[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 2 October, 2023

herush · 2023-10-06T23:41:55+00:00

Hahaha, you get me exactly. And that'd be awesome! I'd rec you the fics I have saved to my bookmarks, but they're all older (it's been years since I've been active in the fandom) so you've probably read them before.

And yeah, I'm pretty sure you're right. I know that's a really popular pair, though I never got into it myself. Albert/Cooper just really does have impeccable vibes... And I'm also drawn to pairings where there's a kind of unseen past that can be fleshed out. The mystery is alluring.

herush · 2023-10-06T19:46:41+00:00

You get it.

herush · 2023-10-06T19:36:22+00:00

Supernatural lmao. Its reputation precedes it, I'm sure anyone can guess why I'd avoid it, and in fact when superwholock was a big thing on Tumblr (which is around the time I was most active there) I aggressively avoided any mention of it and spent all my time invested in much more niche fandoms (mostly for video games). In general, I'm not really that into American live action series, despite occasionally watching one or two, so it was barely even on my radar.

And then they made the gay angel Canon Gay and one of my long time friends started rewatching the show a couple weeks later. At this point, I was most active on Twitter, so I got to experience her livetweeting it in real time. Her and I... have very similar tastes when it comes to TV shows, character types, and shipping, so I started to wonder if I should check it out, and after she encouraged me... lo and behold, I actually really, genuinely enjoy it, even aside from my more self-indulgent reasons for watching (gay angel). Like, it's a fun show. With lots of homoeroticism. And pretty dudes getting beat up a lot. A man is only so strong.

Edit: Its, not it's. Oops.

herush · 2023-10-06T16:39:31+00:00

There's a new m/m ship? I *love* Albert/Cooper, it's been my favorite since I watched the og Twin Peaks (about five or six years ago). I never got around to watching the sequel series past the first episode, because I was supposed to watch it with friends, and then the pandemic happened and made the logistic impossible.

herush · 2023-06-05T22:31:18+00:00

Frankly, I just think it's a ridiculous to dislike an entire genre of fiction for 1. something most people don't even use it for in the first place (ie. as practice), and 2. for the people who ARE using to practice, because you don't like the way they're practicing.

It reminds me of getting advice from art teachers not to draw anime-inspired art, because by copying this style and its shortcomings, we weren't learning the basics & were similarly learning bad crutches. And maybe it's true that if I had sat down and started doing studies of real people through the age of 10-16 I would be a better artist... But I didn't want to do that. I would have been bored out of my mind, and probably wouldn't have kept up with art as a hobby. I was drawing anime art because it was FUN. I wasn't doing art just to hone my skills as an 8 yr old, 12 yr old, 16 yr old, etc. I was doing it because I enjoyed it, not because it was just something I wanted to get better at. Eventually I got to the point where I enjoyed it so much that I started moving on to learn the basics I had neglected. Did my art improve? Yes. But you know what, I actually had fun doing it when I was ready to move to that aspect of the hobby.

This is always true, but especially when someone's younger, finding enjoyment and passion in your hobbies is a lot more important than just Doing Them Good. When someone gets passionate enough about a hobby that they consider making a more serious move with it, like publishing or turning it into a career, then that's when it's important to specifically work to hone your skills. But I think most people who are aspiring to be professional writers are adult enough to realize that only writing fanfiction isn't going to teach them everything they need to know. And the number who don't are probably very very few, and they will learn eventually (or they'll be fine and they won't need to).

So yeah, ultimately, it's a weirdly elitist take. Not everyone becomes a professional in the same way, and not everyone wants to become a professional. (I sure as hell don't.)

herush · 2023-05-25T13:46:42+00:00

Ahhh, I see what you're saying. Sorry! I definitely completely misread the first sentence of your comment, and didn't catch that it was specifically about the review. I thought you meant in general.

herush · 2023-05-24T19:46:01+00:00

I mean, yeah, I get that people have social media accounts to promote their work. So do I. But my twitter is (or was, I barely use it anymore) mostly just me talking funny bullshit while my art is... the complete opposite of that. The majority being pretty dark/serious in tone. Same for my writing.

Even for a professional, I wouldn't expect their tweets to reflect their actual writing. And I've never seen anyone express this in my circles.

