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The thing about the wild replies to posts that go around talking about fandom misogyny is that, at least for me, I did have to make an active choice to care about female characters.

There's less of them and they are often written with a lot less to work with and it's easier to focus on dude characters. But I had to look at myself and wonder why I was willing to read pages and pages of meta and fic and headcanons for Julian Bashir when I wasn't interested in the same for Jadzia Dax when they have a similar amount of screentime. Why I wasn't interested in Captain Janeway when she's the lead of her show. Yes, writers are often sexist, but the writers were ableist and homophobic and so on with a million male characters, but I was willing to put the work in to love them. At some point, the viewer/reader/listener's own sexism plays a part in their willingness to engage with a character.

So I had to actively choose to seek out those meta and fic and headcanons for female characters. And it is significantly harder to find than it is for male characters, because most of fandom hadn't questioned their own sexism. But what little of it there is out there is often just as high quality and interesting as the stuff I was already looking at, if not more so because there's the added dimension of fighting against the writers' misogyny, which often requires even more engagement and creativity.

It was, for me, a process that I had to continually work on to care about women characters as much as I did guy ones. But it got easier the more effort I put in. And now those posts about how no one cares about female characters are very relatable to me.

But the way people respond to those posts, it's always "I can't change the fact that the writers are sexist! It's an immutable fact that female characters are less interesting! You're attacking me personally over something that I can't change! And actually, you're the sexist for not realizing how terrible these female characters are and how you're victimizing me asking me to care about them!"

Besties, I promise it is something you can change. You just have to put the work in

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Source

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eloise/penelope a/b/o fic centering around the "we don't know how babies are made" thing

you can have that one for free

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"should we tell authors on ao3 when we have discord conversations about their fics" i don't speak for everyone here but if y'all ever find a group chat discussing my fics you can should must and WILL send me screenshots of the whole damn thing. inflate my ego. gimme

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If you're a writer you're supposed to write a lot of bullshit. It's part of the gig. You have to write a lot of absolute garbage in order to get to the good bits. Every once in a while you'll be like "Oh, I wish I hadn't wasted all that time writing bullshit," but that's dumb. That's exactly the same as an Olympic runner being like "Oh, I wish I hadn't wasted all that time running all those practice laps"

[fictionalurl]

If you're a writer you're supposed to write a lot of bullshit. It's part of the gig. You have to write a lot of absolute garbage in order to get to the good bits. Every once in a while you'll be like "Oh, I wish I hadn't wasted all that time writing bullshit," but that's dumb. That's exactly the same as an Olympic runner being like "Oh, I wish I hadn't wasted all that time running all those practice laps"

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...Why was my first and only thought that this was a @ponyregrets fic waiting to happen.

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oh god wait. I didn't make this up? these popped into my head a full year after I had apparently reblogged this and I was completely convinced it was an original thought.

(anyway, naturally, I did a thing with it. as you do. brb while I edit this into the author's note WHOOPS)

Okay there's no way someone hasn't done this by now, but my brain keeps trying to scan The Locked Tomb prayer to No Children and I just thought you should know that I have been plagued by this for. Months.

I pray the Tomb is shut forever / I hope the worst isn't over / I pray the rock is never rolled away / And I hope I never get sober.

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I hope the second, those disciplined fools give up on trying to save us I hope we come up with a failsafe plot to piss off the ghosts who'll enslave us

I hope our fences get mended even though I walked in on your noose and I hope we hang on past the last exit in some kind of unlikely truce

(I'd screamed) "I hope the castle I grew up inside someday burns down and I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away and I never come back to this town again

in my life" I hoped I'd lie fake my skill with a rapier and knife and I hoped you'd die I hoped we'd both die

-

you hoped I'd cut myself dueling the crown I hoped you'd bleed all day long pal says you don't want to watch the world burn and I desperately hope he's not wrong

you pray the tomb's shut forever I hope the worst isn't over you pray what's buried stays buried and I hope I never get sober

I just hope when you think of me years down the line you have at least one thing to say and I hope that the strength that I found to get out will bring me beside you again, one day

I should drown you I should drown you in salt you kowtow to my mercy (though your duty is still to the vault)

and I hope you die only if we both die

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夏休み

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just dawned on me that "reading every wikipedia article on the garments associated with the christian religion so that you can write a scene in which someone takes said garments off of someone else" applies to at least two fandoms I know. and that in both cases I am probably. so down for the resulting scene

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someone should like... do wedding rings made of wood. and ceremonially burn them as part of the service in some highly elaborate way, to make the message like... our relationship isn't made out of or represented by the objects we carry with us; it's made out of the memories we share together. those are things we can't misplace.

(both a great irl idea and a fun fanfic idea if one of the characters is incredibly forgetful/prone to losing things :D or if they're a surgeon or something. and in an epilogue scene the characters can be older and domestic, and one can say, "oh, honey, you forgot your wedding ring," and the other can momentarily freak out before laughing and letting their spouse slip nothing onto their ring finger and kiss their hand)

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If you're struggling to write sex, write food. if you're struggling to write food, write gore. if you're struggling to write gore, write sex. They're all variations on the same themes.

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You know what video game role reversal I'd like to see? Android-girl-on-a-space-station games. Like half of them are grim survival horror titles with stoic semi-amnesiac protagonists who suffer terrible tortures and uncover mind-blasting truths and probably go mad and die at the end, and the other half are big stupid action games with an absolute fucking meathead for a lead who overcomes every challenge with relentless cheerfulness, unflagging empathy, and the power of incredible violence – I want to see those characters trade places for a day. All right? I want to see a milieu like Signalis have to deal with a protagonist with the personality and skillset of Assault Android Cactus.

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If you didn't want to be assimilated into my found family then you should have killed me when you had the chance