Tag Archives: unpopular opinion

gregxb:

iamthefirechild:

crzydemona:

They actually named Skye on Agents of SHIELD “Mary Sue” … ‘nuff said.

Why is Skye a Mary Sue and Melinda May isn’t? Or Jemma Simmons?

Show your work.

Mary Sue Poots is first introduced as an anarchist hacker, living in a van but still manages to look like a supermodel. She is recruited into SHIELD by Agent Coulson where she continually out sasses everybody on a regular basis, is quickly sent into the field where she easily brings down villains of the week, is easily forgiven when she betrays SHIELD, and has a secret past that most of the audience doesn’t care about.

Eventually it is revealed that she has super powers and is the most important person in the world, all while critics and most audiences can’t muster the energy to care. The creators of the show seem to love her, while Mary Sue Poots and Chloe Bennet are torn down week after week by professional critics. Chloe Bennet auditioned six times for this role, and I find it impossible to believe there wasn’t at least one thespian who was better at the craft than she is because, well, I’ve seen more convincing performances in soft core porn.

At this point, I doubt I will ever like the show… but it would improve by leaps and bounds if they killed this character off. And right now they are telegraphing that she is going to redeem Hydra McBoringpants.

The show sucks, and Mary Sue Poots is the biggest reason (in a long list of reasons) why it sucks.

The most amusing analysis I saw: “By rejecting the name Mary Sue, the writers are showing the audience and the critics that she is not one.” Maybe they should have actually written her to be a decent character to begin with.

Had I accidentally written a character like Mary Sue “Skye” Poots, I’d go back and rewrite. Any hero worth their salt has a bunch of issues and quirks to make them relatable and likable. Batman should really be living in a padded room, Superman is lonely and struggling under the weight of massive responsibility, Iron Man has daddy issues and is emotionally closed off, Captain America is awkward with women, Spider-Man blames himself for everything, Elisa Maza is stubborn and sometimes selfish, Daenerys Targaryen has her issues with naivete, and soon, possibly, overconfidence.

Mary Sue “Skye” Poots is just perfectly perfect. Fuck her.

I feel like my concern was not actually addressed here. How is she different from Jemma and Melinda? We haven’t yet found the villain of the week whose ass Melinda can’t kick, nor the science question Jemma can’t solve. Every single character on the Bus is presented as the absolute top of their field, whether that field is piloting an oversized VTOL aircraft through a man-made nor-easter, curing an alien disease spread via static electricity with a survival rate of 0 and a patient lifespan measured in hours at best. Ward is a consummate liar, not to mention a solider who is presented as rivalling a Green Beret. Fitz builds electronics that rival Starkware.

We know next to nothing about any of these characters’ backstories — yet you claim that Skye is the one with a secret past. In fact, if I remember correctly, Skye’s past is the one we know the most about. Are you then alleging that because she is a foster child, who has no idea who her real parents are, and nevertheless managed to find a way to survive on her own when she was too old to be fostered, she cannot possibly be as skilled and intelligent as she is? I find that to be more than a little insulting — that would imply that success and intelligence are entirely dependent on nurture.

What makes Skye different from Jemma and Melinda /besides/ the fact that you don’t like her?

Warning: unpopular opinions, extreme selfishness, probable name calling, and general overblown whining below. If you read it, and you just want to pet me and make me feel better after — don’t. That’s not what I’m after. I just need to get this out.

I’m not tired of roleplaying. I’ve been roleplaying online since I was fourteen or so. The age of about half the folk here, really.

But I’m so very tired of the way things are around here — of people reblogging bits that say “omg I’m so shy I really want to play with you but I’m scared” and “please come to me I want to rp with you”. And yet, I reach out, and reach out, and I do the memes — and there is no responsiveness. There is no reciprocation, at all. I fill up people’s inboxes, I make them feel wanted, and mine stayed empty, no matter how many memes I reblog. I can count on the fingers of one hand, and name in a heartbeat, the people who will inbox me if I post memes.

Every time, the same people. Don’t get me wrong. I /love/ these people. I am not complaining that they respond to me — I’m complaining that it’s /only/ them, and that for anyone else at all, I’m doing all the work. I’m /tired/ of that. I’m tired of this ‘shy’ bullshit.

