MDZS Drinking Tropes 🍶🍺

And they were tombmates 🪦

Emergency, read my story and help me ‼️

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Donate to Rebuilding Hope: Help Ezzedine Escape the War in Gaza, organized by Loria Rahime

My name is Ezzedine Salem. I once lived a life full of promise and … Loria Rahime needs your support for Rebuilding Hope: Help Ezzedine Esca

I am EzzEl-Din, his condition, and the my family of Gaza are very difficult, they do not have the necessities of life, no medicine, no food, no health, no education, nothing but death and destruction I appeal to everyone who sees my campaign to stand by my family, Whether by donating or sharing the story with your friends to raise an amount that will help my family 💔🍉

We will have no home left We are now in the street. Please help me spread my campaign

Donation rate of $5 from every person who achieves the goal of 10,000$

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Donate to save our life 💔🙏🏻

gofundme.com

Donate to Rebuilding Hope: Help Ezzedine Escape the War in Gaza, organized by Loria Rahime

My name is Ezzedine Salem. I once lived a life full of promise and … Loria Rahime needs your support for Rebuilding Hope: Help Ezzedine Esca

@paper-mario-wiki @wayneradiotv

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maybe the rainbow skeletons wanted to celebrate pride because it is still june

it's cold out there, reblog to give a trans man a cup of soump

Cecil Palmer could do TMA but Jon Sims could not do WTNV. Cecil has no fucking curiosity, as the Archivist he would read all the statements and go “golly, these sure are fun :)” then find out about the Fears and kill Elias in three days. Jon in Night Vale would be fired and eaten day 1

WE ARE BACK AND BETTER THAN EVER 🔥🔥🔥

update!!

hello everyone, update after so long! (sorry about that, a lot has been going on!!) i’ll be removing the videos i’ve uploaded on youtube temporarily due to copyright concerns, but fret not, i’ll redestribute them in a different format as soon as i can! i’ll also be continuing to work on this project as soon as i can, but without a fixed schedule this time!

thanks for sticking around!

[discourse] in defiance of the author’s wishes (re: mxtx fandom)

table of contents : context  : moral arguments : addressing the legal side of things  : closing remarks

Context

on March 17, 2018, mxtx posted:

“As long as you don't split or reverse the top/bottom positions of the main couple, I won't mind what you ship. I myself have a lot of fun shipping couples in mainstream shows, and isn't reading all about finding joy? You can imagine freely or ship whoever you like, just don't break up or reverse the top/bottom positions of the main couple.”

(I realise that the 不拆不逆 “no splitting or reversing” rule might be implicit within the entire Chinese danmei fandom, so i do not wish to single mxtx out. for example, i know that Chinese 2ha fans also go around policing people who ship, say, chu wanning with shi mei — so this isn’t just a mxtx thing. although i do not know if other danmei authors have explicitly stated “no splitting or reversing” since i have not been a part of other danmei fandoms.)

Nevertheless, “no splitting or reversing” became the constitution in Chinese mxtx fandom. Fans parade around with the slogan “拆逆死“ which means “kill yourself if you split or reverse”. Since the pronunciation of 拆逆死 (chai-ni-si) sounds like “chinese”, some fans on the Chinese internet have been putting “chinese” in their bios to mean “kill yourself if you split or reverse”.

From now on I will be referring to split/reverse ships as cult ships, as Chinese fans like to call them.

There are two main consequences of the “no splitting or reversing” rule (on the Chinese internet):

You will receive permanent bans with no option for appeal if you post cult ship fanworks in the novel communities on Weibo

It is implicitly agreed upon that you are not allowed to use individual character tags, the novel tag, or the author tag when posting cult ship content on any platform. So, for example, if you write Wei Wuxian x Jiang Cheng, you are not allowed to use #weiwuxian #jiangcheng #mdzs #mxtx. The name given to this conduct of tagging only your cult ship is 圈地自萌, which means “enclose a piece of land and amuse oneself within it”. You are not allowed to step out of your land. 

However, not everyone agrees with the practice of “don’t step out of your land” — this includes people from both sides of the debate. Some official shippers believe that cult shippers should not have any land to begin with, and purposefully leave the cult ship tag unblocked so they can police cult shippers at every opportunity. Some cult shippers believe that because their ship involves the individual characters, originate from the novel written by the author, they are in the right to use the individual character tags, the novel tag, and the author tag, and that people who dislike their ship should just use the block function. 

-

Moral Arguments

There are two main types of moral arguments that Chinese official shippers make.

