#And what really really sucks is there's a limited amount of books in English at the local library

[whogirl42]

Honestly thank god for ao3 and fanfics in general cause I started reading a book today—a real physical book. It's almost 500 pages long.

... I've already read over 300 of them.

The 4 new books I've ordered probably won't arrive for at least another couple weeks!!! and I currently have way too much time on my hands.

[orpheusstation]

What I'm here for.

This year Stockholm’s Cinema Queer Fest is centered around rage. Since attending the program release I have been haunted by the reality of rage. There is a James Baldwin quote that is now breath to me and it goes like this: “To be a negro in the country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” Rage and anger are familiar to me. I am learning to make space for them in the world, to make them other people’s problems and not just my own, but this ancestry of rage, community of rage, is new to me. I am also now interested in how to make this rage productive, not merely in my interpersonal life, but to direct towards real change and manifestation. I think it is possible, but I am also only twenty years old and my life is in constant transit.

After rage, Baldwin began following me around. He appeared as an excerpt in one of the most god-awful books I’ve had to read yet in my college career, but the little indented quotation of his power moved me so thoroughly that I began hunting him down rather than waiting for him to find me. I bought Giovanni’s Room earlier this year, but I’m still trying to finish Song of Solomon (which has been an excellent read so far). I desperately wanted Baldwin’s voice, though, the intense degree to which he could evoke emotion, his masterful ability to suck me in swiftly, into the worlds that still brutally reflect our own. I took myself out to a cafe in Sofo and I wanted to wander around after I finished my work. I looked really good that day, and I felt it would be a shame just to go back and rot in my room. It was also sunny out. I came across an English bookstore just a block over from the cafe I was at and began my hunt for Baldwin.

I got Giovanni’s room at the Open Bookstore in Chicago, alongside a pocket copy of Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp. It was hands down maybe the best bookstore I’ve ever been to (although one of the staff recommendations was Tender is the Flesh and I think that book is awfully written). Maybe I’ve only ever been to shitty bookstores, but this one had a fantastic selection that not only met some of the more obscure texts on my reading list but also added many more books to that list. The little English bookstore I found definitely falls under the shitty selection, but they did have two books by Baldwin. I had already read his short story Going to Meet the Man so I bought the overpriced copy of Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems. I have a limited amount of books I brought from home here, and my copy of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems did not make the cut. I’ve been missing having a bedside book of poetry, and the slim size of the book wouldn’t be obtrusive when I inevitably pack to go home. It’s been a couple of weeks since then and someone else in my life has been consuming a lot of space in my mind which takes me to my next musing.

James Schuyler’s A photograph is nestled within Jose Esteban Munoz’s Cruising Utopia. Schuyler’s poem whisked me away in a similar fashion as Baldwin’s excerpt, except my obsession was with ecstasy and not rage. The type of ecstasy Schuyler is getting at, and the one I’ve reflected the most on is that kind of feeling of looking back with joy. I feel rage more often than I feel ecstasy, but life has been pretty good for me recently. When I went swimming with friends a couple of weeks ago I remember looking back at the sunlit shore, at all our clothes and belongings messily strewn about in our haste to get in the water, and I was seized by such joy that I did not care that much when a large wave washed in and almost took all my belongings into the water. I have few moments in my life that inspire ecstasy, or rather sometimes it is just hard to find them, but in some moments they wash upon me and I am whisked away.

I like thinking of rage and ecstasy in this simultaneous fashion. They make sense together, for it is maybe in this life where I am so filled with rage that these moments of ecstasy are so beautiful and so simple. I forget them so easily and yet they continue to find me in soft and quiet ways. The rage makes me desire ecstasy, want to fight for it and to know this is a reality we are all entitled to have. This blog will be a disorganized journey of this fight and exploration. I’m interested in black punk, black poetry, and black rage and what any of this has to do with how we manifest action into our lives.

[doctor-peggy]

Once my high school has a famous author speak to students and other people (probably parents) while he was on a book tour. I attended because my English teacher let me and I got to skip part of class (if she ever reads this: I’m sorry. I know you’re on tumblr. Please don’t be mad at me.)

Anyway I didn’t particularly like his writing to start with, so my expectations were low… but I really would have skipped the talk for my actual English class if I had known that I would come out of it with nothing useful.

Specifically, the part that drove me absolutely nuts is that when someone asked about how to get better at writing or get published or something, he said nothing of how to explore your own writing and gain useful skills that help you express yourself better. Nor did he say anything about the nature of the publishing industry. He pretty much says “if you can’t get it right on your first try, give up while you’re ahead. telling stories is not for everyone, and writing skill is innate and immutable. you either have it or you don’t.”

I really should have walked out then to prove a point.

Typically I don’t end up engaging with communities who place disproportionate value in a specific style of written expression, and who claim that other forms of writing are less important or valid. It’s not that I avoid it, but more just that I don’t end up in those kinds of spaces one way or another.

