The Tumblr Files - Official Thread (Case I: Steven Universe) - An exposé on the media and people that destroyed the Internet

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

Now the writing industry is full of woke bullshit. You could probably draw a line from Tumblr if you squinted hard enough. But one thing I noticed, among all the requirements and requests for gays and BIPOC characters; alot of them liked dads. For whatever reason, a father figure was a win among otherwise woke agents. This has always stuck with me as strange.

I thought Tumblr hated the nuclear family. Was it gay dads specifically, or were straight dads also considered a "win"?

 

[WelperHelper99]

I thought Tumblr hated the nuclear family. Was it gay dads specifically, or were straight dads also considered a "win"?
View attachment 7267511

If I remember correctly (its been years), it's basically characters like Greg, or as more commonly known, the stupid goofy dad stereotype, because God forbid we portray a father as competent.

But yes, straight was fine. Dads were fine. Alongside this wishlist of garbage from the Agent, some of the most (legitimately) racist things you will ever read, it's also like "I want a papa bear character too!". Whiplash man.

 

[Carmen The Aids Rabbit]

The more I read this the more I'm convinced there might not be any weird shit with Toby. What I'm getting is that Toby is a high tier marketer that knew exactly what the Tumblr cringe hoards wanted and how to execute it.
Whatever he actually believes the gender shit or not, he knew it was bad business so he kept his mouth shut.

Tho I don't believe on the "didn't want to get famous" bid. Like it was mentioned, his connections to other more established Tumblr artists point otherwise, plus I doubt someone who doesn't take the series seriously would put that much thought into it

 

[Darth Insanius]

View attachment 7262545

The title of this post made me realize Steven Universe is really just a gay and badly written version of Animorphs with a bunch of stuff lifted from 90s anime instead of LOTR.

Spoiler: Meme

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

For those who haven't already, I would highly recommend reading Case II, as it is just as, if not more important as Cases I and III, and it will be especially important to understanding Case IV.

 

[pork and beans]

You talked about undertale and danganronpa but forgot to mention that tumblr shipped komaeda x sans for years until they started shipping sans with reigen from Mob Psycho 100 instead… because of some poll or something, I don’t remember…

random=funny humor was so bad n the 2010s oh my god

That tumblr PHD needs more elbow grease

Superwholock fandom, which I think deserves a mention

Superwholock definitely needs a mention although I’m not sure where because it was late 2000s and early 2010s wasn’t it? Like 2012 was probably the peak.

Either way Supernatural fandom is like a cockroach that will not die and the direct precursor of stuff like The Boys or troon musicians who have become the new st patrons of tumblr for handmaidens today and already have threads on lolcow farms, so…

 

[Kari Kamiya]

I can't believe I missed this getting posted lol it was an unexpected birthday gift I totally ignored.

Anyhoo I literally never heard of half of those games mentioned in the write-up, which probably goes to show that I did not lurk those particular circles (and likely for good reason). I don't even know if a friend, of whom we used to often talk about stuff going on in the video game scene and DeviantArt at that time, even knows of all of those titles. Hell, I was actually under the impression Homestuck was some weird Comodore 64-esque webcomic and not an actual point-and-click MS Paint game originally. I probably could've played it way back when had I known about it for that alone, though none of my friend circles at school actually talked about it. Lord knows what that would've entailed.

Undertale honestly doesn't sound like a bad game on the surface, and I'm totally okay that MS Paint was used for the sprite work even as meta-humor or whatnot, I just never played it because one: I didn't get myself a proper PC set-up until long after its popularity waned, and two: Tumblr turned me off from it because it was everywhere I looked. If Tumblr was deep into it, it typically wasn't a good sign. Also the skeleton-fuckers than spawned from it made me go "wtfffff" (seriously, why wasn't that mentioned?). Now my aforementioned friend did play it and had some fond words to say about it, though I dunno what he thinks of it these days.

Also it's hilarious (and eye-opening) that Sans only became a meme due to his Genocide Route fight even though Tumblr literally took offense to that route. Fucking amazing how deep the hypocrisy runs with that community, though that was probably their attempt to "take back" from the Internet at large what was "theirs" by pretending they were always into that.

