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Biromantic/Asexual Night Vale phone backgrounds for anon

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quick twitter request ;^)

What. The. Actual. Fuck.

Why is yt like this?

where is the mode where i don’t have to see any straight people then

FAVE CHARACTER LIST (15/?)

↪ Cecil Palmer (Welcome to Night Vale)

“Kill it with kindness, and if that doesn’t work, kill it with sharp sticks and knives.”

July art

So–yesterday was Homestuck Day, and by that I mean it was the nine-year anniversary of the first posted page of Homestuck.  You may have noticed your entire dashboard going into a maddened, dismaying frenzy.  People you thought were your coworkers, your neighbors, your friends, your family, all of them infected by a virus that transmits through gray facepaint and Vriska memes.

Well, okay, I kinda got a little weird there.  My purpose in making this post is actually to advise you to read Homestuck–hell, read Jail Break and Problem Sleuth first, if you want, they help you to understand what the hell is going through the author’s head.  But read it, especially if you want to be a content creator, because reading Homestuck is a transformative experience–in that it will transform how you understand, process, and create fiction.  It pushes…boundaries.  It pushes the boundaries of storytelling, of character interaction, of audience participation, of the medium itself–of several mediums themselves.  The actual story has some severe execution problems late in the game, but I am firmly of the opinion that Homestuck is gonna be taught in college in fifty years alongside other great works of fiction throughout the history of mankind.

Moreover, it’s helpful to understand the people making content that are Filthy Homestucks.  Your favorite artist is a Homestuck.  Your favorite cartoon is made by Homestucks.  Your favorite indie game was made by Homestucks.  You’d be surprised how large a percentage of you this is true for.  Homestuck, for better or for worse, is important, and I highly recommend the experience of reading it.

If you wind up buying gray facepaint and pointy anime shades as a joke, all the better.

Eldest sibling?

No, dear, you mistake me. I’m the eldritch sibling.

Aradiastuck Corpse Party it is!

I am really baffled by the people attacking AO3 for hosting stories that involve rape, incest, pedophilia, and other dark things. Have…have they never been to a bookstore or library? People write stories about all manner of dark, horrible things. This is not remotely new. And at least on AO3 and other fandom platforms, the dark things are generally tagged. In bookstores and libraries, not so much.

V.C. Andrews was freaking popular when I was in jr. high and high school. Her books were in the school libraries. They needed to be stamped with trigger warning: EVERYTHING, but mainly things from the fun list of rape, incest, pedophilia, and child abuse. Her books are still sufficiently popular that there are new ones coming out despite the fact that she’s been dead for years!

Her books are in the library I work at. Her books are in most bookstores. Her books are probably still in the libraries of the jr high and high school I went to. Does that mean anywhere that has her books supports rape, incest, pedophilia, and child abuse?

That’s not how it works. Yes, there are occasionally things that a store or library will decide they don’t want to carry, no matter what. The first bookstore I worked at wouldn’t even special order The Turner Diaries. A lot of bookstores won’t even special order The Anarchist Cookbook. I’m sure there are other books out there that people are reluctant to touch, even with a ten foot pole. But, barring those few exceptions, most bookstores and libraries are not in the business of policing the content of the books they deal in.

Not because booksellers and librarians are all monsters who should be reported to the FBI, but because there’s a long history of censorship going very bad places very fast. Also, free speech is considered an American value. Hell, let me just link to the ALA page on censorship.

I don’t pretend to know why stuff like V.C. Andrews’ books, or the fics on AO3 that some people want to report to the FBI, are popular. I don’t get it. It doesn’t appeal to me. Yet I recognize that different dark things are in kinds of fiction that I do like - violence, murder, torture, war, other things that most of us really fervantly hope never to experience in our lives. I don’t know whether fiction is an outlet for whatever darkness lurks in everyone’s hearts, whether it’s a way of dealing with our fear of bad things happening, whether human culture just finds bad things fascinating, or what. Maybe humanity is just super fucked up and Pluto really is a warning buoy telling other civilizations not to go near the planet with the creepy mammal infestation on it.

But I don’t think going after fic platforms because some of the fic hosted there is disturbing is a solution to anything. (And if the people doing so are not also on an equivalent campaign against bookstores and libraries, I suspect that what’s going on is not what they claim is going on.)