immortal boy king

For Hellsite Eyes only…,

Hello again, Tumblr. Now that our dashboards are back to normal (‘normal’ doing some heavy lifting here), the crabs are back in tropical paradise (for now), and Mr. Brick Whartley is back with them, we felt it was time for reflection.

In his opening statement on April 1, Mr. Whartley, our now-former Head of Viral Marketing and Exponential Growth and Front End Software Developer, outlined his ambition to “...increase clicks across the platform by any means necessary”. Quite the lofty ambition. And this got us thinking—how did we do? And by we, of course, we mean you. Well, you didn’t disappoint, and if you like unnecessarily large numbers, you’re in for a real treat.

By 12:49 pm (PDT)/3:49 pm (EDT), the community had summoned 7.5 million crabs at a rate of 1.07 million crabs per hour. 

By the end of the day, there were 20,000 posts by 14,000 of you with the tag “time for crab.” Time indeed.

The community’s April Fools prank was a resounding success, with more than 52,000 posts from Tumblr users attempting to “crash” this Hellsite by scheduling posts all at the same time. 

Mr. Brick Wharley’s blog accumulated more than 3,000 followers and 12,000 notes, while @staff received nearly 50,000 notes across the day.

Perhaps Mr. Whartley didn’t do such a lousy job. Finally, the most important statistic of the day, the community summoned 25 million crabs across Tumblr on April 1, 2022.

Fiction does have the power to influence someone’s views and behavior. Not at a single work (JAWS was very much an outlier), but constant exposure can absolutely have an effect, positive or negative.

For example: Look how commonly people in all seriousness perceive two characters sharing a bed as something inherently romantic etc.

Or worse, look how many people believe in negative stereotypes, because they keep seeing them in fiction.

The “there’s only one bed” trope absolutely comes from the IRL belief that sharing a bed is always sexual in nature, especially if it’s between adults or people of opposite sexes. (Even kids get this treatment sometimes, depending on the family.) You can straight up look to the Hays code for this- they would require married adults on sitcoms to sleep in two separate beds to avoid even the implication of sex happening, meaning that the implication people thought in the 1930s and shit was still “two people in a bed? SCANDALOUS!”

Jaws is actually still an example of this, rather than an outlier- Jaws took a much-maligned species (sharks) and essentially writ them larger than life in all of the ways that their negative stereotypes already suggested. Sharks are dangerous killers! Sharks will kill everything! Even boats! Of course it had a highly negative impact on the actual IRL shark population- most people had had no reason not to challenge these preconceptions, and Jaws was scary. But that shit didn’t come out of nowhere, and if you made the same movie about, let’s say parakeets, it likely wouldn’t go anywhere. (Say “coyotes”, and it would. See how that works?)

The point I’m trying to make is that fiction may reinforce negative stereotypes, but it is absolutely not where they come from, and you won’t start believing in them just because someone on ao3 wrote a 10-kudos fic where they call someone a homophobic slur. That’s not how it works.

also, that last point- fiction being part of a psychological violence thing- you’re right. but the thing that you have to also keep in mind is that that’s fictional violence that the reader keeps going into. Like on purpose. As much as it sucks, there’s really only so much that you can do about someone reinforcing their preexisting biases with fiction that feels comfortable and not challenging to them. Ironically, though, fanfiction is not really the place that people do that; the broader media landscape (ie: tv, movies, comics, tradpub books) tends to skew more racist and more sexist and more homophobic just, like, because of the general way that creating any of those things for a paid audience works. Sanitizing fanfiction will not succeed at taking racist or homophobic or sexist works away from someone who wants to read things that are racist or homophobic or sexist, because if they keep seeking those things out, they have a frankly astonishing wealth of shit they can dig up just, like, from reruns from mainstream TV in the last 20 years.

Because of what fiction is in its essence: A means to understand the world. This is the point I’m trying to make here: You can come up with a new stereotype in fiction and people will start believing it if it’s used often enough.

