don't mess with visual novel fans. we cant read.

🫩 no i don't think those characters are siblings i think they're friends. I don't think that's their mom I actually think she's their friend. I don't think they're related actually I think they're friends with each other.

a character being a perpetrator does not negate their victimhood and neither does their victimhood negate being a perpetrator. u can accept and reckon w both dimensions in ur analysis

don’t care didn’t ask + you’ve projected onto this character to the point that your characterisation is unrecognisable to the source material

the unfortunate side effect of developing a more critical eye for fan behaviour as a product of society™️ is that new fan takes on a piece of media become fairly predictable. oh the white guy with daddy issues is your favourite? you think the asian man is an adorable subby cinnamon roll? you think the woman in a position of authority is either mom-coded or a total bitch? say less

obviously there’s nothing morally wrong with the projectionist lens through which a large portion of fandom operates but it does get kind of tiring to constantly feel like. hey guys what if we stopped talking about ourselves and instead talked about the character

and of course a degree of projectionism can be a very useful lens in certain circumstances, such as having unique insight into a character who shares certain aspects of your own experiences. but at the end of the day you still gotta recognize that there are going to be aspects of them that diverge from yourself

ah. a nuanced story that allows for imperfect victims and portrays the confusing and contradictory nature of being human – particularly in a context that explores abuse, harassment and trauma. i wonder what people on the internet make of it... oh. oh no. oh no no no no no

stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation with the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.

Trying to find wlw ship fics on ao3 SUCKS because it’s always a background ship in a mlm centered fic. Everyone loves the wlw ship, but not as much as the mlm one, so they’re just sidelined. “Oh, but most women in media aren’t written well!” So? Fandom has completely remixed male characters for the sake of the ship. Make an AU. Change the setting. Put your own spin on the characters. I hate fandom misogyny so much.

call me terminally academia-brained but i do think a lot of the fun of character analysis is figuring out how to build a compelling argument for a particular reading using lines of evidence from canon as well as meta/intertextual support

and you could say that what i’m saying here is basically “a lot of the fun of doing character analysis is doing character analysis” but let’s be real a lot of fandom character analysis is pretty heavily vibes-based. and i think that’s where i really chafe up against the traditional thought-terminating fandom attitude of like, everyone’s opinions hold equal weight and any interrogation of that is inherently hostile. because i think it’s fascinating to dig into where others are coming from in terms of their views on characters or dynamics or whatever, especially when they differ significantly from more commonly expressed views, and part of that digging is asking people okay what parts of canon are you drawing from to support your opinion? what parts of canon are you disregarding or downplaying? how does this argument hold up in the light of how race, gender, class, ability, etc. operate both in the piece’s in-fiction and real world contexts?

Unhealthy ships in a fandom are a bioindicator. They're like finding caterpillars on your produce. You may not want to consume them---you may even find them disgusting---but if they aren't there at all, you know that stuff is COVERED in toxicity.

don’t care didn’t ask + you’ve projected onto this character to the point that your characterisation is unrecognisable to the source material

you've heard of death of the author, now get ready for death of the audience: where instead of basing your reaction on a thousand uninformed opinions online, you actually read the text and engage with it

girl help there's people on this post who can't actually read my text

[completely misunderstood the story] I always interpreted it as a sort of found family narrative myself. Like the frog is the scorpion's baby and she loves him very much :)