#*futaba.txt

Okay, so just in case people don't go through the comments on every post we make (which is normal, I mean, why would you...?) we decided to keep up all the information we wrote up based on terms from Pluralpedia and all the links to labels &ct. because it's convenient to have that information available to people that want the elaboration on what we are/do and what's going on.

Eventually, inevitably, we'll probably start moving all of this information to a physical journal IRL and start describing our selves, our experiences, and recording our speculations and other information there. Over time it's just kind of become apparent that there's a lot of weirdness going on that's gone unrecorded, and there's still a lot of information that's up in the air (such as the fate of some system members; the functions of others; which one of us can taste colors; ect.) and being able to document things on the fly is easier than waiting to sit down at a computer or whipping out our phone and typing for ages.

Not to say that we have no interest in sharing the information we do puzzle out, just that it'd be easier to document it on paper and write it up digitally later.

I also imagine that, to an extent, ask culture on tumblr has evolved in general. There used to be a lot of ask games spread around that encouraged people to interact with the blogs they followed so that people could get to learn more about the person behind the blog; it was a fun little way to both engage with the blog and make friendships.

Unfortunately between the culture of not commenting on posts being the norm and (I assume) the fear of both giving and receiving anonymous asks, people stopped doing this or do it veeeery infrequently these days. Not sending an ask anonymously could allow people to click through to your blog, and if your ask was received poorly, you'd be made fun of by the recipient, their followers, and maybe their friends. Anonymity helps relieve most of that pressure, but people can still screenshot asks or publish them with comments.

Re: last rb; to break it down a little more, ask blogs (obviously) center around getting a lot of interaction with their content. The entire point of ask blogs was to answer questions people had about the character(s) on the blog.

If the blog wasn't being mentioned or reblogged anywhere else, that means that, eventually, even if it somehow had a following, people would stop asking questions because they either lost interest or got all the answers they wanted. More engagement means new followers, which means new questions.

There was also another aspect to this though; shy followers meant that ask blogs with large followings may still have only been getting one or two questions. I remember when we ran our Pikachu ask blog we had about 200 followers, but we only got about 20 questions over the entire lifespan of the blog itself.

As someone who ran several ask blogs, there were sometimes long periods of time where people would not ask any questions, but needing engagement to survive, we had to go anon and send questions to ourselves to make it look like something was going on. Another solution a lot of blogs had was giving their ask blog a plotline, adding multiple characters or creating worldbuilding that didn't actually subtract from the character much. This encouraged more engagement by turning the character into more of an OC, or making it more obvious that this iteration of the ask blog leaned into certain things more (such as ships.)