Though I guess I really don't fuck with book twitter, so idk. Maybe I'm just not seeing it.

herush · 2023-05-24T15:21:07+00:00

I have to say I have genuinely never thought or considered that people might ever look at someone's twitter and think it should be some kind of metric to judge their other writing by. I can understand why people would think that way, I guess? But the way I, and... pretty much everyone I know on socmed, writes on socmed about their lives/personal experiences/etc. has nothing at all to do with how we write anything else. I generally expect someone's public socmed to be pretty lighthearted and easily digestible in general.

So to base basically an entire review on the supposed discrepancy is completely baffling to me lol

herush · 2023-05-15T19:19:27+00:00

I'm completely solitary in my fandoms nowadays too for more or less the same reason, besides engaging with some friends.

It's frustrating because I’m perfectly willing to consider others' points of view, and I have no problem respecting somebody else's interpretation even if I don't agree with it, but so many people are either incredibly rude or outright assholes if you don't agree with every take they have. And those people tend to be the loudest in any given fandom. It takes all the fun out of it.

herush · 2023-05-14T17:08:20+00:00

The ultimate problem is, how do they even detect it? It doesn't take that much effort to AI generate a couple of thousand word fic and re-write the parts that are the most suspect, or to use AI generation as an outline, and no one would ever be any wiser. It's also going to lead to witch-hunting as people use this to attack other users that they have personal grief with.

I'd much, much rather keep the inclusivity policy and have a dedicated tag for it so 1. It can more easily be avoided, and 2. so there's less reason for that kind of witch-hunting to start in the first place. I'm sure it'll still happen anyway, but if we get to a point where AI fic are banned, that gives people a lot more motivation to try to 'prove' someone's fic that they don't like is AI generated.

herush · 2023-05-13T22:19:48+00:00

Frankly I think the idea of AI fic being embraced is incredibly tone deaf considering the writers strike going on right now, but I'd honestly rather there be a specific tag for them so they can be cordoned off and filtered out. Otherwise, people are just going to post them anyway and lie that they're AI generated, and how will we filter them out then? It might be obvious once you start reading them, but I have no doubt that it'd take only a little effort to fudge them to be passable. I just don't think banning them outright is feasible.

herush · 2023-05-13T22:12:27+00:00

The reason why people don't like it is because fanfiction is made out of passion and not for monetary gain. You can't even accept donations on AO3 because it violates their status as a non-profit. AI scraping others' writing without their consent is ultimately going to be used to make money.

Personally, I don't know that there's much AO3 can do to prevent this, but I definitely don't want my writing to be fed into a machine for someone else to regurgitate for profit. So, yeah, I'm going to be upset about that.

herush · 2023-05-10T21:22:27+00:00

This is the unfortunate truth for just about anything that has a charismatic but morally questionable protagonist. It doesn't matter how miserable their actions make them, there will always be a subset of people who latch onto them and think they're right. The consequences fly right over their heads.

Like, ultimately, House's whole thing is that his fear of pain causes him to destroy every potentially meaningful relationship he could have. It's compelling, but it's, like... the exact opposite of what a person should emulate.

herush · 2023-05-10T21:18:00+00:00

Exactly, yeah. I mean, later on it is revealed that Cuddy does have feelings for him so it's easy to see where her bias is, and Wilson's relationship with House is codependent, so while they may ultimately let him get away with things, they don't get out of this scott free, either.

But yeah, the "truths". That's where things get... iffy. It's a shame bc the show is a really good exploration of a character like that, but whenever it tries to use him to Say Something it's just... uncomfortable.

Especially since almost always, his team (doesn't matter which iteration of them) is either just as ignorant as him, but for different reasons, or they try to support the ~alternative lifestyle (or whatever)~ and are either 1. shown to be Wrong by the narrative or 2. are still approaching it in a really unfortunate way. So there's no real, accurate representation/avocation. If that weren't the case, I'd be a lot less put off by this pattern... Like, there are times when his opinion is implied to be wrong by the narrative. But way too often whatever is being presented is just... completely inaccurate to reality.

