#fandom musing

SPOILERS for INSIDE JOB and one more Disney show but I hope I am safe since it’s not exactly new.

The ending to Inside job CRUSHED ME.

You know, Reagan and Ron? The least likely couple to be created? That turned out to be the absolute best pairing I could have ever hoped for? THEM.

I SO wanted them to end up happily, even in Appleton. Hell, they deserve it. So I had a stupid idea.

Maybe there’s a timeline where they did end up together?

The one where they stayed in Appleton.

Because you know what I thought of when I looked at Appleton logo?

SPOILERS!

Yeah it’s very very far-fetched. But just IMAGINE.

Ron and Reagan end up together.

They move in. They argue. They make up. They live somehow happily. They have KIDS.

A boy, who just knows there’s something out there - something he just needs to prove or discover. That’s just out of his reach.

And a girl, whose only idea for life is to be happy - truly, remarkably happy. Against all odds, against the very universe scheming to make her and her family unhappy.

Maybe them?

Like I said, it’s far-fetched but I love the idea for Ron and Reagan escaping the shadow world, only for their kids to almost unleash eldritch horrors upon the earth.

Because if there’s something Reagan’s kids and Randall’s grandchildren would do is make a deal with cosmic horror spirit and turn on strange machines in the basement.

(yes I’m looking at you Mabel)

We know twins are not related to uncle Stan (Hell, he may as well be Owl Lady’s ex from the Owl house - guy has his own set of relationship problems)

And we never saw their parents!

So what if Dipper and Mabel’s parents are Ron and Reagan? Maybe they did wipe their minds and raised the kids without a care about the shadow government?

You can’t tell me that Ron would be a bad father - guy has the father streak a mile long! He is patient with Reagan, he is reasonable, absolutely scared shitless about people he cares about and just wants them all safe! He would instal that hopeful streak in Mabel and keep feeding it because she is just what they need to keep color in their life. He is also snarky and Dipper definitely learned that from someone.

And Reagan? Socially unsure Reagan who has the habit of hyper fixating and losing touch with reality and would definitely pass that on to her son? She would try to be so gentle with Dipper and not crush his hopes and ideas because she would feel bad if she even tried. She could remember her dad as a mad scientist and most of all absent father but he also always nurtured her scientific growth. So let her nurture that in her own kids - most notably her son. And let her daughter make all the friends she could have. Just keep praising her - gOoOood work honey…? (Confused glance at Ron, as their daughter runs around with handmade embellishment gun for her sweaters. Ron just gives Reagan a thumbs up)

Let them just be good parents.

Or even not-so-good-ones. After all, who sends their kids off to a relative on the other side of America for the whole summer without even background checking the guy?

Mayyyyybe parents who were just given their memories back and called to help in saving the world from another crisis?!

Or just terrible parents. Just because Ron and Reagan are great with one another, they still argue and they make mistakes. And they may try to do their best by their kids but also fuck up. They could and they probably would because which parent doesn’t fuck up sometimes?

Maybe they never got wiped and they tried to make their relationship work despite their jobs? And then BAM kids?

Or maybe Ron got wiped, and Reagan was pregnant already and her and Brett raised the kids until Ron came storming back into their lives (because I want them to be happy together - and he could beat the brainwash since he surely build some immunity by exposure over the years)

Man I just love the idea of Mabel and Dipper being Reagan’s kids. And just - living their best summer adventure life while their parents have to deal with one cosmic crisis after the other. And then Ron and Reagan realizing it’s their kids whom unleashed the cosmic horror upon the earth the moment they got some time for themselves!

Yeah, grandpa Rand would be proud.

And for anyone who says that Mabel and Dipper don’t look like Ron or Reagan - there are some possible options that explain the difference in noses (since it’s one of the things that set the kids apart from R&Rs).

Option 1: genetics - Mainly Ron’s parents having round noses.

Option 2: Ron and Reagan unable to have kids and using the donor or adopting (maybe a certain red-head with golden heart is the donor?)

Option 3: Brett being in the relationship with them both (my favorite)

Because look at them:

I run out of space for pictures but puppet master Brett and puppet maker Mabel? They would be besties, if not family.

