Weird and Wonderful fandom

[archaardvarkarchive]

Hello. This blog is about thoughts on writing and the minting of fanfiction by communities too.

Before I get into this, lemme just say I’m a inclusivist theologically, so keep that in mind, m’kay?

Jesus as an Armadillo? What are you talking about?

My pastor gave a sermon on it.

He said that armadillos were incredibly clever and resilient, and said this, of Jesus avoiding every ‘trap question’ the Pharisees threw at him by coming at the OT from a different angle than yes or no.

Now, armadillos are not directly related to aardvarks, but they are both specialized in eating insects and they look reasonably similar- probably due to convergent evolution

I don’t remember why exactly I named this blog *Arch* aardvark archive, probably just for the rhyme. Or the idea of an arch-something being like, a ‘chief’ or a ‘principle’, like an Arch-Mage.

Totally unrelated but funny rhyme: I aim to be an Arthrophage, like our good friend the Aardvark. But more in a human way, like a pescetarian. 🐠 Health benefits, you can look up yourself.

But now picturing the idea of an Archangel Armadillo is pretty funny.

👼 -feed me arthropods!! *nom*

I’ll leave you with the happy-making Aardvark Song.

[archaardvarkarchive]

Hey, everybody who wants more WLW content …

come get your gourmet food

[hapalopus]

Whenever I feel like hope is lost, I google "tarantula saved from burning building" and read all the stories about firefighters rescuing one of the world's most hated animals because they're someone's pet and it doesn't matter if you're scared of spiders or think they're gross, their lives have worth and they deserve to live just as much as any other pet

[archaardvarkarchive]

Here we go again … a post with thousands of reblogs about getting teary-eyed over invertebrates, meanwhile it’s almost guaranteed nearly 100% of those rebloggers probably funded factory farms more than once today

where’s all this sympathy for your own victims?

I would actually like for a homo sapien NOT to risk life, limb, and/or permanent lifelong lung damage if their mask is jostled, over something whose brain is the size of my fingernail, actually!

[hapalopus]

"Something" that's a living creature with feelings

[archaardvarkarchive]

Yes. Factory farmed animals are things with feelings. But I bet you paid somebody who makes them miserable and confined today.

Tell the viewers, would you be fine and dandy if your significant other, your best friend, your sibling or parent, got maimed, COPD, or even died trying to save a fucking arthropod?

Be for real

[hapalopus]

Whenever I feel like hope is lost, I google "tarantula saved from burning building" and read all the stories about firefighters rescuing one of the world's most hated animals because they're someone's pet and it doesn't matter if you're scared of spiders or think they're gross, their lives have worth and they deserve to live just as much as any other pet

[archaardvarkarchive]

Here we go again … a post with thousands of reblogs about getting teary-eyed over invertebrates, meanwhile it’s almost guaranteed nearly 100% of those rebloggers probably funded factory farms more than once today

where’s all this sympathy for your own victims?

I would actually like for a homo sapien NOT to risk life, limb, and/or permanent lifelong lung damage if their mask is jostled, over something whose brain is the size of my fingernail, actually!

[gooseworx]

Is ribbit a guy or a girl?

she/they

[zoguy1]

People treating this as "Ribbit is a girl" and saying that Jax isn't bi/queer anymore just because a character was revealed to have she/they pronouns goes to show the extorsexism. Wow.

Ribbit falls under the non-binary unbrella.

It's not confirmed that Jax has romantic feelings for either Pomni nor Ribbit, it's all fandom shipping. And the ship still makes Jax queer.

Don't fucking treat she/they as "girl" people.

[archaardvarkarchive]

How would attraction to one character confirm whether he was bi or not in the first place. omg. What are these people doingggggg lol

all the same tho, a guy being attracted to someone who presents as femme doesn’t make someone queer tho … until we can evaluate how they present, Jax could feasibly be attracted to them in a straight way

I believe Gooseworx has even confirmed Jax is straight …?

(ofc if the transfemme theories turn out to be true, that would mean he’d specifically be attracted to whatever masculine traits they have)

Pronouns alone do not change how sexual attraction works … everyone on the planet could linguistically reverse their pronouns tomorrow (ie but not their bodies) and conventional allohet men would still be attracted to conventional allohet women and vice versa.

[srune]

only thing that comes to mind today.

[deadgenerations]

the fad of putting these little blurbs in TTRPGs was probably the most embarrassing bit of useless wanking the little industry scene has ever done, besides the time Warmahordes put a "this aint your daddys tabletop game!" in their rulebook.

does this serve any purpose other than to make the publisher feel like they're Doing Something, and to help consumers feel like their purchases are meaningful political engagement?

