let's discuss untagged fetish content for a second
TW: This is NOT a sexual post but I am talking about sexual content and fetish material in a non-graphic way
I also mention grooming!!
You have been warned.
Somehow, talking about being force-fed fetish content is the easiest thing at this moment after the nerve wracking experience of watching my own posts release.
So, a little bit of history about me. I used to be quite focused on the Modern Warfare fandom before I moved over to being focused on the BOCW fandom. Why'd I do that when the juicy action pieces I'm hungry for are in MW? Because I got tired of being force-fed sexual content.
And I had so much peace here before the Black Ops Six reveal attacked. Seriously, I think that 2023 was the most enjoyable time I have had here. 2024 is when it turned to shit.
Nowadays, I can't just support a Bell post, I need to analyze it to see if there's a barely disguised fetish the OP decided to include with no warning. It doesn't matter if you're a mutual of mine or a complete stranger, whenever I see Bell included I have to pause before I support the post.
My perception of Bell has nearly been ruined a couple of times, and I have nearly left the fandom before.
It took me a bit to realize this, but I don't hate AdBell, and I'm not "anti adbell", I'm actually anti "untagged torture porn" :)
I hate how I constantly need to ask myself a set of questions before I can feel comfortable even liking a post with Bell in it.
It's not an enjoyable experience asking "does this author secretly have a hypno fetish", "does this author have a transformation fetish", "does this author have a torture fetish", and so on and so fucking forth until I inevitably leave this place.
Now, that's dramatic. I know it is, but guess what? I was groomed with this kind of material :)
I'm still dealing with the effects of that to this day :)
It's very triggering for me to see this kind of shit suddenly with no fucking warning :)))
I hate to say it, but being here sometimes feels like an uphill battle. I'm having to use all these strategies so that I don't ruin one of my favorite stories for myself before I can even play the fucking game. And not even just that, there are so many awesome people in this community that I have almost cut off because I assumed they were going to pull some shit with fetish content. And then there are the folks I had to unblock because I realized they're actually fine.
I HATE DOING THIS! I HATE FEELING LIKE THIS. HOLY SHIT. Oh, and I haven't even gotten to the worst part! I'm not the only one who feels like this 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
I'm not the only one who has to deal with this, isn't that so fun? I'm not the only one running through a mental checklist every time Bell appears. GREAT /s /s /s
I love how I have been basically driven out of tags I used to LOVE browsing. That's so fucking cool. I'm glad I don't have a place here anymore! Thanks.
(Oh and btw, if you are someone who posts fetish content untagged, and you interact with minors too... you deserve one thousand lashes. You're sus as fuck. You deserve a hundred more if you don't mark your account as one that posts fetish content.)
Swear to God nothing cracks me up like antis in the CoD fandom lamenting over the "romanticisation of abuse/grooming/incest/pedophilia" in fandoms and fanfictions.
My sister in Christ you are a fan of Military Propaganda - The Game. There's literally a scene where Ghost sees a fucking airstrike on a warehouse or something like that WITH PEOPLE INSIDE and his comment is "what a glorious sight". Like... they put burly hot men with sexy british voices to attract people and they romanticise it!!! And you PAY for it! And your money goes to the fucking PENTAGON!!! Are we for real???
And you get bothered if people write fucked up shit about the tf141? slurping up that propaganda like kool-aid
You hit the nail on the head when it comes to the CoD Fandom’s tendency to excuse or exacerbate the bad actions that a morally ambiguous character commits just because they’re hot. I think it’s fine to do it in jest, and maybe even take a step back and recognise that the characters you are analysing and trying to appreciate belong to a franchise that’s minted tens of millions of dollars and is ran by a company that is openly anti-consumer. It can very much be that deep, but sometimes it’s not.
Although I enjoy it when creatives in the fandom add to their personalities, their thought processes when making decisions that have affected the canon of the game, and even aspects of their personal lives, I find it intriguing and slightly frustrating it seems to be solely done through the lens of “x character as a romantic parter.”
