@vixenscratch / vixenscratch.tumblr.com
Having gender feels/mild confusion and realizing most of my inner circle consists of cis guys. Which is normally fine and whatever, but when I’m questioning whether something I experienced starting at ~13 was dysphoria or just something menstruating people go through IT’S NOT THAT HELPFUL.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate cis male friends trying to be supportive, but uh… you kinda have little to no relevant experience here, my guy.
that ‘pakige?’ post but me, a couple hours after posting a fic, like ‘comints?’
F5 F5 F5
… F5 F5 F5 F5F5F5F5F5
now more than ever it's blatantly obvious that people go out of their way to erase trans men from communities and queer history. it's always been happening, but it's way easier to watch it in real time now thanks to the internet and social media. we are watching people basically gloating that they misgender trans men and don't see them as men. we are now watching people kick trans men out of queer spaces because they are often "femme and them" or "nonbinary and woman" support groups, conflating nonbinary identities with womanhood, and denying trans men or transmasc nonbinary people places to go. many of them get told that their presence would "scare" the lesbians, women and enbies because they have trauma.
where do the trans men with trauma go, though? we can't go anywhere. when i was struggling with domestic violence that ended up destroying my right leg, i was denied shelter in queer spaces and even women's spaces even though i have F on license. domestic violence shelters especially will turn trans men away if we pass. even if we partially identify as women, we can't go in because 'our voices are deep and scary and we're loud and aggressive and threatening and might prey on the defenseless scared women'
finding transmasc support groups is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. i've seen numerous organizations across the US have transfemme support groups, nonbinary/genderqueer support groups, and then nothing for transmascs. where the hell do we go when they won't let us go anywhere?
we try to exist online and they try to erase us from here, too. bickering and arguing about how we're not real men, sending trans men death and sexual assault threats, acting like they're saviors for kicking out the "dangerous ugly men" from the queer community, as if we don't belong to it at all.
i refuse to be erased. i refuse to sit in silence while people tell me my problems don't matter because now i "have male privilege". I don't. once people find out what my legal name is they view me as a woman. strangers however view me as a cis man and will deny me help, either through programs, or because i'm a "strong young man, i should be able to pick myself up by my boot straps." i'm not white. i'm not abled.
i'm proud to be a trans man and i will be here to fight for other trans men's rights to have a platform to speak, and spaces to occupy. i will not rest until trans men & mascs have safe places to be and meet other trans men.
trans men are queer. we belong here. we are taking up the space we rightfully deserve and we are not leaving.
How did you train your cats to not wake you up?
By rolling over and stubbornly feigning sleep if they did.
Their brains are little cause-effect engines. If standing next to your face and yelling until you feed them doesn't actually produce that result, they'll eventually stop doing it. You just have to outlast them.
What if your alarm goes off before they get tired?
Then you really overtly respond to the alarm before you pay attention to them. They'll eventually learn that the alarm is what wakes you, not them. Mal and Vice actually do react to my alarm before my eyes open, they usually get cued up when they hear it because awake/petting time is right after.
My beloved fluffy hellbeast figured out that if she chews on cords/electronics, I stop ignoring her/pretending to be asleep. I sadly have found no solution short of banishing her from my bedroom. Cats eating cell phones and chargers not acceptable.
Do you guys remember how kidnap fantasies were popular on wattpad because young girls and queer teens were both made to feel shame at the thought of their own sexualities, so the fantasy of being kidnapped totally against their will was a way for them to engage with a romantic or sexual fantasy without feeling morally in the wrong for doing so? Added bonus that the fantasy involved being whisked away from repressive environments like home or school, right?
Finding out that Bram Stoker was in a sexless marriage and that scholars believe that he very likely was closeted gay puts the entire book into perspective as to WHY it reads EXACTLY like a self insert wattpad Dracula kidnap fic:
“I TOTALLY love my wife and would never do anything that an upstanding Good Straight Working Man wouldn’t do but oh nooo, big strong man with broad back and strong enough arms to carry me back to bed like a princess trapped me and claimed me as his, completely against my will 👉👈 But he protects me against the bad evil sexual women (who I assure you, I am TOTALLY sexually attracted to, as any straight man with a choice would be) but trust me, I do NOT want ANY of this. What’s that? The Count is not capable of feeling love? Would be a shame if I had the special ability to change tha-”
This is also the fantasy behind all those old bodice-ripper romances that people today like to mock or call problematic, by the way.