1. If you split the official ship, you condone cheating behaviour and that makes you a bad person.

The first argument is too trivial so I will leave the refutation as an exercise for the reader to do at home /j

2. You are not respecting the author's wishes and that makes you a bad person.

The author has wished many different things. For example:

Screenshot 1 translation: I strictly forbid any crowdfunding or fundraising related to me, my works, or my characters, regardless of the purpose, whether it be for celebration, group buying, rankings, charity, or any other named activities.

Screenshot 2 translation: Once again, I emphasize: No new social media pages related to my works are allowed, nor organizing readers in a roundabout way, whether it be for celebrations, group buying, rankings, charity, or any other named activities. Please also refrain from flamboyantly organizing any collective birthday events.

Screenshot 3 translation: I've repeated many things many times and do not wish to repeat myself. Could everyone please just listen to my words occasionally.

(A brief aside before I address the second argument, something I used to say when debating Chinese fans: “I don’t think people who violate the author's wishes mean any disrespect. I don’t think they’re shipping or hosting charity events or birthday parties out of spite, but rather, it just so happens that the author prohibits a ship they enjoy or an event they organise. Just because I cult ship, for example, doesn’t mean I hate the author.” And they would respond: “if you really liked the author, you wouldn’t go against her wishes. You do not deserve to like the author. You are a mxtx anti.” And I would say, “I like my mom a lot, but I won’t listen to everything she says, simply because I don’t think everything she says is right. Plus, I don’t think the world can simply be explained by like vs. dislike. Also, Xie Lian said this: [For instance, if you admire or like someone, you won't always treat them well, no matter what happens.]” But then the most hilarious thing happened, in the revised version, a rebuttal for that scene was added:

【”For instance, if you admire or like someone, it doesn't mean you will always treat them well, regardless of what happens."

"Why not?" San Lang questioned. "If that's not possible, it only shows that this so-called 'liking' isn't anything significant."

Xie Lian shifted the conversation, asking, "Then... does it mean that aside from liking someone, the only other option is to dislike them? Are these the only two attitudes one can choose from?"

San Lang chuckled and retorted, "Why not? Right is right, wrong is wrong. To love is to love, to hate is to hate. Why can't things be clear and straightforward?”】

… ah.)

To address the second argument for real, i believe that producers retain no moral authority over the methods by which consumers engage with their products. for instance, i believe that choosing not to follow the official “twist, lick, and dunk” method when eating oreos does not constitute disrespect towards the oreo brand. Or to use another analogy, suppose a farmer selling apples insist that you peel the apples before eating them. I believe that it does not make you a bad person if you choose to eat the apples unpeeled, despite the farmer being the one who watered and harvested the apples from their trees.

I am thinking of potential counterarguments, and the strongest one I came up with is: “but products like oreos and apples are fundamentally different from intellectual property.” And I think the main issue here is that, to employ economics terminology, the content of novels like tgcf is a non-rivalrous good (not the novels themselves but the abstract content), which means that my consumption of it does not reduce availability to others. In other words, unlike Oreos or apples wherein after I purchase them, the specific items I bought are no longer physically in the hands of the vendor; after encountering characters like Shen Qingqiu, Shen Qingqiu still exists abstractly in MXTX’s head. This gives the illusion of ownership on the author’s part. I want to be very careful here because I think it’s easy to equivocate between different uses of the word “ownership”. I am not arguing that the author fails to retain ownership in negation of all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into the creative process, i.e. their copyright. Instead, I am contending that, just as I paid for my Oreos and apples, upon my purchasing of the Seven Seas version, the paperback Chinese version, and the revised uncensored version of TGCF on JJWXC, the author does not own the ways by which I choose to engage with these fictional entities. Once a work is made public, its ontology becomes independent of the author’s intent, and in all its readers’ heads exist distinct versions of the characters, in effect making them belong to all of us.

(There. As a bonus I have also resolved the issue of not being “chinese” enough. Ah, is this a bad place to make a communism joke?)

Addressing the legal side of things

In 2022 I wrote to the legal team at AO3, and here is their response:

Regarding the “moral rights”, that’s actually a thing. Upon receiving lots of spam from 12-yr-old readers that “you are breaking the law”, I did a quick Baidu search (China’s Google) concerning the legality of splitting/reversing ships. Surprisingly, the search results yield “yes, it’s illegal”, and hence the 12-yr-olds' confidence. But that is akin to getting a cancer diagnosis from searching symptoms on Google. So I dug deeper. 

After reading tens of published papers and court cases, here are the key takeaways of what I found:

Given that intellectual property rights are a bit behind in China, they have largely based their laws on US copyright law. As organizations like OTW continue to fight for the rights of transformative works in the US, China probably will just follow suit.

