On offending people, people getting offended, and political correctness

If you can't stand getting offended once in a while, get off the internet.

That's really how I feel about this new wave of political correctness. Suddenly it's a grave sin to say "homophobia" - because it's ableist against people with actual phobias.

...Right.

((Last I checked, the clinical definition of a phobia was based off of it impairing normal functioning. So if you have a terrible fear of being eaten by lions, but you never encounter a lion, then by clinical definitions, you don't have a phobia because it doesn't interfere with your normal life. Homophobes think that being gay is morally wrong and so forth, and go to nearly obsessive lengths to avoid it; in less extreme examples, my dad's friend Jeff won't go to the park with just my dad for fear of being mistaken for a gay guy. That is interfering with daily life - probably not enough to call it clinical distress, admittedly - and thus it fits the clinical definition of homophobia.))

Today's example: Something within a fictional work explicitly intended to offend a character within that work. Nope, not allowed to do it, it might hurt someone's feelings. There's no way to tell a story about these issues if you're not allowed to touch the issues - sorry, some of us aren't here to make fantasy editions of racism, sexism, homophobia (Look! I said it! So ableist!), and so forth in our works. I have a very diverse cast, and I handle a lot of issues in between them that the political correctness machine wants us to pretend are invisible. I'm well aware that I'm not perfect at handling them - but the fact is, I am going to handle them.

Oh, and if you think it's not someone fetish, then you are just dumb, or possibly making some discrimination of your own against people with fetishes. Which given how uptight our culture is sexually, would not surprise me.

Real life ain't whitewashed, and neither is the internet. Get your panties out of a knot and deal with it. Don't like don't read, and all that.

PS TNT crew - you guys always know how to make me feel better. Thank you thank you so much.

Oh vatchat

No, actually, I won't understand if I run an LJ RP. If they're really such different beasts, then there's no point in me even bothering to play. But oh my god, how dare I rock the boat.

I'm used to being the lone voice of dissent. But I wish people would actually stop and think about what I'm saying instead of "that's how we've always done it." How is including a sex entry in a ONE CANON ROLEPLAY not stupid? When I think something's stupid, I confront it head on. And then I get yelled at for making conflict. Conflict is the only way to bring change, ya'll. You played TWEWY, at least some of you, I would hope that you know that.

Life ain't all flowers and happy music, vatchat. But then again, maybe if you knew that, you wouldn't have welcomed Kat back.

Sigh

I always promised myself that I'd never try to get emotional fullfillment through RP ships... But that seems to be exactly what I'm doing now.

Sigh. Alma muse, y u do dis to me?

xposted from my LJ

Why F-locking your fic entries is stupid (And why I'll never do it)

Lately, there's been a lot of wank regarding a certain community stealing translation work off other comms. Because of this, a certain other community in which I'm fairly active has started requesting that fanworks of all types be f-locked to that community.

I'm not going to be doing so.

I'll be honest; I write fic mostly for myself and the enjoyment of my friends. But I also write it so that people who are fans of the same series/pairing/etc can read it, because I'm a total sucker for feedback and I make a lot of friends that way. Flocking my work goes totally opposite of that. When I post fic to a community, I don't post fic directly; instead, I link to whatever one of my fic comms is appropriate (starsdgmfic, starstwewyfic, or the KH one I SWEAR I will make eventually). Those will not be flocked, because people (myself included) think joining a person's personal comm to read their fic is kind of a pain in the ass. Additionally, I link off-LJ friends to those entries, and it would be kind of hard for them to read if they were flocked, ne? If I posted it to a public community, it would be the same way. I would want to be able to link other people to my work without them having to join the community, and thus, I would flock nothing.

In addition, I think it's a stupid strategy as a community. You don't get people to join a comm because it's all flocked - personally, that just pisses me off when I DO notice. Usually, however, flocked comms just look blank - and thus, inactive. If you're trying to entice people to join the comm (which the one I've speaking of here is; it's a small community for one specific pairing that is not particularly well received by the fandom), then the image you want to present is one of an active community that people can participate in.

LJ is the only creative medium, in fact, that does have a flocking feature - DeviantArt and Fanfiction.net/Fictionpress (.org? I forget) do not. Why? Because they're creativity sharing sites. If you don't want anyone to read your work ever, then by all means lock it away. But if you're here for sharing, if you're here for feedback or even just to make someone smile for a little while, then don't hide your work away. If you're gonna be sharing, share. If someone wants to steal your work that badly, a little flock feature isn't going to stop them anyway.