I still think studying writing is useful and important. I learned a lot about how I can use language to my advantage when trying to express what’s in my brain exactly the way I wanted it to come across. I can and have used literary techniques I learned about in my silly little fluff/humour fanfics because many of them, beyond the stuffy technical terms, are just ways to direct a reader’s attention to evoke certain feelings or ideas.

But it’s important to remember that there is a point where studying writing ends and gatekeeping writing starts. And it’s not necessarily a point that’s hard to notice. I know that I will be studying some limited amount of writing in the near future and it will be entirely the result of privilege. And when I inevitably analyse writing, I would like to not forget that the writing I am studying is not more valuable than the 100k+ word slowburn texting au fanfic that I once read. Which I am specifically referencing because I didn’t bookmark it on ao3 and now I’m looking for it. Which is somewhat unrelated. Anyway.

It sucks that we even choose to assign social value to a certain type of writing over other types of writing. And it’s incredibly frustrating to me that this has distanced people from writing. I hardly know how to work through that kind of disillusionment… but I do sincerely hope that writing doesn’t have to keep being hard and painful for you forever. A form of self-expression that imposes arbitrary rules about its usage is no longer a form self-expression.

Also to that one author who spoke at my high school… fuck you.

I've been able to neither read nor write stories in a long time. Poetry too, for the most part. I guess what I mean is that the art of the written word has become a stranger to me.

I hate what poetry classes did to my writing. Yes, the Wikipedia poems, but they are easier because they're not my own words, and I have gotten so many comments on those saying they are powerful pieces of art, but for me personally they're a way of hiding from the awfulness of trying to assemble my own words into poetry.

I hate the poems I wrote in poetry classes. I hate the version of me I showed others in those classes. I hate the way poetry classes taught me to draw from my own experiences and thoughts for poetry. I hate everything I learned about how to interpret poetry, the eye with which I learned to read poetry, and the vocabulary I learned to talk about poetry, and ultimately, I hate "literary" poetry.

"Literary," by the way, is the category of art that has more meaning, value and legitimacy than the "other" category, which is not "literary." A "literary" poem is published in special, fancy "literary" magazines and almost invariably written by a person with a MFA or PhD in poetry.

You could say that the distinguishing feature of "literary" art is its overwhelming sense of legitimacy. A "literary" poem is a poem in the same way that a nonprofit organization is charitable, that a CEO is rich, or that an SAT score demonstrates your academic prowess. It is a poem completely immune to the possibility that someone will think it sucks. It expects to be absorbed, analyzed, studied, and discoursed upon because something feels "official" about whatever designates it as Good Art.

Literary poems are not only written by and for a special subset of people that have been formally taught to read and interpret poetry, they are written exclusively for audiences that will automatically assume they are Good Art; beautiful, meaningful, and worth interpreting. Because of this, most literary poems are literal incomprehensible nonsense.

Just take this one:

Say I climb the ladder of wheat/and at the top there is a faucet dripping beads of water/but the water takes a year to turn into an eagle/and the sky's forty-three shades of gray pierce/the first inflection of my heart, the point where the signals/throw grass into the river. Say the river sags/and the horizon sucks the lance out of the ghost's hands/like the moment of being born, the point where a shadow's/tongue slides through the faultline./Grace. Sunlight, cherries.

(it continues like this)

And conceptually, I love art as collaboration between the creator and viewer, where abstract, indeterminate and murky things are forced to take shape through the participation of the viewer as they interpret and associate things that stand out to them in the work! The "aliveness" of art in the abyss between what the artist attempts to communicate and what the viewer feels is the coolest thing to me!

But this philosophy of art is incompatible with the idea that there is an elite category of art that is worthy of interpretation, analysis, and reverence. I can fuck around with this random word generator and get something that is roughly as meaningful as the above. I don't mean that as demeaning to the poem, I mean that I feel demeaned by the poem, because its linguistic play and experimentation is something that everybody can do, that everyone should try doing, but this poem has been designated as something exceptionally meaningful and worthy and its writer teaches writing at the University of Chicago. You can click through that website for hours and not find a single soul without a MFA or above in poetry or creative writing.

For me, the world of "literary" writing was like a room with a splatter of vomit across the floor that no one else would acknowledge. The ability to formally study poetry in college was a privilege, but I was constantly aware of privilege, and the thing about privilege is the more you have, the less you think about it. What of the ability to pursue a PhD in poetry? What small fraction of people could expend so much time and money on something that didn't really have a career associated with it? And of that fraction, which fraction would be seen as "good enough" to publish poetry books and to teach? With poetry this indeterminate, how were the "good" poets selected at all?

Literary writing excludes poor people, and the existence of published literary poets who are immigrants or minorities doesn't negate this. Increasingly, published writing in general excludes poor people. A LOT of popular authors graduated from very elite schools!

But literary poetry I hate especially, because it puffs itself up on unlocking the universe and human experience and pain, as if insight into those things is a seldom-appearing gift instead of something many people have, except they don't have the time and money to train themselves into expressing it in a way that appears Literary.

The "literary" vs. "non-literary" paradigm had an inescapable rottenness to it. I couldn't stop thinking about the luminous conversations I'd had with people who lacked the formal training to express ideas in a "literary" manner, but still showed me something vital about the universe.

