A Mystery Awaits

Now I just need to figure out what it is. Fandom thoughts, shitposting, and cute animals, maybe? She/Her, Aro-Ace

[mysteryteacup]

Hi, I'm Teacup!

Here's the post where I keep my massive list of fanfic ideas and thoughts for:

Humans Are Space Orcs

SVSSS

Dimension 20: Cloudward, Ho!

Dimension 20: City Council of Darkness

Here's my AO3 if you want to read any of the fics I've written because of all those ideas.

[calvinandhobbescomic]

[justadreaminghufflepuff]

This comic is genuinely how I remember which is which.

[bauhin]

Polite guy has very bad no good decade before getting sucked dry in an unfun unsafe unsexy way by his sword defending something that won’t exist for much longer

I really like the colours and detailing in this piece and tried to slap in a lot of symbolism very curious how it will be interpreted

[ravioliet]

"why can't they just be friends?" not in the homophobic sense, but in the "in your need to center romance in everything you are missing the whole point of the media in question" sense

[lipstickhamlet]

some of my oddly specific shakespeare staging opinions:

modern stagings of hamlet should keep them as royalty unless the fact that they aren't is hugely relevant to that production.

benedick and beatrice should be in their early 30s at least and claudio and hero should be noticeably younger. beatrice being adamant against marriage and both her and benedick's reaction to each other makes more sense if they're older.

this one's controversial but i think paris should be in his late teens, not way older. i might make another post elaborating on this but paris' death frames him as another victim of the families' violence, with romeo mourning + identifying him as being in the same situation as himself. it's not that old man paris isn't a good interpretation; it's often the easiest way to show romeo and juliet's positions as children helpless under their parents, and makes very clear what demands are being made of juliet. but i feel that adding paris to the list of young people killed in the play as a byproduct of the adults' violence gives romeo's identification with him more weight. given that he clearly has much more control than romeo and juliet but is still identified as a victim of the violence, i think it makes the most sense if he's a bit older than r&j but still very much young.

modern stagings of julius caesar should keep all the knives as knives, but if there has to be a gun, make cassius shoot himself in the head while caesar and brutus still die by stabbing. i've posted about this but the short version is that's it's the best way to show cassius' death as cowardly in contrast to brutus and caesar, whose deaths still mirror each other.

give the fool in king lear an onstage reason for disappearing. i like the 2018 national theatre version that has edmund kill him, and the 2023 south korean production that had cordelia be the fool in disguise the whole time. there was one from 2014 where lear beat him to death in madness which i think would be very shocking, but to good effect. the subsequent lack of comedy in the play after his disappearance would feel more jarring if we actually see his death.

benvolio should appear again in the last scene of romeo and juliet, mourning the two along with everyone else.

[mysteryteacup]

Hard disagree on Paris: him being older is crucial to showing how terrible Juliet's dad is becoming due to the family feud.

For context: forcing fourteen year old girls to marry grown men was not as common as modern people believe back in Shakespeare's day. Shakespeare was specifically showing Juliet's dad going from a good dad (you don't have to marry Paris and certainly not till you're older) to a bad dad (you will marry Paris and you will do so younger than we all know - yes back then they knew that - is healthy). The point of Paris' age is to highlight that Juliet's safety becomes less valuable to her father than his rage against the enemy house.

Everyone watching the play in Shakespeare's day walked away knowing that Juliet would have died tragically young if she'd been forced to marry Paris, too, because Paris being older means Paris wasn't going to wait as long to get heirs. If Paris is not much older than Juliet, the implicit threat to her life and the reason it makes her father such a monster when his hatred consumes him is lost, because Paris' parents would also be making him wait to consumate the marriage.

[free-my-girl-tourney]

Fandom Misogyny Victim Tournament

Round Two, Bracket 3

Joan Watson (Elementary) vs. Alicent Hightower (House of the Dragon)

Joan Watson

Alicent Hightower

Remaining time: 6 days 9 hours

Propaganda below the cut:

Joan Watson:

In Joan's case the fans that attacked her were mostly from another fandom, BBC Sherlock, who were mad that a woman was playing Watson. Sometimes they were racist also since she is Asian.

