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foli-vora · 5 months ago

Note

hi honey i hope you’re doing well

- in your post you mentioned reblogging, writing or drawing content that does not allow for racists or makes it impossible for them to engage with your blog.

i really want to do this, but i’m a little confused as to how to go about it. of course i am not expecting you to hold my hand and take me through baby steps - because that’s ridiculous for all the reasons others have mentioned etc. but i am worried that creating this kind of content would feel like performative activism coming from a white creator. i want to make genuine efforts and not performative ones. are there any websites or examples you feel are good? i don’t want to listen to a non-bipoc person’s opinion or suggestion on the matter.

again, sorry for asking this - it feels inappropriate- and if you do not want to explain, which i COMPLETELY understand, i will try find information elsewhere!

this has been in my inbox for a week, but when i went to give it an answer... it just kept growing and growing and so I created doc to share, bc it's like 25k words now and that's after i cut it down. Here's a link to the google doc that is navigable with the table of contents the same text is below the cut.

Thanks for sending this to me anon. I’m not a BIPOC creator, but this is not a question they need to answer for white people—so stick with me!

I know you were looking for links and suggestions on how to be an ally without being performative. I made a post last weekend with a list of links, many that lead to collections of resource lists for books, videos, podcasts, films, journal articles, and more. I haven’t reviewed every single item on every list, but I’d bet none of them specifically address racialized tropes, reader inserts, and responsibility in the ppcu fandom. So I created this. I'd suggest reading in the google doc for the sake of being able to use the table of contents, but below the cut is everything that is within the doc. These are the major headings:

-> to white folks in the pedro pascal tumblr fanfic community -> understanding whiteness in fanfic (default whiteness) -> racial ambiguity and representation -> fetishization, tropes, and racialized desire (what they are and writing without centering white supremacy) -> anti-blackness: the foundation -> systems of power, supremacy, and silence -> personal accountability and community responsibility -> tools for doing better (questions and challenges for writers and readers) -> sustainability & hope (ethical consumption & joy; it's not that hard!) -> practical tools (a simplified checklist) -> glossary of terms and concepts used throughout -> links to learn more

This is about the challenges I see in fandom, why they matter, how to do better as writers and readers, a few examples from my own work (and some friends’), questions for self-reflection, and a message on how to keep doing the work. Because even if there’s a lot to learn here about what’s happening and why it matters—doing better is not hard. You don’t need a PhD in critical race theory to be more than a performative ally.

But who am I to say all this with any kind of authority if I’m white?

Great question. Think critically about your sources.

Outside of fandom, my career is in social work and advocacy. I fight against systemic injustice inside the institutions that uphold it daily. I’m not afraid to talk about race or the impact of power, privilege, and oppression. (I'm not afraid to learn or take feedback either, but I'm educated and qualified to speak on these topics and I know how to do research.)

What this is:

A resource for white fanfic writers and readers who want to write and read about characters of color without relying on racialized tropes

A call to reflect on how whiteness shapes desire, fantasy, and power in fandom

A tool for unlearning harmful patterns, not a purity test

What this isn’t:

It’s not a list of rules for how to write 'correctly'

It’s not anti-kink or anti-darkfic

It’s not written for guilt or performance—it’s for accountability (just like all of my fics; nobody asked for this yet here i am)

TL;DR:

Race and power are already present in your fic, even if you don’t name them

'Blank' readers are often default white-coded in ways that uphold harmful dynamics

Characters of color are often flattened into fetishized roles—protective, dangerous, stoic, fixable

Desire is shaped by systems—unlearning means asking where those desires come from

You can still write and read tropes and rough, messy, filthy fic—just consider how the reader and mc are written

I. To the white folks in the pedro pascal tumblr fanfic community

A note on learning from white people

You can learn from white people, but more importantly, you can (and should) learn from the work that Black, Indigenous, and other scholars and activists of color have already published. Their work is out there, and it’s not your mutuals’ job to repackage it for fandom.

Expecting education to come from your timeline or group chat, especially from BIPOC mutuals, just shifts the burden of emotional labor onto the very people most harmed by racism. Instead, seek out existing resources, pay attention to who you’re learning from, and take responsibility for your own unlearning.

Why is this an issue? Why should white people care?

People of color, especially Black and brown women, don’t enter fandom as blank slates. They show up already carrying the weight of systemic racism. Not just the obvious stuff—slurs, threats, open hatred—but the daily grind of microaggressions. Being interrupted. Being dismissed. Being treated as intimidating for simply existing. They’re already doing emotional calculus all day: How do I say this without being labeled angry? How do I exist without making white people uncomfortable?

So when they come to fandom to write, to read, and to they’re not starting fresh. They’re already tired. And what they find here is more of the same.

They scroll past fics where brown men are uncontrollable or unpredictable until they’re tamed by a soft, white-coded reader. They see women of color erased from canon. They read tags like ‘comfort’ or ‘fluff’ only to find stories where the only people who get to be healed or loved are white. They open inboxes full of asks demanding kindness or silence—or worse, demanding nothing at all before sending racist abuse.

That’s what covert racism looks like in fandom. It’s not slurs—it’s patterns. It’s who gets to be soft. Who gets to be complicated. Who gets erased so the reader can feel wanted.

And through all of it, fans of color are still creating. Still teaching. Still trying to make a space where they can rest. They’re often forced to educate gently, package critique as suggestion, and protect white feelings in order to be heard. They’re expected to be resilient, not because they want to be, but because they have no other choice.

So when racist trolls show up, slinging slurs and trying to drive them out, that harm doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It lands on people who are already carrying the weight of your silence.

That’s why this work matters. If we as white writers start taking responsibility for the quiet harm—the erasures, the tropes, the centering of ourselves—we can make fandom safer before the big harm hits. We can make space that doesn’t rely on BIPOC fans always doing the emotional labor to be tolerated. And we can stop expecting resilience from people who deserve rest.

Is this really an issue?

Are white-coded reader-inserts popular in Pedro character fanfic? Are microaggressions blatant in fics and comments and tags? Are characters fetishized?

Yes.

Why should white people care this much about fanfic?

Let’s say it out loud.

"It’s just fanfic" is a lie white people get to tell. White people are taught to see themselves as neutral. So when they write, they think: it’s just smut. I’m not trying to make a statement.

But fanfic is a statement. It says who gets to be wanted. Who gets to be safe. Who gets to be forgiven. Who gets to be fucked—and how.

If your story defaults to white softness = worthy and brown dominance = dangerous but sexy, you’re not just writing porn. You’re echoing and reinforcing what’s desirable—and what’s disposable.

White people should care because they are the least likely to see the systems they’ve internalized. If you don’t interrogate them, you reinforce them.

This document was written by a white person for other white people who write and consume fanfiction in the Pedro Pascal character fandom. It exists because racism—both overt and subtle—shows up everywhere in fandom.

This is written through the lens of female reader x male character fics. That’s the space I’m in (mostly), and the dynamic I see doing the most harm. This doesn’t cover every other kind of fic—queer pairings, trans and nonbinary readers, poly dynamics—not because those don’t matter, but because I’m staying focused on the place where I see the clearest patterns and the most unchecked repetition.

It’s for both writers and readers. Because the problem isn’t just what gets written—it’s what gets reblogged and praised. If you’re white and in this fandom, your engagement shapes the culture too.

This isn’t a callout or a purity test. It’s a place to start asking better questions about how white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and colonial power shape the way we write.

Even when we’re just here for smut. Especially when we’re just here for smut (me), because smut is never neutral.

Neither is softness. Neither is love.

We write what we’ve been taught to desire. And if you’re white, what you’ve been taught is shaped by centuries of colonial violence, racial coding, and media that sells whiteness as safe and brownness as edgy.

For fans of color, especially Black and brown readers, fandom isn’t an escape. It’s a mirror. It reflects what’s always been true: that whiteness is the default. That love is conditional. That softness only belongs to certain people. That even in fantasy, they are not the ones being wanted.

The fandom is saturated with these dynamics. When characters like Joel, Javi, Frankie, and others are written over and over as stoic, broken, rough-but-secretly-soft brown men who fall for delicate, unnamed, white-coded readers… something’s happening. And it’s not just trope preference. It’s repetition. It’s hierarchy. It’s eroticized racial power.

And because Pedro plays so many roles that white fans read as both sexy and safe, this fandom draws a lot of white people who genuinely want to do better—but who haven’t had to look too closely at how their fantasies are still shaped by scripts they didn’t invent, but are definitely repeating.

If you’re white, this is not to make you feel guilty but to ask you to learn, so that the next time you write softness, or filth, or rage, or romance, you can ask: Who is centered here? Who is erased? Who is allowed to be a person? And who’s just a vessel for someone else’s pleasure or pain?

That includes white fans who are queer, disabled, survivors, or otherwise marginalized. None of that makes us immune from reproducing white supremacy. This asks you to hold all your identities—and still take responsibility for the power whiteness gives you.

If you feel uncomfortable, that’s okay. Discomfort isn’t harm.

No one’s asking you to stop having fun. But if the fun always comes at the expense of others, it’s time to rethink who the story is really protecting.

It’s a lot to look at upfront, but if you stick with me—it’s not that hard or scary to do better once you know what to do, what you’re looking for, and what you’ve been seeing.

Language and labels; Latino and Daddy

When I use the word Latino, I’m referring to the actor’s publicly shared identity and the characters he plays who are framed (implicitly or explicitly) as Latino men. When I say brown, I’m talking about the broader racialization that happens in both media and fandom spaces—how fans treat his characters as racially and sexually othered, even when they claim “race doesn’t matter” in fic. That flattening—using “brown” as shorthand for dominance, risk, or sex appeal—erases the complexity of ethnic, national, and cultural identities. It lets white fans generalize their attraction while avoiding accountability for how racialized desire functions.

No matter how much you admire him, or how much respect you think you’re showing, if your work only reflects what makes you feel sexy and powerful, then you’re not creating fanfiction. You’re reenacting supremacy.

Note: When I reference Joel Miller here I’m specifically talking about the version played by Pedro Pascal in the HBO show—not the video game character. This isn’t a critique of game!Joel fanfic or how people intentionally write that character, since the racial and cultural dynamics I’m discussing are directly tied to Pedro’s casting and how his portrayal is racialized in fandom.

The “Daddy” label was fueled by pop culture, by media outlets, by fans—until it snowballed into a meme that’s impossible to escape. Interviews, headlines, red carpet clips: all of it wrapped him in this tidy little fantasy. It sounds harmless, even affectionate. But what it really does is flatten him. It takes a full human being—complex, politically outspoken, thoughtful—and reduces him to a digestible image of safe, sexy dominance.

That’s the thing about the “Daddy” trope. It’s a white-coded fantasy. It packages power in a way that’s easy to consume: rugged but tender, older but not threatening, dominant but only in ways that affirm you. It dulls the edges. It lets white audiences eroticize masculinity without having to reckon with where that desire comes from, or who is being projected onto. The trope sells the illusion of control. And when it’s mapped onto a brown actor, it becomes a way to fetishize without confronting race at all.

This narrative doesn’t stay on the red carpet. It spills directly into fandom. The characters get flattened the same way he does—collapsed into tropes instead of being written as people.

You start to see the same fantasy on repeat: the stoic, rough-edged brown man who wants you, fucks you, softens just for you—but who rarely gets context or depth beyond that. You get Joel as “Daddy” without history. Javier as “Latin lover” without culture. Frankie as “shy but filthy” without substance. It’s not character work; it’s projection. And it often centers white fragility paired with brown dominance, reinforcing a racialized hierarchy that feels familiar, even if it’s not intentional.

With Javi especially, it gets even more explicit. He says something ‘sexy’ in Spanish, he knows how to fuck and that’s the whole picture. But it’s not about him—it’s about the seduction of brownness without the labor of writing someone who has an actual relationship to language, identity, culture, or politics.

If you’re not grounding your portrayal in who the character is—if you’re stripping out everything except what turns you on—then you’re not writing a whole person. You’re dressing a stereotype up in the outfit that makes your fantasy feel hotter.

And if your love for Pedro’s characters doesn’t include any curiosity about the cultures they come from—or any interrogation of how whiteness has shaped your desire for brown men who are “safe” to want—then it’s not love. It’s consumption.

Fanfic isn’t an escape—it’s a mirror shaped by culture

Fanfic isn’t a break from the world—it’s a mirror.

“I write to escape. I don’t want to think about politics.” But your escape is already shaped by politics. The stories that feel good, that feel safe, that feel sexy—those are shaped by what you’ve learned about power, safety, and desirability. Who you want to be in the fantasy, who you want to be protected by, who you want to control or be controlled by—none of that is neutral. It’s learned.

That doesn’t mean your fantasy is “bad” or that you’re a bad person for having it. It means that your imagination isn’t separate from the systems you live in.

Your brain has been steeped in media, stories, and cultural narratives that tell you what kinds of people are soft, what kinds are strong, what kinds are violent, and what kinds are worthy of love. So even when you think you’re writing apolitical smut or harmless fluff, you’re still drawing from a well of beliefs that have political roots.

Escaping into fanfic doesn’t mean you’ve left the world behind—it means you’re bringing the world in with you, whether you realize it or not. So the goal isn’t to strip the fantasy away—it’s to understand it. To be honest about what it’s reflecting back. And then decide what you want to do with that.

‘But I write for myself’

“I write for myself” or “this isn’t for you”? That’s a go-to defense when folks don’t want to think about harm. “This fic is for me.” “I’m not writing for an audience.” “Let people enjoy things.” You can write for yourself. Nobody’s saying you can’t.

But when you hit post, you’re publishing. You’re putting something into a public space, one that other people exist in—including the ones harmed by the structures your fic might be echoing.

Nobody’s policing what turns you on in private. But when you post it in public, it don’t exist in a vacuum. If your fantasy reinforces white supremacy, fetishizes brown men, or erases marginalized readers—that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to write it. But it does mean people are allowed to name the harm.

This is not about making you feel bad for your kinks or sexual shame.

The issue isn’t the kink—it’s the underlying story that makes the kink work.

When those dynamics only feel hot because whiteness is framed as innocence and brownness is framed as danger, that’s a racialized power structure dressed up as erotic truth.

You can still write dark, filthy, violent smut. You can write possessiveness, dubcon, obsession, power play—all of it. You don’t have to be soft or sanitized. But you do have to ask yourself: who holds the power? Who gets to be human? Who gets flattened into a trope?

Anti-racist kink isn’t sanitized. It’s not watered down or neutered. It’s just aware. And because of that, it’s often hotter—because it’s more real.

Propaganda is the reason you don’t see it; you contribute to it by writing more

The reason this is hard to talk about—the reason white people deflect, collapse, spiral, and resist accountability—isn’t just social awkwardness.

It’s propaganda. It’s the stories you were raised on. The systems you were told were fair. The versions of yourself that the media keeps handing back to you, over and over, like a mirror that says: you are good. you are normal. you are the center.

And propaganda doesn’t just come from governments or textbooks. It comes from Disney movies. From Tumblr posts. From romantic comedies. From fanfics where the brown man ruins you and the white reader cries pretty and gets protected. It comes from “girlboss” feminism that teaches white women to demand softness, but never asks what it costs. It comes from stories that call themselves empowering—but only empower people who were already allowed to feel safe.

Propaganda tells you that racism is a slur, not a system. That your feelings matter more than someone else’s survival. That if you didn’t mean harm, it couldn’t have happened.

And it’s not accidental.

This is exactly how the system was designed: to protect white comfort. To shield white innocence. To keep white women in the role of victim, even when they’re causing harm. To keep white men in power by making sure no one else is allowed to be angry. To flatten race into feelings, and power into politeness.

Who benefits from that?

Rich white men, first and always.

The institutions built to keep them there.

Every system—school, media, policing, publishing, Hollywood—that says white is the default and everything else is deviation.

The corporations that profit from performative “representation” while silencing real critique.

The conservative think tanks pushing “anti-woke” panic into classrooms and fandom alike.

The white women who don’t want to lose the pedestal patriarchy gave them.

This is why the echo chambers exist and why fandom becomes hostile to critique. Why any challenge to softness or purity is framed as cruelty.

If the pushback you’re feeling feels too intense, ask yourself: How hard must the system be working to protect itself?

Imagine who built it. Imagine what they’re afraid you might see—if you stop looking for a mirror, and start looking at the foundation.

And here’s the part white fans often don’t want to hear: you contribute to this system whether you mean to or not.

You contribute by writing more of the same tropes. By praising and reblogging the fics that center white softness and brown dominance without question. By framing these dynamics as hot but never harmful. By ignoring critique and continuing to reward stories that feel familiar—not because they’re better, but because they flatter you.

That’s how propaganda works: it doesn’t just feed you stories—it teaches you to protect them. And the more you protect them, the more you protect the system they were built to serve.

Shaping private and vulnerable ideas of identity through fanfic and romance

This hits harder in fanfiction and romance than almost anywhere else because these are the genres that shape our most private, vulnerable ideas of who we are and who we want.

It’s where we build stories about who deserves softness. Who gets to be desired. Who gets to be protected. It’s where people go to imagine being loved—not just by a character, but by the world.

And these systems don’t operate separately. They uphold each other.

Patriarchy teaches that women should be soft and submissive.

Colonialism decides that white women are the softest—and most worth protecting.

Imperialism labels brown men as threatening or hypersexual.

Capitalism turns all of that into a product and sells it back to you—repackaged as romance, kink, or porn. And worse, it keeps these systems in place by profiting off the harm they cause.

So if the fics you read and write and share always center a fragile, innocent, white-coded reader being loved, protected, or sexually dominated by a brown man—it’s not just a kink or a trope. It’s a fantasy built on systems that have justified slavery, genocide, imperial conquest, and racial hierarchy.

That doesn’t mean you’re intentionally endorsing those things. But it does mean you’re repeating the narratives that uphold them—and that continue to oppress everyone who isn’t a white man.

What matters isn’t whether harm was intended. It’s the story your work tells on repeat—the assumptions it affirms, the power it normalizes.

Are you saying that only certain bodies are beautiful? That dominance only feels sexy when it comes from racialized men? That safety and worth only show up alongside masculinity or money? That women are rewarded for staying small, quiet, and compliant?

These questions aren’t meant to shame you. They’re meant to help you see what the fantasy is doing—and where it comes from.

ELI5 deconstruction and decolonization

Deconstruction isn’t about destroying what you love, it’s about asking you to take it apart, piece by piece, and look at what it’s made of. It’s like realizing your favorite recipe came from a cookbook written in a time when people thought margarine was healthy—you can still love the dish, but now you’ve got a chance to make it better.

Deconstruction just means looking at the ingredients: who gets centered, who gets erased, what ideas are baked in about power, race, gender, love, sex, safety. That’s it. You don’t need a degree in theory. You just need curiosity, humility, and a willingness to stop pretending fiction happens in a vacuum.

Decolonization sounds bigger and scarier than it is, but at its heart, it’s about letting go of stories—and storytelling habits—that were built to uphold empire, whiteness, and hierarchy. It’s not about never writing white characters again, or never indulging in fantasy.

It is about questioning why white softness is always the default. Why brown characters are so often written through white desire.

Why the same power dynamics show up again and again—and who that repetition is serving. Deconstruction and decolonization are tools, not punishments. They don’t kill creativity. They make it more honest.

II. Understanding whiteness in fanfic

Default whiteness in reader-inserts—even when skin tone isn’t mentioned

Default whiteness is what happens when you don’t name race, but your story still codes the reader through white traits.

The physical ones—like blushing, freckles, pale skin, eurocentric beauty standards. But there’s more than just appearance. It’s also in behavior. If her voice gets small when she’s overwhelmed. If her house is full of western media references. When her reactions are shaped by safety and assumed authority. Her interactions with other characters, friends, and family. Implied values and desires and goals.

This is the baseline in fic, and it’s not neutral..

When you build a reader character around purity-coded white femininity (quiet, soft, trembles under pressure) you’re not just writing a personality. You’re writing a framework. One that tells white readers they are the fantasy and tells readers of color they’re not even imagined.

