ugh the new helluva episode gave me shivers

you know, i don't think i can say that i like myself anymore

asdfjkl; i'm not sure what's funnier, that i was not pegged as a batfam enjoyer when i still yearn for my fun when i was doing marvel/dc or that i am remembered as the "yaoi buddy" (but yes i went by "the smallest stabbiest bat" on discord for a while). i really like damian and i think the dc animated movies do a really good job portraying him too (i still think about that one scene in jl vs tt where he throws all the rings onto the bottles and everyone's oohing and awwing but he's just so forlornly meh about it + about the scene a few minutes later where he goes to 1v1 beast boy on ddr and goes from horrible to amazing in like a minute and a half as he gets the hang of how to do it + is channeling it as fighting and combat instead of fun because that's all he's ever known before and sorry i need to go have feelings now-)

honestly he's great, he gets the batfam in a way that a lot of the dc writers miss (the dc animated movies get p close but they do still do tim dirty) - the batsignal, thanksgiving, the robins confessing their crimes, tim's search history, tim + dick on a stakeout, tim coming out, the aftermath of clark pretending to be bruce, working for lex luther or the joker... there's a ton more but these are the ones i found p easily on my tumblr so.


edit: i forgot for like 10 minutes that the dc animated movies also gave us divorced dad lex luthor with twink bisexual kon and you know what they were exactly correct for that decision too lmao-

i did not expect to accidentally open pixel to an entirely fantastic opinion about damian but as a former damian rper i can definitely cosign to almost all of it (since a lot of that is why i ended up loving the little dummy)

i also relatedly recommend a lot of thereddpanda's tiktoks, he understands the batfam in the way a lot of the dc writers are sleeping on these days and it's good stuff-

gonna quickly clarify since y'know. it's quoting me, it's directly in response to me, and it's definitely putting words in my mouth that aren't actually there.

i'm not saying that you (general) shouldn't be allowed to side-eye someone who wants to write.... honestly, literally anything. heaven knows i would to find out someone was writing, idk, a super in-depth thread about cannibalism (which is one of my big personal "icks"). and it is always (general) your decision to write/interact with someone for any reason, no matter what it is, the same way that it is your decision to place + enforce limits on what you personally are able + willing to write.

what i'm saying is that on a site-wide level, i don't see a problem with permitting even the most extreme content so long as the people wanting to engage with it are taking every single precaution to very clearly label it for what it is, are being conscious about not exposing people to it in unavoidable public areas, and are otherwise just generally able to distinguish the difference between fantasy + reality and keep it that way. or, to put it another way - i should have to knowledgeably open the thread and continue reading past the warnings to find the content, i shouldn't randomly stumble across it in general channels of the discord (yes, including general rp channels), and anyone who is an actual legitimate problem/predator should get yeeted.

(plus, i mean, let's be honest here. even if someone wants to write the most messed up possible content, they would still have to find someone else willing to write it with them. and if by some miracle they do, a lot of the rest of the community they're in is probably going to naturally avoid them for exactly the reason you pointed out. if the person is actually a problem, sure, boot them + delete the content, but like... if it's just a few people existing in a corner doing their own thing + no one is being harmed by it unless they are deliberately going looking to be harmed, i don't feel like it's worth my time as a staffer to intervene + i am going to be massively peeved as a member if a staffer does.)



again, to be clear, i agree with you in that i don't think there's a huge population of people clamoring to write extreme content either (or at least, not in public). no, really, i don't. i truly think the vast majority of people don't want to, and i also truly think that of the people who would, most of them are going to self-censor to some degree specifically out of fear of that side-eye or people avoiding them for it. (plus like imo i do think there is a harm in diluting warnings about legitimate predators in the rpc by co-mingling them with, idk, writing two teenagers being intimate or liking a problematic series or whatever else, but that's a whole different other topic.)

but like, idk. it might be the fact that i grew up in the "don't like? don't read!" era of fanfic (and trust me, i have seen some gods awful stuff posted out there, whether i click on it or not) or maybe the fact that i primarily play canons and thus deal with the additional stupidity of "i don't control how old characters are in canon, i don't control what the actual creators do with the canon story, and i do not control what these creators say or do in their outside lives that might be a problem". but i'd much rather trust in people (who are mostly other adults who have all been saying for forever now that in-character actions/thoughts do not equal out-of-character beliefs/endorsements) to curate their own experiences, enforce their own boundaries with their partners (or non-partners), and otherwise just enable that behavior in others.

