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i love villains who work for worse villains it’s hilarious. they just have a boss. cashing villain paychecks. taking villain lunch breaks. probably working villain overtime

#they need a villain union (via @evilswampchicken)

ok, tv show about the villain union please

monster of the week format but the monster of each week is a new villain boss taking advantage of their villain workers

some episodes the union negotiations will be interrupted by the heroes bursting in to foil the villain bosses’ plans but the show is not about that and it’s always like, in the background while the main characters are talking to the villain workers about their treatment and stuff

new fiction rule:

if one of your women characters are going to assist in a sudden unexpected birth at some point during their journey, they need to have mentioned earlier in the story that they have some hands-on midwivery experience. Maybe they're proud of it. Maybe it was just part of their life as an ocassional assistant to a family member. Whatever. But the plotline, "someone is in labor and there are no doctors/healers/whatever for miles? What a convenient time for me to mention for the first time EVER that I am experienced in this," has to go.

The only exception is if it's a character trait that this character consistently fails to mention numerous skills they have for comedic effect or because they're notably mysterious or vague about their past.

In general it's sort of poor planning when a character suddenly reveals they have a skill that solved the problem at hand for the first time when the problem arises. Examples:

In Jurassic Park, it's established mid-movie in a passing conversation that the girl Lex is "a hacker" who spends all day in her room doing whatever hackers do. She also expresses interest in all of the park computer technology. Later, when the system needs to come back online, she is the one with the skills to do it, which made narrative sense.

In Jurassic World, the new Child Duo TM do not express any interest in cars or mechanics, but when they suddenly need to fix an 30 year old jeep to escape, there's a line like, "remember that summer we spent fixing that car with Grandpa?"

Suddenly, they are car experts and in no time have a totally defunked jeep up and running again.

Yet a third example, I once read a series where, three bookes in, the protagonist is faced witha puzzle that requires someone who is able to see and talk to ghosts. She then brings up three books in that she can see and talk to ghosts. As if that's not something about a character that might be worth mentioning before.

The second and third examples bother me, because if you tell a story like that, how are there Ever any stakes? Any time a problem arises, why can't another character say, "oh by the way I can easily fix this right now?"

And with the "sudden midwivery skills," there's the added element of shoehorning women into sudden "woman roles" it's assumed they should have, as if midwivery isn't an entire career with yeats of training.

Honestly it's not like I actually am some writing authority, but this feels like it would work and be interesting!

Someone who is established to have worked with livestock saying that they at least have some relevent knowledge, i.e the risk of umbilical cord strangulation, how to care for a baby immediately after birth, what crowning looks like, the fact that the character would be far less squeamish than others about the entire process, etc.!

There's also not a problem with a character going in like, "I have no idea, but here goes my best....."

I take most issue with there being no stakes because anyone at any point can mention their relevant skill, especially when it means just slapping some "womanhood motherhood" skill onto a woman who we had no reason to believe knew how to do this before.

I gotta say, I love the idea of someone being like “Hey I helped deliver a cow once, I can help!” and then they’re like “I’ll just reach in and pull!” and everyone else is like “NO OH MY GOD NO.”

everyone else after the actual birth: what, you’re not gonna ask mom to lick the baby clean too?

them: shut up at least I was TRYING

I have no natural talent for swordplay, none. In fact when I first got into martial arts, it was plain to see that I had a lot of force behind my strikes, but no technique. My katas and evasions were miserable until I took up ballet, whereupon at least I did improve.

YOU MIGHT THINK, okay so what, being Not Good At Swords in Ohio in 2020 wouldn’t be worth mentioning, who cares? Well, my sister closest in age to me is Great with swords. A natural. Loves those funky blades. And people remember this.

So any time we’re somewhere with swords, people will call me out to get involved, and I’m like, “no, you’re thinking of the other redhead with a long-ass Czech last name who happens to look exactly the same as me. Please don’t get me involved.”

They’re always like, come on. Two apples from the same tree can’t fall far from each other.

In fact, I’m not even an apple. I am a lemon, maybe a mango.

I don’t know where I’m going with this.

Once we were at a Ren Faire that has a little booth where friends pay a few dollars to “swordfight with big foam swords, and the guy running it thought we were twins and was like, “hahaha YES the twins fight for free!” I got corralled into a pen with my sister literally only to die. A crowd gathered and watched me get slaughtered.

my dude i would be of no help even IF you were in my neck of the woods renn faire circuit wise, I’d be yelling from my calligraphy booth across the field 

“FIRST BLOOD!!!!”

You’d pen me a beautiful epitaph

oh you know me so well

I keep looking at this and bursting out laughing bc I especially like how it sort of reads as if I lived, Loved, and Fought by accident too.

Jurassic Park except they provide proper enrichment for the animals and they therefor don’t feel the need to hunt slow, small humans.

