Yep. Or at the very least, they need to explain why those four deaths were necessary for the alpha timeline to succeed. Because...sure, maybe Eridan's death is arguably necessary (it prevents him from betraying them all to Bec Noir) but Feferi, Nepeta, and Equius didn't have to die. The only thing you could argue is that without Feferi, Nepeta, and Equius' deaths, there's no Fefetasprite and no Arquiussprite, and with no Arquiussprite there's no Cal juju (and Fefetasprite seems to have made a pretty deep impression on Roxy). But they're clever kids, they could figure out a way around that - John could have grabbed the bodies or gotten the codes necessary to make copies of them. Agreed. I blame the fact that 1) I don't think we see any examples of healthy kismessitudes, in canon (the prototypical example given to us is BQ/JN, which...pretty obviously has potential to go wrong at all times unless things shake out exactly right for them both) and 2) the one who gives most of the explanation for how kismessitude works is Karkat, which feels to me like being told how marriage works by a kid who literally got all their info on romance and dating from sitcoms and romcom movies; Karkat's probably one of the more reliable narrators we've got on the issue, but he's still got a limited view on what's normal or healthy - the best we can say is that he's the first to acknowledge that Vriska doesn't know how to do a healthy kismessitude and that she needs to do a lot of work on how she acts before she'll be a good choice for a kismesis for anyone who isn't desperate. (And as much as Eridan has to bring to a good kismessitude...he is pretty desperate to get his concupiscent quadrants filled.)
When you see some nice art and wonder why you aren't following a person, then you check their feed and oh, yeah, it's because they're totally insufferable and think liking villains makes you a bad person.
There wasn't any Fefetasprite in the retcon timeline, either, and ARquiusprite was basically only there because he was a fan favourite. Vriska tried to excuse not bringing them back with "but we need the sprite kernels", but they had a Life player RIGHT THERE. For that matter, it was established earlier that dead players could still use their powers, so there's no reason all the dead Feferis wouldn't already have been bringing everyone back as soon as they died in the first place. They HAVE ways to keep their friends alive and they're just not bothering to use them. This is a personal gripe, but I despise Karkat's post-retcon explanation of kismessisitude, because not only does he boil it down to merely mild irritation, but Terezi and John haven't to my knowledge ever expressed any attraction to each other, which was always presented as being part of it before. We're told that Karkat feels all the quadrants smushed together and this is the equivalent of human romance (a concept which I also dislike but that's a different post), but by his own description he feels black for literally everyone he's ever met in his life.
tfw the best method of fandom advertising is mid-change and you have to keep using the old platform while figuring out how to adapt to a new one.......... like goddamn no wonder most companies hire people to do this shit for them
So uh This fandom is really gonna fetishize the two super-abusive oarents because they're hot/might be hot They're really gonna talk about being dtf the guy who had his kids literally chained in the basement huh That's uh. That's something.
hold up, I thought being dtf characters who do bad things, even REALLY bad things, is not frowned upon around here? also what do you mean by "fetishize"? "find attractive"?
some people have different tolerance levels for different characters and their fans, frequently for emotional and objectively illogical reasons like, Vriska Stans(tm) who go the full "vriska did nothing wrong, never sexually assaulted tavros, and if she did he deserved it anyways for being boring and a wimp & it didn't count because she's a lesbian" give me hives BUT i'm absolutely dtf noted daughter-murderer-because-she-steals-their-bodies-to-give-herself-immortality flemeth dragonage because, like, goddamn that's a hot grandma who can turn into a dragon? they're both awful people but one makes me want to call for help when people talk about how great she is without qualifiers and one makes me want to go "AND ALSO SHE CAN GET IT"
I'm very familiar with this but to be honest that sounded more like moral judgement ("fetishize"? really?) than low tolerance.
I think part of it might be that this is a corner of the language where you start running short on synonyms (sexualize might fit, but the connotations aren't quite the same). So even though fetishize has been widely weaponized in some pretty toxic ways, it still has its original meaning that doesn't necessarily include moral judgment, and there aren't that many synonyms available to choose from. Because why would we make language easy, that would just be silly :V
I agree with your reasoning (that it's not necessarily a moral judgement bc original meaning) but when you apply original meaning "fetishize" is EVEN LESS appropriate than idk "sexualize"? there's no mention of anything remotely close to fetishes. so that's just straight up not what's being described ^^;; unless the entire fandom has a literal abusive parenting kink. ...how did this become linguistics
I would personally be a lot more comfortable with having this conversation if people asked ZeroEsper to clarify instead of speculating about what she might have meant.
