when ur reading fanfic and one character was cooking and the other comes up to them and they start making out and everyones like starting to take their shirts off and the author STILL hasnt mentioned anyone turning off the stove
occasional posts from users
The New Ride š
Slightly based off of the ā69 Oldsmobile 442 my dad had when I was growing up. Such a gorgeous car š©š
This will be the Steddie print choice this month for my Acid Rain tier! [ Patreon ]
ok some days being visibly homo is the most wonderful thing in the world. an old woman walking her dog stopped to say hello to me and I asked if i could say hi to her dog. she seemed really excited and told me "his name is rupert brooke. i named him after a gay poet from the era of the first world war. he had red hair just like my dogs fur". then she leans in and whispers like she's divulging some great secret and says "i don't usually tell people about the gay part"
Why is your profile picture Dunken Donuts
Because the MA flag has some not so great implications ( https://changethemassflag.com/ ) so I chose the next best symbol to represent the largest possible stereotypical cross section of the state. I'll probably change it once we get a better flag and emblem.
and on the fifth day god invented people who are younger and more successful than you in order to teach you some kind of fucked up and evil lesson
Chappell Roan on The Late Show
āhow would you feel if someone blocked you just because they found you annoying?ā then i wouldnāt have to interact with someone who thinks iām annoying? i donāt see a problem
today i come to you with yet another eddie art š«”ā¤ļøāš©¹
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. Itās like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to āexplainā the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course weāre gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While itās true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other āselfcestā-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, weād reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and letās be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesnāt even account Ā for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they arenāt onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking.Ā Female characters are more likely to be written by men who donāt understand women vary well.Ā
But itās easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. :)
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I donāt think itās the sole reason, but I think itās a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). Ā (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) Iāve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandomās M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but Iām periodically tempted to try to do so.
All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes firstā¦ exceptĀ āThe Jobā actually meansĀ āMy Partnerā.
When itās a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.
Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. Itās not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.
If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Donāt like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutoutsā¦
And then we will ship an OT3.
Iām going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.
As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.
In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.
And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, orĀ āgood,ā or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesnāt know how to write women the way they write men.
And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.
When you have a group thatās allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldnāt be enough in their own right.
And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallengingĀ āsafeā appearances.
It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.
They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interestāin appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot developmentāgoes to the men.
And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, thatās where the shipping goes.
āyou have a group thatās allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costsā
RIZ ON THE OWLBEARS REAL (NOT CLICKBAIT !!!1!!)
Weāre haemorrhaging money on the groundskeeper, Jawbone!
Some of my favourite little bits. This is like the first time i fully color them ^.^ it was fun. Took wayy longer than it shouldve LOLL
anyway the actual point of fandom is to inspire each other. reading each other's fics and admiring each other's art and saying wow i love this and i feel something and i want to invoke this in other people, i want to write a sentence that feels like a meteor shower, i want to paint a kiss with such tenderness it makes you ache, i want to create something that someone else somewhere will see it and think oh, i need to do that too, right now. i am embracing being a corny cunt on main to say inspiring each other is one of the things humanity is best at and one of the things fandom is built for and i think that's beautiful
tiktok is such an awful app, it's almost designed to feed you misinformation and expose you to insane discourse. unlike beloved tumblr, the app that feeds me misinformation and exposes me to insane discourse
No, no, no, you see on tiktok an algorithm feeds you misinformation. On Tumblr I feed myself misinformation from my charcuterie board of hand-selected unhinged mutuals.
None of that mass market junk. Only artisanal, small batch, sustainably cultivated, fair trade horseshit.
mini bad kids ! I'm making this into a sticker to hand out to folks at D20 live in Glasgow !!
Wizard and her paramour
potential reasons kipperlily has hated riz since day one:
1. riz didn't give her a business card
2. riz did give her a business card but she did an american psycho style analysis of it and did not like what the card told her
3. a goblin getting dunked in a trashcan killed her mother
4. a briefcase killed her mother
5. has a crush on riz and is taking the tweet that's like "one time I had a crush on a girl and I put a note in her locker telling her to leave the school" to the next level
6. has a crush on a different bad kid and is mad at riz for becoming the rogue of the group before she had a chance
