polinet68

he/they ||| Paul ||| gender and sex are not real. they only exist for fanfiction tropes.

[polinet68]

finally in the stable internet zone! have not experienced an outage in about a week.

pjsk #1 short graze note fan

certified walking contradiction / contains multitudes / allegedly somewhere between a moth and a mole

[chimaerakitten]

So we all talk about being in fandoms for things that are charmingly bad, and being able to acknowledge that they’re charmingly bad. But of course some people are in fandoms for things that are Actually Amazing. There are people out there who write fanfiction for The Best Science Fiction Novel Of The Twentieth Century. Or who draw fanart exclusively of The Best Movie of All Time. And there are even more people who are in fandoms for things that are Actually Pretty Good, which is not quite amazing but is closer to it than to Charmingly Bad.

And sometimes, you have a string of fandoms that are Actually Pretty Good. And the danger of this—the very great danger—is that when you have a string of Actually Pretty Good and even Actually Amazing obsessions, you start to believe that maybe you have taste. Perhaps you are now immune to the indignities of losing it over something mostly bad.

And then it is shattering to discover that no, bad things can still stick a fork in your brain. 😔

[chimaerakitten]

So I understand why the “transformative fandom gathers around things that are not good because there being a problem makes people desire to fix it” model is popular. I even agree that it’s accurate in many if not most cases. However it is not what this post is about. Plenty of people do transformative and creative fandom activities for things that are very, very good. Simplified models do not encompass everything.

And frankly, it’s starting to really get on my nerves when people read “I think this thing is good. I wouldn’t change a thing about it and frankly I don’t even think there should be more canon added to it, but I am still going to write thousands of words of fic, make a cosplay, and draw fanart” and then completely misunderstand and respond with “yes I agree—I like things that are good too. But I never feel the transformative/creative fandom instinct for them because they are too good.”

Some people do not feel it. Other people do. Stop misreading me to avoid having to adjust your mental model of how fandom works.

[blessphemy]

one of the ways a Canon work can be fandom bait is by missing something that fans want to fix, i.e. "it's bad", but i think this is only one way out of multiple that something can be fandom bait.

compelling worldbuilding (invites interaction with the setting)

interesting gimmick (see: daemons, drift compatibility. subcategory of compelling worldbuilding)

shipping bait (duh)

original character bait (in-universe categories/factions and design elements that make it fun for people to create their own characters)

compelling narrative (invites interaction and tweaks to the storyline: AUs and fixits and so on)

basically anything that invites interaction and recombination. but fandom also has a sort of multiplying effect: the larger the interactive audience of fandom is, the more likely it is to generate ideas and works that draw in more participants. so:

network effect (the larger the established fandom, the more likely it has subfandoms and infrastructure that appeals to niche audiences)

[chimaerakitten]

Yes this exactly, thank you bless.

Things that have space to play in are fandom bait, but space to play in does not equal holes.

[ladyshinga]

Monogamous people with dozens of exes and the most horrifying relationship history you've ever heard of in your entire life: "Well I just can't support polyamory, because those relationships never work out"

[polinet68]

EXCITING UPDATE: tumblr has updated the graphic for liking (some?) pride posts to include trans and progress flag colors as a second loop!

LESS EXCITING UPDATE: trans women are still getting silently nuked off of the website.

i feel like one of these is more important than the other. especially now that we know they can unban old accounts with little issue

DON'T take what we can get. KEEP MAKING NOISE ABOUT IT.

staff stop banning trans women

[lgbtqiatext]

[g3sztenye]

shot through the heart 💘

[meirimerens]

Les chats feront des chiens

Les ronces feront des grenades

Et moi, je ferai la guerre.

first line of the caption is a play on the french phrase “les chiens ne font pas des chats”, “dogs do not make ( = give birth to) cats”, which is the french version of the idiom “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”. here conjugated to mean “cats will/shall make dogs” because. well. smiles.

second line reads “brambles will/shall make pomegranates/grenades” (homonyms in french)

last line reads “i will/shall make war”

[heedra]

really losing my patience for any 'feminist' statement to the tune of 'we need feminism because women fill a fundamentally different and necessary role than men and will be better at doing x y or z'. like actually i think we need feminism because it is an unbearable death of the spirit by inches to exist in a world where you are not seen as a fully realized human being because of a single cultural determination, and because a world that enshrines such things creates systems that are fundamentally sick to the core

[quasi-normalcy]

So...how much of the bad discourse surrounding Steven Universe is just because people were really hoping that the Gems would beat up Andy DeMayo in "Gem Harvest"?

