poise & propriety • he/him

the first methodology is strongly informed by quantifying and qualifying canon character behavior and then extrapolating from the canon behavior what other behaviors that character is likely to exhibit. in this scene this character exhibits a violent behavior, which means this character is likely to exhibit violent behavior in the future. this character has only ever mentioned male love interests, they will only have male love interests in the future. things like that.

the methodology i find more effective, because this is the methodology i use to understand real human beings* as a very autistic person who needs a framework with which to understand human beings very well and very quickly in order to, you know, live, is this: you qualify and quantify the individual's observed behavior, then you identify the internal processes that inform this behavior, and THEN speculate what sort of behaviors those internal processes might continue to inform.

*yes i know the character isn't a real person, but they are written and acted and directed by real people in order to communicate something about real people, and then real people come and analyze those characters, and i just don't think we're going to get away from the humanity in our dolls, at least not in this discussion

i will use an example from OFMD, sorry to anyone who doesn't give a shit, but this is unfortunately the only mine in which i toil.

ed gets a lot of headcanon mileage in the direction of being a sub, a bottom, a pillow princess, god's perfect baby girl forever, with specific attention to his sexual preferences/behaviors. if you gather up the behaviors from canon that seem to inform this they might look something like: run me through. whip my balls. im your captain. letting stede take the lead on the calypsos birthday sex. bigging his eyes like that 24/7.

from the first methodology, you might land on (and i do see a lot of this) something like "ed has only ever expressed bottom/sub tendencies** so ed is god's perfect bottom sub pillow princess always."

**i'm not going to get into the question of whether you can. fucking. determine someone's sexual preferences from their personality in non-sexual contexts. i'm just repeating lines of thinking i have observed.

analyzing through the second methodology, and i'll just pick one incident, again, as an example, you can look at "run me through". so we know that "run me through" is metaphorically sex, and that ed is the one that gets stabbed/penetrated. but i think it's pretty easy to argue that it was also literally ed wanting/seeking physical intimacy and having no better language for that than violence and pretense, which we're given to understand from how he interacts with jack and the background he's come from. then, looking at his failed attempt to kill stede, we know ed is not capable of hurting stede physically. so maybe we conclude that he "bottoms" in that scene because while he desperately needs closeness from stede he doesnt want to endanger him in any way.

and then you take your internal processes informed behavior and you could extrapolate a hell of a lot of things from that about ed's future behavior. maybe this is a one time thing. maybe he prefers to bottom always. maybe he prefers to bottom until he's had enough safe, comfortable, pleasant sex with stede to feel confident that he can do the same for stede. lot of places you can go but my point is that you've ended up there by looking at the character as a full person instead of a collection of behaviors and therefore you understand that they have depth, complexity, and the unpredictable unpredictability of all people.

and here's the real big reason i like this framework, is when you're working off this framework and talking to someone else who's working off this framework and you end up with different conclusions, i think it's way easier for everyone involved to go "yeah i see how you got there but i don't agree" and maybe even respectfully talk about their differing conclusions and learn something along the way.

#i have found that fandom at large will do the 1st one for female characters & characters of color #and the 2nd one for their favorite masc white male character #i have seen ppl doing the 2nd one for a white guy where they’re like “what if this shitty action has this secretly sympathetic motivation?” #and i’m thinking abt an old twitter poll by a canyonite asking which POV ppl preferred to read/write in their steddyhands fics #and ed was last place by a HUGE fucking margin #i’ve seen a lot of interpretations of ofmd that simply do not consider ed’s interiority at all (& not just from the canyon) #and it’s CRAZYYYYYY bc we literally have a whole episode IN HIS HEAD!!!!! #anyway i do feel like this list is missing “analyzing the character as a plot device” #but that contributes less to the fandom sandbox of fanon/headcanon than the 2 listed here

so first of all yes a billion percent to all of the above. there's no disputing that broad trends in fandom on what framework gets applied to what characters is motivated by internal biases. (racism in ed's case, misogyny when female characters get short shrift from their analysis.) and i think my original post is incomplete without acknowledging that, so thank you.

and two where you're completely right "character as a plot device" is something i missed, and you're also right that it contributes less to the fandom sandbox and i wonder if you might be able to make some sense of some vague thoughts i have about the difference between, like, critical film analysis where you're trying to develop a deeper understanding of just what happens in the source material, and sort of the transformative nature of fandom where you're not necessarily trying to tease out "What It Is", and sort of looking more at "What Else Can It Be?"

