What is Tumblr?
Tumblr is the opiate of the very, very few.

roma★
hello vonnie
occasionally subtle
Cosimo Galluzzi
NASA
One Nice Bug Per Day
taylor price
Three Goblin Art
d e v o n
Game of Thrones Daily
noise dept.

★
Keni

Discoholic 🪩

PR's Tumblrdome
Show & Tell

Andulka

#extradirty

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Misplaced Lens Cap

seen from Vietnam

seen from Malaysia

seen from Malaysia
seen from Italy
seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
seen from United Arab Emirates

seen from Germany

seen from Vietnam

seen from Poland

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Türkiye
seen from United Kingdom

seen from Türkiye
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
@boytranscending
What is Tumblr?
Tumblr is the opiate of the very, very few.
This is so obviously correct I can’t even think what the other answer would be.
anyway the thing about Ratthi and Gurathin is that I could get behind them as a Thing but literally the only version that works for me is Gurathin being So Fucking Mad that he could bite through METAL because it's sooooo stupid that he did the Most Basic Thing imaginable and got a stupid lil crush on the Hot Nice Guy from work that everybody wants to fuck. oooooh wow Gurathin that guy is hot and nice and now you want to touch his junk about it??? groundbreaking. inspiring. idiot. obviously he'll be taking this to his grave. and meanwhile Ratthi's acting like the girl from a horse girl movie. going pspsps with lil sugar cubes. trying to lure Gurathin to his polycule board game night.
Ratthi isn't even doing it with Intent he just thinks Gurathin needs more enrichment but every time he's like oh hey wanna get a smoothie after work :) no pressure :) only if you're up for that haha :) Gurathin's going oh fuuuuuck he's trying to seduce me 🤬
and he knows the rules!!! he knows all of the weird rules and how to set up the board and what the weird little tokens are for and he's keeping track of points because he has to have a Task to alleviate the inherent mortification of being invited to your hot nice coworker's polycule board game night so now he's just. Gamemaster Gurathin. everyone loves him, invite him back!!! Ratthi thinks he's just discovered a previously untapped passion for game night that no one has ever figured out but Gurathin is in HELL. fighting for his life trying to keep track of the points in Sci-Fi!Wingspan and update his spreadsheet where he's trying to figure out how all of these people are involved with each other. Murderbot keeps hacking in to make annotations because its desire to watch Gurathin suffer slightly outweighs its distaste for romantic and sexual relations.
Murderbot isn't adding anything incorrect for the record it's just stressing Gurathin out with extra info. sliding in with shit like "you forgot to note that Variables Three and Seven have recently become romantic partners" and Gurathin's like "bullshit, they're both dating Variable Four but they're not involved with each other" and Murderbot goes "incorrect. they went on their first date this weekend. Ratthi is very excited for them and told me about it this morning. it was agony." and then Gurathin throws up
my lord. the two statues you commissioned are finally complete. yeah, the double-order with the vast and trunkless legs of stone and the shattered visage. i like to think we captured the sneer of cold command pretty well. it's a really thought-provoking piece my lord. very deconstructionist. i'm sure that even a traveller a thousand years from now could take one look at it and instantly recognise it must have come from an artistically enlightened culture
It is implied through gameplay mechanics that the two kingdoms at war in chess both formally permit regnal polygamy, allowing the King to take at least nine wives of equal status, and that marriage can be bestowed as a military honour, but curiously that honour - in stark contrast to the conventional attitudes of the aristocracy - can only be bestowed upon soldiers of the unlanded class, leaving great questions to be asked of the material interests and stability of these kingdoms' aristocracies
Unless, of course, it is gameplay abstraction that we see soldiers as individuals and we are in fact commanding representations of whole units, in which case the King already has up to nine wives but only one is in command of her own company at the onset of battle, and unlanded regiments are largely self-directed (which would explain their limited effective range, lacking proper leadership coordinated with the objectives of the ruling class) with further members of the aristocracy taking charge of those which excel in the field, presumably in large part so they can take credit for the soldiers' successes and advance their own social and political standing as is often the way of things