It’s not shyness. Okay, maybe for some people it is. I know I get that immediate thought when my inbox flags — ‘here comes someone to tell me off for whatever reason’. But mostly, it’s fucking laziness. It’s laziness, and it’s people who come on here intending to rp one or two very limited things. And despite posting memes, despite all but begging for people to come to them, they aren’t actually interested in anything beyond their one or two ships, their little world that they’ve made.

I /resent/ that. I resent that as a female OC, I’m the LAST on anyone’s list, despite the pretty reblogs that bounce around about playing with OCs. I resent that male muses, particularly of certain canons or faceclaims, are madly sought out. I resent that all of my male muses can get smutplay anytime I want it, and no matter how hard I try I can’t get that for Summer. It’s fucking insulting.

I’m exhausted from reaching out and feeling, from the tone or slowness of the response, that I’m not wanted, that whomever I’m reaching to would rather pay attention to the male muses they’ve found than me. I’m tired of having to reassure people that I’m okay and I don’t mind waiting, when in fact I do mind. I do mind seeing fast replies to everyone /but/ me. I do mind being last on the list. I do mind responding to opens and seeing my response vanish under the onslaught of male canon muses; I do mind seeing a ship the other mun agreed to melt away when someone else shows up with a male muse.

Gayness is not a fetish. People are going to pop into my inbox and call me homophobic, and that is bullshit — what I am against here is this idea that every single male muse, every male period, is hungering for the d, wants buttsex, that gayness is the status quo and the norm. At /best/ it’s likely to be 50% of the male population, but if tumblr roleplay was the population in question it would be 95%. And /that’s/ insulting too.

I’m tired of seeing the posts about “oh I want angst”, “oh I rp for the plot”, “I’m not here for the smut”, “I want to do something other than ships” — almost invariably these come from the very people who display the exact opposite attitude when someone comes along who isn’t the exact muse that mun wants to play with. These are the people who produce the most smut, the most romance, who ship within two minutes of meeting a new male muse. They post things like “I want the relationship to be realistic, they should fight” and then only write sticky-sweet, true-love purple prose crap.

Or they reblog things like “I want to have unrequited crush, there are ships other than love” and the moment I turn up in their inbox and try to flirt with their muse, no matter how many cautions I post, I’m shoved away because I’m forcing a ship on them.

How dare I try to make friends, how dare I try to do something realistic, how dare I — well, basically anything. How dare I exist. It doesn’t matter the fandom — every one of them is like this.

I’m not dropping threads. But I’m so very tired of feeling like the only adult in the room, and then having people accuse me of being childish and whatever when I have something like this to say. I’m tired of my wanting a little attention, to be equal to other partners, being perceived as shipbashing, as being pushy, as whatever.

It’s not wrong for me to want to be the one who gets tagged when a partner I thought I had a ship with posts a romantic or shippy thing. It’s not wrong for me to want my inbox to be filled sometimes; it’s not wrong for me to want to be the one sometimes who has to scramble to keep up a little bit because their partner is so excited.

I’m always the excited one. Always the one reaching out. Always the one who replies too quickly, whose muse is ready to go. Always the one with all the plot ideas.

It’s somebody else’s fucking turn. Stop bullshitting me (and everyone else) with this crap about the things you want, and go out and get them. Stop waiting around for people to just offer it to you.

thedarknesstohislight:

image

LISTEN UP.

If someone is triggered by something you’re doing and you don’t tag that and you have the indecency to even mock them for it then I can safely say that you are the lowest of the low. IDC what people ask you to tag whether it’s a situation or even something that you may not think is ‘triggering’, you do the damn thing.

If someone has said to you that that makes them uncomfortable and you just ignore that and make them feel bad for it then you my friend need to look at your life and your choices. Even if it seems small to you or it’s ‘just the internet’ then get some perspective; there are real people behind these computers with real emotions. 

Get your head out of your arse and say hey howdy hey to the real world. 

No, okay, look, I was just going to let this pass by but now I can’t do it.

That is not how the real world works.

The world will not tag your triggers. The world does not care if you are triggered. And by this I do not even mean ‘other people’, I mean all the much bigger things beyond this.

Sit down, let me tell you a story, children.

Once upon a time there was a Panya who was very in love with her boyfriend and they rented a condo together. And the last night of November their gas-powered water heater blew the fuck up, and burned down their condo and all the condos in the row, and they had to stand there and watch as the firefighters did everything they could.

And for over a year I was triggered by almost anything at all to do with fire. Fire alarms freaked me out. Candles. The smell of burning. I had a job, at the time. You know what happens at jobs? Fire drills.