And the idea of Ron cultivating the optimism in Mabel still stands - he may not be the one who she gets it from but he will surely do his best to make his little girl happy and to keep her happy (her and his son and his wife - he is such a family man)

So…

This excellent post by @slitheringghost about how fandom can lazily replicate and often fail to meaningfully challenge — the books’ (JKR’s) minimisation of female intellect has had me thinking more broadly about this fandom.

I’ve had thoughts for a long time about how fandom struggles with female-presenting people expressing intellect, at least in my personal experience (and to be clear, this isn’t everyone in this space, and I’m not claiming to speak for all female-presenting people here — I’m talking about patterns I’ve observed in my own experience). In my entire life, I have never been told not to have an opinion as often as I have in this space. I’ve been vague-posted that I have no right to an opinion, had people in my inbox telling me my views aren’t important and that nobody should listen to me, had my sexual desires speculated about without my consent (e.g. “you think X so you must want Y” even when I’m not talking about anything sexual) and been instructed to be quiet rather than having my ideas actually engaged with (I have literally received rape threats for analysing a fictional character through the lens of mental health). I’ve also had misogynistic insults like “bitch” and “cunt” appear in anon hate.

And the hostility listed above almost always clusters around my metas and longer think-pieces and invariably attaches itself to moments where I’m analysing, theorising, or trying to think something through in public. Again, this pushback almost never takes the form of substantive disagreement. It isn’t my arguments being dismantled; it’s me being told to stop talking (or more accurately thinking) altogether (if I wasn’t a huge advocate for globally enforced podcast licences I would be advising some of you anons to genuinely consider starting a red-pill podcast).

And this isn’t me asking for sympathy or trying to martyr myself (if this were unbearable, I would simply log the fuck out). I’m also not saying that other marginalised identities don’t experience pushback here (they absolutely do) I’m saying that, in my case, the hostility to me thinking in public has a distinctly unpleasant misogynistic undercurrent, and it’s hard not to notice it.

For me what’s particularly noticeable is how closely that undercurrent mirrors patterns in fandom discourse more generally. For example, when canonically intelligent male characters are feminised by fandom, or popularly reimagined as more feminised versions of themselves, they’re often stripped of their intellect altogether. This isn’t a complaint about gender-bending or reimagining characters (if anything, being transformative is where this space is at its most creative, and that freedom to play with gender is part of what makes fandom valuable): the issue is what consistently gets lost when femininity enters the frame.

You see the same selective logic at work with canonically female characters too. Intelligence and female characters are very rarely conflated in this fandom in the way they routinely are for male ones. Bellatrix is an obvious example here: her madness is leaned into far more than her brilliance or talent, despite the fact that she is canonically formidable. And while there are people who do interesting, expansive work with female characters, you very rarely see women reimagined at scale as misunderstood geniuses or intellectual outliers. Sybill Trelawney is another case in point — despite making several genuinely accurate predictions in canon, she’s almost universally treated as a fraud, rather than as someone whose abilities might be uneven, misread, or poorly understood (a kind of rehabilitative reading that sidelined male characters are frequently afforded).

Like we've all been kids, we each have known the allure of a wonderfully textured scab, an especially wriggling mole, a terribly insistent itch, an extra hard booger

You can't tell me there wasn't a time in toddler Steven's years where he didn't tug on the big hard shiny rock deadcenter of his stomach, with the perfect little ridge around the edge just begging to get your grubby baby fingernails to get underneath

@thealmightyemprex @goodanswerfoxmonster @princesssarisa @the-blue-fairie @themousefromfantasyland @angelixgutz @amalthea9

This script is usefull to do a drinking game:

And I for one 100% support this idea.  

‘Do you think we should show Ly this strange magical book we found at the bottom of an old well covered in vines in the darkest part of the swamp?  I mean we remember what happened last time we showed her that old guitar we found’

There’s Armageddon’t, Armageddidn’t, Apoca-nope, Armageddon-that-wasn’t, Apoca-wasn’t and the list goes on. This just amuses me.