Your point about the fetishisation of gay men within the CoD franchise is also very valid, and this is just my personal opinion but there is actually an over-abundance of shipping within the fandom. It saturates the tags with sexual content and oftentimes pushes queer people (specifically people who are aspec) out onto the fringes. I do believe that’s unintentional though, since the online CoD community seems very supportive of LGBTQ+ members.
I guess my question here is- why? Ever since the inception of CoD 4 Modern Warfare Call of Duty has made campaigns that almost exclusively deal in moral duplicity which requires characters that are inherently complex (with varying degrees of success, of course. This is a company that has its developers essentially working factory shifts to pump out a “new installation” every damn year.)
How does such polarisation happen when the general identity of CoD’s campaigns has been ethical conundrums and moral ambiguity?
Anyways, good to see you on here. Hope you’re holding up okay :)
Hello hello. Welp, if you read my other posts, you know why I'm adding this cut. More essay shit. (Links to the other posts in question in order: one, two, three, and four. This is all for context because I'm referencing a bunch of other posts I made. It's not necessarily required reading, but I would like if you did read them because they cover so much stuff and I don't like repeating myself.)
Yeah I do think wholeheartedly that this fandom has a problem with either excusing a morally dubious character's behavior because they're physically attractive (and white), or really exaggerating it. And this applies to not even just Russell Adler, this also applies to 3/4 of 141 in Modern Warfare, and so on.
Honestly, the discussion around Adler and Bell has become super uninteresting on Tumblr because of this. Mild side tangent here:
I'm getting kinda tired of people summing up the existence of Bell's character as a "slobbering loyal dog soldier" because it's not just plainly uninteresting imo, it's also missing the point of Bell's existence in BOCW. My stance on this is almost the same as my stance on Adler's characterization, if you can not seriously tell me what makes Bell an interesting character, and I see you basically stripping whatever character they had to make them only an accessory to Adler, then I don't take you seriously as a Bell Fan.
I also don't take you seriously as a Bell fan if I see that you can't accept the two truths of Bell's character:
1. Bell is absolutely the victim in BOCW, and we have an entire game (BO1) explaining why MkUltra is an evil fucking thing to inflict on someone. Because of their involvement with MkUltra a solid chunk of the cast in BOCW are not good people or role models to look up to.
2. Bell is not innocent and was either actively helping Perseus in his endeavor to take millions of lives through nuking Europe, or they were at the very least an accessory to it. Both are bad.
The most interesting thing about BOCW is its complexity. Bell is a very contradictory and complicated character by nature of the choices you are given in the narrative. You can decide who dies and what happens at the end. Bell is both powerful and powerless, they both have agency and none at plenty of points.
To address your point about shipping:
I don't hate AdBell as a ship (I apologize for my post saying that I did in the past, I was having a knee-jerk reaction to a lot of triggering posts), but I do hate how for whatever reason when you want to look up Bell or talk about them, this ship immediately comes into focus. No, that's an understatement... It's fucking inescapable.
Like, Adbell and Bell has become interchangeable for this character, and that's annoying, it's the new Ghoap. And you're right about the shipping kind of making the fandom inaccessible. It's also annoying trying to dig for standalone content.
I'm not even trying to say that the shipping is bad because I'm a shipper myself (Roach x Bell crackshipper lmao), but I completely understand what you're saying. The shipping also really flattens the characters when the author clearly only thinks of them as characters in a relationship, and not anything else. That's super boring, actually. (Admittedly, I've had this problem with Bell and Roach, but this may be because I'm not fucking writing right now. I HAVEN'T CONTINUED MY FANFIC IN 500 DAYS FUCK.
But that's unrelated. This problem is usually caused by tunnel vision, happens to a lot of authors.)
And also, I hate to say it, but I don't like browsing certain cod tags anymore (ghost, bell, soap, and so on) because they're just filled with untagged porn, or untagged suggestive content now. There's also a bunch of untagged kink shit for AdBell that's just circulating around now, and I'm not gonna pull my punch here, it's irresponsible and borderline assholery. (Not to mention the amount of dark fics that are also un-fucking-tagged, and the apparent allergy to using the read-more cut.)