Also in terms of Tumblr hating anime, there was still a sizeable circle on Tumblr dedicated to anime and not just the genderspecial/"feminist approved" (think Sailor Moon and Kill la Kill) kind, though there was definitely overlap since you could've easily fallen down a progressive rabbithole depending on the blog you clicked on. I hear the When They Cry franchise got big on Tumblr when Umineko was finishing up because the creator apparently started to pander to them/give in to some retarded Tumblr theories for the answer arcs. I haven't gone digging simply because I still haven't finished Umineko and I've attempted to avoid spoilers for so long, it's just something the R07 thread in Multimedia was bringing up here and there. And given there's a troon following...

I think there's an overlap between the WTC and Danganronpa fanbases due to similar themes. Maybe if Danganronpa gets mentioned more, it would be nice to get some confirmation of any other horror-murder-mystery VNs getting popular on Tumblr despite "problematic" elements. Corpse Party oddly enough didn't get a Tumblr following despite being very similar, might be because it didn't have mental illness at the forefront or whatnot.

You talked about undertale and danganronpa but forgot to mention that tumblr shipped komaeda x sans for years until they started shipping sans with reigen from Mob Psycho 100 instead… because of some poll or something, I don’t remember…

Crossover ships are so widespread and so popular on Tumblr that it's legitimately hard to keep up with all of them.

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

You talked about undertale and danganronpa but forgot to mention that tumblr shipped komaeda x sans for years until they started shipping sans with reigen from Mob Psycho 100 instead… because of some poll or something, I don’t remember…

random=funny humor was so bad n the 2010s oh my god

That tumblr PHD needs more elbow grease

I did mention Sans winning the Tumblr sexyman poll (which is why he was shipped with Reigen, the runner-up from the poll), but I almost mentioned "Fingers in His Ass."

See, in early 2016, Triple-Q's YouTube account got nuked for copyright issues (which would not be the last time). Because this was when Triple-Q's popularity was at its peak, the hashtag, "#FreeTriple-Q", started trending online. On Triple-Q's end, he made the "Love Determination" series of mashups, one of which being the Undyne one I mentioned.

Fellow SoundClown BotanicSage simply uploaded a voiceclip to SoundCloud of him singing a tune about how Kanye West "likes fingers in his ass", as the reason Triple-Q's account was terminated was because of a Kanye West song. The song itself was sung to the tune of Asgore's theme.

https://soundcloud.com/botanicsage/sounds-from-sunday-morning

Due to the popularity of the voice clip, BotanicSage would later do a full mashup of the voiceclip with the original song, entitled "ASSGORE (Fingerfückung)" And so, yet another "funny maymay" was born in the Undertale/Tumblr-adjacent community.

https://soundcloud.com/botanicsage/assgore

In fact, the popularity of this meme managed to break outside and even reach people who didn't play the game at the time.

As for the Komaeda shipping, my guess is that just came as a byproduct of him already being a popular character on Tumblr, which was already thanks to Danganronpa's explosion in popularity due to the SA Let's Play, which I already briefly talked about. Danganronpa experienced a second explosion in popularity on Twitter in 2018, but that's a story for another day.

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

I can't believe I missed this getting posted lol it was an unexpected birthday gift I totally ignored.

Oh, then happy late birthday, Kari!

Hell, I was actually under the impression Homestuck was some weird Comodore 64-esque webcomic and not an actual point-and-click MS Paint game originally. I probably could've played it way back when had I known about it for that alone, though none of my friend circles at school actually talked about it. Lord knows what that would've entailed.

That's the thing, Homestuck wasn't a point-and-click game. It was a webcomic first, and then they had animations and brief interactive games made in Flash. No one I knew IRL knew about it either. Heck, barely anyone I knew online knew about it back in the day except for one person I ran into on a Minecraft server. And not even half a decade later, I went to check up on her old DeviantArt, and she had trooned out.

If Tumblr was deep into it, it typically wasn't a good sign. Also the skeleton-fuckers than spawned from it made me go "wtfffff" (seriously, why wasn't that mentioned?).

