the Now but Not Yet

Waffles. Hong Kong-London. Ao3 @WafflesRisa.

[buginateacup]

Every single fic update there is an author trying frantically to find the right balance between a nonchalant aside of "leave a comment if you enjoyed =)" and clinging desperately to the coat tails of a random stranger, dragging along behind them on the street wailing "Please, please! I have to know what you thought! I'm desperate to talk to people about this! Ask me about the alliterative repetition! Ask me about the symbolism!"

[inyourorbitx]

@the-communist-unicorn peak comment

[ratbastarddotfuck]

tumblr userbase is going to become unconscionably insufferable in response to this taste of power I suspect. don't let it go to your heads.

[ratbastarddotfuck]

Lots of talk about "bullying wins" and little talk about power and the flow of capital, which is what matters to the corporate bigheads who approve these things. imo a few things were at play here to make them rescind this.

- It was buggy. Tags not showing up for an OP past even an empty reblog did not appear to be intended (or at least, it was not mentioned in the announcement), and is a MAJOR problem. Specifically, it undoes the major update from around 5 years ago which was heavily praised by the userbase (one of few tumblr updates to actually be widely well recieved) which allowed a poster to see tags in their activity feed. If this was the only problem, they could have launched a bug fix. Same goes for not being able to turn off reblogs.

- Userbase unity? Well, maybe. Specifically - the userbase had a swift, harsh, and overbearing response to this update. Most of the complaints were the same: this will exacerbate harassment, this will disrupt the flow of communication, this will make it impossible for someone to maintain their posts. Big names in the tumblr ecosystem came down hard, fast, and with significant concern: if this stays in place, I will have to leave - this place will not do what I need it to do. Much of the userbase said the same, sharing alternate blog hosting sites and doing the thing we always do when this ship looks like sinking. Additionally, their replies and feedback forms were obviously being flooded. This put real pressure on their workers in the office, which puts financial pressure on the company. I think the most disrupting tactic though, was going offsite. I checked out their instagram and twitter comments; they were flooded. This is something we Don't Usually Do when we're just whining about the newest change. Usually we stay here to complain but we make do with the change. This, I think, is the thing that signified people weren't just whining but were actually for real pissed. And then of course...

- Five hours before the roll-back announcement, an article drops. That kind of bad press is the nail in the coffin for a dying company like tumblr. I imagine several concerned meetings somewhere in those five hours.

What do we learn? The answer is not "bullying works" and "swearing at customer service reps is fun". The answer is to remember that online, we are both the product and the thing that creates the value (similar to but obviously distinct from the actual workers of a corporation; if we vanished overnight they'd have nothing). Brush up on your collective bargaining & try to understand why this happened in this way. And don't try to replicate this for every random update that comes next by endlessly harassing them. Take stock of the little power you have and work out where to put it to use. This is still just tumblr.

[bardic-tales]

The Death of the Digital Ecosystem: Why Decoupling Notes Destroys Tumblr

@staff

For years, the total note count on a post served as a universal metric of a piece of content's impact. Whether a user liked the original post or a reblog fifteen branches deep, that engagement flowed back to the source. This ensured that the original artist, writer, or editor received the full credit for the viral success of their work.

Under this new system, engagement is trapped within the specific reblog a user happens to see on their dashboard. If a massive, high-traffic blog reblogs a piece of art from a small creator, every like and reblog that occurs through that larger account stays with them. The original creator is left with a stagnant note count on their own dashboard while their work generates thousands of interactions for someone else.

Erasure of Creator Visibility

Instead of seeing one post with 10,000 notes, a creator may now have to hunt through dozens of different reblog chains to find where the conversation is actually happening.

If the notes no longer flow back to the original post, the creator loses the ability to see who is enjoying their work, what the tags say, and how the community is responding.

On a platform where engagement often dictates visibility, splitting that engagement into tiny, unlinked fractions makes it significantly harder for original works to gain momentum compared to the high-reach blogs that reblog them.

Incentivizing the "Big Blog" Monopoly

This system rewards accounts that have already established a large following at the direct expense of the smaller accounts that actually produce the content. It transforms reblogging from a method of sharing into a method of acquisition.

When a reblog functions as its own independent post with its own note count, the incentive to click through to the original source disappears. The platform is transitioning from a collaborative ecosystem into a standard social media feed where the person who posts the content last—not the person who made it—reaps the rewards.

