ACK popped

That's what I get for Plurking in between duties!!!

On DW I see more Emet-Selch/Hythlodaeus.
On twitter I see more Emet-Selch/OC!WoL.
On Ao3... Well it's not quite a social media site but the number of female self-insert fics with Emet and Elidibus (separately) are really common.

Every so often I'll see a Lahabrea ship and I'll be all 'gasp. I've found a unicorn!'

I figure mentioning this here won't have a bazillion strangers in my mentions, unlike twitter >.>

Me: Huh! This difference in fandom interaction is neat!
Also me: If I mention this on twitter I may end up with members of the ascian cult in my mentions and I'm not ready to interact with someone who thinks that Elidibus is real and alive and astral projecting to have sex with them every night.

I think the only Ascian I'm not afraid to mention fandom trends for is Fandaniel.

The ascian cult person has kinda moved on to facebook tbh

Since most of the core ascian discord groups have made people aware of her shit...

Also the hythades shippers on dw is cuz we got taste (I kid idc who people ship emet with)

it's because WoL players dont tend to frequent DW

and if they do appear they disappear within the month...

there's some kind of unspoken rule that people dont take their wol into games so that may be why

Oh that’s a relief. I can mention ascians on Twitter then.

“Unspoken rule” instantly had my brain all “CHUCK ONE OF YOURS IN” and I’m all “no. No one wants to play with a canon-noncompliant plant spirit in a miquote body that communicates by dance”

Some people: I’m going to make my WOL my self-insert!
Other people: I’m going to make a fascinating character that plays with the themes for my WoL!
Me: [opening my coat to show of niche concept bullshit that is only a WoL when it’s convenient for me]

Everyone but me is valid.

Though, I do have a character actually made to be a WoL but she was also made to break a friend’s heart because that’s just how I am as a friend when you’re an emotional masochist.

Not the sort I’d rp. Just the sort I’ll be throwing at my friend in the saddest way possible.

Anyway, Emet-Selch/Hyth is good content and I wish I could find more on ao3 that is actually in character.

Then again asking for Villains to be remotely ic in fics on AO3 might be asking a lot, based on my search of the Zenos tag.

LMAO Thats why I just do not read fics anymore, I wanna read the character, not someone's OC in an emet suit

But as for the WoL rule in dreamwidth, that largely comes from some very persistent bad eggs that rubbed everyone wrong because they took the WoL thing to mean they are the most special and everyone should love them/bow to them and every npc player should revolve around them. It's an unfortunately earned dislike, even if there are some good ones out there.

also some games where the mods were unaware that the wol as a character is a single person in the story mistakenly let multiple wols app despite them just being variations of the same cardboard cutout silent protag role, so they had like 4-5 wols and it was a nightmare for everyone involved

I have seen wol players try to act like the wol is just random adventurers while also taking up the msq history so you just basically get a bunch of the same character with different decals that technically break the no multiples rule in games but do so taking advantage of the mods' canonblindness to do it

This makes sense! It’s a shame that people pulled that shit. Good WoL would be fun to play with U_U

id say dreamwidth being more emehyth (well... me and chips, i guess,,) is because generally rp lends itself better for shipping canon characters, partly because of its collaborative nature

but on twitter and such where people create content mostly for and by themselves as it were, it's normal for them to focus on their own perception of the narrative

Mm! Makes perfect sense! I admit that, for all the shipper I am, I tend to prefer canon char ships outside of rp (in rp anything goes) so I usually watch the self-shippers with amusement.

Like. You go you little beans. Have all the fun.

Hahaha yeah like I got emet/hyth going in my game because it's my preferred ship and on twitter its what I make for myself too. I have 0 interest in WoL-like characters and I don't ship emet/wol anyway!

But yeah there is just nothing appealing to me with self-shipping at all. I like canon characters together way more.

Azem and Emet-Selch struck me more as besties than ship material, you know? Though that one tales from the shadows with Selch and hyth? HELL YES. That specific type of familiarity really gets me to melt.

YEAH!!! I see them as besties, and having a bond like that which is so strong and platonic means a lot more to me than it merely being romance. That's just such a more moving narrative to me than it being the same old story of only romance being the only love worth enduring.