My main focus with Case III was documenting the people who worked on Undertale, the culture that fostered it, and the culture it fostered. That, and again, this thing was taking forever. There's definitely a thread or two on the Undertale fanbase that's documented plenty of this stuff. At least I was able to briefly mentioned "Ask Humantale" as an example. Researching all the AUs probably would've delayed this thing by a month or two.

 

[WelperHelper99]

That's the thing, Homestuck wasn't a point-and-click game. It was a webcomic first, and then they had animations and brief interactive games made in Flash.

>Flash
I know it's not technically dead, there are workarounds to make it work even after Adobe dumpstered it... but man, that was a different time. A good time. Your computer could be a shitbox that your dad just had for work, but a flash game would run on it. I guess it makes sense that Homestuck got some small games in Flash. Easy way to build a game as a fan.

 

[The_Gam3]

random=funny humor was so bad n the 2010s oh my god

IDK, I think it's one of the few things from that era that's still hilarious, especially now. The song I mean.

What I'm getting is that Toby is a high tier marketer that knew exactly what the Tumblr cringe hoards wanted and how to execute it.

This is probably why Undertale remains relatively obscure despite being as massive as it was. It really only appeals to certain kinds of people. Personally I loved Undertale when I first found it at 14. 10 years later, the humor is a big turn off and the story itself if overly saccharine. Despite that tho, I will play Deltarune once it is finished.

 

[1994 Honda Civic]

I'd say the closest thing undertale innovated in outside of packing tumblr ideas into an easily digestible package for the masses while pandering to them would be mashing shmup elements with rpg mechanics. The whole not having to fight monsters was sorta done before with SMT's negotiation system which even had more meat on it's bones in the early snes days then the simple ACT system, illustrated by how none of the bosses can be mercy'd with it.

Instead the main focus and wow factor is directed towards the bullet dodging mechanics. I think this is best illustraited when Papyrus does the blue attack and turns the fight into a platformer of sorts. It adds character while also contributing to the whole deconstruction feel while also shaking things up without going into typcial rpg mechanics. Though, this sort of idea of enemy attacks having personality and being dodgeable is still done better in the Mario and Luigi rpgs with how you can actually see movements, while not having to cut down on shmup difficulty either.

The fact that Undertale's combat system is structured the way it is should tell anyone what this is inspired by. I will give it credit for trying to switch it up a little with these colored SOULs having their own gimmick tied to one another as it was a decent way to spice the gameplay. Over making his own negotiation system similar to Megaten, this was a good enough compromise to keep things simple for accessibility.

Photoshop Flowey's boss fight was also not even that difficult when the initial fear of getting hit is taken away from you. It basically is a shmup boss battle with needing to focus on weaving around the projectiles just with not as much insane patterns to dodge. It takes everything that a shmup would and dials it back by a ton. All of this, Nintendo and other devs definitely gave Fox the inspiration to make his ultimate loosely inspired Earthbound fanfiction a top seller.

Speaking of, an influnce for Tobby is clearly Zun and Touhou. Given how he's collabed with the man already it should be very much obvious with the inspiration. What is more interesting though is how it likely influcenced his obsession over lesbians. Due to it's cast utterly dominated by girls, it was one of the main influences on the whole Yuri scene in the Doujin space which is where a lot of nerds would've started getting off to that shit.

I should also add some things for context. Toby discovered the series at a middle school age, so he would be close to a true OG back when the series only had 9 games in its arsenal. The devotion for Touhou runs deep with him, so deep that he played Necrofantasia, one of the songs in the 7th entry, on piano in his church's summer camp once.

Couple that with Battle Against a True Hero having the hallmarks of a lost Touhou boss track, it doesn't really surprise me one bit that he admires ZUN a ton.

Spoiler: Source of inspiration

Sourced and translated from this interview:

I also wouldn't be at all shocked that the doujin scene for the franchise is pretty much the source for his fascination with lesbians. It always was a core component within the scene developing as much as it did. I guess he could also be considered as Patient Zero with Tumblr for the ills of shipping culture getting very preachy and obnoxious in its worst times back in the 2010s.

