If you look at Damian, Jackson, Duke, or Jaime, they've all changed. But crucially, there's an effort to connect these older versions of them with who they were when they were introduced. Damian in 2023 feels like he did in the 2010s just older. His characterization might vary from author to author but the base personality is consistent, and has been for decades. Even Duke, who's character went through a radical change from Robin to Signal, has that same base of being an intense genius who pushes himself to extremes. His appearances in urban legends line up with what we know about him from We Are Robin, almost a decade ago

I know people think Jon was boring in under Tomasi, but he had a personality. He was proud, boisterous, naive, trusting. I feel like people view all kids as having these traits and view 2016 Jon as plain because of this. But plenty of adults have these traits. He could still be a brash and trusting guy while being more mature.

And even if he didn't have a personality... Shouldn't there be an effort to give him one? Any effort? Just a crumb of effort

(note: both times they mention Jon's childhood interests - games and toys and anime - they imply that he's grown past these things or even scold him for watching anime. Nothing more exemplifies how these books are written by out of touch old people than this. Lois commenting on Jon watching anime makes no sense because nowadays that's not noteworthy. It's become normalized for adults to collect toys and love anime and cartoons and that kind of bs. No one with their hand on the pulse has touched this character in a decade lmao)

Instead he just doesn't have a personality anymore. He doesn't have the same interests anymore. And I could appreciate that in a "most people grow out of certain interests and develop new ones" if that's how it was written. But it's not written at all, any character work that could be derived from changes to Jon is just not there.

First of all, he is not happy that Brian Michael Bendis and Dan Didio did the age-up to Jon. It interrupted the momentum of the character. He said that both Bendis and Didio were full of themselves when they did that.

Second, he does not feel that the character is salvageable, ever since Tom Taylor made him an "LGBT icon." (He actually said "gay icon," but that is technically incorrect.) When he wrote Jon, he wrote stories that were accessible to anyone from 10 to 100. The implication is that anyone could pick up a Super Sons or pre-aged-up Jon comic and "get it."

Third, he has not read the Tom Taylor run of "Son of Kal-El." I told him about Jay Nakamura, and how his powers prevent him from being harmed in pretty much any circumstance. Mr. Tomasi was...not impressed.

(I did not tell him about the series where Jon goes to the Injustice universe and does...very little, actually. I had the feeling that it would not have brightened his day.)

Dan Jurgens created the current iteration of Jon Kent back in Convergence. Peter Tomasi, Patrick Gleason, and many others developed Jon during the Rebirth era. And then...well...

Look, I can't blame Mr. Tomasi for feeling bitter about the whole thing. He had a good thing going. The character of Jon Kent had incredible potential for a wide variety of stories that many people could relate to. And then he was told that it was out of his hands and that the New Hotness that was Bendis (along with the "genius" of Didio) would essentially create a new character with the name of the old one.

Again, this is from Peter Tomasi's mouth. I did offer to keep his opinions about the matter in confidence, but he said that he'd been very forthright with his opinions. And to be honest, there's not much that either Dan Didio or Brian Michael Bendis can do to him now.

Anyway, I leave you with a portrait of Mr. Tomasi from the con. Opinions and thoughts are, as always, welcome.

--Doc

Because the tag itself was created as a response to a fandom-wide tendency to disregard warnings and assume tagging was exaggerated. And then the same fucking idiots reading those tags describing things they found upsetting or disturbing or just not to their taste would STILL click into the stories and give the writer's grief about it.

And as a response writers began using the tag to signal "no, really, I MEAN the tags!"

But like.

If you really think about it, that's a solution to a different problem. The solution to "I know you tagged your story appropriately but I chose to disregard the tags and warnings by reading it anyway, even though I knew it would upset me, so now I'm upset and making it your problem" is frankly a block, a ban and wide-spread blacklisting. But fandom as a whole is fucking awful at handling bad faith, insidious arguments that appeal to community inclusion and weaponize the fact most people participating in fandom want to share the space with others, as opposed to hurting people.

So instead of upfront ridiculing this kind of maladaptive attempt to foster one's own emotional self-regulation onto random strangers on the internet, fandom compromised and came up with a redundant tag in a good faith attempt to address an imaginary nuance.

There is no nuance to this.

A writer's job is to tag their work correctly. It's not to tag it exhaustively. It's not even to tag it extensively. A writer's sole obligation, as far as AO3 and arguably fandom spaces are concerned, is to make damn sure that the tags they put on their story actually match whatever is going on in that story.

That's it.

That's all.

"But what if I don't want to read X?" Well, you don't read fic that's tagged X.

"But what if I read something that wasn't tagged X?" Well, that's very unfortunate for you, but if it is genuinely that upsetting, you have a responsibility to yourself to only browse things explicitly tagged to not include X.

"But that's not a lot of fic!" Hi, you must be new here, yes, welcome to fandom. Most of our spaces are built explicitly as a reaction to There's Not Enough Of The Thing I Want, both in canon and fandom.