At the absolute minimum you could make a game which actually is a meaningful cultural expression of your ideals, or which is politically anti fascist in any way.

[sunspotpony]

So this is actually I can reassure you, the exact opposite of self indulgent wanking with no impact. It’s aggressively impactful in a very specific way—by making the nazis in the room very loud about the fact that they’re nazis.

I’m going to tell you about how a discord banner that was put up for pride month in the Lancer ttrpg official discord was so successful at getting bigots to out themselves, that it’s been the permanent official discord banner for 4 years now.

This is the updated version. It’s animated now.

But pride month 4 or 5 years ago, somebody made the server banner a Goblin mech dabbing in front of a trans flag.

And for your average person who joined the server, they just kinda went, lol cool.

For the trans people who joined the server, it made them feel extra safe.

And for the bigots who joined the server? They’d fucking bitch about it IMMEDIATELY. And promptly get banned.

And that month saw so many bannings of dipshits that they decided to keep that banner, because every single time a bigot joins the server, there is a high chance that they will out themselves IMMEDIATELY and be promptly banned.

While including text like this in a book is different than a community space, the reality is, fascists do not like being embarrassed or confronted about their beliefs; they have fragile egos.

So imagine you are going through the book with a group of friends, and you get to this block about “fascism bad,” and somebody is like, “I don’t know how I feel about this. It seems a bit stupid,” it immediately gets to raise a red flag for everybody that maybe this person isn’t, as cool to have at the table as they thought.

Similarly, you know how many bigots went and burned their beers/hats/shoes because some corporation supported trans people/gay people/Collin Kapernick?

This is performative, yes. But it’s not performative to puff up themselves as heroes. It’s performative, aimed right at the fragile skinned assholes who will boycott Oreos and Budweiser for “supporting the gays.”

It’s one of the FASTEST ways to reduce the number of virulent bigots in a community for ZERO COST.

Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.

It’s still PROFOUNDLY CHEAP AND EASY to include this blurb.

So, it’s free, zero effort nazi repellent.

Frankly with that in mind, I’d regard anybody who ISNT doing this, as maybe a tiny bit cowardly.

It doesn’t fix the world— anyone who thinks the table top scene will magically save the day is a fool—but it does increase the odds that the hobby will be a safer place for more reasonable people, and not become a bastion of fascism like the wh40k fandom has.

[noctumsolis]

Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.

It may be atypical but it's certainly not unique. Another example is the Heraldry discord I'm on, with an icon that is animated to switch its original colours and two other versions, displaying gay pride and transgender pride colours.

Bigots join, bigots mouth off, bigots get banned.

Sometimes we get a different flavour of bigot, ones who tolerate us queers but are racist as hell. They tend to out themselves, too, because it's a heraldry server. That fact alone makes them assume that we're all "European culture is best" and other racist bullshit. They get banned.

See also the Godot discord, with an icon that scrolls through pride colours in a beautiful way.

[trismeowgistus]

It even works for games famously infested with fascists like 40k. Games Workshop coming out with a (really rather tepid) statement of support of BLM had Nazis losing their minds in the comments fucking immediately

[walking-fandom]

I remember the meltdowns when the new Worls of Darkness books came out that this blurb is in. It's pretty easy to piss fascists off by just saying you don't want them there.

[crazy-pages]

The Pathfinder Facebook group did something like this on purpose as a honeypot and immediately banned all the bigots coming out of the woodwork, and immediately eliminated more than HALF of all incidents requiring moderators. Not just about bigotry, everything.

And that is TACTICALLY USEFUL.

Because game companies spend so much money moderating chat spaces (both forums and in-game chats) and they lose so much business when dominant third party online spaces associated with their game turn toxic. Hell moderation is the big money sink for social media. Managing that cost is one of the most difficult aspects of the business.

Now imagine telling a game or social media executive that you can eliminate half of their harassment in a single honeypot operation. Imagine telling them that you have a technique which surgically targets a majority of their most toxic members and immediately gets rid of them. Because that's what this is.

You slap up a big pride or power banner and an announcement that this company stands with [insert group here], or stands against fascism, and you take names on everybody who has angry or quibbling shit to say about that. And then you ban them all. And just like that the moderation load you're dealing with gets so much lighter. Keep it up with a similar announcement whenever a topical opportunity presents itself and you clean out any new trash which walks in too.

And it just so happens that the way to do this is to clear out the bigots and make a safe space for oppressed groups.

There are so many of these companies which are worried that by taking a stand like this they will hurt their user base. There are so many forums online with volunteer moderators who reflexively don't want to wait into politics because they think that will increase their workload. Give them good solid practical examples of this reducing their workload instead, and you will get some of them onboard.