It shows up constantly in reader-inserts with Pedro characters: the brown man is dominant, stoic, sexually experienced. The reader is shy, good, untouched, young.

This is where the danger lives: when the same setup shows up again and again, across characters, tags, and pairings—Latino men written as rough, sexually aggressive, emotionally restrained. White-coded readers who fold in silence. Stories where sex is a reward for fragility. Where power is taken, not asked for. Where the reader doesn’t speak, but always says yes.

This doesn’t mean you can’t write dominance, kink, or darkfic. It means when white-coded fragility gets paired with brown-coded aggression, you’re not just writing porn—you’re reinforcing scripts about who exists to be wanted, and who exists to do the wanting.

And when the reader has no voice, no thoughts, no conflict or tension or agency, she becomes a vessel. And vessels get projected onto.

Racists love blank readers.

They love stories where the woman is pure and the brown man is dangerous but sexy. They love power that doesn’t question itself. They love softness that stays small and white.

So block that. Give her a spine. Let her hesitate, spiral, want things she shouldn’t. Let her be horny and guilty. Let her push back. Let her say no. Let her say yes with enthusiasm. Give her a body that isn’t just something pale and bruisable. Give her language, culture, contradiction.

But I’m trying to write a blank slate reader-insert—not an original character!

Exactly. And being a human being is relatable. Having emotions is relatable. BIPOC readers are already adjusting to relate to white-coded reader characters. Your blank slates aren’t blank if they’re default white.

And give your Pedro characters depth. Let them ache. Let them grieve. Let them make mistakes and want to be better. Let them fuck up and ask for comfort. Let them be full people—not props for white desire. If they’re dominant, let it come from choice, not instinct.

Most of these characters already have complexities built into their canon. Use those traits. Don’t caricaturize them.

None of this makes the fic less hot. It makes it harder for projection to flatten it. And it makes space—real space—for readers of color to see themselves in it without having to disappear.

The more realistic, complex, and human the reader is, the less likely it is that conscious or unconscious racists will see themselves in the story.

Default softness, femininity as whiteness; writing white supremacy

And while we’re talking defaults, let’s talk about softness.

There’s a formula that shows up in many fics: the reader is delicate, and the love interest is hard, guarded, broken. The whole arc hinges on her gentleness healing him. But what that formula actually does is code vulnerability as whiteness, and dominance as something racialized. It reinforces the idea that care is something brown characters give, not receive. That emotional openness only belongs to white-coded readers.

Gentleness doesn’t have to mean submission. It can be emotional intelligence. It can be setting a boundary instead of folding. It can be mutual vulnerability instead of one person healing the other through silence and self-sacrifice.

Let brown characters show tenderness without it being treated like a plot twist.

That kind of emotional nuance shouldn’t be a prize or a personality. It should be part of a real, textured dynamic between people.

Power ties into this too. Ask yourself: in your fic, who gets to say no? Who gets to hesitate, to ask for space, to change their mind halfway through—and still get held, still get wanted, still get loved?

Often the white-coded readers are the only ones given that space. Brown and Black characters are expected to dominate, to prove their desire through control or persistence. White readers submit, and the story tells us that’s what makes them deserving.

And here’s the part most people won’t say out loud, but it lives underneath all of this:

'I’ve been in this fandom for years. I’ve read hundreds of fics. And I’ve never seen anyone who looks like me get loved the way your white readers do.'

That is not a side note. That’s the quiet wound. That’s what structural exclusion looks like when it’s wrapped in smut. Every time the reader is pink, tiny, innocent—or a 'blank slate' that only works if she’s white—another reader of color gets the message:

This isn’t just about white writers doing better. It’s about saying to every BIPOC reader who’s ever felt shut out of softness, safety, or sexiness: you deserve to be wanted too.

Default whiteness doesn’t have to be intentional to be harmful. It just needs to go unexamined. And it’s everywhere in fic. When you don’t name race but still lean on those cues, you’re not writing a neutral reader—you’re re-centering whiteness as the baseline for belonging.

Purity-coded whiteness isn’t just about who gets centered. It’s about who gets marked as worthy. It comes from a long, documented history of white Christian morality. Even if you’re not religious, you’ve absorbed it through media, language, and stories about what femininity and desire are 'supposed' to look like.

It’s the idea that:

Whiteness = innocence.

Femininity = submission.

Desirability = fragility.

Virginity = value.

That’s why, in so many fics, you see the same patterns over and over: the reader is 'too good.' The love interest wants to break her gently. Her softness is erotic. Her silence makes her special. Her purity makes her desirable.

And when the man is brown, that framing gets even more loaded.

This is racial coding. It’s gendered. It’s classed. And it shows up even when no one names it. Brown characters don’t get to be 'innocent.' Instead, they’re fiery or sexual by default. They get punished or sexualized—not protected. That’s part of a cultural pattern that goes back centuries.

Purity-coded whiteness has roots in Christian colonialism, where white settlers saw Indigenous, Black, and Brown people as sexually wild and in need of control. It’s shaped by Victorian femininity—the 'angel in the house' ideal, where white women were supposed to be obedient, sickly, and pure.

You see it in Western media: the princess pipeline, the best friend of color who never gets the love story, the romcom lead who needs saving. It’s embedded in porn tropes too, where white women are innocent, 'barely legal,', while brown and Black women are exotic, wild, or already experienced.

You see it everywhere:

Who gets cast as romantic leads.

Who’s allowed to have softness in trauma narratives.

Who gets protected—and who gets punished.

And you see it in fanfic.

A reader who’s helpless or fragile, who gets protected and worshipped by a brown man who’s framed as dominant and dangerous, is echoing a racial fantasy where white innocence is the prize, and brown desire is only safe when it’s tamed by submission.

How the Reader Is Coded as 'Soft,' 'Small,' or White—Without Saying It

Physical coding examples:

These phrases signal fragility, delicacy, or physical passivity:

• 'He lifts you easily' / 'he manhandles you' She’s moveable. He’s in control.

• 'You feel the bruises blooming already' Her skin is decorative and damageable.

• 'You gasp as he stretches you open' Pain is framed as innocence.

• 'He cradles you like you might break' Fragility is eroticized.

• 'You whimper' Used instead of 'you say,' especially in moments of submission or overwhelm.

• 'He towers over you' / 'his hand dwarfs yours' / 'you’re trembling under him' Positions the reader as physically smaller or more vulnerable, even if their size is never stated.

• 'You go limp' / 'your knees give out' / 'he holds you up' Signals surrender or physical passivity.

• 'Your skin flushes / bruises / marks easily' Emphasizes vulnerability, especially paired with language about being 'handled.'

• 'You curl into him' / 'you hide your face' / 'you bury yourself in his chest' Infantilizing physicality—reader becomes small and clinging, like a child or pet.

This mirrors white femininity tropes: pale, tender, helpless, worthy of saving and desiring because she’s easy to bruise and easy to control. They aren’t phrases that can never be used, just cues if there is no other personality or depth or texture to the reader or the mc.

Emotional coding examples:

• 'You wait for him' / 'you know he needs time' Her emotional labor is automatic.

• 'You’re not like other women in his life' She’s set apart—implicitly from canon women or women of color.

• 'You nod' / 'you stay quiet' / 'you don’t speak unless spoken to' Lack of voice becomes coded behavior, not a neutral choice.

• 'You’re too overwhelmed to think' / 'your mind goes blank' Eroticizes emotional helplessness.

• 'You don’t know why you trust him—you just do' Removes reader’s agency or judgment, replacing it with submissive intuition.

• 'You’ve never done this before' / 'you’ve never felt this way' Virginity and naivety as shorthand for value.

• 'He knows what you need better than you do' Power and control are ceded completely, often without the reader ever questioning it

Behavioral clues:

• 'You let him' Repeated phrasing like 'you let him do this / take you / touch you' shows consent—but framed as permissiveness, not active desire.

• 'You want to be good for him' / 'you don’t want to disappoint him' Internalizes submission as love.

These build a reader who is not just emotionally soft, but morally soft. She forgives. She absorbs. She exists to be chosen. Her lack of agency is the kink.

Even when not described racially, this kind of emotional coding often defaults to white femininity in a white reader’s fantasy. These aren’t phrases to ban from your fics, just to consider when reading and writing—are these defining the reader? Is she more than these reactions and behaviors?

‘Are your reader-inserts actually relatable to POC readers?’

There’s an assumption that if you don’t name race, you’ve written a neutral reader—but most of the time, that just means you’ve coded her white.

How does your reader behave? Does she get to want things? Does she get to be messy? Does she make bad choices, get called out, keep going anyway? If your reader is docile, sweet, and always reacts the way a man might want her to, she’s not being written as a person—she’s being optimized for a white, male gaze. That doesn’t just exclude POC readers. It tells them that if they don’t conform to that softness, that prettiness, they’re not part of the fantasy.

The real question to ask yourself is this: would a person of color feel like she’s allowed to exist in this fic? Could she read it and recognize her own kinds of longing—whether it’s angry, selfish, joyful, weird, or sad? Could she see herself wanting and being wanted?

If the answer is yes, then you’ve made space. If you want your reader-insert to feel relatable to a broader audience, pay attention to the everyday assumptions you’re making. Does the reader move through the world with automatic safety, authority, or ease? Can she dress casually in public without being judged? Argue with a cop or a teacher without fear? Are her cultural references limited to Taylor Swift, sitcoms, and Thanksgiving dinner?

A lot of white-coded fics lean on a specific version of comfort and normalcy that doesn’t reflect how many POC readers experience the world.

Think about details that could invite more people in. You don’t have to name race or replicate someone else’s culture, but you can expand the space you’re writing from.

Being more inclusive doesn’t mean excluding white readers—it means writing a world where more readers can see themselves without having to erase who they are.

'Relatability' is not a neutral concept—it’s political. When white writers say they don’t write racialized, fat, disabled, or queer readers because it 'wouldn’t feel relatable,' what they’re really saying is: 'I’ve only ever been asked to relate to people who look like me.'

You’ve been trained to see whiteness, thinness, able-bodiedness, and softness as the default. That’s not a personal failure—it’s a system doing what it was designed to do.

But you can unlearn it. And you should. Because fiction is where we practice desire, intimacy, and worth. So why not build a world where no one has to disappear in order to be loved? Relatability doesn’t come from making characters vague. It comes from giving them enough specificity that people with different lived experiences can still see themselves in the story.

A reader with a complicated relationship to her body might not need the character to look like her—but she might recognize the way desire makes her feel uncertain and hungry at the same time.

A reader who grew up bilingual might connect with someone who code-switches at work.

A disabled reader might find comfort in a character who worries about being a burden, even if her condition isn’t named.

When you write with care and complexity, you don’t have to name every identity to make people feel seen—you just have to stop writing like only one kind of person is watching.

Whiteness is global

Whiteness is global—colonialism made sure of that. It didn’t just steal land and resources; it exported whiteness as the ideal, embedding it in language, beauty standards, religion, media, and power structures across the globe.

Whether you’re white-adjacent in Latin America, light-skinned in South Asia, white-presenting in Europe, or part of a culture with different racial language, you’re still engaging with fandom spaces shaped by Western norms.

If you don’t often feel 'othered' in fandom, or if you benefit from proximity to whiteness online, this work includes you too. Not because you’re the problem—but because the structure is bigger than any one country. We all interact with global systems built to center whiteness. And we all have a role in pushing back.

‘But I’m marginalized too’ / ‘but I’m not racist’;

The trap of personal exception: white queerness, disability, trauma, and proximity to marginalization.

Being queer, trans, disabled, neurodivergent, fat, or a trauma survivor matters. Intersectionality is real. But having marginalization in one area doesn’t cancel out whiteness or proximity to it. White queerness, white neurodivergence, white trauma still benefit from systems that exclude Black and brown people.

Acknowledging that isn’t erasure—it’s solidarity.

You might not feel white if you’re Jewish, southern European, or from a culturally marginalized background. That history is real. But in fandom and most media spaces, being read as white still gives you safety, legibility, and access. This isn’t about guilt—it’s about noticing the structure you’re moving through.

Most reader-insert fic still assumes a thin, white-coded, cis, straight-ish woman—even when it hints at queerness. Trans, nonbinary, and especially BIPOC readers are rarely centered unless it’s through tokenization or kink.

Class gets erased from characters despite their exhaustion and survival are core to who they are. You don’t have to strip out struggle to write intimacy, it could make it deeper.

III. Racial Ambiguity, and Representation

Racial ambiguity, desire, and erasure

Pedro Pascal is a brown man. He’s Chilean, Latino, and light-skinned. Racially ambiguous in the eyes of Hollywood, which means he often moves through roles that allow white audiences to claim him as 'close enough' while still indulging in the thrill of otherness.

This ambiguity makes him especially easy to fetishize. When it’s convenient, his brownness is exotic, rugged, hot. When it’s not, it disappears.

He’s cast in roles that aren't always culturally grounded, soldiers, cowboys, bounty hunters, stoic dads. Characters who are brown in body but white in narrative. It’s erasure wrapped in accessibility rather than representation. It gives fans the fantasy of diversity without disrupting their sense of comfort, control, or familiarity.

In fanfic, this plays out through projection. Characters—regardless of setting, time period, or backstory—are often written the same way: dominant, emotionally shut-down, sexually experienced, obsessed with the reader. And that’s no accident. When fans flatten multiple, distinct characters into one seductive archetype, it’s not about who those characters are—it’s about how Pedro looks, sounds, and feels to them.

That pattern is shaped by racial dynamics, even if those dynamics go unnamed.

Desire becomes racialized when the appeal is tied to his brownness only when it serves the fantasy—and erased when it complicates it.

Latinidad isn’t a race

Latinidad isn’t a race—it’s a cultural and ethnic identity that exists across the full spectrum of racial experience, including Black, Indigenous, Asian, and white Latines. But in U.S. media, Latinidad is often flattened into a single image: light-skinned, white-adjacent, and aesthetically 'spicy' without being culturally specific.

That’s why light-skinned Latine actors, like Pedro Pascal, are frequently cast to signal 'diversity'—they visually suggest brownness without challenging whiteness. It’s a version of representation that doesn’t disrupt the dominant power structure. These actors are celebrated for being 'ethnic' enough to stand out, but still safe enough to center in white fantasies. It’s inclusion designed for comfort, not complexity.

Racial ambiguity isn’t the same as representation—it’s a strategy. Media often casts light-skinned or ethnically ambiguous actors of color to signal diversity without disrupting the comfort of white audiences.

He’s visibly not white, which lets studios check the inclusion box, but his characters don’t all have cultural specificity, heritage, or language that grounds them in a real identity. This creates the illusion of representation while avoiding the messiness of race, history, or systemic context. On the surface it seems like progress, but when interrogated critically it’s marketability (capitalism strikes again).

HBO racialized the role without engaging race

Pedro Pascal’s casting as Joel in The Last of Us was a deliberate racial shift from the video game’s original white character—but HBO never engages with that change. The show racializes Joel visually, casting a brown man with a Black daughter and a Latino brother, yet avoids any meaningful exploration of what it means for this family to exist in a post-apocalyptic America as people of color.

There’s no cultural context, no acknowledgment of race, no tension rooted in identity—just vibes. It’s a missed opportunity: the show uses Pedro’s brownness to deepen Joel’s emotional weight, but doesn’t ask how that brownness matters beyond the surface.

You can be specific or intentional

When you’re writing Joel Miller as played by Pedro Pascal, you’re writing a brown Joel—even if the show refuses to engage with that. HBO gave us the visual but not the context, the casting but not the culture.

That means fanfic has the opportunity to do better.

You’re not bound by network politics or marketability. You don’t have to avoid race to keep an audience comfortable. You can be specific. You can give Joel cultural ties, community, language, heritage.

You can imagine how being brown shaped the way he parents, the way he grieves, the way he survives.

Fanfiction doesn’t have to flatten characters the way canon does. It can fill in what was left blank—and do it with care.

IV. Fetishization, tropes, and racialized desire

Fetishizing the actor before the character

If every character he plays ends up acting the same (domineering, sexually skilled, emotionally shut down but obsessed with you) you’re not writing the character. You’re writing a projection. And that projection is shaped by race, whether you realize it or not.

Pedro is a brown man. He’s light-skinned, yes. Sometimes white-passing. But he’s not white. So when white fans start thirsting over him, calling him 'daddy,' making jokes about getting 'ruined,' it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You might think it’s harmless, even complimentary. But when the obsession starts with how he looks, how he talks, how he moves, and not who he’s playing—it becomes racialized consumption.

You’re not just saying 'this guy is hot.' You’re saying 'this brown man makes me feel something dangerous and safe at the same time and I want to bottle that feeling.'

Props for white desire and growth and tropes

Characters of color aren’t props for white desire.

Sometimes white writers think that if they give a brown character depth—pain, a tragic backstory, visible emotion—they’ve done the work. But depth without agency is just another kind of tool.

Your character might cry or rage or carry grief—but if their only function is to make the reader feel something, they’re still a prop.

What might seem like tenderness to a white author is often projection. Desire shaped by whiteness. Characters flattened into archetypes: dangerous but safe, stoic but obsessed, soft only for you. Emotionally repressed, a dominant lover, rough but respectful.

The kind of brown man a white reader can handle. The kind who’ll ruin you, but never betray you. The kind who only softens if you earn it.

The 'rough hands but gentle' version of the same trope. The brutal protector. The emotionally neglected provider. The man who isn’t allowed to rest unless the reader gives him softness.

These characters are rooted in old fantasies: the Latin lover, the stoic brown soldier, the tragic-but-loyal protector.

You might think you’re writing something new, but if the brown man is only there to catalyze the reader’s emotional transformation, you’re not deconstructing the trope. If the reader is the only one who gets an interior life, you’re writing extraction.

This gets even messier when the reader character is white-coded, or blank. White writers often use reader-inserts to process emotional themes: What does it mean to be wanted? To be ruined? To be cared for after sex? To be handled by someone bigger, rougher, older, darker?

Those questions can lead to powerful fic. But if you never ask why those dynamics feel safe or desirable to you, you’ll default to the cultural scripts that shaped you. And those scripts are racialized.

Racialized coding of dominance and danger:

These descriptions don’t say 'Latino' or 'dangerous,' but they build that archetype through tone, silence, control, and implied violence.

• 'He doesn’t say much' / 'you can’t read him' His silence becomes mysterious. His interiority is erased and replaced with threat or allure.

• 'You feel it in the way he grips your throat' / 'his hands never waver' Control is framed as erotic. His calm is power, and that power is absolute.

• 'He fucks you like he hates you' / 'he ruins you and doesn’t apologize' Violence is the kink. There’s no emotional fallout—only intensity.

• 'He only says your name when you cry' Softness becomes a reward for submission or pain, not a baseline trait.

• 'You don’t know what he’s thinking, but you know he wants you' He’s not given a POV—his desire is animalistic, not explored.

• 'He takes what he wants' / 'he doesn’t ask' Dominance is tied to disregard.

• 'He’s aggressive or violent, but not to you' Frames violence as part of his appeal and makes the reader exceptional for surviving it.

• 'He’s a man with nothing to lose' / 'he’s done bad things, but he protects you' Romanticizes trauma and criminalization. Danger is turned into loyalty, but only for her.

• 'He doesn’t talk about his past' / 'you don’t ask questions' Keeps his history off the page. Erases context to make space for projection.

Even when race is unspoken, these characters are built around:

• Emotional restraint framed as sexual threat. • Violence treated as natural or inevitable. • Silence that becomes fantasy instead of concern. • Cultural erasure that makes their brownness visual—but empty.

This is racialized control. Power is erotic, volatility is the plot, and whiteness (or white-coded softness) is the thing being protected, broken, or claimed.

Daddy kink: The daddy kink might seem harmless, or even empowering, when wrapped in aesthetics like white frilly socks, soft baby tees, and shy reader inserts who giggle and get praised for obedience.