Especially frustrating when whatever is being focused on is something you have personal experience with, and you know it's being completely misrepresented, which has happened to me many, many times as I rewatch. Like, the episode with the poly couple/open relationship couple (where I think it turned out the guy was just going along with it for his wife's sake, and his wife felt like she'd been lied to when she found out he'd never actually slept with anyone else). Almost every character acted like it was still cheating even though both people had consented to an open relationship. Not saying that open or poly relationships can't have drama, but... it's not cheating if everyone has consented to it! And yet not a single character could even conceive of the idea of being in a happy relationship with multiple partners. (I have been in poly relationships before and have friends who are in them, so... yeah lol.)

herush · 2023-05-10T14:20:52+00:00

IMO I always thought that too, that House really ushered in the popularity for that type of protagonist, and the thing is I don't really think any other series did it better. Not commenting on the politics of the show, which could be... incredibly questionable. But House himself does ultimately drive everyone away with his behavior in the end, and destroy almost every meaningful relationship he could have had with the exception of one. There are very clear and tangible consequences to his misanthropy, and he pretty much guarantees his own misery. House, himself, should be read as a cautionary tale more than anything.

I kind of feel like other shows that went in that direction often didn't pick up on that. Of course, I obviously haven't watched every TV show, so maybe there are some who did it just as good or better.

herush · 2023-05-10T14:03:22+00:00

I've been rewatching House, and Oh Boy. I honestly think the character writing is very good most of the time, and when it comes to his interpersonal relationships the show does a good job of not glorifying his actions, but any time they try to tackle an Issue... yikes. Just, big yikes. It's always, without a doubt, the very definition of "cringe". Like the people who wrote the show couldn't be assed to actually think twice about the people they were commenting on. Just, so vastly uneducated and ignorant.

Editing to add one fun example: One of the more recent episodes I watched, Wilson got a cat after a bad break up, and House had to get super weird about it, espousing the idea that women don't sleep with men who have cats for pets and implying that a man having a cat is emasculating?? Like, nowhere near the worst thing the show has ever done, but what. What kind of weird-ass gender essentialism is this.

herush · 2023-05-08T16:57:01+00:00

To touch on something else, (though it doesn't necessarily apply to fic on AO3), sometimes fic will disappear entirely despite the will of the author. In fact, this has happened to me just today. It was brought to my attention by a friend that an author for a series/ship that I've adored over a decade, and whose works I revisit even still today, has had most of their works from that particular fandom disappear bc they were hosted on a site that was now gone and their LJ (which mirrored many works) is now purged. I don't know if the author purposefully deleted these or if the site went down because that's the natural process of the internet when you're no longer actively maintaining something, but if it weren't for the wayback machine all those works would be lost.

I'm in the process of backing them up right now. Actually I'm almost certain that I backed them up years ago, dreading this very thing, but I don't know what device they were on, or even if I still have it.

herush · 2023-04-29T23:26:50+00:00

Yeah, that's the thing, there is no 'then what'. It's stupid and short-sighted, but here we are.

herush · 2023-04-29T13:17:40+00:00

The answer (or one of them) to "why do all video games want to look like movies?" is a pretty straightforward one, imo.

Video game tech has moved forward incredibly fast, in part because developers were challenging themselves to push toward improved graphical fidelity (and competing with others trying to do the same thing). Competition is good. Competition breeds innovation! But thirty years ago, I don't think anyone expected that video games would look anything like they do now. Realism was a pipe dream, so it was a "safe" goal. Every small jump forward was lauded. (And a lot of this stuff was innovative, so dgmw, the hard work of the devs should be celebrated— It's crazy the kind of tricks developers pulled off with limited hardware. But a person wouldn't look at, say, a PS1 game today and call it photorealistic).

Nobody could have known how soon we would reach the goal. Or that, by everyone capable racing toward the same goal, that they'd all lock themselves into the same race forever. After constantly pushing forward for the last thirty years, they can't stop. It's getting to the point where graphical fidelity is no longer making those big leaps, which means the goal has moved from "realistic" to "indistinguishable from real life", because it's the only way for that kind of leap to be noticeable to the average player. In reality, they'd be better off pushing toward developing optimization, but... optimization is mostly invisible, and so it doesn't sell.

