you know how I'm filled with rage?

As payment for your time, here is a pic of Glenn being a good dad to Nick, who had a nightmare and was in the living room watching movies a bit too loud so that someone would wake up and keep him company. It worked and now he fell back asleep. Those Close boys, forever in my heart. 

[ID: A digital drawing of two people on a couch in a darkened living room. One is an Asian man with long dark hair, tattoos, a bracelet in Philadelphia pride flag colors, and a red shirt that says “Blessed Grandma.” He is looking affectionately at the other person. The other person is a kid with shorter dark hair with a red streak, a bracelet in trans pride colors, and a blue shirt that says “University of California Santa Barbara.” He is asleep and leaning on the first person. Both have black-painted fingernails. The light bouncing onto them suggests that they are in front of a TV. In the background is a potted plant, a family photo (a sloppy background redraw I did based on a very beautiful commission from Nat) and a bookshelf with books and a framed photo. /end ID] The very gently-phrased TLDR:  Enjoy their story all you want, they’re very funny and the characters are wild, but if you’re recommending the show to someone who might count on content warnings, maybe mention that the CWs on this show aren’t particularly reliable.

You keep telling Anthony you want representation, that you want more diversity, you want characters confirmed as fandom wide headcanons, whatever. You tell him you want more. 

But, these same blogs that say these things reblog posts on the “men writing women” memes and rant on cis people writing trans characters and white people writing POC and whatever else, so let me off you this. 

If you were a content creator, and your fans were asking you for representation, while on the same note saying how people who aren’t [people group] can never get [people group] right, what would possess you to take that step to provide that? I want you to genuinely think about that, because as a content creator who prides themself on putting in the kinds of characters I’ve heard people cry for in my stories, seeing those kinds of things is very discouraging. Because, I, as a white person know my portrayal of a POC is never going to be as good as POC want it to be, but all I can do is try  my very best and listen to them on their critiques and turn around what I did wrong. 

I’m not saying Anthony is justified in the lack of diversity in NPCs, but you guys need to understand that when you tell him to provide diversity then also complain that [majority group] never portray [minority group] right is not helping your case. All you’re gonna do is discourage him from providing that. 

If you need evidence, here’s an actual Talking Dads quote form Anthony on Trans Nick and other fandom wide headcanons  ( I did not transcribe this scene, i thank my Discord friend for sending me this. I don’t know your Tumblr but if you see this just drop a say so in the notes) 

“Anthony: Oh wow. There are a lot of ones I like that are almost exclusively about gender and orientations and stuff like that. Of like, oh yeah maybe Nick is trans or or or any of those kinds of things. Cause those, it’s always like, not not that I would ever take those because uh, uh, and, make them part of the main canon just because I feel like that might- I don’t trust myself to not make that appropriative and weird. But I love that people from marginalized communities are taking those characters and being like “he’s ours now!”

Beth: Yeah. 

Anthony: ‘Nick, he’s- he’s black and he’s a trans man and Glenn loves him and it’s not a big deal.’ And like, all that kind of stuff.”

I’m sympathetic to sentiments like this, because this was my writing until this very year. My thought process was “I won’t write POC because I, as a white person, might fuck it up” and that thought process is only made so much stronger when if you do fuck up, no matter how minor or how severe, you’re met with nothing but inbox spam and threats and hostility. If you want response; use your words politely. When you attack them, nothing will change. Attacking does nothing but make them fear their own fans, and that’s genuinely not what we want. I know that’s not what we want. This callout/cancel culture people have created in this little fandom is so toxic, to both us and the dads. 

If you’re gonna ask something of the dads, do it nicely. Don’t come for their throats. If you, YOU personally, have sent them the same message multiple times and have no response after a couple weeks; then you get rights to get more aggressive. Not when you’re posting one call out on their Twitter.com and do nothing but yell and accuse. That’s not accomplishing anything. 

If I, a fifteen year old, find myself using more tact in these posts than grown ass adults, there’s definitely a problem here. And it’s not the dads. 

You wanna know that dads aren’t giving representation? Because they’re scared of fucking it up, they’re scared you ADULTS are going to come for their throats at the smallest mistake and continue to turn their fanbase into a warzone. Don’t make it a warzone. 

You know how you fix that? Approach them. Message them on some platform. Just say; Hey, I know your fans want [character] to be [minority group] and if you wanted help in learning how to confirm that, I am [minority group] and I’d be willing to help you.