But when it’s mapped onto a brown man like Joel, it stops being just about kink. It becomes a fantasy of dominance filtered through whiteness: his rough hands, his work boots, his age and control become tools for the reader’s submission.

The brownness that makes him 'rugged' or 'dangerous' gets aestheticized, while the white-coded reader stays adored for being easy to handle.

This kind of story often plays out like a coquette-fantasy pipeline: the reader is fragile and sweet, maybe childish in tone, and Joel is the daddy who ruins her just enough. It builds the illusion that this dynamic is innocent.

But the safety only works because Joel is curated. His race is kept ambiguous or whitewashed.

His power is tamed. And all of that is what makes him 'usable.' When daddy kink plays out like this, it reinforces a racialized power structure: the brown man exists to anchor a white woman’s fantasy of being cared for, corrected, dominated, and loved without ever having to name the imbalance.

It’s not that daddy kink is inherently racist. But when a racialized man becomes the silent, stoic, endlessly capable caretaker of a white-coded girl-child fantasy—without history, context, or complication it upholds systems that have long fetishized brown men as strong, useful, desirable—but only on terms that keep white women safe and centered.

Latin lover:

The 'Latin lover' trope shows up everywhere and it’s almost always the same formula: Latino men are framed as exotic, seductive, hypersexual, emotionally volatile, or even predatory. They’re dangerous, but in a hot way. They speak in accents or say things in Spanish during sex, smirk a lot, and always know exactly what to do in bed. That’s the fantasy.

What makes it harmful isn’t just the sex appeal—it’s the flattening. The appeal is built on mystery, intensity, and performance, not personhood. These characters aren’t allowed to be fully human. They don’t get to be awkward or quiet. They don’t get to be unsure, soft, grieving, or weird. Their sexuality becomes a performance for someone else’s fantasy. Their desirability becomes cultural shorthand—'he’s Latino, so of course he’s sexy' instead of something that belongs to them as a person.

Even when the framing sounds complimentary 'he’s so confident,' 'he’s irresistible,' 'he’s incredible in bed' it’s still reducing a whole person to how they make someone else feel.

That’s what makes it dehumanizing.

The trope isn’t about the man at all. It’s about the person watching him, wanting him, consuming him. It turns Latino identity into a vibe, a flavor, a sex appeal setting and a racialized fantasy.

Purity as Healing:

There’s a quiet but pervasive pattern in fanfiction where a brown man’s growth, tenderness, or emotional healing is tied directly to the reader’s purity. Sometimes that means virginity. Sometimes it means patience or caretaking. Sometimes it’s just that she’s never asked anything of him except love.

The message underneath is the same: that the brown man only becomes worthy of peace when he’s given access to white-coded innocence. That his ability to be vulnerable or gentle isn’t his own—it’s unlocked by her goodness.

That’s salvation as reward. It turns the reader into a tool for redemption and flattens the man into someone who only becomes lovable once he’s softened by someone else’s virtue.

And when that virtue is tied to whiteness, it reinforces the oldest script: that tenderness is something you give, and brown men are only allowed to feel it if they’ve earned you first.

Danger and Darker Skin:

When fans write dominant characters as 'dangerous but hot,' it often means dangerous within limits. That danger has to be legible. Sexy. Readable as fantasy.

And most of the time, that means proximity to whiteness e.g., light skin, good English, emotional restraint. It’s why darker-skinned characters (especially Black men) are rarely allowed the same latitude.

If the fantasy hinges on aggression, power, or danger, but it only feels safe when that character’s brownness is managed by whiteness, then that’s not just preference. That’s anti-Blackness.

It says: dominance is attractive, but only when it comes in a body you don’t associate with real-world threat. Only when the man is dark—but not too dark. That’s the racial coding embedded in desire. And if you’re not actively naming it, you’re still writing from inside it.

Infantilized Readers and DD/lg Dynamics:

Even when fics don’t explicitly tag themselves as DD/lg or kink dynamics, they often slide into the same shape: overwhelmed reader, gentle-but-strict older man, caretaking disguised as domination.

These tropes aren’t inherently bad, but they’re rarely interrogated. White-coded readers are often written as small, soft, emotionally immature, or childlike. They pout. They 'don’t know any better.' They get praised for being good or punished for acting out.

And the man is the one who manages them. He sets the rules. He guides her. He disciplines her. He knows what’s best.

It’s white innocence being eroticized as submission, and brown masculinity being framed as both danger and control.

When you write an infantilized reader into a power imbalance with a man of color, you’re not just writing kink—you’re reinforcing white helplessness and brown responsibility.

You can still write these dynamics. But name the power. Hold the weight. Power isn’t just a surface-level kink; it becomes part of what they have to navigate. Maybe the reader begins to realize how much emotional labor she’s asking of him. Maybe he voices it. Maybe she’s forced to see him not as a fantasy but as a person—with history, hurt, pride. The story slows down enough to hold that weight—and let it change them. Maybe the reader wants to be cared for but starts to question whether that care is freely given or expected from him. It creates discomfort, vulnerability, or friction—something they can’t just fuck through. Maybe there’s silence. Maybe someone leaves. Maybe one of them reflects on how much they gave—and whether it was safe to do so. Maybe the character carries a weariness he can’t name out loud. The imbalance lingers, because it wasn’t just a setup but it meant something.

Reader Agency:

Agency doesn’t only matter in degradation or dark fic. It matters in gentleness, too. Slow burns, caretaking stories, and healing arcs often fall into a quieter trap: the reader becomes good, pure, nurturing—but also passive. She listens. She supports. She waits. She doesn’t ask for anything in return.

A reader can still be tender and have boundaries. She can still be caring and hold power. She can fuck him and tell him off. She can help him heal while holding her own ground. Real love isn’t obedience.

The 'safe' dominant brown man:

In a lot of fic, the character isn’t just dominant—he’s safe about it. Javier might grab your chin, call you princesa, manhandle you in public, degrade you in bed—but he’ll never cross a line you didn’t secretly want him to cross. Frankie will stop immediately if you say 'no.' He'll notice when you’re overwhelmed. He'll ruin you, but gently.

He's rough, but he’s not a threat. He's a dom, but he’s a caretaker. He's sexual, but not a predator. That's what makes him readable. That's what makes him usable.

This setup lets white readers enjoy dominance without fear. they get the thrill of submission without risk. they get the fantasy of being fucked, wrecked, and handled by a brown man whose roughness never becomes a problem—because he’s not really in charge. you are. The reader is the center of gravity. The emotional arc belongs to her.

His control and desire are all in service to her fragility.

But when this becomes a pattern—when brown men exist only to serve that fantasy—it stops being subversive. It becomes the new default. and like all defaults in fandom, it gets naturalized, copied, and defended.

Sleazy Joel / DBF Joel:

Older. Rough. Maybe pervy. Maybe sleazy. Maybe he watches you in the pool. Maybe you tease him. Maybe you don’t. Maybe he tells you it’s wrong while fucking you anyway.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that setup; power imbalance is hot. Age gaps can be hot. Sleazy men can be hot. But when that dynamic plays out without tension, without interiority, without fallout—when the older man of color is degraded for fun while the younger, white-coded reader walks away with the power of being wanted—it stops being kink and starts repeating a script.

These stories are about control. They’re written to make the reader feel special.

The message is: he shouldn’t want you, but he does.

He’s older, filthier, meaner, and you’re the one who made him lose control. That’s compelling.

But when the character is brown, it hits differently. Then you’re not just writing a horny older man—you’re writing a man of color who can’t control his sexual desire. His danger is erotic because it’s happening to someone framed as innocent.

This is reinforcing racial stereotypes.

And then there’s the aftermath—or the lack of one. In many of these fics, there’s no consequence. No fear of getting caught. No tension with Sarah. No fallout with the reader’s dad. It’s all smoothed over if there is conflict. Joel can cross a lifelong boundary with someone he’s known since she was a kid, and no one around him will blink.

That silence matters.

Because it rewrites grooming as inevitability. It normalizes fixation on youth. And when the reader is white-coded that dynamic slips even further into comfort. The story becomes about her coming of age through his desire. About his want being proof that she’s desirable, mature, grown enough now to handle him.

That’s how the trope drifts from taboo into normalization. It stops being about tension and starts being about reward. About ownership. About youth as currency. And when that dynamic gets mapped onto a racialized man—especially one who’s already being written as stoic or secretly perverse—it’s a power fantasy shaped by white supremacy. The fixation on innocence, the lack of fallout, the disappearance of any adult woman who might challenge the reader’s place in the story—none of that is neutral.

But you can write sleazy Joel with care. You can write DBF Joel with care. You can write him wanting it, regretting it, breaking something, facing it. You can write the reader wanting it, then flinching. You can build complexity and consequences. You can let the story breathe and carry weight.

Kink isn’t the problem. Narrative detachment is. If you’re going to write power, write the cost. Write the ache. Write what happens after. That’s what turns a trope into a story. That’s what keeps the fantasy honest. Age gap / power dynamics:

There’s a common undercurrent in age-gap fic, especially ones with older men and white-coded reader-inserts: innocence is the appeal. Whether it’s framed as shyness, inexperience, virginity, emotional immaturity, or even a history with the character since childhood—what the reader brings to the table is vulnerability.

What she receives in return is attention. Desire. Validation. Power.

And that power is the point. These fics aren’t just about being fucked—they’re about being chosen. Being seen. Being wanted by someone older, more experienced, emotionally guarded, and often emotionally broken.

The trope says: he could have anyone, but he wants you. And not despite your fragility—but because of it.

That’s not inherently bad! Wanting to be wanted is human.

But when youth becomes the currency of that desire—when the reader’s value is tied to her blankness, passivity, or lack of life experience—it starts to slide into something else.

Something that quietly centers power imbalance as a reward. Something that treats being small, silent, or emotionally underdeveloped as the fantasy.

That’s a script rooted in patriarchy. And when fics like that get praised and shared it reinforces and upholds the oppressive gender roles.

And it’s one that shows up again and again in fics with brown or racialized love interests. Because when the reader is framed as young, innocent, and white-coded—and the man is older, darker, harder, and more damaged—the racial dynamics start to echo familiar, violent patterns.

Dominance becomes racialized. Innocence becomes whiteness. The fantasy becomes about submission, control, and access without ever naming it.

Innocence becomes currency. And once that’s the exchange, anything that threatens the fantasy (Black women, consequences, discomfort) gets erased.

But age gaps don’t have to be exploitative.

They can be hot, complicated, messy, real. You can write tenderness and still make space for anger, power, grief, regret, tension. You can write characters who get tangled up in each other and have to figure out what that means.

That’s what makes it good. That’s what makes it matter.

Because innocence isn’t a personality. And youth isn’t a reward.

Even a 1k-word blowjob degradation fic (it me) can feel human. There’s no need for a redemption arc, soft moments, or a moral lesson. Kink doesn’t have to be therapy.

But it needs intention.

Maybe the hesitation lands like guilt. Maybe desire sits alongside shame. Maybe a line slips out and instantly sours in his mouth. Maybe she sets it in motion, begs for it, consents completely and still walks away conflicted. Maybe power feels like pride one moment, and exposure the next. Maybe the desire has depth, tenderness, and love.

What matters is that they have a reason, a psychology, a contradiction. Anything to remind us they’re human. Not stand-ins for someone else's fetish.

Resistance isn’t required for complexity. Craving degradation doesn’t flatten a character. If she says 'make it worse' and means it, if she’s hungry for shame or pain or submission and still fully formed—that’s the point. What makes her real isn’t whether she says yes or no. It’s whether she has a self.

Two-dimensional doesn’t mean submissive. It means hollow. And that hollowness is what lets white-coded reader fantasy slide into default: the soft girl, the innocent girl, the fragile girl.

Blankness invites projection—especially from racists who read themselves into these characters and stick around undetected. Until something disturbs the illusion.

A character of color becomes two-dimensional not because of genre or smut level, but because they exist only to serve the reader’s pleasure. Their pain stays in the past. Their power stays aesthetic. They’re either always dangerous or always safe—but never both. And they’re defined entirely by how much they want the reader, not by what they want for themselves.

It shows up all the time: Javi who degrades you but always praises you after. Joel who punishes but listens. Frankie who ruins you but makes it feel gentle. Brown men who hurt just enough. Push just right. Hard only in ways that keep the reader’s purity centered.

If his kink exists only to demonstrate how perfectly he serves the reader it’s just racialized labor.

Same with the tender trope: the white-coded reader who teaches the hardened brown man to feel again. She heals him through purity, patience, or sex. She earns his loyalty by being manageable. He earns his worth through her approval.

Craving destruction doesn’t erase control. Loving to be used doesn’t remove agency. Power can sit in the terms she sets.

These dynamics echo outside the bedroom—boss and employee, teacher and student, older man and younger woman, officer and civilian. The setup isn’t the problem. Power is. Who holds it. Who gets to speak. Who pays for it.

If the reader never initiates, never desires, never acts, then she’s not submissive—she’s a placeholder.

It’s possible to write domination (yay!). To write filth (me). To write fucked-up power dynamics (also me). But it has to be done with eyes open.

Noncon / Dubcon / Dark fics:

These are some of the most morally complex tropes—and some of the most misused. Writing a character of color as the aggressor in noncon or dubcon fic, especially opposite a white-coded reader, taps into a long legacy of racialized sexual violence.

Even if that’s not the goal, the visual, emotional, and historical context still lingers.

Because even if the fic doesn’t name race, readers still picture him. Pedro’s body, voice, and brownness carry weight—especially when he’s cast as the one who overpowers, violates, or punishes a white-coded reader. That pairing hits deep-rooted cultural scripts—fear, fetish, supremacy.

Eroticizing that danger without context turns into propaganda in kink’s clothing. That doesn’t mean you can’t write it. But if the scene aestheticizes assault and makes it sexy because of how scary or animalistic he is, without any examination of what that power means, then you’re writing a racialized rape fantasy.

That doesn’t make you a bad person. But it does mean you need to slow down.

Ask: What is being eroticized here? What makes this hot? Whose pain is being consumed, and why?

There are ways to write noncon ethically. Dubcon can be devastating and sharp. But the characters need dimension.

Don’t strip him down to a machine. Don’t reduce her to something to be broken. Somebody needs to carry fear. Somebody needs to feel guilt. There should be consequences. Aftermath. Contradictions.

Dark fics aren’t unethical by default. But they engage directly with dynamics of harm—rape, manipulation, violence, coercion, obsession, dehumanization. And when the man is brown, those dynamics are never neutral. His 'darkness' gets entangled with racialized tropes: hypersexuality, control, emotional detachment, rage.

Darkfic turns trauma into vibe. Scarred hands. Heavy silence. Angry sex. When the man is brown, it often becomes proof of his desirability. He’s hot because he’s dangerous. Desirable because he has nothing left to lose.

If your darkfic relies on a brown man being terrifying but sexy, obsessive but hot, cruel but desirable to a white-coded reader who teaches him to soften…it’s not kink.

You can still write it. But write him real. More than the threat. More than the heat. And if he does something terrible, let it stay terrible. Don’t wrap harm in softness and call it redemption. Don’t gut him just to make him safe enough to want.

Cheating / Infidelity:

When one of the men is brown (and the boyfriend or husband is white or absent), there’s often a subtle dynamic at play: the brown man is allowed to exist only outside of legitimacy. He’s the affair. The danger. The secret. The thing that fucks you up. And the reader gets to return to safety afterward.

That tells a story, even if you don’t mean it to. It’s worth asking: Why is this man only allowed to be wanted in secret? Why doesn’t he get tenderness? Why doesn’t he get chosen? If he’s only good for wrecking the reader and then disappearing it’s more than a trope. .

That’s how media treats brownness across the board. And it gets even messier when the man himself is the cheater—especially when he has a canon wife who gets erased from the story.

He’s married, a father, or a hitman with a domestic life, but in fic, his wife disappears. Or she’s cold. Controlling. Dismissed. Replaced. And the reader becomes his real connection. The one who sees him. The one he fucks like he means it. When a brown man cheats on a woman of color—or when his canon Black or brown wife disappears—it says something, even if you didn’t mean it to.

It says that the reader is the one who matters. That her feelings, her body, her pleasure are worth rewriting the story. It positions the canon wife as the obstacle and the reader as the reward.

That’s how whiteness centers itself, even in someone else’s story. You can still write cheating. You can still write wreckage. But don’t let your brown characters be disposable. And don’t erase the women who already loved them just to make space for yourself.

Enemies to Lovers

This trope can go a lot of directions, but there’s a particular pattern that can reinforce harm: when hostility or violence from the love interest is eroticized because he’s racialized, or 'dominant'—and the reader is innocent, white-coded, and eventually 'tames' him.

It turns resistance into foreplay. Which can work, but when the emotional payoff is about transforming the scary brown man into someone who loves you, the reader’s 'victory' starts to look like domination, too.

Pedro’s characters are often guarded, angry, or morally gray and fic turns that into a challenge. The beast you tame. The rage you survive. But if your fic treats hostility as a test the reader wins by being white, or forgiving—you’re not writing tension. You’re writing racialized conquest.

It’s also worth asking what kind of 'enemy' he is. Is he truly an antagonist, or just someone from a different class, culture, background, or emotional world? Does the tension exist because they hate each other or because the reader is scared of his power and turned on by it?

You can still write that. You can write enemies to lovers that bites. But let the transformation go both ways. Let the reader change, too. Let her ego crack. Let her projections fail. Let him be more than a monster with a heart of gold. Or let him stay complicated and unreadable. That’s where the good stuff is.

Unchecked desire becomes dehumanizing

Kinks aren’t the problem. But when desire goes unchecked, especially when the character only exists to serve the reader’s pleasure it replicates a narrative that others and dehumanizes characters.

You can write sex that’s rough, cruel, worshipful, humiliating—whatever you want. But when the brown man is distilled to how well he performs it, and the reader’s only role is to be adored, ruined, or forgiven, that’s fetishization.

If your kink relies on dominance, coercion, or emotional damage to hit, then let it be messy. Let it have consequences. Let it have weight. If the man you’re writing is brown, ask yourself: does he get desire of his own? Or is he just there to prove the reader’s worth?

You don’t have to make the kink vanilla, just make the characters real.

Desire becomes dehumanizing when the fantasy stops at consumption.

When the character is reduced to what they do to you or for you. When kink, tropes, and emotional dynamics are framed as hot because they strip away complexity.

Because they let the reader feel powerful, ruined, forgiven, or chosen without ever asking what it costs the person on the other side.

It’s not about whether the story includes rough sex or praise. It’s about whether the person enacting those things is allowed to be whole.

Unchecked desire turns characters into tools. And when those characters are brown, it echoes long histories of real-world racial and sexual violence masked as fantasy.

Writing a fantasy without centering white supremacy

So how do you write tropes in fandom? How do you write dominant Latino men, virginity kink, age gap, PWP—without turning your fic into a playground for white supremacist fantasy?

You don’t have to stop writing them. You just have to know where the danger lives.

Start with dom!Latino men. The problem isn’t dominance—it’s when that dominance is vague, unearned, or coded through racialized danger. If your only description is 'he growled something in Spanish and took you,' and the reader just melts on cue with a 'yes, sir,' then you’re writing a fantasy of control that uses race as shorthand.

Instead, show us why it works. Let him pause. Let him know her. Let her give in because of who he is—not just what he is. That’s how you block projection from readers looking for a faceless, racialized dom to overpower them without context.

Corruption kink follows the same pattern. If the reader is shy, untouched, and overwhelmed, and the man just 'takes' control while she whimpers and submits, that’s not kink with intention. That’s conquest. And racists eat that up. But if she wants it? If she resists it, chooses it, knows it’s a bad idea and leans in anyway? That changes everything. She’s not a vessel for someone else’s desire. She’s an active participant. Racists don’t click with reader characters who ask for what they want and look their danger in the eye.

Virginity is another landmine. The issue isn’t writing virgin readers—it’s tying virginity to whiteness, fragility, or moral purity. If she’s blushing and calling him 'dangerous' while being grateful he’s 'teaching' her, that’s recreating a colonial seduction fantasy.

