knight who is constantly searching for a good and noble king to serve but cannot fucking find one for the life of him so he has to become the good and noble king himself.
and now all these other knights are coming around like "please let me serve you" and like obviously hes going to let them serve him thats the point of being a good and noble king but its also. very annoying. one of you become the good and noble king for once lets trade
things I found out today: Veth is even more soothing to draw than Jester.
the nein ranked in order from most soothing to most frustrating to draw:
what gets queued and what doesn't is literally a matter of gremlin brained whimsy at this point.
i’ve started shoving original posts into the queue instead of the drafts bc i want to say it but not right now.
no offense, I know I am heavily biased against twitter as a platform in general and really only use it to say funny shit when I'm drunk. but every time I get asked if I have a twitter all I can think is how do y'all even have fandom on twitter?
like I don't use reddit, but reddit makes sense for fandom spaces because of how it's laid out. hell even though I'm personally more partial to things like tumblr and discord that reflect the anonymity of old fandom sites versus like mainstream social media sites I can still understand how you could have fandom through facebook groups. twitter just feels like such a bad platform for fandom and I don't get it other than like maybe for livetweeting purposes.
like the very concept of twitter threads reflects the failing of what it’s being used for vs what its original purpose and design was for.
new health issues emerged. it's always FUCKING something.
good news though, I found out from the Graves’ Reddit it is, indeed, a common side effect of over-medication, which I’m already adjusting for. so, to amend the original post: it’s always FUCKING Graves’.
ALTin Azune's defense, I'd imagine his equivalent of a sophomore year sex ed class was near incomprehensible given the company he kept at the time.
this was in fact my artistic vision. fun fact: my original idea was for the second panel to be Azune asking Teor and Thjazi a similarly ridiculously worded follow-up question only for Teor to respond with “Nothing. Don’t listen to Kattigan.” but then after I drew the world’s tiniest Azune, I decided it was infinitely funnier to imply no one knew Kattigan did this and therefore, no one corrected it.
down with "in this essay I will-". bring back "anyway, here's wonderwall."
“in this essay I will-”
“anyway here’s wonderwall.”
sole survivor: I don't regret it. I would kill Kellogg again in a heartbeat.
piper: wow :(
nick: wow >:(
deacon: wow >B(
sole survivor: okay, I get Piper's disapproval, but the "I Have to Avenge My Dead Wife" duo DOES NOT get to judge me.
totally bullshit how when a man kills the members of his former gang to avenge his dead robot wife, it’s okay and when a robot who has been programmed with the personality and vague memories of a man who has been dead for a hundred years kills the man who murdered the fiance of his original self, it’s still okay, but when a woman kills the man who killed her husband and stole her baby while she was trapped in a cryogenic pod for two hundred years, it’s suddenly not okay. smdh.
I love this website. people will tell you not to use the word "narcissist" even though the usage of narcissist to mean "a self-absorbed person" predates the very concept of personality disorders by like literal centuries, but then they'll accuse random strangers they don't fucking know of having moral OCD. completely unserious website.
I want to be absolutely fucking clear here and not mince any words because I don’t want the message here twisted into only the first half of this post: this is about how I don’t think calling someone a narcissist in its original context is the same as claiming someone has narcissistic personality disorder*, but it is also about how I think using “moral OCD,” a term that only exists to describe a psychological symptom/phenomenon that causes people who suffer from it great emotional distress, as a term of mockery that people should “just get over” is utterly repugnant fucking behavior and all y'all should be goddamn ashamed of yourselves for turning it into a buzzword du jour to use against people you don’t like. and if you disagree with me about that second part, you can sincerely get fucked.
being a country music fan is funny because I can't explain enough that there's a direct domino effect line between the 1968 hit country/pop crossover song Harper Valley PTA by Jeannie C Riley and the Elvis gimmick blogs currently blowing up on Tumblr.
basically if you’re familiar with the Elvis Lives conspiracy chances are you know a massive part of the old conspiracy theory is the singer Orion/Jimmy Ellis, an Elvis soundalike who was intentionally marketed as “maybe Elvis???” after the death of Elvis Presley, and if you’re particularly into that kind of stuff, you’ve possibly even heard of Shelby Singleton, the Nashville promoter/producer behind the Orion stunt. so what does that have to do with Harper Valley PTA?
basically, back in 1968, Shelby Singleton comes across a demo of Harper Valley PTA and from jump, it’s got the makings of a hit. the lyrics are written by now legendary country songwriter (and one of my personal favorite artists of all time), Tom T. Hall. the “fuck you, small town America” story it tells is something that resonates with the cultural zeitgeist of ‘68. the musical arrangement is intentionally modeled after/ripping off the '67 hit, Ode to Billy Joe by Bobby Gentry, which also had themes of a (granted much more subtle) criticism of the hypocrisy of small town America. they just need a singer, as the woman on the demo in Singleton’s opinion isn’t quite the right fit. he wants someone with a little more “attitude” to really sell the song, but then he finds Jeannie C. Riley and all the pieces come together. they record it, take it basically across the street to a radio station Singleton has an in with that night, and the single blows the fuck up in a way that’s almost modern in its instant virality.