Several people in the notes by now have brought up the mobility of the castles, and there is simply no explanation for that I can think of beyond the drift between original and translated forms of the game. The original pieces occupying that role were heavy war chariots, with some later replacing them with war elephants carrying an archers' tower, and when it spread to Europe (a continent notably lacking in elephants) the elephant part began to be omitted and the tower reshaped into a European-style fortification. There is no gameplay justification for its retaining the war elephant's moveset, it is merely a cumulative translation issue.
STOP CALLING IT A SIEGE TOWER!!!!!
It is very obviously not a fucking siege tower, like 1) in the majority of cases their designs are round and crenellated in the style of western European post-Norman fortifications, which is not remotely what a siege tower looks like, 2) why the fuck would a siege tower be in a pitched battle such as that depicted by the game, what the fuck do you think they're besieging, and 3) do you think a fucking siege tower can cross a battlefield at speed???
Like please think about what you're saying, the role and construction of a siege tower, for one fucking second, instead of leaping to the first piece of medieval military engineering you can think of that's related to the concept of towers. A siege tower unit is not going to be in the middle of a battlefield actively hunting down mounted cavalry and providing a rearguard screen to the frontline infantry, is it, like come on that is ridiculous and if you think that's a remotely reasonable thing to say you clearly have no fucking clue what a siege tower is actually for; furthermore, if you're in a pitched battle where the king himself is on the field like why are you even gonna bother besieging anywhere nearby, you have an opportunity to end this war here and now (as demonstrated by the rules of the game!!) so why on earth would you bring your expensive, cumbersome siege equipment along instead of leaving it back at camp, if the king retreats (and you can't take him in the rout) then sure then you go and grab your siege equipment but y'know it would just exhaust your troops and put it in harm's way for no reason to drag it into a battle where no siege is taking place.
The lesson of avatar was never “killing bad people makes you just as bad as them” it was “you cannot be letting fascists dictate what counts as a win or loss” guys like come on it’s been 20 years
Katara doesn’t forgive Yon Rha and hug him and dry him off and walk him home she leaves him scared and sniveling and crying in the mud but she leaves him alive because she realized in that moment that she was only doing this because she felt like she had to. She hates this man, therefore she should want to kill him, right? The narrative isn’t saying wow Katara killing a mass murdering fascist dickwad is just as bad as said dickwad killing an innocent wife and mother during a raid on her home, it’s saying wow isn’t it fucked up that this little girl has been forced to carry this deep seated anger in her for most of her life to the point where the only outlet she believes she has for it is killing a man in cold blood? And like… yeah! That is pretty fucked!
#katara realizing that the man who killed her mother #who has been the face of evil and the war for most of her life (prior to aang's bullshit) #is just a pathetic loser #and by extension that most soldiers who commit hideous crimes of imperialist violence are just Some Guy #god that's really something #like he's Not a monster he's Not uniquely evil he has NO particular grudge against her or kya #the most traumatic event of katara's life was just a day at work for him #and less than a decade later he's nothing. he's retired and miserable and PATHETIC and he's not worth her time #she's better than him in every way #brave and powerful and generous and about all PRINCIPLED in a way he could never be. she's exceptional #she doesn't need to kill him she's already beaten him in every way that matters #and killing him will not create any positive change in the world #katara doesn't show mercy for his sake she does it for hers #god I love you katara ( @batmanisagatewaydrug )
Yes, yes, yes!
“She already beat him in every way that mattered.” She just didn’t know it until she saw him again. She didn’t know he was no longer a threat to other young children and their mothers until she saw for herself that he’d been neutralized. She didn’t know how much she had grown until she stood next to him and realized she was the one looking down instead of up. She never could have known any of it without seeing him with her own eyes, and that’s why seeking him out was her only path to peace.
This episode and Katara’s choices are so misunderstood because people hear Aang’s arguments about forgiveness and peacemaking and forget that’s not what this story is about. This has always been a story about a boy who runs away from hard things.