"But there are things on the internet that I don't like!" Yeah, and they are also out there, offline. And, here's the thing, things existing even though we personally dislike or even hate or even flat out find offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable existing is the price we pay to secure our right to exist as individuals and creators, regardless of who finds US personally unpleasant, hateful or flat out offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable.

"But what about [illegal thing]?!" So the thing itself is illegal, because the thing itself has been deemed harmful. But your goddamn cop-poisoned authoritarian little heart needs to learn that sometimes things are illegal that aren't harmful, and defaulting to "but illegal!" is a surefire way to end up on the wrong side of the fascism pop quiz. You're not a figure of authority and the more you demand to control and exercise authority by command, rather than leadership, the less impressive you seem. You know how you make actual, genuine change in a community? You center harm and argue in good faith to find accommodations and spread awareness of real, actual problems.

But let's play your game. Let's pretend we're all brainwashed cop-abiding little cogs that do not own a single working brain cell to exercise critical thinking with. 99% of the time, when you cry about any given thing "being illegal!!!" you're correct only so far as the THING itself being illegal. The act or object is illegal. Depiction of it is not. You know why, dipshit? Because if depiction of the thing were illegal, you wouldn't be able to talk about it. You wouldn't be able to educate about it. You wouldn't be able to reexamine and discuss and understand the thing, how and why and where it happens and how to prevent it. And yeah, depiction being legal opens the door for people to make depictions that are in bad taste or probably not appropriate. Sure. But that's the price we pay, creating tools to demystify some of the most horrific things in the world and support the people who've survived them. The net good of those tools existing outweighs the harm of people misusing them.

You have a responsibility to yourself to only browse things explicitly tagged to not include X.

However, unreasonable demands are met with unreasonable solutions.

I did go more in depth about it here.

Tl;dr, if you have extreme triggers around fiction, you have a responsibility to yourself to look after them. If the faintest mention of the color blue sends you into a spiral, you need to curate your experience and possibly only consume stuff you know for sure doesn't include it. And yeah, it sucks when it turns out people don't tag extensively for your triggers. That's the kind of thing that requires community support and trusted people to vet stuff for you, or polite inquiries to writers to find out if you can read their stuff.

What you don't do is demand everyone everywhere stop writing about things you personally find triggering. Because that's how you fail the fascism pop quiz. Again.

Also, you're wrong.

People tag their SFW fic all the time as not having sex in it.

AO3 has obligatory tags for rating (which indicates the presence of sex or violence), and for non-con (and character death, and underage sexuality).

If you don't want to read graphic rape or sex, you can filter out fics by those tags, also known as Ratings and Archive Warnings. Those tags are obligatory to post in the archive. Literally every fic has to tag for those. So pretending that you can stumble upon sex or rape without warning as a widespread problem is disingenuous. Do people mistag? Yeah, but it's a minority and you can report it for TOS violation.

Because ratings and archive warnings are obligatory tags to post into AO3.

If you do not filter by that, and stumble on something that upsets you, that's on you.

But the main point of this post isn't about rape or sex, BECAUSE THOSE ARE OBLIGATE TAGS IN AO3 ALREADY. We're talking about other, less common triggers that people are upset about.

If you have specific triggers and they're not commonly tagged in the community you're in? That's on you to figure out how to vet for them. Either by reaching out to individual authors or by having trusted friends vet stuff for you. It's cumbersome and inconvenient, BUT THAT'S WHAT TRIGGERS ARE. Because the alternative is to run into them and have A Bad Time.

If you're not actually triggered and just mildly inconvenienced by reading something you don't like, then fucking hit back and stop reading.

AO3 is a writer-centric space. It was designed from the ground up for the benefit of writers.

As a reader, again, if you have a trigger or a very strong preference, it is your responsibility to avoid fic that is not explicitly tagged the way you need.

If you can't risk it, for your mental health? Then don't.

Authors are not obligated to tag beyond the minimum, and tagging culture revolves around courtesy. You can ask, but that doesn't mean they're obligated to oblige.

“Not the dragons. The rats”

Osaka Station Fountain-Clock, Osaka, Japan

Water Boat Fountain, Valencia, Spain

Magic Tap, Cadiz, Spain

Vortex Fountain ‘Charybdis’, Sunderland, UK

Cascades Of Hercules Monument, Kassel, Germany

“Tunnel Of Surprises”, Lima, Peru

Keller Fountain, Portland, Oregon, USA

Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara Fountain, Ancient City, Thailand

Fountain At The Smithsonian National Museum Of African American History & Culture, Washington, D.C., USA

Trevi Fountain, Rome, Italy

‘the Divers Fountain’, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Giant - Entrance To The Swarovski Kristallwelten (Crystal Worlds), Wattens, Austria

Banpo Bridge, Seoul, South Korea

‘The Mustangs Of Las Colinas’, Texas, USA

“Let him grow taller, she asked the gods. Let him know sixteen, and twenty, and fifty. Let him grow as tall as his father, and hold his own son in his arms. Please, please, please. As she watched him, this tall young man with the new beard and the direwolf prowling at his heels, all she could see was the babe they had laid at her breast at Riverrun, so long ago.”

Esse trecho acabou comigo 👍 catelyn com bebê robb.