I've been bitching about literary poetry for like two years now, and really, I just hate what studying all that shit has done to my own writing style. It's so frustrating that the joy and playfulness won't come back.

[omg-im-such-a-masochist]

              BOUND SERIES: PART 1 (THE NEGOTIATION)

Prompt: Y/N decides to look for a Dom to have her first real Submissive experience. She just didn’t expect him to be so breath taking (Yes, it’s a shitty description, but I don’t wanna ruin it! Hahahah)

Word Count: Long-ish

Pairing: Drew McIntyre x Reader

Warnings: + 18, BDSM, cursing(me and my sailor’s mouth) and adult subjects (For now)

Notes: I’ll probably make a little series out of this, so here’s how it all started... Y’all know the drill loves,sorry for misspellings,english isn’t my first language (bla bla bla),check out my other stories if you’d like to(it would make your girl here very happy 😊) and if you’re comfortable with it,please let me know what you think? Some feedback is always welcomed and appreciated ❤️You can check out my other stories typing ‘masochist writes’ on the search bar on my page and my newest story as a fixed post.Okay,now let’s get to the fun part,shall we? Hope you’ll enjoy 😉

Tagging: @blondekel77, @drew-is-boo, @akiko-tanaka, @drewmcintyrekoccsrocbwdgfan, @new-zealand-chic (maybe? sorry babe)

I was sitting in one of the outside tables at a small coffee shop, paitiently waiting for him to show up. He wasn´t late or anything like that, I was the one that arrived earlier, from what I’ve heard he was extremely on point. That's why I wasn't surprised when he turned around the corner at 2:00 p.m. sharp. The friend who've had indicated him to me, did mentioned his incredible size and beauty, but man I still got caught off guard by it.

He's a fucking walking dream. Bulky type, extremely tall, piercing blue grayish eyes, shoulder lenght black hair that was tighly secured in a low ponytail, dark beard, incredibly defined arms and thick strong thighs. He was dressed approprietely, not too fancy but not too sloppy either, simple rolled up sleeves plain black dress shirt, perfectly fitting jeans and some casual discreet boots. He was breath taking! And I wasn't the only one who've noticed his incredible dominieering energy that seems to exudes from his body naturally.

His eyes scanned through the tables 'til his gaze found mine, he confidently approached were I was sitting.

"Y/N I presume?" He has a slight accent, but I can't pick up from where...

It took me a second to recover "Yes, that's me" I give him a shy smile

He smiles widely back at me, letting a beautiful pair of dimples on display "I'm Drew"

"Y/N" I shook the hand he offered me, frowning soon afterwards "But you already know that" I whisper

He chuckled lightly "Can I get you anything from inside?" He points towards the coffee shop

"No, I'm good! But thank you" I raise my latte cup

"Ok then, I'll be right back" He says as he entered to grab himself a drink

My nerves was stariting to get the best out of me, I was sweating profusely, I felt like my hair was a mess, my makeup too minimal, my clothes too simple, I hadn't sprayed enough perfume, was there something on my teeth? Do I smell bad? What if he thinks I'm ugly? Or too fat? Should I try to suck my belly in? Is that gonna work? I could already feel all of those old ghosts from the past calling for me.

"Penny for your thoughts?" He says already sitting in front of me

I startled a little "Oh sorry, I didn't notice you came back"

"Yeah... Is there something bothering ya?" He carefully searchs my face for something...but I'm not sure what...

"Just you know, deep in thoughts" I try to shake it off

"Right.. Are these thoughts any related as to how much you're feeling insecure with your own image because of me?" He asks

*Damn! Why is he so good at this?* I thought

I debated whether or not I should lie to him, but I figured he would find out if I did eventually so I didn't bother

"Kind of, yeah.." I vaguely say

"Why Y/N?"

"Because I mean, look at you! Who wouldn't feel insecure around you? You're a very good looking man and well.."

"And you're a very good looking woman, so what's the matter? There's something else" He starts to search for something again and I can feel his getting close to find it..

I feel like I'm going through a polygraph test and he won't stop until he finds the truth "Daddy issues" I bitterly laugh "For real and not just you know, as a joke" I whisper as I prepare myself for him to walk off at any minute.

After 5 long minutes of silence I raise my head to find him still just sitting there, looking at me.

"Are you not gonna like..leave?" I ask softly

"Why would I?" He asks in a soothing voice

"Because, I'm fucked up?"

"And who isn't?" He lightly chuckles

"I- I'm confused" I whisper

"Look Y/N, I'm a man, a real man not an immature little boy. I'm not going to walk off because a beautiful adult woman has some self esteem issues due some fucked up things an immature little boy self proclaimed man did to her" He didn't even blinked "I'm not here to make you feel bad about yourself, I'm here so you can see your true self darling, not a twisted blurred vision from somebody else" He squeezed my hand

"Would you like to do this another time?" He asks

"No, please I- I would like to do this now if that's ok" It was weird how comfortable he made me feel

"Of course darling, whatever you'd like" He softly brush his fingers on my cheek "Thank you Y/N, for being honest, trusting me and being so up front about something so personal and hurtful" He hold my hand on his own and press a light kiss on my knuckles

He left me so speechless I could only nod in response.