The semantics of “distort, mutilate, or otherwise harm the integrity of their works in a way that harms the author’s reputation” is very vague and debatable. There are at least three ways to interpret it (I think one of the papers I read offered four). The first is that they only have to prove that you distorted the integrity of the work. The second is that you satisfy the condition of harming the author’s reputation. The third is that you satisfy both conditions (integrity of work and author’s reputation). It depends on the court. 

None of the court cases pertained to unserious, just-for-fun fan works. Usually what happens is someone makes a film out canon, for example, and sell it for profit, or someone publishes their own novel which contains characters from another published work. 

And that is for China only^ if you live outside of China, you are under another country's jurisdiction.

-

Closing remarks

I am addressing this issue because it has impacted me and my friends in many ways. "kill yourself if you split/reverse the official ship" is probably the least of our concerns, mainly because it is such a popular phrase that we've become desensitized to it. @/Eleven receives private messages on Lofter on a weekly basis of people wishing her entire family to get murdered. A hualian main friend of mine has been posted to Weibo for following me; and I had to pull a Shi Qingxuan with "hey let's not be friends anymore if being associated with me is gonna get you cancelled".

mxtx has been through a lot and i understand where she's coming from. and maybe, the people who identify as "kill yourself if you split/reverse the official ship" don't truly mean it -- maybe they're just expressing their love for the official ship.

Recently i've been seeing the sentiments I used to only witness in Chinese fandom surface on Twitter and sometimes I worry that western mxtx fandom is going to turn into Chinese mxtx fandom, with the in-group/out-group mentality -- you're either with us or against us. At the end of the day, I do like mxtx, I admire her tenacity and I think she's a brilliant author, I love her works and the characters in them. I simply do not want to be backed into the corner of "anti" due to not following every order she gives.

祝墨香和她的粉丝们平安。

Very dangerous guy: stop asking me questions or I'll kill you

Jonarchivist: right, right, of course, sorry

....

Jonarchivist: but just real quick, wha-

Unfortunately, I am once again asking for assistance.

Due to several factors I don't really want to talk about, I've suffered a series of mental health episodes over the past few weeks that have left me, quite frankly, in the worst state since... basically before I started working on trauma recovery. I've come pretty close to being hospitalized a few times, but aside from the additional trauma that might incur, I also just simply couldn't afford it.

My ability to work an outside job was already limited by my C/PTSD among other things, but for right now, I can't even think about picking up a shift without having a panic attack. I can still force myself to do things if necessary, but... honestly I really need to be able to not do that, at least for a little while until I can get back on track.

Unfortunately, I can't afford to take a break with no income. A few surprise expenses came up recently which very nearly brought everything crashing down. It's only thanks to the support of my followers and fans that we were able to scrape by, but right now there's no buffer whatsoever. My partner's already working as much as he can, and almost his entire paycheck is going to rent payments and other bills. I can't ask him to work even more to cover my expenses as well.

Last month, I had to skip getting a prescription filled. I can't do that again. My cats are more than six months past due for their shots just because we can't afford it, and I'm stressed every day that I might lose them because of this. They are my literal lifeline.

To cover my own expenses, I need a bare minimum of $600 USD a month, broken down as follows:

Medication: $100

Medical Debt Bills: $300 (total $6000)

Credit Card Bills: $100 (total $3500)

Utility Bills: $100

This is just literally what I can't afford to stop paying no matter what, it doesn't cover groceries or gas, and I also need an additional one-time $500 to take my cats to the vet.

Any percentage of this that I can make through ko-fi tips, donations, requests, and patreon pledges is more time I don't have to spend forcing myself through panic attacks and hallucinations to work an outside job.

I'm hoping to get to a more stable place both mentally and financially eventually, but for now... I'm stuck. I'm stuck and it scares me. I want to heal, but right now it's like all the work I've already done and the progress I've made is evaporating. I'm struggling to keep up with even the most basic daily tasks, let alone my creativity and emotional well-being.

If you can help support me, I'm really, really grateful. The best way to do so would be through joining my Patreon, but really anything helps. I have some requests open on my ko-fi if you'd like to get something out of it, and here is a link to donate directly to my Paypal if you'd prefer that. I'm not really in a stable-enough place to make a full commitment right now, but if you leave a note with your donation that includes your url and a character name (or just a character on ko-fi), then I'll do a little doodle for you as thanks once I... am not struggling so much with the urge to delete myself from existing.

Thank you.