And somewhat related to that, just the general idea of queerness as inherently predatory, but that originated in law first and manifested in fiction as an extension of censorship laws. The predatory trans woman was only ever either a serial killer or joke punchline in fiction, introduced mainly for shock value, while queerness as evil was often used by queer creators to sneak in queer rep past censors.

The thing is, yes, fiction can affect social perception. Fanfic can mess with you. Art can affect you deeply. That is very often THE POINT though.

“Fiction affects reality” and “You can explore difficult topics in fiction without the fear of censorship” are not mutually exclusive concepts.

“The predatory trans woman stereotype … comes from fiction.”

What? CITE ME SOME SOURCES. The predatory trans woman stereotype is an outgrowth of the predatory gay man stereotype, which, yknow, comes from the historical belief that queerness on the whole was predatory. “The general idea of queerness as inherently predatory… originated in law first” - because people who were prejudiced wrote the law. See how that works? The same prejudices were present in the people who wrote the fiction. These laws did not spring fully formed out of the ground. They were not handed down from some mysterious power on high that said “1800s America, You Must Be Threatened By Queerness”.

Trans women in particular were and are at high risk of assault if they were “clocked”, especially historically. “Stealthing”, ie hiding in plain sight, was a historical way to avoid facing as much transphobic violence (and still is today! It’s an extreme form of ‘passing’ where you avoid disclosing your trans identity as much as possible). Examples of trans people going “stealth” date back hundreds of years across both assigned genders. Compounding this, most trans women were seen as “effeminate gay men who crossdress” for a very long time. I shouldn’t have to say this, but homophobia has an old and storied history in western society that goes back much further than our current media landscape (like this law criminalizing gay sex on penalty of death from 1533). People already hated gay men. Trans women were, for a long, long time, seen as the “worst” of gay men.

So, first and foremost, we have the issue of “your average homophobe does not see trans women and gay men as separate groups for much of the 1900s”. Meaning: you should be looking at the predatory gay men trope for early examples. We do actually have lots of those. You know what those date back to?

People being homophobic.

This article by the SPLC here goes into detail on certain homophobic arguments, and the first one is a “predatory queerness” myth- ie, the “gay men are pedophlies” one. I want you to take a note as who is cited for the origins of these myths. Very few of them are books at all, and the ones that are purport to be historical fact, not fiction. This one from the American Bar Association details the “gay/trans panic defense”, and includes an example from the 1950s.

These were not invented from wholecloth in fiction, dude. These came from actual attitudes held in society at the time. To claim otherwise is dangerously fucking misleading.

Ma-ia ho

Ma-ia ha

Alo?

sunt eu

GIVE IT 10-15 YEARS AND WE’LL ALL BE GROWN UP AND AN ENTIRE NEW SET OF KIDS WILL BE ON HERE BLOGGING ABOUT COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SHOWS AND BANDS AND MOVIES AND BOOKS

THE ONLY THING THEY’LL STILL BE BLOGGING ABOUT THE SAME AS WE WERE IS DOCTOR WHO

By which I mean: if you’ve just called your best mate an absolute dickhead, you can’t then call a hated politician something that’s (technically) worse, like a total fuckwit, because that would imply either that you were really insulting your mate or that you like the politician. Instead, you have to use a milder epithet, like bastard, to convey your seething hatred for the second person. But if your opening conversational gambit is slagging someone off, then it’s acceptable to go big (”The PM’s a total cockstain!”) at the outset.

back then i made a bunch of these but by now i lost the pic and dont know how to find the original post anymore

so anyway here is the diagram for anyone else who is interested!!

this requires pretty big carboard pieces, if you have a really big box or something you can make it from one piece, but if you don't, you can also just make each of the pieces individually and then tape them together

and then in the end you put it together like this!!

and then when you make a bunch you can put them all next to each other and stack your books like crazy