"Where do you want to begin then, love?" He asks

"I've never officially done this before so, I don't kno- Where are you from? I can hear a very light accent, but is so faint I can't pick up where it's from" The curiosity took the best out of me.

He laughs before saying "Scotland, love"

"Oh, cool" Was all I could say

We've talked about everything, cultural differences, work, hobbies, movies, tv series, books, travels, food...it was pretty clear that we matched, which I was glad. My heart skipped in my chest once I heard his next question

"Well, I think we both can agree that there's some chemistry between us, love. So I would love to do a test scene with you so we can see if this chemistry goes beyond the talking. Would you be interest in that?"

"Yeah, of course. I would love that" I smile softly

"Good. Let's negotiate a scene then shall we?" He says mirroring my smile

He unlocks his cellphone and begin to type something on it.

"Alright, let's start with a simple one. Are you into pain?"

"Yes"

"To what level? Light, moderate or hard?"

"Moderate"

"Soft limits?"

"Um... age play, floggers, nipple clamps, temperature play, pet play, orientation play, exhibitionism..I guess that's it"

"Hard limits?"

"Scat play, minors/ children, chemical play, race play, needle play, serious bodily injury, animals and fisting"

"Do you have any medical issues Y/N?"

"No"

"Do you take any type of prescripted medication?"

"Yeah, contraceptive pills"

"Do you have any addictions? Legal or illegal substances"

"I smoke cigarrettes, sporadically"

"What word would you like do use as our safewords?"

"I would like to keep the three basic colors please"

"Ok, and safe signs? For when your mouth is restained"

"I don't know.."

"What do you think about 1,2,3? 1 for green, 2 for yellow and 3 for red?" He asks

"That sounds good"

"What would you like as aftercare?"

"Um..maybe some cuddling? And some candy" I blush and he sweetly smiles

"Are you ok with the following: General bondage, spanking, sex toys, degradation, praise, breath play, trichophilia, edge play, fear play?"

"Yes, I'm ok with all"

"Would you like to have intercourse?"

I froze at that question

"Y/N, I asked if you would be interested in having intercourse?" He says softly

"I didn't knew that was an option" I whispered

"Generally it isn’t, but like I said, you're a very beautiful woman and I would be lying if I said I don't feel attracted to you" His eyes were glued to mine “But that’s up to you, love”

“Yes I would be interested in it” I murmured

He smiles fondly “Is there anything else, besides fisting, you don’t look forward to do during intercourse?”

“Not really..I just have a problem with anal”

“You don’t like it?” He asks

“I don’t mind it actually, is just that, past experiences were not really that pleasant”

“I see..well anal sex can be extremely pleasurable to the woman, but that will depends on who’s performing it. We have to prep you properly before hand, have the right amount of lubrication and patience, love. But we’ll get to that when it’s time, don’t worry. I’ll never do something that we have not fully agreed on with before hand”

I nod.

“Okay, double penetration, how do you feel about it?”

“I’ve never done it, but I would like to try it”

He smirks at me “Alright, love. So, as our test scene I was thinking about setting a time limit, like 30 to 40 minutes to keep the scene short, just to feel our chemistry together”

“I’m good with that” I respond

“What would you look forward to do on that scene?”

“Um...some bondage..degradation maybe? And maybe intercourse too?” I blush

“That sounds like a plan, love” He winks “When would you like to do it?”

“Can we do it now?” I eagerly ask

“I like the way you think Y/N” He smirks as he got up from the chair “C’mon love” He offers me his hand “Let’s tie you up”

I took his hand as we walk down the sideblock. Oh God, what the hell was I doing?...

                                To Be Continued....

Thoughts on this series 👉👈?

[olderthannetfic]

It's really surprising that you're so well versed in older fandoms and yet participate in new popular ones (that cdrama, kpop) is this by design? Im in my twenties and my interest turnover is already way slower than it used to be

You know, that’s a really interesting question. I wouldn’t say it’s by design exactly in that I do tend to just follow what strikes my fancy, and I can’t force myself to want to write fic for just anything. (I find it easier to like reading fic without serious involuntary emotional investment, but writing takes more. Vidding I can do on command most of the time, but I don’t usually bother unless I have a lot of feels or I’m fulfilling someone’s prompt.)

However, me getting into BTS was 100% due to me wanting to understand BTS enough to explain to people who weren’t very interested but wanted to know what was going on in fandom lately. Under normal circumstances, I run the dance party at Escapade, the oldest extant slash con. We borrowed vividcon’s thing of playing fanvids on the wall--all of them set to dance music--as the soundtrack for the dance party. This means I’m creating a 3-hour mixtape of fannishness, which has amazing potential to make people feel in the know about Fandom Today... and equal potential to make them feel alienated if nothing they care about shows up. Only about 100-150 people attend the con, so it really is possible to make a playlist that feels inclusive yet informative--it just takes a huge amount of work.

