The Three Laws of Fandom

If you wish to take part in any fandom, you need to accept and respect these three laws.

If you aren’t able to do that, then you need to realise that your actions are making fandom unsafe for creators. That you are stifling creativity.

Like vaccination, fandom only works if everyone respects these rules. Creators need to be free to make their fanart, fanfics and all other content without fear of being harassed or concern-trolled for their creative choices, no matter whether you happen to like that content or not.

The First Law of Fandom

Don’t Like; Don’t Read (DL;DR)

It is up to you what you see online. It is not anyone else’s place to tell you what you should or should not consume in terms of content; it is not up to anyone else to police the internet so that you do not see things you do not like. At the same time, it is not up to YOU to police fandom to protect yourself or anyone else, real or hypothetical.

There are tools out there to help protect you if you have triggers or squicks. Learn to use them, and to take care of your own mental health. If you are consuming fan-made content and you find that you are disliking it - STOP.

The Second Law of Fandom

Your Kink Is Not My Kink (YKINMK)

Simply put, this means that everyone likes different things. It’s not up to you to determine what creators are allowed to create. It’s not up to you to police fandom. 

If you don’t like something, you can post meta about it or create contrarian content yourself, seek to convert other fans to your way of thinking.  

But you have no right to say to any creator “I do not like this, therefore you should not create it. Nobody should like this. It should not exist.”

It’s not up to you to decide what other people are allowed to like or not like, to create or not to create. That’s censorship. Don’t do it.

The Third Law of Fandom

Ship And Let Ship (SALS)

Much (though not all) fandom is about shipping. There are as many possible ships as there are fans, maybe more. You may have an OTP (One True Pairing), you may have a NOTP, that pairing that makes you want to barf at the very thought of its existence.

It’s not up to you to police ships or to determine what other people are allowed to ship. Just because you find that one particular ship problematic or disgusting, does not mean that other people are not allowed to explore its possibilities in their fanworks.

You are free to create contrarian content, to write meta about why a particular ship is repulsive, to discuss it endlessly on your private blog with like-minded persons.

It is not appropriate to harass creators about their ships, it is not appropriate to demand they do not create any more fanworks about those ships, or that they create fanwork only in a manner that you deem appropriate.

These three laws add up to the following:

You are not paying for fanworks content, and you have no rights to it other than to choose to consume it, or not consume it. If you do choose to consume it, do not then attack the creator if it wasn’t to your taste. That’s the height of bad manners.

Be courteous in fandom. It makes the whole experience better for all of us.

well personally i like it when there’s incest and necrophilia and murder and cannibalism and abuse and torture and gore and mutilation and body horror and sexual depravity and death.

Superhero comic readers dont actually enjoy anythingwe just kinda liked one story once and are just forever stuck chasing that high

If your liveblogging doesnt look like youre being tortured youre doing it wrong

in hushed whispers just feels like this

same moment different angle

The bullet bandolier over the skirts is a look. 😌

these pictures of a platoon of og antifa drag queens manning a gun bigger than my car better not awaken anything in me.

jury-rigged. even keel. by the board. three sheets to the wind. loose cannon. son of a gun. pipe down. taken aback.

Give me some leeway, hit the head, learning the ropes, the cat is out of the bag, get underway, the cut of your jib, true colors, hand over fist

under the weather, in the doldrums, long shot, toe the line, groggy, aloof, overhaul, mainstay, pooped, keel over, in the offing, give a wide berth, footloose, flying colors, press into service, shake a leg

Chock-a-block. Scuttlebutt. By and large. Above board. Slush fund. Batten down the hatches. Shot across the bow. At loggerheads. Squared away. Dead reckoning. Down in the doldrums. Touch and go. Fathom/plumb. Leading light. Overwhelm, overreach. Skyscraper (originally a sail at the very tip top of a mast!). The bitter end.

we’re all in the same boat

Origins of Astonishment (circa, 1997). Digital-medium

All of us when we realize this is the official Pokemon account

unmute

You only need to know one thing: meow.

[Video transcript:

(Meow in the background. The meows continue through the video.)

So, (meow) today I am making... (meow) (snicker) pine- (meow) pinecone dice. (meow) (meow) My cat- (meow) He- (meow) He wants to narrate, too (meow). SHUT UP, THUNDER. (a beat.) He's not allowed in the bedroom (meow) 'cause he beats my other cat up (meow) and she's in here right now (meow) so he's throwing a fit.

Anyways, we're making pineco- (wheeze) i lost my train of thought.

So, I use- (meow) (exasperated) pi- i can't fucking these blank inserts (meow) to put the pinecones in (a series of meows interrupt) and then I put the pl- I had this all planned out and I was gonna explain exactly what I was doing and then the (meow)... the CAT... (meow) (a beat.) (Some purring) Can you (purring) hear that? Listen to that)(meow)

Anyways I hope you like the dice, bye.

End transcript]

Look I love unconditional devotion love stories as much as the next person, but there's really something so deliciously raw about conditional devotion.