“We stuffed this pumpkin full of live goats for the T. rex watch him try to get them out with his little fingers.”

“Turns out the raptors are cage breakers, so we’ve gotten them a series of door handles to manipulate. Little guys just love it.”

"The Rexes are incredibly affectionate pack animals, so we were careful to breed multiples. Be sure to come during spring time to watch them go broody over anything even vaguely egg-shaped." "We put the Raptors through target training and now if they are bored, hungry, or just want a scratch under the chin they go to spot near the bars and ring a little bell for attention." "Imprinting after hatching was so common that we now have keepers under contract to care for the animals well into adulthood to prevent them from pining." "The Gallimimus turned out to be just giant Canada Geese, and so fear nothing. Their keeper regularly has to stop them from trying to attack fences, guests, feeding buckets, and the now traumatised pack of Ceratosaurs in the next paddock."

"We also fired Dr. Henry Wu."

I have questions for OP either about how big they think a pumpkin is or about how small they think goats are.

In a fictional genetic theme park, we play by Roger Rabbit rules. They’re however large they need to be to make my joke work.

I respect that. Question withdrawn.

OP's joke was scientifically valid and I will not stand for anything less than everyone recognizing that.

congratulations tumblr user @jooshcraft​ you are the sole person on this clown website for clowns to engage in the Pumpkin Discourse who has not straight up annoyed me. i declare you Pumpkin Monarch.

do not disappoint me.

For your viewing pleasure

god keep ur fucking kink meme shit out of ao3 tag y'all make this fandom even more insufferable than it already is and thats saying something!!! The kind of shit y'all post require a fucking trigger warning it doesnt belong in a safe space

Hello! I see there’s been some confusion! Allow me to clear something up: AO3 is not a safe space.

Let me repeat that. Archive Of Our Own is not a safe space, not in the way you mean it.

From the AO3 Terms of Service:

Why does the Archive have a goal of maximum inclusiveness?

What kind of content do you allow?

The ratings/warnings policy is really minimal. Why is this?

The stated desires/goals when AO3 was conceived and initially developed can be found here, on a livejournal post from @astolat (founder of VidCon, Yuletide, and AO3, and all around fannish legend). In short, the goal was “allowing ANYTHING – het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult.” 

And that, in fact, is precisely what AO3 hosts. You see, AO3 is a safe space for fanfiction. It’s a safe space for people to explore all kinds of fannish content without fear of banning, deletion, or legal reprisal. It was founded, designed, and developed to be a safe space for fandom and fannish works.

There also seems to be some confusion about the nature of safe spaces vs. trigger warnings. A fannish work that merits a trigger warning isn’t something that doesn’t belong in a safe space. The trigger warning is what MAKES something a safe space despite the presence of fannish works that merit warnings.

Something else to consider: there are many other things that include het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, and highly adult material, in addition to incest, pedophilia, infanticide, necrophilia, rape, bestiality, sadism and violence, adultery, and all manner of other things. 

So holding individual women (because that’s what fandom primarily is, women exploring their sexuality in a safe forum filled with other women doing the same) accountable for their fictional exploration of things that a) exist in real life in genuinely damaging forms, b) have significant impact on women themselves, thus leading in some part to the urge to explore those things safely, and c) have existing in movies, television, popular culture, the Bible, and in all of literature since literature began? Well, that’s just an extension of the same culture that polices women’s sexuality in the first place and drives them to find safe ways to explore it.

Ding ding ding we have a winner 🙌🏼

AO3 was pretty much meant to be a safe space …  FOR WRITERS.

FOR WRITERS TO POST PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING AS LONG AS IT IS ADEQUATELY WARNED FOR AND MEETS THEIR CLEARLY POSTED CRITERIA.

IT LITERALLY EXISTS TO PROTECT FANWORKS FROM BEING CENSORED, THREATENED BY LAWYERS, OR TAKEN DOWN OR ALTERED AGAINST THE WRITER’S WILL. THIS APPLIES TO ALL WORKS THAT MEET ITS TOS. ALL OF THEM. YES, INCLUDING AND ESPECIALLY THAT REALLY ICKY ONE.

THAT IS LITERALLY ITS PURPOSE FROM THE VERY BEGINNING. IT WILL NOT CHANGE ITS PURPOSE AND SUDDENLY DECIDE SOME KINDS OF CENSORSHIP ARE OKAY NOW BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE YELL.

If this makes anyone personally uncomfortable, there’s a very easy way to avoid that. Just don’t use AO3. Problem solved.