Impact on Collaborative Conversations

Tumblr’s unique culture is built on the reblog chain: a chronological, evolving conversation. By allowing users to like or reblog "any part" of the chain as an independent entity, the platform is breaking the narrative thread.

If engagement is siloed into specific branches, the incentive to add to a conversation is replaced by an incentive to simply own a piece of the engagement. This change doesn't encourage conversation. It encourages the commodification of individual posts within a chain, making it harder for the original voice to ever be heard over the noise of the rebloggers.

The Disincentive to Create

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of this update is the psychological toll on the creative community. When the platform actively diverts credit and engagement away from the source, it destroys the motivation to share original work at all.

For many, the reward for posting is seeing how far their work travels. If that travel is now invisible or attributed to others, the labor of creating becomes thankless.

This system makes creators want to share nothing. If the platform is built to harvest a creator's effort for the benefit of curator blogs, the logical response is to stop providing the raw material. I am one leaning into this category. Without us creators, the curator blogs have nothing to curate.

By making it harder to protect and track one's own work, the platform is effectively telling creators that their presence is secondary to the conversations happening around their work: conversations they may no longer even be able to find.

[seaplease]

[slutforpringles]

ding dong the witch is dead 🥳🎉🎊🙌🏻

[wafflesrisa]

[wejustvibing]

he noticed the cameras and said let me show you 😭😭😭 (or at least i hope he did because 😭😭😭)

[formula1-sideblog]

[goodbyetothenight]

"Here, I brought you a burger."

[wafflesrisa]

Anon - I completely agree. I won’t post your ask because as you say, it’s a heavy topic. I think when we stop seeing people as individual people, it’s very easy to be consumed by blind hatred for groups at a time. It’s a dangerous path to walk, and anyone can fall to it unless they watch out for it

[eirianerisdar]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Or read on FFN

Fic Summary:

Eight years after the Sky People were defeated at the battle of the Floating Mountains, Tonowari encounters a strange Sky Person child, Spider, under the care of the Omaticaya clan.

The more he learns about this child, the more horrified he becomes.

Tonowari was never one to allow any child to grow without a loving family. Spider is no exception, even if Tonowari must adopt him himself.

Now, if only Jake were to agree...

Chapter 2/?: The Hungry Thief

Spider battles hunger and cold. Tonowari gets closer to solving the mystery of the child in the grass, and enlists the help of a completely unaware Jake.

[wafflesrisa]

There are a number of people on different social media platforms saying that Neytiri can’t be racist, given that her people are the ones systematically oppressed and humans on Pandora are not (so she’s simply “xenophobic” or “righteously angry”).

In the gentlest way possible, I would like to suggest that that line of reasoning sounds very similar to the modern-day argument that “oppressed people cant be racist”.

My own great-grandparents fled from the their ancestral lands against the oncoming tide of the pillaging, sexually violent, brutal imperial Japanese army. They worked in a land foreign to them homeless, hand to mouth, in hard labour to survive for years. My grandparents bear the same generational trauma.

If today I brought home a nice, gentle, even Chinese-speaking Japanese man, my grandparents would have likely disowned me.

The Japanese are not currently facing any kind of structural oppression. And yet - my grandparents are racist.

The humans on Pandora are the oppressors, not the oppressed. Neytiri despises the human in her children, her husband, in Spider. Call it what it is. She was racist, until she learned to See.

[wafflesrisa]

Jake, Neytiri and Spider in Avatar: Fire and Ash - a meta essay on racism and post-colonial trauma

(Warning: heavy Avatar: Fire and Ash spoilers below, reader beware!)

AFAA has a lot of nuanced, meaningful things to say about race and cultural trauma.

1. Spider choking in his sleep

Spider’s exopack malfunctions and he starts asphyxiating in his sleep. The whole family panics and tears the pod apart searching for his spare, except Neytiri. She just stands there, eerie, calm.

At that moment, still in her mourning veil, the audience realises she would be happy for Spider to die. The Sky People took her son, and in her eyes, her son’s empty pallet has a Sky Person breathing in it.

It’s not a surprise that later, when Spider can breathe without a mask, she flatly suggests killing him outright. Jake is shocked. But the audience understands. To Neytiri, Spider is just another Sky Person, and she hates them with all her being. She does not see him. She just sees his exterior - a Sky Person.