So I won't be flocking anything, except a few bits of personal business on this journal that I'd already been flocking anyway. Deal.

PS I am thankful for my ability to write argumentative essays. :D

Dear DGM fandom

Dear D. GrayMan fandom;

WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU BATSHIT INSANE?

Seriously. I went several years without encountering a truly insane fangirl in the KH fandom. ...Okay, there's Smile. But one in three years ain't half bad.

In DGM? Two in as many months.



The first one was a pretty normal fangirl. Bit of a fantard, to be honest, but I'm willing to put up with that. Although she doesn't seem to understand that I'm not into yaoi porn... ANYWAY, so one day she says she has something very important to tell us. The next hour is spent in a discussion of how an archangel has told her that flu shots are a conspiracy by the government to kill our babies, and trying to convince me that her vision actually happened, because, ya know, it's completely normal for angels to appear to teenage girls so that they can mobilize the people against the evil government.

...Yeah. Atheist squid was more than a bit doubtful. (Which made her promise me that the angel would "give me a sign" - HA! I said that maybe he'd make my nose stop running.) And also amused at the irony of her MSN screen name - "Angel Fantasy."



The other one is a controlling psychopath who takes possessive to a new level. So I joined this RP, right? I play the canon love interest of one of the other characters in the RP, and so me and that mun got to playing around a bit with the muses in the OOC thread. Crazy FREAKS THE FUCK OUT. She drops hints, I make an IC offer to share/compromise/whatever. She IGNORES me and is generally a childish little prat, so I ignore her until the point where she starts literally SHOVING MY CHARACTER AROUND. (This after calling Alma a hussy, while HER LAVI IS WALKING THE IC THREAD IN THE MINISKIRT OF CHARACTER FAIL.) So yeah, I snapped a little and called her out IC.

this is apparently enough to make her leave the roleplay and think that I super special always hated her and intend to take her friend away from her. Which I, you know, never intended to do and haven't done. Anyway, so they're "waifus" and Crazy insists on a "divorce" unless friend agrees to FUCKING RULES REGARDING THEIR RELATIONSHIP. And Friend passes it off as nothing because it's "not a real relationship," it's just the internet. BULLSHIT.

I'm really worried about her now >.>

Crazy also seems to think that I think I am my character. Lolnostupidbitch.





...Maybe I ought to introduce Katelynna to the fandom... [/cruel]

I am not a fantard

Really, I'm not.

I mean, yeah, I'm a fangirl. I love my fandoms quite a bit, and if I have nothing better to do, I will talk them to death. But that's different from being a fantard.

Fantards, to me, are the ones that "love" the canon so much that they've completely twisted it around in their heads. Generally speaking, I've seen three kinds of fantards; the haters, the shippers, and the just plain wrong.

Let's start with the last one, since it covers the other two.

The just plain wrong are, well, wrong. They have funny ideas about the characters - funny as in, "haha, someone actually thinks that?" or possibly funny as in funny in the head. These are the people who you dread coming within range of your roleplay, because they have no grasp of the character's personality at all. These are the Kairi-Princess-of-Dark-s, the Lavis in miniskirts, and so forth. They don't really seem to have a grasp on why the characters act the way they do; a character is just their appearance, as often as not, and therefore ugly characters are hated and pretty characters are amazing.

The shipper is a hotness-devoted subtrope of the just plain wrong, and they are, essentially, the ones who don't really care about how the characters interact as long as the sex is hot. Usually, they are yaoi shippers, and they are the source of the stereotypes against yaoi fangirls. They don't care about whether the characters are friends or enemies, brothers or much anything else. If it's hot, it gets shipped, and baw on you if you don't like it.

These guys bother me for two reasons. One of them is OTP syndrome; the idea some shippers have that two characters are absolutely destined for each other, period, and if you ship one half of the pairing with someone else, that's a crime worthy of execution. Heaven forbid I ship Larxel in public, lest I be swarmed by Axel's yaoi fantards. The other, which I encountered closely more recently (IE last night), is the idea that every character needs to be shipped (unless of course they're a female and therefore a slut). For these, it becomes more about the pairing than the characters themselves.

-to be finished later orz-

HELLOOOOOOO~

Maybe I might actually keep up on this blog thingy.

Okay, so following Enelar's example a bit here; this blog is, to a certain extent, private. I might talk about specific people in it, and some of it might be things I don't want those people to know. If you got linked to this blog, I'm trusting you to be mature enough to handle whatever I say about you.

Strangers, ya'll're welcome to comment, lurk, what have you. Welcome to Squidland.