If you don't tag your shit as mdni, smut, or nsft (not safe for tumblr. it's another way of saying nsfw without getting your post shadow-banned), or whatever, then it's on sight. I block you on sight and start thinking less of your opinions. (Unless it was an honest mistake, and you fixed it, then we're all good.)
If I, a 20-year-old, can find that kind of shit without even looking for it, I can almost guarantee that a minor saw it by complete accident. And dude, I know that probably happened to you, and I'm so sorry. I had that happen to me when I was 17 (maybe a little younger). It fucking sucks. It also fucking sucks that you literally can not look up these characters anymore for any reason. I'm an adult now, and I can't even scroll through the Cod Bell tag anymore. Fantastic, glad this fandom is so all-inclusive /s.
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I feel like there's a lot of cognitive dissonance in this space because we're all left leaners getting on a fandom that is centrist leaning on the right.
Then again, it's probably because CoD is trying to be "woke" now, and that's attracting a lot of folks. But, it's kinda disappointing that we never get to talk about the actual canon with all its characters because that would require us all to get political, and that's pretty uncomfy (apparently).
So we get this "rebellion" of people focusing on shipping the characters, and I won't repeat myself, but that doesn't really accomplish much? It's a really tone-deaf and dissonant response to a game franchise that is openly propaganda for western hegemony and imperialism (and all that comes with it).
Fandoms in general don't handle moral duplicity and complexity well. They're generally very polarizing, and that is unsurprising. Media Literacy dies here.
I also think a lot of the cod fandom's problems are caused by performative leftism, and the problems that come around with fandoms in general especially when it comes to fucking up their interpretations. We've really got to reach a happy medium because this pendulum swing where we just have to be toxically positive all the time is bad, but when it swings the other way it's also bad because the result is people terrorizing one another over meaningless shit. (Both the "let people enjoy things" and "I HATE when people enjoy things" crowds are equally annoying.)
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And now we get onto the franchise its self. Honestly, if I knew how to pirate these games and not get myself fucked over, I would one hundred percent do it because I do not think these games are worth the price they are for the ethics and quality involved.
I hate how you can see the decline in cod started when the games got too bloated and unfocused as a result of there not only being too many cooks in the kitchen, they're also fucked up on the redbulls because they're tired and overworked.
It's a shame how 2019 was basically when the games released (MW19 and BOCW) were incredibly focused and good, but then over time they started to become mid (decent) but unfocused and toothless as fuck (MW22 and Bo6), and then we reach the apex of what was built in the past of this franchise and the current gaming industry where we just get total shit because of bad ethics (MW23 and Bo7).
I used to say that MW23 was the worst made CoD game because everything surrounding it is bad. The story is bad, the characters are bad now, the game itself is bad, the quality is bad, and the development behind it was bad. There is no acceptable context in which people only had a couple of months to work (16 if I remember correctly), and were ruining their health with the stress and sleep deprivation.
Activision deserved to go bankrupt for this because those are disgustingly common industry practices, but they are terrible ones. Crunch Culture is destroying the gaming industry, support Game Developer Unions so that this will stop happening. I want Activision to be destroyed tbh.
And I hope Black Ops 7 is the nail in its coffin (wishful thinking, but let me dream) because holy shit they turned every single dial up to 11. This was absolutely unacceptable. The story was probably written by ChatGPT, and the game assets were AI generated. There were layoffs for the development team of this game.
Genuinely one of the worst games of 2025. I knew it was gonna be bad too, my spidey senses tingled. If Bo6 is mid and has Ai generated content for its multiplayer, then it was gonna get worse with Bo7. Let's do what MW fans do to MW3 and pretend it doesn't exist.
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Wrapping up some loose ends here.
I think that you're right about a lot of the CoD fandom's unfriendliness toward certain groups of people being definitely unintentional.
I mention racism and misogyny because it's usually unconscious and internalized because when we grow up in a society that's patriarchal and racist by design, you do end up picking up stuff like that. It's still your obligation to recognize that and take the steps that you can to unpack that. It's mostly not malicious.