Every year, I do a lot of research on which fandoms are getting big and look for vids from vidders people won’t have heard of, so there is an element of consciously trying to keep up with things. Generally, I only get into these fandoms myself if I had no idea what they were and then suddenly, oops, they’re my kryptonite, like the buddy cop android plot in Detroit: Become Human, which sucked me in hard for like 6 months on the basis of a vid.

(So if you’re into cross-fandom meta and associated stuff as one of your fannish interests, you tend to have broader knowledge of different fandoms, old and new, than if you’re just looking for the next place you’ll read fic. It’s also easier to love vids for unfamiliar things than fic.)

But though I was only looking for a basic primer on BTS, BTS has 7 members with multiple names and no clear juggernaut pairing, not to mention that AU that runs through the music videos and lots of other context to explain. The barrier to understanding WTF was going on at all was high enough that to know enough to explain, I had to be thoroughly exposed... And once I was over that hurdle, oops, I had a fandom.

--

In terms of old vs. new, here’s the thing: kpop fandoms in English and c-drama fandoms in English right now feel a lot like anime fandom in English did in the early 00s. I had a Buddy Cops of the 70s phase in the middle, but my current fannishness is actually a return to my older fannishness in many ways.

What do I mean about them being similar?

Yes, I know some wanker will show up to say I think China, Korea, and Japan are indistinguishable, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the way that I used to routinely meet Italian and French and German fans, Argentinian and Mexican, Malaysian and Indonesian and Filipino too. English-language fandom of SPN or MCU may have all those fans from all those countries, but it feels very American most of the time. English-language fandom of a non-English-language canon is more overtly about using English as a lingua franca.

It also tends to attract people who as a sideline to their fannishness are getting into language learning and translation, which are my other passion in life after fanworks fandom. (I speak only English and Spanish and a bit of Japanese, but I’ve studied German, French, Russian, Mandarin, Old English, and now Korean.)

Nerds arguing about methods of language learning and which textbooks are good and why is my jam. This is all over the place in English-language fandoms of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean media. Those fandoms also tend to be full of speakers coming from a Germanic or Romance languages background who face similar hurdles in learning these languages. (In other words, if you’re a native Japanese speaker trying to learn Korean, the parts that will be hard for you are different than if you’re an English speaker, but you’re also usually not doing fandom in English.)

There’s also an element of scarcity and difficulty of access and a communal attempt to construct a canon (in the other sense) of stuff from that country that pertains to one’s fannishness. So, for example, a primer explaining the genre of xianxia is highly relevant to being a n00b Untamed fan, but just any old thing about China is not. A c-drama adapted from a danmei webnovel is perhaps part of the new pantheon of Chinese shit we’re all getting into, but just any old drama from decades ago is probably not... unless it’s a genre precursor to something else we care about. Another aspect here is that while Stuff I Can Access As A N00b Who Doesn’t Speak The Language may be relatively scarce, there’s a vast, vast wealth of stuff that exists.

This is what it felt like to be an anime fan in the US in 2000. As translation got more commercial and more crappy series were licensed and dumped onto an already glutted market, the vibe changed. No longer were fans desperately trying to learn enough of the language to translate or spending their time cataloguing what existed or making fanworks about a show they stuck with for a bit: the overall community focus turned to an endless race of consumption to keep up with all of the latest releases. That’s a perfectly valid way of being fannish, but if I wanted that, I’d binge US television 24/7.

Anime fandom got bigger, but what I liked about anime fandom in English died, and I moved on. (Okay, I first moved on to Onmyouji, which is a live action Japanese thing, but still.)

Hardcore weeaboos and now fans of Chinese and Korean stuff don’t stop at language: people get excited about cooking, my other other great passion. Times a thousand if the canon is something like The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty, which is full of loving shots of food preparation. People get excited about history! Mandarin and Japanese may share almost nothing in terms of grammar or phonology, but all of East Asia has influence from specific Chinese power centers historically, and there are commonalities to historical architecture and clothing that I love.

I fell out of love with the popular anime art styles as they changed, and I’m not that into animation in general these days. (I still own a shitton of manga in art styles I like, like Okano Reiko’s Onmyouji series.) I’ve become a filmmaker over the last decade, and I’m very excited about beautiful cinematography and editing. With one thing and another, I’m probably not going to get back into anime fandom, but it’s lovely to revisit the cultural aspects I enjoyed about it via live-action media.

BTS surprised me too, to be honest. I really dislike that early 90s R&B ballad style that infests idol music (not just Korean--believe me, I resisted many rounds of “But Johnny’s Entertainment though!” back in the day). While I like some of the dance pop, I just don’t care. But OH NO, BTS turn out to be massive conscious hip hop fanboys, and their music sounds different. I have some tl;dr about my reactions in the meta I wrote about one of my fanvids, which you can find on Dreamwidth here.

