Dragons, Truly The Best Thing Ever

D.grey man and ffxiv are a few of my favorite things but honestly I reblog what ever the hyperfixation of the month is

[boatgrave-deactivated20250901]

[mysteryteacup]

*Scrolls past*

*reluctant sigh*

*scrolls back up*

*rebogs*

[homunculus-argument]

Have you ever thought of something in your own worldbuilding that you didn't intentionally plan, but just connect the dots afterwards like "wait, that actually checks out"?

Like in the story of the Book I Am Not Working On, there's the fisher folk. They don't fish, actually, they live in diaspora and nobody really knows why they're called that, anymore. They're more known for their numerous, strict and often seemingly random and nonsensical ritual purity rules, and stereotypically having absurdly large numbers of children. The twist is, they don't actually have more children than any other peoples of the Empire, their purity rules just ensure that they maintain higher levels of physical hygiene in everything to do with childbirth and handling infants - and therefore have a lower infant mortality than other peoples.

The "why do these people have huge families" thing also had another side: Fetishisation. The fisher folk's purity rules also involve no sex outside of marriage, and there's a myth on top of the stereotype that the reason why they seem to have a massive amount of kids is because their husbands are so good in bed that their wives cannot turn them down even if they're 100% done having kids. And since fisher folk do not have sexual relations outside of marriage, no outsider has had enough fisher dick to verify this.

But while they are loyal to partners, they are also polygamous, both ways around. A perfectly normal fisher marriage arrangement may feature a man and his two wives, and his second wife's first husband. One household may cover seven married partners, and all their mutual children. It's considered taboo to pry into which kids are "really" whose, paternity is unknowable and unless you were close enough to the family to know which one of the wives gave birth, the biological mother is none of your business either. Every partner in the marriage is equally a parent to each child born within it.

And this is where my own "wait hold on" comes in. Besides the lower mortality, the illusion of fishers having insane amounts of kids may also partially come from the way their families are structured. If you've just met a group of five people you don't know anything about, and they all claim that they have nine children each, it wouldn't cross your mind that they might all be claiming the same nine children.

[prokopetz]

It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?

[veteratorianvillainy]

#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable (via sarahtonin42)

[persephoneshadow-deactivated202]

I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.

[prokopetz]

Totally.

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?

[observethewalrus]

YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!

[ainedubh]

Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.

[slitthelizardking]

I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.

[lierdumoa]

This doesn’t even account  for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well. 

But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.

[destinationtoast]

Yay, mathy arguments. :)

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het).  (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.

[olderthannetfic]

All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.

When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.

Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.

If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…

And then we will ship an OT3.

[kyraneko]

I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.

As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.

In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.

And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.

And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.

When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.

And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.

It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.

They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.

And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.

[whetstonefires]

Yeah I don’t really ship but I do write a fair amount of fanfic, and in most franchises working with the female characters is a chore.

You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.

The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.

That you don’t have to unearth and piece together like some sort of volunteer archeologist coming up with theories way more complex than the available artifacts truly support.

[headspace-hotel]

Guys read this this is an amazing breakdown of it

[totallysilvergirl]

ALWAYS reblog.

[byjove]

everyday I pray Zillow makes a comment section

[byjove]

it would be the most fun gay people have had since the golden age of disco

[guerrillatech]

[fatfemmefreaquency]

this is the guy who joked that he was “homeless” when he was “couch surfing” (sleeping in his billionaire friends’ guest suites and vacation houses)

…which he was doing because he had sold all of his personally owned real estate and moved the money off-shore into tax havens where it would be hard to trace because he didn’t want to keep paying alimony and child support

he was never pretending anything. he’s been transparent about who he is the whole time

[jemdraws]

He's just so babygirl I love him 😍

[louisinart-like-cuisinart]

Anyway if you see this you have to reblog and tag with a delight from ur day -- even the littlest thing counts

[shoresoftheshadowlands]

It was raining, so I took a nap with the sound of rain in the window, and had a little turkish delight as a treat

[dragoncatepicness]

I’m painting little minior Pokémon’s I made for a friend it has been a delightful night Ty for asking

[shoresoftheshadowlands]

Those are super cute!!!

[dragoncatepicness]

Thankyou!!

[louisinart-like-cuisinart]

Anyway if you see this you have to reblog and tag with a delight from ur day -- even the littlest thing counts

[shoresoftheshadowlands]

It was raining, so I took a nap with the sound of rain in the window, and had a little turkish delight as a treat

[dragoncatepicness]

I’m painting little minior Pokémon’s I made for a friend it has been a delightful night Ty for asking

[littlepinkbeast]

so a lot of fantasy settings do the thing where there’s one or two or maybe three human societies, all based on European cultures unless they’re bad guys, and then the non-human cultures are all based on non-European cultures, like orcs will be loosely based on Mongols and there’ll be an animal race with superficial Native American trappings.  And for many reasons this can get really annoying.

