Fandom

Fandom emerges when there is love of a story, of art, of music, of any form of expression. That love will change, shift, and become its own creature over time, deviating from its origin. It is then that fascinations begin. These fascinations start out slowly and creep their way into the logic of the fandom.

It is so easy to justify the small things. "I love this character," becomes more important than a plot point. Well, that's okay, there are lots of other plot points. "This band is so popular I love them, though I haven't listened to the music yet," the words pang against your inner senses but you bend a bit to allow it. At least they might start listening to the songs now that they like the band.

Then it turns dark. "I love this character so much, he's such a helpless baby!" The fandom cries about the megalomaniac who heartlessly terrorizes the innocent. "Oh my god, this song is so cute, I made a pony remix of it!" And that grunge metal song then had a pony remix. "Look at this art, it's so amazing I'm going to invert the colors and put a cat in it." Then Picasso had a cat, I guess.

Soon the story, music, art, or whatever else is irrelevant. The fandom is an incestuous pit of ideas loosely torn from these concepts, eaten up, regurgitated, and then feasted upon again. It has reached the point where there is virtually no connection to the source material any more.

Unfortunately your logic is still distorted from before. You accept a lot of material that you would otherwise question. The fandom accepts a lot of material that it should otherwise detest. Your standards have lowered.

The only question then is do you stay in this mess of a community and join into the cesspool or do you go back to the source material that you loved? It's a bit of a loaded question, I admit, but it's an honest to goodness question. There is no right answer, merely going where you will be happier. Sometimes the story was just the start, as the end of the book likes to tell you. You should probably avoid those who don't agree with your answer though, to save each other both a lot of headache.

Milquetoast

When you take a story or show and remake it, you are doing something that inherently violates people. You are taking their memories, attachments, and a part of their life and saying that it’s old and no longer belongs to them.

Normally these concerns are quelled when this new thing fills the place of the old and both have a place in the heart of a person. Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more common to take that thing and say, ‘I can make more money by selling it to these people instead of you.’

Now their memories, attachments, and history are thrashed. The characters they once loved are someone else entirely wearing the simulacrum. The stories are twisted and changed away from the comfortable lines they once drew. The history that was fondly buried is now dug up and put on parade in its necrotic state.

You’re disrespecting them and violating them. If you are doing this out of love for the story and characters, then I wish you well. If you’re doing this for money, you are a bad person.

Teen Titans GO! I’m looking at you.

Sex Talk

Pictured: A Distraught Cat, Source Unknown

I think that a lifetime of growing up as a person who is relatively open to the world about my sexual habits and interests has dispelled many of the common myths that like to permeate through high schools, colleges, and households of the modern day. There are these strange stereotypes that many of us have accepted that just aren’t true: women rarely actually want sex, if there isn’t an orgasm then it was bad sex, men are always horny, every man wants to rape you, girls tease you to get what they want, if you’re in the friendzone then you can never get the girl, guys need to be tamed. Lies told from an egocentric worldview.

The first lie that we’re going to tackle is that women rarely want to have sex. From a scientific standpoint, this potentially has some validity as women have less testosterone than men on average and thus have a lower libido. In reality you do not need to have a pair of gonads squeezing testosterone through your system to enjoy sex. It’s pleasurable. Humans want sex. If something is good and pleasurable then people will want it. To say that women never really want sex is to say that your sexual partners in the past haven’t been very sexually active and potentially disliked having sex with you because the sex was bad. Otherwise? Humans like sex.

Orgasms are supposed to be a benchmark of successful recreational sex. I mean, they feel great, don’t they? If you’re not getting your partner to orgasm during sex then you must be bad at it and they aren’t going to enjoy the sex, right? Na. Orgasms are great but just the act of having sex is pretty enjoyable. I mean, do you masturbate solely for the purpose of getting off or does it feel pretty good along the way too? You also don’t have to have an orgasm right away. I’ve come under the impression that you sabotage yourself if you race to make yourself or your partner orgasm and fall into despair if you fail on either front. It’s cool. Have as much fun as you both possibly can and if you didn’t orgasm or they didn’t orgasm, then take care of it afterwards. Heck, maybe they can even give you a hand. There’s a good chance that they know how to get their rocks off and you know how to get yours off.

Gosh, going through grade school and into college there was this myth perpetuated that men are always horny and want to sleep with everyone and anyone. No. Creeps, guys or girls, that haven’t learned any self control are always horny and want to bang anything and everything. Normal guys are just like normal girls and they probably have a few people they fancy, a few people they wouldn’t mind a friends-with-benefits relationship with, and a lot of people they would never touch for a variety of reasons. I’ll grant you that some people are willing to sleep around a lot more than you are and they go far to perpetuate this though. I wonder what the statistics would look like if people were polled on how many people they would want to sleep with out of everyone they know and meet? This is entirely a guess but my assumption would be a stark drop off at the 5% mark and a rapid approach to 0 once you got past 50%. Undoubtedly someone would be on the 100% mark of wanting to sleep with everyone they know and meet but it’d be an awful lonely position.