--

But back to your comment about turnover: I know fans from the 70s who’ve had one great fannish love and that’s it and more who were like that but eventually moved on to a second or third. They’re... really fannishly monogamous in a way I find hard to comprehend. It was the norm long ago, but even by the 90s when far more people were getting into fandom, it was seen as a little weird. By now, with exponentially more people in fandom, it’s almost unheard of. I think those fans still exist, even as new people joining, but we don’t notice them. They were always rare, but in the past, only people like that had the stamina to get over the barriers to entry and actually become the people who made zines or were willing to be visibly into fanfic in eras when that was seen as really weird. On top of that, there’s an element of me, us, judging the past by what’s left: only people with an intense and often single passion are visible because other people either drifted away or have seamlessly disappeared into some modern fandom. They don’t say they’re 80 or 60 or 40 instead of 20, so nobody knows.

In general, I’m a small fandoms and rare ships person. My brain will do its best to thwart me by liking whatever has no fic even in a big fic fandom... (Except BTS because there is literally fic for any combination of them, like even more than for the likes of MCU. Wow. Best fandom evar!) So I have an incentive to not get complacent and just stick with one fandom because I would very soon have no ability to be in fandom at all.

My appetite for Consuming All The Things has slowed way down, but it also goes in waves, and a lot of what I’m consuming is what I did back in 2000: journal articles and the limited range of English-language books on the history of m/m sex and romance in East Asia. It’s not so much that I have a million fandoms as that I’m watching a few shows as an expression of my interest in East Asian costume dramas and East Asian history generally.

I do like to sit with one thing and experience it deeply rather than moving on quickly, but the surface expression of this has changed depending on whether I’m more into writing fic or more into doing research or something else.

But yes, I do do a certain amount of trying to stay current, often as a part of research for fandom meta or to help other people know what’s going on. Having a sense of what’s big doesn’t automatically mean getting into all those things, but I think some fans who are older-in-fandom and/or older-in-years stop being open to even hearing what’s new. And if you’ve never heard of it, you’ll never know if you might have liked it.

[patrickian]

I got tagged for this so...

Nickname: Patch. It’s short for Patrick and I simply cannot stand anyone calling me Pat, so I forced this one on my friends.

Zodiac: Virgo. My mom is super into this stuff and could give you a full run down but it’s not my bag so this is all I remember.

Height: 5’3” Not short… compact.

Last movie I saw: Gunpowder Milkshake. I thought it was a fairly basic shoot ‘em up with the only twist being that it starred a bunch of women rather than a bunch of men. Nice visuals and threadbare plot.

Last thing I googled: not counting work related stuff (something about limitation periods & COVID) was something related to NHL contracts because I was trying to argue that a certain player was over paid.

Favourite Musician: Don’t have one. Not really at least.

Song stuck in my head: Deutschland by Rammstein. It’s the part thats kinda like call and response. Anyways… stuck like fucking glue for a few days now.

Other blogs: Nope. I do have a twitter… which I try to keep more professional.

Blogs following: Many. Surprising, not all Terror related.

Amount of sleep: 6 hrs give or take. Climb into bed around 9pm, go to sleep around 11, wake up around 5. Get out of bed around 7.

Lucky number: doesn’t matter

What am I wearing: today is work from home day so: grey t-shirt, khaki shorts. No socks. Yesterday I wore my navy suit, white shirt with grey check pattern and decided to skip the tie since I wasn’t meeting any clients.

Dream job: I wish my current job paid more. I work for a legal clinic that handles civil matters for low income people. For me that stuff like landlord/tenant issues, debt collectors, wills & estates, etc. I’m leaving it for a “regular firm” where I’ll handle divorces where people will argue over who gets the four fucking snowmobiles. It will pay the bills and more but at what price to my soul?

Dream trip: New Zealand. Because I want to be one of those (annoying) LOTR tourists.

Favourite food: Pretty much anything salmon.

Play an instrument: I tried to learn how to play the drums when I was like… 10 or something. I sucked at it and gave up.

Languages: English. I have a reading knowledge of German, which means I can muddle through with a good dictionary. I know a handful of Cree words & phrases. I try to read/speak French with a terrible American accent just to annoy my husband who is functionally bilingual like the good Canadian he is.

Favourite Songs: None. Sometimes I relive my ill-spent youth and put on some sort of “top Alt-Rock Hits of the 2000s”. Does that count?

Random fact: You can sue a manufacturer because some lady found a snail in her ginger beer.

Describe yourself as aesthetic things: Ikea catalogue with it’s casual yet carefully curated put together look. It looks very middle-class if a bit rundown. Then you open the drawers & cupboards to find all sorts of weird shit just stuffed in there randomly. Faded pictures of university aged kids in budget shopping LARP costumes and bad pencil drawings of some beefy welsh guy who needs a better agent. A peek into the armoire reveals a collection that would make DI Felix Kane really excited. Under the bed are boxes of random papers and books on everything from knot tying to how to make pivot tables in Excel to goat farming.

Tags: (just going to do a few since many mutuals have already been tagged) just in case you want to :)

@astro-gnome, @keybladeofsteel, @gullbones, @corpyburd, @tsvete, @kittydesade, @seacollectsrivers, @houseocats, @orchiddingme

[universitypenguin]

What happened to u? U okay?