But what if we turn it around?  There’s an awful lot to explore if we stick a different angle on it.  I want to see a thing where the human kingdoms are based on, say, imperial Mali around the time of Mansa Musa and the Mughal empire, and then maybe the orcs are based on pre-Roman Gaul, and the marauding beastfolk raiders look like Polish winged hussars, and your secretive-and-xenophobic but wise-and-spiritual elves or whatever are based on all the most alien and unfamiliar bits of medieval Catholicism.

[roachpatrol]

can you even fucking imagine how insufferable a bunch of catholic elves would be

[joiedecombat]

[by-saiyuri]

gods with their fox husbands, aka crossover no one asked for because I can't stop thinking about tartali and hualian

[yeehawpim]

a comic about fix-it fanfics

[mozz14]

I love fix-it fanfics!

[riding-with-the-wild-hunt]

a whole bunch of gazan mutual aid projects and nonprofits. if the decision of which individual fundraiser to give to feels too daunting, or if you just want to help as many people as possible in one go, these are great initiatives to support.

care for gaza - focuses on providing food and essential supplies. donate here or here.

connecting humanity - securing internet access via donations of virtual sim cards (esims). if you can't afford a whole plan yourself, crips for esims is a communal pool that will use your donation to purchase and maintain esims

gaza soup kitchen - provides food, medical care, and classes for children. also has a gofundme

glia gaza medical support initiative - provides medical care through field clinics and tents at hospitals. donations can also be sent through their website.

ele elna elak - provides clean water, food, clothing, and shelter. they also have a gofundme

life for gaza - raising money for the gaza municipality to repair water and waste management infrastructure

taawon - partners with local civil organizations to provide food, water, medical care, shelter, and basic supplies

the sameer project - running various initiatives providing tents, medical care, and necessities. they have their own encampment project focused on sheltering families with children, sick and disabled members, or members in need of perinatal care

islamic relief worldwide's gaza emergency appeal - provides food, water, hygiene kits, medical supplies, and psychological support

baitulmaal - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, shelter, and medical supplies

gaza mutual aid fund - distributes food, hygiene products, water, and other essential supplies, including financial support. run by @/el-shab-hussein's amazing friend Mona. updates can be found on her instagram.

hygiene kits for gaza - provides hygiene supplies including menstrual products, wipes, and toothbrushes/toothpaste

anera - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, hygiene supplies, medicine, blankets and mattresses, and psychological care

palestine children's relief fund - provides supplies and support with a focus on children. also has an initiative for lebanon

dahnoun mutual aid - provides water, food, tents, baby supplies, financial support, and other necessities. updates can be found through their instagram

certainly this is not an exhaustive list, so please feel free to add on other projects or organizations that i didn't include. and as always, please take the time to donate if you can and share. it truly makes all the difference.

[moosopp-art]

My goobers omg

[catchymemes]

[infinitydivine]

I am not taking a risk

[darlingsstern]

Not risking it pals

[doralimasstuff]

U know what I want potato of luck

[shrewreadings]

Damn right I’m reblogging. See previous post re wrath of whatever from high atop the thing.

[classycookiexo]

[capricorn-born]

Oddly specific. Got a deposit for 6,837 today

[weaselle]

fuck it, i never ever do those “reblog for X, this one really works!” posts, but this one doesn’t have any of that BS, this is just straight up wishing us good things; and then the comment doesn’t even say any of that either. Zero claims on this post, all positive vibes

May you end this week feeling ever more certain of a future you’ll love

[vmohlere]

May you end this week feeling ever more certain of a future you’ll love

[nerdygaymormon]

Big shout out to the coalition of Catholic nuns who just told the US bishops to stop being transphobic.

“As members of the body of Christ, we cannot be whole without the full inclusion of transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive individuals,” the letter reads. It goes on to argue that “we will remain oppressors until we — as vowed Catholic religious — acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ people in our own congregations. We seek to cultivate a faith community where all, especially our transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive siblings, experience a deep belonging.”

The letter also states transgender people are “experiencing harm and erasure” in various ways, listing daily discrimination, a groundswell of state-level legislation aimed at LGBTQ rights and “harmful rhetoric from some Christian institutions and their leaders, including the Catholic Church.”

Read about it here

[writing-prompt-s]

An elf goes out on a ‘short errand’, forgetting that 30 years is a long time to have left his human wife and child at home.

[fullmetalbookshelf]

This is just Fullmetal Alchemist