oh, you know

the walls have ears, the doors have eyes, and the shadows have citron

[autistichalsin]

Periodic rent-lowering-gunshots:

Fiction is not reality.

You can enjoy things in fiction that would be awful in the real world. Like playing a murderhobo in a game! In the real world, being or supporting a murderer-thief would be pretty damn awful, while in the game it's just good fun. Same with anything else you choose to do with the pixels on the screen, like kinks that don't affect anyone real, so they're okay in fiction, but would be pretty damn bad in real life.

No one else is responsible for your online experience. They are required not to harass you, but they are not and never will be obligated to not post about ships, kinks, or tropes you dislike just to avoid you seeing them. It's up to you to blacklist words or phrases, block tags, or even block users as needed to avoid seeing content that upsets you.

No one can force you to read anything against your consent. Any content you don't like seeing can be instantly avoided by closing out of the offending post/fic.

You are not owed an online experience free of discomfort.

Nothing that happens in your imagination can ever make you a bad person. Words you write or read about fictional characters will never make you a bad person.

The claim that media consumption influences real-life behavior is intellectually dishonest and serves only to excuse the behavior of real offenders.

Fiction is a safe way to explore horrifying or confusing concepts. Therapists agree that fiction, even (or especially) about taboo topics is a good coping mechanism, especially, but not exclusively, for trauma survivors. Fiction is to adults what play therapy is to children. This doesn't stop being true if the work in question is of a sexual nature.

Sex isn't an inherently worse or better motivation than anything else. A work written to create feelings of arousal isn't dirty, shameful, or in any way less pure than works written to entertain, provoke moral questions, or for other reasons. And worth noting is that multiple purposes can exist in the same story, especially fanfiction.

You aren't entitled to an explanation for why someone reads, writes, or otherwise enjoys certain works, kinks, tropes, ships, etc.

[dogpuppy]

[charonsferry]

doing actual worldbuilding for a story that is 100% porn is the best thing. yes i know you're here to flick your shit. analyze my weapon design boy

[niuniente]

No foreplay without loreplay.

[usatokkiss]

happy one year anniversary to my favorite little freak

[oofuri2003]

Asa higuchi thought this was so important she had them bring it up twice. Why

[foxes-in-love]

[sporesgalaxy]

obviously there's a lot of serious ethical reasons fatphobia sucks but also it's so annoying that I can't just say "I'm huge" and have it be percieved as a neutral statement rather than self-deprecating. Like oh my god no, I DON'T mean "It's a shame I'm not smaller," what I mean is "I can throw well over 200lbs at someone anytime I want by simply jumping or flopping over, and many people cannot lift 200lbs so they couldn't even stop me"

[beegonethots]

Explaining tumblr to anyone

[johnny-depp-is-loved]

Big fan of whatever this genre of conversation is

[wizardrights]

[damnhotpocket]

Gema.piano on instagram

Why are all music teachers like this 😭😭😭

[kosmogrl]

my humor might be broken cause I find this trend actually funny

[agnesmontague]

ive invented (note: dubious claim) something i call the bear diet which is mostly fruits and vegetables with fish as the main protein source and something like once a month you eat a few hyperprocessed foods of your liking because that is when you, the bear, raid a dumpster in the suburbs

[stellarskyes]

after the hyperprocessed foods, do you take tranquilizers to simulate getting captured by animal control and returned to the wild?

[agnesmontague]

i would settle for melatonin gummies but well. knock yourself out

[hqissodelicate]

I NEED EVERYONE TO SEE THIS AWESOME BANRI ART THAT THE SWAGTACULAR @ashipikaur DREW 4 ME

inspired by the just as awesome zombie run night performance from mankai stage~ (ref pic under the cut)

tysm again ashishi for this beautiful art!! everyone go comm her NEOW if you can!!

the reference image:

for context, this was right after banri tricked misumi into going into the prison cell using a streamer of triangles lmao

forever in love with the full image im especially amused by muku, omi, and kumon's faces akshdudh omi looks like he's having a full-on crashout between the cousins, and then there's kazu who's just like 😁 🤳 lmaooo

[beansfrombeans]

that art would have been sexier if you'd made him fat btw

[beansfrombeans]

yeah i'll give you that it would have been even better if that artist had made joel smallishbeans a fat woman rather than a skinny twink man with a flat stomach

[oofuri2003]

Something something the framing here…always looking back at mihashi etc

[aidashakur]

[fictionadventurer]

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.

[datasnake]

Other examples of “blamed for things their copycats did” include Watchmen (blamed for the gritty antihero comics of the 90s) and Madoka Magica (blamed for excessively edgy and grimdark magical girl shows).

[fictionadventurer]

Four years on, and I think you might be the first person to add this type of comment to this post. After receiving so many comments that are like “THG is nowhere near on the level of LotR” or “THG didn’t invent YA dystopia”, it’s so refreshing to see someone understand exactly what I meant by framing THG as “a work blamed for its copycats”, and expand on it with examples that I didn’t know about.

It’s so rare to get an original comment on this post. Thank you so much.

[flightfoot]

Oh yeah, it gets really annoying with Madoka. The original Madoka Magica had PURPOSE to its darkness, it wasn’t just being “edgy”. It was asking questions that other magical girl series took for granted.

Like, why are girls between the ages of 9-17 targeted? Because those are some of the most emotionally vulnerable people who can produce some of the greatest emotional extremes.

What are the monsters that the girls have to fight? They’re corrupted forms of the girls themselves, once the hope that powers them is extinguished.

Why does the cute mascot creature have special powers that perfectly work with taking down these monsters? (In this case, taking in grief seeds for disposal). Because they were the ones who started this whole thing and it’s basically a giant energy-harvesting scheme.

And the wishes! The magical girls are shaped by the wishes they receive in exchange for their service. Notably, while a lot of wishes go wrong, Kyubey is NOT a jerkass genie. I don’t even think he really gets to choose when and how the wishes get granted, exactly. They seem to be granted more or less in the way that the girl envisioned, so if things go wrong, it’s because the girl didn’t think the wish’s consequences through. I really like that.

How are these girls suddenly able to withstand way more punishment and pain than they ever could before, and why is the transformation item so important? Because their true bodies are now their transformation items, which are way easier to protect, and it lets them heal their old bodies even when they sustain lethal damage.

Madoka also acknowledges the horror of fighting monsters and how dangerous it is, which traditional magical girl shows often gloss over.

And in the end, it rebuilds some of this stuff. Yes, all this is horrifying, but Madoka perseveres and uses her emotions, her will, to reshape the world to be fairer than it is now, to give magical girls a happier ending! Hope is not useless, and love wins out in the end, even if it’s bittersweet.

Unfortunately, most of its imitators just go “Magical girls, but now they kill each other and die horribly!” and didn’t really have a ton to say beyond that, at least not using the unique strengths of the magical girl genre.