“Oh, my next forty years are going to consist of nothing but washing dishes and keeping house and bearing children for the disdainful man I married right out of high school because my parents said college was for men and I had no other obvious life path open to me? What if a pirate captain thought I was worth stealing away from it all? [what if I ran away but no-one could blame me for leaving]?”
#I read an article a long time ago about a woman who was raised in an incredibly repressive conservative christian community#where all that mattered was purity and virginity etc #She talked about how for a long time rape fantasies were the only way she could derive any pleasure from sex #because she couldn’t feel safe exploring the idea of wanting sex #it wasn’t really ABOUT rape or eroticizing assault or whatever #it was about creating a scenario where she was free from the shame associated with wanting #i think this is true of a lot of icky-seeming stuff in romance and erotica #it’s an imaginary scenario where nothing you don’t really want actually happens #but you can’t be blamed or feel guilty for it #you didn’t do anything wrong#anyway that article changed my perspective a lot #i think there’s also something to be said for people who have felt ugly and undesirable their whole lives #enjoying fictional scenarios where a hot alpha werewolf or whatever is so attracted to them he ‘cant help himself’ or whatever #because it can also be really shameful to want to be desired #when you feel like youre ugly and gross ( @headspace-hotel )
#i had recently similar realization when stumbling into pit of y/n x character stories about “your dad’s handsome best friend”#it immediately introduces age gap where the man (usually) is middle aged and generally experienced#and y/n is a young adult at best but always exploring their sexuality for the first time#of course part of why this trope is popular is that teens tend to have crushes on adults#but I kept wondering why it has to be dad’s best friend until it hit me: it’s about safety#person who is your parents friend is a person who isn’t scum bc otherwise your parents would be friends with them#they’re safe and not a predator preying on young and impressionable like a groomer might#they’re your parents friend so they care about you too#which makes the fantasy at the same time spicy (age difference) and safe (dad’s bestie can’t hurt you)#idk it’s just interested how sometimes our brains try to justify things to us
@thirstyforred i hope you don’t mind me pulling up your tags because you’ve made a GREAT point which I think is also echoed in the following tropes:
While irl age gap relationships very much have the potential to be predatory, it is worth recognising why some people consider them attractive in fiction and what these fantasies help them explore.
I’m sorry to bring up HP, but let’s take Snape, for example, since I remember him being a massive hot commodity back on 2012 Deviantart. I heavily doubt that most tweens girls who had a crush on Snape would actually want to get on with their teacher - it was just a fictional crush which allowed them to explore their likes and dislikes in a safe environment (and also let this man move on from his high school crush, which is also fair because let’s be honest he NEEDS to let go of it.)
So yeah, this post does put a lot of tropes and kinks into perspective, which I think is important because one’s squick is another’s fantasy, and neither of these people are inherently more/less virtuous/problematic for liking or disliking it. Fiction is fiction. Real life is real life. What is cool in a book isn’t necessarily what you’d like to experience irl and vice versa, and it’s good to bear in mind that people’s experiences are different than yours and their takeaway from a piece of media might be different from yours.
This reminds me of that deep dive post about the Labyrinth and how it came out in a time when girls weren’t supposed to like anything to do with sex. Yet here is an attractive older gent offering to give you everything and be your slave if you say yes and run away from your crappy family
a flip side of “one person’s squick is another person’s fantasy and it doesn’t say much about their RL values” is that there are other subsets of rape fantasy whose focus is squarely on experiencing violence, unwillingness, violation, coercion, distress, etc - it’s quite common in whump and hurt/comfort fanfiction, for example. there can be elements of martyrdom involved, or of having one’s pain validated and projected into larger-than-life form, or other explicable kinds of emotional payoff, but tbh the common denominator in a lot of taboo fantasies seems to boil down to the human brain being really good at both “wow, wouldn’t it be fucked-up if–” and “wow, that sure is a high-voltage psychological hot button you’ve got there! wonder what would happen if someone eroticized it.”
this doesn’t mean the bodice-ripper phenomenon isn’t significant and worthy of attention, of course; i just get twitchy when discussion of it veers towards “well ackshually rape/kidnapping/abuse fantasies are okay because zero women really fantasize about the bad parts - all the violence in fantasies of sexual violence is just an instrumental way to defuse the shame of wanting sex. in fact maybe we should rename them all to ‘ravishment’ or 'reluctance’ or 'forcefulness’ fantasies, and claim true rape fantasies can’t exist and are a contradiction in terms!”
