Me when people whine that the Black Rose Saga is pointless because nothing plot important happens in it. Honestly. In general? Complaints about Utena's plot not making sense or wanting more plot or a more 'coherent' plot. People who say you can or should skip episode 13 and then whine about the 'plot issues' also drive me batty. Since that episode is basically the team looking at the audience and showing us what Utena is about.
Things like that give me this sinking feeling as I realize why all those English teachers belabored all the points. Missing things that aren’t literal is supposed to be a feature of my learning disability, but I’m pretty sure these experts wouldn’t be able to correctly identify a learning disability if it bit them and then introduced itself. If that’s my problem, how do you explain all the other people?!
I admit it took reading Umineko before it, like, really clicked for me; in high school I'd see a textbook say "X is a metaphor for Y" and my reaction would usually be a 50/50 mix of "no shit, Sherlock" (because high school English textbooks do not tend to do deep textual analysis) and "that one Tolkien quote about allegory vs. applicability, Nightcore Remix." But if you're asking why Toxic Masculinity McGee doesn't get medical care for his fingers in The Shape of Water, you. You don't need a degree in Symbolism from the University of Sea Kittens to figure out the answer to that one.
It's such an open and out example of 'the rot' of American brand toxic masculinity and American Exceptionalism too...
In my considered opinion, none of us should be expected to get all of the metaphor all the time, even the stuff that’s super obvious to other people or in retrospect. That’s why discussion is so valuable. But if an entire youtube comment section is going through extended convulsions trying to figure out that it’s about his dick, that’s a bit... hmm. Even without any metaphor, this guy textually came out against washing his hands after using the bathroom. Does that sound like someone who has sensible thoughts about medical matters?!
Yeah, even without generalizing it into A Statement, you can get "he sees admitting he has suffered lasting damage and needs help as a humiliation, so he tries to pretend it isn't going on even as the problem gets worse and worse." Though this same comment section also had someone saying they thought he was supposed to be the audience surrogate, so maybe I should just see if I can find a modern-browser version of the extension I used to have that turned all Youtube comments into keyboardsmashes.
If that’s the audience surrogate we’d have to fucking riot, because I’m pretty sure that would count as fighting words. Even Michael Bay has never come close to insulting an audience so badly. Guillermo del Toro would never. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is the only other movie I can think of that has made me feel that intensity of revulsion. I am not sure I wanna even know how they got to that conclusion.
sometimes you can learn all you need to know about a person from a secondhand description of one of their youtube comments
That is so ??? Especially because if you're having trouble picking up the plot and the metaphors all at once in real time, the re-cap episodes are perfect for that! They go through everything again with more commentary! (And they are often plot relevant in and of themselves. Like, 13 isn't the worst episode to skip, but it still moves the plot forward!)
I’ve unfollowed at least five Magnus Archives blogs because they reblogged anti stuff. I can’t help but feel like once again I’ve made the same mistake I make every time I get into a new thing of logging back into tumblr for fanworks and fic recs only to inevitably stumble across fandom drama.
i like lindsay ellis's videos! i really do. i do not like that she included part of a hamilton animatic in the recent one but didn't credit the creator anywhere easily visible. did she just deem it popular enough not to need a link or citation? even if that's the case, i don't like the precedent it sets...
(my mostly TMA sideblog at Spoiler morguecrow dot tumblr dot com does not contain such content /shameless advertisement) but yeah, one of my favorite TMA fanfic writers is Super Like That and it's, unfortunate
It kinda bums me out that with the huge and great growth of the TMA audience, along with it came antis When the content of the show is I mean, unhealthy relationships, people committing grave mistakes and questionable decisions, like body horror and torture and suffering. Plus cmon its a dead dove generator. Plus the policy of the official communities has always advocated for proper tagging and welcoming all fans and staunch opposition of attacking others. Plus a specific tag to hide stuff! It was mostly if u wanted to hide stuff from the crew, but 'Do Not Archive' became the general tag for like nsfw TMA communities. It's just a bummer I guess I'm P sure there were some antis when the fandom was smaller but they were definitely less loud than how It looks now (I don't follow TMA stuff anymore for my own reasons but my friends tell me theres random discourse passing around) Used to scoff with my friends at the idea of TMA antis, but I guess antis can be anywhere and 'justifying' content they like
If you know flo-nelja, their blog would probably be not anti (and I mean ive seen nelja's fic) tho nelja's blog is general fandom.
antis heard "gay content" and they all came running i was hoping the mechanisms would be the chill side fandom where all the adults were but it's Not. they're canonically incapable of dying, how is the fandom not here for the dead dove potential?!
the tma fandom frustrates me. when it's at the point that people assume they're gonna get hate and threats for writing META that frames characters as not Innocent Pure And Objectively Correct UWU there is a problem and don't even get me started on the undertones of ableism in the fandom
I can certainly understand liking horror and having limits on the kind of content you want to see (I definitely have horror limits, I personally haven’t delved into dark fic/dead dove for this fandom because of that and also because I’m less into reading darker fic when the state of the world is, for lack of a better way to put it, like this). Insisting everyone else must share those limits and are bad people if they don’t is real shitty. But I guess I’m just preaching to the choir here ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Anyways my TMA fandom experience definitely hasn’t been all bad, there’s some amazing fanworks and I’ve mostly been having a great time going through them all with the exception of those people I unfollowed.
weirdly I've found that most of the quote unquote dark fic is actually LESS depressing than canon it tends to actually use found family tropes, as opposed to canon where everyone just fucking despises each other.
