"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
we're not kids anymore.
taylor price

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Jules of Nature
ojovivo
Keni

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

JBB: An Artblog!
RMH

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Not today Justin
styofa doing anything
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Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Sade Olutola
wallacepolsom
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

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@ilichilink
Zzeldy
HES BACK. RUN
wish everyone could perceive the Vague Concepts in my head because i just know you would looove my Vague Concepts. you would think im so smart if you saw the misty clouds of Vague Concepts floating around in my head. #MyVagueConcepts
Intersex fairies with wings like this
i’m tired of babying grown women who let beauty standards control their entire life. stand up, grow up & get over yourself. enough. you aren’t perpetual victims. exercise the autonomy you refuse to acknowledge you have. you can choose to stop this circus anytime. grown ass fucking women acting like helpless victims to the patriarchy and then in the next breath going “COME WITH ME TO MY BOTOX APPOINTMENT😃” you are traitors and we will never make it out of the patriarchy if personal responsibility can’t be taken
like god fucking damn women for centuries fought to have financial and social independence, and we largely achieved that in most countries, just for modern women who have no idea what patriarchy used to do to us to turn around and go “i’m not the problem, blame men for saying i look prettier after a nose job” you have everything your foremothers hoped and dreamed for, all that autonomy won through blood and sweat, and you waste it offering your body up to the patriarchy because “social pressure” get the fuck over yourself and stop acting like you have no choice. absolutely pathetic
and whenever people criticize women who get cosmetic procedures done and who enslave themselves to beauty standards it’s always met with “it’s not their fault, it’s the patriarchy” and i find that to be such a circular, never ending blame game. yes fucking obviously it’s the true fault of the patriarchy but you can’t hold a system of social hierarchy accountable because the decisions individuals make constitute said system. and turning it into a chicken or the egg debate does nothing besides shift blame to something that cannot be reckoned with or addressed. stop blaming the patriarchy at large for the individual decisions of fully autonomous women
this just feels like choice feminism but on the other extreme no?
i disagree that this is choice feminism because as i mentioned individual choices constitute a system & letting half the population off the hook completely for participating is just silly. but i do agree with your tags that this is a very western take because i am american and truthfully this was an angry rant i made after watching a handful of tiktoks by white american women, and i didn’t proofread. i honestly didnt think this would get notes & i know i could’ve worded a lot of things better here lol
Poll about reasons why fandom is "quieter" these days: https://www.tumblr.com/memorizingthedigitsofpi/819055973575589888/there-are-lots-of-reasons-why-fandom-is-quieter
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I'm amused that there's no option for "rose-tinted glasses" or even "other".
I feel like I'm forever posting about Baby's Second Fandom problems. Maybe it's my age or how long I've been in fandom, but it seems like I'm constantly tripping over toxic nostalgia, and this poll is yet one more example. The poll itself isn't toxic in the sense of being rude to other fans or anything like that, but it betrays a mindset that is generally not great for the people who hold it.
Fandom isn't quieter now.
LJ went the way of the dodo, and a cohort of "LJ was the golden age of fandom" people continue to cry about this. Since I'm the right age and was on LJ, I know tons of such people, and they show up on every single one of my "LJ was not the peak of fandom" posts to reminisce about how it was totally the peak of fandom and everyone agrees. Ah, LJ! Those were the days!
Tumblr is now where LJ was a decade or more ago, and I'm seeing more and more tumblr era fans choosing to be sad old fogeys prematurely.
It's certainly true that 2026 tumblr doesn't feel identical to 2012 tumblr even taking out the personal element, but I've been pleasantly surprised at how much tumblr has hung on post porn ban, even bouncing back a little as twitter shit the bed multiple times.
But I look at those poll options and just sigh. Discords are hard to know anything about from the outside, and there are negative aspects to that format, sure... But mailing lists were siloed. Invite-only LJ coms were siloed, and there were far more of these than people remember. Some of the old fic archives did not have open account creation.
It goes much deeper than places that one couldn't freely make an account on too. Even at the height of people thinking fandom=LJ or tumblr=fandom, it wasn't so. There are whole other parallel worlds that I never knew about at the time and only found out about a decade+ later when the quizilla tweens ended up on AO3 in college or whatever. Quizilla was huge. I could have been there. I just wasn't. I was on FFN at the beginning but left in the early 00s. Whole eras of FFN culture sprang up without me knowing about them. Even now, I see LJ slashers going "Wait? I thought everyone left FFN back in the day?" on a post that lays out just how much this isn't so.
Baby's Second Fandom problems can be a midlife crisis or they can be literally your second fandom.
Fandom wasn't that easy to find in the past. Even in an era where it's easier to hear of it, it's not always that easy to really get into it beyond reading a few fics on a site and doing zero interacting. People tend to enter fandom in meaningful way when they happen to like the hot flavor of the moment and when they're in a phase of life where they have the right mindset and level of free time for that.