which is an overreach and a misdirection because:
1. i can assure you that lots of people are there for the “not wanting it” part itself and the bad parts in general (and, incidentally, that tons of teens and tweens do in fact have horny teacher crushes, regardless of their opinions on whether that’d be a good idea to pursue IRL)
2. it’s not because they secretly want to be raped either; it’s because what the “you” who’s the POV character of a fantasy wants, what the “you” who’s in control of the narrative wants to run fantasy scenarios about, your actual desires, and your RL choices of what to do/pursue/agree to can all be distinct, often with opaque and paradoxical relationships between them.
3. the shame-avoidance motivation is a super interesting part of bodice-ripper fantasies’ appeal, and goes a long way towards making that appeal understandable to people who aren’t into it, but it is not what grants them some magical ethical-acceptability hall pass. treating it like it is throws a lot of people under the bus for having other mechanisms behind their fantasies, a disproportionate number of whom are people whose damage about rape culture just emerges in a slightly different form.
(there is a parallel temptation among “what if ✨terrible things✨ happened to my fantasy avatar” types to treat more romantic flavors of coercion fantasy as ethically dubious, for sugarcoating abuse or promoting warped understandings of consent and predation or somesuch. and while there are discussions to be had there re: society-wide failures in education on sex and consent, a lot of this reaction also seems to be rooted in squick and desire to distinguish between “virtuous thing i seek out for valid cathartic reasons” and “dastardly, inferior thing that may fall under similar labels but i want to avoid it because it makes my entire psyche break out in hives.” which… are not great conditions for having those conversations.)
anyway, yeah, it can be really hard to pin down what even one person is getting out of a story, let alone generalizing about what everyone who likes an entire subgenre is there for, let alone jumping to ironclad conclusions about its relationship to their values and beliefs. let’s keep that attitude extended to the ~problematic~ fantasies the ravishment stuff tends to get distinguished from when it’s explicated, because they do exist, and often have similarly compelling internal logic of their own.
me @ my mutuals
genuine question, do you think callout posts are inherently evil? like if someone's doing some weird shit and hiding it i think people would want to be warned about that at least. just try to discourage harassment as much as possible
The existence of a callout posts means that the targeted person will be harassed if enough people see it. There is no amount of "don't harass anyone mentioned in this doc/video" disclaimers that will prevent that. The post is now potentially a permanent record that anyone can cite for years into the future. You are now at the whims of unknown strangers to be banned from communities, kicked out of creative projects, or be blocked by friends, at any time with no warning. I would consider this to be harassment, but to people who don't know about how these things usually go down they would be seen as righteous whistle blowers.
No matter what you actually did, if your awkward interaction with someone was too sexual, or if you stated a shitty opinion about a complex topic, or if you misjudged someone's boundaries, or if you engaged with kink in a way that made someone outside the scene uncomfortable, you are now a predator. I have seen firsthand the game of telephone starting from "this person did/said something sexualized on an online platform where teenagers could have been present," to "acted creepy around teenagers," to "regularly sexually assaulted children," to "pedophile".
Callout posts do not actually stop the person from "doing weird shit". It depends on what you mean by "weird shit", but if you mean "secretly draws/engages with Bad Porn", which is what a lot of callout posts are about, I implore you to recognize that it is truly not your business to know every private action someone takes just because you follow them on social media. This applies to awkward interactions people have in private too. Sometimes it's patterns of abuse, but a lot of the time it's interpersonal drama that is not anyone else's business.
If by "weird shit" you mean that someone has demonstrated ongoing patterns of real emotional/financial/sexual/etc abuse, and it's something that cannot be handled by any other means (either privately or with legal action if relevant), then in those cases a callout post can potentially do more good than harm if it reaches the people that need to know about it.
The level of long-term mental anguish that a target can go through is absolutely no fucking joke. A callout post has the potential to be a gun to someone's head, especially if they're socially/mentally/physically disadvantaged to begin with, which conveniently describes the most likely people to be targeted with high profile callout posts. [This is because: 1.) Our communities are wayy more likely to self-police than the rest of the internet and 2.) there are groups such as kiwifarms that love when a trans girl does something they can suicide bait her with and they also love it when we infight, isolate, and attack each other.]