Hello!

First off, thank you for your concern. I appreciate it and I needed it after the past two days. To answer your question - I'm doing great.

I don’t have a lot of context about your question, but I’m guessing your concern is due to my recent blocking spree. A day ago, I went through my followers list and found some minors. I’ve previously seen smut fanfic writers concerned by underage people interacting with their posts. Until I had to block a few of them, I wasn’t aware how uncomfortable it would make me feel.

Since the blocking spree, I've had a lot of thoughts. I'm about to spew them everywhere. You might regret asking me if I was okay. Sorry about that. No one needs to read this whole manifesto about my rollercoaster of emotions the past few days. But in the interest of transparency, I'm posting this very long note.

What I want my readers to know is the following:

Tumblr is both a place for fanfiction and a social media site.

When I interact with followers and write explicit content, I have to be careful about what I'm saying and who I'm saying it to.

I don't intend to block or purge my followers in the future.

As long as I appropriately tag and put warnings on my work, that is adequate protection for my blog. Everything I write containing explicit content is tagged.

However, I won't interact with users who don't have an age stated in their bio.

There have to be boundaries, given the content of my writing. But I've also come around to the realization that I'm not capable of policing every interaction. Tumblr is a public forum. Minors following me makes me uncomfortable. But by the same token, my work is clearly labeled at 18+ and so is my blog.

There's a lot of explicit content out there for minors if you really think about it. In my high school freshman English class we talked about the book "The Color Purple." Believe me, that was explicit and we were only 14. Any minor with a library card and a Google browser can access a lot more intense content than what I write. I hope they're all being safe, but I can't have a melt down blocking spree again.

I'm not a cop, I'm not a parent, and what minors consume is down to them and the adult responsible for them. If I know someone is a minor I'll block them, should I notice they're trying to interact with me. Otherwise, I'm not purging my followers ever again. It's too much drama. I'd rather leave Tumblr than do that twice. I'm tired and I'm starting to work on my post graduate classes, I work full time in a demanding job, I'm in the process of editing my novel, and trying to keep up with my personal life. Quite literally, I don't have time to block. Writing fanfic is supposed to be my fun time. Let's keep it that way.

Due to the fact that some people I blocked were later unblocked after I took a closer look at their blogs, I'm posting a full explanation below. A quick summary is this:

After only writing for three months, I'd amassed 500 followers. On Monday I blocked almost 200 of them. Then I reviewed my block list and editing down some people who were prematurely blocked. [I assume the anon is one of the unblocked who had me disappear from their dash. Sorry!] This blocking thing isn't sustainable. In the future I'll run my blog differently as far as interaction goes in an effort to be responsible.

Continue reading for the saga of:

The Great Blocking Spree and Existential Crisis of an Erotic Fanfic Writer.

The Blocking Spree:

On Monday I realized a thirteen year old was following me and interacting with my work. This creeped me out.

*Commence blocking spree*

Then I realized how daunting my followers list was. I had 500 followers prior to Monday. That day I blocked about 200 people (some of them prematurely - more on that later.) So after the daunting task of trying to assume, to check bios for ages, to review blog content and determine the user's age, I was tired. Today, I even took a moment to reconsider if I wanted to use Tumblr. Because if all this is my responsibility, maybe I don't have the time or dedication to manage it. When I can be chill, I try to be. This attitude also affected by blocking. It contributed to me unblocking people. When I was doing the blocking spree, I'd give people with no age in their bio a fair shot by reviewing their posts.

I blocked some bot accounts, then a bunch of blank blogs, some ambiguous people who very well could be of age. For the first 100 followers I was pretty aggressive. Then my attention span dropped off and I was a bit more ambivalent. I realized I was doing a crappy job of moderating and wondered what the point was.

The point was that the thirteen year old interacting with my work freaked me out. When I found two sixteen year old followers, it pushed me to continue the purge.

So on I go, blocking. I'm so responsible for doing this, right? But my methodology is crap. What is context for being an adult? Someone had posted about budgeting advice. I thought the budgeting advice was too good for it not to have come from an adult. But my father's a financial advisor and to be honest, I could have given that level of advice at fifteen just from osmosis. Someone had pictures of themselves entering their marijuana plants in the Oregon State Fair. Okay, you've got to be over 18. I didn't block them. Someone else complained about their stats professor and I didn't block them. But in retrospect, one of my high school friends got permission to take college level math courses when we were seniors. She was seventeen when she had a stats professor. The thought circles back - what am I accomplishing here? Next, I went back and unblocked someone who ranted about her Tinder matches being 60 year old men. I wondered if their post was even real. I've lied on the internet before. Nonetheless, I persisted and worked through all 500 followers. When I was done I had 312 followers left.

Post Blocking Spree Existential Crisis:

I know that all the blocking in the world can't stop a teenager who wants to read smut fanfic. I'm not much for posting on social media and I'm not used to a lot of anonymous interaction online. Honestly, I got rid of my SM accounts during college when I felt it was wasting my time. This is the first time I've really use a social media site to post content since college. My twitter account is unused, my Instagram is for close personal friends only, and my TikTok is for mindless consumption of cat videos. (I've trained the algorithm to feed me only cat videos, it's great and I highly recommend it.) I don't post on TikTok, so I don't consider it full use, just lurking.

