my first gripe is that I've tripped and fallen into hyperfixation on a MCU series, which in this day and age just feels embarrassing. my second gripe is that I have found One author in the Moon Knight fandom whose writing I enjoy. everyone else either doesn't understand grammar or is suffering from a terminal case of He Would Not Fucking Say That. several of them also seem to be obsessed with making MK adopt spiderman, for some reason which I would probably understand if I watched No Way Home, which I refuse to do.
I am THIS close to making a "Books to read if you liked Harry Potter but it's poisoned for you now" wiki just because I just saw yet another post of alleged book recs that was just a list of random titles with wildly different reading levels, tones, styles, settings, and plots with no other information.
I think the thing a lot of people loved about HP wasn't so much the plot or writing or characters, but the sense of fantastical whimsy. There's a magical fantasy world just underneath our own, close enough to reach out and touch, full of quirky fantastical reimaginings of the normal trappings of everyday life! That plus the sorting system makes it a primo series for self-insert escapist fantasies, and I think sometimes people making reclists focus too much on the "there is a magic school and an evil dark lord" thing and so their recommendations don't scratch that same itch.
That and they'll mix ones that are heavy on the magical whimsy factor in with a random assortment of YA and middle-grade adventure fantasy, and then some ones that have nothing in common with HP except "a school exists somewhere that some magic people attend." The one that prompted the post listed the entire Valdemar series in the same section as The Enchanted Forest Chronicles.
Honestly, I'd prefer things featuring the magical whimsy without the school. School was almost entirely a miserable experience from beginning to end for me and having different lessons wouldn't have changed that - Hogwarts still has a bullying problem and the whimsy happens during free periods while the actual lessons are described as being boring hard work! Kind of harder to find a particular tone through a keyword search, though.
Like, I don't even care that much about the goal here, because quite frankly I think the population of people who don't have any better ideas about how to find any other fandom to be in than a "things kind of like Harry Potter if you squint from 16 miles away" rec list who are also users of Tumblr Dot Com in the year of our lord 2023 is probably close to zero. But I have been watching people do an unbelievably bad job of trying to get people to Read A Second Book since I was in elementary school. I have spent 20+ years seeing "Mad about Harry? Try Diana!" as a review blurb on every single Diana Wynne Jones book printed after 1999, and seething about it the entire time. I read that fucking interview where some journalist went to Ursula LeGuin and asked if she thought JKR was ripping her off by writing a book about a kid who goes to wizard school and she said that a lot of journalists who were acting like HP was mind-blowingly original had clearly not read either fantasy or kidlit in decades when it was new, and every few years since I've seen it circulating again with people again quoting her reply as an amazing dunk on HP and ignoring that it was much more on the journalist, and every single time I know that none of these fucking people have actually read A Wizard of Earthsea or they'd know he starts wizard school in chapter three and graduates in chapter four. Tumblr as a community is terrible at reccing media at the best of times, and I have been watching people make comparisons to specifically these books that I could tell were facile surface-level nonsense since my biggest problem in life was that I was falling down on the playground at recess and skinning my knees every day. I have seen people be wrong on the internet about this since doing that involved a dial-up modem and Netscape Navigator. And somehow after all these years of what used to be these two books that nobody else in the class had heard of becoming an international media juggernaut, people are still just as fucking terrible at suggesting to Harry Potter fans that they read literally anything else.
For the record, if I was actually going to do the thing (which I almost certainly won't but the probability isn't quite zero), what I'd do is make a wiki where each book/series someone recs has a page. The page has the title, author, cover, date of publication, publisher blurb, and whether the book is kidlit, YA, or adult. I'd then put in a tag system, maybe with page categories- for example, So You Want To Be A Wizard might be in "Adventure stories about kids," "Urban fantasy," and "Stories about learning magic," and Dealing With Dragons might be under "Funny," "Light-hearted," "Fairy tale inspired." That way the tag/category pages become self-updating themed lists for specific aspects someone might be looking for, with immediate access to more detailed information, while keeping the process of adding things fast and easy since it's mostly copy-pasting publicly-available information. Maybe provide links to Goodreads and Does The Dog Die so people can quickly find more detailed opinions and content warnings without having to take on a much higher moderation workload. Hell, there's probably a free platform out there built for exactly this sort of tag database; I just say "wiki" because I know I could go to Miraheze and get something with basic functionality in like five minutes.
Do I understand why everyone refers to this character by a name they emphatically do not want to be called? Yes — it's the only name they have that isn't chosen by the player, of course people use it. Will understanding stop me from being privately grumpy about it? Absolutely not.
(Aha, yes. I don't think they've expressed much opinion on the matter at the point we've played up to, to be fair; it's just noticeable enough after a playthrough that it throws me to see everyone refer to their MCs as "my Sidestep".)
More articulate people than me have written thousands of words on the ableism, classism, and sexism involved in people favouring Vriska over Tavros. One of my friends pointed out that the sexism has multiple layers, naming both "oh but women couldn't possibly EVER be violent" and the favouring of traditionally-masculine behavioural traits over traditionally-feminine ones despite the actual gender identities of the people displaying them. I personally think there's also an aspect of certain fans, though not all, seeing Vriska as the bully they didn't get to be in their own childhoods and wanting a chance to be as uninhibitedly horrible as she is without consequences. However, all that aside, I also suspect it's a non-trivial factor that most people think blue is a prettier colour than brown. (ETA: In case it amuses anyone; I figured this out from the Fluffy Community.)
Recently reminded of how I'm pretty sure I lost a friend over disagreement about troll gender. We didn't have an angry argument or anything, we were both civil throughout, but it's hard not to consider it connected when they stopped talking to me after I pointed out that Cronus and Damara are not good examples of troll sexual behaviour being non-gendered. (Cronus is the typically-male incel type; Damara is not hitting on anyone at all, she's mocking them for not bothering to learn her language, and she's supposed to be a parody of the hypersexual Asian schoolgirl trope. Both these tropes are strongly gendered and I'm not sure how anyone could assume Damara was sincere in the first place.)
The Near Light event is rerunning right now, and that means it's time for the political masterminds of the fandom for a phone game about catgirls on Tumblr Dot Com to once again start complaining about how it's neoliberal centrism to... *checks notes*... not attempt to overthrow the legal government of a powerful, highly militarized nation with a few hundred foreign mercenaries.
People claiming Redwall promotes prejudice against marginalised groups. Salamandastron and the Abbey are specifically noted to be unusual oases of peace, and outside them it's not the mice who have the power over rats.
People giving Hussie way too much credit about worldbuilding. Alternia was slapped together from whatever was funniest at the time, and the Mother Grub was a silly gag that turned into a McGuffin without Hussie ever thinking about the actual ramifications. See the fact that they always talk about the singular Mother Grub for an entire empire.
What's the alternative term for headcanon when the reasoning is "this is directly contradicted by canon, but canon is stupid/offensive so we're changing it"?
For the specific individual concepts, I mean. Like "I know X in canon doesn't make sense, so I like to change it to specifically Y or Z, but other people like to go with K..."
I think so. Probably the closest term we have, maybe we should add to prokopetz's "spleencanon" list. "Spleencanon"/spiteshipping sorta covers it but this would also cover when the canon just doesn't make sense as well as when you're mad at it.