I don't think callout posts are inherently evil, but they do nothing to make the target not continue their unwanted behavior. The only good function a callout post can serve is to warn potential future victims. If there are no victims, no behavior that will DIRECTLY lead to someone being victimized, no scam being uncovered, no patterns of abuse being shared, then the only victim is the target of the callout post. Everyone else involved is just gawking at gossip and/or contributing to suicidal levels of anxiety to a stranger.
reblogging again to show the tags that should never be buried
Sharing prev tags because fuck they're important.
And also, like... I'm not going to go into the full story because I do not have that in me right now, but... I was very close to attempting suicide because of a harassment campaign that started with a few somewhat socmed-popular people making gross allegations against me. I had a plan for it. The only part I didn't do was follow through.
Because I was that fucking scared and hurt and wholeheartedly believed that I was about to become shunned from the furry community for the rest of forever. Like... "if I try to commission an artist in five years, they'll turn me away because of the things being said about me right now." That's more or less exactly how severe I thought things were becoming.
I can't fucking go to furmeets anymore. There's too much trauma and I don't have the tools to manage it.
As an adult I think me and all my friends should all have matching schedules and work like 20 hours a week and also everyone lives within 15 minutes of each other why is that so much to ask
Laios: He games. Adores single player RPG/action games set in a medieval fantasy setting where he can make his own character instead of playing one that is made for him. Makes his character a werewolf or equivalent whenever possible. Liked Darkest Dungeon. Disappointed with Spore, but loved SimAnt, let him talk to you about SimAnt.
Marcille: Huge fan of games that require a deep understanding of the mechanics combined with fantastic lore. Her favorite games combine the two along with character drama but she likes turn based games much much more than action/adventure. LOVED Dragon Age: Origins but didn't like Dragon Age II and Inquisition as much. She's the type of person who would play Rimworld but commit no war crimes.
Senshi: He doesn't game. Probably played Minesweeper or something a few times but it the hobby doesn't interest him.
Chilchuck: Has been playing Age of Empires II on and off since 1999. He heard a new version came out but he's uninterested. "A new game? Sorry, I already have a game."
Izutsumi: Isn't gaming, she may get hooked on a mobile game or two though.
Falin: Infrequent gamer. There's one or two narrative games that have really hooked her over the years but she's not a fan of games that require a large time commitment to either finish or learn the mechanics of. Has never drowned a guest in RollerCoaster Tycoon (okay, maybe one to see what happened but she reloaded immediately after.)
Kabru: He's playing competitive online games, usually has one main game that he focuses on for a period of time and then moves onto the next one. Enjoys playing against human players instead of NPCs. He's ranked in a higher tier in competitive modes despite not being online very often because he's good at coordinating teams in a way that lets him rise through the ranks quickly. Has saved a marriage via voice chat.
Mithrun: Doesn't game, hasn't gamed, likely will never game.
Thistle: He has a minecraft server with like 70 mods, you need to download his custom installer to join it. He is desperately trying to get people from going inactive and leaving. Very active in moderating the server from griefers and trolls.
Like. I'm trash and want to play off of/build from this. Sorry not sorry, OP, no offense intended.
I feel like romance mechanics/options would be important to Marcille. Like. Give her Baldur's Gate 3 and she will make alts just so she can romance all of her fave husbandos (monogamously only, she's the romance novel kind of gal after all).
Someone has absolutely tried to introduce Senshi to Cooking Mama. Said person was later pulled aside and shown how to do the tasks involved in Mama's recipes IRL.
Izutsumi has gotten drunk and played mocap Fruit Ninja at a party a non-zero number of times. She was good at it and later denied enjoying it.
Thistle probably fucking loves Botania and thinks the changes Vazkii made to make it more tedious to the day/night flowers are brilliant. (I'm not salty IDK what you're talking about.)
Separate from people's actual gaming preferences, I want to see the party play Mario Party purely for the chaos.
Anyone have tips for software/tool that's good for making family trees and charting character relationships?
Because, like... over on the Mastodon/Fediverse instance Aethy I've been a total wormbrained goblin about an OC that I transplanted from his original somewhat-typical fantasy setting to a modern AU where I could ship him with @prismatoxic's Nate because Nate is best angery problem child. And, uh.
