Garage bulletin board

I love my server :)

I do! And not just cus it's got "all my friends" on it, actually, I don't know 2/3rds of the people there, I just. Enjoy having someone to talk robots with.

 

My WBEx isn't going super great. I knew right away what I wanted to write b/c I'd always had a weird headcanon regarding Nobodies that I wanted to explore but the person I got matched with didn't want meta, so I'm stuck trying to make it work in fic form, and all I got is very abstract nonsense.

And I still struggle making the characters sound right b/c I have never written for KH before despite having been in the fandom way back when and never really going away. KH character voices are very specific, trying to nail them is hard.

 

I wonder what it is about me that genuinely makes me so uncomfortable with modern out-of-universe language being used for making jokes and memes involving fictional characters, other than the fact that there are a lot of dipshits out there doing it.

(There is no trend in fandom that isn't being done by dipshits, also. That's how trends work.)

Like IDK I know it's speficically the "making the characters talk like how I/people I know/people in the Funny May-May Videos Do" that makes me kinda... sit there like... "uhhhhh" but I don't know why. I can tolerate it when it's being used as a kind of shorthand to describe the internal process of the character but art where they physically say those word with their mouth-equivalent, despite them being things I say with my mouth-equivalent, immediately gives me a lingering sense of wrongness that has very little to do with whether or not I think the meme/joke/phrase is in character or not.

(I wonder if it has anything to do with my reflexive adding of "as the kids say" in front of phrases I've picked up from the internet. I've developed a weird obsession with "context" ever since I went on meds, I feel like.)

 

*seeing a character I like headcanoned as aro* :)

*remembering headcanoning this one particular character as aspec used to be a popular way to get them out of shipping considerations* :/

*remembers that to this day there's a bunch of desexualising baggage floating around them* >:(

*realises that the person making the headcanon is probably just living their truth* :'|

 

There's a new fic in the tag for your OTP. It's a single-chapter of decent lenght, and only has your ship and one other tagged. The tags are a little nondescript and the summary doesn't mention either of them, but you're starving for content.

You read the fic. Only one person from your OTP is present, and they never interact with the other on-screen. The depth of the exploration of the ship is two other characters debating about their exact relationship status while neither are pleasant. Their relationship contributes to the plot not at all.

(Alternatively -- the two of them interact, but honestly if it hadn't been tagged in you would have just thought the author had a better grasp of canon voices than most.)

 

Character headcanoned as aspec as a soft way of declaring them unfuckable is also not exactly a great thing to be subjected to as an aspec person with self-esteem issues, lmao.

 

... SZ and LE have gone fucking done it, huh.

I was kinda dreading this happening every since they started making content about "fandom", where they ignored boundaries, acted flippant about topics they had no personal investment in and never thought to consider what might happen if they performed "expertise" over topics and conflicts they simply haven't been involved with.

.... Well, at least one of them has been the target of, like, sustained campaigns of hatred and abuse, to the point where they've actually had a whole presentation about it.... So....

 

I'm so excited for a commission that's almost ready.

 

Why isn't the most common rebuttal to people getting mad about someone still liking a creator who turned out to be douchebag just... "they might not know about that".

Like, fuck, I just saw a post about how Dan Avidan has apparently had accusations of.... something, the post didn't specify, at him, and that you shouldn't do the "EWW WHY ARE YOU STILL A FAN OF [problematic creator] IN 2021" and I agree on that part!! But could we stop acting like it's always because people haven't ~processed~ it yet and start assuming it's b/c most of us don't fucking keep up with gossip?

 

Nothing makes me feel quite as undignified as sitting on the bathroom floor b/c I have a headache and food and meds have made me nauseous and I can't lie down b/c that makes it worse but I also can't get up b/c I don't want to risk throwing up all over my apartment

 

*rubs hands over eyes*

Y'know sometimes when you just keep reading a thing because it's upsetting you? That's been my entire afternoon.

 

It started with the latest LE video, which I'm, like... not in a hurry to watch for "oh this is definitely the kind of thing that will trigger me to hell and back" reasons, but also because the wank leading up to it has left me feeling cooled on Breadtubers as a whole for a while, and the way being a nobody a lot of people listen to makes anything they say inherently complicated to contend with.

But catching up on the conversation (inasmuch as I can while not engaging LE's actual video) got me to revisit RaceFail '09 also... the Great Star Wars Racism Shitstorm of 2018 -- namely, the "Your Vagina is a Bigot; My Vagina is a Saint" essay, and the associated conversation around white women talking about fandom with other white women, and the consequences thereof.