Every time there was a fire drill, for over a year, I had a panic attack. My co-workers knew what had happened. I /wished/ I could be warned about the fire drills — but guess what? NO. That entirely removes the point of the drill — my co-workers needed to know that if there was a real fire I was liable to freak out. And I needed to know what I would do.

No trigger warnings there.

To this day, over five years later, I still have to be cautious about certain things. F’r’ex, hibachi restaurants. I love them. My favourite place to go out to eat. Remember what they do there? The cooking show, with the fire? Yeah. Still gets me. I go anyway, and my friends know that there’s a chance I’ll freak a bit.

It’s not their responsibility to take care of my emotions. Is it nice when they do? Absolutely. Totally. I’m endlessly grateful that my friends took the time, that first couple years, to ask me was it okay to have a fire in the fireplace, to light candles, etc. I’m glad that when I go out to the hibachi restaurant with my tae kown do mates and I shriek when the fire at another table startles me (I’ve fallen over a couple times), they always ask. They always check on me. My husband holds my hand when they do the table show for us, because he knows.

It’s still not his responsibility. It’s mine. To pay attention. To be aware of the things that give me trouble, and avoid them, or work to minimize my reaction.

It is GREAT when people are willing to work with you on dealing with triggers, especially the really bad kind. But don’t shame them for being unwilling to be responsible for you. Don’t be ugly to people if they refuse to do a thing to make it easier for you — their lives and their emotions are real too, and they. Are. Not. Responsible. For. You.

Oh hi social anxiety, I did not miss you.

I realised this morning (morning?) that if something was important enough to keep me up for three hours working it out in my head, it was important enough to write down. Buckle in for unpopular roleplay opinions.

Remember that conversation I had last night? The one about OCs, and writing with them? Yeah, That started because I asked, “What do you perceive as the difference between an OC and a character like Skye with currently very little canon story?”

And the answer, basically, is “Skye’s limited information is accessible to me in a way that I prefer, and she is presented from the beginning as interacting with a character I accept as canon.”

And that is bullshit.

I’m going to use my Summer as the opposing example here, because I’m a horrible person who thinks everything revolves around her. By doing a very little reading, you know a great deal more information about Summer than we know right now about Skye.

You know her history. What’s Skye’s history?

You know her name. Is Skye her real name? What’s her last name?

You know her family. Does Skye have a family? Where are they? What kind of relationship does she have with them?

You know what kind of job she does, both as a superheroine and as a normal person. How does Skye make her money?

You know her powers. Does Skye have any powers? She’s presented as a genius hacker, but so far there’s actually not a lot of detail beyond her own claims to support that.

In terms of personality, there is exactly as much information available for Summer as there is for Skye — the difference being that Summer’s information is presented via writing in interactions with other roleplay characters, and Skye’s information is presented via television in interactions with other new characters.

To say to me, “With Skye, i’ve seen her interact with other people that Tony already has a background with – Coulson, May – and I’ve seen how she reacts to them. I’ve seen how /they/ react to her, and therefor, Tony already has a baseline for how he would react to her, to what she does for a living” is to utterly, utterly denigrate all the work I’ve put into shaping Summer as a character, in writing with other people and thereby fleshing her out.

It’s also showing yourself up as a lazy roleplayer who is apparently incapable of getting enough into character as to figure out how your muse would deal with someone brand new.

So somebody explain to me this, because it seems to be the key problem with OCs: why is it considered so hard to write your muse meeting someone new? Why do you have to have a preexisting concept of that other muse before you can imagine how your character would react to them?

And given all the information that is available about my muse that isn’t available about these new ‘canon’ muses, why am I being slighted in favour of someone who is making up just as much information about their muse as I have about mine, simply because you happened to watch a tv show where they interact with a minor canon character?

What’s the difference between all the roleplay history that you demand people be aware of when coming to interact with your muse and all the roleplay history I’ve created for mine?

If you can’t figure out how your muse meets someone new, maybe you shouldn’t be roleplaying.

its-peterparker:

I really admire people who play OCs. Because they came up that person’s personality, traits, relationships, ect. That really doesn’t seem like an easy thing to do, and it takes creativity. I see people that refuse to rp with them, and I just don’t understand that at all. Because I think you guys are totally awesome, and deserve a medal or something.

I wish this was true for more people so HARD.