Garage bulletin board

Between Oshi no Ko season2 and NigeWaka, there is definitely Some Bullshit in the air in the anime industry. I can't believe we got both Melt's first touch with self-expression and whatever the fuck that just was on the same week.

 

BTW both of these shows had some of the best first episodes of all fucking time. Like, the first two episodes of NigeWaka are a masterpiece in how they make the "drinking from a firehose" tone of the show work, but also Oshi no Ko, Notoriously, Did That, so I don't know if I can compare them, really.

 

This isn't related to anything currently going on but every time I get the urge to write a post about the friendship between two characters, an implied familial connection or the relationship between siblings, the double-edged sword of "if I tag this as anti-ship DNI people are gonna read it as being shippy (a thing that I'm fine with, but which isn't the point) and potentially lead to harassment from antis" and "if I don't tag this as anti-ship DNI, it will almost inevitably get some anti in the tags bringing up incest and shit in the most triggering way possible for me" hangs over my head and I almost never end up posting the thing.

Like, there really is no winning. My OCD specifically thrives in people implying that what I said is the "good", "pure" way of discussing things, rather than the "dirty", "degenerate" way. The last time I had to really wrestle with this was when we were playing FF16, and while I did not personally ship Clive and Joshua romantically, I did have a lot to gush about with their relationship, and I was horribly uncomfortable with people who hate that ship bringing it up unprompted to complain about it compared to the few Clive/Joshua shippers that interacted with it to be like *Leo pointing meme* about what I was saying.

 

.....okay maybe it is a little bit related to what is going on (I wanna talk about Shu and Ray, largely in the same way I talked about Clive and Josh, and even though Dendro has no English-speaking fandom to speak of, you get badly triggered once and that shit stays with you forever)

 

It isn't even the Clive&Josh stuff that haunts me, it's the one time I talked about Miko's status as a de facto daughter figure for Bulkhead and had someone I follow comment on how gross people who ship them are, like. None of that was implied in my post. Why did you bring it up? Why did you feel the need to put that image in people's head in relation to what I wrote.

 

And like logically I know the tainting of my intent from that comment only reached the people following that person because thank god it was just in the tags rather than a comment or something, but does OCD care? :) well.

 

Also like FDNH is getting close to being finished so I need to finally come to a decision on if I'm going to tag it as "implied Taion/Isurd" b/c it's genuinely at the level I think their ability to deal with their feelings amounts to, sticking to strict canon-complicity, pissing off people who genuinely wanted The Ship, Explicitly, or if I wanna put in the author's note that "if this reads like Taion/Isurd to you, good, that part is intentional" and potentially get people who have weird ideas about what "platonic" means outraged at being mislead.

 

I love having no real problems, actually.

 

Shu Starling, Bearbo from my novels.

 

Thinking about that bear man.

 

Sometimes I have conversations that end with me wanting to just go "listen, I call myself a bisexual because I'm like thirty. You can call me whatever you want, I'm not married to any label" and then I remember a Major Bisexual Youtuber coming just short of saying all pansexuals are fake suvakki liars and have to hold my tongue to not reignite that discourse.

 

My sexuality is "anything with a pulse". I love being bad bi representation. I'm tired. Just let me give head to someone.

 

(why did I bring up Major Bi YTer at all? Because I see them recommended all the time, and while panphobia is a minor issue, it still stinks of "our faves can do no wrong, if you have a problem with them you're [a different sort of homophobe]". I do like their other stuff, but every time they roll their eyes about them kids making up new labels I remember that one of the "new labels" they talk about is "pan", a word that has been around since the seventies. It's not respectability politics if it's our ingroup doing it, I guess)

 

Anyway. My overall point is that if I stopped respecting everyone I think has a bad take on anything, I would not respect anyone and have no community, and so when people talk about having community as if it's all about having people around you who boost you and agree with you, I gotta laugh. Sometimes you're on the same side with people who do not respect you. The best way to stop them from aggressing against you is to just not talk about the things they would disrespect you about with them.

 

Remember that one time a popular Tumblr blogger came to my DMs to yell at me for tagging their post as "don't believe in (the existence of queer rep until I see it with my two eyes)" and they read it as "don't believe (in the value of queer rep)" and then mocked me for trying to politely say that hey, chief, you totally misread what I fucking wrote and are now yelling in my DMs about it.

 

Where is this coming from? Well, you see. I've been getting into new shonen series and it reminded me of the snowball's chance in hell of seeing a guy in any of the things I like having an on-screen romance with any of the other guys he has interactions that read heavily as romantic to me. It's like genre expectations affect on what subtext people are likely to pick up on, and which they're likely to consider authoritative.

 

Do I still say with my mouth that there's no straight explanation for volume 18? Yes. Do I think that's, like, the intended way to read it? Absolutely not. This is a Japanese fantasy action book series for boys aged 13-18.

 

IDK like. Sure, I can accept that that person genuinely just misunderstood my point that one time -- what bothers me about it is that when I went "listen I think there's been a misunderstanding there", they pretty much went "I DON'T CARE, I HURT MY OWN FEELINGS WITH WHAT I IMAGINED YOU SAID AND I FEEL JUSTIFIED AT CALLING YOU NAMES ABOUT IT". That's the part that bothers me. Like, are you ever gonna address how you shouldn't actually talk like that to anyone, let alone someone following you on Tumblr you've had exactly one passive-aggressive interaction where you also totally misread what I said with?

 

Swinging wildly between being depressed about not being comfortable talking to people in fandom anymore, pessimistic about how I've rarely actually gotten the kind of response on my stuff I've wished, and being too distracted by Bearbo from my novels to be sad about anything.

 

burnt my hand :(