But if she’s just been waiting for the right moment? If she wants the feeling, not the performance of purity? Then virginity becomes a choice, not a virtue. And he’s not rewarded for corrupting her—he’s just the one who happened to get her yes.

If you want to write age gap fics, it’s worth slowing down and asking what exactly you’re eroticizing. The trope veers into fetishization when the older man is always dominant, stoic, or tortured by lust, and the younger reader is white-coded, breathy, and easily undone.

Even when she’s bratty or the one who starts it, the power imbalance still exists—and when he’s brown, that imbalance gets racialized whether you name it or not. To write it with care, let both characters feel the weight of the risk. Let him hesitate. Let her second-guess.

Don’t just frame his guilt as proof of how badly he wants her—give it space to matter. Let them talk, not just fuck. Flip the power sometimes. Let her teach him something. Let him feel out of his depth.

If it’s always about him holding control and her being seduced or ruined, that’s not chemistry—it’s just a script. Give them consequences. Give them emotional arcs.

You don’t need five chapters of backstory to write a responsible age gap scene. Even in a single, filthy PWP, you can shift the balance by giving both characters clarity, agency, and texture. Let her be aware of the power dynamic and push on it—flirt with it, mock it, challenge him a little.

Let him ask, even if it’s just a line like, “You sure about this?” or “Say it again.” Let the reader own her pleasure. Give her language and rhythm. Don’t make her go breathless the second he touches her—unless that’s something she enjoys and expresses.

Don’t rely on guilt or restraint as his entire personality. Show why the tension turns them both on. Let there be a pause, a joke, a stutter, a slip. That’s intimacy, not fragility. Power is still sexy when it moves. Control is hotter when it’s negotiated.

Even in a one-shot, you can give them eye contact, internal POV, emotion. You can write a scene where the sex is filthy, the stakes are high, and nobody disappears into a stereotype.

And ask yourself honestly: would this story still be hot if he were white? If the answer is no, what’s really doing the work in your fantasy—his age, or his race?

None of this makes the fic less hot. It just makes it harder for racists to slip into the fantasy unnoticed. Which means you’re doing your job.

That’s the core of this whole thing. Reader characters don’t need to be flawless or in control. They can spiral. They can cry. They can dissociate, beg, submit, or break. But they have to be present. They need an interior life.

If your fic removes all that and leaves behind only gratitude, fragility, or silence, then it’s not serving the reader. It’s serving someone else’s fantasy. And that someone might not be who you want in the room.

So ask yourself:

Is this character still hot if he’s not Latino?

Am I writing him as a person or as a performance of power?

Is the reader reacting, thinking, choosing?

Would a racist feel good reading this? Would they feel flattered, dominant, pure, entitled?

You don’t have to write or read political fic. You already are.

Sex, race, power—they’re already in the room. So enjoy the filth. Make it rough, raw, tender. Just look for intention. Characters with flaws. Readers with texture.

Don’t hand supremacists a seat at the table with what you write or share. Make them feel unwelcome. Make them feel seen.

‘Just because it’s not intentional doesn’t mean it’s not harmful’

You don’t have to mean harm for it to land that way. Most of us didn’t grow up being explicitly taught racism—we absorbed it through stories, language, beauty standards, and silence. When those influences show up in fic, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person—it means you’re a person who was shaped by the world around you.

But harm still happens. A reader of color who sees herself erased, stereotyped, or reduced to someone else’s kink doesn’t feel comforted by the fact that you 'didn’t mean it.' And maybe it’s only one fic you reblogged, or one trope you wrote—but in the ocean of fandom where that same narrative keeps repeating, your one post becomes part of a pattern.

It contributes to the projection, to the praise, to the comfort of a story that reinforces the systems already in power. Intent doesn’t cancel impact. The responsible thing isn’t to defend yourself—it’s to recognize where that harm lives in your work and do something about it.

Desire scripts are learned through media

The things that turn you on didn’t come out of nowhere. Kinks and preferences are shaped by what we’re exposed to—who gets shown as desirable, who gets to be assertive or passive, whose pain gets romanticized. If your fantasy involves a powerful brown man taking control while a fragile, pale reader melts with gratitude, that didn’t just appear in your brain. You were taught to eroticize that dynamic.

That doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to enjoy the kink—but it does mean you’re responsible for noticing the patterns, asking where they come from, and choosing how to write or promote them with care. Want isn’t neutral. Desire reflects power. And interrogating that doesn’t ruin the fantasy—it deepens it.

V. Anti-Blackness

Anti-Blackness isn’t a side note—it’s the foundation

White supremacy begins and holds itself together through anti-Blackness. Every system of racial hierarchy, every proximity-based privilege, every colonial script about bodies and danger and value—all of it is shaped around the dehumanization of Black people. And that logic doesn’t stop when we write fic. It shows up everywhere, even if the characters we’re writing aren’t Black.

Because anti-Blackness built the system. It shapes who gets written, who gets shipped, who gets seen as sexy, desirable, or narratively safe. Anti-Blackness is why Black characters disappear. Why they get recast or sidelined. Why they’re rarely part of white ships or soft narratives. It’s why Black men are described with animalistic or aggressive language—or not written at all. Why Black femmes almost never show up in reader inserts—unless they’re rewritten as obstacles or tropes.

And if you’re not consciously interrogating that pattern in what you create and consume, then you’re contributing to it.

Fandom is full of people who think they’re being 'inclusive' because they like brown men in porn, or reblog Black characters once in a while. But if those characters aren’t centered—if they don’t get detail, interiority, or complexity—they’re not being included. They’re being used.

This also shows up in shipping characters with white OCs, especially when it involves erasing canon love interests of color. It’s ignoring Black or brown women who were already in the story. It’s writing deep emotional arcs for white pairings and only pulling out the edge, the filth, the 'dangerous but sexy' dynamics when a character of color is involved.

So when you default to whiteness, what do you think you’re protecting? What were you taught to want? And what would it take to want something else?

That’s why Latine fetish tropes so often echo anti-Black violence. When Javier is written as stoic and sexually dominant, when Joel is rough and unfeeling, when brown men are desired because they’re a little dangerous.

It’s not just about ethnicity. It’s about distance from Blackness. It’s about fear and power. It’s about how white desire is built on the idea that you can want someone without ever being at risk. That you can fantasize about dominance without naming what made it feel safe.

Because proximity to whiteness gives you options. Blackness doesn’t.

Why brown masculinity gets to be ‘dangerous but sexy,’ but Blackness doesn’t

Javier Peña isn’t written the way he is in fic because we all coincidentally find the same traits sexy. He’s written that way because he sits at a specific intersection of desirability and danger—one that white writers are comfortable projecting onto.

He’s brown, but not too brown. Dangerous, but redeemable. Dominant, but clean about it. He doesn’t demand anything. Doesn’t speak too much Spanish. Doesn’t have dark skin. Doesn’t talk about race. Doesn’t break the reader’s fantasy. He’s just dark enough to be hot. Just angry enough to be exciting. Just brown enough to be different. Just safe enough to stay.

He’s not threatening, but he still lets you feel owned. That’s the sweet spot. That’s the role that anti-Blackness has carved out for men like Javier: readable, fuckable, containable.

And when you write him that way without asking what it means, you’re not just using a trope—you’re extending a system. You’re saying: this is the kind of brown man who gets to be wanted. This is the kind of dominance I can handle. This is the kind of racialized masculinity that makes me feel safe.

And what’s left out? Anyone who doesn’t fit that mold. Darker skin. Non-standard English. Cultural rootedness. Rage that doesn’t serve the reader. Softness that doesn’t get rewarded. Sexual dynamics that don’t stay clean. The kinds of men who don’t turn themselves inside out to prove they’re safe.

And that’s anti-Blackness at work. Not just in erasure, but in containment. In the idea that power only gets to be hot if it knows its place.

Afro-Latine erasure

Afro-Latine identity is often erased in fandom because people still treat 'Latino' like a race. But Latinidad isn’t one thing—it spans ethnicities, skin tones, languages, and histories. There are white Latines, Black Latines, Indigenous Latines, and everyone in between.

Colorism and anti-Blackness push Black Latines out of the frame even when canon leaves space for them. Characters get flattened into mestizo-coded fantasy figures: just tan enough to be sexy, but not dark enough to make anyone uncomfortable. If you’re writing a Latino character and never once consider how race, skin tone, or cultural specificity shape their experience—you’re not writing representation.

White-washing characters and erasing canon Black characters

Whitewashing isn’t just about skin color. In fanfic, it happens any time a character’s racial or cultural identity is erased, ignored, or flattened to make them easier for white readers to imagine—especially in romantic or sexual roles.

Whitewashing shows up when racialized characters are stripped of heritage, dialect, community, or context. When their family disappears. When their cultural identity is replaced with vague, white-coded templates: just vibes, devotion, and aestheticized trauma. It happens when you extract desire from brown men but erase everything else about them.

Sarah is Black in the HBO show. That casting choice wasn’t random. It adds weight to Joel’s grief and depth to his character. He’s not just a grieving father—he’s a brown single dad raising a Black daughter in Texas. It changes how we understand his protectiveness, his fear, his anger, and the world he’s trying to survive in. Because if Sarah is Black—and Joel is brown—then what does it mean when the reader is always white? What does it mean when the only tenderness Joel gets to show is directed at whiteness?

White-washing Javier doesn’t always look like changing his race; more often, it means writing him as if race doesn’t matter at all. It means giving him a name and a body, but not a heritage. It means stripping away the contradictions and internal tensions of a Latino man navigating U.S. law enforcement and foreign imperialism, and turning him into a blank canvas for white-coded desire.

Anti-Blackness in fandom doesn’t always look like slurs or cruelty. Most of the time, it shows up through silence. Through the characters who never get written. Through the Black women who vanish. Through the side characters who never get to be the love interest, never get to be soft, never get to be wanted.

White feminism and the echo chamber—how misogyny is a shield for whiteness

White women who understand feminism often think that’s enough. They know how to name misogyny. They know what patriarchy feels like. They’ve fought to be seen, to be respected, to be messy and still loved.

But when it comes to race—especially their own racial privilege—they get defensive. They turn intersectional critique into personal attack. And in fandom, that defensiveness turns into an echo chamber.

They call criticism misogyny.

They frame critiques of whiteness as attacks on feminism.

And they protect each other—their reader-inserts, their casting preferences—without asking who keeps getting erased to make room for their empowerment.

It shows up in how relatability gets treated like a universal experience, instead of something shaped by race, class, body, and culture.

So when fans of color push back—when they ask why certain stories are always the ones being told—white women hear it as hate. Not critique. Not grief. Not exhaustion. Just hate.

Patterns That Repeat

There’s a pattern that repeats every time fans of color—especially Black women—raise critique in fandom. It doesn’t matter how that critique is expressed: thoughtful, grounded, calm, angry, academic, messy, personal, or collective.

As soon as it touches whiteness, the response is the same. White women vaguepost. They cry misogyny. They frame it as harassment. They say they’re being silenced. They say they just want fandom to be fun.

And they make themselves the victims.

This isn’t about misogyny. It’s about power. About how whiteness responds to being made visible. Many white women want to feel good about themselves. They want to be the safe ones. The progressive ones. The inclusive ones. The victims of patriarchy—but never the agents of harm.So when Black and brown fans interrupt that narrative, it gets framed as cruelty. Because whiteness wants critique to sound like gratitude. It wants to be thanked for not being worse.

The truth is: white women don’t like being watched. They don’t like being named. They don’t like being made responsible for anything outside the frame of fighting sexism.

When Black women say: This casting is racist. This trope is harmful. This story isn’t for us. It gets read as an attack. Not a boundary. Not a pattern. Not a call-in.

Because in these spaces, Black women aren’t allowed to be angry. They aren’t allowed to be disappointed. They aren’t allowed to want more. Their tone is always wrong. Their grief is always too loud. Their critique is always too much.

And white women’s comfort is always the line.

That’s the real pattern.

Not just in fic. Not just in casting. In how fandom operates. How whiteness uses passiveness and victimhood to shut down discomfort. How white women frame accountability as cruelty. How they shift the focus back to their own pain the moment someone else’s harm is named.

White Women’s Fear of Black Women Isn’t Harmless

This fear doesn’t always look like fear. It looks like silence. Like defensiveness. Like tone-policing. Like ‘I support them, but that post was aggressive.’

There’s a particular discomfort that many white women feel when Black women are direct. Or firm. Or critical. Because that critique threatens the self-image white women want to maintain: kind, safe, feminist, good.

And here’s the twist: white women often want approval from Black women. They want to be seen as the right kind of white. The good ally.

That dynamic plays out in fandom, too—reblogging the right posts. Defending the right tropes until a Black fan says they’re harmful. Tying 'support' to aesthetics and vibes instead of actual behavior.

It turns Black women’s labor into currency. White women want the credit but not the risk. And not the accountability.

What Community Care Actually Looks Like

When a Black creator posts about receiving anon hate or racism, it is not an invitation for white fans to flood their inbox or replies with ‘I’m so sorry this is happening to you’ or ‘you’re so strong’ or ‘this breaks my heart.’

That kind of response centers white feelings again. It turns someone else’s harm into a place to perform guilt or grief. Those posts aren’t meant to gather pity. They’re reminders.

They are documentation that the hate hasn’t stopped. That it’s still happening. They are not for white people to process in public.

If the first instinct is to fawn over the creator, or express how sick or guilty or angry it makes you—pause.

Those feelings are real, but they’re not the point. They don’t need to be witnessed by the person harmed. They need to be translated into action.

Community care is not about being visibly sad. It’s about being responsible.

Consider for yourself:

Do I want to be liked more than I want to be responsible?

Do I listen when Black women speak—or do I flinch and try to make it about me?

Do I reblog educational posts but keep writing the same stories?

Do I say ‘we all make mistakes’ only when white people are the ones who messed up?

Do I mistake my guilt for accountability?

VI. Systems of power, supremacy, and silence

The systems upheld by these tropes; how fandom normalizes harm

The tropes we recycle in fic are shaped by systems built to control and contain.

Patriarchy teaches us to eroticize dominance when it comes from men and submission when it comes from women. Colonialism and white supremacy tell us which kinds of bodies and behaviors are worthy of love, which are exotic enough to be consumed, and which are too much.

These systems aren’t abstract—they show up in the kinds of fantasies that get repeated without question: the silent reader-insert, the hypersexual man of color, the purity-coded white love interest. They shape who we’re allowed to see as human, and who exists only to make someone else’s story more intense.

When fandom refuses to interrogate these patterns, it stops being transformative. It becomes another place where harmful power dynamics are disguised as comfort or catharsis.

Harm doesn’t always look loud—it often hides inside tropes we call 'classic,' or dynamics that go viral for being 'hot.' But when those tropes always reinforce the same hierarchy every time, it teaches us that desire and dominance can’t exist without supremacy.

And if we keep calling that fantasy, without naming what it’s built on, we risk turning fandom into just another tool of the same systems we think we’re escaping.

It always comes back to the same systems; it’s always rooted in power, privilege, and oppression

Power, privilege, and oppression aren’t just about individual behavior—they’re systems that shape how the world works, often without us realizing it. Power decides who gets to make the rules and who has to live by them. Privilege means you benefit from those rules, even if you didn’t ask to. And oppression is what happens to the people those rules were never made to protect.

It’s like playing a game where some people start five steps ahead and others aren’t even told the rules—except it’s not a game, it’s real life, and it affects everything from who gets listened to, to who feels safe, to whose stories are seen as worth telling. These systems are everywhere, and they show up in how we learn, love, work, and imagine the world—including the worlds we create.

When fic repeats the same hierarchies—glorifying whiteness, romanticizing control, erasing or flattening Black and brown characters—and when fans defend those patterns with the same tired rhetoric about 'preference' or 'it’s just fiction,' it doesn’t stay confined to a story. It spills out into the culture of fandom itself. It shapes who feels safe, who gets supported, and who gets targeted or ignored.

That’s not abstract harm—it’s real. Black and brown fans are pushed to the margins, asked to educate, or punished for speaking up, all while watching their identities get stripped for parts in fic that won’t name them.

When we normalize that dynamic over and over, we’re not just reflecting oppressive systems—we’re helping uphold them, directly harming the people we claim to share space with.

Racists hate nuance—what deters them is not the same as what’s ‘inclusive’

Racists hate nuance because it makes projection harder. They’re drawn to flat characters, simple power dynamics, and stories that never challenge their worldview. What deters them isn’t 'diversity' in a checkbox sense—it’s complexity. Depth. Contradiction. A reader with a point of view. A love interest who isn’t there to serve. Stories that don’t let whiteness feel default or domination feel clean. Inclusion makes space; deterrence makes that space uncomfortable for people who expect to be centered without question. And that difference matters.

Rigid, binary thinking is a common feature of racist ideology. Racists tend to be uncomfortable with moral complexity, emotional contradiction, and ambiguity, because those things challenge their sense of order and dominance.

In fan spaces, this plays out in how often racist readers:

Flinch at morally complex characters of color.

React with hostility to reader-inserts that don’t center whiteness.

Lose interest when desire isn’t mapped cleanly onto control or fragility.

Nuance complicates projection. It forces engagement. And that makes it deeply uncomfortable for people who aren’t used to being decentered.

'Inclusivity' often gets framed as visual representation or surface-level diversity—adding characters of color without disrupting the dominant narrative structure. But deterrence happens when the framework itself shifts—when whiteness isn’t centered, when desire isn’t sanitized, when stories demand accountability, not just access.

A story can be 'inclusive' (a character of color is present) and still completely palatable to racists (if that character is fetishized, sidelined, or written to uphold white-centered power fantasies).

Nuance, contradiction, and emotional depth are what actually push supremacist readers out—because they make it harder to reduce characters to tools or projections.

What it tells the community when white people are only loud about issues that affect their feelings

When white people are only loud about issues that affect their own feelings—when their urgency only shows up in response to personal discomfort, hurt, or critique—it tells the community that their allyship is conditional. That their care is rooted in image, not accountability.

It signals that harm against Black and brown people can be tolerated or ignored, but hurt feelings? That’s worth speaking up about.

And everyone notices.

It reinforces the message that whiteness is still the emotional center—that justice only matters when white people are impacted by it, and that safety and belonging are privileges some people have to earn while others expect them by default.

Respectability politics

Respectability politics, tone policing, and 'nice discourse' all function to uphold whiteness by centering comfort over accountability. They shift the focus from what’s being said to how it’s being said—especially when that 'how' comes from Black and brown people expressing justified anger, grief, or frustration.

These tactics frame emotional expression as unprofessional, aggressive, or unproductive, while protecting white feelings and maintaining the illusion of neutrality. In reality, they keep power dynamics intact by demanding that marginalized people be palatable in order to be heard.

Stop Praising White Writers for Saying What Black Fans Get Punished For

Here’s another pattern that keeps repeating: a white writer says something critical about racism in fandom—but says it gently. Carefully. With disclaimers. Maybe even with softness or a 'we’re all learning' tone.

And suddenly, they’re being praised. Reblogged. Applauded for their 'bravery' and 'accountability.' People comment: 'This is so well said.' 'Thank you for using your voice.' 'I needed this.'

But when a Black fan says the same thing—sharper, louder, angrier—they get ignored. Or silenced. Or treated like they’re attacking the whole fandom. People call them divisive. Harsh. Aggressive. 'Too much.'

The message is clear: white people are allowed to name harm if they do it in a way that doesn’t make other white people uncomfortable. Black fans are allowed to name harm only if they do it politely. Quietly. With disclaimers. With a tone that centers white feelings instead of their own.

That’s not allyship. That’s tone policing. That’s white supremacy.

If you only listen when it’s said gently, you’re not actually listening. If you only engage when it’s packaged with kind edges, you’re not ready to be accountable. You’re looking for comfort. And you’ll keep choosing the messenger who makes you feel safe—even if that means ignoring the people who’ve been saying it longer, louder, and with more at stake.

