is when entire whole ass fandoms reject certain parts of canon#like there is a standing thing in one fandom that the finale just NEVER HAPPENED#so like sure you can tell us that we don’t get to decide what isn’t canon#but when an entire whole ass fandom just straight up says WTAF and rejects a finale?#bet
Remember that chromium is Chrome, Edge, Opera, and every other browser you can name other than Safari and Firefox
Anonymous asked:
You keep talking about the origins of AO3 as this group effort by an actual group of people who were friends and who spent time discussing this with each other in person. It's kind of blowing my mind. Is there a post or a journal somewhere that specifically keeps record of this?
--
I'm dying.
Nonnie, seriously?
No, that's mean, I know you're serious. It's just flabbergasting how much fandom has expanded and how much there isn't a direct link to the past.
Astolat and Cesperanza floated the idea at Vividcon and various places, I think, though I wasn't going to cons in that era. We were all on LJ in those days, and Astolat made a big post nailing her theses to the door. Discussion in the comments was instant and prolonged.
A LJ com was set up to discuss. It was later renamed to otw_news, but if you go all the way back to the beginning, you can see brainstorming mess instead of official news posts.
Early brainstorming: https://otw-news.livejournal.com/2007/05/
For example, here I am collecting links to older archives to look at for research when designing AO3.
Fun fact, we never intended to call it AO3. There was a whole call for name suggestions, but nothing was as evocative as astolat's original post title referencing Virginia Woolf. (For those who haven't thought about it, AO3's name is a reference to A Room of One's Own.)
But also notice how many people voted: 562.
That's how many people cared at the time: a few hundred. Maybe a thousand if you count lurkers, but frankly, that community was not as lurkery as now. It wasn't just ten friends. It was a community effort. But what "our" community looked like at the time was vastly different. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon astolat, not a vast sea of strangers like fic fandom on AO3 is now.
Here's an early post suggesting we ban the under 18s from the site entirely. Pity we didn't do so, given the rise of antis.
Here's the invite to a fundraising party at astolat's in NYC that following Halloween. I dressed as Amanda from Highlander, not very well.
You can tell we knew each other by looking at those comments on astolat's initial post. You can also tell how discussion-based that part of fandom was back in 2007.
The way my tumblr is now with a ton of text, back and forth, and hopping around between threads of conversation, all featuring a consistent set of faces, is very much like LJ. Most of tumblr is not.
This is important info to put out there, and I constantly forget that "fandom" as it is now is nothing like the community we had then. This is a good resource for understanding what was going on with the creation of AO3 in particular, but it's also a great example of why older fans say that we miss the Livejournal era of fandom so much.
AO3 is the result of long discussions, hard work, and a dedicated community of fans. Though it isn't is a social media site (and it was never intended to be), it is the only place now that sometimes feels like how the fannish community used to be on LJ--when a good discussion gets going in the comments on a story. But AO3 is for fanfiction et al, and therefore is limited in discussion subjects.
(The ads you'll encounter if you follow those links, though? Did not exist when we were there and were one of the reasons we abandoned the site--not the most important reasons by a long shot as you'll understand if you read more about why AO3 was created, but they were a factor.)
We were a collection of communities, with some-to-significant overlap in members. Fanfiction writers were not "content creators," and people who didn't write fanfiction were not "the lucky audience who should be soooooooooooo grateful that writers deigned to gift us with their incredible talent." We knew each other. Many of us met each other IRL after meeting through fandom (once fandom shifted to the internet there was some hesitancy at first about meeting "online" friends, but that was quickly gotten over). We went to conventions together. We had lunch and dinner and parties and meet-ups IRL outside of conventions.
If you take a wander around from even just that one LJ community (click on a username to check out their personal LJ), you can see how discussions would branch off without excluding anyone the way they do on Tumblr. If you wanted to share something you saw on someone else's LJ, you just linked to it, and people followed the link to read it and join in the discussion (or just lurk). The force of Tumblr splintering is an active barrier to creating real communities.
I really miss LJ. I miss the connection I felt to my community there.
#fandom is supposed to be a community -- not a two-tiered system of sellers and buyers
Yup.
