Fatherless Biped @rubiline@shrike.club

i'm trying to find a particular edit but even google knows this is a futile end

Can't sleep without holding on to a motherfucker.

im almost certain softboy gamzee was brought into the fandom noosphere by 4chords LOL

hetalia sowed some biennial seeds and then its descendents managed to mutate them into decennials, and now we have to reap all the corpse flowers that have sprouted because of it. it's simply not fucking fair

mass fandom "movements" originally toothless "let's get the creators to canonize our ship!" what-ifs, have turned into outright harassment campaigns.

ship wars have become breeding grounds for culling those one dislikes by throwing around vaguely social-justicey words with no context and siccing illiterate teens with a thirst for blood on them.

stupid AUs have metastasized into consensus-reality "sub-canons" which threaten to consume the text itself (the gamzee softboy interpretation LOL)

we can fast forward 7 years here. this fandom vibe has metastasized, through what was basically a warped echo chamber (the kind that hetalia's fandom encouraged,) except, well, hetalia's fandom lasted 4 years max (with 2 in the full swing of toxicity) while homestuck had 10 fucking years (with 7 inherited from hetalia). the dynamic was never meant to last - to mutate so horribly. and it's led, along with the current zeitgeist of content creators being "beholden" to their fans, to... this.

after all, they were derived from the same root userbase. lots of people were like "haha, what a weird fandom alliance," but what they didn't realize was that the homestuck fandom was literally, at that point, a natural extension of hetalia. homestuck, like hetalia, gained video popularity through comedy fancomic dubs and shipping wars. the content deployment tactics were the same. it was the same people, or people directly influenced by them.

by 2013, the hetalia fandom was slowly winding down. but homestuck was thriving, as hetalia fans with a year of distance from the end of the web series uninterested in the new OVAs moved to other fandoms. it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that 80% of homestuck's "newer" (at the time) fanbase on tumblr were former hetalia fans. lots of these people still had hetalia friends. so when fandomstuck came around, it was almost natural that the first "ship" was hetalia <> homestuck.

hetalia fans who lost interest in the show often moved to other fandom spaces. superwholock was invented by hetalia emigres. most modern fandoms were underscored by old hetalia fans. shit, truth be told, i was technically one of them (running). the best case study of this was fandomstuck

there was NOTHING like that before, save annoying people fighting over which shonen anime was the best (which is, essentially, just schoolyard power creep roleplaying, and is fundamentally harmless). the hetalia fandom basically invented the "main character a week" pattern for fandom. it was a crucible and a pattern for every toxic behavior that emerged since. from outright ignoring text in favor of fandom interpretation, to mass ostracization of arbitrary fandom pariahs, they had it all

prior to hetalia, the height of fandom drama was personal beef between, say, star trek writers, or RGU theorists, or small-scale shipping wars. hetalia and its fandom, emerging in the halcyon days of fully interconnected global social media, fucking used that medium to create one of the most violently stupid, toxic, and unintentionally horrible spaces on the internet

the hetalia fandom was endemic of a lot of really interesting trends you didn't see in fandoms back in the day. i strongly believe that as far as fandoms in internet spaces went, the hetalia fandom was the foundation of almost every awful thing you could see in modern online social-media based fandoms today

i thought about early homestuck fandom (as i was there) on tumblr and more specifically fandomstuck, and i just. was immediately hit by the full realization. THATS why they have this weird divergent narrative in their heads that has nothing to do with the actual comic. that's why they refuse to contend with context and history. that's why they're obsessed with shipping even the worst things. it makes a lot of sense as someone who lived through both