Magicwives and Withered Roses

Misadventures is baaaaaack!

https://www.instagram.com/nikkibooko

this is nikki’s (bdubs’ wife) instagram and she is publically following a lot of far right accounts (ex jd vance and turning point usa)

I don't really want to make a judgement on Bdubs based on who he's married to but uh.... this isn't great.

it's 2026 you can't pretend not to know what she uses the money for.

and yes, even if you are pirating it, if you sre talking about it online it doesn't mean shit. every bit of cultural relevance you give her is still money in her pockets. I'm sorry she's not a corpse decomposing in the ground yet, you cannot claim "oh but I'm making with it things that would make her angry!" while you are also helping keeping her rich by keeping her relevant.

grow a spine.

However. I don't want an over fixation on these large servers to take away from fandom responsibility either.

You want more women and trans people in Hermitcraft, which is great, but do you watch Gem? Or Pearl? Cleo? False? Extending this to the Life Series, do you watch Lizzie? Hell, lets expand to poc, disabled people, and other queer people too. Do you watch BigB? Bdubs? Do you watch Scott, and Martyn, and Scar?

If you do watch them, how do you treat them? Are Lizzie and BigB perpetual side characters? Are Gem, Cleo, and Scott just Too Meann for you? Do you even know Martyn's queer? Do you treat Scar as much like a competent adult as you do his peers?

Expanding the scope, lets talk about Smps that do have more women and trans people on them. When Vampires Smp was airing, who did you watch? Who did you perceive as the 'main characters'? Now watching Bannerfall Smp, whose storylines are most important to you? Do you value canon wlw relationships as much as you do fanon mlm ones?

And furthermore, I fear some fans put the responsibility for 'creating representation' entirely on large Smps to take the responsibility for supporting marginalized creators off of themselves. Large Smps should take note of who they're platforming and why, and if they are primarily made up of abled cishet white men it's a good thing to check unconscious community biases on who gets cast in what servers. But if you don't watch any marginalized creators, I'd argue putting the onus entirely on large servers to platform them for you instead of seeking them out is only avoiding a very important conversation you should have with yourself.

None of this is saying we shouldn't talk about bias within the streaming/youtube space itself, obviously, or that large servers shouldn't examine why they tend to favor certain additions over others. But an equally important conversation needs to be had within the fandom, because I and many other people I know have noticed how the mcyt fandom behaves regarding marginalized creators and their characters.

Please, people posting about this, don’t focus on guilting people for not watching women/gender minority creators on past SMPs like Vampires or the past seasons of Hermitcraft and the Life Series, because these are spaces we all go to switch our brains off, and the patriarchy is so ingrained in us all. The past is the past, and spreading guilt and shame will just make people get defensive and double down.

But now? We all have an opportunity to realise just how much we can expand who we watch, and check out some different creators- which can literally only bring us more joy and happiness. If we really want to see change, let’s focus on new SMPs- HC10, Bannerfall, SBK, Decayed and Decrepit- these are what will support these creators the most.

it's one thing to check what resonates with your audience, and in this era of social media, engagement and immediate reactions are good data yes.... but there are fanspaces that are supposed to be By Fans, For Fans, and in many of those cases there was never intended to be a permeable membrane for information to go from our side to theirs. shaping your content from fan reactions only is only ever going to get you so far, and WILL cause you to feel resentment to that content with time.

mind you, this also goes to younger and newer fans. for decades fan content, AND ESPECIALLY SHIPPING CONTENT, has been made For Fans, NOT FOR THE CREATORS. the women that shipped kirk and spock 60 years ago did so for themselves and their own enjoyment, not to send their hand-written fanzines to gene roddenberry in hopes for the story to be shaped into what they liked.

and i feel insane, because we have had this talk SO. MANY. TIMES. in the fandom spheres. supernatural, sherlock, voltron. im sure there's more but those are specific examples i SAW, and one of them i was literally part of the fandom while it all happened. we've seen non-minecraft youtubers distance themselves because fans push the shipping too much, and they may play into it for a while but then they get tired and lash out and condemn the shipping so the fandom-in-fighting happens and then the youtubers no longer interact and it becomes a "SEE, SHIPPERS CAUSED THIS" and i cant believe im seeing it AGAIN, on a new font

AvidMC has a lot more here about creator culture and the unhealthy fetishization of M|M flirting in the fandom that I cut because I'm not touching it in this post. There's a lot there that's clearly true and needs attention. Plenty of folks are talking about that.

But the bit I'm including really bothers me, and I am not done getting it out of my system.

What he describes about his character in Vampires SMP is not what happened. I really don't understand why he's backtracking on his own explanation from the time the story aired.

v!Avid's impression of vampires at the start of the story was firmly rooted in trauma canonically and queer panic metaphorically. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the trauma he attributed to vampires WASN'T EVEN CAUSED BY VAMPIRES. That's all in AvidMC's character design as it unfolded on screen.

While plunking through footage for my film editing project, I found a conversation from, I think Episode 2, which I hadn't watched in Avid's POV. He says to v!Sausage, and I'm typing from memory here, but it's close: "I read your books, and I think you could have done more research. I know all about vampires. They don't sparkle in the sun, and you can't fall in love with them. They don't love. They are horrible."

I almost cried.

If there's any stronger foreshadowing for v!Avid's character arc, I can't think what it would be. The "morals" v!Avid gave up because he had no other choice were prejudice that AvidMC had defined and heavily foreshadowed that he needed to overcome. And when he became a vampire, what he found was unadulterated joy. His initial freakout about the "gross stuff" of turning into a bat looks like a metaphor for same-sex physical contact. When he finally lets himself transform, it's euphoric.

We weren't supposed to celebrate that?

Where it gets fanwanked is that v!Avid swung from being insanely afraid of vampires to ready to join up with them to kill all the humans. He was not a stable character or any kind of moral exemplar. His infatuation was also clearly built on the euphoria of his transformation. It wasn't necessarily an epic romance. It was also not necessary for Scott Goldsmith to react to it at all. The fact that v!Scott did was rooted in his own character arc and not directly related to what was going on in v!Avid's head. AvidMC's post-Episode7 Q&A gave me the impression that he hadn't really expected his queer metaphor to have such a big effect outside his own character's head. But it did for reasons out of his control, and that kind of thing is what makes this storytelling medium so powerful.

This wasn't some kind of fan-pandering yaoi. It was two queer guys with incredibly sophisticated characters whose arcs happened to interlock briefly on a romantic beat. And then they didn't even get to compare notes because v!Avid was immediately murdered in ANOTHER complex plot event tangled in the cycle of violence and revenge. The abused struck back by killing someone his abuser valued. The sweet one turned to darkness for the next round of revenge. This is friggin' literary stuff guys. This is why VSMP was a breakthrough hit.

1. stop being bigoted towards nonbinary people its not a loss that avid came out and its not a stepping stone towards being binary trans either

2. avid clearly isn't perfectly educated on all the queer matters and that's alright but don't take his words at face value for all queer people. nonbinary people come in all shapes and sizes

3. reducing ANYONE no matter their gender to their appeal of others is fucked and it needs to stop. avid has perfectly good storylines without other peoples involvement

4. using this as an excuse to push the narrative that all mcytshipping is bad and wrong is incredibly fucked up and dismissive of the actual real problems at hand and is not only performative but futile. shipping is a corner stone of fandom and it will continue to be, the problem is reducing everything to a shipping lens and an overwhelming amount of m/m and the fridging of non-men in fandom discussions

5. nonbinary people Can be yaoi if they so choose but avid has actively expressed No Yaoi. so don't !

6. youre allowed to be upset avid called the end of vsmp yaoi slop! even if he doesn't like it it was impactful and meaningful for a whole lot of people and there Was a reason it got so popular, and hearing one of the guys that made it call it trash is....upsetting. you can be upset! its okay! just dont be mean

7. at the end of the day its very stressful to go through life altering realizations televised and i wish him the best

I was originally going to just go with the silly block people but then remembered I had this in my drafts. So, your welcome.

Saltdog- Mog Callum Drift Pix

Wild Fae- Katherine Matt Shelby

Celestials- Oli Jimmy Jojo Martyn