Joan is the best adaptation of Watson out there and a great take on the character. Never forget when Sherlock smashed a plate in anger and then Joan smashed a plate and was like Well look at that that didn't solve anything. Or when she outsmarted Moriarty.

the level of hatred and disdain people had for the character Joan Watson and the show elementary (which also spilled over to the real life actress Lucy Liu) even though they never watched the show was absolutely wild. And literally the only reason was because they turned John Watson from "white dude with just enough characterization to be gay shipped with Sherlock" into a self-confident, genuinely complex Asian woman. People back then ate up EVERY Sherlock adaptation or AU… but somehow the only adaptation that was considered to be universally hated trash was the one where your fav is adapted as a woman 🤨

Alicent Hightower:

The fandom favorite is a man who grooms his teenage niece, murders his wife, slaughters innocents, and is an all around insufferable dick. Alicent is way more hated than he is despite the awful hand she is dealt.

Is Alicent the best? Hard to say. Yes, the child bride is a terrible mother. Yes, she nearly stabs her childhood best friend/first love. Yes, she plots against our main protagonist. Yes, she marries her two children to each other. Yes, she is self righteous and hypocritical. I support women's wrongs.

Alicent is a victim of CSA and general misogyny. She resents her children because she was a child bride forced to have them and thus her relationship with motherhood is complicated. She acts out because of all of these things and instead of trying to understand her or offer her any kind of sympathy, people instantly attack her and say she is a bad character. I know you said not to bring up misogyny towards real people but the hatred of the character gets so bad that sometimes people make the actress who plays her uncomfortable which just goes to show how undervalued and disliked Alicent is. Meanwhile the rapist pedophile men on the show are beloved for being hot and sexy.

Alicent is a complicated character that is so compelling to watch. She is one of the best acted characters on the show, full of complexities that are easy to understand if you offer her just a little bit of sympathy. Her complicated relationships with her children are also so interesting to explore, because she simultaneously loves and hates them and it makes her a mother character with real human flaws instead of being a pure innocent saint. Also she has insane closeted lesbian subtext. She's an absolute delight.

[misericordiia]

wound dressings and bandages are lingerie for the enlightened pervert

[free-and-to-none-accountable]

[animentality]

[sherlockboylove]

no no i actually think it’s super fun that you took that aro/ace character and bent them over backwards to make them gay!!!! we all know being gay is more #progressive than being aro/ace so i’m so glad you freed them from having a storyline unconnected from romance and shipping!!! you go diva!!!

[aromanticofficial]

official aromantic rage

[tcfactory]

I'm not going to share the post going around with this image, because it's entirely focused on fueling this stupid "witch hunt" hysteria and I don't want to directly interact with anybody who buys into that nonsense, but since this and similar comments are being touted around as proof that "the anti-ai witch hunt" exists and there are innocent authors getting caught in the splash zone

come a little bit closer and listen to me for just a moment:

This is a bot comment. It's SPAM.

What is more, it's spam that's in favor of genAI slop. Give me a few minutes of your time and I'll explain how, since I spent a couple of hours digging into it.

Comments like this have been spotted and quickly identified as malicious spam on AO3 as early as 2023. If you have spent any time in AO3 writing spaces, then you should have run into discussion and warnings about them, because they were everywhere for a while. They got a little sneakier about it (to a given degree of sneaky, because the comment itself is still likely AI-generated as well) but the scam goes something like this:

Somebody accuses your lovingly handcrafted fic of being genAI. They used to straight up name a generator, saying something like "your fic sounds exactly like something OrphanCrushingSlopMachine-9000 would generate". The point of that probably was to use your fic as indirect advertisement for "OrphanCrushingSlopMachine-9000". They counted on somebody gullible reading the comment and deciding to check the specified AI website/tool and hopefully trying it out, because if it really could generate text like your fic then they could generate their own fics and wouldn't that be great?

They don't do this as much anymore, because it gave away the game too quickly and made the spam easier to identify and report. Now the new script starts by making some vague claims about your fic being genAI, usually with a degree of emotional manipulation tacked on (see how the comment claims that the fic was recced and it suggests that the reader is disappointed because the plot seems interesting? They skim superficial information about the fic and the chatbot adds it to the comment to make it seem more legitimate) without naming any specific generators or sites. When you take the bait and try to deny the claim or even try to give proof, that's when they will show their hand.