#gods I remember all of this#what’s another important thing to note is that AO3 wasn’t the only site trying to do this!#this wasn’t the only community organizing to do this!#it was just the one that was successful!#I spent YEARS working with a lesser-known all fandom archive that focused on both the archive side and the community side#and we lost out to AO3 years ago and our archive no longer exists#when we get pissy about the current state of fandom#when we insist you learn your fucking fandom history?#THIS SHIT IS WHY!#and for the record I still wish AO3 had banned the under 18s#most communities that had any kind of adult content back then just straight up banned anyone under 18#if you were not a legal adult you could not access the community#the inclusion of children was seen as coming with a need to censor ourselves and we didn’t want that!#and when children became openly welcomed in fandom we saw the rise of how we needed to make fandom a safe space for children#it was NEVER for children#hell strikeout and a number of other things meant to make our spaces more child friendly were why we all left them!
i need feminism because when jesus does a magic trick it’s a goddamn miracle but when a woman does a magic trick she gets burned at the stake
mattheuphonium
fabulous
tockthewatchdog
i mean they did also kill jesus. that was a pretty significant thing that happened. like i understand where you’re coming from here but they very much did kill jesus.
Sometimes I entertain myself by mentally categorizing tiers of headcanon. It has nothing to do with quality, just:
1- Wait, This is Headcanon?
The source material doesn't explicitly say that the headcanon is true, but it really strongly implies it, to the point that a lot of people don't even realize it's not explicit canon. I'm not talking ships so much as just really obvious details that aren't quite spelled out.
2- Interpretative Headcanon
The headcanon is based on something in the source material, and it's a valid interpretation, but there are a lot of ways to interpret the thing in the source, and it could easily and justifiably be read quite differently. This is also often mistaken for explicit canon.
3- Borderline Headcanon
The headcanon is spun off from something in the source material and doesn't contradict anything in it, but the basis is ephemeral enough that it's mostly something you/someone else/the fandom made up and ran with.
4- Classic Headcanon
The headcanon is not directly based on canon details. It's made up to fill those fun blank spaces in canons, and to connect things we do know. So it works with what's established in canon and can lead to really fun and interesting spins on canon, but it definitely leans more towards invention.
5- This Headcanon Has Creaky Floorboards
The headcanon is not only stuff you/I/fandom made up to go with canon details, it can actually be fairly difficult to reconcile with those details. It's technically possible to make them fit if you squint and interpret in some specific and improbable ways, but it's an obvious stretch. (This sounds negative, but sometimes canon details suck.)
6- HeadCANNON
Creaky? LOL. This headcanon definitely cannot be reconciled to its source material and does not wish to be. It gives no fucks about canon except insofar as these headcanons often go out of their way to defy the canon details of the source and blast holes straight through its structure.
i’ve seen a vast number of redditors-turned-tumblrs on here express this exact realization:
“i can say whatever i want on here and i don’t have to deal with a bunch of assholes downvoting me! i can like/do/be whatever i want on my own personal blog!”
and like. idk man. it’s so cool that people are discovering this for themselves and finding joy, but it’s also frustrating to me because this is how the internet should be. ppl expressing themselves.
it also feels like ppl have shit-talked/heard bad things about this site for so long that they are genuinely surprised when tumblr is fun to use.
genuinely if any social media you are using is making you feel bad, stop using it. this should be fun.
Very Brief Guide to [tumblr], for Reddit refugees
Shit You Must Do Right Fucking Now:
- Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.
- Go into Settings -> Dashboard, scroll down to Preferences, and turn off the options in the picture. This will get rid of most of the algorithmic stuff.
- Turn off Tumblr Live. You have to snooze it once every 7 days for some stupid reason. It's hosted through another company and will steal your data if you use it.
- Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:
- Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.
Basic Features of the Site:
- Reblogs drive the entire site. If you'd upvote something on Reddit, you'd reblog it on Tumblr. You can add text, images, or tags to a reblog, but you're not required to.
- The dashboard is the equivalent to your Reddit feed, and contains the posts of all the people you follow, with the newest at the top
- You can send an ask to someone, and it'll appear in their askbox for them to answer. You can receive them too, or turn off the settings if you don't want.
- Tags aren't actually used for finding stuff (search function is dogshit), but are more for categorizing. People also talk in tags. Because Tumblr is weird, you can't use quotation marks (") or commas in them without fucking it up
- You can filter both tags and phrases under Account Settings; doing this will put a filter over a post that contains them, which you'll have to click through to see the post itself. Useful for avoiding hate speech or blocking out annoying stuff
- You can make polls in posts. Here's one now.
- Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.
Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don't:
- Very old posts (I'm talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There's no such thing as a post being "too old" to reblog
- Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.
- If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.
