Big missed opportunity of not having Rosa fighting Albedo on top of rooftops because i know she would have NOT trusted his golden ass and would thrown a spear right on his head as he was prepared to merge baby durin or smth
The Abyss copying elements...Anemo's swirl reaction taking on the quality of the elements it comes into contact with...catholic aesthetics...inverted statue...Time......
The Abyss copying elements...Anemo's swirl reaction taking on the quality of the elements it comes into contact with...catholic aesthetics...inverted statue...Time......
Please tell me more about your Nameless Aventurine š„ŗ
We have a timeline now!
I also did a mini origin comic but it's a few months old now so here's a rough look at the start of the au!
Kakavasha (he'll be referred to as that within au canon) never becomes Aventurine, and is raised on the astral express!! He definitely has a few personality changes, namely being a lot more comfortable being open with others and being able to develop genuine relationships.
The IP3 are friends too! However Jelena also never becomes Topaz- yes I will expand on Topaz!Bronya, yes it will affect Bronya x Seele in devastating ways
IF YOU DO PLEASEEEEE LMK!! I lost motivation for awhile and haven't done much more for this au but anyone who wants to talk about it or make stuff pleaseee feel free to ask/do it š
I think that meme about Genshin's two character archetypes being "Boy With Trauma" and "Girl With Job" is still the funniest and unfunniest thing about the game.
Like, here we are at the tail-end of Natlan and they're still serving us "Escoffier's personality is chef" and "Ifa has generational trauma inherited from the unresolved grief of his family's internecine conflict which led to the death of innocent animals."
Okay, I'm kidding, but being serious, if we had a nickel for every time "gainfully employed" was the primary character trait of a Genshin female character, we would have... a lot of nickels.
On the one hand: Hilarious. Every single society in Teyvat is being hard carried by its female workforce.
On the other hand: I wish that more of the female cast was given fully realized backstories outside of their assigned professions.
Like, more of the women should get to have tragic, wild pasts (or presents!) that have bearing on both their character development arcs and the plot of the game itself. You know, as a treat.
a serious discussion with teyvats-worst-hero Moon Spice
Sometimes it feels like nuance is systematically ignored in these large fandoms like the Hoyoverse games.
I definitely have thoughts about a lot of things. Very complicated, often critical thoughts. But I donāt think itās enough to justā¦. Write everything off as completely acceptable or completely unacceptable. It all feels very reactionary.
And this isnāt me chickening out and going with the most moderate opinions as though lack of extremity makes the correct option. There are elements of Hoyoverse games that I greatly like or dislike, and I want to be able to express those takes freely without the assumption that Iām āone of them,ā the malicious opposing side as determined by whatever camp the reader has decided is fundamentally good and correct.
Itās a thought I have again and again, any time thereās controversy over the gamesā merits and failings. Some might say that thereās nothing actually stopping me from posting about these regular controversies. There isnāt. Thatās true. But if Iām going to roll the dice for that random chance of disproportionate, overwhelming negativity, itās not going to be just in reference to Twitter drama over the anime gacha games. Itās going to be a far-reaching critique of current fandom/media culture.
So Iāll just preface this lecture with the following messagesā if you believe Iām provoking you specifically, then thatās your feeling to bear. I donāt have anyone specific in mind and donāt intend to be directly inflammatory. I care a lot about having real discussions about these issues and donāt appreciate bad faith.
Feel free to scroll here if this kind of thing stresses you out. This will be very long.
Correlation is not Causation
Do you, reader, genuinely have an understanding of the way fiction does and does not affect reality, or do you function off of assumptions of how people react to it? Itās a correlative relationship. Not causal, not independent. Correlative.
Fiction can affect how we view things in real life, but cannot forcibly change our opinions or our actions. Itās a form of cultural influence. The effect is more pronounced the less experience you have in that topic and the more prevalent that particular trope/message/philosophy is. This is a big reason why childrenās media is held to a higher standard of clearly identifiable messagingā they have very little experience in a lot of areas and are still learning what ānormalā entails.
Itās also why, for example, mainstream media constantly showing fictional relationships with power imbalances while never acknowledging their potential for abuse is considered a toxic standard, but depicting a relationship containing power-imbalance without acknowledgement of immorality is not in itself a dangerous trope that should be banned. Context is everything, including both the rest of the work and the outside world (which includes past, present, and future alongside cultural considerations).
