“Oh yeah, I’m just super into indy writers. Lots of digital zine type content. Ebooks and a lot of pop culture commentary. Really bleeding edge lit. Transformative stuff.”
[ID: A screencap of a quote, without attribution as to OP or platform. The text is “I don’t really read anymore is just code for I actually read quite a lot but it’s all gay fanfiction on AO3 but I refuse to tell you that under any circumstance.”]
Hey so I know Black Sails was a while ago and I’m late to
the pirate party but I desperately need your attention for a moment because I’m
losing my MIND.
Obviously the show is a fantastic no-holds-barred blend of
history and fiction, but there’s one historical connection that I thought was
half my imagination at first, but every second I look at this shit I’m sliding
downhill into acceptance.
The Hamiltons and their complicated and scandalous
relationship with a Naval officer…..
…are based on the Hamiltons and their complicated and
scandalous relationship with a Naval officer?
Yes, that’s a picture of Horatio Nelson on the end. I know, and I’m sorry. Please give me a chance to explain myself.
We have, right to left, Admiral Nelson, Sir William Hamilton, and Sir William’s wife, Emma Hamilton, mostly remembered for her extraordinarily blatant and scandalous affair with Nelson. It was a hell of a thing. There were contemporary rude cartoons about William Hamilton being so scholarly and oblivious that he didn’t know his wife was openly carrying on with Nelson.
There’s even a movie about it starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, for whatever that’s worth.
But it’s a little ridiculous, the extent to which their torrid affair is remembered for having happened under William Hamilton’s nose. Nelson lived with the both of them for extended periods, traveled across Europe with them, wrote incessantly to them. In fact, they referred to themselves fondly as the Tria juncta in uno– that is to say, three joined in one.
Look me in the eyes right now.
Letter from Sir William Hamilton to Lady Emma Hamilton Burford, Eighty Miles from
London. Saturday Night, [July 27th,
1801.]
Here we are, my Dear Emma, after a pleasant day’s journey! No extraordinary
occurrence. Our chaise is good, and would have held the famous “Tria
juncta in Uno,” very well: but, we must submit to the circumstances of the
times. … Amuse yourself as well as you can; and you may be assured, that I shall
return as soon as possible, and you shall hear from me often.
Ever your’s, my dear Emma, with the truest affection,
Wm. HAMILTON.
My kindest love to my Lord, if he is not gone.
I’m sorry but I don’t know what else to tell you.
Excerpt, letter from Sir William Hamilton to Admiral Horatio Nelson Palermo, May 26th, 1799
Above all, take care of your health; that is the first of
blessings. May God ever protect you! We miss you heavily: but, a short time
must clear up the business; and, we hope, bring you back to those who love and
esteem you to the very bottom of their souls.
Sir William Hamilton ending a letter to his wife: Adieu, my dearest Emma! Your’s, with my whole soul, W.H.
Sir William Hamilton ending a letter to Nelson: Adieu, my dear Lord! Your Lordship’s truly affectionate, and
eternally attached,
Wm. Hamilton
This has been driving me completely bonkers wrt the attitudes of the historical accounts for a hot minute now, particularly since Emma became a social pariah for their highly-publicized presumed affair after Sir William, and then Nelson, predeceased her, but I honestly cannot, for a single eight-hundredth of a second, imagine that the concept of the Hamiltons and Lt. McGraw came about without some awareness of the self-proclaimed Tria of the actual married Hamiltons and their very dearly loved Naval hero.
And, for one final small item of infuriatingly minor but TOO CONVENIENT connection– Sir William Hamilton had been married once, prior to Emma, and was widowed by his first wife’s early death. His first wife, with whom he was eventually buried, was named Catherine Hamilton, née Barlow.
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. :)
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.
When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.
Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.
If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…
And then we will ship an OT3.
I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.
As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.
In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.
And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.
And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.
When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.
And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.
It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.
They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.
And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.
Yeah I don’t really ship but I do write a fair amount of fanfic, and in most franchises working with the female characters is a chore.
You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.
The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.
That you don’t have to unearth and piece together like some sort of volunteer archeologist coming up with theories way more complex than the available artifacts truly support.
A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it’s a good day for everyone.
That was on July 7th.
Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all–the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it’s immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.
On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs–nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.
There’s a specific chain of reblogs that I’d like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.
But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.
ALT
99% percent of the people who have seen the post–virtually unchanged from how it left my dash–have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That’s insane to me.
None of those 36 people know that they’re part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.
And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.
You really, truly, cannot get this on any other website.
I’d rather have a thousand “OHMIGOD WE WERE RIGHT!!!” theory confirmed moments where due to good storytelling and foreshadowing the audience was able to figure out parts of the future plot than just one more stupid twist that makes no narrative sense to avoid being “predictable”.
If people knowing anything about your plot spoils the show entirely maybe it’s just no good lmao.
It’s not worth ruining your narrative themes and character integrity just so everyone is shocked. Sometimes twists that have been guessed …. Are better.
A very, very gentle reminder that “prev tags” is now completely useless, bc you can no longer click back thru the reblog chain and see the prev tags. You can see the reblog in front of you, and you can find the original post - by itself, completely devoid of context - but you can’t click thru to the previous reblog. This is apparently intentional, since I literally emailed support about it - being able to click back thru the reblog chain and being able to see the source post in context on op’s blog are fundamental parts of the user experience imo and I am pissed - and their response was basically like yeah we meant to do that but if you want to talk about it you can go to our WIP blog, where the ask is literally only open one day a week and we will completely ignore you.
@lisxdumbr excuse me as I borrow your tag for a moment, cause we’re onto something.
Rent-lowering gunshots aside, I think this highlights a pretty fundamental quality to tumblr memes, which is they’re meant to be fun, not funny.
Most Goncharov content aren’t funny. They don’t make you laugh as an audience. In fact, there’s some serious and awe inspiring quality fanarts, music, fanfics, and analysis on a non-existing flim. It’s not about making the funniest joke, it’s about having fun making the joke.
Tumblr memes aren’t meant to entertain a passive audience. The entertainment value is in the participation. And this quality is present in a lot of long-form tumblr memes. Colour theory, urban gothic (short lived but glorious), hawkeye initiative (short lived but glorious), making shitpost arguments into shakespeare, @theshitpostcalligrapher (excuse the tag) and other shitpost calligraphy. A lot of these memes are about taking silly things seriously. And even passively reblogging these memes are about participation. “I can take this seriously too.” Or, in Goncharov’s case, “yeah I’ll help collectively gaslight the internet”.
Another big part about sharing it isn’t about how funny the joke is, but how impress you are with the effort. As an audience you can feel the love artists/musicians/writers put into their Goncharov fanwork, and can’t help but have respect.
This same logic goes for how coffeeshop fics are fun to write, but they aren’t funny. The charm for the reader is that someone loved these characters as much as you did.
In contrast, when you look at viral tweets, they’re often one-shots. They’re very funny and witty but you don’t tend to get the same degree of repetition and variations. Because twitter is built for consumption and snappier participation, and the increasingly algorithm-driven navigation makes content more competitive, which means quality lies in individual tweets, and not in the whole phenomenon.
tldr; Tumblr memes/jokes are about how fun they are to make/share. Twitter jokes are about how fun they are to consume.
Third of 8 sketch animation commissions. The Kirin character belongs to Khan. I tried to took commissions with characters that are radically different from each other. Love animating ferals and humanoids both.
ALT
♠