The context that frames this episode is the final lead-up to a confrontation Aang doesn’t want to have. He’s giving Katara the advice (and permission) he wishes someone would give him. He doesn’t want to face the Fire Lord; he wants to do what he’s always done: dance around the problem then bail. But he can’t. Zuko had to stand up to his abuser and speak his truth, and he will yet have to face and beg forgiveness from the father figure he rejected. Katara has to face the demons from her past. Toph had to reconnect with her parents (via letter while maintaining her boundaries, but she’s not hiding or pretending the Gaang kidnapped her anymore). Sokka had to face his inadequacies. Aang doesn’t get to change the subject and run away anymore.
Forgiveness vs. revenge is a false dichotomy here. Neither was the solution. Neither was the point. The whole argument was Aang’s last-ditch effort to give himself an out. A red herring. A non sequitor. And Katara calls bullshit. Just like Zuko does with the final line of the episode: “What are you going to do when you face my father?” Because unlike Yon Rha, Ozai is a known, very active threat; and Zuko understands from sad experience that Ozai will only view an olive branch as a sign of weakness and an excuse to escalate his violence. “I forgive you on the world’s behalf,” was never a valid option. And couching it as “Air Bending pacifist philosophy” was never going to make Aang “the bigger, better person.” (If you are the only other armed person in the building during a mass shooting, you don’t get to forgive the shooter on behalf of his current and future victims then pat yourself on the back for being virtuous. That’s not enlightenment; it’s just cowardice wrapped in a fuzzy blanket of self-delusion.)
But back to Katara, who has spent her entire life living in the shadow of her mother’s murderer. Until Katara saw Yon Rha as he truly was, she could not see herself clearly. Katara weighing herself against the monster that haunts her nightmares and finding him outmatched and outclassed, understanding that she is no longer the little girl who needed rescue, knowing that she is bigger, stronger, more powerful, and scarier than any demon she could face… That’s what she needed.
She was never going to get that by listening to Aang and avoiding the confrontation. If she had taken Aang’s bad advice (and it was bad advice, no matter how moral and peaceful it sounded), she would have continued being that scared little girl forever. No matter how skilled or powerful she became, that shadow would always loom larger.
There’s a lesson here for everyone about facing the conflicts we fear. Maybe it’s not a lifelong grudge. Maybe it’s just an awkward conversation that needs to be had. Or an overwhelming task we’re putting off. Or an apology we need to give. Maybe the solution isn’t getting back at the other person or getting yours or serving justice. Sometimes you may have to be the one who rights a wrong, but sometimes it’s enough to face the discomfort, shine light on the boogeymen, and walk away with a clearer perception of yourself and your own strength.
a little funny that the common star wars practice of taking aesthetic elements from foreign cultures as to appear "alien" to american audiences so throughly wrecked jedi discourse on here and made it so u can't critique the jedi without being told they're buddhists/jewish/muslim/sikh/asexual, when the jedi in the actual text have far more in common with george lucas' methodism and his later struggle to commit to both a marriage and a demanding career.
the fascist allegory in star wars has always drawn from american imperialism, as do all the politics in the prequels, and the jedi's later status as persecuted and hunted down do not override their willing service as army of the republic, but a few blunt aesthetic choices have made it so many are genuinely convinced that doing apologetics for a fictional institution is both progressive and a duty that includes disavowing the actual protagonist of the whole saga, mr star wars, as #problematic. the prequels politics were muddy enough b4 u all somehow brought rampant traditionalism in . and i cannot stress this enough: the jedi aren't real
You wake up, it's 2015 again, Tumblr heyday, your friends are unbanned, the posts, the bits... the block is hot but the dash is hotter, one wrong move will get you deactivated...
who you tappin and who you cappin?
>look north
You see several people arguing passionately about something. You can't make out any words, but one of them is wearing a Steven Universe shirt.
>look east
You see untagged porn.
>look south
You see a featureless gray wall immediately in front of you.
>look west
You see a featureless gray corridor extending off an unknown distance into the darkness.
>move west
You venture forth into the hallway. As you take your first step, your foot bumps into something solid.
>look down
You see a knife on the ground. Though its blade is pitted and dulled by time, it still gleams in what little light remains here.
>take knife
You pick the knife up and put it in your pocket. Its heft feels good in your hands.
Gained 1x KNIFE.
Your stomach begins to rumble...
>check inventory
You are holding: 1x KNIFE, 1x STICK, 1x TINDER.
>use knife on stick
You sit down and whittle the stick to a point.
Lost 1x STICK, gained 1x SPEAR.