Because this has a real measurable impact with the right follow through, and the impact is a general reduction in all harassment of everyone. And that is worth capital M Money and capital T Time to some people.

[daysleftofsecondterm]

1,106 days left

[archaardvarkarchive]

Also like. Let’s say this was performative.

So?

Do the non-performative things AND the performative things! Nothing is stopping you from doing both!

Have a bit of fun at the silent Nazi’s expense, maybe do or don’t keep them from secretively sprinkling in some of their views if they’re smarter about it … but at the end of the day … DO BOTH!

[petewentzisblack1312]

heres my challenge to everyone for next month, for black history month. any time you want to draw inspiration from art, like poetry, music etc, pick a black artist. web weave with langston hughes and james baldwin and jamaica kinkaid and hanif abdurraqib and derek walcott and set your edits to meghan thee stallion and beyoncé and eartha kitt and coltrane and invoke basquiat in your art and it can be fanworks or original stuff and importantly, it doesnt have to be about race. obviously be cognizant of the context of the art youre using because a lot of the artists i mention specifically create art about racism but like. take your white doomed yaoi ship and make a webweave to poem by langston hughes. set an edit to body by meghan thee stallion. engage with black art in all contexts.

[petewentzisblack1312]

you can reblog this. other people should also be exposed to this idea.

[fantastic-nonsense]

the people do not want you to know this, but some of the best Percy Jackson fic is on FFN, not Ao3

[archaardvarkarchive]

"endure the terrible search system" in the tags. My man, this is the part where you make a Recommendations List, not insist people shovel shit.

[dreichsmirr]

My abortion was really one the most hated kind of abortion. I wasn't underage. I wasn't raped. I wasn't in medical need.

I got pregnant not through some fluke or 1 in a 100 contraceptive failure. I got pregnant because I was knowingly and willfully having unprotected sex. Out of wedlock too if that matters.

It was my own fault, I was being irresponsible because I knew I could always get an abortion if I got pregnant. My abortion was as close as it comes to 'using abortion as a contraceptive' as anti-choicers love to say.

I didn't abort it because my health was in danger or because I didn't have the ability to care for it or whatever else. I did it purely because I didn't want a child. I wanted sex and I didn't want to deal with any consequences from it.

There's no moral here. I don't feel bad about it whatsoever. I suffered no karmic consequences or punishment from god. My life is amazing. I want to rub this in the face of every conservative and anti-choicer. I did the terrible thing. I had an abortion for the most selfish of reasons and literally nothing happened. Suck it.

[archaardvarkarchive]

"I suffered no karmic consequences or punishment from god." This is . . . . . . . such a weird statement to throw in here. Like. You do understand that in both of those belief systems, your punishment would occur after you died, right?

This post could be all on the up and up and with that it just . . . makes you look stupid. Or maybe I'm too autistic. idk. It doesn't seem very "funny" even without that lens.

[venomvalley-deactivated20250612]

the current state of fandom needs to be old yellered immediately. im loading up the shotgun as we speak

[venomvalley-deactivated20250612]

this is the PERFECT addition bunny omg

[theconcealedweapon]

[archaardvarkarchive]

BOOM

[liberalsarecool]

It’s 2026. Stop letting politicians of any party convince you that we cannot protect human rights. It’s a matter of leadership and courage. If they don’t have it, vote them out of office.

Let’s go!

[archaardvarkarchive]

I mean this makes a huge assumption that the unwieldy and huge Fed operates the same as a city level government . . . which is . . . wow. Like for sure the Fed is stupid, it introduces way too many competing interests, and we should give more power to state and local governments. This is what this post should've arrived at. But instead it just hears the singular term word "government" and says "oh yeh these two very different things are the same"

[fidelcostco]

[archaardvarkarchive]

Picturing what a m-f-&-intersex-inclusive version of this tweet would look like,

“don’t write for an imaginary audience- write for you, your erectile tissue, and-”

Still vaguely penis-flavored, just by association, but technically speaking, clitorises also have erectile tissue, so

If anybody can think of anything better …

oof, wait, this would exclude anyone who had gender-nullifying surgery, like agender ppl sometimes do, or anybody subject to FGM. Fuck it.

[bounce-a-coin-off-your-witcher]

Oh you're writing a gay smut fic with a fantasy setting? Don't forget to give one of your characters a

[philosophicalparadox]

It’s not that mysterious though.

Anyone carrying a bladed weapon carried oil. (More on that in a sec) Oil is what you use to clean and condition steel, especially, since water will rust it.