3-3-3 references the rpg rating system, which is a scale of 0-3 for the language, sexual, and violent content permitted on any given site. it's been in use in the rp community for at least 10+ years, although it's been far more popular in the rl community than the animanga one.

as i stated previously, i think it's a little outdated now, at least in terms of language and sex, since i think the former should be expanded from solely encompassing swearing to also include hate speech, bigotry, extremist rhetoric, cult-like language, and other such topics that would make sense to be classified there + are typically not always directly addressed in site rules (or tend to be dealt with privately after the fact) and the latter doesn't do anything beyond checking off the box for whether or not explicit smut is permitted (such as addressing kink and/or extreme topics).

i will also agree with illidan main that these days, yeah, most animanga/rl sites tend to advertise themselves as 3-3-3 or 3-2-3 (based on whether or not they permit smut) but the fact of the matter is that most of them aren't actually free-for-alls the way that 3-3-3 is meant to be (in my opinion, they tend to hover anywhere around 2-2-2 to 2-2.5-2.5, depending on the site).

but idk, maybe i'm the weird one who would actually want sites that are 3-3-3 (or whatever the actual equivalent would end up being) to not have limits, including on all of Super Bad Stuff (tm) that i have negative interest in wanting to write, because i just genuinely don't care about if people want to write the most explicitly gods-awful content so long as they're treating it as the appropriate "dead dove: do not eat" that it is and it's something that's genuinely "ic =/= ooc". i'm just tired, okay, i don't want to have to devote time + energy into figuring out if so-and-so is actually a real predator to be concerned about or if they just happen to write a teenage character being appropriately developmentally horny or some hydra character that's not bucky barnes or whatever other bad-faith judgment call is being made here.

i ended up thinking more about it, and honestly, i just feel like the current rpc has just outgrown the old 3-set lsv rating system in its current format (which makes sense, it is 10+ years old and the rpc has changed a lot in those 10+ years).

language really should be expanded to more explicitly include not just swearing but also bigotry, hate speech, extremist rhetoric, cult language, etc - not to promote those things, imo, but because a lot of people do get cagey and/or uncomfortable to acknowledge bigotry in the world setting or to allow characters that touch on politically-sensitive topics (like playing a hydra character or a ben shapiro esque character or anything with harry potter), and that's something that generally is addressed separately in content restrictions or privately with members as opposed to a general warning.

sexual content should be reworked to make it actually meaningfully scale for the middle ground between "smut threads are allowed" and "all sexual content is allowed", both to address the common bans/restrictions on sexual content for "no limits on sexual content" sites (pedophilia, incest, teenage characters) as well as to actually indicate comfort levels regarding kink (since imo there's a lot of ground to cover there).

violent content can probably be left alone for the most part, though i'll refrain from committing to that since i generally don't really get involved in sites/genres where it would be a problem (and i generally think most rpers will self-censor in this regard for taste), so i don't feel like it's meaningfully my place to critique it all that much.


(and i mean, sure, rpg ratings aren't enforced by anyone, so imo, people could absolutely just start making these distinctions on their own, but at the same time, when the general understanding is that language = swearing and 3 sex = smut while 2 sex = no smut, i feel like it kind of defeats the point of having a standardized shorthand to use when different people are going to be using different yardsticks for said shorthand.)

i was today years old when i realized the language part of the rpg ratings makes more sense to not just encompass swearing but also extremist rhetoric, bigotry / hate speech, and almost everything other general content warning topic that doesn't fall cleanly under the sexual or violence categories

man, it's amazing how low the bar is that i was so legitimately impressed that lovebrush chronicles made the common sense decision to rerun a specific event immediately before they ran the sequel to it-

okay but if we're wanting to blame someone, we should probably start with the people who actually voted for him in spite of (or in many cases, because of) all the reasons not to

not to be a debbie downer on main but man, what i wouldn't give to have people who were actually excited to see me + wanted me to stick around

bump! still looking for a bunch of loveless, vampire knight, tears of themis, and lovebrush chronicles canons to satisfy the yearning inside my tiny lil heart for many many dumb things-