2. Jake and Neytiri’s argument

This confrontation was the most important scene for Jake and Neytiri’s character development in the entire movie. Neytiri is forced to say ugly words out loud: she hates Sky People. She hates their pink fingers and pink skin. She hates, hates,hates.

Some people have defended Neytiri here by saying she is reasonable to hate genocidal colonizers who destroyed her people and slaughtered her family. But that’s not what’s happening here. Neytiri hates her internally-human husband. She hates her half-human children. She hates Spider, a child arguably more Na’vi than her husband in all but appearance, who underwent torture to protect her family.

Neytiri is racist.

It is true that she has suffered generational and personal trauma from racial genocide. But she is blinded by her suffering. And she is wrong.

Jake calls her out on it. Note that it’s very dangerous thing to have an effectively white human husband call out his indigenous wife for racism, because the audience may be tempted to “white knight” him.

- But then the script takes a fascinating turn that completely flips this on its head.

3. The flight back and Spider’s near-killing

On the flight back, Spider sits between Jake and Neytiri, the physical representation of the gulf between the two of them.

But Spider sleeps against Neytiri’s back, and she lets him. Neytiri is Omaticaya. And what Spider has done - save Jake’s life - through her own cultural lens, was enough for her to see that he is really Omaticaya at heart. His loyalty is Omaticaya. His heart is of Eywa. He may look like a Sky Person, but he is Na’vi at heart.

But Jake, who had seen the same thing as Neytiri (Spider heroically saving his life) interprets events through his own cultural lens, and his conclusion is that Spider needs to die. Jake may look Na’vi, but he is human military at heart. This mean he can be utilitarian in a way that Neytiri could never be, the way Na’vi can ever be. It is wrong. Jake, who looks Na’vi, makes a Sky Person choice.

The next scene is heartbreaking, not least because Spider is so unrelentingly Na’vi himself that he accepts his fate to “go be with Eywa”. He chooses what is best for the everyone else. He wanted to die loved.

Of course Jake doesn’t go through with it. But it’s not because he had a change of his moral values. He just didn’t have the guts. Meanwhile Neytiri, with her red face paint washing across her hands - she runs to stop this, because That. Child. Is. Omaticaya. And she knows it now.

It is telling, that when Neytiri finds them, Spider doesn’t look at Jake. He looks at her. She says “I see you.” And Spider smiles.

There is a connection based on a shared cultural understanding passing between Spider and Neytiri, that Jake does not understand.

Final thoughts: real connection comes from seeing the inside

Jake: a Na’vi body with a human heart. Spider: a Sky Person body with a Na’vi heart.

Neytiri: she learned to see past what is outside to see inside. That is what real connection is. That is what real love in the face of racial and cultural barriers is to see inside a person for who they are, as an individual, separate from the characteristics of the group they may externally resemble.

To say I love you. I know you. I see you.

[wafflesrisa]

I have a desperate need to write meta on the themes of racism and generational colonial trauma in the Avatar franchise

Especially the way Neytiri, Jake and Spider are written in Avatar: Fire and Ash

[lislemons]

the third avatar is a story about having enough swag as a white boy you transcend spiritual boundaries to get to your friends’ afterlife

[wafflesrisa]

Avatar: Fire and Ash - love some emotionally constipated marines

[wafflesrisa]

It’s 2am and I can’t get over certain details in that Avatar: Fire and Ash scene (spoilers beware)

.

.

.

Spider falling asleep against the warmth of Neytiri’s back; her letting him

The role reversal when Neytiri, who earlier suggested killing Spider, argues for Spider’s life

Spider awkward eagerness when he asks “is this a talk?”

Jake telling him to shut up cause he can’t bear Spider’s voice

Jake didn’t hide the knife from Spider because he knew Spider wouldn’t even think Spider would use it against him

Spider asking “but you love me though, right?” in that small voice because he is fundamentally a child so starved of parental affection that he is willing to die to hear it just once

Jake’s first and only time calling Spider “Son” was with a knife at Spider’s throat

Neytiri’s face paint washing over her hands like guilty blood

Neytiri crashing through the undergrowth towards them and the sheer terror on her face because she can’t tell on approach if Jake is cradling a dead Spider or not

[wafflesrisa]

Avatar: Fire and Ash spoilers without context