Now the mindset that every man wants to rape you is a fair one, if only because it only takes one person out there intent on raping you to make things dangerous. I’m not saying that you should be afraid of the world, but being in the mindset that every situation can be dangerous keeps you on your toes and watching your drink for date rape drugs. No, most guys and people out in the world actually don’t wish you any harm. They are probably entirely ambivalent towards you or wish you well. Most of the time people will even stand up for you or back you up if things go bad. The problem is that there’s someone out there with unscrupulous morals and it’s hard to identify them until after they’ve struck. The only word of caution that I really want to put up about this is to not let the fear engulf you. Most of the world is full of fine people and if you’re careful that one scumbag isn’t going to ruin your life. What people do is they’ll ruin their own lives so that they never even have the chance to meet that scumbag. I’ve had friends turn down huge opportunities to advance their education, career, and other momentums in their lives because they’d be leaving their bubble and they could be raped outside of their bubble. This is crippling to them and very sad to me.

Something strange that I’ve seen is that girls will tease you to get what they want. Okay, so picture this situation. A person goes through life talking to people. This is strange, I know, but bear with me. While talking with people, they figure out that by flirting just a little bit, the person that they’re talking to will be friendlier with them. God, that’s so wrong of them, right? Now, when they do this with 99% of people, the other person gets that this is how conversation works and fun is had. Then there is the odd person out that hears a compliment and thinks that means they will get sex if they buy this person things. Ya. You’re being gross when you think you can buy sex from people. As a guy who has had a lot of gifts thrown his way, I find it outright revolting when the other person immediately cuts contact with me because they find out they’re not getting sex from me. Maybe you should have asked that person if they were single and interested before you started trying to barter sexual favors from them.

Now onto the friendzone. The friendzone is that place that people like to slink off to when it is obvious that a friend they are interested in is not interested in them. The friendzone is a make-believe place and you get there by being friends with someone and hoping for a romantic relationship when they aren’t interested in more. The reason why you’re stuck there is because they are not interested in you. But if they’re not interested in you why are they still friends with you? Not all human contact results from wanting romantic relations. You’re stuck in the friendzone because they aren’t interested in you romantically. They’re interested in having you as a friend. If you’re going to keep fawning over them like that you should discuss it with them like an adult and explain that you aren’t sure if you can maintain your friendship due to how you feel about them romantically. Otherwise it’s not the friendzone, it’s just friendship.

The last thing that is especially annoying in some relationships is that it doesn’t matter what your personality is like, your partner only needs to look for looks because they’re going to be remodeling your personality anyway. No, you’re really not. Your partner is someone. They have their own personality, habits, and behaviors. Some of these things shift on their own pretty naturally and others will alter themselves over time to fit better with those around them, namely you. However, when you try to change the core of a person to better suit you, you are being manipulative and controlling. This makes you a bad person, is making your partner unhappy, and is probably making you pretty miserable too. The solution to this is to date someone who you actually like rather than just someone who is pretty.

The things I’ve listed off are just the tip of the iceberg and I’m sure you’re familiar with some of them and a bunch of your own. When something sounds wrong, I’d really advise doing some research on it and whatever you do, don’t just discount your empirical experiences as wrong when they contradict. You’ll be a richer person for it.

Hello, I'm TK and I make more noises of being in pain when my character in a video game gets hurt than when I'm actually injured.

Silly stuff

I did a series of silly haikus for my girlfriend for no real reason. They were written inside of origami hearts and placed in a heart shaped box for her. Here are a few of the finer travesties~


Oh man so many hearts
Don't they just remind you of
Tons and tons of butts

Cocoa is luscious
Cocoa is warm; just like you
Ro ro ro ro ro

We are like Chocolate
Creamy, smooth, lickably yum
I kiss you muah muah

A New Direction

A New Direction

I've given up on the idea of maintaining a blog for the sole reason that my interests are too human. They wane, jump, and practice parkour far too often for the good of any website. As such I'll be using this page as a creative outlet for short story writing and long story writing too. Worst yet, sometimes even poetry will pop up.

Want to help me out? Be mean. Be critical. Tell me everything that you hate about every sentence that I make and point out even the tiniest, most nitpicky mistake. I cannot begin to tell you how much I would appreciate that. If you do not want to then that is fine too. I need to improve and no one improves by being coddled.