So if you’re praising this resource, ask yourself: would you have shared it if a Black fan said it first? Would you still feel called in if the tone was different?

Weaponizing harm vs. accountability

Sometimes, when someone points out something harmful in a fic or post—like racism, stereotypes, or erasure—a white fan might say they feel 'attacked' or 'unsafe' because of how the critique was worded. That’s called weaponizing harm: using the idea of being hurt to avoid taking responsibility. It makes the conversation about their feelings instead of the actual harm that was done.

Accountability is different. It means saying, 'I hear you. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, but I want to understand and do better.' It means staying in the conversation, even when it’s uncomfortable. Being called in isn’t the same as being attacked. The goal isn’t to make you feel bad—it’s to make the space better for everyone. When you use the language of harm to shut people down instead of listening, you're not protecting yourself—you’re protecting the same systems people are trying to challenge.

The difference comes down to direction: weaponized harm deflects; accountability engages. One protects ego. The other builds trust.

Fandom as a reflection of broader media bias

Fandom feels like a free space, but a lot of what we love still comes from the same biased media. If movies and shows mostly focus on white, straight, attractive characters, that’s who ends up getting the most fanfic, edits, and attention too.

It’s not because other characters aren’t good—it’s because we’ve been trained to care more about certain people. So when fandom keeps writing deep, emotional stories for white characters and ignoring or flattening Black and brown ones, it’s copying the same unfair patterns from TV and movies.

If we’re not careful, fandom doesn’t break the rules—it just repeats them with more smut.

You don’t have to write Black OCs or readers attending protests

A lot of white writers hear all this and immediately panic:

'So what—am I not allowed to write at all?' 'Do I have to write characters of color now to be good?' 'Am I just supposed to avoid writing anyone unless I’m an expert?'

No. That’s not the point. And trying to prove you’re a 'good ally' by suddenly adding Black OCs or heavy-handed activism into your fic can end up feeling hollow—especially if the rest of the story still centers whiteness and treats race like an accessory.

What actually matters is how you shape your story. Whose voices are present. Whose bodies are seen as desirable. Whose emotions get space on the page. What you name—and what you assume.

If your reader character is white, say so. Name it. Own it. Don’t pretend it’s neutral. If your reader isn’t explicitly white, make sure the writing doesn’t default to white-coded traits, purity, or behavior.

Ask what kind of reader you’re centering. What kind of reader your story is protecting. And whether your characters of color get rage, joy, softness, grief—or just danger and edge.

You don’t have to make your story about race to write responsibly, you just have to be intentional about the story you already want to tell.

But if you don’t name the dynamics in your work—whiteness will do it for you. The racists will. They’ll find your story, and feel flattered, cozy, confirmed. Because you never wrote anything that challenged them.

So no, you don’t need to write Black OCs just to prove something. You need to stop pretending race isn’t already in the room. Because it is. It always is. And if you don’t interrupt the defaults, they will keep writing your stories for you.

VII. Personal accountability and community responsibility

Examples from my own fics—what I think works, what I’m still working on

I’m not a professional creative writer. I post all my fics in the middle of the night the second I get the last sentence typed out. But I do think about the characters and the tropes and what I’m adding to the fandom. Even if I mostly write smut and crackfic AUs, there’s still intention.

I spent a long time interrogating the tropes and relationships and the weaknesses and the strengths in my own fics before writing this. I offer just a few examples to give an idea of what it means to write a trope without fetishizing and flattening characters.

I like to write confident, emotionally layered reader characters. Some who make bad choices on purpose. Readers who want things, regret things, have insight, depth, flaws, desires, wit. I’m not interested in writing passive reader-inserts. I like characters who have perspective, even when they’re falling back into bed with someone they shouldn’t.

I also love writing dominant, emotionally unavailable, or obsessive men. But that’s also the exact place I have to be careful. It could be easy for those dynamics to fall into familiar, racialized scripts. If I’m not tracking how they’re showing up on the page, those contradictions can slide into stereotypes.

In a fic with Javier, I pushed the dynamic into pure one-night stand territory: cocky Javi, hot club, filthy tension. It could’ve easily become 'Latin lover'—but the reader has a voice. She flirts, she holds her ground, she reacts. She’s not idealized or purity-coded, and she’s not exceptionalized either—her friends are present, desirable, complex. Javi’s seduction isn’t framed as ethnic or exotic or cultural or innate. It’s personal.

In a Joel fic that is probably the closest I’ve gotten to writing something 'age gap' trope-y, but is still twisted into something else, he’s not suave. He’s emotionally constipated, lonely, awkward—kind of a mess. And she’s confident, clever, cocky about how into her he is. That reversal gives her control without making Joel feel like a caricature. That said, a lasagna is a white-coded cultural cue and that plot point leans into care-taking. Plus, I was inspired to use the lasagna by another fic I loved reading where the reader also made lasagna…so I’m guilty of literally repeating the same cue in our fandom.

I wrote a stalker frankie fic as a colder, darker story, but I think it works because of how clearly the power imbalance is the point. It’s written intentionally, not glamorized. And the reader still feels real—anxious, specific, afraid, but not erased.

Same with a dark Dave that fic is a descent into delusion. But the reader isn’t flattened. She’s warm, socially magnetic, confident, and in a queer marriage. She only gets reduced through his lens, which is the whole point: his POV is warped. He turns her into a fantasy, but the fic never pretends it’s truth. That distortion is part of the structure, not a byproduct.

I like messy, emotionally intense dynamics. I write characters who fuck to avoid things they don’t want to feel. And I want to keep doing that. I don’t want to sanitize the sex or the emotions. I just want to do it with care—without flattening my characters, and without letting fetish tropes sneak in under the heat. That’s what I’m always working on: keeping the desire sharp without making the people disappear.

Other examples (shoutout kat, shoutout emma)

Some of the most thoughtful fics I’ve read come from people who are writing with care, complexity, and real intention—not to prove anything, but to make better, sharper stories.

Kat writes reader-inserts and OCs who aren’t white-coded yet can be soft. They’re sexual without being hypersexualized. Strong without being flattened into tropes. Her reader characters have standards, passions, texture, culture, careers, flaws. They don’t always forgive. There’s tension, care, desire, and it still doesn’t always end with her folding. She writes agency. She writes resistance. She writes female friendships that hold real weight in the narrative—not background filler, but relationships with depth and personality.

Emma consistently flips tropes on their head. She writes female friendships that are messy, complex, and believable—full of miscommunication, jealousy, and real care. She doesn’t use sex as a shortcut to healing. Her characters grow through reflection, not just orgasm. Even side characters are handled with intention. An ex-boyfriend isn’t written off as a villain—he’s a complex Asian man whose presence brings grief and clarity, not shame. A Native character is presented as desirable and emotionally present, not just background. When Joel tries to rescue the reader from a traumatic situation, it feels like it might end with comfort sex and an easy resolution—but it doesn’t. They have to work separately to develop emotionally. There’s no reward for surviving. There’s just complexity, and care.

What to do about old fics—when you find harm in your own work

Nobody wants to hear that their fic is racist. The instinct to spiral, explain, or defend is real—but it’s not helpful. The worst thing you can do in that moment is make it about you. Don’t get defensive. Don’t ask for emotional labor. Don’t start clarifying your intentions as if that cancels out the impact.

When you get called in or critiqued: take a breath. Say 'Thank you for pointing that out,' and log off for a bit. Resist the urge to DM the person—unless they explicitly invited that conversation. Come back later, reread the fic with clearer eyes, and figure out how you want to move forward. Maybe you edit it. Maybe you add a note. Maybe you don’t change the fic, but you commit to doing better in future work. All of that matters more than a performance of guilt. Accountability means showing your community you’re capable of growth—without making it someone else’s job to drag you there.

This is also where white community care comes in. BIPOC fans should not be the only ones doing this work. If you’re a white fan, get organized. Build a beta group where you flag racial coding for each other in your fics. Run anti-racist fic challenges. Hold processing sessions when you read something that pushes you. None of this is about proving you’re good. It’s about being useful, so the burden doesn’t always fall on the same people.

Consider these questions when reading or writing:

Does the reader-insert have a voice, flaws, contradictions, and agency

Asking why something turns you on, and what that power dynamic says

Boosting BIPOC writers, and making space for their work without co-opting it

Taking feedback seriously—not personally

And if you need a gut-check reminder:

Racists don’t love your fic because you’re evil. They love it because it echoes what the world already tells them: that whiteness is sweet and desirable, that brownness is rough and controllable, and that power decides who gets to be loved. You can interrupt that. You just have to care.

If you’re a white fan trying to show up better, your voice matters. But only if you use it well. Don’t center your own learning process in public unless you’ve been invited to. Don’t reword BIPOC critique to make it 'softer.' Don’t derail important conversations with your guilt or confusion. And if another white fan is writing or being praised for content that reinforces harm, speak up. Back up the people who already said something. Credit them. Talk it out with your white friends in private, so BIPOC fans don’t have to carry your process for you.

Also—and I can’t stress this enough—respect when BIPOC creators don’t want to engage. You are not owed a conversation. Don’t DM someone to apologize, explain, 'clear the air,' or ask for help fixing your fic. If they’ve named harm and stepped away, let them. Some people are protecting their peace. Some are exhausted. Some are triggered. That’s not about you. Reflect privately. Edit your work if it needs it. If an apology is appropriate, make it public—but don’t perform it. Then move forward and do better. No gold stars required.

And if you’re realizing you fucked up, consider these steps:

Don’t panic.

Re-read your fic. Pay attention to tags, tropes, visuals, and language.

Add a public note, even something simple like: 'After receiving feedback, I’ve realized this fic includes harmful tropes around race and reader coding. I’m reflecting and working to do better.'

Deleting the fic just to dodge discomfort could erase the critique and read like a cover-up.

Finally—use your platform to uplift someone else’s work. Don’t center your guilt. Center someone’s clarity. Pass the mic. Keep going.

This work isn’t about being perfect. It’s about proving that when harm happens, you don’t disappear. You show up differently.

Am I being performative? Spotting performative allyship

If you’re white and scared of being performative, that’s a good sign—it means you care. But fear alone won’t make you accountable. Clarity will.

Performative activism doesn’t always look loud. Sometimes it’s subtle. Vague statements about harm that never name who was harmed or how. Reblogging 'diversity' posts but still writing the same white-coded fics. Tagging fics as inclusive without describing the reader in a way that invites anyone nonwhite in. Writing brown men with care—but only when they’re loving you. Saying 'thank you for the feedback' but never changing how you write, read, or show up. Posting about racism in fandom without naming whiteness. Feeling the pressure to write a Black OC—not out of intention, but to prove you’re not racist.

That’s performance. It’s not always malicious. But it keeps you centered. It keeps everything safe. And it keeps things quiet enough that nothing has to change.

Here’s how to spot it: it centers the poster’s goodness, not the harm being named. It focuses on how they feel about racism, not how they benefit from it. It collapses under specificity—because as long as things stay abstract, it feels safe. The moment someone says, 'this trope is harmful,' they disappear.

So what do you do when you’re not sure if what you’re writing—or saying—is performative? You ask better questions. Am I doing this to be seen as good, or to reduce harm? Am I changing my behavior, or just trying to get credit? Am I being specific, or staying vague to protect myself? Am I creating space or just trying not to get called out?

Stop needing to be liked. Stop seeking approval and start seeking responsibility. If you’re not ready to change, don’t perform like you already have.

You don’t need to be perfect. You need to be honest. And you need to be willing to write from a place that isn’t just about centering your own comfort.

White guilt and how to respond without centering yourself

'White Tears,' 'White Guilt,' and 'White Fragility'

If these terms make you uncomfortable, good. They should. But they’re not insults—they’re patterns. And if you’re white, you’ve probably done them. The point is to recognize them before they cause harm.

White tears means centering your feelings when you’re being called in or critiqued—saying things like 'I didn’t mean it like that,' 'I feel attacked,' or 'I try so hard to be a good ally.' The impact is that you make the harm about your pain instead of the person harmed.

White guilt means believing that feeling bad is enough. You think that shame equals accountability, saying 'I feel terrible' instead of asking 'What can I change?' The impact is stagnation. You stay stuck in your feelings and never shift your behavior.

White fragility means reacting with defensiveness, anger, or retreat the moment whiteness is named. You might say 'I’m not like those people,' 'You’re being divisive,' or 'You don’t know my heart.' The impact is silencing. You shut down the conversation and reinforce white innocence.

These patterns show up constantly in fandom, especially when fans of color name racism—in fic, in casting, or in cultural dynamics. White women in particular, especially those used to seeing themselves as the 'safe ones,' often panic.

What White Women in Fandom Can Do Better:

This is a request for honesty, humility, and follow-through. If you’re white and want to do better in fandom, listen without needing to defend yourself. If your first impulse is 'that’s not me,' slow down. Ask why you need that to be true. Stop collapsing critique into cruelty.

Racism is worse than being called racist.

Let yourself be seen—and stay in the room anyway. You will mess up. Don’t disappear when you do. Decenter your comfort. You don’t have to feel good to be doing the right thing. In fact, you probably won’t. Make changes that stick.

Don’t just reblog. Shift how you write. Shift who you read. Shift how you respond when someone names harm. You’re capable of change. But you have to choose it. Not once. Not just when it’s trending. Every day. Especially when no one’s watching.

White Guilt Is Not Solidarity—It’s Just More Work:

When a Black or brown creator shares an example of racial violence in fandom—anons, harassment, erasure, white silence—they’re not doing it for pity. They’re doing it to name the pattern. To build collective awareness. To say: this is still happening, and it’s not okay.

But what happens next is predictable. White fans flood the post with replies like 'Omg I’m so sorry this happened to you 🥺,' 'People are so disgusting,' or 'I just can’t believe someone would do this.' And suddenly, the post stops being about the harm. It becomes about your reaction to the harm. It becomes a performance of guilt. Of sadness. Of moral outrage. As if being shocked proves you’re the good one.

Black and brown creators aren’t shocked. They live it. They expect it. What they don’t expect—what they’re still waiting for—is for white fans to do something about it. To name the covert forms of harm that lead to those hate messages. To question the comfort of your own circles. To stop reblogging and recommending fics that center whiteness as default and brownness as a kink.

Because when you respond with guilt and nothing else, you’re not helping. You’re offloading your discomfort onto the people already doing the labor. You’re asking to be reassured. You’re asking to be forgiven. You’re saying 'this hurts me too,' when it’s not your wound. That’s not solidarity. That’s recentering. That’s self-soothing in someone else’s grief.

Guilt Without Accountability Feeds the Same System

This same dynamic shows up in fic all the time. When white readers write brown men as soft doms, reformed criminals, or dangerous-but-redeemable types, but only for an 'innocent' reader—they’re writing from the same place those pitying comments come from: guilt. Projection. A desire to touch danger without being touched back. To be wanted by someone racialized without having to examine power. The white-coded reader gets care. Gets safety. Gets worshiped for being breakable. And the man of color gets to prove he’s not dangerous by giving her everything she wants.

That’s white guilt in a love story.

And the people who name it? The ones who say 'hey, this feels familiar—and not in a good way'? They get ignored. Or called divisive. They get hit with more microaggressions—because whiteness doesn’t like being made visible. Especially when it’s in bed with guilt and fantasy.

If It Makes You Feel Bad, Good. Now What?

Guilt without accountability is just performance. Shock without change is just delay. Pity without action is just another way to be centered. If you’re white and you feel something when you read a callout, or a critique, or a post naming harm—good. Feel it. Sit with it. But don’t make it someone else’s job to hold it for you.

Ask what you’re doing to keep that harm from repeating. Ask what you’re writing, reading, normalizing. Ask what kind of reader you imagine when you say 'you.' Ask what kind of power your story gives away—and who it gives it to. Ask whether your guilt is keeping you quiet, or keeping you innocent. Then do better. Not louder. Just better.

VIII. Tools for doing better

Questions for writers and readers to ask themselves

What’s being eroticized here? And why?Is it control? Passivity? Danger? Is the heat coming from power imbalance, emotional withholding, or someone being broken open? That’s not a problem by itself, those dynamics can be powerful. But what makes them compelling? Is the tension grounded in character, or is it just the trope doing the work?

Does this character feel like a person—or just a fantasy performance?When a dominant character is sexy because they’re angry, controlling, or detached—especially if they’re a man of color—ask whether that intensity is contextualized. Does it come from a backstory, an emotion, a flaw? Or is it just treated like something that makes him hot by default?

What version of the reader is being centered?Is she allowed to feel conflict? Does she react to what’s happening, or just receive it? Can she say no, hesitate, want more, or feel shame—and still be seen as desirable? Or does the story only reward her when she stays quiet, grateful, and easy to want?

What kind of projection does this story invite?Would someone with racist or supremacist thinking feel comfortable in the reader’s place? Would they feel flattered, validated, or in control? Or would they be pushed out by emotional depth, contradiction, or resistance?

What kind of bodies and behavior are treated as lovable?Does softness only show up in thin, pale, able-bodied characters? Do characters of color only get to be dominant, broken, or stoic? Who gets complexity, and who gets flattened to support the dynamic?

What does this story assume about power?If someone uses control, cruelty, or coercion—what happens next? Is it named? Interrogated? Does it cause consequences, or is it immediately rewarded with desire and submission?

Am I writing through a lens—or writing from it?When you use tropes like obsession, manipulation, degradation, or rescue, are you naming what those dynamics do to people? Or are you aestheticizing them? Are the characters shaping the story—or just performing roles you already had in mind?

None of this is about purity or moral approval. These questions aren’t a checklist. They’re tools. They help you write better, sharper, more human stories. Not just because you want to 'do better'—but because the work is more compelling when it holds tension and intention.

Let your characters want things, fuck up, spiral, and survive. Let them be sexy and selfish and tender and hard to pin down. Just make sure they’re not disappearing into the fantasy. Make sure they still feel real.

How to learn from Black and brown writers without stealing, checklisting, or co-opting

If you want to write reader-inserts that aren’t default white, the best thing you can do—besides interrogating your own habits—is to read more fics by Black and brown writers.

Not just to 'diversify your reading,' but to actually pay attention to how they write:

How do they build voice and interiority into the reader character?

How do they balance specificity with relatability?

How do they write softness that isn’t passivity?

How do they describe bodies, features, reactions, desire?

How do they give space to kink and power and grief without flattening identity?

Read for structure. Read for rhythm. Read for what’s not there—how white-coded language disappears, how cultural context isn’t explained for a white audience, how desire is written without safety being assumed.

Don’t copy. Don’t co-opt. Don’t turn it into a checklist.

Just watch how it’s done when the center shifts. When whiteness isn’t the default. When the reader is written for someone else.

Let that change how you see your own writing.

And when you find work that does this well: support it.

Leave comments that are actually about the writing. Don’t make it about you. Don’t say 'I didn’t even notice this was inclusive!' or 'I usually can’t relate to reader-inserts but this one worked.' Just say what you loved. Be specific. Be generous. Be quiet about your surprise.

And most importantly: don’t treat Black and brown fic as something to copy.

It’s someone’s craft. Someone’s culture. Someone’s fantasy. Someone’s language. Someone’s story.

Respect that. And let it shape you.

Challenges for white fans: critical consumption, discomfort, and growth

If you want to build anti-racist muscles in fandom—not just nod along to the discourse—start disrupting your habits on purpose. Treat it like a challenge. Something that stretches how you engage with fic, creators, and your own patterns of attention.

Try a week where you only read fics by BIPOC writers. Mute your white faves temporarily and notice what voices you’ve been missing—not out of guilt, but to shift who you imagine when you think 'good writer,' 'hot fic,' 'must-read.' Read slowly. Sit with how it feels different. Ask yourself why that difference feels unfamiliar—and whether that’s about the writing, or about what you’ve been taught to value.

Try a week without white-coded moodboards. Scroll past every promo with pale hands, porcelain skin, and bridal poses. Not because aesthetics are evil—but because visuals aren’t neutral. Uplift the fics that don’t default to whiteness. Look for creators already building outside that gaze and help make their work more visible.

