Hannibal Lecter + Reaction Faces

Бабочки Боярышницы на медоносе Синяк. Butterflies Hawthorn on the honey plant Sinyak.

one thing that always sticks out at me in fandom discourse is this assumption that ‘quantity of fanworks about a thing’ is equivalent to ‘how much people care about the thing’ which I always find a bit ?? bcos for me it’s always been like

That is an objective part of the problem and why some people are so mad.

It is not about some ship, like Destiel shippers wouldn't even blink if they didn't get 15x18. The show did not address the ship? Sad, but ok fine, whatever, never expected anything else, thank you very much.

But no, they had to go and do 15x18 and then just expected what exactly? That we MIB flash ourselves? That there won't be any consequences?

LGBTQA+ theme is important to the society nowadays so you don't mess with it. Do not go there if you are not making a statement and aren't ready for repercussions. It is a highly irresponsible action and is really bad for ratings in the long run as we can see now.

Let's just see how many people the cw managed to get mad?

The LGBTQA+ community.

The Destiel shippers.

The Castiel fans.

Parts of Dean and Sam fans who wanted better end for them.

Other groups of fans whose characters didn't make it to the finale for literally no reason whatsoever.

The spn fans who were there for Found Family and Free Will messages.

The writers and editors community who knew those messages and are generally like wtf did you do with your storyline in that last episode, there so many contradictions and plotholes, bruh.

Other people with common sense who can guess that when after 15 years you get to see only 2.5 main characters in the finale it means something went wrong.

Who did like it?

Strange people who says that the shows was about two brothers only? No offense but literally just do not understand how found family trop went over your head when it was repeatedly explicitly said by cast and everyone involved like?? Literally in the 15x21 for example??? No there are clearly nothing in 15x20 that is about found family???? Just how??? The power of denial I guess.

The Wincest shippers. With full respect for these people I say that they deserved it for being baited even longer than Destiel shippers. But I consider it questionable tastes to prefer the bad written ending with your ship being baited yet again or even going cannon over a good written one. Trust me, I'm speaking from experience, I was in this situation before and it's not worth it.

The anti-destiel shippers who are so sick of hellers they are acting out of spite.

And the anti-lgbtqa+ community who do exactly the same thing as onti-destielers.

And the CW. Maybe. I guess they are not sure now)

I am sure I forgot some communities for all this, both liked/disliked the ending and were influenced by it, please feel free to add :)

Destielgate

I think the weirdest thing about this Destielgate is that some people act as if this is drama exclusively for hardcore Destiel shippers. It certainly is not. I’m not apart of the supernatural fandom, but how supernatural handled Destiel seriously affects me as someone of the LGBTQ+ community. In fact, it affects literally anyone who understands the significance of Destiel.  None of my friends watch supernatural, and yet everyday we talk about the newest Destielgate updates and every single day we talk about how ridiculous it is that they are trying to cover up the Spanish dub and how hurt we are that queer characters are being treated like this. 

I get updates about Destielgate from my queer discord book club where only like, 2 people have watched supernatural and none are actually dedicated fans of Supernatural. Despite all this we have in depth conversations about what is going on and trade the information we have discovered and we all are basically waiting in suspense to see what is going to happen to Destiel. Because how this ends, affects all of us. I feel like the episode writers, or CW, or whoever was in charge of this did not fully understand the impact of having lead characters of an extremely popular tv show come out as queer. I feel like they truly had no idea what they were getting into and no idea how important it was to the LGBTQ+ community that it is handled well. Because when I say queer representation saves lives? It LITERALLY saves lives but depending on how you handle it, it could have the opposite affect.

What truly baffles me is that Destiel did not need to become canon. Destiel shippers would have ben relatively fine with the ship not sailing because that is the nature of ships; they are almost never canonized. But they decided to make it canon in the most homophobic way possible. Yes, any representation is good, but what some do not understand is that a character declaring his love, not having his love reciprocated, immediately getting sent to Mega Turbo Super Hell (the empty) and then never being mentioned again except in a throw away line? Never being grieved over? Never having any resolution? these things that happened after the confession was a rapid devaluing of a character that was apparently very important before that episode. As soon as he declared his love for Dean, he was stripped of the value that the show had been putting on him. Castiel, a character who was well loved and an integral part of the storyline suddenly does not matter to people who previously would have died and/or killed for him right after he declared his love for Dean? That is where the problem lies. That rapid devaluing of Castiel as a character sends a clear message to any queer person watching the show: they do not matter. They are not valued or wanted and its better to stay silent than to speak your truth. It is better to be a closeted gay than openly queer because when you come out you could lose everything.

Yet another Bury Your Gays ™ trope (with the huge chance of there being queer censorship) is the business of literally all of us in the LGBTQ+ community. This is not about a Supernatural ship anymore, it is about whether or not blatant homophobia and queer censorship will continue to go unchecked. It is about whether big companies will decide that queer lives are more important than money. It is about the LGBTQ+ community no longer being something inconveniencing, but rather something precious.  

I have OCD and with that comes quasi-hallucinations, and I grew up watching a ton of horror films so some of the worst of mine are the standard white skin/black hair demon girl type shit.

However, because a lot of them are based on horror film I have found comfort in doing things that “go against” horror films and being like “see? This could never happen.”

(It’s irrational. I know that. But shut up. This is how I cope.)

For example: I started hearing garbled whispering from beneath my table, so I started playing the muppets sound track. Because they would never play Movin’ Right Along when the protagonist is about to get attacked. That won’t happen. Disney, who owns the muppets, wouldn’t give them the rights.