>make angsty post
You cup your hands to your mouth and yell out into the darkness. "Man, I'm such a waste of space, even getting drunk doesn't make me feel better any more, I should just die!"
>listen west
Through the overwhelming silence present in this place, your ears faintly begin to pick up the scrabbling of talons on stone.
>look west
Although its gray skin has evolved to blend in perfectly with the gray walls and oppressive darkness of these halls, you can just barely make out the form of a wild Anonymous approaching, drawn by your cries. Its sunglasses-covered eyes glint in the darkness. Although it has no mouth to move, it speaks constantly in a stream of consciousness as it patrols. As it draws closer, you can make out some of what it's saying: "you just want attention, if you actually cared you'd [chewing noises], drug addicts like you are worthless..."
>throw spear at anonymous
Your aim is true: the sharpened stick flies down the hallway and pierces directly through one of the Anon's reflective eye coverings. It shudders, twitches, and gurgles as its pitch-black blood pours out in gouts, never breaking eye contact with you or stopping its rambling until it just abruptly... ends.
>skin anonymous
Sorry, I don't know what you mean by "skin".
>use knife on anonymous
You bleed, skin, and field-dress the Anonymous corpse.
You gained 1x RAW ANONYMOUS MEAT and 1x RAW ANONYMOUS HIDE.
>cook raw anon meat
You can't do that without a fire.
>use tinder on spear
You can't use those items like that.
Your stomach rumbles again, louder this time...
>examine tinder
An app you used a lot in 2015. You were quite the manwhore back then.
>fuck
Sorry, I don't know what you mean by "fuck".
Good job with the sheep description, really upsetting
I'm just saying that if you met your first ever nonhuman mammal at six years old, it might be a bit confusing.
Yeah I immediately texted that excerpt to my dad, just to let that filter into his work day. Very upsetting.
I was thinking about that Tumblr post about the toddler who was just finding out that parrots can talk
#wait no sorry#I just can't get over the fact that you'd be able to meet your first mammal at 6#like 6 years and you don't at least interact with a DOG?#or a cat
They're on a spaceship
During WWII, children in London were evacuated to the countryside. For many of them, this meant their first encounter with livestock:
How London Boy Learned Where Milk Comes From
LONDON.—Ernest Brown, minister of health, read the following essay he received from a 10-year-old London East End boy who had been evacuated to the country: “The cow is a mammal. It has six sides, right and left and upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush. With this he sends flies away so they don’t fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so his mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, milk comes and there never is an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realized but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell and one can smell it far away. This is the reason for fresh air in the country.
“A man cow is called an ox. The cow does not eat much but what it eats it eats twice so that it gets enough. When it is hungry it moos and when it says nothing at all it is because its insides are full up with grass.”
This is one of my favourite bits of writing ever
Fuck yeah he is learning so much
Every single American is on welfare, they just find ways to pretend that it isn’t welfare. Do you think that your home mortgage interest deduction fell from the sky? Do you think God granted you a child tax credit
Speaking as a curious outsider, do M/M fans really write more than F/F fans or are M/M fans just more common than F/F fans so there's just more M/M fic by default since more people like M/M? I feel like with fanart it's fairly equal but there's a big gap with fanfiction and I wonder why that is.
--
Oh boy...
So, a lot of the discourse is about AO3 stats. That old AO3 census was pretty flawed, but the broad demographic patterns it showed match every other (also flawed) survey and anecdotal evidence about slash fandom spaces, BL fandom spaces, etc.
AO3 is mostly cis women with a hefty chunk of nonbinary people and some trans men. There's a scattering of other demographics, and when a site is as popular as AO3, that means that the total number of demographic X can still be pretty high even if the group makes up a tiny fraction of the whole. (So I don't want to hear any "My friend group is all cis men/trans women/whatever and..." style moaning.)
Lots of AO3 users are bisexual, but lots are asexual or straight. Other demographics share a smaller slice of the pie together.
Much of the discourse boils down to:
"AO3 is full of wlw. Why don't these wlw produce more f/f?"
The answer is that the question involves masses of assumptions that aren't actually valid.
If one looks at internet spaces broadly, one sees a mountain of het. In spaces with more cis men, the het reflects that. In spaces with more cis women, the het reflects that.