Try an OC-only week. Step away from reader-inserts and see what shifts when the character isn’t 'you,' but someone with a full history, body, voice, and context. What gets easier to connect with? What feels more challenging? What does that reveal about what you’ve come to expect from reader characters?

And whatever comes up—talk about it with your white friends. Not BIPOC fans. Don’t process your discomfort with the people already carrying the weight of fandom racism. Share what challenged you, what surprised you, what made you uncomfortable. That’s where the shift begins.

This work isn’t just about what you write—it’s about what you consume. It’s about who you imagine being loved, and what kinds of stories feel good to you.

Who’s at the center of your favorite fics? Is it always someone passive, quiet, full of self-loathing until the man tells her she’s beautiful? Is she desirable because she’s breakable? Do you only feel connected to love stories when the main character shrinks, submits, or disappears?

That’s whiteness. That’s what white femininity teaches: to be wanted, you have to be thin, fragile, grateful. Rewriting that isn’t just political—it’s healing.

Seek out or create stories that don’t center whiteness. Not just in how people look, but in how they move, speak, think, love. Find a reader who’s sarcastic, fat, loud, or angry. Someone who’s chronically ill, disabled, neurodivergent, or a survivor. Someone who isn’t grateful to be wanted—but knows she’s worth it. Strip away the fantasy of whiteness and ask: can you still see the love? Can you still feel the desire?

Try it. Not because it’ll be perfect, but because what comes up in the process will show you what whiteness never taught you to imagine. That’s where the good stories live.

This also means being honest about what you're drawn to and why. One of the most overlooked lines in fandom is the one between 'inspired by' and cultural appropriation.

White fans often borrow aesthetics—Catholic guilt, cartel violence, machismo, or the vibe of a 'dangerous but sexy Latino man'—and fold it into kink or angst or desire. But if you’re not naming the culture, not honoring its complexity, not doing the work to understand where those dynamics come from, you’re not appreciating the culture.

Being 'inspired by' doesn’t mean you get to use someone else’s identity as mood. It means being responsible with what’s not yours. If you’re into cartel AUs because they feel dark and edgy, or Catholic imagery because it makes your guilt fic hotter, ask yourself what you’re doing with those choices. Are you writing culture, or just borrowing texture?

This also ties into how we think about self-insertion. A lot of reader-insert fic isn’t about writing yourself in—it’s about disappearing. When people say 'this is so relatable,' what they often mean is 'this matches what I was taught men want.'

But relatability doesn’t come from blankness. It comes from voice. From specificity. From a character with a point of view—even when the story is messy. Especially when it’s messy. If the reader never wants, questions, resists, or reflects—if she only exists to be wanted or dominated—ask why that feels safe. Who taught you that being acted upon is the same thing as being loved?

That’s the work and that’s where your fandom habits stop echoing power, and start unraveling it.

Trying to do better isn’t just about what you write—it’s about how you read, how you engage, and how you show up in other people’s spaces.

Racism shows up in comments all the time, even when it’s unintentional. It sounds like calling a fic about a brown man 'so spicy,' or describing a Black writer’s story as 'raw and powerful' because it includes trauma. It shows up when you're surprised that you 'related' to a non-white-coded reader-insert, or when you leave more enthusiastic feedback on 'inclusive' fics by white writers than on fics by writers of color.

It’s in compliments framed like confessions—'I don’t usually read this kind of thing, but…'—and in the assumption that specificity only feels 'relatable' if it’s white.

Even when you’re trying to be kind, you may still be centering your own emotions—your guilt, your surprise, your sense of growth—and placing that emotional labor onto someone who never asked for it.

So before you leave a comment, ask yourself: Am I reacting to the writing or to the identity? Am I making this about me? Am I placing my own discomfort or awakening into someone else’s space?

Support writers of color without turning their work into a moment for your self-reflection. Be generous, be vocal, be consistent—but don’t be extractive. And if you realize a comment you left may have caused harm, edit it. Apologize. Learn from it. Move forward better.

What Can You Do Right Now?

Share and reblog fic that isn’t just more of the same.

Uplift Black and brown creators—actively, consistently, and without expecting anything in return.

Make fan art for their fics.

Leave comments that highlight what you loved, what made you feel something, what stayed with you.

Make rec lists like others are already doing. Normalize it. Make it part of your fandom practice.

Deplatforming isn’t harassment—consequences are care

Deplatforming isn’t censorship. It’s not bullying. It’s not harassment. It’s choosing not to center or celebrate work that perpetuates harm. In fandom, that might mean not reblogging a fic that leans on racial fetish tropes. It might mean removing a fic from your rec list when someone points out the harm. It might mean unfollowing a creator who doubles down on stereotypes—or building fan spaces where anti-racist values are non-negotiable.

None of that is a 'pile-on.' It’s boundary-setting. And if someone asks, 'Isn’t that just bullying?'—the answer is no. Bullying is about power. Deplatforming is about accountability. No one is entitled to attention or praise. If someone repeatedly creates content that harms BIPOC readers and refuses to reflect when called in, the community has every right to disengage.

Kink isn’t the only thing that deserves careful labeling. If your fic includes racialized power dynamics, cultural trauma, religiously charged kink, or fictional violence that mirrors real-world oppression—say so. BIPOC readers deserve to know what they’re walking into before they read something that might eroticize their trauma.

If a BIPOC reader blocks you, disengages, doesn’t respond—that’s their right. You are not owed labor, forgiveness, or feedback. That boundary is theirs. Your job is to respect it and sit with whatever discomfort it brings up. If you realize your fic caused harm and you want to take accountability—edit, clarify, apologize—then do it publicly, clearly, and without expecting personal closure. Their silence doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. It means you have work to do now.

Common Excuses

'But I didn’t mean it that way.'Intent doesn’t erase impact. No one’s accusing you of malice—they’re asking you to look at what your story actually reinforces, not just what you hoped it said.

'It’s just fiction.'Fiction is where we rehearse power, intimacy, fear, safety, and control. It shapes how we understand desire. It’s never just anything.

'It’s canon!'Canon was built inside white supremacy, capitalism, and commercial media. Your job as a fanwriter isn’t to replicate it—it’s to interrogate it.

'I didn’t say she was white.'You don’t have to. The way she behaves, the way you describe innocence, safety—all of that codes her as white, even when race isn’t named.

'I didn’t think of him as Latino/Black/etc.'But you’re using racialized traits to build your fantasy. Pretending that’s neutral is just another form of erasure.

'But I’m a marginalized person too.'You can be queer, disabled, neurodivergent, or a woman—and still reproduce racism. Your marginalization doesn’t cancel out the harm you cause.

'But I find this hot!'That’s fine. You’re allowed to be turned on by power dynamics. But if the only way it works is through white fragility or racial domination, it’s time to unpack that.

'I’m scared to write now.'Itt’s not censorship; it’s accountability. Being asked to slow down and reflect isn’t punishment. It’s part of growth.

'I support diversity! I just don’t want to be policed.'Real support means showing up when it’s inconvenient. It means doing more than boosting aesthetics. It means listening when someone asks for better and not making it about you.

'But this isn’t a big deal.'It’s a big deal to the people you’ve written out of the fantasy. It’s a big deal to the readers who never get to see themselves treated as gentle, safe, or desirable. If you care about your audience, that should matter.

How to research for yourself; terms, critical examination of sources

Everything I’ve written here is grounded in my own education, experience, and conversations with peers.

But if something here feels unfamiliar or challenges what you thought you knew, you don’t have to take my word for it. You can look it up.

Search things like:

'white innocence in media'

'tone policing and white femininity'

'reader-insert fic and default whiteness'

'anti-Blackness in fandom'

'intersectionality and racial desirability politics'

'cultural appropriation vs. cultural specificity'

'proximity to whiteness and privilege'

'fetishization of Black and brown men in media'

Start with Black feminist writers. Start with Indigenous scholars. Start with people of color who’ve been talking about this longer than fandom has existed. You’ll find that the patterns I’m describing aren’t new and they’re not just personal takes, they’re part of much larger systems.

And if you’re looking for a 'real source' because you’re uncomfortable, ask yourself why. Ask why personal testimony, lived expertise, and collective harm aren’t enough. Ask what kind of voice you would believe—and whether that voice has always been centered in whiteness.

This is an invitation to take responsibility for your own learning.

Do the work privately

If you’ve learned something from this—if you’re feeling shaken, moved, angry, energized, uncertain, hopeful—good. That means it landed. But please, don’t take those feelings and dump them in a Black or brown fan’s inbox.

Don’t message your BIPOC mutuals to say 'I had no idea, this opened my eyes, I’ll be better.'

Don’t ask them if your moodboard is okay now.

Don’t send them drafts to review.

Don’t use them as your personal DEI consultant.

Don’t hand them your guilt and call it vulnerability.

If you have questions—use your resources. Use search. Use your group chats. But stop burdening BIPOC fans with labor they never asked for just because you suddenly feel something.

You don’t get to make them responsible for what you’re just now realizing. You get to be responsible. And capable. And self-reflective. And resourced enough to hold your own learning.

IV. Sustainability & Hope

Duality, burnout, and how to write ethically without giving up joy

If reading all of this makes you feel exhausted—good. That means something real is happening. You’re not just coasting. You’re being asked to examine your habits. Your patterns. Your privilege. Your desire. Your role in a system that’s been invisibly serving you this whole time.

If it makes you want to log off and take a break, ask why.

Because that feeling—the cognitive fatigue, the emotional overwhelm, the sense of 'I just can’t'—that’s what Black and brown people feel every day when they log in to fandom and see the same white-coded softness, the same idolized white leads, the same tropes that flatten them into danger, into flavor, into silence. That’s the weight of always being the deviation. Always being the lesson. Always being asked to do more emotional labor so white people can feel like they’re growing.

So if you’re feeling burned out—let it remind you what’s at stake. Let it remind you that you can feel tired and still choose to show up.

You don’t have to stop writing or reading fic. You don’t have to disappear until you’re 'perfectly educated.' You don’t have to come back with some flawless DEI-approved masterpiece.

You just have to stay. Keep listening. Keep asking better questions. Keep writing with intention. Keep interrupting comfort, even when it’s yours.

Making Change Sustainable

Sustainable change doesn’t come from guilt. It comes from integration. From making this part of your daily practice. From refusing to compartmentalize your politics and your pleasure.

So how do you do that?

Let this be a rhythm, not a panic. You don’t have to learn everything at once. You don’t have to overhaul your archive tomorrow. You just have to start being honest.

Build a practice of reflection. Before you post, before you tag, before you describe your reader—pause. Ask what your work is saying. Who it’s centering. Who it’s erasing.

Accept that you will mess up. You will get called in. You will feel embarrassed. That’s okay. Stay in the room. Repair. Adjust. Keep going.

Don’t isolate. Talk to other white writers doing this work. Hold each other accountable. Share resources. Tag responsibly. Uplift fic that does it right. Support writers of color materially and vocally without expecting praise in return.

Make it a habit. Not a panic response. Not a moment of guilt. A real, living, sustainable commitment to stop writing supremacy into your stories just because it feels easy.

You’re allowed to hold duality. You can write horny smut and still interrogate power. You can love romance and still challenge what stories get framed as 'deserving.' You can fuck up and still be trustworthy. You can feel overwhelmed and still be responsible.

This is not about being perfect. This is about being honest. Being accountable. Being part of something better than the system that taught you to want the same thing over and over again.

You don’t need a PhD to genuinely do better—it’s not hard or scary to do better; that’s propaganda (fear tactics) to convince white people to stay passive

Consider these questions before posting or reblogging a fic:

Does the reader character have thoughts, feelings, and inner conflict beyond being wanted?

Would a POC reader feel like she belongs in this fic—or is it built on white-coded behavior and assumptions?

Is the brown man a full person with emotional contradictions, or just a fantasy tool?

Are power dynamics actually mutual—or does submission = reward?

Would a racist feel powerful, entitled, or flattered reading this?

And if you realize you wrote something that doesn’t hold up? That’s not failure—it’s a chance to grow. You can revise publicly. You can name it in your tags or author’s note. You can say:

'This fic reflects tropes I wouldn’t write the same way now.'

'I’m learning about how reader-inserts can be unconsciously white-coded.'

'Thanks to those who’ve raised awareness—I’m taking time to improve.'

Nobody gets it perfect. But you can show you’re paying attention. You can make it easier for BIPOC readers to feel safe, seen, and included—without them having to do the work for you.

It’s overwhelming to learn? It’s more overwhelming to live it. Show up anyway.

If you’re feeling uncomfortable, that’s the starting line.

Every time your brain goes, 'But I just wanted to read fic and relax,' ask yourself: 'What does that escape look like for BIPOC readers?' Because when they open AO3 or Tumblr, they don’t just see fluff and smut. They see the same racist tropes topping the charts. They see white-coded reader inserts getting adored. They see brown men flattened into kinks, pain porn, or tools for someone else’s redemption arc.

If your escape depends on erasing someone else’s humanity, it’s not harmless. It’s not neutral. It’s privilege. And you can write something better than that.

It’s okay to feel overwhelmed. But don’t let that feeling turn into silence. Stay in it. Learn out loud. Try again. Show up anyway.

You don’t have to choose between pleasure and accountability. You can read fic and pay attention. You can share headcanons and make space for critique. Time doesn’t have to stop when something hard gets said—you just have to keep moving with intention. That’s what community care actually looks like.

Joy as resistance; not avoidance

Joy is not the opposite of resistance—it’s part of it. Especially for BIPOC fans, finding joy in fandom isn’t avoidance, it’s survival. It’s a way to carve out space where we exist fully: laughing, thirsting, creating, building community. That joy doesn’t mean we’re ignoring harm—it means we’re still here, despite it.

For white fans, it’s important to understand that doing this work—learning, unlearning, showing up—doesn’t mean you lose access to joy. It means you make space for more people to find it too. So keep writing, keep reading, keep screaming in the tags. Just don’t let joy become the excuse for silence. Let it be part of what keeps you in the work.

The world is overwhelming; change happens in your circles

The world feels overwhelming because it is. But change doesn’t start with fixing everything—it starts with what’s in front of you. Your group chat. Your mutuals. Your reblogs. The fics you write, rec, or stay silent about. You don’t need a massive platform to shift culture. You just need to show up where you are, consistently and with care.

Racism in fandom doesn’t thrive because people are evil—it thrives because people stay quiet. So start small. Say something. Make your corner better. That’s where real change begins. The world is overwhelming, and the systems we’re up against—racism, white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism—are massive on purpose. You’re not going to dismantle them overnight. But that doesn’t mean you’re powerless.

Change doesn’t start with fixing everything at once. It starts in community. In the stories we tell, the conversations we hold, the ways we show up for each other.

You shift culture by practicing it. By protecting your people. By educating yourself and the people around you. By building habits of care and accountability, even when it’s messy. Especially when it’s messy. You’re not doing this alone.

V. Practical Tools / Simple questions for writers and readers

for White Fic Writers Who Want to Do Better

You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to be intentional.

Race is already in the room. If you don’t name it, white supremacy will fill in the blanks.

Your fic is powerful. That’s why it matters what stories you tell, who they center, and what they normalize.

Questions for writers to ask themselves about their fics

Desire and power:

Who holds the power in this fic, and why?

Is danger aesthetic or contextualized?

If consent is broken, is there fallout—or is it treated as hot?

Reader coding:

Does the reader have agency or just reactions?

Is she valued for who she is—or for being easy to hurt or control?

If she pushed back, would the story still work?

Character of color:

Does this character have emotional depth, contradiction, and context?

Would the story still be 'hot' if the character were white?

Is this character desired—or used?

Fandom structure:

Are canon women or partners of color erased to make space for the reader?

Would a racist reader find this fic validating or comfortable?

What to do with the answers:

If your answers show complexity and care, you’re on the right track

If you see red flags, pause and reflect—don’t spiral, just revise

You don’t need to rewrite your whole fic to do better. You just have to notice and adjust.

A Quick Reader Checklist: How to Read Fanfic Without Reinforcing Harm

Am I reblogging the same trope over and over—especially if it centers white softness and brown dominance?

Am I praising BIPOC stories for being 'relatable' or 'surprisingly powerful'? Why is that surprising?

Am I commenting on the story—or just sharing how it made me feel?

Do I only interact with BIPOC creators when the story is about race or trauma?

Am I reading outside my comfort zone—or just going back to what feels 'safe' and familiar?

Do this instead:

Boost fics that don’t center whiteness.

Leave thoughtful comments that focus on the craft.

Follow and reblog BIPOC writers and artists regularly.

Share recs, not just reactions.

Reflect on what you desire—and why.

You can still read fluff. You can still enjoy PWP. You can still have fun. Just make sure your joy isn’t built on someone else’s erasure.

Glossary (terms and concepts)

Capitalism An economic system built on profit, private ownership, and competition. Capitalism rewards exploitation—of labor, bodies, land, and culture. In fandom, this shows up when content is valued by how fast it’s produced, how widely it spreads, and how well it aligns with marketable trends—even if it harms marginalized people. Using racial fetishization of brown characters to get more notes is a form of capitalism. It turns identity into a commodity, rewarding writers for exploiting racialized desire. Even in fandom, capitalist logic shows up: what gets attention is what sells—fast content, trending tropes, and characters of color packaged for consumption. It’s racial capitalism in action. The character isn’t loved—they’re used.

Colonialism A system where one group takes land, labor, and resources from another—through force, control, or domination. Colonialism didn’t end—it evolved. In media, colonial ideas show up in who gets to speak, who gets saved, and who gets written as 'other.' Colonial values are often fetishized in fic through tropes like marriage, babies, and traditional family roles. These aren’t neutral—they reflect a system built on control, ownership, and legacy. When those tropes are centered without questioning who they exclude or how they uphold white, Western norms, they reinforce colonial ideas about whose lives—and love stories—deserve happy endings.

Covert racism Racism that’s subtle, coded, or framed as 'not about race.' It looks like:

Casting brown men as dangerous but desirable

Erasing canon women of color from fic

Assuming a reader-insert is white unless told otherwise

Treating anti-racism as 'aggressive' but never interrogating white defensiveness This is what most white writers participate in—often without realizing it.

Cultural erasure Writing characters of color without their context, history, or identity. This happens when brownness is aestheticized—used to signal danger, mystery, or sex appeal—without any attention to who that character actually is.

Default whiteness The assumption that characters are white unless stated otherwise. In fanfic, this often shows up in reader inserts, casting choices, and who gets imagined as central or desirable. It’s not always named—but it shapes everything.

Desire vs. consumption Desire sees someone as whole. It allows contradiction, agency, and context. Consumption uses someone to fulfill a fantasy—especially when that fantasy relies on power imbalance, passivity, or cultural erasure.

Fetishization Reducing someone’s race, culture, or difference into the reason they’re desirable. It turns identity into a kink. Fetishization flattens people into objects: something to want, not understand.

Imperialism The political and economic expansion of power—usually by a dominant country over others. Imperialism shapes global narratives about who’s civilized, who’s dangerous, and who needs saving. It informs everything from casting choices to how characters of color are framed as threatening, exotic, or useful.

Institutional racism Racism that’s built into the policies, practices, and structures of institutions like schools, governments, media industries, and publishing. It doesn’t rely on personal hatred. It just keeps things unequal by default. This is why 'diversity' efforts don’t work if the system itself isn’t changing.

Internalized racism When people of color absorb the messages of white supremacy and turn them inward—believing they are less valuable, less desirable, or less worthy. This often shows up in how characters of color are written by white authors: with flattened identities, no softness, or as villains who need to be 'tamed' or punished.

Kink vs. reenactment Kink can be consensual, negotiated, and nuanced—even when it’s dark or messy. Reenactment is what happens when racialized power, gendered violence, or colonial scripts are written without awareness. One is about intention. The other is about default.

Microaggressions Small, everyday actions or comments that reinforce harmful stereotypes or assumptions. They might seem harmless to you—but to the person experiencing them, they stack up. In fic, microaggressions show up in word choices, character framing, or who gets to be complex.

