OMG, the catharsis. I feel like I’ve been walking around with a knife in my heart for two years and someone finally pulled it out
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
🪼
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Three Goblin Art
Not today Justin

tannertan36
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I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
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titsay
Game of Thrones Daily
RMH
occasionally subtle

if i look back, i am lost

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@elsie-dee
OMG, the catharsis. I feel like I’ve been walking around with a knife in my heart for two years and someone finally pulled it out
So I decided to introduce my kids (13&8) to the joy that is GO. They’ve been loving it. Until today, when my eldest decided to finish s2 by herself 😭 My phone pings at work: “Mummy, I’m dying”. Fuck. I’m gonna have to get a therapist, aren’t I?
I am pissed off. That is all.
❤️🧡💛💚💙💜
OMG I’ve just twigged that The Barber is Ligur!!!
Does any lovely friend have a sneaky link for the full film of Cabaret?
Is this a safe space to confess I really fancy Joe Lycett?
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?
#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)
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.
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?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
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.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Guys read this this is an amazing breakdown of it
ALWAYS reblog.
#just crowley things (aziraphale)
Love him.
‼️ if you live in the UK please vote in the general election (4th july) ‼️
when can I vote? 7am to 10pm
where can I vote? check your poll card or visit wheredoivote.co.uk (if you're a student registered at your home and term time addresses, you can vote at either but not both)
who should I vote for? visit getvoting.org for your candidates and tactical voting info
what do I need to take with me? just photo id is required (list of valid id here), your poll card is NOT required
what if I can't make it? you can register for an emergency proxy vote until 5pm
#vote vote vote
Yet another AO3 bot situation - please spread the word!
Hi, it's me again, the person who wrote that viral post about fanfiction plagiarism! Today I'm here to warn you about abuse perpetrated by bots who have stolen AO3 usernames.
There's currently an epidemic of bots going around leaving (apparently random) horrible, hateful comments on people's fics. This isn't the first time bots have invaded AO3, but the big problem with this wave is that they're using real AO3 usernames to do it.
I learned about this when another writer contacted me after receiving the following comment on their story:
Now, while that is my username, I DEFINITELY did not leave this comment (and anyone who would leave something like that on a fic should be slapped! What an awful thing to post). This fic is in a completely unrelated fandom that I have never participated in, nor has that author participated in any of my fandoms, so the probability of it being some intentional fandom drama thing to make me look bad is also low.
The writer whose fic the comment was left on enlisted the aid of some friends and tracked down other guest comments with unrelated usernames attached, which is pretty strong evidence that they are being left by bots at random.
The TL;DR: If you receive a cruel comment from a (Guest) with an actual AO3 username attached, it's most likely from a bot. Please do not lash out at or dogpile the AO3 user who owns that name, and who in all likelihood has no idea that their name has been hijacked for evil.
If finding this kind of comment on a fic, even left by a bot, is likely to upset you, I would recommend changing your comment settings so that only users who are logged in can leave comments. To do this, edit your story settings, and under "Privacy," select the radio button that says "Only registered users can comment," as shown below.
Please spread the word to other AO3 users! And if you see mean guest comments on other fics, maybe let the author know that it's probably from a bot and not a real person who thinks their writing is bad.
@french-ao3
Can you please reblog if your blog is a safe place for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, asexual, aromantic, pansexual, non binary, demisexual or any other kind of queer or questioning people? Because mine is.
so. so far in doctor who we’ve had:
space babies (babies in space) with a bogeyman made of bogeys that are saved by the power of farts
a musical episode where music comes to life and they’re a drag queen
one of the most intense doctor who episodes where the doctor stands on a landmine in a fifty-first century anglican war and everything around him keeps getting worse also the real enemy was capitalism
the doctor disappeared for twenty years and ruby assassinates the prime minister in an emotional study on fear of rejection or something
everybody dies because of systemic racism
alien bridgerton LARP where the doctor finally kisses men again
is there any other show with such a wide range of ridiculous settings that are all part of one connected, serious plot?
i fucking love doctor who lmao
It’s not rtd. it’s not rtd. rtd didn’t write rogue this was Kate Herron and Briony Redman’s first ever dr who story and they need all the praise in the world for it. I need at least somebody being vocally enthusiastic about having women writing dr who especially when I can tell you all adore this episode. Don’t let rtd get away with it don’t let him run away with the credit for a character and episode entirely conceived by two women
I’m meeting these two humans tomorrow and I am NOT NORMAL about it