Looking broadly again, one also sees a lot of allegorical work. Think the literary equivalent of drag queens. Spaces with lots of cis men have plenty of art that focuses on female characters. It's partly because they're hot, but it's clearly also because some emotions are easier to express while playing with female barbie dolls than while playing with male ones. The distance is helpful. Some of this art is f/f, whether that's because two girls equals twice the hotness or because there's twice the distance or because guys are intrigued by the all-female social spaces they aren't privy to in real life.
AO3 is a space full of allegorical work for AFABs. There are some trans men doing very #ownvoices art, but a lot of AO3 is drag king stuff. It's people using cis male barbie dolls to express their insides rather than their outsides and the social role other people demand that they inhabit and relate to.
--
This doesn't sound like a direct answer, does it?
What I'm trying to say here is that:
There are not more m/m fans.
If we compare #ownvoices m/m with #ownvoices f/f, the amount might well be similar. It's always going to be relatively small in the grand scheme of things.
If we compare "Ooh, girls are neat and exotic" f/f with the kind of m/m that tends to be on AO3, both are popular and common. They are not both common on AO3 because AO3 was founded by a bunch of fujoshi and it has thus continued to attract fujoshi and adjacent fans more quickly than it attracts other demographics.
Wankers like to compare AO3 m/m to their desired and hypothetical #ownvoices f/f spaces, often with a heavy undertone of gold star cis lesbian #ownvoices f/f.
This is apples to oranges.
There is no reason these two numbers should ever resemble each other.
--
The reason fan art looks more even is that AO3 cannot directly host images and thus only a few fan artists bother with it. Fan art spaces are big social media or older art sites that have a wider and/or different user base.
With different demographics in the user base, there will naturally be different posting patterns.
--
The fanfic gap is partly because AO3 makes it easy to get shipping stats, while other fanfic spaces make it quite difficult.
The gap is also because fanfic, as a hobby, attracts fewer cis men than cis women. Everybody likes making shit based on preexisting shit they enjoyed. Not everybody calls it fanfic and puts it on a fanfic archive.
The reasons are complex, but the best explanation I've seen—and made—boils down to gendered socialization around unpaid labor. Cis dudes will code open source projects because that gets specific kinds of clout they are taught to value. They don't usually write free fiction for the purpose of deepening social bonds with their community.
As writing becomes more commercial or produces other kinds of rewards, it attracts more cis men. Cis dudes write spec scripts all the time. I've seen men talking shit about fanfic while writing a blog post speculating about what a sequel would look like in such detail that it's essentially one of those not!fic tumblr posts. Cis dudes write epic quantities of webnovel content, plenty of it focusing on female characters and plenty of it including f/f.
Fan art has always been socially different from fanfic. In some spaces, fan art is respected and seen as a stepping stone to pro work or at least to accolades of a type fic doesn't get. It aligns more with what cis men are socialized to value.
There totally are fanfic spaces full of cis men. I'm told that Worm fandom on those forum sites I never go on has plenty of dudes writing f/f, exactly as one would expect.
--
Both the wanking and the self-aggrandizing navel gazing about m/m stats tend to come from people who spend too much time around AO3 circles and only around AO3 circles.
The lack of a broader view of fan activities and spaces and original-ish art spaces leads to the huge disparity between m/m and f/f and to many stupid conclusions about why it's there.
If you want more f/f, invite the cis men.
If you want more #ownvoices, no matter which kind of own voices, curate your space but expect it to be smaller.
If AO3 doesn't satisfy, explore the many, many other places out there. If it does, stay put.
There are so many options one can pursue to look for fun and pleasure. I wish people were a little savvier about them instead of feeling stuck in place and feeling sad about what they can see from right here.
--
Not that you sound sad. You don't.
But to talk about the "gap", you have to look at the faulty assumptions that lead to AO3 shipping stats being taken as a valid stand-in for all of fandom.
Here is what fan art on AO3 looks like:
Sure, the fanart tag isn't exactly the same as the overall stats on AO3. Maybe we could say something about the larger share of gen. But one thing I think we can say for sure is that AO3 fan art reflects AO3 and not patterns of fan art everywhere.
This type of context is vital if we want to have a realistic conversation about this kind of topic.