They will either start insisting that no, your fic really sounds EXACTLY like something put out by OrphanCrushing-SlopMachine-9000 (thus circling back to the same indirect advertisement tactic from before)

Or they will say that no, sorry, they can't take your word on it and your proof isn't good enough, but there is this one specific AI checker they trust above anything else, you should plug your fic into that and it will prove without question that your fic isn't AI.

Do you see the trap there? The "AI checker" in question is either a paid subscription (turning this into a straightforward scam) or something that runs off the same model as one of the AI generators they are supposed to be checking for. The whole point is to try and scare you into putting your authentic text into an shady AI-powered site, thus providing the LLM with more training data.

Most of the time the comments come from guest accounts, but sometimes they are from newly registered or even hacked accounts, so if you see something like this, even coming from an account that has bookmarks or even posted fics of its own, it's very likely a bot. Don't engage, just report and delete.

Fanlore has a page keeping track of all known, wide-spread AO3 comment bots. If you see a suspicious comment and you aren't sure if it's legit or not, maybe check there first before taking it at face value.

I personally haven't seen comments like these in some time (I got about half a dozen or so last year) but that doesn't mean they aren't around anymore. There seems to be a newfound push to present people opposing genAI in fanfic spaces as unstable lunatics who are looking for any excuse to accuse upstanding innocent writers of using genAI so they can freely bully them and I've certainly seen a lot of references to comments like these to prop that claim up, so I might just have been lucky to avoid them.

All the same, these comments are NOT coming from people opposing genAI. They are not the sign of some nebulous witch hunt on AO3 authors. If you've been duped by this kind of comment before: I'm sorry, I hope this post will help you identify them in the future. If you have bought into the narrative being spun about the "anti-genAI witch hunt destroying and bullying innocent writers", please consider for just a moment:

Who benefits from it if you turn your eyes away and hold your tongue even at the most blatant examples of genAI slop for fear of being branded a bully? Who has a vested interest in destroying or discrediting anyone and anything that can prove that something was made, at least partially, with genAI?

There is a lot of talk about how you should always be kind, assume the best of others and simply look away, don't interact and move on if you suspect that a fic is fully or partially AI generated, but the people who benefit the most from genAI in any field, but especially artistic ones, are liars, cheats, plagiarists and scammers. Turning a blind eye to their presence as good as invites them in and I don't know about you, but I personally don't want those people in any of my spaces.

[cheesenames]

also idk if it's a generational gap or a more general shift but i feel like people used to frame it as "i'm in x fandom and my otp is [ship name]" and now i see a lot more "i'm in [ship name] fandom"

[cheesenames]

adding @grumfy 's expert insights

[cheesenames]

#theres something in there that when you have people just in “ship”fandom these ships get so isolated and myopic#that they lose all distinction...the ideal breeding ground for migratory slash fandom#like in most media the relationship to other characters and the settings is. important. to whatever the ship is#but if youre just like “im in here with the ship!” it doesnt really matter#plug in fanfic trope number 3 and youre good

interesting points from @ireallyamabear too

[bookgeekdom]

[robertreich]

Wondering why grocery prices are so high? One reason is that minimal competition means maximized price gouging. And now some of the biggest egg producers in the country are getting a mere slap on the wrist after years of ripping us off.

[captain-price-returns]

whoopsie

[zoesupreme]

Christopher Nolan almost allows colors into his mythical epic shot on 70mm IMAX film. thank god they stopped filming in time.

[butchboromir]

this is how some people on here talk about punk

[bluedancer9000]

isn't the whole point of punk nonconformity? anarchy, spreading compassion, individualism? being true to yourself? i'm pretty sure you would be less of a punk if you wore the stereotypical all black, ripped stuff. a shirt that has punk stuff printed on it or clothes that have faux rips that go on to be mass produced is way less punk than mending clothes yourself or getting secondhand.

[butchboromir]

actually the whole point of punk is high jump kicking peoples' dogs

[bluedancer9000]

Go to wiki and educate yourself

[butchboromir]

yeah it literally says it right here on wikipedia. punk is about high jump kicking peoples' dogs.