#moltenrambles

[moltensmusings]

It is actually tiring seeing people jumping through hoops trying to claim they aren't homophobic as they continuously move the goal post to explain why Francesca getting a Sapphic love story is bad.

"Infertility" was focused in season 4 and the author on record admits she forgot about it/it wasn't a big deal to her. The writers have given it more attention in the show than the books did.

"Well Michael was the best" from everything I've read and seen he was an abusive asshole who forced himself on Francesca. The content we have of Michaela already makes her an improvement.

"I hate that it's like cheating" again, everything I've seen from the books points to the desire being there even before John passed, meaning that they didn't actually change anything. We just got more John content than the books did so it's more noticeable.

The fact of the matter is that the forbidden romance angle is going to hit even harder if it's queer. Remarrying your dead spouse's family members to maintain title wasn't out of the norm. However, a woman desiring another woman would've been. The set up of the feelings being so strong that Michaela can't stay to comfort Fran for fear of what she's feeling actually sets up such a solid tense atmosphere once we get their season as the yearning and emotions only ferment over time.

It'll add the perfect additional layer to their romance of a hurdle they'll have to get over. Imagine the passionate argument of "where we're you when I needed you?!" It'll be amazing.

Two incredibly feminine woman, both now seasoned when it comes to romance, getting a front and center spotlight on them as they slowly weave together.

I genuinely can't wait to see the romance play out.

[moltentarts]

I'm new here, are your FT redesigns for a fic/comic you have or plan on making? Sorry, I just absolutely love the designs and how they come together ^^

Hello! The redesigns are really just for fun! Occasionally I'll make a little comic like I did with my "levy being angry and hating gajeel" idea, but outside of that I don't have plans for a full fairy tail rewrite.

Main reason is: in the future (hopefully within the next year) I'd like to properly start my own personal comic and any fairy tail redux would be a massive commitment that would take years to complete!

I do have ideas for one or two more mini comics if I can thumbnail them.

Thank you for your kind words as well! I'm glad you like them!

[moltensmusings]

Critical Role table top fans can be some of the most aggravating people to deal with. I saw an edit for Nott from the animated show and half of the comments were people just, loudly spoiling her story for new fans unprompted or just acting like they have plausible deniability by going "I could spoil" and then not even waiting for a decent time before doing so.

This doubled with those same people often yapping about how they hate Veth's final look or that her goblin one was better/more interesting and then proudly doubling down as they admit they don't actually care about her story and just wanted her to stay a goblin.

Like, I get it. I've had character designs change before and not been happy, but Sam always made it blatantly clear Veth wanted her body back, she wanted her life back. Her story was about self loathing and body Dysmorphia and if she'd been a goblin the whole time sure we could talk about how her arc should've ended with her finding comfort in being a goblin. But Veth was a young woman who was tortured and murdered and had her real body ripped from her as she was forced to become the very creature who had destroyed her life.

She was alcoholic because of her trauma and how much she hated what she was. She encouraged Caleb's growth because she wanted to be herself again. The way some of the fandom talks about goblins/Veth's story can often border on really weird territory. They complain that Veth is Fat in her Halfling form which also is dumb because fat women can exist. They complain she's uninteresting in her halfling form which to me says you care more about appearances than you do about the content of the character. Like you can sit there and pretend "I don't care about looks" but if whether you can enjoy a character boils down to them visually appealing to you, you are just as shallow as the people who only ever enjoy handsome/pretty characters.

Veth being a halfling doesn't take away that her story is still about finding confidence in ones self, in fact she outright states that before becoming a goblin she still hated how she looked and struggled with feeling like she was never good enough. Which is why it's so huge when she becomes herself again and we see her reveling in her body.

You like goblin characters? Fine, but stop claiming Veth is boring or that her story loses some of the substance by her being a halfling when there's incredible depth to the character.

[moltensmusings]

A facet of shipping I also find annoying is the "Why are you other shippers attacking us?!" as shippers of one group pretend like they don't have any toxic fans. I'm fully aware that people who ship what I like have a high chance for toxicity. I'm the first to admit when they are. I'm not going to pretend like Kataang fans aren't often toxic sore winners who feel the need to argue and insult others out of nowhere. But I also think it's very disingenuous to act like Zu/tara fans don't have similar toxic shippers who antagonize and insult others.

In fact I've interacted with a good portion of toxic shippers who spread around lies and twist canon content to demonize aang or take the worst possible read of a situation. I had to actively block a fan who took everything I said in bad faith and took canon content out of context to try and act like I was crazy for saying that some shippers will lie about characters to boost their ship.

Shipping spaces in general have just as much a chance of being toxic as power scaling spaces, a lot of shippers become incredibly parasocial about what they like and it gets to the point where if someone doesn't ship what they do it means that person is somehow morally flawed and stupid.