But hyth and emet in the short story was SO good I loved their banter

I have an interest in WoLs, but amusingly the only WoL ships I care about are unrequited heurcefant x WoL and zenohika. The latter isn’t fun with a lot of the content though. It’s frustrating because Zenos is not a draco in leather pants, he’s a fight-addicted anhedonia-having prick who has real stalker with a crush vibes.

Yeah, Zenos isn't capable of loving or being "fixed". He is what he is, and he's not going to change, and that's what makes him so appealing to me as a character.

Well loving in the sense people depict it as, anyway

The appeal of zenohika to me is: adversarial shit is fun. Bring on the dysfunction and the many failed attempts to get the bastard to stop being omnicidal in practice.

Yeah and that's def legit!

Like people can ship how they wanna, I ain't here to tell them what to do, but I def don't agree with 90% of the shipping I see with Zenos

RIGHT? RIGHT? Azem and Selch being best friends is way waaaay more meaningful as a dynamic imo.
Also: hyth being Hades’ lover is all the more meaningful when you think about how hyth was the only one aware of it all. I just. Have many feelings about this ship!!!

Oh yeah, people can ship how they wanna, I’m just completely going to groan and grumble privately- or if it’s egregious enough, with a friend or two in a small chat - if they can’t get basic character things right.

At this point I’m half way to making zenohika fics on my own because at least one person has to actually take canon into account! (Though I don’t want to, so I probably won’t.)

(Sitting down and writing something to be actually in character is only fun if people are going to read it and enjoy it, and based on what I’ve seen, zenohika shippers mostly just want stuff that turns into fluff, and stuff that is wildly out of character.)

The fact that emet was distracted when making hyth, and how dedicated shadelodaeus is to playing his part for emet and all that...it's so good u_u the teasing and affection is just so goddamn good

I love his like "I want you to survive so you can keep your promise to Emet-Selch"

YES! THAT!! THAT RIGHT THERE! THE BEING DISTRACTED WHEN MAKING HIM. AAAAAAAAA

YES THAT IS SUCH A GOOD LINE

YEAH!!

I just. I respect emetwol shippers but they are missing out on some hella amazing shit with emethyth

AGREED A LOT. like they can ship their ship, but holy hell is emethyth like everything I love in a ship

I think it has most of the things I like in a soft ship? Like. Gosh. The gentle teasing, the casual familiarity, the fact that one of them is long dead and the other pines something terrible. (That last one is optional but greatly appreciated.)

Yes!!! same!!

I just got distracted by a thought: how would someone play a Zenos in a game? Like. Unless someone becomes a useful rival right off the bat he’s going to be all “hey what the fuck I was planning for the end of the world by my hand so my best friend and I could have an epic battle to the death”.

Like, even if you nerf him majorly he’s like the definition of a problem on two legs.

Best case scenario he lays down on the ground and croaks from boredom. This is not a likely scenario.

… actually, he could work in something like Avalon where the point is to fix the multiverse so you can go back home. Like. So long as his WoL didn’t end up there.

He’d still be a massive problem, but like. At least he would have a goal. Hell. He might even get a kick out of not being one of the two most powerful people on the planet.

Sorry. I got distracted because I was just thinking how well people play Selch on dw, and was wondering how other canon characters would do in various games and immediately had a “holy fuck” moment.

I have joked about someone apping him to victory road only because he'd be depowered and he can't possibly muscle his way through everything. He'd likely find everything pretty stupid, but there might be something interesting for him in the fact that everything isnt easy and requires him to actually put forth effort

to achieve anything at all.

Also people can't die and he can't die, so he'd have to do something else entirely.

Omg. If you do you gotta tell me how that goes.

Yeah he’s have to like. Get a hobby that isn’t hunting. Or at least not hunting people.

I could see him trying to break the world, since there's like obvious cues that it's...not a normal reality and seems more like a simulation they're stuck in

Ooooh!

I have emet there currently and he is pairing up with dirk strider (from the epilogues) and they're trying to fuck with the system themselves lmao

Fucking bless.

All I know about epilogue dirk is… actually nothing.

HAHAH he's homestuck dirk who never actually addressed all the issues he was left with when canon ended and then he spiralled down into villainy because of those unaddressed issues from his traumatic past and everything else that happened to him. Lots of people don't like the epilogues for legit reasons, but I like them and where they went with dirk.