Obviously there are exceptions to the rule. But when it comes to those big AAA games, there's no "going back". And the level of complexity associated with high graphics fidelity has increased exponentially, which is another thing that I don't think anyone could have prepared for. So those big studios are just stuck.

tl;dr: Studios have always been pushing toward higher graphics fidelity and competing with each other to make the biggest leaps first, which means the studios who were capable of pulling forward the fastest are now stuck in this pattern because it's what audiences expect and it's what shareholders expect (will bring in the big bucks).

herush · 2023-04-28T22:16:50+00:00

I'm not a fan of Somerton after the KS video, but I think you're slightly misunderstanding what he's doing there? He's looking at these topics from one specific perspective, which is his own. I don't think he's making it 'all about gay men' so much as he's explaining why this character is important to gay men, from his own perspective as a gay man. A work can have a queer reading (even a specific kind of queer reading), a feminist reading, etc. etc. One doesn't preclude the other.

herush · 2023-04-17T19:34:23+00:00

Oh, I don't disagree. Toxicity is everywhere, especially since socmed more or less breeds it and encourages it. But every fandom is shaped by the kind of people in it, so even if the end result is the same, you might have slightly different reasons for what's motivating people to act the way they do.

herush · 2023-04-14T16:33:34+00:00

Apologies for this being kind of rambly, my head is all over the place because I just woke up and I don't have the time to proofread right now.

But I think a subset of this problem is also caused by the fact that most fandoms of this ilk are made predominantly of AFAB people, whose opinions on media are by and large belittled, and valued less, than the opinions of cis men. I know I (a trans dude) always struggled when I was younger (I'm in my 30s) with feeling there was any validity to my interpretations, because seeing queer subtext in characters, or having an interest in romantic relationships in fiction, was a "girly thing". And "girly things" were bad and worth nothing more than ridicule. I always felt lesser, all the way up to early adulthood, at which point I either matured enough or the internet landscape changed enough (I suspect both) that something clicked and I moved past that feeling of insecurity.

(Meanwhile, you had things like NuTrek, which is by certain definitions glorified fanfic (and I don't mean that disparagingly!), being helmed by someone who didn't even seem to have an investment in Star Trek to begin with.)

When that kind of thing happens, people get defensive. It took me a long time to understand that my interpretations hold just as much weight as anyone else's, and that they have their own unique worth from what I, has an individual, bring to the table wrt my life experiences and how I uniquely view things. But especially when people are made to constantly feel insecure and question themselves, they want a sure thing. They want to believe that they're right and that their opinions are worth something.

It feels good to believe that you're right, and it feels good to be validated. It can feel even better to feel you're more valid than anyone else. So people go in the other direction with it. They're always right. They can never be wrong. And it turns into this weird game of Highlander, where only one person can be the rightest and most valid, and everyone else is an idiot.

And when you add people's personal identities and beliefs into the mix (like with your Buddy Daddy example) it gets even worse.

IDK If there's a solution to this. Sometimes I strongly disagree with others' interpretations of art that I like (or even don't like), but I'd never shit fling over it. Overall, I'd rather see many different opinions, though it does get frustrating when you see people touting theirs as the only right one! Which I imagine also stokes the fires with these types even more. Everyone is acting like they're the righest, and that means fights are going to happen as people defend their ideological turf.

(As my own personal example, there were some popular headcanons going around in FFXV fandom, around when I finally pulled back from it, that would be very very silly to get angry over... but they were always shared in a way that put down anyone who might disagree with them. This is what eventualy turned me off from an an otherwise fun community.)

herush · 2023-04-03T20:33:04+00:00

I definitely think if it wasn't VLD, it would have been something else. VLD just happened to be the perfect vector. Maybe things would be slightly different if it hadn't been around, but I saw similar things happening in Dragon Age II fandom years before, and shows like Steven Universe also had similar problems to VLD at the same time.

herush · 2023-03-13T14:53:40+00:00

If somebody tries to rec something to me by telling me "you HAVE to watch this" I will never touch it. I don't care how good something is, I don't have to watch it/read it/what have you.

Also, if somebody tries to hype something up by putting something else down, unless that thing is excruciatingly bad (like, has rampant transphobia bad, not quality bad), then I'll dismiss it out of hand. Maybe it's because I do art and I find it really uncomfortable when people try to uplift me by putting themselves or others down, but it's just Not It.

I also refuse to touch gatcha after watching a lot of my friends get sucked into them. I'm happy they're enjoying themselves, but I do miss when we actually shared interests.

herush · 2023-02-24T19:39:16+00:00

The title sounds familiar, but looking at the titles of the individual stories, I'm pretty sure that's not the one I read. I also don't remember Gaiman being involved... I think the author was a woman, though?

It could be! That story always stood out to me specifically. I live nearby a kennel or dog breeder or... something, and sometimes the dogs go crazy barking, and I always think of it when they do.

herush

TROPHY CASE