Shippers who enjoy what goes canon often will brag and gloat about winning things. The toxicity in some spaces has actually led me to hating ships I previously had no positive or negative feelings for. It's almost like shipping spaces have a cycle where one person throws a punch and rather than blocking that person or ignoring them, we then see others start throwing punches in response and everyone starts screaming that the other people are the issue not them.

Maybe let's not be 5 year olds for 2 minutes and accept that 1. these are fictional characters and 2. everyone has the free will to simply ignore what they personally do not like.

"i'll ignore when other people do" this is why we can't make progres on this shit.

[moltensmusings]

i have noticed with some newer fans (not a lot, to be fair) that jester is disliked for being a "pick me" or a "mean girl" and i'm wondering if this was common back in the day?

I haven't heard the mean girl complain (absolutely wild for people to say that about JESTER of everyone. Her and cad are legit the nicest most giving members 😭) pick me as a term has kind of completely lost its original meaning much like with most terms coined to describe a certain archetype of female characters and at this point people just use it to be insulting.

I could maybe see new fans misunderstanding her character and saying "pick me" because she just, really wanted fjord to like her. But she never threw the others under the bus or in any way was cruel towards other women to make it happen. Jester was the most sex positive of everyone and she loved interacting with women and engaging with girly stuff. Even in the animated show, and real pick me would've been picking fights with nott and beau, trying to subtly degrade them, focusing on how small and delicate she was compared to everyone else as she tries to cozy up to the guys. And Jester just, isn't that character.

Jester is delighted to interact with others because more than anything she wants friends. Yes she'd also like a romance novel story and to be wisked off her feet, but she's a kind woman who is always there for her friends in ways that can sometimes be too much.

I can't really speak to how early fans interacted with her as I was kind of pretty divorced from the fandom until 2019-2020. But pick me as a term really wasn't something that was used until like, 2022-2023, after mighty nein had ended.

I know some fans who hated Jester didn't like her voice, found her raunchy humor to be grating, didn't like her vibe/her character type.

TL;DR: Those two words are newer insults people are using for her, and more than anything it just feels like a new brand of people not understanding Jester as a character that has existed in a different form for years.

[moltensmusings]

I've often talked about how I really don't like the argument "x character is deserving of love because they're sad and lonely and care about Y" when it comes to shipping, and I stand by that. And to me the argument being used back during the huge fandom meltdown post 118 of critical role really shows me the bias of fans and how many of them didn't consider Fjord or his emotions when arguing who Jester should've gotten with. Because if the claim "Well x deserves it because they deserve love" is the basis we're going off of, you should be arguing that about Fjord.

Fjord is the character who was raised in an abusive environment who only felt love when he was adopted by Vandran, at 17. He had no idea how to give affection to other people and he's so bad at flirting because of being so beaten down in every way during his early years that the idea someone is actually into him is crazy. He spent his childhood being called ugly, stupid, unwanted, being physically brutalized by the boys at the orphanage, exploited for child labor,

Travis describes Fjord's time with Vandran as "The most love he'd ever known" and if you read his origin you know that's a pretty low bar all things considered. For the first time he was treated like a person and given room to grow and a person who wanted to help him reach his full potential. There was really not much spoken or physical affection between him and Vandran and then Sabian takes it all away and Fjord is back at ground 0, grieving the loss of a father figure completely alone and he consistently down plays his grief when the nein bring it up. Having to exist without the people who he had grown to feel at home with.

So if we're using the claim "character without love deserves it the most" fjord logically is the one that argument fits. But it's a dumb fucking argument anyway, because no one deserves love from someone just because they lack it in their life. Jester doesn't owe fjord her love because he's never experienced anything like that before. Jester doesn't owe Fjord her love because he's faced rejection all his life. If Fjord had confessed to Jester and she rejected him it would've been tragic. But she wouldn't be a bad person or doing anything wrong in the action.

Fjord is deserving of love because people deserve to feel loved, but it doesn't mean people have to give it to him. It doesn't mean because he wants something and he's suffered he's owed it.

The argument to this day will always frustrated me because, as I mentioned, it really shows how little some fans care about Fjord as a character that they think his life has been normal and lacking pain. And because it demonizes Jester for not choosing the person people deem the saddest or "most worthy of her". It objectifies her and treats her like a prize to be won for being traumatized.

So: While I can enjoy "person who lacks love is adored by someone in ways they never thought they could be" you'll never see me arguing that the ship has to happen for that reason.

[moltensmusings]

it's kinda ironic in a messed up way if bell's hells fans and araman fans are now like "aw man jester is the worst, she hates all other women" because most jester hate i see is from men who are like "jester is an asshole that only cares about herself and never gets punished because she's a WOMAN! if she was a MAN everyone would hate her and want her to get rightfully punished!"

