A Romantic* Fangirl

“You feel the bulge in his pants” - implies that you are feeling some guy’s penis, may be sexy depending on context

Regular people: Wait, the King has easily stolen potatoes? How do I get in on this?

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

via @ninjahijabimuse​

Sampling rights becoming prohibitively expensive to use by small artists

Musicians being forced to sign over sampling rights to their record company, making any benefits they would hypothetically gain moot.

The Digital Milennium Copyright Act leading to the vidmaker-stomping nightmare that is ContentID

The DMCA leading to making it harder than ever to preserve media due to the way it prohibits tinkering with any locks the megacorps put on it, meaning it's way easier for artists' hard work to end up vaulted and lost.

The way basic chord progressions and musical styles have become copyrightable thanks to various lawsuits by the Marvin Gaye estate

The fact that the artists of the past used to be able to remix; adapt and iterate on art made within 56 years of them, likely created in their lifetimes, and now artists can only do those things with art produced nearly a century ago by people long dead.

New and independent artists being crowded out of the market by megacorp-owned IPs that would be public domain (and thusly convey less of an overwhelming advantage-via-marquee-value to megacorps) if the US had its pre-1976 copyright laws.

Times That Copyright Expansion Has Actually Materially Helped Artists On An Institutional Level:

is there yuri / is this bait (positive) / is this bait (negative) / is the toxic yuri from the gifs real / how much gay is in it / do they want us to ship it / was i supposed to ship this / am i just seeing things? what the fuck? if they didn’t want me to ship it why would they put stuff like this in it / can someone please tell me if there’s real yuri / if they weren’t canon why do they seem so GAY / I’m so stupid I fell for the gifs but there was nothing there but queerbait / i can’t tell if i’m supposed to ship this and i’m going to be so mad if this isn’t actual yuri / am i hallucinating because i thought this was supposed to be queer

It’s not like these are illegitimate questions (if it’s a burning question a person has, it’s legit for that person, and I absolutely understand that there’s a material difference between a canonically queer character and a tragic missed opportunity, and some of those missed opportunities really are tragic). Nor do I think people should censor themselves from asking the question if they really need to know. I’m sure many people in the queer fandom side of tumblr dot com have asked some form of at least one of these questions, myself included, while shopping for shows. But the helplessness and genuine fear behind it, coupled what feels like a rapid uptick in this rhetorical style, makes me kinda sad because it feels like a real shift in how audience engagement works.

I want people to enjoy thinking about things! The pleasure of interpreting things with your own brain is so good! It is possible to relish coming to a conclusion that doesn’t perfectly line up with how/why a story was told in a given way! You can guess “wrong” and still find value in your guess! You can guess “right” and still choose to explore it deeply, or imagine alternatives! Liking or disliking something on your own terms, based on your own thoughts about what you saw, isn’t embarrassing. At the end of watching something, you don’t get assigned your own executive producer from Hollywood who smugly tells you what was real queer content and what wasn’t and why you did it wrong.

And even this world where more queer people have the funding and platform to tell queer stories (and there needs to be a LOT more where that came from, it’s still DIRE in so many ways), it would be such a shame for expectations around representation to result in a loss of understanding of the many different layers of how stories are told. Subtext is important not just for decoding whether queer sex is going to happen—it’s a way to tap into all sorts of character desires and motivations, often unspoken but visible in texts just as they’re unspoken but visible in real life. There is real, transgressive, electric pleasure in a story that gives you a queer experience whether or not two particular characters literally fuck at the end. Why nope out before you get there because you’re afraid of being wrong, or afraid it won’t be obvious enough?

There’s a real danger of collapsing all the nuance and brilliance of modern storytelling into something flat and boring if watching TV is just about this transactional thing where viewers are waiting terrified for the moment they’ll be made a fool for “seeing things that aren’t there.”

But I guess if you can’t trust your critical thinking brain, or you don’t understand how to identify if you’re actually being queerbaited by an evil person or if you’re just responding to different layers of writing and direction and performance in ways that might be frustrating at times but also might yield some really cool fandom experiences? Then yeah, it would be really scary to dive into a TV show without knowing, in so many words, if the yuri is real.