At the very least, Toby did keep his more progressive side somewhat subtle over the years, in spite of the wide influence it had in today's culture. But the fact still remains that he has done a lot to get to where he is now and while it is commendable, it sure came with its own drawbacks.

 

[pork and beans]

especially now. The song I mean.

LOL absolutely… if you replace fingers in his ass with… oh god, Kanye… I can’t even type it

 

[Spangled Drongo]

Anyhoo I literally never heard of half of those games mentioned in the write-up, which probably goes to show that I did not lurk those particular circles (and likely for good reason). I don't even know if a friend, of whom we used to often talk about stuff going on in the video game scene and DeviantArt at that time, even knows of all of those titles. Hell, I was actually under the impression Homestuck was some weird Comodore 64-esque webcomic and not an actual point-and-click MS Paint game originally. I probably could've played it way back when had I known about it for that alone, though none of my friend circles at school actually talked about it. Lord knows what that would've entailed.

Undertale honestly doesn't sound like a bad game on the surface, and I'm totally okay that MS Paint was used for the sprite work even as meta-humor or whatnot, I just never played it because one: I didn't get myself a proper PC set-up until long after its popularity waned, and two: Tumblr turned me off from it because it was everywhere I looked. If Tumblr was deep into it, it typically wasn't a good sign. Also the skeleton-fuckers than spawned from it made me go "wtfffff" (seriously, why wasn't that mentioned?). Now my aforementioned friend did play it and had some fond words to say about it, though I dunno what he thinks of it these days.

I was exposed to Homestuck when my best friend at the time got extremely into it but I didn't see the appeal whatsoever, I don't even know what happens in it apart from kids accidentally destroying the world with a video game and then the extremely popular grey troll people with candy corn horns who talk in different forms of leet-speak are introduced like halfway through, but the general vibe of it trying way too hard to be quirky and  lolsorandom turned me right off as a teenager who was mainly into popular anime and your bog standard sword-and-sorcery RPGs and novels and didn't care for anything in that "subversive" style. I could also never figure out if it was supposed to be a comic or game, because I heard people describing it as both, or as a comic with game elements and vice versa.

Then another friend got into Undertale when that was new, same deal there, it reeked of Tumblr culture and trying way too hard to be edgy and quirky while simultaneously lacking any humour that could be perceived as even slightly offensive to anyone so I didn't go near it and still haven't played to this day.

Statements like "you just hate it because it's popular, well guess what, it's popular because it's good and you might like it if you actually check it out!" were thrown about everywhere in those big fandoms back in the day, and come to think of it, that sort of comment is not something I've heard much of lately, you're far more likely to be called whatever-ist/phobic if you don't like something popular that conforms to current year sensibilities, I've heard a lot of people who don't listen to Taylor Swift because her music just isn't their thing for instance get called sexist. Either way there have always been aggressive fans of the latest trendy bit of media who won't take "it's just not my style" as an answer.

Also in terms of Tumblr hating anime, there was still a sizeable circle on Tumblr dedicated to anime and not just the genderspecial/"feminist approved" (think Sailor Moon and Kill la Kill) kind, though there was definitely overlap since you could've easily fallen down a progressive rabbithole depending on the blog you clicked on. I hear the When They Cry franchise got big on Tumblr when Umineko was finishing up because the creator apparently started to pander to them/give in to some retarded Tumblr theories for the answer arcs. I haven't gone digging simply because I still haven't finished Umineko and I've attempted to avoid spoilers for so long, it's just something the R07 thread in Multimedia was bringing up here and there. And given there's a troon following...

Free! otherwise known as the "swimming anime" was a fairly big one too, naturally, because it prominently featured shirtless men and was pure fujoshi bait similar to Supernatural. Though heavens forbid you shipped one of the guys with a girl, and I remember a bit of a flame war starting too over whether or not the main character has autism because he's single mindedly focused on swimming and has some quirks when that's pretty much par for the course with anime protagonists. Then after Free! came Yuri on Ice, which I imagine was much the same thing but that was also around the time I outgrew Tumblr and weeb shit so I didn't get to see that fandom go wild.

