Is There Anyone Out There?

How is fans sharing your work and linking fellow fans back to your account a *bad* thing?!

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Are you new?

Most creators don’t want their work reposted. They may appreciate shares from Youtube and the like. They certainly do not appreciate someone making a separate video upload or whatever.

Fandom creators are even warier, particularly about their work escaping its intended context and finding hostile outsiders. Of fucking course they do not want their work on some other platform. That’s the way to get waves of harassment sent back towards that fandom creator. It also often involves lots of asspats for the reposter and nothing for the creator.

I have no sympathy for reposters crying that they got harassed over art theft. Stop stealing if you can’t take the heat, asshole!

Maximum audience is what shitty influencers want. It is not the ethos of fandom. Some people seek fandom fame more than others, but there has always been a strong sense of finding your corner, not of trying to get your shit out to the entire world.

WHY THE FUCK would I care about people needing the “convenience” of my fic on their own platform of choice? I use AO3 because I support AO3. I loathe Wattpad and will certainly not want to increase its popularity with my free labor and my content.

Yes, it does annoy me when people screenshot this blog and put it on twitter. I am intentionally not on twitter because twitter is garbage. I have no desire for my own writing to increase twitter’s relevance. Fandom should stop treating twitter like The Place To Be. If people feel like they’re missing out by being there and not here, good!

And obviously, I roll my eyes when some attention-seeker posts my shit to reddit and gets eighty billion upvotes. If you love me so much, go give my reddit account that karma. (If you’re doing your own hobbydrama writeup or something, that’s different though. I’m talking about c&p posts with little of your own content.)

There are different ways of sharing, and some of them are more annoying than others. Some platforms are irrelevant to a creator, while others they actively oppose being popular. Nobody is going to know or care if you post some fan art to a private discord with your friends.

(To be clear, creators still have the right to ask you to take said rec post down–for reasons ranging from “I’ve been harassed in the past and don’t actually want to maximize exposure” to “the reasons you give for reccing my work make me uncomfortable” to “I just don’t feel comfortable”, but while everyone has that right and you’re an asshole for ignoring such a request, I would stand pretty firm in saying that when we post something publicly, other people have the right to talk about it and point others in its direction. An individual being uncomfortable with a stranger recommending their work is an individual issue, and doesn’t mean the recommender was wrong to do so.)

Like, I’ve done this! I’ve had great fics that I thought deserved wider readership! So I made posts like this, LINKING my readers TO THE FICS. What I did not do, because I’m not a deranged fucking animal raised by some kind of feral libertarian in a parking garage, was repost the contents of a story that isn’t mine.

If your intentions were innocent, you’d just post a link in the first place.

i fucking love chihuahuas, man. i think there are a few factors involved, but i think the problem first and foremost is how chihuahuas are treated by humans.

chihuahuas are rarely allowed to be real dogs. they are treated like decorations and accessories and stuffed animals and cute little novelties

so not only are they rarely trained or thoughtfully socialized and taught to be comfortable with different things, but their autonomy and sense of personal safety is very often disregarded or intentionally threatened by the people around them

people pick them up with little consideration for the dog’s feelings, manhandle them at will and physically force them to comply with human desires. sometimes people intentionally antagonize them because they think it’s funny – for a while there was a very popular Tik Tok by some twenty-somethings dedicated to harassing and frightening an elderly, disabled chihuahua because he made funny noises when he was upset and uncomfortable.

it only stopped because the dog died.

the people responsible claimed to “love” the dog.

chihuahuas’ attempts to communicate discomfort are almost always ignored. dogs usually start out with relatively subtle body language that most people don’t ever learn to read. they might have the whites of their eyes showing, or yawn and lick their lips, or look away, or pin their ears down, or get tense. and when chihuahuas do this, it is almost always disregarded.

so they learn that polite and subtle communication of their discomfort gets ignored, and they start to escalate in an effort to be understood. they might start to growl or snap or bite. they might learn that the best defense is a good offense, that people who approach them are rude and frightening and the only way to get them to back off is to try and be intimidating.

and a lot of the time even that doesn’t work. because hey, look, the chihuahua is growling. isn’t that funny and cute and nonthreatening

there’s more involved but fundamentally at the end of the day, the issue is that chihuahuas are often profoundly mistreated for their entire little lives, psychologically and physically, with no way to communicate or be understood or have their boundaries and needs respected.

and as much as people have made ~aggressive chihuahuas~ into a funney meme, i think that’s fucking tragic.

Because little dogs can't do the same level of physical harm as bigger dogs, people tend to laugh off their very genuine distress and anger. It's absolutely not okay, and it's way too popular on social media.