However, I do think describing the first type of analysis as people saying "This character exhibits X behavior so therefore they are [Type of person who exhibits X behavior] and will continue to act that way in the future" is maybe a little too... generous??? I don't mean this in a bad way, it is good to be generous to people, but in my experience, the type of fandom analysis that happens the most often is people watching/reading a story and pattern-matching it to other stories they have watched/read in the past so that they can determine the appropriate archetypes to slot characters into, and then those archetypes eat the canon character from the inside out. In fandom, these archetypes come from other fandoms as often as they come from traditional media tropes (and both fandom and traditional media include a bunch of racist and misogynist tropes/archetypes, which people often perpetuate by mapping them onto a canon where they weren't present (ex: when people take Ed and Stede, who are close enough in size that they swap clothes in their first scene, and make Ed much much larger than a tiny frail Stede. this happens so often)).

An example of the archetypes people use is The Dynamic, where (afaict) people were really determined to come up with a sort of hero's journey summary of all ships by boiling them down into combinations of two archetypes, which are descended from Holmes and Watson. Highly recommend the Fanlore page, I think it's really notable how "the dynamic" is often described not as just a pattern but as like, the ingredients of a good relationship?? which is going to incentivize people to cram their blorbos into the archetype because they want their blorbos to have a "good relationship." Personally I think the whole thing is. uh. really reductive and absurd. but that's just me. Ed and Stede absolutely get infected by these archetypes, though.

Another example is the Fandom Ghost, which is a downright spooky thing to read if you've been in the OFMD fandom since the beginning and watched what happened to Izzy Hands. Because fanon Izzy Hands did not come from looking at things Izzy does in canon and extrapolating from that what he might do in the future. Nor do I think fanon Izzy Hands came entirely from giving him motivations to describe his canon behavior. Like people are giving him much more sympathetic motivations than he actually has, but lots of times they are just describing an ENTIRELY different guy. A guy I have never seen on the tv show our flag means death. But he is a guy who shows up in white male side characters over and over and over, so it seems like he really is just coming from somewhere else.

“I was going to get my masters degree but then it was 2020, so yeah”

“I was cast in a play and then it was 2020”

I think there is a broad cultural problem with the current state of fanfiction that likely stems from the proliferation of fics-turned-published-novels wherein fic authors now feel they have a duty to churn out a high volume of content at an inhuman rate. and in order to meet those demands, they resort to AI. and that sucks.

I think readers and consumers of fanfiction broadly speaking also have a bad habit of feeding into this culture by demanding and expecting a high volume of content churned out at an inhuman rate, and it often prevents them from accurately assessing the quality of what they're reading, leading to a general degeneration of fic quality, feeding an audience that is getting worse at recognizing good art vs. bad art. and that sucks.

going from 1,800 fics to over 38,000 fics for a single ship in less than six months is not normal and should have been a warning sign for people that there was likely a fuckton of slop being produced and posted. and that sucks.

I don't like the excuse that some authors are using that they only used AI to beta their work. there are plenty of humans who would happily beta your fic for you. and if your reasoning for not using a human is because you wanted your work beta'd faster, I would implore you to examine WHY you feel like you are on some kind of binding schedule in a hobby space. kill the profit-driven manager in your brain and take your time making shit.

generally speaking, I believe this is a problem that is driven by both readers and writers but at the end of the day, the real driver - as ever - is capital, and its influence on art and creativity. I don't blame authors or readers for falling victim to this because the world around us sucks, but my god we all need to at least try a little harder to resist.

if you're a reader, be critical of what you're seeing and consuming. and if you're a writer, stop giving away any piece of the creative process to AI. silence the part of you that insists you must post as much as possible all the time. you do not have to capitulate to hustle culture and also your fanfiction will probably not actually make you rich and famous, even if all those comments and kudos are making you feel important.

like even sitting in an office for eight hours a day isn’t particularly pleasant (or healthy, as we are beginning to see) but when we’re talking about doing *actual work* for that same amount time it gets pretty fucking brutal

doing literally *anything* (even leisure activities) for eight hours straight tends to be less than enjoyable but when we’re talking about things like construction, landscaping, factory work, and hell, even foodservice and retail, eight hours is a fucking ETERNITY

Oh my god oh my god oh my god. Guys. This is so exciting. I am a ball of hype.

