Found your way here already? That's a shame.

It's always from the perspective of The Humble Creator, who's just here to Have Fun and is Minding Their Own Business, suddenly being affronted with any manner of ill fandom conduct. People sneaking food away and telling their friends that they liked it but not the chef, or stealing the food and passing it off as their own somewhere that gets them more attention, or of course: being yelled at for bringing something that's not to their own, hyper-specific tastes. ("I don't like chocolate cake, how dare you bring it! No I don't care who else might like it!")

And these are accurate descriptions of the fandom experience! Audiences can be tactless, or outright rude, or even steal things. It sucks. Obviously it makes sense to use a potluck guest as an example of how to conduct yourself in an online space.

But let's not act like the creators are actually all here to just have fun, minding their own business. It's not as simple as "don't complain about the abundance of chocolate cake when you could find something else or cook for yourself." If I'm allergic to something in that cake (let's say potato starch for. no real reason), and that same thing is in everything I try to look for, even things that it doesn't conceivably work with, I'm not gonna feel welcome at the potluck.

Fandom is community, you say? Sure, that's true. And just like how aces and aros are excluded from every other community they want to be a part of, this potluck sure is full of people who don't think twice about using potato starch in Literally Everything.

"But I'm just having fun playing with my dolls!" Yeah, in a public space where everyone can see you. Let's not act like we're all just minding our business in some sequestered corner of the playground at recess, this is the internet. We're TRYING to be seen and noticed and appreciated.

"But no one's forcing you to eat chocolate cake--" correct! So we need a better analogy. It's actually more like being stuck in a room full of people smoking and being asked why you don't just dodge the fumes.

News flash: you can't! Maybe you brought a mask, but that doesn't filter out All Air, just like how filtering tags won't actually work on everything. And in both cases, even if it did, you're basically left with nothing else to take in.

And let's say, for the moment, that someone actually did show up to the potluck with a cake free of potato starch. They're gonna get comments such as:

"Oh this is delicious, does it have potato starch in it? No? C'monnn you gotta be lying, this is totally what potato starch tastes like"

"I think they're lying about the starch so that they won't spoil the recipe"

"This is great but it'd be better with potato starch in it. was kinda expecting potato starch not gonna lie"

"Y'know I didn't realize this would be a cake with potato starch but you made it so well! It turned out so much better than the way other people make it!"

(These are all paraphrased messages I saw a fan comic get that was repeatedly stated to Not Have a Ship In It and was written by an aro author to boot)

Yes, we are all ultimately responsible for curating our own fandom experiences. But people are also responsible for what fandom experiences are even available, and if the creators are smack-talking anyone who's allergic to potato starch and putting it into recipes that are usually safe for that person to eat (*ahem* shipping characters who are explicitly aromantic in canon), and then getting mad at people for asking they keep the recipe as-is, then...

Ok so quick headcanon time because I mistook Rouxls for a woman when I first saw him and I can NOT think of this guy as a male:

He's a cis woman who prefers using he/him pronouns for literally no gender related reason. He also feels more comfortable in masculine presenting clothes. I personally think that this is more interesting than a trans headcanon, cause I haven't really seen stuff like this.

Alsooo he's aroace. Let me explain: yes, he does get into a polycule with a male and a female, but that was only because he's a dumdum who thought that Kris, Susie and Ralsei are a throuple. He didn't seem to be attracted to either one of his lovers, he just wanted more power. He said so himself, "three art stronger than one".

Now for the next question: why would an aroace person assume three people are in a polycule even when that is not so? Amatonormativity. (I hope I wrote that word correctly, I haven't seen it in a while.) He's experienced it so many times throughout his life that to the people around him everything means romance, that it's not too farfetched to headcanon that he just assumed the three heroes are in love because the idea of love had been forced onto him his entire life.

please give us more information about Omair, i love them so much and i want to know more about them!!!!

Fun fact, Omair is the only Muslim NPC in DT... that I can recall off the top of my head. He doesn't explicitly mention this in his dialogue, but there's a few clues, his name + his shop's rules, which are atypical for Dialtown, like not mentioning Satan's name in his shop and of course - no cursing. It's a nice little detail that separates him from the ordinarily foul-mouthed town.

His full name is Omair Al-Haddad, which is, like most DT names, a pun. Omair is frequently translated as 'problem-solver' and Haddad being 'blacksmith'. So y'know, 'Problem-solving blacksmith' pretty much sums up a talented IT guy. Fabron's surname also comes from the same place.

As for where his traits came from, I wanted another shopkeeper NPC for the game, but specifically, I liked the idea of having an honest or friendly one that was overly patient/fair with Roger/Gingi and winds up paying the price for it. I do like to imagine that after the route ends, he (eventually) gets paid back though.

Usually with a lot of my NPCs, I like to have them clearly striding for something? Like everyone in the world, Omair moves even when he's not around. He loves what he does and cares a lot for his business, but his shop is in an awful location with little foot traffic and due to his lack of revenue, he could not set up anywhere else if he wanted to. As a result, he runs TV commercials at like 3 or 4am in the morning - not once has anyone ever been swayed by them.

With Omair's design, I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted him to look like at first. I went back and forth on the head, but decided to stick with the Phone head since Fabron, the other IT guy of the route, already had a custom and swapping them wouldn't have made sense, since I was using Fabron's screen for the possession screen.

The idea of having Omair be a Muslim was pretty much the last thing I came up with for the character. It actually stemmed from me from struggling to land on a name for him. I basically looked through names that had certain meanings, y'know, relating to intelligence, problem solving, working with metal and... 'Omair' was by far the one I liked best. Then I realized that I didn't actually have any other NPCs in the game who were clearly Muslim.

Then I thought more about it and realized how relatively uncommon black Muslims are in fiction for the most part, despite being a fairly common demographic, though perhaps less so in the States. For context, my next door neighbours while working on DT were Nigerian Muslims and I always enjoyed stopping to chat to them. Probably the closest I've been to neighbours since moving out, so they left an impact on me to say the least.

African American Muslims were also hugely important in American 1960's cultural politics, with Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X's activism, and there's a few smaller references to the politics of that decade in the DLC due to Crown's influence on the story, like Benny's introduction. Benny's surname, Fusco, partly comes from the photographer who shot Robert Kennedy Sr's funeral train! I'm rambling, but yeah, I decided to go with it.

the way fandoms are desperate to make all aroace characters romance and sex favorable but then dont do anything remotely similar to any other identity is astounding. hmm i wonder why

ANOTHER ONE!!!