My biggest issue with homestuck ending was how it never truly addressed any of dirk's shit and he got pushed to the side for everyone else's shit, so I'm glad there was a consequence for that.

Ahhh!
One of these days I’ll finish homestuck

ZornSable: EMEHYTH HIGHFIVE!!! i too... am a huge sucker for their dynamic u_u for me they hit the niche of "been around each other so long theyre practically married for all intents and purposes"

Yes!! exactly, they feel like an old married couple...

and i'm so here for that

though in general my "canon" ship is azemehyth because i love the amaurotrio but like... its a personal ship, if that makes sense? i fuck around with it with a friend because we decided to have our ffxiv characters exist in the same universe, but i wouldnt really like. go public with it, as it were.

but i adore the canon emehyth content we have your honor these losers are gay

my Hot Take is that emet->fem!azem is cuter if theyre very close friends (in a different way than emet and hyth are) and emet->m!azem is unrequited romo feelings. these are my ship enjoyments

I agree with this, emet reads as a gay man to me so thoroughly...

The trio IS a very good ship, I won’t lie.

Like I read emet's feelings for azem is just a hotbox of complicated emotions that just settled on friendship and that's perfectly fine, but I also read canon as with meteor as the wol (none of my characters are wol, they're just unrelated to the msq), so emet is just a tragic gay man with too many feelings and oops all war crimes for those he loves and lost

I can see Emet as a gay man, am incapable of seeing him as straight, but my own headcanon is that the ancients had vastly different gender constructs than we do and that they don’t map very well to the binary. Like. With the society being as non-individualist as it was, I can’t see gender being a “public” thing to have, and gender being more of a private++

Thing that can be fluid, and that their language didn’t even necessarily have gendered pronouns, but that when translating it all to English they had to do SOMETHING.

But then again if I CAN read “gender binary? What’s that?” Into a fictional society I will, so your mileage may vary.

Yeah I think gender was a thing but it wasn't like as binding as it is for mortals, since the unsundered speak in gendered terms, and even gave their two gods gender when they could have not (lahabrea also made a female fire spirit, so gender is def a thing), but that doesn't mean they all adhered to it or that it was particularly relevant to anything other

than personal distinction!

also I guess I am tired of being told by fandom that since the amaurotines were perfect beings, that being anything other than bi or non-binary isn't perfect enough so I'm just like...let people like me exist in their world, please? thanks.

But I def think they likely had genders that we mortals couldn't comprehend, and their sexualities were probably way more complex, so when I say emet's "gay" I mean in how it translates to amaurotines/ancients and he likely doesn't personally identify with that word specifically

I wish I could read the original Japanese because I would have been able to know ifrita was female, not just it being the English translation picking one and running with it. The Hydaelyn and Zodiark being mother/father had always translated in my head as the biological roles.

Oh yeah, no, people being all “only bi and NB is perfect” is bullshit. Like. That implies that on some level gay and straight people are flawed for their sexualities, to say nothing of binary folk, and that is NOT ok.

Considering that japanese doesn't really use gendered pronouns too much that doesn't help too much, but I can say that the JP fandom takes ifrita to be female

Zodiark also isn't meant to be a fatherly role in the same way Hydaelyn is but is still male

Like, implying that anything binary or non-bi is an aberration is no better than the people who act like being queer is an aberration. Fuck.

And the fact they haven't shied away from using non-binary terms esp in shb, I feel like had they meant for no binary gender at all, they would have done it. Esp when one of the english localization members is nb and is why the fae became nb. So, to some extent, binary genders exist in canon, but it doesn't have the same weight as it does for mortals.

So that's why I'm like, I'm p sure the ancients had ALL THE GENDERS

On sec. I’m having an angry. I apologise but like. Even with my headcanons regarding amaroutine genders inherently being outside of our binary, it’s not about perfection, and of fucking course what we would think of as gay and straight people exist. God fucking fuck.

SORRY DIDNT MEAN TO MAKE YOU MAD HJFDJKJKG

But yeah that's something i've endured for a while now with the ascian side of the fandom just like :x good to know that I'm flawed cuz I'm not nb nor bi...

ITS NOT YOU. ITS THE PEOPLE WHO NO DOUBT THINK THEMSELVES ENLIGHTENED FOR SAYING A SOCIETY WITHOUT GAY PEOPLE AND BINARY PEOPLE IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE GOOD

well ok not just the ascian side, just fandom in general

YEAH...