One creator or a fraction of any fandom enjoying disturbing/morally objectionable content does not carry the weight to constitute a moral panic. It isnāt enough volume of content to ānormalizeā anything unless itās supporting a movement that is both popular and leading to real-life harm.
I am absolutely going to get side-eye for this from what Iāve seen, but from the limited interaction Iāve had with fandom spaces in my adulthood, this whole pro-ship anti-ship thing seems to be based on this fundamental misunderstanding. It likely started as a distaste for disturbing ship content (Eg: incest, pedophilic), then evolved into the belief that engaging with this content meant you were similarly predatory, then started including less and less serious dynamics (Eg: a problem with weird age gaps becoming a problem with all age gaps), finally reaching a state in which personal discomfort with a fictional idea is tantamount to real life harm.
As I said, Iām not deeply involved with fandom. But based on the timeline of fandom history, conservative political trends in my country, and my own personal experience, Iād hazard a guess that this way of thinking is based on many young people (20ās and under) holding onto a veryā¦ victimized worldview. Itās hard to describe, but thereās a pervasive theme of scary sexual deviants and moral corruption. An overt fixation on protecting innocent eyes that donāt really exist.
When to Be Worried
A more nuanced test of moral concern that Iād offer is whether or not the anticipated audience would assume that the idea behind a part of fiction is:
1. This idea is a reasonable message or authorial intention to interpret from that work
(eg: itās reasonable to interpret that in a horror movie where promiscuous characters die as a result of sexual activities but virginal characters survive, promiscuity is considered a negative trait. This interpretation is not reasonable if their killer is framed as a dangerous religious extremist.)
2. The idea is true (or partially true) in reality
(eg: you may not assume all women are unfathomably attracted to you because youāre like the stereotypical ālosersā that always get the girl, but you may assume that they owe you a chance if youāre nice to them)
3. Acceptable and normal to have within their own social groups, not necessarily in the mainstream
(eg: itās completely fine for Romani* people to be portrayed as criminals because no one you know has ever batted an eye about it)
*more commonly called āgypsiesā in my experience, but this is considered a slur by the members of the community Iāve seen. Iām clarifying here because Iām legitimately not sure if many people would recognize their actual name, but Iām not opposed to censoring it if itās preferable.
4. Something that they should actively participate in or facilitate
(eg: making or allowing racist remarks, attempting BDSM techniques without proper communication or research)
Pick Your Battles
Thereās also a spectrum of how seriously these trends need to be taken on their own. Hereās a little chart Iāve created for the occasion.
(Note: Do not take every pixel of color on this chart as my infallible, fully-formed belief. I literally made this on my phone with my finger.)
The blue section (the intersection of mainstream belief and zero harm) is of least concern. These are the non-issues. Think of the most unoffensive show you can, and this is that.
The red section (the intersection of immediate real-life harm and mainstream belief) is of highest concern, because these ideas are both dangerous enough to directly cause harm and popular enough to actually incite people to act on them.
Notice that both these colors curve up and around to also include the maximum heights of āunanimous immorality.ā This is because some things that harm no one are vehemently despised by the culture they appear in, and some things that everyone theoretically hates can, due to cultural complications or lack of control by the general public, still happen.
The center of the chart is yellow. This is where things getā¦ Complicated. Thereās the capacity for harm, but it isnāt necessarily immediate or tangible. Thereās variable or split opinions on the morality of the idea. This zone is, in my eyes anyway, the origin of āproblematic.ā
It Both Is and Is Not That Serious
Oftentimes the things that fall into this category arenāt inherently bad, but their unanimity makes them so. Maybe thereās competing representation or access needs at play, or maybe thereās a complicated web of good and bad elements that are hard to separate from one another. Either way, itās hard to decide how to handle the situation.
So we justā¦ donāt.
By throwing out the baby with the bath water, we avoid the uncomfortable experience of examining the borders of our social justice while reframing our hasty dismissals as being unarguably goodā āunarguablyā being the key term. But to actually rectify the problems in our media, we have to ask what the complete dismissal of a work will achieve.
