Oh Man There's More

I'm back with Dragon Age 2. Let's see if I can remain faithful to Sebastian or if I'll get distracted by sexy elves and mages. https://www.twitch.tv/therobichaud

It's boy band vs monsters tonight on The Robi Show

Final Fantasy XV tonight at 10:30 EST

Tiktok is obsessed with trying to create their own Goncharov. I've seen several attempts at it, and they all fall flat. It's one of those things where it's so pathetic it's funny.

Also, the inherent failure comes from the fact that it's always someone trying to make money off it.

Meanwhile, a bunch of people are making videos about fake discourse as though they're in the omegaverse, and that's amazing. I love that.

Okay, so here's my problem.

I have issues and criticisms of Contrapoints and Lindsay Ellis that I would love to actually discuss with people who would actually know who and what I'm talking about, which excludes everyone in my real world life.

But I also can't really discuss this sort of thing online either because both of these women have hatedoms that will glom onto any reason to harass them and I really don't want them using anything I might say to do so.

Like, look at the contrapoints tag here on tumblr and, aside from the fans just enjoying stuff they like, you'll find that most of the criticism is either full TERF bs or quickly attracts full TERF bs.

And I want nothing to do with that. I don't want to read the nasty vitriol they spew out or in any way contribute to their gross bigotry.

My issues/criticisms really don't have anything to do with either of these women being women. And I don't want to get mixed up with the crowd for whom that is their issue.

I just really don't like feeling like I need to bite my tongue because bigots want to act in bad faith

I have no idea how old your book rant post is, but here I am, about to be your problem

I HATED THE SUNBEARER TRIALS

Yeah, okay cool, it’s a book with a trans author and trans main character. EVERYTHING ELSE WAS TRASH

It starts off great, with the MC graffitiing (spelling???) a wall with two birds and then he never does anything interesting again in favor of pining over/think about/hate a guy from his childhood that was mean to him once ten years ago. Before you go thinking the MC’s hatred of him is justified, just know all that is because the guy pulled a mean girls and said YOU CANT SIT WITH US a literal decade ago.

His best friend is a part of a group he hates, but it’s okay because she’s one of the good ones

And now: The cardinal sin

THIS BOOK IS MARKETED AS PERCY JACKSON MEETS THE HUNGER GAMES YET HAS NO CHARACTER DEATHS AT ALL AND SAYS **** IN THE FIRST LINE

WHO IS THIS FOR????????

I adore Hunger Games, but I mean it when I say that if I could travel back in time to stop those books from ever being published, I would do it in a heartbeat just so I would never have to see a book marketed as "X meets Hunger Games" ever again.

If you put even the slightest hint of competition in a YA or YA-adjacent book, it gets called Hunger Games. I could write a full rip-off of Bring It On, but the competition element would guarantee that it would be marketed as an HG style book.

The same thing happens with Mean Girls. Does your book have teenage or early 20s girls being in proximity to each other? Well it's Mean Girls now.

And it's really not doing these books any favors. Cause people pick them up expecting something in line with the brutality and messaging of HG, and end up disappointed as hell when that's not what they get.

I think publishing houses might actually be my mortal enemy

⬆️ Me fighting publishers for all the bs they pull (especially Red Tower - hate them)

Replies to this post regarding Hogwarts Legacy

This is one of the most bad faith takes I've seen on this, and I've seen some pretty bad ones.

I'm not going to argue on this. I mean, that whole post is about how there really is no more arguing to be done here, you either value people's lives or you value personal entertainment. You've gone for the latter. You just don't want to admit it so you spew out this garbage to justify it to yourself.

If you want to play the game, just play the stupid game. It's not like anyone is going to physically stop you. But for goodness sake, shut up about it. You're all just making yourselves look even worse.

BTW your transmedicalism and antisemitism are showing. Thought you might want to know

If sexual activity between same-gender people became illegal, the police would be the ones enforcing those laws.

That's why police are not welcome at Pride. Pride is for unconditional supporters, not for those who would become enemies as soon as they're ordered to.

All of the above.

I also want to add that it is extremely unnecessary to tag your main character as being in a relationship with every other character if it's not a massive poly situation.

For example: if your fic is Tav/Astarion, you don't need to also tag it as Tav/Shadowheart Tav/Gale Tav/Wyll Tav/Karlach etc etc. If you want to indicate that those characters will be in the fic, you can tag with just their names or with Tav & [character].

There is an issue in this community with misstagged fics on AO3, specifically in the FxF tags. I don't know if it's going to reach the actual people or not but I'm still going to put this here:

A lot of MxM and FxM are tagging FxF ships in the main relationship category despite the ship itself only being written in the background.

Which is a problem because when you go into your ship tag to find fics of your ship, a ridiculous amount of them are off topic. And while yes you can lower that amount significantly by filtering and tag exclusion, AO3 has a built in feature that is made to avoid this.

I am going to use the Shadowzel tag for that because it's the most popular FxF ship on there and it's also one of the most misstagged rn. As of right now, there is 607 fics in the Shadowzel tag without filter. If you restrict the search to only include FxF, you are down to 397 fics. That is more than a third gone!

And it gets rid of some shadowzel content as well, so it's either you filter that out or you have to scroll through a tag where 1 out of 3 fics are about Astarion, Gale, Halsin, etc instead of the ship you looked up.

If your fic, let's take for example a Tav x Astarion, has either consistent mention of Shadowheart x Lae'zel, the most popular wlw ship, or has them in the background as support characters, or even just mentions them as a funny little wink and you want to make sure your readers know they are in here, you do not use the relationship tag! You go down to the additional tags and add "Minor Lae'zel/Shadowheart (Baldur's Gate)".

Unless the pairing you are tagging is the main focus or have a significant role and spotlight on them, you should not use the relationship tag! It clogs the feed for no reason, AO3 is not a website where you have to advertise your posts to the most tags possible.

Adding a visual for clarity:

We've taken the valley, now let's head into the mountains.

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