And it fucking worked.

I'm vibrating out of my bones

THIS

This is The Problem with new dmc anime. All other stuff can be overlooked. But not this shit. They made a such grand mistake taking out the literal soul of the gameverse. Everything else doesn't work as it should without this conflict done right.

And it's done completely wrong. Who's idea was it to poorly disguise USA politics and racism problems as "demons", "slavery" and "hell".

Dmc explored the union of human and demon parts, questioned what they are, what they represent. With main themes as love, power and survival, explored through different concepts of family. It was always there in different forms that evolved and layered over each other with each new game and manga.

So the most noticeable outcome of those? We got intimate family melodrama with brutal and unstoppable action. Which is a receipt for success!

In the new anime we get boring "save the world, save them all" in a grand plot because "they're just like us" and Dante who has NO IDEA that he's a halfdemon and what was his family. Unless they play the amnesia card which would be ridiculous ngl but also even worse. So he's basically left without conflict AT ALL.

He's just a guy.

When the whole premise of dmc is that this "just a guy" is not in fact "just a guy".

I'm almost crying, send help

I think part of what makes the Netflix show so frustrating is the fact that there's definitely blind spots in the original lore that could allow for a deeper discussion on a demon's capability for love and goodness, but the show itself just did not seem interested in actually exploring those ideas.

I've seen some posts going around about how demons not being inherently evil was already established in the games, and I think that is true. The gameverse has a bit of a strange philosophy when it comes to demons and their capacity for good. On one hand, the original two games act as though the only way for a demon to be good is to actively distance themselves from their demonic heritage.

Dante telling Trish and Lucia that "devil's never cry" actually feeds into the idea that demons are inherently evil and that they aren't actually demons because they are capable of goodness. In those games, this is played straight. However, in later entries, they seem to recognise this for what it actually is - the rhetoric of a man who is projecting his own self loathing in regard to his demonic half onto the people in his life who are dealing with similar problems.

Vergil and his core beliefs around demonic power being the only thing to keep him safe when human fragility failed him is the first time Dante is forced to confront a flaw in his worldview. Vergil is technically correct in that their heritage is what has kept the two of them alive up until that point and that in order for Dante to stop his brother and Arkham, he'd need to embrace that power too. Dante seems to internalise this as the idea that his power needs to be used as a force for good - "with great power comes great responsibility," style, but still retains that he is good in spite of his demonic power.

Power in DMC is not inherently evil, the folly of the villains in the series is that they seek it to fill a hole that should have been filled with love instead. On some level, Dante recognises this, but is often too burdened by his self loathing that he has a hard time excepting and seeking out love himself.

In contrast, Nero is able to acknowledge what is truly important to him, allowing himself to be vulnerable when he gives and receives love, while also fully embracing his demonic side and the power it gives him. V also has a similar revelation, although his is just as much about learning to love life itself and rediscovering passions so he can have a better coping mechanism that isn't more power.

These core character arcs clearly indicate that the reason humanity is seen as morally superior in the games is their willingness to love and willingly give. To gain more out of life than just power (it's also what makes the power hungry human villains so evil, they want to throw away what makes them human for the chance at being powerful). Whereas demonic power means that demons live in a perpetually dog-eat-dog world where there is no incentive to love or create, you can only ever take. But when demons like Trish are given the chance to grow from that, they are just as capable of love as any human.

This then opens up for the line of questioning, well, if environmental factors are what's making demons so power hungry, then wouldn't exploring how being shut off from the opportunity to grow in the human world be an actually valid idea for the Netflix adaptation to explore? It could have been! Genuinely!

However, the writers were not interested in exploring that concept, not really. The need to fit established DMC lore into the shape of a narrative about how the Iraq war and the US government intensionally otherised Arabic people meant that those ideas couldn't be expanded upon because of how that would have impacted the portrayal of a very direct analogue of a real life group of people.

This is often the problem central to the fantasy racism trope, because it's a direct reference to a real group of people who's only actual differences from any other ethnic group is appearance and culture, any discussion of how physiological differences may impact the way they live and experience the world very quickly become a minefield.

The demons in the games are often one of a kind or a species with entirely alien biological incentives, trying to make them seem like their way of life would be no different from the average human is actively contradictory and just plain boring. It's part of why the demons that were taken from the game look so out of place compared to their more human shaped counterparts.

There is the potential in examining a demon's ability to love in the gameverse version of the lore, and it wouldn't have been a problem for the anime to explore that. That sort of exploration would have had to focus on how love can come in many forms, how a fundamentally different way of perceiving the world around you doesn't mean your perspective isn't valid. However, because demons are an exact reference to a real life group of people now, making them out to be anything other than just like any other human is risking a lot.

So that's the crux of the issue for me. I think trying to force the demons from the game lore into an Arabic shaped hole is kinda a bad idea. Hell, if they were desperate to make the US government into the big bad then there would have been precedent for it. DMC2 and DMC4 both concern powerful groups in society abusing demonic power for personal gain, the idea that a government would do the same isn't too dissimilar in my opinion.

To be honest, I feel a lot of the criticism of the anime has only been scratching at the surface of the actual problems so far. I'd appreciate it if the pre-existing fandom could recognise where problems existed in the source material before jumping to complaining about the adaptation, even though there is a lot to complain about...

meh

THIS IS THE FUNNIEST THING IN HISTORY. BUZZKILL ALERT

I started a new disco game and he wasnt there. Straight up just didnt exist.

King??????? Where are you