Like there's nothing inherently wrong with having preferences in sexuality or gender identity...

Like. I can see how you can come to “people outside the binary don’t exist” without it being a problem, but not how you can get “a perfect society is one without any room for binary genders”.

Yeah like I think they had both binary and non-binary, because ultimately it just makes sense that they wouldn't feel the need to adhere to the binary, but the existence of a binary isn't the problem. It's when expectation is placed on the binary that it's a problem.

I mean like. I got to “genders beyond mortal comprehension” and “the binary doesn’t exist in the way we think of it, because all mortal genders are small and incomplete because to the amaurotines we are far less faceted beings and cannot conceive of how nuanced gender is for them” but that doesn’t exclude the possibility of them having their own version of

But they were not a gender role ruled society...

Yeah I feel that!

Binary genders, just that they would look vastly different to our own, and be more of a thing you share with specific people than it would be like ours.

Yeah I think the ancients have such interesting potential to explore these types of identities in their perspective, instead of "everyone is bi and nb and thats that" like those would be interesting to explore too, but more so with the existence of other identities to accompany it!

It's also super disrespectful to nb and bi people imo to say they are the default because it kinda minimizes them as their own legit identity

I feel like having attractions to specific genders is probably a little more complicated when there aren’t outward gender signifiers, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t going to stop them.

Anyways tl;dr saying a perfect society is that everyone is nb and bi is not the woke sentiment people think it is...

As an nb person myself: it sorta lumps all nb genders together too, which is also insulting. And like. Completely failing to understand that in a binaryless system, nb people do not exist in the way we think of them, because “nb” is just an umbrella term for “not binary”. Like amaurotines would have names for this shit.

Yeah! Like from how I read canon, with meteor as the wol, Azem is then male, hythlo is male, elidibus is also male, and so emet's closest contacts are all male. He just surrounds himself with males (or however that might be in their own ancient view of the gender), so I'm like "seems p gay, ur honor"

And as an ace person: they can fuck right off. I have enough people thinking I’m an aberration and not even a person already.

Yeah exactly!! like nb isn't just a third gender, and it feels like people act like it is...

God right? Like I would love to see more ace headcanons for the ancients

I mean I do headcanon zenos and estinien as ace, and actually azem/wol/ardbert

I was looking at how ardbert's love of his friend fueled everything and brought about the apocalypse. His fatal flaw was the thing that brought him his biggest strength and it was his platonic love for people.

Elidibus is ace. Prove me wrong! You can’t: HES DEAD!
(I’m so sorry but actually not)

So that's how I read azem too. Makes a great counter for zenos who has 0 connections to anyone.

well except for the biggest friendslut of them all

LMFAO I'd be down for an ace elidibus tbh

I read Zenos as not having gender-based attraction, but put him into the right situation and he’d have single-target attraction, but distinctly not sexual? But like, would have sex if it played into the games, but it’s not about sex. So yeah. Reads as very ace to me, just like, not sex repulsed, with some weird category of attraction/obsession.

For me, I see meteor as ace, but my own WoL all have different sexualities.

Then again they’re not ACTUALLY WoL, sept one, and the others are all OCs I like shoving into WoL what-ifs.

The one WoL I have is a disaster bi who doesn’t realise she has attraction at all because she’s too busy being the second-smelliest dragoon in eorzea and beating things up because she’s an autistic cat that basically has the zoomies.

The side story with him utterly unaffected by yotsuyu and she was like "do I have to throw myself into his lap naked??" really sold me on it too

Oh man is that on the website?

but yeah like the character they give meteor (he does have one!!) and then mixed with ardbert...really just reads as ace to me

Hilariously I’ve had the ace Zenos hc from really early on. This man has no time for sexual desire, only challenge seeking.

Yeah it's from the sb short stories! but yeah, when I played through sb I was like "this man is ace af..."

Oooh! I’ve only read the shb ones so far.

Oh man all the short stories are really great!