 

And, like, alright, I'm a fixer personality, when I encounter problems that can't be solved I will literally sit there and try to solve them until the thing is done or get forcibly removed from the circumstances -- and I can't really describe the experience of realising that on the one hand, it's a factually undeniable reality that being a fan of colour and having the conversation around fandom mediated through whiteness has absolutely enabled parts of fandom to completely disregard their own racism, their own complicity and a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" of letting white supremacy find roots in fandom

but at the same time, having watched this stuff on the periphery during the Sequel Trilogy's rollout, realising that the people trying to have that conversation are either having it coopted by people who just want to exercise control over other people's fictional output, or are, straight-up, also the kind of people who call me a "pedophile freak" for liking BakuDeku.

 

Like what the fuck am I supposed to do here??? Clearly not descend into despair, because I'm a direct beneficiary of the fact that any time we talk about the policing of sexuality and of literature, the myth of white female fragility is a thing that only benefits me as a white Nordic person who grew up in an Americanised media landscape, if white supremacy retains its hold of fandom I'll be safe from harm until it starts striking deals with ableism in fandom and then suddenly my "defective" white arse is on the line again.

But at the same time, as I was chasing down the threads and reading through the comments, I kept noticing how the ones written by fans of colour were deleted, from dead blogs, protected and generally inaccessible to me, while the conversations that kept going were just more white people talking to other white people, and god, I want to do something about that, because that experience of "having to stop talking about a thing because something about me means I'm gonna get harassed out of this conversation" is the whole reason I'm so afraid of purity wank as a thoroughly socially unacceptable queer.

 

Fandom is kind of a microcosm of society, and I feel like the fact that the conversation about racism keeps going while fans of colour get pushed out of having it for fear of their own goddamn safety just... makes me feel like maybe talking things through isn't a solution. If we can't make it work in fandom, how could we ever make it work out there, in the real world, where the stakes are life and death all the time instead of when someone truly deranged decides to take the wank too far.

 

But also like... this happening concurrently with the whole "lol now libfems are taking issue with the Eric Andre Girl Power Meme" thing also has me feeling... like, I'm not a woman, right, so I don't feel comfortable arguing none of the points about trying to control the art and expression of white women is invalid and just another wounded gazelle tactic to paper over other structural issues which women also perpetuate. Like, it feels distinctly disingenous to do that if I'm trying to have an intersectional understanding, to just wholesale go "fandom just has a victim complex" when to this day people in fandom get harassed for the crime of being-in-fandom-and-doing-it-wrong.

Like, I want to have both of these conversations!! But trying to have them at the same time makes me feel like my head is a melon someone just took a machete to.

 

Eyyyyyy new chapter of ITB is out. We're finally into the weeds of giant space alien anatomy, I'm even going to have to reference interfacing in the next chapter to establish that there is indeed a medical reason for why the robots fuck.

I also wrote... look, I don't know what this is. Technically it's me grappling with the backstory I've established for Wheeljack in my head, but truly, I just wanted to write some Impactor being A Smug Shithead who is juuust a little bit too good at playing people and also aggravating Wheeljack is just, like, my life's goal. He deserves no happiness.

It's also me finally starting to talk about my Icarus Agenda when it comes to the Wreckers as a whole and Wheeljack in specific. I've been sitting on that series title for A While now.

 

Struggling with wanting to reblog a bunch of my old art b/c hey I use to like to draw! But the person who encouraged me the most is someone I'm no longer friends with and a lot of the art is from a fandom we shared together and I don't want to invite even a suggestion that I want to interact with that person ever.

Also a bunch of it is about their OC. Dammit.

 

"[Villain] abused [hero], stop shipping survivors with their abusers!"

Bitch Villain and Hero didn't interact enough for that to have been abuse. Has nobody ever been an asshole to you? Have you never politically disagreed with a stranger? How are you this sheltered?

 

I kinda lost my interest in playing Thumper when it was spoiled to me unceremoniously, so we started Iconoclasts over with my friend, as a way of looking at a well-designed puzzle-platformer for our video game and also b/c it makes for phenomenal AU fodder and I really wanna write about Cybertronian theocracy pulling a One Concern in the face of a Quintesson invasion.

Also watched Symphogear. I still think Nanoha did the Magical Girl Scifi Shonen thing better, but SZS is, like. Objectively the better show, and it's nice to have something to use people to get them into the genre. Also, another show to recommend that has 90% female cast, that's always good and fun.