It’s that easy! Wow! 

Because, honestly, even a sensitivity director can’t be perfectly knowledgeable on every single minority group. 

If you want your kind of minority group represented in DnDads, god dammit reach out to the cast and offer your input. Not you may not be an authority on your minority group, or some kind of genius on it, but one of those people reaching out and offering advice based on their own experiences is often much better than nothing. 

Like, the other day on twitter someone said, “Hey, Jenna and Anthony! I noticed you called Ratticus Finch ‘agendered’ and that’s not a perfect term for all nonbinary people, so I would suggest putting in some more research on terms before the next episode.” And THAT’S how you approach topics at first, not screaming and yelling. That’s how you put in advice. That’s how you provide criticism. 

I said when I first started talking about discourse that the adults are the problem, and i still stand by that. Because I am yet to see anyone under the age of 25 acting like this. Anyone younger I’ve seen on this has been tactful, and polite. Which really shows the difference in generations. It’s sad. 

I hold hope in the hosts, because they’ve made steps to change in the past. And they’re only gonna take the issues one hurdle at a time, you can’t expect everything to be managed all at once, they have to pace themselves or else they’re going to get burned out and that’s worse. 

And if this podcast at the moment is not up to your standards? That’s fine. Walk. Away Come check back in in a few months if you still hold interest and see if it’s what you want to associate yourself with. Just stop attacking the hosts, criticize and construct them instead. 

So, to start: people have asked nicely. At this point I’m pretty confident that listing off all the times cast members have ignored or misled people who criticized them won’t change anyone’s mind, but to look at just one easily-receipt-able interaction:

I come back to this pretty often, but it’s because to me, it’s just so blatant. Someone said that this situation might be dangerous, Anthony agreed and said he’d do something, and then he didn’t. And then he ignored the issue for three months straight. 

Despite the fact that there are plenty of other instances of people politely reaching out to no avail . . . I don’t think I need them? This is enough to dissuade me from trusting Anthony or putting effort towards reaching out to him, because he’s already shown us that this is how he’ll respond, and he’s done nothing since then to indicate that he’s changed or will act differently going forward. If he’d apologized for mishandling this situation, that’d be one thing, but he refuses to even acknowledge it. So I have no good reason to think that polite, private criticisms and suggestions will lead anywhere. 

And either way, the notion that asking nicely is the only way to get change and that being angry and aggressive won’t change anything reflects poorly on the cast, not on the people calling them out. If you (general you, not you, larkofchaos) won’t accept criticism that’s not sugarcoated or given nicely, then your priority was always your own feelings and ego, rather than a desire to avoid causing harm. If, for instance, you won’t do content warnings because you’re afraid people will yell if they’re poorly done, then your goal in doing those content warnings is clearly to look good/avoid being yelled at, when the goal should be to reduce the risk of people being harmed by your content.

And when you do mess up, you’re still responsible for that and for fixing it, regardless of how nice people are about it.

To pull just one example from dndads: it’s fucked up that Anthony’s planned dare for Darryl was literal sexual assault; it’s fucked up that he put that in TD; it’s fucked up that the rest of the cast rolled with it. All of that is true whether I say “oof, Anthony seems like a great guy but this is pretty iffy” or “hey FUCK this and fuck you.” You can argue that the latter is a dick move, but it changes nothing about what Anthony did or his obligation to correct it.

[. . .]

You don’t get to have the power and also the immunity of ignorance. That’s like-- ignorance and benefit of the doubt are the things you have to check at the door when you go into the influencer club. Once you are in a position of power and you have clout--in any career, but let’s keep it in circle with specifically creators and content producers--there’s a tax on being there. And the tax is you have to be more responsible than most people do with those kinds of statements.

It’s a little bit like how if you have thirty grand in the bank, you don’t get to gripe about being broke. It can be cathartic to gripe about being broke, but once you have that thirty grand in the bank, sorry! That’s a thing you don’t get anymore; that’s the tradeoff.

Cancel culture isn’t some fucking amorphous, magical presence floating all around us-- “Oh my God, look out everyone! It’s the disease of cancel culture, we have to run away from it!” All cancel culture is, is people’s reaction to shit you did. When you say you want rid of cancel culture, what you’re saying is “I don’t want people to react this way to the thing that’s happening.” That’s not a thing you can do! That’s not a power that you, or anybody else, has. 

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