[quasi-normalcy]

I was astonished to learn that there was controversy around this episode, because I felt like it was just kind of a normal children's cartoon about getting along with difficult relatives; and then I looked it up and learned that it had the extremely inauspicious timing of airing right after Trump's 2016 victory, and, yeah, okay, I can understand why a children's fantasy about reconciling with your obnoxious conservative relatives and getting them to accept your alternate family structure would play rather poorly at the time.

[quasi-normalcy]

I think that Rebecca Sugar probably assumed, like most of the world that wasn't my specific flavour of extremely online in 2016, that Clinton would crush Trump and that this episode would maybe help to smooth over divisions; but of course what ended up happening is that an episode about how you should be empathetic towards your bigoted relatives ended up airing just as your bigoted relatives were going around victoriously hate-criming people in the street.

[quasi-normalcy]

Watching it now, though, it ends up feeling wistful more than anything. Like, yeah, sure, it doesn't work like that, and we all know that now...But wouldn't it be nice if it did? It feels like a pleasant dream.

[livingauthorssociety]

Steven Universe is fundamentally a power fantasy—but the fantasy is being able to get through to people and heal things. The power is love instead of strength.

[lilly-kittyeyes]

"Like, yeah, sure, it doesn't work like that, and we all know that now...But wouldn't it be nice if it did?" Yeah....

[princess-of-phyresis]

they're selling anti-ai slogans on sweatshop-produced t-shirts. i don't need to write the poem for you to get it do i

[sleepy-seal]

im being so serious when i say this but we need to bring back the "my genitals are none of your business" "if gender is whats in my pants then my gender is some loose change" mentality from the late 2010's because too many people on here are openly flirting with exclusionary people who spout enbyphobic rhetoric. stop caring about what people's agabs are you assholes. they literally mean nothing. they're not a zodiac sign or indicative of people's character. you are not wholly pure or wholly evil because of your assigned sex. you're just a person.

[ash-and-art]

"what genitals do you have?" Is sexual harassment regardless if its from a security guard or a chronically online furry

[partywithponies]

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???

[urlocalpyshcopan]

as a black gay person real like where y'all be finding this stuff pass the name

[brainsforbabyjesus]

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!

[infamousbrad]

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.

[kagedtiger]

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

[redstonedust]

people often call ships with girl and nonbinary characters yuri when the nonbinary character has displayed no preference for feminine terms. but theres an equal argument to be made that the characters have different genders and are thus hetslop. and thats beautiful to me.

[polinet68]

[polinet68]

when media (esp media inspired by other older media) uses "plays piano" as a sign of class i understand that. you need free time. you need free money. but when they use it as a signifier of patience i laugh. have you ever seen a pianist who doesn't play the wrong note in practice and slam the side of their elbow into an entire octave in frustration. piano is about stubbornness, not patience. this piece Will submit to me or we will Both regret existing

[pokeballvictimized]

i wonder if i'll still have a blog tomorrow when i wake up!!!! it looks like posts are getting deleted right off my blog so idkkkkkkkkkkkk

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

well that didn't take long, less than an hour. @staff do you wonder why we loathe you?

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

please note that none of you would have seen this if I hadn't reblogged it because I believed her. can you please believe me that it happens so much more often than you hear about? the only rare thing here is that it's too obvious to miss.

[polinet68]

sometimes you open a fic with 2k kudos in a genre you like and immediately. i am certain the plot is engaging and people love this for a Reason. However. does not place me in the scene 👍 just tells me what a character is doing and drags them between scenes and dialogues on a leash 👍 does not place me in their mindset 👉 i scrolled past three chapters to see if it's just early setup weirdness and gave up 👆

[catthlaf]

Xar's science words sound like SBR dialogue idk