When I talk about performative leftism, I mean leftism with no work. As is in, you have those values, but you never actually apply them in a meaningful fashion for the spaces you come into, how you shape your thinking, and the content you consume and support. (When I say "you", I mean a hypothetical strawman, not you as a person Harpy.)
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Alright, I think I got most of everything, but feel free to add on or point out stuff that I missed. Thank you for your message, I really fucking appreciate it!
I'm trying to keep myself together (mentally and physically).
But this is a rare moment of activity, enjoy it while it lasts, you're not getting this again for a month or two. Lol.
Copy-Paste Policy on responding to my posts:
Feel free to tell me your thoughts! If you disagreed with anything I said in my post, please tell me why. If you agreed, feel free to add on and tell me why.
You know the deal. If you're going to respond to my post, please tag me, directly comment, or reblog my post.
Okay, I can't believe we need to keep having this conversation, but apparently "leftists" in the general cod fandom aren't getting the picture! 😊😊😊
There is absolutely nothing wrong with shipping the characters, doing the yaoi and yuri, and writing dating sim fanfictions. BUT, and this is a big BUT, there is a problem if you are not analyzing the source material!
Call of Duty is propaganda, and you can not remove that fact from the characters. It doesn't matter if it's Black Ops or Modern Warfare, the fact remains that this is Pro CIA and Pro Military Intervention propaganda.
Please do research about the game you claim to be a fan of. It doesn't matter if you "don't do politics" if you are not critical of propaganda you will spread it around whether you realize it or not.
If you aren't doing research about CoD and the actual real world politics it includes, you are on the same level as the cod gamer bro who gets mad about "politics" (aka politics he doesn't agree with) being in his games.
You people will literally fall for anything holy shit
(Do not find the person who posted this to send them mean messages/comments if you do that you're an asshole and you should get a life. It is not that deep!!)
TF141 all wore the same scarfs in the campaign, Ghost kept his on, and this is being called "confirmation" of Ghoap.
This is queerbait, they're baiting you into accepting their shitty story because they know it works.
News flash. They are never ever going to confirm this ship. If they ever say "Ghost loved Soap" they will mean it in a brotherly manner only because they are never going to have a homosexual relationship featured in their game in a way that can not be removed for censors. (This is genuinely what happened with Mason and Woods in Black Ops 7, will you people ever learn?)
Support queer creators, it's not that hard to get your hands on some military BL if you need it so fucking badly.
"Fun" fact: There are actually Call of Duty missions that copy real war footage and they don't tell you!
My cod bashing doesn't stop.
So, I'll be honest, I've bought all three of the original Modern Warfare trilogy games, and Black Ops 1, 2, and Cold War. I knew that these games were propaganda from the start, but since I'm a young adult and not a kid anymore, I assumed I was going to be perceptive of any attempts to sway me.
I had fun with Modern Warfare one, and I plan on finishing my second play through of the missions before I do it again 2 more times. Unfortunately, I was not informed that multiple levels in this game are closely based upon real life missions to the point of being imitations. I did not know this when buying the games.
The AC 130 mission, "Death from Above", is the most egregious offender because it's virtually undisguisable from an actual AC 130 bombing. The game's mission in particular is based on footage from an AC 130 bombing in Afghanistan (from 2006). It is actually insidious that the game does not inform you of this. (I do not feel comfortable linking the footage in question, knowing that there are minors following me.)
You are running a recreation of a mission in which real people died. and. they. do. not. inform. you.
It's scary that you can't tell the difference between the game and the real footage visually. This is on YouTube, and in the comments, people are commenting on the gunner's aim as if it was from a Call of Duty. In fact, a majority of the comments are talking as though it's a Call of Duty game, and they even provide timestamps for when people get blown into pieces. There are comments quoting the AC 130 FCO from the CoD mission I just mentioned with zero hint of irony. Furthermore, the lines from the mission were ripped from this footage (I'm talking almost one to one repetition here), and I am not exaggerating, there are more instances of this in Modern Warfare such as in the USMC missions.