Many people in the Middle Ages used scented oils for their skin and hair from noblemen to lowly serfs.

Oil was incredibly abundant and quite cheap. The TYPE of oil however does matter in this.

Sheep oil (rendered from their fat) was very common and used for all manner of things from making soap to treating skin conditions. Rendered sheep fat has a very light texture and is a decent carrier oil without too pungent of a scent. Unfortunately it did rancid fast so it was common to add lots of herbs to it to help preserve it, especially rosemary, borage, marjoram and citron peels. This is how it became a common “perfume” oil used to scent hair skin or clothes. Nearly anyone would have had this handy somewhere.

Rendered pork oil was very common too and was most popular as a cooking oil.

Vegetable oil made from walnuts, almonds and flax seed was by far the most common non-animal oil. Nearly anybody had a bottle of almond or walnut oil in their pantry or on their person. These were by far the most popular oils used for conditioning steel, with walnut oil preferred because its tannins also gave armor a patina that kept it better. Only the absurdly wealthy ever wore polished armor. Everyone else blackened it to make it keep better. Walnut oil is good at doing that.

Walnut oil also works well as a lubricant. People back then DID use sexual lube by the way. No prostitute would be caught dead without it. Their favorite types were walnut and olive oil, though almond oil might be used in a pinch. They also used watered down acacia gum in southern Europe, which was sticky but slick and easy to re-wet.

Olive oil though was THE oil in Europe. It was expensive, comparatively, but obviously people considered it well worth its cost because it was found everywhere south of the Seine and frequently seen in even minor lordly houses or knights quarters much farther north. Considering quite a few people of the time thought it had aphrodisiac qualities when applied as certain way (likely because raw olive oil has a warming effect) I think you can imagine the most common reason it was sought after by men in particular.

Olive oil was also used in medicine and just about any church had some floating around somewhere because it’s conveniently good at treating minor infections and is wonderful for toothaches.

So the mysterious vial of oil isn’t at all mysterious and even if he were carrying it around with the sole intention of using it for sex, that wouldn’t actually be that strange either.

[eraserheadadult]

i think part of the reason lost media videos are so fun is that it more ethically scratches the same itch as true crime. a bunch of people online being amateur sleuths and going down rabbit holes is a lot easier to enjoy when theyre looking for a cereal commercial from 1991 instead of liike bothering the families of murder victims

[crotchapple]

Smart

[nolookfirmino-deactivated201904]

do men have resting bitch faces as well or do they not have negative characteristics ascribed to them for putting on a neutral rather than a deliriously happy facial expression

[12yearsaking-deactivated2015081]

Yes, Black men in majority white spaces do. If I don’t smile every single second of the day my coworkers become in intimidated and start asking me what’s wrong, telling me to smile, make jokes about how I’m trying to be a thug/act hard, why am I angry, etc. And it’s not just white men at my job God FORBID I my large Black ass makes a white girl feel threaten because I’m sitting down with a neutral expression.

I’m not trying to take this post away from women and make it about Black men but I want to point out that wether it’s patriarchy or white supremacy; those who feel as if they have power over you HATE to see you not smile. They are so used to people like you smiling to gain their approval that when you don’t there’s a cognitive dissonance that makes them extremely uncomfortable.

That’s why “angry Black women” is a thing. They have to put on a smile for everyone (yes even feminist white women) or we all get uncomfortable.

[naamahdarling]

This is such an amazing response.

[archaardvarkarchive]

the tone policing includes unspoken tone T_T

[televisionenjoyer]

ok repeat after me: gluten free is not "diet culture". gluten free is not meant to "take the joy away from carbs". gluten free is a diet that allows people with an autoimmune disease to eat without inflicting further damage upon their bodies. we don't have to be condemned to eat the most disgusting and basic shit ever because we have celiacs. we deserve options too.

[archaardvarkarchive]

Wait, when people say this, aren’t they referring to NON celiac people nor with sensitivities who do gluten-free? Like, some people somehow think this is a “healthy” option even though it does zilch to help them. That’s the diet culture part

[blastovkatamarinecromancy]

well, just let them have their diet culture as long as it makes gluten-free food more readily available. It's like how I ain't vegan, but having certifiably food that is free of meat byproducts like gelatin makes it safer for me to find halal foods.

[archaardvarkarchive]

veganism is not a diet.

[xxpostsfromthevoidxx]

Veganism is a CULT.

[archaardvarkarchive]

Interesting personal opinion. Quite an extreme one. Care to back it up with anything substantive at all?

Tags “tw disease” as if animal products aren’t the leading cause of preventable disease. lol

We’ve entered Backwards World today …