God I'm sorry I think I posted that a while ago and then dropped off the face of the earth. 'Fetishize' is maybe not the best word, but I don't know if I entirely mean sexualize either? I don't think there's a good fit with either word. People are allowed to have their kinks and that's fine, the issue in this particular fandom (the HxH fandom) is that these two characters are unambiguously abusive toward their kids, and they don't really show up unless it's Revisiting Childhood Trauma time. Again, people are allowed to have their kinks, they're allowed to talk about how they find these two characters attractive and they want a rich powerful man like that, but there seems to be this weird thing where the only time it ever gets acknowledged that these two are bad parents is with jokes. And I cope with humor too, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of awareness of what, exactly, is wrong in that family dynamic, which makes it less funny. It's more like jokes about 'haha, you know they're so ashamed of their kids now cause their kids don't do everything they say anymore lol' which has kind of a sad history in canon. And again, I cope with jokes too, but even when I go into the tags (are they still called tags on Twitter? I'm not clear on that, sorry if I'm being ambiguous) and there's Serious Discussion going on, when it comes to these two characters it seems like 99% of the time it's 'love these two, Silva is a dilf and I'm so down'. It really feels like a lot of the more active members of the fandom exclusively or almost exclusively post thirst content for these characters, and their abusive traits are played for laughs. I find it kind of weird because I understand that it's a shounen anime, and there is that whole trope of 'we're hitting/tying up/beating our child so that they can become a Powerful Main Character' thing that happens a lot and it's played for laughs, but HxH actually allows the fucked up family dynamic to be fucked up and Not Okay. So it's not the typical physical comedy setup you usually get, there's abuse being treated as abuse. I'm not saying there are never any moments of family physical comedy, but they definitely don't comprise the entire narrative around this family. Again, I understand that some people cope with humor and I don't expect people to justify their kinks to me but it's just. It's really frustrating if I go into the tags for this couple's kids and someone brought up the parents so it gets derailed with 'ooh I'd let him be my sugar daddy' and 'you know she's a milf under those layers!' I think it's cause they're wealthy and the family has a lot of power based on the number of sugar daddy jokes I see. And I think those are common things to find attractive, but I just. It makes me frustrated sometimes because I think Togashi did a pretty good job writing an abusive family dynamic and letting it be treated as bad, and sometimes I want to talk about that, but I don't feel comfortably doing so because the post will be public and I'm worried about getting backlash from people like 'oh come on everyone in shounen animes abuses their kids, don't be so hard on these two'.
That makes a lot of sense to me. Some people want to have fun, light-hearted discussions about characters they find attractive, and joke about the horrible things they’ve done because it’s not real, so it’s safe to explore that. Other people want to have serious discussions about the horrible things, because the fact that it’s not real can make it a safe way to talk about heavy topics and terrible things that do happen irl. When either discussion drowns out the other, that’s very unfortunate. People will probably feel like they’ve lost a necessary area of emotional safety.
Yeah, it makes me kind of sad. I'm really fixated on this show right now, and I found some parts of it really relatable. I wanted to talk about it with other people, but now I don't really feel safe doing so, if only because if someone hopped in and was like 'listen just because these parents tried to brainwash all their kids to make them perfectly obedient to the family doesn't make them abusive, it's comedy' I don't really think I could handle that. It's kind of weird how I can talk about that family with a friend who also likes this show, and we can speak seriously and I'm okay and even feel better afterwards, but if someone tried to play the abusive parts off as a joke I think it'd be a lot for me to handle.
it's hard when it's the Only Thing like, my two favorite characters in Naruto are very frequently shipped with each other. i viscerally dislike the pairing. i'm not gonna jump down the throat of anyone who does like it, but it drives me crazy because these are very minor characters and the only art or fic that centers on them is pairing. it's hard to be ykinmkato about a certain kind of content when it's something you find both upsetting and impossible to escape.
It seems like you have a really good handle on where you need your boundaries to be for this. That sounds pretty damn healthy to me. It also sounds like you have a completely realistic idea of whether the internet at large is likely to be able/willing to respect those boundaries (no). At least not on tumble. (I am going to repeatedly misspell the site name that way because I’ve found it gives me a visceral feeling of relief to not type a half-disemvoweled word. (For some reason imgur is exempt. Maybe because “img” is something I’ve been comfortable typing and pronouncing since I was a kid, it’s directly relevant to what the site does, and possibly most importantly I don’t have any grudge against imgur.) I apologize if this bothers anyone.) Whenever I have a Fan Opinion that I really want to talk about but don’t particularly want a debate around, I put it in my vent thread. Once I get around to making a blog thread, I’ll probably put it there. People are not all that likely to argue with me in my own thread even if they might if I posted elsewhere. Usually it’s just a matter of energy for debate, but if I were concerned about a discussion that might trigger me, I’d outright ask that people not do the specific thing in my thread, probably at the top of the post. I haven’t had any trouble with this. I know I certainly don’t argue with media interpretations I disagree with on an emotional level in other people’s threads. It just feels wrong. If you’re looking for a larger potential audience than kintsugi, maybe Dreamwidth if that’s your thing? It’s a little more exposed than the forums, but ime people don’t really treat it like tumble, where the conversation is a site-wide free-for-all. If people reply directly, it’s a comment on your own blog, and that makes a difference to how people treat the discussion. It’s way more like how people see a vent thread, where etiquette dictates that commenters respect that they’re conversing within your personal space. You can explain in the post that this is a sensitive topic, and to please respect that by keeping the conversation serious and on topic, because while it’s all well and good to joke around and discuss the attractiveness of the characters, this is not the place for it. I think the vast majority of people will be totally willing. If you like, you can set comments on the post to moderated, meaning they won’t be publicly visible without your approval, which may discourage any stray rude people from commenting. That doesn’t fix the problem of you having to read it if they do, but I think it makes it much less likely to happen at all. Livejournal clones at least historically have a very different vibe from the tumble. Whatever you decide to do or not do, I’m sorry that you’re in this position. It sucks. I’ve been on both sides of that kind of thing as a minority, and it’s distressing. Heck, I’ve been on both sides as part of the majority, and it’s all fun and games until you notice someone else feels like they have no voice. Then it’s a hell of a lot of fancy footwork diplomacy.
Thank you. That's something I've been working on. I used to have trouble keeping myself away from things I knew might upset me, but I've been trying some new things. I've actually never used Dreamwidth before! That sounds like a good setup for potentially productive duscussion. I've been kind of flip-flopping on checking it out, but now I think I will. Thank you for the suggestion!