We have terfs who admit that ace discourse was their first step towards radfem ideas. We’ve had multiple break downs of how terfs and radfems try to radialize other people by using ace/bi/pan/nb/queer/etc. discourse. We’ve had multiple break downs of how popular exclusionist arguments use the same faulty logic and arguments that radfems use.

“Protect the children” generally means something like, “preserve their innocence.” And I can see why someone might earnestly believe this is good. Because integrating new ideas into your worldview is genuinely uncomfortable. I think, uncharitably, that this is especially true if your worldview is conservative; your whole political bit is resistance to new ideas!

The idea that children shouldn’t have to grapple with ideas they may find uncomfortable for whatever reason maps perfectly onto the idea that children don’t get to grapple with ideas that you may find uncomfortable for whatever reason. And I can’t speak in super general terms here, but I can definitely say that my childhood was impoverished because of this.

Not everyone bothers with this step. But a lot of people do it because if you move a young plant out of a sheltered environment into a radically harsher environment with no prep, it had a pretty good chance of dying. They need time to adapt. If you protect them in the greenhouse the whole time so they don’t get any damage on their perfect widdle leaves, you’re not doing them any favours; it’s going to be a massive, potentially fatal shock when they get planted out, and if they die it sure as hell wasn’t the plant’s fault.

Raising a child is just a long period of hardening them off.

The reason it’s evil for an adult to solicit sex from a thirteen year old isn’t because there’s some Pure Natural Innocence about them that Cannot Be Corrupted. It’s because they are still learning about sex and how to navigate relationships, they don’t have the experience or maturity to make those kinds of decisions yet and won’t for several more years, and soliciting or agreeing to sex with them is inherently dangerous and a gross abuse of power taking advantage of this fact. It is because the thirteen year old is supposed to be safely learning about sex and their relationship to it on their own terms, in a safe way without people taking advantage of them. If you decide that that child shouldn’t have any education about sex until they’re eighteen, that they shouldn’t have sex ed or be allowed to witness any indication of its existence, you’re not protecting them. You’re creating eighteen year olds with a thirteen year old’s understanding of sex (assuming your attempt even works, which it often doesn’t -- often you just create pregnant teenagers). And then throwing them out of the greenhouse into the garden, where other people have no way of knowing how vulnerable you’ve left them until it’s too late.

If you protect children from having to learn about racism, or from seeing disabled people that might make them feel uncomfortable, or from learning about other cultures, or death, or sex, or drugs... you’re not helping them. At all. This is the period where they are supposed to be learning this kind of thing.

Some kings to get you going.

Beau is very much inspired by Cab Calloway, so you know. I, Heidi Ho myself, just have to be obsessed.

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A post shared by 𝕸𝖚𝖉𝖉 //𝐉𝐉 (@muddthetwospirit)

Mudd is an indigenous king and honestly? His looks are FUCKING INSANE I love him.

Drag kings haven’t just been around for decades, they’ve been around for over a hundred years.

In the 1800s, drag kings were called “male impersonators” (and likewise, drag queens called “female impersonators”), and they would work the music halls (like, variety acts, comedy and theatre) - mostly singing silly or risqué songs like “Burlington Bertie from Bow”, “Following in Father’s Footsteps” or “Jolly Good Luck to the Girl that Loves a Soldier” - and many of them also did panto, acting as the Prince Charming, or Peter Pan (as is traditional), things like that

One of the early ones was Bessie Bonehill in the 1890s

Here she is, from an image search -

Later on, there was Ella Shields

And Hetty King, who worked until the 1930s, 30 years on the halls

But perhaps my favourite was Vesta Tilley

Imagine, (and this may have happened to you before so think of how that felt) having someone, loudly and unprompted, talking about how they find you, personally unattractive and don't want to fuck you. You never asked, you have made no indication you want anything to do with them sexually, and yet they just keep talking about it, then say you are harrassing *them* when you tell them to shut up.

Now, not finding you attractive is well within their rights, but they're being incredibly rude and hurtful to say that to your face without any reason to.

Idk, as a cis queer person who also has a lot of other aspects of my identity such as being mixed race and disabled that some people take issue with, who has been on the same recieving end of strangers not shutting up about disliking your body for one reason or another when you're just trying to survive, and having to take the constant harassment on the chin and deal with it constany chipping away of self esteem just for daring to *exist*; I agree that it does get to a point where you're just being transphobic. (Or in the cases of myself, ableist or racist)

for anyone who doesnt remember, the goblins were the banker characters who worked in gringotts and looked Uncomfortably Like jewish stereotypes. and youre suppose to suppress their rebellion, where theyre rebelling against the fact that like most nonhuman magical creatures, theyre treated like shit by wizards. yep :)

click thru the top tweet to read the whole thread with all the screenshots, it just gets worse and worse but jesus fucking christ, HOW. i know i shouldnt be surprised that this fucking francise of all of them is pulling this shit but how fucking blatant can you be.