(Note: In the real mission, they were accurate with their targets, so as far as I know, these are not civilians but terrorists. However, it is mortifying that people can have such a lack of separation between fiction and reality that they can speak on an event in a war like this.)
When I saw this, I was horrified because I had actually enjoyed the mission and toying around with the gun options without prior knowledge of this. I enjoyed blowing those npcs to pieces because they were supposed to just be video game characters. And the fact that CoD is a commonly used recruiting method for the military makes this scary.
Now, you might ask: "Kyan, how is this a problem if the people targeted in the war footage are undoubtedly dangerous terrorists and there isn't a single civilian in it?" and that's a good question. You see, the game presents this as very simple, and there is no risk to civilians at all. This is not a reflection of reality, and these games target young boys as young as 13. In the war footage, they almost mistook the building that had the terrorists in it, for the mosque close by. If someone hadn't hastily corrected, innocent people would've died. This is how real war is. Mistakes are made, confusion occurs, and the result could be people dying.
I am stating all this because the idea that Call of Duty is using fictional characters and events, therefore it can't be held up to scrutiny as a "documentary game" is NONSENSICAL. Call of Duty uses real events and real people all the time to prop up the US Military. The modern games do this a lot.
This video by Data Male goes over this topic really well, I suggest you guys watch it. (TW: THE FOOTAGE I'M TALKING ABOUT SHOWS UP ROUGHLY 4 times, and while they're not the worst parts, they're definitely present. Exercise caution.)
As a contributer to the CoD fandom I really want to talk about the propaganda of CoD especially how a character like Adler is idolized and treated like a wholesome creature when the game itself shows you he's a backstabbing CUNT who would shoot you the moment you are deemed worthless to him the thing is I'll bury myself six feet under and get shunned by the fandom just because I spoke out against their idea of Adler
That also applies to Modern Warfare but these games are more blatant about their propaganda so the community wrapped itself behind obscene layers of GHOAP yaoi to the point where it's impossible to call them out
Spitting fire over here, huh? I have... a fuck ton more to add to this because I've been thinking about this too!!!
Cut has been added because this is a long ass reply. I'm talking straight essay shit.
What you said also applies to characters like Graves or Makarov. And he also falls into the exact dichotomy that explicitly morally dubious (either grey or evil) characters do.
You either get a complete sweetening of the character, or you get the absolute worst version of them that isn't even in line with how they're evil (sweetheart vs demon). And usually with the latter, it's sexualized, and let's be real for a second, it's because these are hot white guys.
I rarely see this kind of shit for feminine characters, those of color, or even those who are considerably less attractive. Not saying I haven't, but there's considerably less.
I feel like we should also discuss how we, as a fandom made up majorly by women, queers, people of color, and all those who tend to fall within these groups, tend to gravitate toward inflicting internalized racism and misogyny on ourselves by thoughtlessly gravitating toward characters like this.
[I'm also not saying that if you like any of the characters named/tagged in this post that you are somehow a bad person. You are not a bad person for liking fictional characters, even if these characters are bad people. They are not real, so that is not what I'm even remotely trying to imply.
I'm also also not trying to twist your arm into feeling bad about liking white characters. Liking or disliking a character based on race is incredibly racist, believe it or not. If you like them for reasons OTHER than the fact that they are white, then obviously you are not liking them for overtly racist reasons.
Shame is not the goal here, please do not feel ashamed of yourself.]
And honestly, I'm not even against sweeter or domestic versions of evil or dark-grey characters because the whole point of fandom (and fanfiction) is to be subversive and diverge from the canon.
The problem comes around when you can not seriously talk about why you had to alter the characters so drastically. As in, you can't genuinely talk about what made these characters "dark grey" and "evil" in the first place. And yes, this does involve politics. If I hadn't repeated it ad nauseam at this point, Call of Duty is a political franchise which means that all of its characters are attached to real world political concepts.
You are not going to escape the politics attached to these characters just because you stripped them away from your fanon version and made them tender. (Please read the post I linked before you comment or reblog. I'm not going to repeat what I said in that post here again.)