Will total refusal to engage with it in good faith contribute to solving a certain problem? Sometimes it can, particularly if itās a work made in bad faith that would benefit from your attention. But many times what it actually does is contribute to a very Puritan view of fiction that only allows us to consume āmoralā stories, for fear that any slight sign of immorality is infectious and corrupting beyond our control. Recall my point about fiction being unable to directly control our actions, only influence our ideas of ānormal.ā
Now, thatās not the only reason people can be overly reactionary. Thereās a second part that often goes with it.
It feels good to hate something.
This is something that has always been very prevalent in Hoyoverse fandoms. Itās very socially acceptable to hate on games like these since thereās already a lot to rag on genuinely. But when the more actively destructive elements are done to death, this lingering desire for justice manifests in treating yellow-level issues, ones that are multifaceted and/or mostly informed by context, as orange or red level problems. Then the game is trashed for being irredeemable. Itās very convenient for the content cycle and social media algorithms.
Iām now seeing these tendencies replicated by fandoms and individuals on their own time. It isnāt in vogue to have nuanced takes on our media, especially not when it does have distasteful elements. This can be seen when the creator of a work is outed as being an objectively awful person in some way. Itās not just that this person is bad, itās that their creations are bad, their creative choices somehow communicated their evil nature, and everyone was stupid for not seeing it or supporting the creatorās actions by not publicly declaring that the work was always bad.
Thereās a point to be made in cutting financial support to the creator, but it clearly isnāt about that. It just isnāt possible to identify a bad person simply by how disturbing their work is, even less so by its quality. This way of thinking allows many abusive people to skate by on the grounds that ābad people canāt make good art,ā as well as making the worrying assertion that āgood people canāt make uncomfortable art.ā
And if they do make uncomfortable art, the audience will demand to be spoon fed confirmation that no, the creator doesnāt actually support the actions of the antagonist.
Donāt Think, Just Feel: Ending Remarks
Anti-intellectualism has been on the rise for a while. In the USA at least.
It started with jokes about the curtains being blue. About how English teachers are just making things up and art doesnāt really mean anything.
And now weāre here, unable to figure out for ourselves whether or not an author means this thing or the other, and wonāt they just confirm it on social media? If they donāt, simply assume the worst. Simply take the text at face value or make arbitrary connections with little textual evidence.
If you got this far, thank you for humoring me. This topic means a lot. You can probably tell that Iām an English major, and Iāve watched as online discourse has taken a nosedive directly into reactionary Puritanism over the course of my life.
I will never forget that day on the Amino (yes, Amino) of my favorite book series when the moderators (likely preteens or teens) banned any discussion of an important canon couple for one reason:
Via a fanon conversion method, it had been determined that the guy was technically an adult and the girl was technically a teenager when they metā¦
In dragon years.
Dragon years.
Notoriously one-to-one with human years.
There may have been an interview with the author where she went āoh whoops sorry I didnāt mean for it to come out that way,ā but I donāt entirely remember. All I know was that theyād declared it immoral and any talk or art of it would be deleted.
And no one said anything about how ridiculous it was!
Itās a pretty stupid story, but that was really the moment in which I saw with full clarity that such a level of moral panic was not based in real problems. It was some amorphous obsession with virtue and control headed by people trapped in an echo chamber they couldnāt see. And now itās worse.
A bad feeling does not determine morality. Personal distaste does not determine morality. Your own ignorance does not determine morality.
Itās been hard for me in the past few years. Sometimes I feel a little like Iām going crazy when I see people saying blatantly wrong things and refusing to think about what theyāre saying. My own education, I will never ever take it for granted I swear on the very concept of God, seems like forbidden knowledge at this point, and itāsā¦ Terrifying. Deeply terrifying. People are so happy for censorship, and I justā¦.
I couldnāt just watch anymore. I couldnāt.
Thank you for reading. Iād love to discuss this with you all since Iām by no means the final authority on fandom things.
hello Iāve been thinking about this a lot lately. The anonymity of tumblr means that I associate my idea/image of you with your icon and sometimes I look at peopleās icons and Iām likeĀ āhmmmā¦.what is that and why?āĀ
so pls reblog this and comment in the tags the meaning behind your icon and why you chose it. this is a social experiment. do it for science pls.
dailybridgerton
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
tangentwithtanner
gummygunk
origamiaround