so now they’re making money hand over fist on this song, and being the type of businessman he was, Singleton knows that if he wants to avoid paying a massive income tax that comes with having a successful song like this on his hands, he needs to start funneling that money into acquiring assets and fast. one of the assets he acquires during this time is majority stock in Sun Records, which for those unfamiliar is the indie label that first recorded famous rockabilly acts like Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and of course, Elvis Presley. now by 1968, Elvis had already moved on to RCA Victor and Sun Records had sold his master tapes to RCA with him. so Singleton can’t re-release Elvis recordings or do anything with Elvis, really, but he now owns everything else that Sun ever recorded. he’s sitting on a vault of unreleased, bonafide original rockabilly from the 1950’s and is the kind of man who isn’t afraid of a little controversy in the name of profit.
most importantly, one of the artists he owns the rights to is the relatively unknown artist, Jimmy Ellis, who sounds just enough like Elvis that Singleton can release some of his songs with a question mark on the album cover instead of an artist name and dupe some people into thinking they’re listening to unreleased Elvis recordings that Sun just can’t legally say are Elvis recordings because of RCA. the hoax is not a super successful tactic while Elvis is alive, but when Elvis kicks it in '77, Singleton sees an opportunity to pour gasoline onto the burgeoning sparks that are Elvis fans who don’t want to believe the King is dead and finally make some money off this grift. after reading Orion, a novel about an Elvis-like rockstar who fakes his death, he convinces Ellis to return to Sun and start recording and performing as Orion in a mask and the rest is conspiracy theory history that was all only possible because Shelby Singleton made way too much money off Harper Valley PTA.
who's more annoying: the "lol I'm a mean feminist who ONLY cares about women (btw my favorite character is Wick. he's a woman to me, but like not in a trans woman way that'd be gross.)" type of Wick fans or the "how dare everyone both in and out of universe not immediately consider my special boy Julien's feelings?? he's so misunderstood and has suffered more than Jesus" type of Julien fans?
I have some thoughts on this if you don’t mind me sharing what bugs me (at least) about the memetic hold it’s had on the fandom. to be clear, I’m talking about “he/him princess” as a memetic interpretation of Wick and not as an issue with the original post. I completely understand what it’s like to make a hasty shitpost for a quick laugh that takes off and then takes on a life of its own in the fandom. so before anyone fucking @’s me about how “it’s just a joke, bro. it’s not that deep” like I haven’t been in the feminist killjoy trenches since the pre-gamergate “no girls on the internet” era and thus have never heard that one before, I don’t think the OP meant anything malicious by it nor do I think Whitney Bad for boosting something she thought was funny. I even gave it a chuckle the first time I saw it like “yeah, Wick’s a spoiled rich kid. he’s the little princess, the same way i call the kids in my toddler class little drama queens regardless of gender.” but at the end of the day, even my light-hearted jokes about toddler drama queens does not exist in a vacuum because that language like that is gendered for a reason. there is no widely used male equivalent of a drama queen for a reason. comedy is an extremely powerful rhetorical tool to reinforce social mores, and when a joke becomes popular to this degree, it’s always worth examining exactly what it is that we’re laughing at.
one last disclaimer before I begin, anything I’m about to say does not apply to my “he/him princesses” out there. if that’s how you see yourself, you’re gold. I’m more of a she/they dirtbag boyfriend, myself, but I get it. you and I are real living human beings with our own interiority and unique relationship to our performance of gender. Wicander Halovar, however, does not have any of this because he’s a fictional character. his gender can only be ascribed to him by his creator, Sam Riegel, and his performance of it can only be interpreted by the audience. therefore, examining why people are so keen to throw this label onto him that he cannot give himself is fair game.
to answer the question of “what exactly are we laughing at?”, we must first answer “why princess?” as I said earlier, I didn’t pay much mind to this joke the first time I saw it, because princess conveys a personality type, often someone who is rich, spoiled, conceited, and entitled. that being said, if we’re laughing at Wick being a snooty little rich kid, it’s worth mentioning that although it’s not his official title, Wick is already functionally a prince. if that’s the intent, there’s no reason not to just joke that he’s our special little prince, our little Lord Fauntleroy, etc, etc. so why princess, if not to say Wick is “the girl?” what do we mean by Wick is “the girl?”