I guess I should be glad that we have built a world where young fans can be so deeply ignorant of fannish history that they think that the mechanism of repression they’re invoking wasn’t originally built and used to silence them, and so easily could be again.  Their assumption is that they are entitled to have fandom feel comfortable and safe for them; it literally does not occur to them that within their own short lifespans you had to have separate and sometimes secret lists and archives for slash because “nobody wants to see that” and “it’s gross/against God’s will” and “what if the children see it!!!”  (I remember a man knitter having to quit the freaking knitlist because he took such shit just for referring to his partner as “DH/DB” (dear husband/boyfriend) the way the women knitters did theirs.)  And even within the slash community…the very first Smallville slash mailing list tried to ban strong language and graphic content.  A rebel splinter had to break off and found ClarkLex to publish all kinds of stories.  That was only in 2001!  

I know it’s a good thing that we’re now in a world where indignant young people have no idea how vulnerable they historically have been and still are in this particular context.  The time before: that was worse, for many people.  But it’s still very tiring to see.

Please, indignant young people, do start up your own archives where the Problematic Content is banned.  You’ll be setting each other on fire within the year over just where the line is to be drawn.  And advancing your actual cause not at all. 

AO3 is big and easy to use and I have seen some fucked up shit there.

Fandom is becoming mainstream. We need to reconsider if “because you CAN write it, no other reason necessary” is a good philosophy these days. It may be that AO3 needs to reconsider its philosophy and possibly change.

Excuse me? What’s wrong with writing something “because I can”? What other philosophy do you want us to adopt? Let’s see if this fits mainstream criteria of normalcy, of “good” and “moral”?  And the answer to that is: NO. A huge big NO. This is why AO3 was created after LJ strikethrough in 2007 - because we wanted a space where it didn’t matter how weird or kinky or fucked up a story is. Where it didn’t matter that it’s not mainstream. Where we wouldn’t be judged, nobody could delete our stuff and nobody could try holding us legally accountable simply for writing something that’s not to their tastes (as long as there is no actually illegal material). 

Why would they “need” to do that? For what reason? AO3 is precisely what we need - apparently now not only to ward off attacks from outside fandom as it used to be, but from inside fandom as well.

“It may be that AO3 needs to reconsider its philosophy and possibly change.”

NO. Ao3 doesn’t *need* to do a damn thing. If you (and plenty of other people, evidently) think that fandom needs a more mainstream, sanitized space/archive go ahead and make it happen, the source codes are out there (and good luck deciding about how clean is clean enough).

I have seen this exact response given over and over again -make your own space, go on and do it yourselves- and it’s always ignored or treated like a dismissal. It’s NOT a dismissal, this is how everything in fandom gets created. This is how ao3 was created: a bunch of people wanted it enough to make it happen. We donated money, time and workto make it happen. And the folks at ao3 did such a good job that the result is now the biggest and most well known fandom archive. But it was born from a bunch of people who wanted to give fanfics a safe space and were willing to work for it.

Every time I see people huffing and ignoring the perfectly logical suggestion to “get together and create the fandom space that you want” I can’t help but think that they just don’t care enough about their ideas to be willing to put in the work (and if so, why should we care enough to do their work for them?) or worse, are just in it for the joy of policing and shaming others

THIS.

We didn’t like how it was done elsewhere, so we built AO3. You don’t like how AO3 does it? WELL GO BUILD YOUR OWN SPACE INSTEAD OF DEMANDIG AO3 TO DO AS YOU PLEASE! DAMN IT!

This entitlement is so disgusting.

not to sound like I take hogwarts houses seriously but thank you to all the people who made content for hufflepuff house back in like 2016 because “you don’t have to be either soft and kind or strong and a fighter. Pick both.” just-so-happened to be the message I needed so badly then and I internalized it so hard because I was becoming a young adult in a world that wanted me to be either weak or strong and I had no fucking way of knowing it at the time but I was going to need to be the person your “Cringy” tumblr posts made me want to become

A bunch of random teenagers on tumblr posting about a children’s book series: the books make hufflepuff house sound stupid :( but I don’t think it has to be stupid :) I think that kindness isn’t weakness or ignorance because if you really think about it, the strongest and most formidable people are the ones that choose to be kind even when it is easier to become cruel. We can be proud of being soft and gentle people, with terrifyingly fierce cores that emerge to protect those we love. :)

Me, 16, probably the angriest person alive and violently insecure about how sensitive I am and any perceived weakness: Wait. You can DO that?

source

hold on

I think if "eccentric billionaire" is going to continue being an archetype we should have fewer characters like Tony Stark and more characters like Seto Kaiba

to expound upon this a bit for people who didn’t watch yu-gi-oh growing up, Kaiba’s backstory is that him and his brother were orphans who were adopted by the CEO of a weapons manufacturer, Gozaburo Kaiba, after Seto bet Gozaburo that he could beat him in a game of chess and won (and yes, every plot point in Yu-Gi-Oh is Like This). 