I have served you and I have loved you for decades, but I will not give up my principles for you. You cut out part of my heart and took it with you down that path that you insist on walking, but you walk it alone. Even when the bleeding, gaping hole you left in my chest kills me, I will not follow you.

me everytime one of my seemingly non-specific homoerotic text posts breaks containment

So this is something I find personally interesting, but the same crowd who’s upset Veilguard doesn’t have “dark themes” are also upset about things like Neve being nice to Lucanis even when you’re romancing one of them, or Veilguard implying Solas and Mythal were romantically involved. I also very rarely see them engage with the actual themes of the game.

My little pet theory is that Veilguard goes a little bit more personal than comfortable for people. Grief is something very real and one of the shittiest things I’ve ever encountered. Your decade-old situationship you never got over having other people in their life? Real, and it sucks as a feeling. Your boyfriend having other female friends? It happens, and I guess for some people it might be difficult to deal with.

But the “dark themes” people want things that are all more removed from real life. Maybe you can find some metaphors or parallels, but they’re not as personal and close to home. The conflict between fictional organizations in a fictional world will always be less personal than a girl sobbing over her dead brother’s body. That’s the thing—people say they want “maturity” in their games, but what they actually mean is aesthetic grimness. They want war and systemic oppression because those things create distance; they’re something you can analyze, moralize over, or engage with as a concept without it ever touching anything too raw. But Veilguard is dealing with affective realism—the kind of emotions that don’t let you sit comfortably at arm’s length. It’s about grief and insecurity and complicated relationships, and that’s more confronting than some war-torn dystopia where the suffering is big and dramatic but not personal.

Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism might also be useful here—how audiences often expect “maturity” to be presented in a way that aligns with traditional power fantasies (war, rebellion, systemic oppression) rather than the mundane, often humiliating struggles of personal relationships. The desire for “dark themes” often translates to a craving for aesthetic grimness or large-scale suffering rather than the discomfort of seeing one’s own vulnerabilities reflected in a character.

This is especially evident in the reaction to characters like Neve. People want a world where cruelty exists in a broad, conceptual way (racial slurs, war crimes, dystopian oppression), but they recoil when faced with kindness that challenges their personal hang-ups. Neve being decent to Lucanis despite his past, or the implication that Mythal and Solas had a complicated romantic history, are character beats that demand a certain level of introspection. They disrupt a more sanitized version of darkness—one that is removed enough to be thrilling rather than unsettling.

It’s kind of funny that a lot of the “dark themes” people feel are missing from Veilguard are actually more escapist than what’s already there. Oppression in a fantasy world? That’s a comfortable kind of darkness—it gives you a clear enemy, a role to play, a power fantasy. But insecurity? Personal grief? That’s messier. That’s something you don’t get to be above. And maybe that’s why people don’t want to engage with it.

And yeah, the irony is pretty thick—if people can’t even handle Neve being a nice person, how exactly do they expect to deal with anything actually challenging? How are you demanding racial slurs for “realism” when you can’t even deal with a character treating someone with basic decency?

James May

i've seen posts talking about leliana origins vs leliana inquisition

i've seen posts talking about harding inquisition vs harding veilguard

i've seen a lot of posts about a lot of dragon age women and how fundamentally different they are between their respective appearances in different games and i just...i wish there was a way to articulate how i feel about this beyond "being 20 and being 30, especially after significant trauma, is like being an entirely different person."

leliana goes from being a bubbly, joyful, enthusiastic spitfire to being a quiet, reserved spymaster who has a hard time being any kind of vulnerable with other people. this makes sense - she had already been through the wringer, but the events between da2 and inquisition kicked her ass. she is still capable of joy, bubbliness, enthusiasm, but she is much more reserved in the ways she shows it.

this isn't subtext. this is text.

we spend a very large amount of time with her between origins and inquisition - there is a lot of text to draw from.

harding goes from a sweet, hyper-competent scout who says exactly what she's thinking. we don't spend a lot of time with her - just Jaws of Hakkon and the introductory cutscene for each new location on the map. almost ten years later, she is a people pleaser, still hyper-competent but much more visibly invested in avoiding conflict in her relationships. except she doesn't. she openly threatens lucanis because of his abomination status. she openly judges emmrich for dating a younger rook. she is a people pleaser in a lot of ways, but she will still speak her mind, she is just more mindful about when she does it.

to me, that doesn't speak to mischaracterization - that speaks to her growth into a much adultier adult. she has spent the better part of the last decade working directly with the inquisitor, and the inquisition's advisors, learning from leliana and josephine about how to best deploy her words for maximum effect.

harding is 30% older than she was when she joined the inquisition. she was fundamentally changed by that experience. she is a different person than she was eight years ago.

anyway, aging is weird and hard to conceptualize when you haven't done it yet

stargate atlantis knocks it out of the park by having the lead character be literally just some guy. he was just oneill’s ride to base. a flying cab driver who basically immediately got sent to another galaxy to explore other worlds because he’s the specialest boy and the only one who can make intergalactic siri work. he doesn’t even know what a stargate is

Do you love yourself? I don’t have to answer that. It should matter.

— unfinished duet by richard siken