Welcome to the no note rotating vape guys post

The date...

One of those tropes that never fail to be funny: when the protagonist is literally telling the truth, and nobody believes them, but everyone is perfectly chill with what they assume was what actually happened, so the protagonist is trying to defend themselves for no reason.

Imagine being like "no but for real, I didn't push him. He literally just slipped and fell on his own", and everyone who hated that guy is like "oh yes, of course darling, of course nobody here would accuse you of having done the unthinkable. We all know that with the way that he was, it was only a matter of time until he would someday just slip on his own, with only one person there to witness the accident. I just wish it could have been me."

red mackerel tabby with low white spotting

@lvcisaliaa @windyskiez @s0lace-1n-s0l1tude @sacchanisekaishikkaku

me to you sillys u deserve all the hugs!!! <33

THANK U SILLIES

@windyskiez @plumywad @sacchanisekaishikkaku @s0lace-1n-s0l1tude @mene-morphosis3 @valerieve @localmentallyillwriter + open tags

AAAAAH YOU TOO POOKIE

Open tags because hugs for everyone

Me, refusing to leave tumblr: sir, this is my emotional support hellsite

beepboop. censorbot approved

“Me, refusing to leave: sir, this is my emotional hell” is a funnier text post than my original one, good job censorbot.

hello, future tumblr! this is what we thought was funny in december 2018.

We still think it’s funny in December 2019

We still think it’s funny in December 2020

We still think it’s funny in December 2021

we still think its funny in december 2022

we still think it’s funny in December 2023

Achievement Unlocked:

Only Our Bodies Can Leave

The spirit remains eternally (at least five years)

Achievement Unlocked:

Forever And A Day

Yup, still funny after 6 years…

hey pal it’s april. you got a time machine?

just got fired from my job reading erotic fiction for audiobooks because i kept pronouncing “penetrates” like it was a greek philosopher

"we need less sanitized queer stories" yall keep saying fucking she-ra romanticizes abuse. you couldnt possibly handle less sanitized queer stories

"we need less sanitized queer stories" youre the one saying the locked tomb series is bad because you dont like the prose. based off of a quote from goodreads of all places. that was dialogue, not even the actual prose.

people keep reblogging only the first half of the post when the addition was the original post. ok

girl help. 4k notes

"she-ra fumbled its message" no! crucially, it didnt! it had the same message as the original she-ra show, which is "this lady is a superhero and is going to do superhero things like save the planet" and she did do that!

"oh but catra never apologized for what she did and they just let her join the good guys" thats a perfectly normal thing in childrens media, and the only reason yallre calling it out is because its queer and you want the perfect unproblematic queer media to exist. except that even if it did you would all find ways to nitpick it, which is the whole point of this post!

Also, notably, she did apologize. They just think it wasn't good enough.

They absolutely could not handle more nuanced media.

can we please pretty pleasr reblog this version,

Lying to someone about how risky something is to make it seem safer than it is because you know they wouldn't do it if they knew it was dangerous: Shitty. Evil. Unforgivable.

Lying to someone about how risky something is to make it seem more dangerous than it is because you know they'd love the thrill of danger while you know you're actually perfectly safe: Actually that's hilarious. Fun for everybody involved.

Imagine being on tumblr minding your own business when out of the blue somebody informs you that people like you should all be lined up and shot and that they take active delight in daydreaming about your suffering. And then you check their profile and it's all

"ouuh uoogh aaaagh why am I so lonely, why does nobody like me, why do people bully me by not being cool with me bullying people, it's not fair that people hate me just for being hateful, every morning people form a conga line outside my house and dance around it while waiting for their turn to go inside to fuck my wife. these people that I want dead ruined my life by making everyone else think I'm insane and unhinged for wanting all of them dead. waaah."

It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?

#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable (via sarahtonin42)

I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.

Totally.

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?

YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!

Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.

I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.

This doesn’t even account  for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well. 

But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.

Yay, mathy arguments. :)

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het).  (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.

All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.

When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.

Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.

If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…

And then we will ship an OT3.

I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.

As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.

In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.

And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.

And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.

When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.

And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.

It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.

They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.

And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.

Yeah I don’t really ship but I do write a fair amount of fanfic, and in most franchises working with the female characters is a chore.

You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.

The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.

That you don’t have to unearth and piece together like some sort of volunteer archeologist coming up with theories way more complex than the available artifacts truly support.

Guys read this this is an amazing breakdown of it

ALWAYS reblog.

And then you can compare it to a show that has actually well written female characters and

Huh. First three spots are taken by F/F, M/M and F/M in descending order. Afterwards are platonic ships.

Just so we have the stats, what are the top 10 most written characters?

Wow. A perfect split, five to five. And the top three are women. (By about 200 fics to Jayce and Viktor, the runner ups, might I add)

That’s out of 29,590 works.

So about third of those (very roughly) are CaitVi.

Just so we have the

stats, what are the top 10 most

written characters?

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Fairy Land by Gustave Doré (1881)

A Mermaid by John William Waterhouse (1900)

Dance of the Nymphs by Nikolaos Gyzis (19th Century)

La Dame a la Licorne by Armand Point (1898)

The english language is so confusing that sometimes I'm tempted to go to the french side of the internet, settle down over there, and every time someone starts telling me shit about how bad my french is, I can let them know that the only reason I'm not fluent in french like I'm fluent in english is because the english won the colonialism. I would be a fluent francophone if it weren't for the french being the second best in their own game.

On est bien là pourtant

pins collected by dr. hilda a. hidalgo during her years of lesbian activism, c. 1970s.