Anghraine

1. Halo

My best friend and I are watching the first season of Halo, and reached the second to last episode. I was worried in the previous episode that it was going to do some John/Makee thing and sure enough, it did.

On the one hand: not as poorly executed as I expected.

On the other: it speedran the entire relationship, the sex scene (though reasonably discreet) was so polished and glossy that it felt actively wrong for a pairing consisting of a woman abducted by hostile aliens as a child and a deliberately isolated former child soldier—I kept wondering how much these people would even know about human sex, much less that one(1) kiss would lead directly to it in such a camera-perfect way. And yet that's supposed to be enough for Makee to question all her brainwashing etc ... idk, it felt very obligatory het and like something that should have spanned multiple episodes.

I did enjoy Cortana and Kai in it, though, and Halsey is always fun in her horrifying way.

2. People being wrong on the Internet about my fave

I ran over a bad P&P take on f_fa (not surprising), and was idly thinking ... I guess it makes a certain sense that a crowd that leans pretty strongly to The Only War is the Gender War and m/m fandom would be a weird fit for P&P. (I swear, I like f_fa a good 70% of the time, even though I mostly don't say anything about it except when I'm annoyed.) Anyway, I found their takes on Darcy off enough that I was curious what running "Wickham" through dememe would turn up—like, if there'd be any interesting discussions about that particular misunderstanding or whatnot.

I stopped relatively early on, but it mostly turned up Darcy/Wickham shipping, Lydia discourse, and this one extremely f_fa argument that it's actually Darcy's fault that almost everyone misjudged him, believed Wickham's lies, and ignored the numerous red flags in Wickham's story, because if he'd been nicer they wouldn't have been as invested in thinking he was actually evil. Uh, no.

3. Tumblr

Despite offloading my old Tumblr posts here, I'm actively avoiding posting there right now (partly to make cross-posting easier, but partly because I'm genuinely outraged in my way). It's difficult because some people have said some really nice things I'd like to respond to, and I'm just used to putting random headcanons or quote compilations or whatever there and getting quick interaction.

Stepping away is doubly hard because an author I've liked as a public figure for years has—it's become clear through my activity bar that she periodically visits my blog and likes/reblogs stuff, mostly P&P stuff, with cool commentary and everything. I want to respond but ;_;

I've now seen numerous posts about how the corporate backpedaling is good for Tumblr actually, guys!! This is great news because Live sucks!

I mean, Live does suck, and the site pushing blatantly T&C-violating content on Live sucks more. But even if they do get rid of it, it just feels a) like Automattic was essentially keeping "getting rid of Live" in their back pocket for this kind of occasion and b) Automattic moving a ton of staff off Tumblr's team and frantically cutting expenses is still bad news for us.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I don't think I've ever seen Tumblr in such a rush to swallow corporate-ese, and I see very little good about it.

I saw the post about staff allegedly being moved off Tumblr and onto other projects/departments/whatever. If it's legit (it does seem pretty Tumblr-flavored and is certainly going to happen eventually), then ... I'm trying not to be an alarmist, it's not (probably) like the lights would go off immediately, but I do think it will happen sooner or later. Just personally speaking, current Tumblr is where a lot of my online interactions and conversations happen, even now. And Pillowfort seems pretty desperate and Dreamwidth, though beloved, is often very quiet—and I simply refuse to use Elon Twitter—so I don't know what I'd do next for fandom tbh. Certainly not Discord.

Looking back, I was fairly reluctant to even be on Tumblr at first (I went there to find Skywalker art and gifs) and I still prefer journal-style fandom (like Dreamwidth!) by a mile, pretty gifsets or no. (Though if Dreamwidth made image uploading less of an inconvenience, I'd just park here forever.) And I had relatively few interactions on Tumblr, too, until I started getting to know people in various then-highly active fandoms. It's definitely become quieter and slower since then, but still.

I had thought the warning signals were getting louder this year. But still. :(