Even though he had taken them in because of a lost bet, Gozaburo realized Seto was pretty smart and started training him to be his successor. He made him study tirelessly, day in and day out, to not just be a genius with extensive knowledge of math and technology, but the kind of ruthless, cold-hearted corporate asshole that would be perfect to run a giant defense contractor. Thing is, Seto was like... 14 so he didn’t want to make weapons...

he wanted to make BOARD GAMES....

and maybe like a theme park or two. This caused some tension between him and his adopted dad and several ridiculous plot points later, Seto used the same scummy business tactics that Gozaburo taught him to turn the old man’s executives against him and take control of the company, leading to this hilarious sentence from the Yu-Gi-Oh wiki

and ever since he took over, Seto has been using his massive pile of left-over blood money to produce nothing but extremely hi-tech gaming peripherals to make playing Duel Monsters (the card game the series is based around) more exciting to watch. And when he’s not doing that, he’s running massive tournaments for duel monsters, or creating entire academies where people study duel monsters. So much of the scale of yu-gi-oh is a result of Kaiba’s willingness to spend ungodly amounts of money on literally anything duel monsters related.

Oh and he’s also a huge, self-centered asshole because as I mentioned earlier, a lot of Gozaburo’s training definitely stuck with him.

The reason I say we need more Seto Kaibas and fewer Tony Starks is because a lot of “eccentric billionaire” types, particularly in comic books, are wealthy men who see some form of injustice in the world that governments and other institutions simply cannot, or refuse to deal with, and so they take it upon themselves to use their vast money and resources to single-handedly solve society’s problems. This is something that literally never happens.

Kaiba, on the other hand, only spends his infinite money on goofy vanity projects that exist primarily for his own amusement. Which means, despite everything about him and the series he’s in being completely absurd, Kaiba is, in a way, actually more true to life, because that is exactly the way that actual eccentric billionaires operate.

Or to put it shortly

The Five Categories of Sea Shanties

1. I haven’t seen home in months. Here’s everything I miss about it.

2. My home sucks. Listen to me dunk on it for fifteen verses.

3. I haven’t seen a woman in months.

4. Have you ever heard of this ship called the “X,” whose captain was a complete and total fuckup, and all the fucked up shit that happened to it?

5. What do you do with a drunken sailor?

Ya truly love to see it!

The kids are alright.

you: the kids are alright

me, sobbing: oh my gosh the kids are alright

if you find yourself in times of trouble just remember that cap has a tactic where he basically throws himself in some guy’s arms while fighting

I WANT TO SEE HIM DO THIS WITH THE WINTER SOLDIER.

Except the Winter Soldier is actually able take Steve’s weight (especially since if Steve does it like in the gif it’ll be the metal arm getting most of it)

and the two of them just freeze

Steve slowly realizing he’s being carried bridal style

Bucky the Winter Soldier blinking like MY PROGRAMMING DID NOT COVER THIS???

and there’s a bunch of camera sound effects as Natasha flips past with her phone out

Steve won’t stop hearing about this for weeks… or months

I love this, though, because my favorite thing about Superman is he isn’t Batman. I love Batman too, but Superman isn’t a dude who decided to live his life in pursuit of a vendetta against society when he was eight and then just did nothing for the next two decades but get super jacked, become the world’s greatest detective, and memorize every strategy used by every winner in every field of competition in history. Superman is a very good-hearted person who knows how to bale hay, use AP Stylebook, and break meteors into manageable bite-sized pieces by hitting them real hard. And I’m not saying Superman isn’t smart. He’s a bright guy, he’s just not like, one of the celebrated geniuses of the DC Universe. The best thing about Superman is he is basically a normal dude who happens to be orders of magnitude stronger than anyone else. Normal dudes have brain farts. Normal dudes are presented with a life-or-death situation they have less than four seconds to resolve and make a decision that is not optimal. Normal dudes aren’t typically asked to rescue a child from a 10,000 ton machine bearing down on him at 85mph, but if they were, they would probably sometimes panic a little and do dumb shit like ruin a train when they could have just whisked the child to safety.

I think sometimes Superman makes the wrong decision, not necessarily to the result of extreme catastrophe, but something like this, where everyone is standing around clapping and cheering and the kid’s parents are weeping in gratitude and they want to pose for a picture for the 6 o’ clock news with Superman and the conductor, and in the crowd someone is like “Why didn’t he fly the kid out of the way?” and rather than rolling with the fact that the emperor is naked his friend just says “Shut up, Drew, it’s Superman.”

And then, because I also love Batman for very different reasons, I imagine that later on the same day Bruce Wayne gets a phone call and Clark Kent is like “Hey, Wayne, I uh, need a favor.”

“Do you now.”

“Yeah, I, uh, kind of owe the Union Pacific Railroad $60,000.”

“Oh, and why’s that?”

“Come on, don’t do this to me. It was all over the news.”

“I’m prepared to write you a no-strings-attached check for the full amount on the condition that you explain your entire thought process from beginning to end.”

Anyway, that’s why I like Superman.