Not gonna draw attention to the post because I suspect the person might blow a gasket, but it’s always so funny to me when you see someone picking apart fanart, in this case, a popular fan Ot3 pairing, and they’re like, “y'all have brainrot, this’ll never be canon, you realize that?”
And maybe I’m just ancient, but since when has fandom ever been about validating canon? Canon is incidental to fandom output. It is, at best, a guideline. You can stick to it, or you can go so far off the beaten path that you fall off the edge of the world and wind up in a new one where the map has words like “here be dragons” stamped in the upper corner.
Fandom is about exploration beyond the canon. It can look like canon, talk like canon, and sometimes even emulate it so perfectly you’d swear you’ve found the author’s secret account, but it doesn’t have to.
Ultimately, however, it’s about having fun. And if you can’t understand that, I have no idea what you’re doing here.
In my experience most of us never expect our ships or story riffs to become canon. We know creators either don’t have the time, money, support, or bravery to write what we write.
Besides, where’s the fun in that? I want the impossible! I want all the characters in a polycule! Tentacle porn! Mpreg! I want this character is a shoe and that one is a sock and they are so in love!
Canon’s just a starting point and it’s eventually the least interesting part of the story. If fandom has done its job.
There are multiple posts saying that Legolas is the Texan amongst the Fellowship of the Ring and you’re all wrong it’s Gandalf. It’s 1000% Gandalf. Gandalf followed a wild horse for two days to tame it and would regularly ride up to the Shire with a cart full of homemade fireworks. Gandalf’s the Texan.
The Ring: If I had a quarter for every time a hobbit picked me up, I’d have two quarters. The Ring: Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
Of all the bearers of Sauron’s ring, 4 of them were hobbits.
I was wrong. It’s 5. Not 4
The lineage of ring bearers is as follows.
Sauron.
Isildur
Deagol
Sméagol
Bilbo
Frodo
Samwise
I love how Deagol counts as a ring bearer even though he had it in his possession for all of like five seconds
He held it for the rest of of his life!
[Image description: Tweet by @banalplay saying “but something happened then that the ring did not intend. it was picked up by the most unlikely creature imaginable: a hobbit, the same fuckin thing that just had it for like 500 years.” End Image Description.] Link to original here. Otherwise reblogging for the final rb there, which made me cackle.
From the ring’s perspective:
1. Home, the finger of my creator and other self.
2. Well, I don’t like it but I can work with this. Cause some trouble, get some revenge, find my way home, this is fine.
3. What the fuck is you?
4. Right personality, wrong species, I don’t know what you are but I hate you and I don’t know why you’re so resistant to my powers.
5. NO NO NO there are goblins everywhere how did I find another one of THESE horrible things. This one’s even more resistant than the last one and also disgustingly nice. I suffer.
6. Listen, I’ll cooperate, just get me the fuck out of this hellhole full of small cheerful people my power doesn’t work on properly. No, not like that. I hate you. Please stop.
7. FUCK
8. (Frodo again) I still hate you with every molecule of my mortal form but at least you’re not number seven. Think I’m starting to get through finally.
9. (Smeagol again) YES it’s you I actually missed you now get me back to the Master and NO FUCK NO I HATE YOOOOUUUUU…. *fzt*
you CHAIN The One Ring?! you chain it like the prisoner?! oh! OH! trauma! deep psychological trauma for hobbits for One Thousand Years!
And here I didn’t think we could top Deagol holding the ring for the rest of his life I am so glad for these additions
the Federation itself as a concept is so funny because the founding members are
the Vulcans, who have been friends with humanity for years but don’t seem to actually like them all that much, instead regarding them with a sort of perverse fascination usually reserved for virology labs
the Andorians, who were fighting the Vulcans for like a hundred years
the Tellarites, who don’t like any of these people and whose cultural trait is arguing, and
humans, whom nobody knew existed until last century when they shot themselves into space on a heavily modified nuke, invented world peace and won a fight with the nearest imperial superpower
like imagine you’re the Romulan Empire and these weird monkeys who’ve barely figured out interstellar travel show up on your doorstep in the equivalent of a shipping container with missiles strapped to it, kick your ass in front of everybody, and then start a friendship club with 3 of your neighbours who all hated each others’ guts until like a year ago. now I understand why every Romulan on the show is so angry
top tier character-building device in pokemon games is when a seemingly antagonistic character has a golbat on their team and then later has it evolved into a crobat, which requires significant friendship, thus signalling that the character was always a kind person inside (plumeria), is growing past their issues and learning to be kinder (silver), may hold a spark of kindness that undermines their cold and calculating image (cyrus), etc etc
Meanwhile, Ghetsis—who is an antagonist who pretends to be an advocate for Pokemon rights—faces off against you with an under-leveled Hydreigon, which in the canon lore of the series only happens when someone forces evolution early, and that Hydreigon uses a full-power Frustration in B2W2, suggesting that it absolutely loathes Ghetsis.
For any non-pokemon players:
In pokemon games, there’s a hidden stat called friendship, which maxes out at 255 points; there are two (major) moves that are affected by this:
Return, which gets stronger the higher a pokemon’s friendship stat is, capping at 102 base power with 255 friendship (for context, hyper beam has a base power of 150)
And frustration, which does the opposite, getting stronger the lower a pokemon’s friendship stat is, capping out at 102 base power when the pokemon is at 0 friendship
The EXTRA fucked up thing is, almost NO pokemon has a base friendship of 0. The only pokemon that do are legendary pokemon and buneary. So Ghetsis actively lowered his Hydreigon’s friendship, and the only way to do that in-game is to let your pokemon faint often without using healing items on them
In other words Ghetsis is a major cunt
wh
what’s up with buneary???
Buneary fucking hates you by default. It’s also another friendship-dependent evolution line.
for others who are clueless in the poking men, this is the tiny bunny that fucking hates you