Okay – so – ahem. There is this academic field called fan studies. I've just finished a master's degree and my final thesis was in that field. (Technically, my field is LIS, library and information science. Don't worry, it overlaps.) Today, my university uploaded my thesis to the institutional repository, so now everyone can read it! It's right there! Look! LOOK AT IT I'm so proud!

TL;DR:

This study looks into a group of Good Omens fans' opinions about AO3's search and tagging systems, and also talks about their thoughts about fandom overall. Specifically, I wanted to figure out whether things like amount of time using AO3, experience using other fanfiction sites, level of comfort with AO3's tagging system, or experience in LIS/librarianship or IT make any difference to a person's opinions about search and tagging on AO3. (There were no strong correlations in my data, but there were plenty of interesting qualitative observations to talk about.) I also looked at how, exactly, people go about searching AO3 in practice, what features they like to use, what things trip them up, and so on, using a fun method from the computer science field of human–computer interaction.

And no one is ever ready for the switch, and even after it happens they can never fully prepare themselves for what they’re going to get. Shane has learned that when he’s going to do that he should take them aside to give them the card rather than in front of people

Once Shane feels comfortable with Hayden as a genuinely good friend in his birthday card that year he writes out a whole thing about how he’s always wanted a best friend like other kids had but never had one and had accepted he never would, and then Hayden came into his life and gave him a level of love and friendship he never thought he would get and he loves everything about Hayden and can’t wait to be by his side as friends and brothers for the rest of their lives. Hayden fully breaks down and loses it, Jackie notices they’ve been gone a while and walks into the kitchen to see Hayden hugging Shane and sobbing into his shoulder. She raises her eyebrows at Shane and Shane just gives her the OK sign and goes back to rubbing Hayden’s back

Ilya learns about the card thing when it’s yunas birthday and he notices her opening Shane’s card like she’s deactivating a bomb. She stares silently as she reads it and Ilya starts freaking out a little when she starts to tear up and then pulls Shane in for a long silent hug. He looks at it later and sees that Shane wrote about how the last year made him realize over again how lucky he is to have someone as strong and supportive as her as a mother and he hopes to one day be half the parent to his own kids as she was to him

When it’s their first time having Ilya’s birthday together he’s legitimately nervous because this is his first Shane Card and he doesn’t know what to expect and part of him is afraid he’s built it up too much in his head and Shane won’t have as nice things to say as he did with other people. And then he opens the envelope and there’s no card but instead multiple pieces of paper because Shane couldn’t fit it all into a limited space. Ilya spends the better part of the next hour walking around the house reading it, taking breaks occasionally to cry or hyperventilate before going back to reading it because holy shit does Shane Hollander love him. Like he knew logically that Shane did but now he’s got pages and pages of Shane walking him through his feelings over the last decade of their life and every moment he remembered and cherished. Shane finally catches up to him and he’s on the floor of the kitchen, face a splotchy red mess, chugging Gatorade because he’s dehydrated from crying

This is a spot from an italian estate agency (we are governed by the right-wing party)

The woman says "Ridiculous..."

In the late 1970s, a brand started in Canada that was the store brand for all the Loblaw-based supermarkets. That brand was called "No Name" to denote that it wasn't like Kraft or Hershey or whatever, this was not a name. (I'm not sure if everywhere calls the in-store brand or a generic brand a "no name brand" but we call all store brands in Canada "no name brands" by default, this is the official No Name brand)

They are also known for being less expensive, sometimes lower quality, and very very simple, but recognizable branding style.

Over the next few decades, this just became a part of Canadian grocery shopping. If you shopped in a Loblaw grocery store (Real Canadian Superstore, No Frills, Independent, etc) you will see the iconic plain yellow packaging. And that was what it was. A plain yellow box just saying what the product was. Eventually the product was labelled in French as well.

In the 90's they shifted to add images to the packaging to just make sure people knew what they were getting, (even though some people, me included, felt it was a bit less fun than getting a box of cereal that just said 'cereal').

So now in grocery stores, we see this:

This is a genuine product. There are hundreds of different kinds of products that look like this. And in Canada, everyone likely has at least one No Name product hiding in their pantry. Because, come on, baking soda is baking soda.

Recently, the company who owns this brand has decided to play with the popularity. There are now funny yellow things you can buy that just describe the thing.

These are jokes for Canadians, basically. Using the iconic branding in a silly, cheeky way, making fun of itself.

So! Just to go back and make sure you understand...

This is a real product:

And this is a Canadian inside joke:

I highly recommend googling No Name Brand. Thank you for attending my TED talk.

See the two versions of her first line below: