when people defend the “Cis white guy is default” thing like “He’s meant to be an everyman we can all relate to and project on!” kindly remind them the largest ethnic group in the WORLD is Han Chinese and the highest gender percentage fluctuates so if you want an ACTUAL “default” you want a 40 year old chinese person whose gender changes from year to year.
Nobody is arguing that the character is supposed to represent the majority, or the statistical average. They’re saying that if you’re making an ‘everyman’ character, you cannot allow who/what they start their journey as to be the focus of the audience. And if writers made the protagonist black, or chinese, or gay, or trans, or even just female then people would act as if that was the sum total of the character and nothing else mattered.
Nathan Drake and Laura Croft do the exact same thing in the exact same circumstances, but in a conversation about Uncharted gender never comes up at all while in a conversation about Tomb Raider the first topic, for good or ill, is always going to be the fact that Laura is female. Guybrush Threepwood is allowed to be a moron who lucks his way through the hero business, but if he was anything other than a cis white man you’d be up in arms about how racist/misogynistic/transphobic the Monkey Island games are. Arthur Dent, Bilbo Baggins, Doctor Watson… none of them could ever be ‘just some guy’ in the mind of the reader if they started out with a single character trait outside of what is expected.
Don’t get me wrong, diverse characters and especially diverse protagonists and POV characters are super important and a good idea under most circumstances, but to put somebody under the “default” heading you actually have to meet incredibly strict requirements to avoid standing out at all.
The largest ethnic group in the world is Han Chinese, but that doesn’t mean much because the nonsense I write in english is not actually aimed at a GLOBAL audience.
Seriously? That argument has always been the WORST one I’ve ever fucking heard, because if ‘Oh you might as well make them an everyman on any global scale’ then guess what fucko, the ‘everyman/woman’ will NEVER be gay.
EVER.
But if I’m fucking well writing for a queer corner of tumblr nobody’s gonna fucking question my bi female protagonist because I’m writing for THAT SELECT AREA.
I am really goddamn tired of people going ‘well this wasn’t made for ME so I should have a right to complain!’ Because jesus fuck Rocky Horror said it best.
As a fanfic reader, you are not owed a single thing from writers. You have no right to demand updates, to harass writers who don’t post as often as you’d like, or who don’t fill your prompts, or to call out writers for not writing fast enough.
Here’s the thing: fanfiction authors are not professionals. We don’t get paid for what we do. We don’t get to wake up in the morning and sit at our computers and write fics for you to access for free. Fanfic writers know that we will never make a career out of writing fanfiction. We write because it’s a hobby, a passion, a stress reliever. We write because we love the characters, because we love the story, because we have more stories to tell. Most importantly, we write for fun.
We go to school. We work jobs. We have kids. We have homes and apartments and rooms to clean and meals to make and chores to do. We have business meetings to attend and essays to write. Our worlds don’t revolve around fanfiction. Fanfiction is something we do when we have the time, late at night when we can’t sleep, on the weekends, between classes, on our lunch breaks.
If you don’t write, you can’t even imagine the amount of work and time that goes into fanfic. You can’t begin to understand how much planning writers do, and how many hours get spent setting up the plot and developing the characters in the ways that make sense.
You can leave comments on our work. We love it when you leave comments on our work. But when we’ve just spent 10 hours putting together a new chapter, the last thing we want to see in our notifications is “I have waited FOREVER for this! What took so long!” “omg! don’t wait so long between updates next time!” “Am I gonna have to wait this long for the next chapter, too?”
There’s a difference between being supportive and letting the author know that you’re still there after months of silence and shaming them for those months of silence. Every single one of us has a life outside of fanfiction. Things happen. Plans change. Accidents come up out of the blue. When I’m sick, when I’m stressed, when I’m flooded with assignments, I don’t have time to update fics, and I don’t need to tell you that. I don’t need to justify why it takes so long for me to update. You don’t need a reason explaining my absence.
Fanfiction is a gift, and just like any gift, when you receive it, you say “thank you”, because no one was obligated to give it to you. It’s rude say “cool, but I want more, too.”
hold on can i just-
Fanfiction is a gift, and just like any gift, when you receive it, you say “thank you”, because no one was obligated to give it to you. It’s rude say “cool, but I want more, too.”
Normalization of casual emotional parental abuse is so funny
It’s a cutesy, ANIMATED NOT REAL, joke.
If this is the abuse you’re worried about, I wouldn’t be too worried.
Tumblr: “We’re tired of black dads being portrayed as absentee fathers or thugs! Give us some real wholesome black dads who love their kids and aren’t afraid to show it!”
Movie: “Ok, how about this movie with a black Dad who’s a hard-working police officer who loves and supports his family. We’ll even throw in a cute little scene where he playfully embarrasses his son in the harmless way that most loving parents do.”
Why are kpop stans so touchy about meaningful lyrics? Not everything you say has to be some kind of profound statement. Sometimes you just gotta ring ding dong ring ding dong ring diggy ding diggy ding ding ding. Y’know?
“she LIED to us!” “SHE USED EVERYONE!??!”‘None of what the Crystal Gems fought for matters now!!” “The entire Rebellion was a joke!” “All those lives wasted!”“SHE LIED!!”
Yes. She did. She lied to everyone. I’m sorry she hurt us all, but once again, I’ma have to ‘splain you a thing …cuz god dammit, this fandom needs some emotional intelligence. ffs
First off, lets get this straight right now; Pink didn’t want a colony. Pink wanted her fellow Diamonds to love and treat her like they treat each other; with respect and care for one-another’s feelings. Pink acted like a brat because they shoved her in that role; The second Blue and Yellow treated Pink with prejudice for not being what they expected, and withheld listening to her feelings until she lived up to what they expected, they doomed her, and everyone else.
That hate! Yuck! But, Blue finally gives her a colony. At first, Pink thinks this is what she wants! Her fellow Diamonds are teaching her how to be like them! Great!
Then she sees organic life, and humans, and falls head over heals in love with all of it. She tries to tell Yellow and Blue, but..
They never listen. Yellow and Blue try over and over again to shove her into an identity that she feels doesn’t fit her, and when she tries to tell them, they won’t listen. So she makes excuses; the human cities are hard to dismantle, she doesn’t want to destroy organic life, and when those don’t work, she thinks up the Rebellion, and Rose Quartz! Surely they’ll understand now, right!? She’s not a Diamond. She doesn’t want to be a Diamond anymore! Her experiences on Earth have changed her mind!!!
But still, they don’t listen. Instead, they seal her fate;
Now she understands; “Pink Diamond” has to die. The concept of, the identity of “Pink Diamond” as they see it, the one they have pegged onto her form, the one they try to force her to be. She has to die for the Earth to survive. She felt making up a fake version of “Pink Diamond” as the tyrant, and a real version of herself, Rose Quartz, was the only thing everyone would accept, and the only thing that would free her, her Pearl and her rebellion followers from their roles.
I’m so tired of this fandom going “BUT SHE COULD HAVE DONE THIS, SHE COULD HAVE DONE THAT!”
In order to win her fellow Diamond’s approval, she’d have to kill all life on planet Earth, something she loved. She was expected to kill a part of herselfin order for them to accept her. That is unacceptable. As unacceptable as her lie.They sent her the message,“I’m not worth love on my own. I have to constantly prove that I am worthy, as though I were a lowly Quartz to them.” and she read it, loud and clear.
So she became one. She chose herself over her Diamonds when her Diamonds failed her.
“SHE STILL LIED!!”
About her status, yes! And a good thing too! Blue Diamond was on Earth while her colony was being made and her subjects were indoctrinated to expect (and maybe even want) their Diamond to be a tyrant. Not to mention, it’s been their society’s culture for all time for a Diamond to be god-like, untouchable, unrelatable. Culture is extremely hard to topple. If Pink came out in the open, gems like Eyeball might have turned on her, gone to Blue or Yellow and told them that she’s failing in her Diamond duties, that they were right, or go Bismuth and try to shatter her and her followers themselves. What then?
What do you think would have happened to her Pearl, the cinnamon roll? The one who very clearly was meant to check in with Yellow and tell her how Pink was doing? The one Pink Diamond clearly cared deeply about, even though it wasn’t the same kind of love? Hello?????? Y’all need some Slytherin cunning–and Jesus. You don’t think these things through!
Pink wanted her colony to be free, like humans. She wanted her gems to live care-free lives, like the one Amethyst is enjoying. And she thought Blue, Yellow would have sooner shattered her, and all of her subjects, than allow that to happen.
I really didn’t understand the whole “SHE LIED TO US!” thing. It’s only a lie if she wasn’t herself… and clearly, this entire Rebellion happened, because she wanted nothing more than to be herself, and no one would let her. This whole “Your identity is a rigid concept and if you change, you’re a liar!” mindset is toxic. Let me put it to you another way: Do you call it a lie when a trans person comes out to you with their new name and identity? No. I see no real difference in this situation; Respect who she tells you she is. The name/form never mattered, people!!
There’s a reason she asked Pearl never to speak of this again; Pink Diamond is her dead identity. Don’t force her to reveal that to everyone she fucking meets afterwards… jeeesus.
And finally, why did Rose Quartz want to become a human?? Welp, isn’t it obvious?
🎵 “I could even learn how to loove… like youuu..” 🎵
The thing about characters with Grey Morality is, they often know…and they try to make up for it. That istheir arc. Unfortunately, the people they’re doing it for, often do NOTdeserve the effort, because no one sees them for who they are until they’re dead, which means all that effort only gets acknowledged when its too late. And that is some bullshit.
This is who she started out as vs who she later became.
It’s a show about love and compassion.
Acknowledge Her Efforts. Forgive Rose Quartz. And Love Her Anyway.
This whole “Your identity is a rigid concept and if you change, you’re a liar!” mindset is toxic.
I’m so tired of every show that takes place in the past (wild west, medieval, pirates etc) ALWAYS having so much sexual violence towards women like writers can cry “oh it’s realism” all you want but it’s very transparent how realism only applies when you want to hurt women on screen. If we’re talking staying realistic, why doesn’t everyone have brown teeth? Or bad skin? Or dying of dysentery? Just admit y’all want an excuse to brutalize women on screen lol
Its a cheap and easy way to show how evil the characters are, since nothing done to a man is considered nearly as horrible
Yeah it’s not a sign of showing they hate women. It’s a sign that something bad happening to women is seen as a special kind of evil while the same thing happening to a man is just normal.
Either way shows should just stop doing that.
Remember the fuss when Sansa was raped in GOT (in the modern understanding).
Remember how those same people had no problem with men being tortured, castrated, murdered, burned alive, and so on. Even when this was in numbers in the thousands, tens of thousands if you include battles.
It’s not that women are overly subjected to sexual violence. It is that you only care when women are the victims.
I don’t think there’s ever been a “wild west, medieval, pirates etc” movie in which women are hurt or killed in anything even close to comparable to the same numbers as men in the same film.
The basic rule is: whenever you see a woman die in a film she must have a face, humanity, emotions, pain: her death must count.
Whereas every action movie you see will have literally hundreds of faceless men dying, shot, stabbed, blown apart in front of you. But you’re not expected to feel anything one way or another about that, and indeed you don’t.
All human beings evolved to put the safety and security of women (and children) before that of men. This is a universal constant found in every known society, at every point in history, and so exploiting that by suggesting a (real or imagined) potential threat to women has historically been one of the most reliable ways to manipulate men to do whatever it is you want them to do (such as go to war, for instance).
Dramatists realised long, long ago that if you want to quickly establish who the ‘bad guy’ is onscreen, the easiest thing to do is have them indicate their intention to Rape The Girl. Or, indeed,make them rape the Girl. Once either of these things happens, any moral uncertainty or queasiness the audience might otherwise be troubled by is immediately removed and they can comfortably switch off their brain, and settle back into their passenger seat for the ride. Every single person watching the film now knows any violence directed towards that fictional man, no matter how horrific or barbaric, is justified and hence something to be enjoyed and applauded, guilt-free.
Game of Thrones is a very good example of this whole phenomenon, because of how enormously popular it is to both sexes, how insanely high its violence count against men is – sexual and otherwise – and how shaking snowflake teenage girls were quite happy to eat popcorn through literally days and days of that but then went into full meltdown only when one of the few female characters who actually got hurt in the whole show had a particularly bad wedding night.
Feminism really is some kind of mental illness, that forces the sufferer to perceive genocidal hatred of women in manspreading, mansplaining and office air conditioning but blinds them from being able to see the mountain of male corpses and homeless men they walk past every day on the way to get their latte.
Burn it with fire, I say. The world will never again be sane and happy until it’s gone for good.
You think I read a single word of that
Of course not, but thanks for reblogging it so all your followers could.
I wanna say to all inspiring su theorists out there that i’m pretty sure the crew is stealing theories off tumblr. please be careful. your intellectual property is important. stay safe out there
this is soooooo funny SU critical blogs learned to correctly interpret foreshadowing and now they think they’re being plagiarized omg me when I read The Very Hungry Caterpillar and I thought he would turn into a butterfly at the end
IM LOSING IT
Um Rebecky Glucose? I theorized that Rose Quartz was Pink Diamond based on clues in the show, it’s my intellectual property now and if you use it in the show that’s stealing.
Fandom prefers their mentally ill characters to be like a fairy tale character, cursed to become a monster after spending 100 years with a wicked witch. Fandom loves Bucky Barnes because they see him as this cursed princess. When Bucky shows symptoms they manifest either as Sebastian Stan Looking Sad And Pensive, or as Literally Not In Control of His Own Body.
Tony Stark, a more realistic day-to-day portrayal of mental illness, is pretty widely hated and treated like a villain within the fandom. When Tony displays symptoms, it’s in making poor decisions out of desperation and fear. He goes to extremes. His mistakes made from fear based in his trauma blow up in his face. He displays coping mechanisms by being obsessive and unintentionally endangering people. He uses false arrogance and humor to distance himself, he lingers on his past trauma and it continues to shape his actions, often negatively, years later. He lashes out violently when he is faced with losing the few people he is close to.
Tony’s poor choices should not be excused because of his mental illnesses. He needs to be held responsible. But the way fandom treats Tony versus how they treat Bucky is pretty telling. Fandom doesn’t want mentally ill characters. They want innocent victims who cope in perfectly healthy ways and have never made any mistakes or poor choices as a result of their mental illness or trauma. They want someone they can feel sad about, but not someone with any messy symptoms.
Just as long as that mental illness isn’t inconvenient, unattractive, or uncomfortable!
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