And honestly, the most irritating behavior that has ever come out of this fandom is when people talk about the *canon* version of Adler and point out that most fanon interpretations of him either fetishize his dark aspects or completely strip them away, which ends up missing the entire point of his character, folks get mad.
(The amount of times I've seen someone get treated like fucking Voldemort from Harry Potter, right down to people refusing to name them whilst clearly talking about them, is insane. And this is over them saying something about Adler being a canonically dubious character. Thankfully this is lower than in the Modern Warfare fandom over other characters, but it's still happened enough times to be concerning.
If someone has an opinion you don't agree with, you can either: openly state your disagreement respectfully to them or ignore them by using the block button. Don't treat them like some kind of shadowy monster, for fuck's sake.)
I'm never going to understand this because your fanon is never going to replace the canon version of this character that most people know. And I thought that this was widely understood, given how I just explained how fanfiction is supposed to work, but alright!
Anon hit it right on the head here. The truth is, Adler is not an idol to look up to in BOCW let alone a good person. A big part of BOCW is the fact that most of the "good guys" in that safehouse are not very good people. There's also a case to make that Adler canonically has abusive tendencies, and it's shown pretty clear as day that he is a manipulator. It's also shown that he can be pretty cruel and heartless when he's able to get away with it. Which is, again, a tendency that abusers tend to have.
To really drive home the repetition here (I WANT you to be sick of me saying this shit), there's also the very real politics and propaganda for Adler that I've seen either be outright ignored or it ends up being euphemized, like in Copaganda shows. It's not meaningful discussion of this character, and to be honest, I don't take you seriously as an "adler fan" if you can not also explain the politics, the morality, and the narrative surrounding his character.
And also, if you do recognize that the reason why you gravitate toward Adler is because of either internalized misogyny, racism, or both, DO NOT FEEL BAD ABOUT IT. They are fictional characters! There are no morals attached to liking them, and you do not have to stop liking the character just because you realize there's something problematic attached to your interest. Just analyze it, and apply it to your analysis of the character.
DON'T FUCKING SHAME MAXX.
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Alright, I've exhausted myself on Adler and BOCW, let's talk about Ghoap.
Anon fucking got it in one go.
I'll add more on to this, and again, read the post I linked in the embed because I do go over this. I will only repeat myself once, and I will not dedicate energy to doing it again.
I feel like the issue with Ghoap is honestly one not even limited to this fandom, even though people desiring to not be made uncomfortable by the propaganda is playing a role here. The issue comes down to fandom's obsession with fetishizing gay men, and this does come back to my comment about internalized misogyny. People of all walks of life tend to gravitate toward men in fandom, and that's not necessarily because the "women are not well written", it's because we view men (especially white men) as the "default" in fiction. (I dare you to seriously tell me that Helen Park from BOCW is a badly written female character, I'm being so for real. She's on the same level of complexity as Adler.)
It's also kind of annoying when you have to really dig to find content that isn't shipping related. I'd like to see more standalone stuff involving the characters, please.
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And that's all. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. Anon thank you for messaging me!!
I'm going to rest, I wrote this as soon as I got home from work. My voice hurts because I'm sick and I've been reading this outloud.
Feel free to tell me your thoughts! If you disagreed with anything I said in my post, please tell me why. If you agreed, feel free to add on and tell me why.
You know the deal. If you're going to respond to my post, please tag me, directly comment, or reblog my post.
Masterpost for The CoD Fandom Critique Posts I made because I finally snapped
You should be analyzing the source material for CoD even if you're just in it for the shipping
There is no excuse for being a cod "fan" that knows nothing about CoD
The characters from CoD are political because the source material is political. Your yaoi is not going to strip that away from them
Your fanon is not the canon, and you should know what you're talking about when you're discussing the characters you claim to be a fan of
Literally all of this at once + this fandom is shit at making sexual and kink content only accessible if you look for it because nobody can tag and use the read more cut apparently + the shipping is not ruining the fandom but can be super annoying
Extras (still important please read):
My ground rules for interacting with each and every one of these posts (ironing out the kinks)
My completely honest thoughts on vague posting and subtweeting
The main tags I use for good measure just to make sure I'm not misunderstood.