Ferret's family is steadily growing as I explore his familial relationships more. (Every married couple on the tree save for Victor/Magdalene and Andrew/Savannah has 3+ children, they're just not shown.) I would love to be able to make a family tree for them, but I don't know what tools are out there and the one I used A Long Time Ago had some limitations that could end up awkward and also, like... I was on Win 95 at the time. I have no idea where the install media might be if it even still exists in the family.
executive dysfunction is legitimately physically uncomfortable. i’ll be trapped between two things, weirdly caught on how-much-time-it-might-take-me. i take hours worried im going to take hours doing things. i’ll sit on the floor for the entire day, caught up in the middle of not-doing the chores i actually do want to be doing.
& the amount of mental energy that goes into it. & the legitimate amount of anger and discomfort and self-hate. is not “being lazy”. it’d be a lot less work if i didn’t have to fight myself to just get up and do it.
i just need you to understand it’s not effortless. it’s never effortless. it’s not “okay let me just get up and finally start doing this.” it’s more like. i am slamming my foot on the pedal but the car is in neutral and nothing is moving. it’s more like shouting instructions into a dying telephone. it’s more like being trapped in a small electric box, and someone who hates me is administering shocks.
im trying. im trying. please help me get up.
yknow, ferret are known horders, which means weaselchuck would also be kind of a horder
he steals from marcille the most, keeps the stuff hidden somewhere, waits until she takes notice of the missing item and then gives it back
that's so cute... weaselchuck stealing things... but he's doing it instinctively so if you ask for it back he gives it... oughghhh i love him. chilchuck would be so mad to be beholden to animal instincts
This has nothing to do with Dunmeshi, and for that I apologize, but I have the funniest ferret-stashing-things story that I feel needs to be shared:
So I used to have a pet ferret, Felix. I also had two ragdoll cats at the time, Belladonna and Clementia.
Clemmy would simply find high ground to avoid Felix when he was out. Bella didn’t - she didn’t really like him but she wasn’t going to just yield the floor to him. (She was also still intact when Felix was around, and would be absolutely enamored with him while in heat.)
Bella became Felix’s favorite thing to try to steal and stash. Imagine this young hob, grabbing a fluffy-ass cat several times his size by the scruff and putting his whole body into pulling her across the floor. Most of the time she’d just kinda let herself be dragged, lying on the floor making the most plaintive little tiny the-world-is-ending mews. I think the farthest he ever managed to drag her was like 2-3 feet, though I don’t remember if it ended because he lost interest at that point or because she got fed up and decided to kick his ass.
His goal was always the same, too; no matter where he started, he would drag her towards the cabinets in the living room, to stash her under there.
(To be clear, I was 100% supervising their interactions, and would have intervened if anyone looked about to be seriously hurt.)
writer’s block (dry) = no desire to write, no ability to write (bearable)
writer’s block (wet) = HUGE desire to write, no ability to write (very evil)
Thank you for this distinction. I hate it.
there is always going to be something a little off-putting to me about claiming a definitive canon sexuality for a character that doesn't actually have one.
like, we all have our headcanons, of course. and that's fine. but there's a world of difference between "i headcanon this character as gay" and "this character is gay in canon", and so frequently the latter isn't even true. if it's not stated in the source material nor by the creator, then it isn't canon. and that's okay!!
like, okay, it doesn't affect me anyway because no listed sexuality could ever stop me from shipping what i want to, but also... this is so often just an excuse to be mad at people for shipping "the wrong thing". it also tends to dip really uncomfortably into biphobic/panphobic territory.
to use a relevant example, unless ryoko kui has officially stated marcille and/or falin are lesbians (i don't think she has?), you cannot act like they are canonically. not only do they have no in-canon definitive romance (because dunmeshi is not a romance story), but even if you interpret their bond as queer (and like, most of us do, i certainly do), that doesn't for sure mean they only like women. you can headcanon that they do, but you can't harass other fans for not treating them that way. you have to accept that they will both be shipped with men, and it's not homophobia unless the shipper in question is actually, you know, being homophobic about it.
nothing another fan does will ever change what happened in canon, nor alter your own fanwork. you can do whatever you want forever. if someone making your fave blorbo a sexuality you don't agree with pisses you off, block them. if they ship things you hate so much that it makes you mad, block them. you're allowed to. this is your space to curate as you please.