Examples:

Describing brown skin as 'exotic' or 'rough'

Framing a canonically brown character as angry or stoic with no emotional life

Making the reader desirable only because she’s soft, obedient, or easily hurt

Oppression When a group of people is systemically denied access to power, safety, or opportunity because of who they are. Oppression isn’t just about individual prejudice—it’s built into systems, laws, media, and culture. Racism, sexism, ableism, and transphobia are all forms of oppression.

Overt racism Obvious, explicit racism. Slurs. Hate speech. Violent rhetoric. It’s easy to condemn but focusing only on overt racism lets white people avoid addressing the deeper, subtler systems they benefit from.

Power The ability to control, influence, or define what’s considered normal, desirable, or valuable. Power isn’t just personal—it’s structural. You can have good intentions and still participate in systems that give you more power than others.

Prejudice A bias or assumption about someone based on their identity. Anyone can hold prejudices. But prejudice becomes racism when it’s backed by power. That’s why white people can’t experience racism in the same way people of color do—because whiteness still holds structural power.

Privilege Unearned advantages you have because of your identity. Like race, gender, class, or ability. Privilege doesn’t mean your life is easy. It means that your challenges aren’t caused by your identity. Privilege shapes who gets heard, who gets seen, and who gets centered. Even in fic.

Racial scripts The repeated cultural stories that teach us what roles different groups are 'supposed' to play. These scripts shape who gets cast as the villain, the love interest, the victim, the prize. Even fanfic, which feels personal and transformative, still carries those scripts if we don’t question them.

Racialized power Power that’s shaped by race and history. In fic, this often looks like brown or Black men written as violent, stoic, or dangerous—and white-coded readers written as delicate, overwhelmed, or redemptive. The imbalance is eroticized, not questioned.

Racialized violence Harm that targets people because of their race or treats race as part of what makes that harm 'feel right' in the story. In fic, this might mean writing sexual violence against brown characters in a way that eroticizes their pain, or treating their trauma as aesthetic.

Racism Racism is the combination of prejudice and power that upholds white dominance. It shows up in laws, institutions, stories, and silence. Racism is not just individual hatred.

Reader-insert Fanfic where the main character is unnamed and written in second person POV. It’s often framed as self-insert—but it’s never actually neutral. Even if race isn’t mentioned, most reader-inserts carry coded expectations that center whiteness, softness, or passivity.

Structural racism The broader system of policies, histories, and cultural norms that advantage white people while harming people of color. It includes institutional racism, but also things like generational wealth gaps, education disparities, and cultural erasure in media. You don’t opt in; it’s already there.

Stereotypes Cultural shortcuts that reduce people to a single, usually harmful, trait. In fanfic, stereotypes show up when characters of color are only allowed to be:

Sexy but dangerous

Stoic and unreadable

Angry, loud, or in need of fixing

Magical, wise, or self-sacrificing

Or totally erased Even positive stereotypes ('nurturing Latina,' 'loyal Black best friend') are limiting and harmful.

Systemic vs. individual Most harm isn’t caused by one bad person, it’s caused by a system that trains people to act a certain way. You don’t have to be a bad person to participate in harmful systems. But you do have a responsibility to unlearn and change.

The 'Latin Lover' trope A racist stereotype that frames Latino men as hypersexual, emotionally volatile, and often dangerous but always desirable. In fanfic, this shows up when characters like Javier Peña or Joel Miller are portrayed as silent, growling, aggressive, or possessive—especially toward a softer, white-coded reader. Their culture is erased. Their danger is the kink.

White-coded When a character or reader is described without explicit racial markers, but their behavior, appearance, or treatment follows familiar patterns of whiteness, like fragility, purity, innocence, or assumed desirability. This often happens unintentionally, especially in 'blank' reader-inserts.

White supremacy Not just the KKK. White supremacy is a system that normalizes and prioritizes whiteness in culture, institutions, and daily life. It teaches us who’s desirable, who’s safe, who’s worthy. It makes whiteness invisible by making everything else stand out.

Links to explore

Some references to further explore these concepts and for white people to do more learning (many of these websites host resource libraries, videos, or toolkits) : 1. National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC): https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/digital-learning/north-star/resources#freedom

2. Race Forward: Systemic Racism https://www.raceforward.org/resources/video-series/what-systemic-racism

3. UC Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute: Structural Racism https://belonging.berkeley.edu/structural-racism-explained

4. The Center for Racial Justice in Education https://mailchi.mp/centerracialjustice/resources

5. Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance) https://www.learningforjustice.org

6. SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org

White-centered anti-racist education, including plain-language definitions and action guides

7. The Anti-Oppression Network https://theantioppressionnetwork.com

Definitions and frameworks for systemic oppression, including intersecting identities

8. The Conscious Style Guide https://consciousstyleguide.com

Offers guidance for writers on inclusive language, bias, and stereotype awareness

9. Everyday Feminism https://everydayfeminism.com/racial-justice/

#an important read

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foli-vora · 5 months ago

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RED DEAD REDEMPTION II ᨖ

#whimpering pathetically at my screen

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foli-vora · 5 months ago

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Arthur in charcoal.

#i need this framed and on my wall plz

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foli-vora · 5 months ago

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RED DEAD REDEMPTION II ᨖ

1K notes · View notes

foli-vora · 5 months ago

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Had to make a meme to describe me currently

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foli-vora · 5 months ago

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LMAO STOP I HAD THIS SCENE PLAYING IN MY HEAD WHEN I WROTE IT 😂😂😂 thanks for reading angel ❤️

run to you: ch 9

marcus pike x f!reader

A/N: we're getting somewhere now and I for one am fucking thrilled. Enjoy the new chapter with some feels! And, as always, a huge thank you for all the love! I appreciate each and every one of you! I have a day off tomorrow so I'm gonna sit and reply to the reblogs I've kept in my drafts from the prev chapter and reply to your asks x

Summary: Following on from ‘Traitor’ and ‘You’re Somebody Else’. An unexpected visitor throws you right back into the life you thought you left behind. Working beside the man that put you behind bars is one thing, pretending like you never loved him is another.

Word count: 5.7k-ish

Warnings: there's angst because obviously, but I believe we've finally earnt some semi-sweet and comforting fluff now - finally (don't get too comfortable tho lmao). Swearing, mentions of murder, vague descriptions bullet wounds, talk of the break in, lots of anxiety and sweating, scribs is going through it, not exactly a suicidal mindset but more of a 'whats the point fighting this' mindset regarding the danger and threat of the whole situation, protective!Marcus coming in HOT, bit of yearning and touching and FEELINGS and they're finally getting somewhere thank god, but again, don't get too comfortable lol. I finished this at 4am so we're gonna ignore any mistakes thank u

main masterlist | series masterlist

This story is 18+ only.

The slam of a door has your breath halting to a choking stop in your throat, and the person responsible for slamming it open in such a hurry steps through not even a second later. You knew it was him coming, heard his hurried rush up the stairs from the speaker of your phone clenched tightly in your hand, but the pure and utter relief that still washes through your system is so overwhelming your knees threaten to give out from beneath you.

“Marcus.”

He spares you a long glance as he closes the distance between you while sliding his own phone into his pocket, eyes rolling over your body where it half leans against the wall until he’s satisfied you’re unharmed. His hand raises, a gesture for you to keep where you are, and your heart slams against your ribs as he pulls a gun from out behind him.

“Stay here.”

It’s not a request, it’s an order.

You follow it, swallowing around the lump in your throat as he steps into your apartment and the silence that follows does nothing to quell the anxiety twisting its way around your nerves. What if you were wrong, and someone was still in there? What if he finds something? What if whoever did this is coming back and you’re left out here alone?

He appears only a few moments later, the frown between his brows deep.

“Are you okay?”

Are you? Physically, yes.

You give a little nod, shifting under your jacket and doing an internal check over your frazzled nerves and endlessly whirling mind. “Just… shaken, I guess.”

“That’s understandable. You haven’t touched anything? Moved anything?”

“No,” you murmur, fingers pinching and tugging at your sleeve. “You told me not to.”

“Good, that’s good. You did good.”

The praise does little to settle your nerves, but you appreciate the thought.

The door to the stairwell opens, your heart all but stopping dead in your chest at the thought of the unknown and the fear that freezes the blood in your veins. It’s nothing to worry about, the new faces that come through the door bare you no harm, but you still can’t seem to wind down from the pure and utter panic that seizes you.

Marcus immediately strides forward to greet the couple of police officers that introduce themselves, leaving you behind with your arms wrapped so tightly around your chest in an effort to ground yourself.

A high pitched ringing pierces your ears and your eyes flutter closed, focusing every thought on counting the breaths that leave your lungs. In, out. In, out. It works for the most part, the ringing in your ears slowly subsiding until you’re able to hear a familiar voice carefully reach out to you.

“Hey Picasso.”

Jacob’s coming to a stop in front of you when you open your eyes, concern swimming in his eyes as he rakes them over you. He’s dressed much like Marcus, clad in wrinkled track pants and a loose fitting tee that you can plainly see is inside out. Another friendly face is calming, and the little smile that pulls at your lips isn’t easy and probably comes off more like a grimace, but he doesn’t mention it.

“Hey Jacob,” you murmur quietly, hands rubbing along your arms.

“You doin’ okay?”

You give a shrug, eyes darting past him to watch Marcus and the couple of officers talk. “I’m alright. What are you doing here?”

“Pike called in for backup on his way here,” he explains, head turning to eye where your front door had been pried open. “I live the closest so…”

You nod, eyes dropping to the floor. “Sorry to get you out of bed for this.”

“Don’t be. You should be more sorry for leaving without saying goodbye. Thought we were friends, Pollock.”

He’s frowning playfully at you when you look up at him, and you shift a little from guilt. He means no harm, you know that, but you didn’t even think of him when you decided to back out of the case. Was he a friend? You suppose so. You’d opened up to him, warmed to his easy going presence and the way he stood up for you. He was nice.

“I’m sorry about that. I just couldn’t—”

He holds up a hand with a gentle smile. “You don’t need to explain yourself to me, it’s alright. Gotta do what’s best for you.”

Marcus appears beside him not even a moment later, slapping a thankful hand to Jacob’s shoulder before resting his eyes on you.

“They’ve just got a few questions for you. Nothing major, just a little statement and then they’ll call in the crime scene team and we’ll leave.”

“What’s the plan, boss?”

“She’s coming with me. She can stay at my place tonight,” Marcus says, and Jacob merely nods in return, as if he was expecting it. “I need you to stay and consult with the local detectives—”

You stop listening, brows coming together as you process his words. His place? Since when is that an option? And why couldn’t you stay somewhere else? A hotel? The little warehouse space they had reserved for you to paint? Hell, you’d settle for the couch at Jake’s at this point.

“What?”

Marcus sighs sharply, brown eyes fixing on you.

“Don’t fight me on this. We can find you somewhere else in the morning, I just—please.”

You find yourself nodding in response to his plea.

The officers behind them make themselves known, reaching out to you by name and beginning a small line of questioning. You answer their questions to the best of your ability, doing your best to focus on them as Marcus and Jacob discuss your apartment quietly behind you.

What time did you get home? What did you do when you found your apartment broken into? Do you know anyone who would do this? Is there anyone who would wish to harm you?

All of the questions begin to make you sick after a while, and Marcus must see it.

He steps in easily, directing their attention to him and cutting any further questioning off with the kind of finality only an agent of his standing could. They back off under his reassurance that he’ll answer any further questions regarding your situation and the investigation you were involved in himself at a later time, once you were settled somewhere safe.

With a nod of goodbye from Jacob, you follow Marcus down the corridor and down the stairs of your building. You try to relax, try to reassure yourself that you’re okay now, but with the gun in plain sight in front of you tucked into the waistband of Marcus’s pants and the tense way he seems to hold himself, eyes checking and rechecking every corner and space on your way out of the building, it does little to settle your nerves.

He opens and holds the passenger door of his car for you, and it’s impossible to miss the way he studies the street with eagle eyes over your head as you slip into the seat and settle yourself against the leather. You watch him walk around the front of your car, wondering what he sees, what he's thinking.

He’s on high alert, even when he slides in beside you and starts the car. It’s silent as he drives. He doesn’t move to flick the radio on to fill the silence, too lost in his own theories to even spare it a thought. Minutes tick by, the flash of streetlights passing by your window and washing over your features as your face twists with your thoughts, running over theories again and again until you feel almost dizzy.

You need to know what he thinks before you drive yourself mad.

Your voice catches in your throat. “Is this related to the investigation?”

“I don’t know yet, but given the timing it’s probable.”

“Am I in danger?”

His fingers rub over his mouth, his gaze focused solely on the red light in front of him as he internally debates on how to answer. You study his side profile, wondering if he’s intentionally avoiding your eyes to dodge answering truthfully or simply just trying to find a way to process his own thoughts.

A soft sigh eventually leaves his lips.

“Maybe.”

The stirrings of a chill begins to creep along your shoulders, a sick feeling bubbling in the pit of your stomach from having your chaotic string of anxiety ridden theories confirmed.

“Hey, I meant what I said. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

You don’t have the strength to say anything, couldn’t even find words if you tried. A thank you attempts to build itself on your tongue, yet it dissolves away the more your mind races and tears start to bite at your eyes. Your hand reaches across the small distance over the centre console to rest on the back of his own, hoping the silent gesture would get your words across well enough.

Ever so slightly his hand shifts beneath yours, and a part of you wilts at the thought of him pulling away and taking away the comforting reassurance the physical touch provides, your fragile state finding an anchor in the familiar touch of skin.

But he doesn’t take it away.

His hand carefully turns, palm now warm against yours, and his fingers gently tangle with your own.

He says nothing, merely letting the rough pad of his thumb stroke along your skin. The steady back and forth of the touch begins to coax the race of your heart into something calmer, soothes the sting of tears. Neither of you move your hands for the rest of the drive.

—

It’s exactly what you expect.

The apartment is neat and tidy, decorated with simple pieces of furniture and little splashes of character throughout. You’re not surprised to see art, and lots of it. Framed prints hang from walls, ranging in size and emotion. A floor to ceiling mahogany bookshelf stretches along a wall behind a small dining table and you itch to tread closer to the collection of books lining it, to see who sits in the few frames that sit peacefully on the shelves.

“It’s very… you,” you comment quietly after studying your new surroundings, readjusting the strap of your weekend bag on your shoulder.

Marcus shifts where he stands, fingers toying with his keys and a small smile tugging at the corner of his lips. “Is that a compliment?”

“You’ll never know.”

The smile widens and he walks deeper into the apartment, keys rattling softly as he places them on the breakfast counter. “The spare bedroom is just in the hall to the left, the bathroom is opposite.”

“Spare room?”

“You didn’t think I was going to make you sleep on the couch, did you?”

“I don’t know,” you reply.

You honestly didn’t know what to think when he bought up the topic of staying at his place. You weren’t opposed to sleeping on a couch when the occasion called for it, and God knows you’d rather take the floor than his bed. That felt entirely too personal given your history.

A spare room was a welcome development. You’d be out of his way and in your own space until he’s able to organise something else.

“Okay, well…” you falter, somewhat awkward just standing there in the middle of his apartment. “If it’s alright, I’m—I’m going to get some sleep. It’s been a long day.”

He nods, eyes falling briefly away from you.

“Yeah. Yeah, of course. Uh, help yourself to the kitchen if you need anything during the night. If you need something else and can’t find it, my room’s at the end.”

You linger for just a moment more, a small piece of you clinging to the reassuring safety his presence seems to provide after the previous events of the night. His gaze moves back to you, so open and steady and soft, it finally pushes you to speak the words you’ve been struggling to get out since he all but flung himself out of bed to get to you.

“Thank you, Marcus, for… everything. I really appreciate it.”

“Anytime,” he murmurs, gentle but with the firm seal of a promise.

His eyes follow you as you begin to make your way to the spare room, the weight of them familiar and surprisingly not unwelcome. No, you feel comforted, secure under his watchful gaze, able to breathe and release the tension embedded into your shoulders.

He doesn’t shy away when you spare him a final glance over your shoulder, and when he returns your small smile with one of his own, something in your chest seems to warm at the tender curl of it. The feeling follows you even when you close the door and slip into something more comfortable, stirs along your nerves when you slide into the crisp clean sheets of the bed and settle against the fluffy pillow.

And it’s still there, even when you succumb to the weight pulling at your eyes and slip into a heavy sleep. It’s not enough to keep the nightmares away though, shadows creeping along the familiar walls of your apartment in your mind and ghostly hands reaching out to tighten around your throat. You awake with a start sometime later, hands tight as they twist in the sheets and heart drumming against your ribs.

You attempt to settle back against the mattress with a few deep breaths, but the shadows dance along the ceiling of the room, taunting you with your recent fear.

Maybe they’d have faces if you knew who was behind this. Maybe they’d be the faces of old acquaintances, pinched with hatred and disgust that you’d given them so easily to the FBI and out for revenge. Maybe they’d be strangers, twisted by fury and fuelled by the significant loss of money from your replicas replacing their targets.

Maybe you deserved it.

Maybe this was just karma, the fall out of your choices and the consequences of each finally catching up to you. Maybe Marcus was wasting his time trying to step in, to save you from a fate you had probably sealed yourself in for when you first agreed to step into that forbidden world all that time ago.

These people, the widespread global business that runs behind closed doors, it was all so much bigger than you ever could’ve imagined when you started out.

What hope do you have of outrunning it? Of surviving the escape of it? There’s no leaving it behind.

Your body feels heavy as you pry yourself from the sheets and sit along the edge of the bed, neck stretching to either side in an effort to rid the ache slowly building behind your temples. Your mind continues to race, barraging you with questions of the unknown, the logical part of your mind struggling to comprehend, to put together how this came to be and how it could possibly play out.

None of it seems to lean in your favour.

The mere notion of it is dark, the apparent threat of death stretching and twisting through your mind until it’s seemingly all you can think about.

Marcus can try, but in reality, how much difference could he possibly make in the end? Whether it was now, or months, maybe even years, down the line… he won’t always be a phone call away. He won’t always be there with a promise that nothing will ever happen to you because of all of this, because of the life you chose to live.

You’re quiet as you slip out of the room and into the living area of his apartment, ensuring to keep your feet light over the floorboards to not disturb him. He had left a light on for you, a lamp perched on the side table beside the couch. That little trace of warmth returns with the thoughtful notion, attempts to coax the darkness plaguing your mind away, but it does very little in the end. The thoughts still run rampant.

The blanket you reach for on the couch is soft and smells comfortingly familiar as you tuck it around your shoulders. In the subdued light of the apartment, you nuzzle into it as you pad to the kitchen, taking in one final steadying breath before setting about finding a glass and filling it from the tap.

Sinking into the couch, you tuck your feet beneath you and huddle deeper into the blanket, thankful the warm light keeps your mind from finding shapes within the shadows stretching along the walls.

You don’t know how long you sit there, mind racing and anxiety spiralling out of control, but the telltale sound of a door opening down the hall has your eyes immediately fixing on the hallway, waiting for him to appear. He does only a moment later, hair askew and shadows under his eyes.

“I can’t sleep,” you offer quietly as an explanation, tucking the blanket tighter around your shoulders. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”

“You didn’t,” he replies, footsteps almost inaudible as he tracks his way to the couch and sinks into the cushions with a soft sigh. “I can’t sleep either.”

Every time he closed his eyes he saw your body spread out on an autopsy table, the soft skin of your forehead swollen and pierced by a single bullet wound. He hears vivid descriptions of your death, the degree of decomposition. His mind plagued him, tortured him, with it all over and over.

He swallows the bile building in his throat, rubbing tiredly at his eyes and taking comfort in the fact that you’re beside him. Breathing, alive.

Is that how this could’ve turned out? What if you had gotten home and they were still there? What if you didn’t have the chance to call him? Who would’ve eventually found you? What if they had come back and he was too late? He shakes the thoughts away, refusing to entertain them for another single second.

It won’t happen. He simply wouldn’t let it.