Honestly I don't think C3 or C4 fans are largely to blame for any hatred Jester or any C2 characters get as someone who is enjoying C4 and really didn't engage much with C3. It could be just my lack of knowledge, but as someone very present for the great fandom meltdown of 2020 following 118, Mighty nein fans are often our own worst enemies and biggest critics. It got so bad that the discourse breached containment and we had non-fans weighing in with incredibly misinformed and biased opinions on the characters and I genuinely don't know if any other critical role discourse has ever reached that insane level of causing Matt to have to go online and actually tell the fandom to stop.

I'm sure some fans of the other campaigns have uninformed/bad opinions and maybe they enjoy taking digs at C2 because they simply want to incite anger and Vitriol towards a campaign that often has some pretty hostile defenders who themselves regularly insult other campaigns, but ultimately I think putting the blame on them for any of the C2 characters getting hatred is a bad way to go and I am unwilling to do it.

Now: For the criticisms themselves. I've heard "if she were a man" about things very often in fandom and it's almost always a guy saying it, it always comes off as something done to try and push back against claims of sexism or to bring out this idea that somehow women get more leniency in fandoms when that simply isn't the case. Women will get hated for doing things male characters do all the time that fandom love, they'll get hated for being in the way of ships and in general just be on the receiving end of a lot of violent misogyny where fans derive pleasure from putting them through torture and suffering. Men on the flip side only tend to get hated on when they're in the way of shipping. They can act however they want and most fandoms don't care. (Compare people hating Fjord/Aang/Sun from Rw//by to people who hate Beauregard/korra/sakura from nar/uto and you'll see big differences in why fandoms hav issues with them.)

Fans who call out male characters for harrassing women 9/10 times come down just as hard on women when they do it, because they don't want to see characters harrassed at all. "If she were a man" is most often a strawman argument.

I think us having conversations about how Jester's early behavior pushed Fjord's boundaries are important. She learns and grows out of it. But ultimately she did at times touch him without consent (specifically his chest or abdomen) and would flirt in ways that came on strong that he wasn't into. But when she realized that what she was doing wasn't working like she expected, because she'd been raised to believe that's how you act when you try to woo, she stopped. She took a step back and did her best to not make him uncomfortable around her. To be a safe place for him to feel able to be emotionally vulnerable and that's what ultimately led to him catching feelings.

As for the "She's selfish" those are reads by people who don't care to understand her and are likely just hating because people love her. Yes There are times when she goes over someones head and tries to help them with a problem in spite of their protests. Because she wants to be helpful and heal hurt and fix things even if she should leave it alone. Any desire people have to see her punished for it is them projecting, the nein don't scream at jester or act cruel to her when she messes up because they know her and know that even if she fucks up she's not being malicious she's just being a person with flaws who wants people to be happy.

This got a bit long but, TL;DR: I think this is a complicated conversation with no one real group to point blame on and trying to point blame only causes more arguing and hostility. Instead we need to focus on combatting sexist/bad takes as they are.

[moltensmusings]

One more post about my issues with invisigal in dispatch.

I think I figured out exactly why it bothers me so much when people excuse invisigals harassment and actions as "well she's a former villain, she's had a hard life so that's just how she is." The problem is: she doesn't learn. If you reject her as Robert she continues to harass him and can at one point force a kiss on him that you initially can't stop because she will force his arms away when he tries to push her off. People go "well what would Robert do" and frankly, if the game gives us the choice to reject her advances and has Robert on several occasions appear uncomfortable by the way she acts, why is it outside of the realm of possibility for us to get an option for him to definitively tell her to stop?

The other villains are also people who have lived hard lives, and in episode 7, they're actively mad at her for constantly pulling stuff like this and endangering their livelihoods. You're telling me the group being upset at her gives no weight to her actions being excessive? Prism is YOUNGER than Visi and upset at what she's done.

She is the team Z member with the most screen time and development, so a platonic route with Robert where he doesn't romantically pursue her and she learns boundaries and respecting people and maybe focuses more on bonding with the team would actually be solid. If we can't get the route where she's a young mentee for Robert, at the very least give us the chance to have a route with her where romantic feelings either play no role or she can be content with at least a friendship with Robert.

Invisigal was not created to exist outside of her romantic feelings for Robert, her feelings are her motivation to be better and that is so incredibly frustrating when so many people in Canon care about her and want good things for her (blazer and Golem to name two) yet the devs make it so the only reason she'd be a better person is if she thinks there's a romantic reward for doing so?

I don't think it's wrong to hate the way the writers handled her character, and I'm tired of people constantly defending the choices they made as if her having hardship excuses everything.