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

Free! otherwise known as the "swimming anime" was a fairly big one too, naturally, because it prominently featured shirtless men and was pure fujoshi bait similar to Supernatural. Though heavens forbid you shipped one of the guys with a girl, and I remember a bit of a flame war starting too over whether or not the main character has autism because he's single mindedly focused on swimming and has some quirks when that's pretty much par for the course with anime protagonists. Then after Free! came Yuri on Ice, which I imagine was much the same thing but that was also around the time I outgrew Tumblr and weeb shit so I didn't get to see that fandom go wild.

Free! was very popular on Tumblr back when it first aired. Heck, I even remember someone I went to High School with had an Iwatobi Swim Club backpack. The topic is of interest to me, as back in 2013, Triple-Q used to meme on the fact that Free! was so popular. When Studio Trigger announced their first major TV Anime, Triple-Q even expressed excitement that "Trigger will save us from the Swim bros!"

https://triple-q.tumblr.com/post/55071771855/set-between-sonic-colors-and-sonic-lost-world

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Free! was very popular on Tumblr back when it first aired. Heck, I even remember someone I went to High School with had an Iwatobi Swim Club backpack.

The pretty boy fujobait helped for sure, however, KyoAni shows were always hyped up and popular due to high production value, so Tumblr of course was going to gravitate towards it.

Triple-Q's comments are pretty funny, though.

 

[Spangled Drongo]

Speaking of anime fandoms on Tumblr during its peak, wasn't Osomatsu-san also a magnet for weird fujoshis with an incest fetish at one point? I haven't watched it but it did come up a fair bit when I was scrolling through the SJW art thread, plenty of fan art depicting the boys with zipper tit scars and pride flags. Seems a weird choice to me because it's based on a really old series and still uses that retro art style that doesn't lend itself as easily to sexualisation as the styles other popular anime/manga amongst that crowd are drawn in and at a glance it doesn’t seem the sort of show to have sexy fanservice moments at all, but then again I've learned not to underestimate a Tumblrina's capacity to turn anything into a Sexyman (TM). Case in point: the skeletons from Undertale.

 

[jONALD]

This whole thread was a massive walk down memory lane for me. From Tumblr back around 2009 just for memes and funny images, then homestuck, then horrors beyond comprehension and eventually witnessing the great online liberal containment breach. The feminist ideals before gamergate wasn't bad and for a time I even considered myself one until I saw a video about S.C.U.M. which made me feel deeply uncomfortable in 10th grade. Cool story babe... Now make me a sandwich! actually don't, men make a superior sandwich
I am STILL baffled how it so many people went into a downward spiral when Trump first took office. I just don't get how it turned seemingly evenminded people into raging lunatics willing to cut ties both online and offline that I would have respected. I deeply wish it could all be undone or are at least willing to forgive and forget so I could all let it be water under the bridge and forgotten about. To me it all seemed to happen out of the blue with no rhyme or reason to my then normie mind.

 

[Newcomer 42]

To me it all seemed to happen out of the blue with no rhyme or reason to my then normie mind.

Ditto, and I'm not an American, so it was even stranger to me when from 2016 forward, EVERY day or so there was a jab against DRUMPF, non-stop, no matter the scenario, which quickly became annoying. Musk changed from being beloved by the press to loathed as well, and it got worse from there.
IMO Minecraft should also be considered a factor of the fall of the Internet, as the autism it caused is irreparable and the premise was stolen from another game (plus they kicked out the game's creator for not being woke enough, top kek). The birth of REEtardera was also another symptom of the net's putrefaction.

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

IMO Minecraft should also be considered a factor of the fall of the Internet, as the autism it caused is irreparable and the premise was stolen from another game (plus they kicked out the game's creator for not being woke enough, top kek). The birth of REEtardera was also another symptom of the net's putrefaction.

Minecraft's history pre-2011 is something I feel I need to look into at some point, as Notch was both a Something Awful goon, and advertised the game on /v/. As for ResetEra, it ultimately just continued what NeoGAF started after that site imploded. Things like the internet's obsession with the industry, industry politics, sales numbers, business decisions, etc. all started on there. I would recommend watching MagicMush's video where he briefly talks about GAF to get yourself up to speed.