- You can screenshot someone's tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called "peer review"
- Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not "creepy" like it is seen as on other sites.
- Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a "yes, and?" attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.
- We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.
- Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say "I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd" and nobody gives a shit.
General Etiquette:
- Don't try to do epic clapbacks here, you'll probably just get laughed at or blocked. If someone is bugging you or spouting bigoted bullshit, block them.
- Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.
- Not every reblog needs a comment or tag in it
- You can go all out with tagging your stuff to organize it, or you can just leave it all blank. Someone might ask "hey, can you tag these posts as [x]?" and you can decide if you want to do that or not. It's generally polite to oblige, but "no" is still reasonable.
- Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don't get involved in it. Ever.
- Don't put fandom tags or jokes on someone's posts about serious matters or personal shit
- You're responsible for curating your own dashboard; if you complain about constantly seeing stuff you don't like, that's probably on you. Don't be afraid to unfollow.
- Follower count doesn't matter much here and you don't have to make yours known if you don't want to.
- Reblog, don't repost. Reblogging keeps the credit and doesn't "steal" engagement like Twitter retweets.
- If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal
- Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There's a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.
Tips:
- Get XKit Rewritten if you're on desktop, it's a really helpful extension
- In the little drop-down menu next to the 'Post now' button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It's good for spreading stuff out over time.
- You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!
- Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs
- Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.
Have fun on [tumblr], everyone!
Tbh when Zuko was trying to persuade the gaang to let him join, he probably should have lead with his father’s plan to do mass genocide on a very specific date, and then once Zuko has their attention, he can move on to talking about how he really lost himself. The genocide plan should have been the sentence that follows “hello, Zuko here”
“I learned no one can give you back your honor, you have to earn it yourself. Also I learned my dad is about to do the worst and most horrible war crime since our nation’s last worst and most horrible war crime. Also what was up with the frozen frogs, Aang. That’s just a mystery that’s been haunting me for a few months.”
seeing reddit refugees repeatedly hit their post limits and comment their thoughts on every reblog is kind of refreshing. site migration be damned these guys know how to blog
Reddit users on Tumblr:
around when I first started dating my boyfriend i bought myself this novelty blanket that looks like a photorealistic tortilla because I am SUCH A SUCKER for novelty shit. when he saw it in person for the first time his eyes lit up, which should have been a warning sign for the indignities to come.
so he’s a first responder and his day shifts start obnoxiously early as far as I, a pampered corporate asshole, am concerned. almost invariably when he’s at my place there will be an alarm at an hour that is downright unconscionable that will make him wake up and roll out of bed to get ready and will simultaneously make me burrow under the pillows grumbling about how surely nobody actually NEEDS their lives saved this early in the morning, after which I will promptly attempt to go back to sleep
he is a clever man and he knows this is when i am most vulnerable to attack.
every single time we do this dance, he quietly dresses, packs up, goes about getting ready to leave, and then when i have juuuust fallen back asleep, he returns with the tortilla blanket. He finds it no matter where I have hidden it.
He then creeps silently up to my side of the bed and uses his superior speed, strength, and reflexes to wrap me up in it incredibly tightly while i am still dazed and sputtering, so that i cannot move my legs or arms and am reduced to humiliating halfhearted magikarp flops that do not deter him from at least attempting to kiss my forehead.
then he goes to my bedroom door, opens it, then pauses, turns around, looks at me, the soft human filling of the facsimile of an enormous burrito he has just constructed, and says in his best romantic lead voice “I’ll see you soon, beans.”
you cannot understand how devastating it is to my ego that i am beans.
What's something about yourself that's true but sounds like a lie?
I'll start. When I was little I had a swimming pool full of corn.
I was burned with hot oil when I was a kid.
I fell on a toaster as a small child (or so I was told, as it was before I can recall) and had burn scars for most of my first thirty years on the back of my left leg. The thigh was an almost perfect unbroken 7, and the calf was a perfect, filled in 0. The scars have vanished now, but they were quite distinct for my entire childhood and it wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that they started to be less visible.
Anonymous asked:
Why can't you people be normal about slurs for 2 seconds
Just because YOU reclaimed and identify with something doesn't mean everyone else does. No one cares about you IDing as a queer or dyke or fag or whatever, people just don't want strangers to randomly assign them words that have historically been used as slurs.
Like, do you understand that people have had this word used against them by bigots? Do you understand that maybe, it's tasteless to get upset at people for having trauma regarding a word? Are you able to comprehend that maybe insisting people be okay with being called a word that means odd, spoiled, ruined or weird is not a good look?
I'm autistic and have a severe learning disability. I'm totally fine when people use the word retard, I call myself a retard, I don't care. But I'm sure as fuck not going to walk up to a bunch of other autistic people I barely know and go "lmao what is up my fellow tards!!!"
I'm not trying to start shit, I'm legitimately trying to understand why you find it appropriate to make fun of people, often victims of abuse or hate crimes, for being triggered by a word.
"I'm legitimately trying to understand why you find it appropriate to make fun of people, often victims of abuse or hate crimes, for being triggered by a word."
Gay is a slur. Lesbian is a slur. Homosexual is a slur. Every single word we have ever had has always either had its roots in cruelty and oppression or has been used against us by our oppressors. There is no term that is pure and clean and innocent and has never hurt anyone's feelings.
Let's disregard fag for now. That one's still in the process of reclamation, I'll admit. Let's just talk about queer. Queer has been the academic term for non-cisgender and non-heterosexual history for half a century now. Queer theory has been around for thirty years. Queer was the word which we shouted as a radical inditement of our treatment by our oppressors: "We're here, we're queer, get over it" and "Not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you" should both sound familiar to you.
And now it's 2012 or so and queer is known as the most inclusive term we have. It's less unwieldy than LGBTQIAAP+. It's not based in a necessity of defining yourself through your oppression like MOGAI. It's, important, a deeply private word. Not in the sense that it is used privately, but rather than it grants its user privacy. If you're queer, everyone instantly knows you're a part of the community, but you aren't being forced to out yourself or give more details about your personal life and identity than you want. It was always a word about identity.
TERFs hate this. TERFs hate this so much, because it's inclusive of people they hate, like asexual people, trans women, and other freaks of nature who society needs to put down like dogs. Queer means TERFs can't as easily define you as the Bad Other. Queer means TERFs will be recognized more easily as bigoted towards the larger queer communities. So, obviously, they do what anyone would, and decide to take advantage of the language of social justice warriors of the time and attack impressionable young kids from 13-16.
The average 13-16 year old doesn't exactly have much experience in real-life queer spaces. They don't get to go to rallies or protests, they don't stay at community centers, their lives are insular and based entirely online. Their understanding of social politics is inherently rooted in the importance of posting in the right language. Their activism is one which tweets correctly. So TERFs slid into their inboxes and went "Hey, just so you know, queer is actually a slur used to oppress people and it's problematic to use since some people have been called it".
And this works, because of course it does, and now I have people like you in my inbox bitching and whining about how queer is a slur and how you've been called queer once or twice in your life. To this I say: My apologies, but fucking suck it up and reclaim it. I don't care about traumatic events you have with queer. It has been reclaimed by the greater community and was done so long before you were born if you aren't literally 50, and more importantly, by giving queer validation as a slur, you actively give our oppressors that power over you. I'm not going to let my oppressors know that if they say an identifier for us meanly enough then we'll stop identifying as that word. I'm not giving the power to silence and repress who we are to people who would use it.
Anon, I respect you enough to say that people who consider my identity as a slur should get punched in the face, because alt-right fash cunts, pig cops, evangelical christians, TERFs, and hyperconservative political lobbyists all consider my identity as a slur. Why should I treat you any different to them? What about your specific treatment of queer as a slur ends up with a meaningfully different result? The neonazis on kiwifarms won't care why you're telling me to shut the fuck up about queer. They don't give a shit about why you're saying this. What they give a shit about is if it works and if calling people queer will get them to shut up and curl up in a little ball and admit defeat and hand them slurs on a silver platter. And I'm not about to live that sort of life, so either get with the program or fuck off.
Reblogging things I like feels a lot more goblinesque than upvoting ever did. The upvotes felt like "hmm yes, I approve *golf claps*" while reblogging feels like furtively staring at something before shoving it in your mouth and scurrying back underneath the nearest piece of furniture.
Which isn't to say that I don't like it. But I definitely find myself going "maybe I shouldn't reblog this because I've already reblogged a bunch of things today and I don't want to look like I don't have a life," I say as I close the app and reopen it like one of those little automatic box toys with the switches.
What the fuck is with the teeth on my dash and why can’t I fucking tap them to make them go away? Or even find out what they are!? Sometimes I hate this hellsite. I take a couple weeks off and fucking teeth just randomly appear!