“How are you doing?”

“Not good.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Do you? You wouldn’t even know how to form your thoughts into words. Where would you even begin? What would talking about it achieve? Nothing. There was no point. Besides, it wasn’t his burden to bear. This struggle was all yours and yours alone.

“No,” you mutter finally, sighing quietly. “It’s nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

“It is something, and it does matter,” he pushes softly, head resting gently against the back of the couch and head rolling to the side to watch you pick at his blanket. “I know it won’t mean much coming from me, but you’re not alone. You can talk to me.”

“To be honest, I don’t even know where to start. My mind’s all over the place. I had a nightmare and it—I don’t know. I just… I’m scared. That’s all.”

Your tone is dismissive, and he seems to take the hint that that’s all he’ll be getting out of you while you’re in this state. He doesn’t push any further, and simply lets the silence fall over you both as his eyes trace the outline of his coffee table.

“Are you hungry?” He asks after a little while. “I can cook you something.”

Your face twists, eyes bouncing to the window where the night still stretches out beyond it. “Marcus, it’s like 3am.”

He hums lowly, and in the corner of your eyes you see a small boyish smile forming on his lips.

“Perfect time for pancakes.”

Pancakes? At this hour? But your stomach rumbles at the thought, reminding you that you didn’t get to enjoy the leftovers sitting in your fridge that you were saving for after your shift. You can’t remember when you ate last, wondering if it was something small before leaving for work or even something earlier than that.

He must see the indecision play across your face.

“Come on,” he coaxes gently, standing from the couch and holding a hand out to you. “We’ll make some pancakes and then we’ll watch a movie or something. It’ll take your mind off of everything. I’ll even let you pick what we watch.”

The offer of a distraction is welcome and highly appreciated, but guilt still bubbles in your system from keeping him from rest yet again. He has a rough job, with sleep surely being scarce already. You couldn’t ruin his attempt of getting what little sleep he could after you practically pulled him out of bed earlier.

“Shouldn’t you go and try to get some sleep, agent?”

He gives a small shrug, that smile curling along the edges of his lips. “It’s not my first all-nighter. Come on, you know you want to.”

You fight a smile of your own and relent, reaching for his hand and letting him pull you to your feet.

It works.

Through the making of the batter, the playful tossing of the pancakes, and the soft drone of American Pickers playing out across the screen when you both finally sink back into the couch with your plates, you find that your mind had been peacefully quiet, your anxiety calmed to a minimum.

Another thing to thank him for.

That warmth, soft and sweet, stirs back to life, and when you glance over at him you have a fleeting thought that you might be in more danger than you’re ready to admit. You immediately stamp it out and refuse to let it grow into something more, swallowing down your appreciative thank you and instead moving to cuddle into the plush arm of the couch, ensuring to keep a distance stretched out between you.

—

Your tea’s cold, the steady rolls of steam wafting up from its pale brown surface long gone. You don’t have the appetite for it right now, the craving all but snatched away with the one simple phone call Marcus had stepped into his bedroom to take. He said he’d be back, that he’d tell you everything.

Time rolls on, and your impatience merely grows along with it.

Do they have any answers? Do they know who was in your apartment and why?

You hope for something random, a break in from someone’s need for quick cash and that can be in, but deep in your gut you know it’s not the case. It wasn’t random. It wasn’t that easy, that simple.

He immediately has your full attention when he eventually reappears, frowning down at his phone before sliding it into the pocket of his slacks. He’s dressed and ready for work, the soft comfortable side of him hidden behind his neatly pressed suit. He senses your questions before you have time to even form them on your tongue, and he gets straight into it, confirming your theories and curdling that bitter anxiety back to life.

“There were fingerprints at your apartment,” he starts, and you shift on the couch as something flashes across his face. “They were a match to the prints we previously pulled—”

—from a gun.

He feels physically sick.

They matched the prints from the ones found on a gun, linked to the murder of one of your old crew. These people, this person, had been in your home, touching your things, been so damn close to you…

Marcus stiffens his shoulders, heart beating at the back of his throat. He doesn’t know their motives, but judging by the state they left your apartment in, he gathered they weren’t there to recruit you. Someone somewhere knew you, knew what you had done, and they weren’t fucking happy.

“I’m putting you into protective custody.”

It’s final, leaving no room for argument.

You’re left to nod, accepting his decision readily despite the dark thoughts that return with it all. What’s the point? His face twists, eyes suddenly narrowed and on you and it’s only then that you realise you’d unintentionally said it out loud. You sigh tiredly, eyes falling away from the questions flashing across his face.

“Marcus, they—” you falter, hands clenching to hide their tremble, “—they’ll find me eventually, whether it’s now or in the future. What more can you do?”

“Anything. Everything. I’ll bounce you around this country until I find all of them if I have to.”

It’s spoken with such a determined vigor you’re left with nothing to say in return. You can’t argue with his resolve. You can’t tell him that it’s ridiculous, that you’re not worth that trouble and that you doubt the FBI would waste such resources on keeping someone like you safe. You’re hardly on the top of their priority list.

“But what kind of life is that? I’m practically on the run until you think it’s safe?”

“If it wasn’t for us—if it wasn’t for me—requesting your assistance with the case, you wouldn’t be in this situation. It’s my responsibility to see to it that you’re safe while we continue the investigation and apprehend those responsible, no matter how long it takes.”

So he thinks it’s his fault you’re in this position. This is him just covering his back, crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s so he wouldn’t be held responsible for anything that happens to you. It’s understandable, his job must mean a lot to him considering his position. It’s your fault you’re even here in the first place.

“Marcus, you don’t have to feel guilty for any of this. I chose to do it. It wouldn’t be your fault if anything happens to me, that’s just the consequences of getting myself mixed into everything when I did.”

“Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“You don’t know that, you can’t promise that—”

“Nothing is going to happen to you,” he repeats, firmer.

There’s that resolve again. You see it etched into his expression, buried within the tightness between his brows. There’s no moving him from it, no talking sense or pushing your case. He won’t hear it, won’t entertain any other possibility than the one he’s seemingly settled on. How could he be so sure?

It wouldn’t kill him to admit there’s a risk here.

You sigh, hands itching to busy themselves as worry curdles along your veins. It pushes your heart faster, turns your stomach until you feel a sickening ache building in your throat. You could take comfort from how hell bent he is on keeping you safe from harm, but your mind pushes to see reason, to know why he’s being so damn stubborn about this.

Even if Jane was right about his supposed ‘feelings’, going to all this trouble for a silly little crush built from your past is just ridiculous. Unless that’s what he’s trying to make up for. It’s not about feelings that are or aren’t there, it’s about fixing what happened. That’s what he’s doing. He couldn’t stop everything spiralling last time, so maybe that’s what he’s trying to do this time.

“You don’t have to do all of this, you know.”

Confusion bleeds into his expression, his hands finding his hips as he waits for further elaboration.

“You don’t need to make up for the past or anything. It’s fine. We’re fine.”

And you were, in a way. Oddly enough, this whole experience had given you closure on a chapter you never thought you’d be able to close. Never did you think you’d be able to achieve this kind of… peace with it all, and yet here you are—in his apartment, comfortable in his presence and the bitter hatred that had curdled so viciously in your heart nowhere to be found.

Of course it still hurts, and probably always will, but he wasn’t all bad. His continuous insistence in keeping you safe, his genuine sincerity in comforting you, and respecting the boundaries you had made along the way through coming into the investigation had shown you that. You can believe he had no intentions of letting it spiral as much as it did back then, didn’t mean for it to develop into what you had shared. It must have been confusing for him, the lines blurring between real and fake.

“Is that what you think I’m doing?” He questions softly, hardened frame weakening under your gaze. “Making up for the past?”

“Why else would you be doing all of this?”

The quiet that falls between you is built with something you can’t seem to place in the moment, his warm brown eyes flicking over your face almost as if he were debating saying something. His mouth opens, and you wait, watching some kind of conflict pass across his face before he exhales gently, his gaze falling to the floor.

He leaves your question unanswered.

“I’m going into the office to organise your accommodations and to follow up on those prints. I’ll have an agent come to collect you sometime later this morning—you can grab some things from your apartment before we move you.”

You should leave it, but you can’t. You want to know why. If it’s not because he’s trying to compensate for the past, then why is he going to all these extremes? Protective custody is a logical step in this kind of circumstance, but you highly doubt there are agents just opening their homes to victims needing somewhere safe to stay.

He had wanted you here, in his apartment where he could watch over you himself. He had made you pancakes, made such an idiot of himself making a mess with batter and tossing the pancakes until a chuckle finally broke its way past your lips, and carefully tucked the blanket around your shoulders when you had fallen into a light sleep on the couch.

Though you weren’t fully conscious enough to recall all of it, a part of you had felt the shift of the couch, sensed his hands near and the sudden reassuring warmth of the blanket before slipping into a dreamless slumber. He was asleep and spread out beside you when you awoke a few hours later, hand stretched across the couch and resting on the cushion just shy of your covered feet, almost as if he were looking for you while lost in his own dreams.

“Marcus, why are you doing this?”

“Because it’s my responsibility—”

You’re shaking your head before he can even finish his sentence. He lets it hang in the air, body slackening as soon as your eyes meet his. The vulnerability that seems to work its way through his system displays openly on his face.

“Be honest with me. Tell me the truth.”

He huffs in wry amusement, face twisting. His head drops, he shuffles on his feet and then he sighs, resigned. “After your conversation with Jane, I think you know why.”

You can’t help but recoil from his words, a frown quick to pinch your brows in surprise. “You know about that?”

His small smile is sad, uncomfortable.

“Jane may be a dick, but Rigsby’s a good guy. He pulled me aside and told me about it when he heard you had dropped your involvement. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry you were put in that position—it must’ve been difficult for you. And it’s not something you should’ve heard from him, of all people.”

He’s not denying it. He’s not rejecting Jane’s words. He’s not standing there insisting it’s just another one of his silly little mind games, or that he was making a big deal out of nothing. He has feelings for you. Actual feelings, and not some strange little crush carried from the past, and from seeing you again after so long. You don’t even know how they could be there. He doesn’t know you, not anymore at least.

“You can’t have feelings for me,” you state plainly, heart suddenly beating at the base of your throat.

“Why not?” He fires back immediately, defensively.

“Because you—” you flounder for words, eyes darting around the apartment in an effort to string your thoughts together. “Marcus, before this investigation, we hadn’t seen each other since—”

“Yeah, well… I guess they never went away.”

“They weren’t real!” You cry out, a touch of anger seeping into your tone as you stand from the couch and face him fully. “You were working, I-I was just a lead! You couldn’t possibly have—”

“You were never just a lead!”

You’re taken aback by the sudden force behind his voice, and he must see the way you flinch at it. He calms almost instantly, chest heaving with a sharp exhale as he breaks away from your gaze and curls in on himself. You don’t know what to say. You merely wait for something more, hanging on the way he seems to be thinking so damn hard on his words.

“You—you weren’t just a lead. Not to me.”

“What are you saying? The whole time, you… the whole time?”

“The whole time,” he confirms quietly, and for a split second you just wish he would look at you.

He doesn’t, and your mind spins. The revelation hits you deeply, the stirrings of confusion, heartache, simmering in the pit of your stomach. It doesn’t change anything. It couldn’t. The damage had already long been done, but strangely enough there comes a wash of comfort that soothes the bitter sting, and the question slips free of your lips before you even comprehend it.

“It was real,” you choke out, eyes prickling from the build of tears, “wasn’t it?”

Maybe not the whole thing given the circumstances, but what you shared, what he felt for you—

“It was always real to me.”

And with those few little words, he shatters the perception you had built of him and the time you shared together. You feel it hit you—hard, your body taking a step back as your throat tightens until you worry you won’t be able to get a breath in or out. The tears slip free, spilling down your cheeks as your mind hurries to replay every memory of him in a different light, one not tainted with betrayal or hatred.

He follows your step back on instinct, one foot coming to move his body forward towards you before he stops himself short. He swallows, a hand finally leaving his hip to run over his face and collect the stray tear that had slid along his cheek.

“Someone will come to collect you soon,” he rasps quietly, leaving you to your chaotic mess of thoughts and slipping out of the apartment, the door clicking shut softly behind him.

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foli-vora · 5 months ago

Text

i appreciate all of your love and support, thanks for reading angel! ❤️

run to you: ch 9

marcus pike x f!reader

Word count: 5.7k-ish

main masterlist | series masterlist

This story is 18+ only.

“Marcus.”

“Stay here.”

It’s not a request, it’s an order.

He appears only a few moments later, the frown between his brows deep.

“Are you okay?”

Are you? Physically, yes.

You give a little nod, shifting under your jacket and doing an internal check over your frazzled nerves and endlessly whirling mind. “Just… shaken, I guess.”

“That’s understandable. You haven’t touched anything? Moved anything?”

“No,” you murmur, fingers pinching and tugging at your sleeve. “You told me not to.”

“Good, that’s good. You did good.”

The praise does little to settle your nerves, but you appreciate the thought.

“Hey Picasso.”

“Hey Jacob,” you murmur quietly, hands rubbing along your arms.

“You doin’ okay?”

You give a shrug, eyes darting past him to watch Marcus and the couple of officers talk. “I’m alright. What are you doing here?”

“Pike called in for backup on his way here,” he explains, head turning to eye where your front door had been pried open. “I live the closest so…”

You nod, eyes dropping to the floor. “Sorry to get you out of bed for this.”

“Don’t be. You should be more sorry for leaving without saying goodbye. Thought we were friends, Pollock.”

“I’m sorry about that. I just couldn’t—”

He holds up a hand with a gentle smile. “You don’t need to explain yourself to me, it’s alright. Gotta do what’s best for you.”

Marcus appears beside him not even a moment later, slapping a thankful hand to Jacob’s shoulder before resting his eyes on you.

“They’ve just got a few questions for you. Nothing major, just a little statement and then they’ll call in the crime scene team and we’ll leave.”

“What’s the plan, boss?”

“What?”

Marcus sighs sharply, brown eyes fixing on you.

“Don’t fight me on this. We can find you somewhere else in the morning, I just—please.”

You find yourself nodding in response to his plea.

What time did you get home? What did you do when you found your apartment broken into? Do you know anyone who would do this? Is there anyone who would wish to harm you?

All of the questions begin to make you sick after a while, and Marcus must see it.

You need to know what he thinks before you drive yourself mad.

Your voice catches in your throat. “Is this related to the investigation?”

“I don’t know yet, but given the timing it’s probable.”

“Am I in danger?”

A soft sigh eventually leaves his lips.

“Maybe.”

The stirrings of a chill begins to creep along your shoulders, a sick feeling bubbling in the pit of your stomach from having your chaotic string of anxiety ridden theories confirmed.

“Hey, I meant what I said. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

But he doesn’t take it away.

His hand carefully turns, palm now warm against yours, and his fingers gently tangle with your own.

—

It’s exactly what you expect.

“It’s very… you,” you comment quietly after studying your new surroundings, readjusting the strap of your weekend bag on your shoulder.

Marcus shifts where he stands, fingers toying with his keys and a small smile tugging at the corner of his lips. “Is that a compliment?”

“You’ll never know.”

“Spare room?”

“You didn’t think I was going to make you sleep on the couch, did you?”

“I don’t know,” you reply.

A spare room was a welcome development. You’d be out of his way and in your own space until he’s able to organise something else.

“Okay, well…” you falter, somewhat awkward just standing there in the middle of his apartment. “If it’s alright, I’m—I’m going to get some sleep. It’s been a long day.”

He nods, eyes falling briefly away from you.

“Yeah. Yeah, of course. Uh, help yourself to the kitchen if you need anything during the night. If you need something else and can’t find it, my room’s at the end.”

“Thank you, Marcus, for… everything. I really appreciate it.”

“Anytime,” he murmurs, gentle but with the firm seal of a promise.

You attempt to settle back against the mattress with a few deep breaths, but the shadows dance along the ceiling of the room, taunting you with your recent fear.

Maybe you deserved it.

These people, the widespread global business that runs behind closed doors, it was all so much bigger than you ever could’ve imagined when you started out.

What hope do you have of outrunning it? Of surviving the escape of it? There’s no leaving it behind.

None of it seems to lean in your favour.

The mere notion of it is dark, the apparent threat of death stretching and twisting through your mind until it’s seemingly all you can think about.

Sinking into the couch, you tuck your feet beneath you and huddle deeper into the blanket, thankful the warm light keeps your mind from finding shapes within the shadows stretching along the walls.

“I can’t sleep,” you offer quietly as an explanation, tucking the blanket tighter around your shoulders. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”

“You didn’t,” he replies, footsteps almost inaudible as he tracks his way to the couch and sinks into the cushions with a soft sigh. “I can’t sleep either.”

He swallows the bile building in his throat, rubbing tiredly at his eyes and taking comfort in the fact that you’re beside him. Breathing, alive.

It won’t happen. He simply wouldn’t let it.

“How are you doing?”

“Not good.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” you mutter finally, sighing quietly. “It’s nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

“To be honest, I don’t even know where to start. My mind’s all over the place. I had a nightmare and it—I don’t know. I just… I’m scared. That’s all.”

“Are you hungry?” He asks after a little while. “I can cook you something.”

Your face twists, eyes bouncing to the window where the night still stretches out beyond it. “Marcus, it’s like 3am.”

He hums lowly, and in the corner of your eyes you see a small boyish smile forming on his lips.

“Perfect time for pancakes.”

He must see the indecision play across your face.

“Shouldn’t you go and try to get some sleep, agent?”

He gives a small shrug, that smile curling along the edges of his lips. “It’s not my first all-nighter. Come on, you know you want to.”

You fight a smile of your own and relent, reaching for his hand and letting him pull you to your feet.

It works.

Another thing to thank him for.

—

Time rolls on, and your impatience merely grows along with it.

Do they have any answers? Do they know who was in your apartment and why?

“There were fingerprints at your apartment,” he starts, and you shift on the couch as something flashes across his face. “They were a match to the prints we previously pulled—”

—from a gun.

He feels physically sick.

“I’m putting you into protective custody.”

It’s final, leaving no room for argument.

“Marcus, they—” you falter, hands clenching to hide their tremble, “—they’ll find me eventually, whether it’s now or in the future. What more can you do?”

“Anything. Everything. I’ll bounce you around this country until I find all of them if I have to.”

“But what kind of life is that? I’m practically on the run until you think it’s safe?”

“Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“You don’t know that, you can’t promise that—”

“Nothing is going to happen to you,” he repeats, firmer.

It wouldn’t kill him to admit there’s a risk here.

“You don’t have to do all of this, you know.”

Confusion bleeds into his expression, his hands finding his hips as he waits for further elaboration.

“You don’t need to make up for the past or anything. It’s fine. We’re fine.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing?” He questions softly, hardened frame weakening under your gaze. “Making up for the past?”

“Why else would you be doing all of this?”

He leaves your question unanswered.

“Marcus, why are you doing this?”

“Because it’s my responsibility—”

“Be honest with me. Tell me the truth.”

He huffs in wry amusement, face twisting. His head drops, he shuffles on his feet and then he sighs, resigned. “After your conversation with Jane, I think you know why.”

You can’t help but recoil from his words, a frown quick to pinch your brows in surprise. “You know about that?”

His small smile is sad, uncomfortable.

“You can’t have feelings for me,” you state plainly, heart suddenly beating at the base of your throat.

“Why not?” He fires back immediately, defensively.

“Yeah, well… I guess they never went away.”

“You were never just a lead!”

“You—you weren’t just a lead. Not to me.”

“What are you saying? The whole time, you… the whole time?”

“The whole time,” he confirms quietly, and for a split second you just wish he would look at you.

“It was real,” you choke out, eyes prickling from the build of tears, “wasn’t it?”

Maybe not the whole thing given the circumstances, but what you shared, what he felt for you—

“It was always real to me.”

“Someone will come to collect you soon,” he rasps quietly, leaving you to your chaotic mess of thoughts and slipping out of the apartment, the door clicking shut softly behind him.

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