Im taking a class in ethics at evil university. Today the professor is asking us if it would be ok to divert a trolley to kill 5 people even if doing so would mean you saved 1 and justify our choice.
i'm not gonna do your homework for you, anon. if you can't write your own essays, how are you gonna be ready for when you need to make a speech to the hero about your evil schemes? are you going to ask fucking chatgpt to monologue for you?
if you want a hint, though, consider that nothing in the premise forbids you from finding the person whose life you 'saved' later
That's a cop-out. You can respond to any evil hypothetical with "and then I kill more people" to justify your choice. You can kill someone after not pulling the lever, too.
and, to be clear, you are of the opinion that 'you can justify whichever choice you want' is an undesirable property in a theory of evil ethics?
"Oh, its ok for me to help people If I might kill more in the future." Oh what, so I guess it'd be ok to give a bunch of people clean water just because you later develop chemical weapons? You're line of thinking is morally solvent.
and thus you see the problem with the absolutist, black-and-white thinking of villains these days. "waaa waaa you can't do nice things for people that makes you as good as the heroes"
have you even considered how much easier it is to get people to trust your chemicals are safe if your reputation is "that nice lady who gave us clean water"? no, of course not, you just get into pissing contests on social media about who is more corrupt, entirely divorced from any real-world practice of evil. y'all think it's more important to do nothing right than something wrong.
Was talking about the devastating scenario design that is convincing Fenris back onto your side to stop the annulment in the Gallows, and how the only explicit concession he makes in the game that his whole argument for the imprisonment of mages is morally and ethically vapid is locked beyond a hyper-specific scenario that happens when he is at low rivalry on the pro-mage route. But in looking it up this time I was struck by the line he says right before you have the chance to convince him onto your side:
"You realize this is a cause you can't hope to win."
Just the utter cynicism and hopelessness that's really at the centre of Fenris as a character. It goes beyond the feasibility of Hawke winning the fight within the Gallows this one day. You can't think you can save anyone. You can't actually expect this will help anyone, instead of just unleashing a bunch of desperate and potentially violent prisoners out on the civilian landscape, who the Chantry will then send more soldiers en force to recapture. You can't actually think this will stop exploitation and brutality. You can't actually hope to escape your oppression. It's already branded itself onto your skin and stained your soul, and it will follow you wherever you go. He knows. He's tried to escape it, and on some level he has failed.
And you don't convince him back to your side by saying, 'no, that's not true! we can win this!' You convince him back by saying either, 'yeah, but that doesn't mean you have to go at it alone. you can have a friend at your side for it' or 'yeah, but i thought this struggle in of itself was important to you. i thought freedom from slavery meant something to you.' And those are the things that get through to him.
he would not say that.
I was there when he said it actually
"oh yeah even if your opponent has an unexpected advantage that completely turns the tides of battle (you thought they were unarmed when they aren't) you shook totally just keep going with your current plan, otherwise you're a coward"
he would not say that.
you're just afraid of a big thick girlcock
Whether Sun Tzu would be into girldick is completely orthogonal to whether he would give bullshit bravado advice that will get you killed. He's the "logistics win wars" guy.
His ladycock advice would be more like "The wise general chooses an adversary who uses familiar techniques."
there is a lot we will forgive for girlcock on this site but misconstruing Sun Tzu is NOT on that list
what do you think about the harpers gooning article
Idiotic. Really did not appreciate the authors bewildered sneering tone. The references to gooning as a political movement a la MAGA and the "gen z tea party" were frankly bizarre, and they betrayed some critical misunderstanding of the subject.
"healthy gooning, as any gooner can tell you, is an oxymoron" these are the words of someone who cannot see past normativity. This is, crucially, said in response to a popular gooner talking about a healthy relationship to said kink. The author repeatedly doesn't believe that people can have a non-harmful relationship to a their wacky meme hypno kink.
The central fantasy of gooning, and why I think it routinely evades "normie" understanding, is that it is a meta-kink. It is a fetishized, WWE fantasy version of the idea of being addicted to pornography. They literally get off on telling journalists they are addicted to porn.