It could be that they're in college and super excited about their favorite show. It could also be that they're terribly depressed, stuck in bed with a broken leg, and fic on the internet is the one bright point in their day. I'd say the positive version is more common overall because one needs energy, but the other one exists too.
I'm often into less popular things, but I found fandom properly by liking The X-Files just as it was majorly taking off. I learned to actually like and use tumblr in the thirty seconds during which I actually liked Sherlock. There simply wasn't anything here for me before that. Suddenly, everything was for me... even if Superwholock was extremely not.
One's first fandom or one's first fandom era or one's first platform teaches one how to be this type of fannish as a general response to media. I like canon in a particular way, so I want fic of it. I like canon like this, so I want meta of the fanworks fandom variety. etc.
Time passes.
One gets into some other media. Maybe it's also the flavor of the moment. Maybe one is lucky for a whole decade. But eventually, one falls in love with something else. This new Fandom (or ship or subset of a fandom) of One's Heart is not popular. There's next to no fic. Nobody writes analysis. Nobody cares. Or maybe it's just that nobody cares on this platform in the vocabulary and mode one expects.
The response is often that Fandom is Dying and/or that one's new fandom/ship/blorbo was robbed, robbed I say! But the reference point is a glowing memory of the peak of Sherlock fandom or one's experience shipping Harry/Draco. "Where are the ship-specific fic exchanges?" Except almost no ships ever get those, even fairly popular ships. "Where is the LJ com?" Except it's 2016 or 2026, and LJ coms aren't how we organize ourselves anymore.
Ye olde Media Fandom zine people did a round of this.
LJ fandom did a round of this.
Tumblr fandom is currently doing a round of this.
But just like with sharks, you have a choice: swim or die.
No one is denying that enshittification has hit many online hangouts, but there are always ways around that. Some of the AO3 forks have quite social and active communities—or so I've been told by the people making them the centerpiece of their current fannish activity. There are ways to find discords just like there were ways to find mailing lists back in the day. You can even start your own discord. You can't be excluded from the party if you're the one hosting it. One could start a curation tumblr that reblogs the important content from an active fandom even now in 2026. Sure, it would be a lot of work, but running a fandom newsletter was also a lot of work in 2006.
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At the moment, I'm reading my way through a bunch of danmei webnovels plenty of other nerds read five or ten years ago. I'm still working my way through the sprawling tentacle monster that is DMBJ and its many adaptations. I'm finally getting around to the Thai BL dramas I didn't make time for until now.
Every time I post about these things, their many fans leave positive comments. Maybe I'm not hitting them at the moment they were most excited about that thing, but lots of people enjoy revisiting via someone else's keysmash-y liveblog. They can come up with at least some comments and ways to interact.
For that matter, I got a reblog on that Bad Girls vid from someone who liked it back in the day.
Other people eventually got around to Beyond Evil. I get an occasional n00b to Miami Vice finding my ancient posts.
In some ways, the most fun is when you yourself feel young and positive and full of energy (regardless of actual age) and you're into the latest hot thing while all of your friends also are. I had a brief stint in BTS fandom like this where all of my offline friends were in the same fandom for once.
That's the outlier. Even if you just chase BNF authors from juggernaut ship to juggernaut ship, your other friends may not. Some friends will peel off as we change platforms. This is just how things work.
Fandom isn't quiet. My old friends from X time and place are.
Fic feedback isn't dead. You're just not in any hot fandoms right now.
It's the same song and dance any time a cohort ages out of the honeymoon phase with fandom or out of their initial juggernaut ship where they were well fed and into a more typical fandom experience where they have to go make new friends or hunt around to see what everyone else is watching or where fans are chatting these days.
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The reason I'm forever rewriting my rants about this is that I think understanding the pattern makes it a lot easier to proactively look for fun or to choose to sit this round out or to decide to become that BNF who makes a small-but-live fandom happen.
Giving in to this It's Quiet Now mindset means being mired in toxic nostalgia, sounding like a grumpy and out-of-touch fogey even to other fans of your same era. They might tell you "Hey, the cool discord's over here!" if you sounded fun. You do not sound fun.
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For what it's worth, looking at all AO3 works in English posted this year, here are some active fandoms. If a person feels like everything is too quiet, surely at least one of these has some actual community somewhere and not just fanworks (and is also not morally objectionable/the wrong genre/a canon format you hate):
Original Work (60161)
Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling (42519)
Stranger Things (TV 2016) (33991)
Heated Rivalry (TV) (32720)
僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia (Anime & Manga) (27328)
Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid (17166)
Batman - All Media Types (16941)
呪術廻戦 | Jujutsu Kaisen (Anime & Manga) (16820)
The Pitt (TV) (16677)
原神 | Genshin Impact (Video Game) (16114)
Hazbin Hotel (Cartoon) (14427)
Marvel Cinematic Universe (12253)
Stray Kids (Band) (10812)
Formula 1 RPF (9594)
Naruto (Anime & Manga) (9453)
One Piece (Anime & Manga) (9087)
Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse) (8819)
Star Wars - All Media Types (8543)
방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS (8475)
文豪ストレイドッグス | Bungou Stray Dogs (8431)
9-1-1 (TV) (8209)
The Amazing Digital Circus (Web Series) (7783)
Supernatural (TV 2005) (7317)
崩坏:星穹铁道 | Honkai: Star Rail (Video Game) (7196)
Project Hail Mary (2026) (6868)
A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin (6803)
Cookie Run (Video Game) (6536)
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (TV) (6396)
Forsaken (Roblox) (6163)
Arcane: League of Legends (Cartoon 2021) (5771)
If you've never been into Asian media, maybe now's the time.
If you normally don't pay attention to RPF, maybe all of the many AUs in kpop fandom will appeal where more real life-ish RPF does not.
If you just fundamentally hate animation and can't go there, there are still plenty of live action canons getting fic.
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Feeling exhausted and alone happens. It's just not a reflection of Fandom™ being quiet now or tumblr being dead or any of the things people normally blame.
It's some combination of one's personal circumstances that need to be addressed outside of fandom and one's unwillingness to check out wherever the action is instead of crying that it isn't delivered to us for the exact thing we already like in the exact format and location we already know.
We all have the power to fix this for ourselves. It just may require hosting the party or being willing to try new things.
people need to stop advising each other on how to spot AI images/ videos based on increasingly unreliable minuscule details and start advising each other on how to find fucking sources. Not only because 9 times out of 10 your most reliable "tell" that an image or video is AI is finding the source account literally tells you in the bio, but because this is also applicable to spotting when somebody is Lying On The Internet. Something people increasingly seem to forget absolutely can and will happen without the use of AI.
"my life isn't a crime, I'm not one of those people -"
"you sure? new parameters for Those People just dropped. check again."
And if you truly cannot imagine this, if you're convinced that it will never happen to you, consider this one thing.
Would you want scammers to know the state of your loved one's dementia?
Oh. Shit.
[unblues a character's eyes]
Shh don't wake them up
anyway no matter how you feel abt that remake you should still play The Minish Cap
And Echoes of wisdom
☝️☝️☝️ and Echoes of Wisdom
The more I think about it the more I want the OOT remake to make outlandish big swings and be absolutely over ambitious in their creative and gameplay department so there are things in the remake that will justify its development and existence at all. I actually do want it to be a bit unrecognizable. There are a lot of people putting time and effort into this remake so I at the very least want it to be interesting, because OOT is still a very good game and the production of a remake feels a bit unnecessary otherwise, especially if you consider the 3Ds remaster and Ship of Harkinian. If I miss original OOT, I’ll play that OOT.
For this, I want something new, or at the very least interesting. Like the RE4 remake because it feels different than the original and I can still enjoy the original and remake in different ways. Something like that.
I don’t actually want a complete 1-to-1 loyal rehash of the original in just a glossier art style because then I’d just play the original lol. I don’t think you should want that either. I don’t want this game to feel too familiar. I want it to feel foreign. If they’re gonna use this dev time to reimagine OOT I want to see it reimagined in an interesting way at least. So I’m just gonna wait for what they’re gonna do with it.
If Link leaves his house and it’s an exact layout of N64 Kokiri Forest in higher fidelity I think that’ll be extremely boring and uninteresting
Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???
as a black gay person real like where y'all be finding this stuff pass the name
for real though, those DO NOT WATCH OR YOU'LL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN lists put out by conservative christian family groups is where I find all the stellar tv shows. Like, shit I didn't know half of those existed, thanks for finding them for me, gonna go watch 30 hours of gay tv now!
I think I know how this works.
For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.
So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?
Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?
Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.
Same as the journalists describing Black Rock City as all naked. Same as the right-wing religious culture warriors describing television as entirely mixed-race and gender non-conforming. Not because it's even vaguely true, we know that, but because they haven't gotten over their discomfort over the last one by the time the next one comes along. The anger, not the stimulus, is the part that's continuous, so their mind lies to them that it's "all" the thing they can't get over.
Similar effect for the presence/proportion of women in things, by the way: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/how-17-equals-496-the-amazing-multiplying-women.htm
I think part of getting better is complete ego death. Like you’re not above setting a timer for 5 minutes and focusing on a task. You’re not above doing a very simple 3 minute workout to start. You’re not above reading for 10 minutes a day when you first get out of your reading slump, even if you used to read for hours. You’re not above starting slow and then building up to where you want to be/where you once were. What you are above is total inertia. Doing something really is better than doing nothing. Radically accept where you are, radically accept your limits, and go from there. Don’t let your ego get in the way.
If you can't handle a queer person of color telling you when you do accidentally do something racist, you are not going to be able to protect your queer siblings