the kneejerk answer is “hey, we’re just headcanoning Wick as queer/trans,” to which I respond a scrunch-nosed “are we?” I’ve seen debates in the tags about how it’s a little on the nose to headcanon Occtis as trans and while I have little to add to that discussion as I do not consider myself transmasc, I will say I don’t doubt that the majority of those headcanoning Occtis that way are transmasc themselves and see their own presentation of gender in Occtis. I can understand wanting more variety and diversity in what kind of characters are considered trans (particularly since Tumblr skews heavily white), but I fully believe this is coming from a sincere place. meanwhile, I really haven’t seen many people really interacting with Wick as a trans or nonbinary character outside of the “he/him princess” jokes, and I greatly suspect any of those who are interested in exploring that interpretation of his character are largely not the same people making these jokes. even if it were a trans headcanon, I can’t imagine many transmasc people would even be comfortable with so many people who aren’t transmasc calling a character they see as a transmasc “basically a girl,” and I can’t imagine many transfemmes would be comfortable with the joke hinging on the he/him part. obviously there’s a whole spectrum of nonbinary identities in the middle (I myself am neither transmasc nor transfemme), but again, I see very little sincere interpretations of Wick as nonbinary.
there are only two possible answers to my question of “why princess?” the first is the extremely cynical answer that these people are just using the veneer of queer language to justify their favorite character being a cis man and their favorite ship being a man and woman. to keep things as civil as possible, I have very little patience for this “the things I like are radical and woke because I’m radical and woke and I like them” circular logic bullshit. it’s the mentality of vapid cowards too preoccupied with aesthetics and preserving their own egos to do any real self-examination required to actually challenge systemic issues. they ask no questions and until they do, they will never truly understand anything they claim to value.
the second answer, which is not mutually exclusive with the first, is that this is about Wick’s gender presentation, sexuality, and general incompetence being interpreted as “feminine.” there’s no real way around this that does not rely on a certain level of repackaged misogyny and homophobia. enough dancing around, Wick is “the girl” because he is a slight and squishy support caster. Wick is “the girl” because he is nice, unworldly, and a virgin. Wick is “the girl” because he needs to be protected and taken care of, because he’s bisexual and not “butch” like Teor, because he’s hesitant to hurt others and values forgiveness. and instead of interrogating how absolutely none of these things are nor should be consider being at odds with being a man, he is “the girl.” he is a “woman to me.” he’s just a “he/him princess.” lol, isn’t that funny? isn’t that radical? Tyranny’s the boy in this relationship even though a good chunk of those things are also true about her!! but like, someone has to be the boy!!! she’s gonna dom and peg him!!! that’s so funny!!! he’s the submissive because only women get penetrated and he’s a failure of a man!!! feminism has won!!!! straight marriage is illegal!!!! I can’t publicly date women anymore or even be out at my job where i make less than $14/hr and work over forty hours a week because I’m scared I’ll be labeled a sexual predator by bigoted fascists!!!!!
ahem, crushing realities and bleak futures aside, this is nothing new to the Critical Role fandom. the jokes about resident special girl Imogen being a bit of a loser were funny when she was falling down stairs and thumb wrestling against herself while Fearne and Chetney ran off to have a threesome, but they quickly got stale when they became more attached to her being a woman than Imogen as an individual just kinda being an awkward dork. similarly, the beauyasha disaster lesbians jokes were kinda funny at first, but then this idea that they were “useless lesbians” “too gay to function” became an inescapable meme about their characters even during more serious moments, which simply wasn’t true and irritating for fans of Beau and Yasha as individuals as well as the shippers to deal with over and over. it ran its course and the joke wasn’t funny anymore because it relied too much on misogyny and homophobia and those who latched onto it were all too eager to double down on that aspect. you can have the best intentions, but jokes that play to common biases will always catch on for a reason.
I opened by saying I found the joke relatively harmless at first and admitting that I, too, call my toddlers drama queens when they’re throwing an obviously fake fit because I gently redirected them from throwing their shoes in the dirty diaper trash. I’m probably still going to slip up and call them little drama queens again at some point in the future. but that doesn’t mean that the term drama queen isn’t gendered, and it doesn’t make it not sexist just because I would much rather think of myself as a feminist. it doesnt mean I’m not, on some level, telling a small child who’s just starting to learn the very basic fundamentals of concepts like language and identity to cut it out because he’s acting like a girl and that’s bad. it just means I’m not above having to check myself, and neither is anyone else. but after writing this, I’ll probably go into work tomorrow and try not to say it for a good while. and that’s a step, at least, and it’s a step only possible by thinking about what jokes we tell and questioning what we’re laughing at. I say all this because the language of social justice is not a cudgel to wield against people and things I don’t like, nor is it a tool to rationalize the things I already like as Ethically Good, Actually. if i want to affect change, I have to be willing to put my ego aside and interrogate myself because nothing exists in a vacuum. or to put it terms the people who need to hear this the most will understand: everybody get more woke right now.