The vast majority of people are perfectly capable of shutting down their goon cave and going to work like normal people. Naturally there are gooners with a maladaptive relationship to gooning, but any sufficiently popular hobby will contain those with a socially maladaptive relationship to said hobby. Go to literally any large video game subreddit and you will find people with a deeply maladaptive relationship to that game.
The other massive obvious, neon-sign point that the author glances off but ultimately does not investigate, is that Gooning is a fetishization of the commerical. Nobody goons to normal looking people, you goon to the idea of people as a product. The ultra-tailored, edited, artificial persona that some sex workers inhabit creates a heightened, exalted reality, which the gooner finds appealing. These are the oiled up bodybuilders of gay porn and advertisement, and the airbrushed slimthick baddies of both porn and commercials.
One of my friends also enjoys an asexual safari into the wonderful niche kink communities of the internet. He told me once that he found a gooner who just cut right to the heart of the matter, and only posted videos of himself fucking a McChicken sandwich, an idealized, constantly advertised commercial product. That is the core eros of Gooning. It is a libidinal response to a socially atomized world dominated by advertising.
This is also why gooners are obsessed with Egirls. Another thing the author touches on but does not investigate. The bicycle was both a moral panic and sex symbol. They allowed chaste young women a new degree of autonomy. Now they can travel further away to hold jobs, and by god they might even meet men unsupervised. How erotic! The Egirl is a similar figure to the female bicycle owner. It is a new class of young women with a degree of social, financial, and sexual mobility. Crucially, many of these young women are twitch streamers. They inhabit a character, and the performance of that character is a product. Many people loudly condemn these women as socially dangerous, and as we all know from reading Georges Battaille, anything forbidden becomes erotic.
Many gooners engage in the kink because of broader social anxieties. Sex is messy and effortful and people are busy. How many women do you know who would like to date, but just don't the time or energy to navigate the anxieties of their partner turning out to be some loser chud? How many trans women are afraid to go outside? History is happening outside! And history is a dangerous place! I can understand why people might want to turn their brain off and crank it into a meditative state for 45 minutes.
The author admits that they "just cant understand how this would be pleasureable, let alone addictive" and thats really the whole article isn't it? They don't understand this shit and yet they wrote an article. I feel like if you're gonna write an article you have a duty to understand the thing you're writing about. But no we are left with "I don't understand this shit but I think it's a dangerous signifier of social decay."
Do you have opinions on thee Gaylors. Like why specifically do you think they're like that?
The increasing atomization of late capitalism shrinks the world of expression. Identity is stored less on your relationships with other people, and more in what you consume and how you consume it. Lliking Taylor swift" becomes a mooring rope of self conception. So when you discover that you are for instance, bisexual, you may attach that now rope of self conception to your enjoyment of Taylor swift.
Also, people within a fandom are rewarded for exegesis. You talk about some new hidden meaning to a taylor song, other fans say hey good job! Fractally niche discussion of a work is the essence of fandom after all.
Taylor is immensely popular, and there is ample reason for fans to reinforce that popularity, to prove that it is deserved, and that fans are correct for enjoying her work. This is mostly reasonable, taylor is a very talented pop singer-songwriter. But in the most intense circles of fandom, there is pressure to assign ever greater social importance a popular work. You are reading this on Tumblr, so I assume you are familiar with the phenomena.
All of this combines to form a milieu in which Taylor's work having some secret meaning, uniquely relevant to the social issues of the day, is tantamout, and the stakes are your own self-conception and sense of identity. The ghost of Taylor Swift becomes the canvas upon which 17 year old bisexual woman map their internal struggles with identity.
I think it's easy to make fun of this sort of thing, but it ultimately stems from isolation. I went through a private little gaylor phase of my own but for Megaman ZX for the Nintendo DS and being nonbinary. If you're going through a drama of self discovery, and you spend all your time on reddit because you can't afford to go outside very much, weird shit is gonna happen.
Apparently Taylor is also known for a love of Easter eggs and little secret games in her album paraphanalia, which only further primes her fans for esoteric modes of analysis.