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I’m gonna go ahead and rant real quick. I’m a fanfiction author, and I’m constantly looking for ideas I like. A lot of those ideas come from prompts, or tumblr posts, or other fandoms, or existing tropes.

Sometimes, fics already exist in those tropes.

So here’s my apparently “unpopular” opinion: I like reading fics of the same trope. If there’s a fic where they’re famous actors and they fall in love that I enjoy, I want four more slightly different ones. If I’m writing a fic where one is catfishing, I want to read the trope in at least four other fics like???

I like to see other authors’ take and style on common tropes. Just because one fic in a trope exists doesn’t mean the trope is off limits for the fandom. Far from it - take a chance with that trope. If you’re worried you’re too similar, mark it inspired by. You’re not going to copy someone exactly, and you could have an interesting spin on it. I want that spin to exist.

If two fics of the same trope can’t exist, I might as well delete over half my fics, including some of my most popular. It’s discouraging to hear people drop ideas because something like it exists - or even maybe exists.

tldr; more than one fic can exist within a trope or prompt in a fandom and be good fics. Please write whatever you want, even if something similar exists. Someone (like me) will read them all and enjoy them all.

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I know that realistically you can only fit so many movies into a list of approximately 100, but I cannot take that "How many of tumblr's favorite movies have you seen?" list that's been going around seriously because there are some truly egregious omissions.

Some of it is very clearly recency bias, which makes me wonder if the op truly wasn't on here in 2013 or so, but you're telling me you made a list of "tumblr's favorite movies" that doesn't include Pacific Rim or Mad Max: Fury Road? Because, like, I was there, Gandalf.

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I’m curious because my mother was taught to type on a typewriter and can type on a keyboard without looking at her hands. Meanwhile, my older sister was taught in school to type on a keyboard and has to watch her hands, and my father was never taught taught typing at all and does the hunt and poke method (single finger typing, looking at the keyboard).

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I had to do another clean install of the OS on my computer, this time thankfully with a very recent backup in place, but now I'm reinstalling stuff and have to face the fact that I've logged nearly 600 hours in Skyrim and never once played the main quest beyond the first major quest.

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Happy Ides of March!!

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et tu, mblr?

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No one:

Tumblr users at 00:00 on March 15th:

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brooding men who cannot communicate their feelings if their life depended on it are only hot when they're fictional. if i have to deal with one in real life i will curse him and pray for his downfall every night before i go to bed

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The world is in great peril, and you are the unlucky protagonist who must save it! Spin this wheel three times and get your Dragon Age party that you're stuck trying to save it with.

Feel free to reroll repeats. Most are companions, but there are also a few companion-adjacent possibilities. You can assume that you as the protagonist have a basic level of combat competency even if you don't in real life, so don't worry about yourself

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"born in the wrong era" but there's no particular time period i'd rather be living in, I'm just pissed af at having to live through the global resurgence of fascism

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There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

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spin this wheel for a length of fic. you have to write a fic that length

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Sophia, the Boston woman from 1875 who haunts a lamp I got at Brimfield: what is a stay at home girlfriend, if you please?

me: well, it's a woman who's financially supported by the man she's dating, and she lives with him and usually keeps house and cooks for him

her: and they're not married?

me: well, no; hence "girlfriend" rather than "wife." I know that may alarm y-

her: oh calm down I know about Kept Women. he has no legal tie to her, though? she has no sort of standing with him in the eyes of the law? only his word that he'll follow through?

me: yes

her: and remind me again- you don't have to be financially dependent on a man anymore, right? there are more than like three careers open to women that will let you support yourself at a decent level now? and society isn't pressuring you 24/7 to get married and stop working outside the home?

me: yes

her: so these women. CHOOSE to be dependent on a man. who could leave them at any moment without legal consequence. because they don't like their jobs. the jobs, while imperfect, that let them live on their own, answerable to no-one

me: yes

her: that had better be some absolutely amazing jewelry they can pawn off if he leaves them, then

me: it's usually not

her: THERE'S NOT EVEN SECURITY JEWELRY?!

me: oh by the way they blame feminism for "having to work"

her:

her: I became fully dependent on my in-laws who hated me, after my husband died two years into our marriage, because I was a 23-year-old orphan with no marketable skills in any avenue besides Running A Household and the only men left unmarried in my social circle were widowers thirty years my senior. I also couldn't establish lines of credit as a widow because the merchants said my husband dying so soon meant that I didn't have stable enough income. and that was entirely legal

me: yeah

her: I'm going to go slam some doors please do not bother me

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spin this wheel of fanfic tags. this will be the theme of your day tomorrow.

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spin the wheel for a genre!