people on the other side do it, too. "ummm chilchuck has a wife" is something i've seen slung at m/m ships for him. not only does his canon wife (who, you know, left his ass, stop acting like shipping him with anyone else is unreasonable on that alone) not preclude headcanoning him as gay if you want to, but it ABSOLUTELY doesn't preclude him being bisexual. for fuck's sake. gay and straight are not the only sexualities. i'm going to drop the contents of a dirty litterbox on your head.
like... genuinely, headcanon whatever you want. you could make everyone in the cast the same exact sexuality if you wanted to. what you shouldn't be doing is acting like anyone else is beholden to your ideas. or, hell, even canon's ideas. fandom is about the freedom to do what you want with your blorbos. have fun with it and stop blaming other fans for not making the content YOU want.
ADGKHAKLDFJG so much all of this.
I have a very few characters that, if there was actually a fandom to address, I'd maybe respectfully ask "hey, this character is 100% gay/straight/ace and I'd kinda appreciate if you don't write them as anything else." (Off the top of my head, Roxeen, Aesuan, and Myen. (Maybe Socks, though technically I think his sexuality is more along the lines of indifference than acespec; he's definitely some flavor of romantic whether that be het/bi/pan/demi.) I have plenty other characters who are mono/asexual, but those three are... IDK. I can't articulate why I don't really want them portrayed off-canon sexuality-wise.) Would I be terribly upset if someone decided they really wanted to ship the three/four of them as a weird allosexual polycule? Nah, not really. Crackship your little freaky heart out if that's what your heart desires, and I'll still appreciate that you like my characters enough to engage.
But yeah. Bi/pan/foo representation is both difficult with monogamous characters (especially since many stories with romantic elements aren't long enough for serial monogamy to become a factor), and something that, like... I'm not terribly invested in representation. But bi erasure is pervasive enough in queer communities already, we don't need it in fandom discourse.
It probably doesn't hurt that I'm a sucker for If It's You It's Okay. I've got multiple characters who, canonically, have The One Exception type relationships in one way or another (in one case it's more pragmatism from someone who thinks there's no fish in the sea for them, but it's understood to be just that by all parties and they do care about each other). In general I tend to like writing relationships with… sexuality being something of a minimal concern. Like, it affects whom the character is attracted to, but they go for the object of their attraction because of that attraction, not because the person matches their sexual preference. Maybe that’s splitting hairs or maybe I just don’t get how romantic attraction works for other people, IDK.
In a similar vein, if you write a character as gay after Season 1, and they unequivocally declare themselves as straighter than a laser beam in Season 2, far as I'm concerned you didn't write them off canon; at worst you're canon-divergent. Because going by the canon as it exists at the point of writing is the most anyone can do.
(Hell, in the case of Chilchuck, I have one AU where the separation from his wife was a bit more mutual, and “more gay than he realized” was a factor. Because, like… that’s a thing that happens, and for that particular AU it was what I wanted.)
Unstoppable Force (my love of seeing other people's takes/stylization on my OCs) vs Immovable Object (my gripping fear of not doing other people's OCs enough justice when I draw them)
I am so fucking puzzled. Some people have been reblogging Supernatural stuff, so I went "okay, I'll give the show another chance, I do like it when it deigns to actually be a monster-of-the-week thing" and like... I know I've watched it before, but I'm not recognizing, like... any episodes. Did I... skip season 1 last time or something?
Because not at least going "oh yeah, I saw this before!" is excessive levels of forgetting, even for me. Like. I maybe recognized the episode with the hitchhiking murder lady, and that was about it.
one profession that does need better gatekeeping is people who write or translate subtitles. brother that is not what was said.
Okay, so, sad industry facts time. I've not actually worked as a subtitler, but it was a career I considered for a while, and I have at least one friend who's done some.
At least Swedish subtitles, though I suspect this is pretty industry wide, suffer from subtitlers' labor being seriously undervalued. Most subtitlers could probably do a better job, if they were adequately paid and given adequate time to do their job. Instead the pay is low (for translation work, which is also seeing a drop in perceived value) and the expected volume high.
I roll my eyes and/or laugh at errors in subtitles as much as anyone, NGL, but the solution is 100% not gatekeeping. Because I can pretty much guarantee that the problem is someone up the food chain making bad/stingy decisions about what's good enough.