I need to just sit down and chill with them one of these days.

zenos 10000% does not feel or understand sexual attraction

also agreed that gender/sexuality must have worked veeeery differently for amaurotines overall, esp since iirc they could just, shapeshift? also gender roles did not exist for them imo (since like. they dont/did not exist in a number of earth societies too or took very different shape, not the "standard" definition we're used to)

though ngl at the same time i personally try to avoid making the aside of "gay (as interpreted by us)" if only because it's too similar to sexuality/gender debates for historical figures, where it's just code for "no we cant have people be anything other than cis/straight"

like on the one hand I understand the soul of that argument and agree with it, it's just that altogether too often it's used to brush away the fact that People Used To Be Gay Before

forever bitter about a russian historical afab figure who fkn... denounced his son unless he called him father and used a masculine name for him. but the ~scholarly take~ on that is "in modern terms there may be grounds to consider this a variation of transgenderism"

YEAHHH. I deffo get that completely.
Also did not know about said Russian figure

Yeah, like generally speaking I think the ancients just had no qualms about these identifiers and so that doesn't mean they can't exist, it was just no more restrictive socially as it would be to have like... blue eyes. It's just a marker of identity and however the ancient viewed themselves as and all its complexity (or lack thereof even)!

Another argument I really hate too is when people say "well do you really love someone if they're a different gender than what you're attracted to" and really that kinda paints this idea that gay love is somehow lesser than bi/pan love and its like, you can still love someone and not be sexually attracted to them guys... Perhaps the shape of the love

changes, but who is to say the intensity?

er like, if someone becomes a different gender than you're attracted to. But like sexual attraction and love doesn't necessarily go hand in hand, often it does, but god. I guess I'm just tried of this like thinly veiled homophobia being laundered by people in such a way that it implies having a sexual preference towards one gender is somehow lesser.

Let gay people exist, pls and ty.

YEP YEP YEEEEP! I get so frustrated when I see that. Like. Okay I RP a LOT of pan characters, so people have come to me with 'pan/bi is more enlightened' before and I've been all 'buddy. what the fuck'.

(Admittedly my DW RP history is 'lesbian who mistakenly thinks she's bi, specifically because of people telling her 'bi is more enlightened' more or less', youngling who is very probably lesbian, maybe a little bi but time will tell, and 'straight man who has a boner for murder', oh and 'sex repulsed ace is having NONE of your shit' but like, off DW)

Like. There is a lot of genuine biphobia going on, and this feels a lot like single-gender attracted people trying to be more enlightened, as almost every bi/pan person I've talked to about this has been fucking up the wall with how much they hate being placed on some bullshit ppedestal.

It feels a lot like 'Oh no biphobia is real. GUESS I HAVE TO BE HOMOPHOBIC NOW!' which is... not helping anyone?

Let's ignore for a moment how most bi/pan people I've talked to on the subject are annoyed with being put on a pedestal, and look at how 'this is just more perfect' also breeds resentment from people who aren't bi/pan and haven't caught on it's not even bi/pan people pulling this shit.

This is just from the angle of 'clearly you don't care about gay people, so I have to explain how this hurts bi/pan people', because this also hurts gays and acespec people in a wide variety of ways.

I likely have limited examples, but in adults I've seen this most in specific circles of wlw who constantly talk about how selfish it is for het women to not be attracted to them, so I might be being a little harsh as aside from well-meaning-but-dumb teens I personally associate it most with entitled assholes in a group that is often anti-trans.

(I could go on at length about how TERF talking points have entered the fandom groundwater and how that has caused shit like this, but that's a whole sociology discussion and I am NOT in the mood to go nab sources and examples, and I doubt you're in the mood to read them.)

((Also I should have clarified: The certain circles of wlw were the ones that overlapped a LOT with TERFs or that were fine with TERFs in their circles. The mention of wlw was to point out the ulterior motives of said TERF and TERF-adjacent sorts, not to imply the problem is that the people are wlw. My wording was incredibly poor and I only just noticed.))

Yeah I have actually ran into some bi/pan people doing the aforementioned putting their sexuality on a pedestal but once I pointed out the problem with that they recognized their bad and apologized, where as I have had people argue with me instead because they wanna think they're objectively right when that's just not the case. No identity is better than

any other, the end.

I'm glad the ones you've talked to have smartened up. I find that young-but-dumb sorts tend to fall into 'oh shit i didn't realise', too.

Um, rude, clearly the best identity is this one at the bottom!

JFDJKGJK

the truest nb identity

DGIHDSGJKWHIGI

i mean, i identify as nb and thats the truest reflection of my usual state

We have found the truest of true NBs!