Okay, Alice, get back to the point....

Right, being anonymous on social media. My blocks are a fence and it's based on self identification from the blogs that follow me. I have little faith in underage consumers to out themselves. I have even less faith in their honesty or respect for an adult's boundaries. They're at a stage in life where they want to push the boundaries. Telling them no is all but inviting them in. I did my blocking spree because I was worried about backlash from someone's parents. But what reasonable judge would come after a fanfic writer? Come on. Logical thoughts but me emotional distress was still brewing.

Why I am the one responsible for who clicks the follow button on my blog? I've always clearly identified what I write and tagged my work as smut.

That thought snapped me out of my whirlwind of anxious thoughts. So I started looking into the laws. My regular work involves medicine, not the legal profession, so I was lost. I found some state level laws that made me glad I'd gone on a blocking spree. California and Florida have specific language in their laws about 'providing minors with explicit content.' But what exactly is that? What I researched applied to the following activities: co-writing smut fanfic with other people, sexting, roleplaying and online messaging.

I run a fanfic blog with limited interaction. I've never done an ask. I don't roleplay on here and I don't want to.

The blocks weren't personal. They were partly based on the awareness that Tumblr is an interactive site and a place that's had a problem with child pornography in the past. But I'm not the smut police. I suck at blocking, and I doubt I did a good job of purging my followers list. This is when it hit me that boundaries are only what I can enforce. They've never been about how other people relate to me, only how I relate to them. (Wow. I've never sounded more like my mother in my life...) After this thought, I started considering what actions I ought to take if I wanted to keep posting fanfic on Tumblr.

My Post Blocking Spree Clarity...

It's up to me who I interact with. I don't have to reply to every comment and re-blog, but I'd like to. I'm stuck between wanting to write for everyone and handling interactions on a social media site that's mostly anonymous.

The fact remains: I can't be the smut police because I suck at it.

What I've decided is that I'll make it very clear on my blog that this is an 18+ space where I publish erotic fanfiction. Smut will always be appropriately marked. I'm not going to interact with reviews, re-blogs, and messages from accounts who don't have their age in their profile. I won't include them in my tag list either. The internet is a public forum. Just as with publishing erotica, once it's out there online for download, it's done. As a ghost writer and an author, I don't control who buys my original fiction, which is just as spicy as my fanfiction. (Trust me, it's explicit. I once had a romance editor tell me I should dial it back on the smutty parts of a novel because "it's a lot of sex for a non-erotica market.") The key difference on Tumblr is about interaction. And that's something I can control. I can decide when I reply to other users. What brought me around to this was the realization that even after the blocking spree, I can't review every single like I get. That's an amount of time and mental energy that's beyond me. Just the past two days have been exhausting and sapped my will to write. Which sucks because I need to go write the next chapter of "Restitution" before tomorrow.

I think the reasons I went on the blocking spree are nuanced. The thirteen year old freaked me out. So did the other underaged people who had ages in their bios. But it also relates to my work. In my job I've seen some nasty child abuse cases. Early on in my career, when I was a 23 year old new hire, I was working on an autopsy for a child abuse victim who'd been murdered by their parent. It was so terrible and graphic, I had to ask one of my older colleagues to take the case. This colleague didn't like me. But she took one look at my face and took the file. She closed out the review without a question and never brought it up again to anyone. I was very grateful. Where I used to work (and where this incident took place) was a major city that holds the unfortunate title of being the human trafficking capital of the US. And something I learned working there was that most human trafficking victims go with their captors willingly. In two years at that job, I never saw one who'd been kidnapped from a dark alley like you see on TV. They were all groomed on social media and thought they were escaping their families (who were often overbearing, toxic, or dysfunctional) for a get away with friends. It was a fun adventure with their internet buddies, until it wasn't.

In retrospect, the underage interaction I found on my blog made me react because of what I've been through. The autopsy case kept coming back to me today while I was at work and I've finally untangled my emotions enough to figure out what caused my melt down. When I was blocking, I was feeling an anxious motivation that I know can only stem from the stress I deal with at my job. Don't feel sorry for me about this - I know my work in medicine helps a lot of people and it's a tremendously satisfying career.

Our Saga's Resolution & How I'm Going to Deal With This In The Future...

- - - - -

In post block clarity, I offer this conclusion:

I'm writing on a public forum. My work is appropriately tagged as smut. In the future, I will also use the tag #no minors to help with filtering. I've always asked underage people not to interact. And on a public forum, what more can I reasonably do? Going forward I will only interact with those who have their age posted in their bio. But blocking sprees and policing every interaction isn't feasible.

I'll review how I'm going to run my tag lists as well. I need to think it over and let my followers know my decision as to if I'll continue using them. Because tagging is definitely interaction and my current tag list was not screened at all. *face palm*

Finally, to my readers who have blank blogs or don't have an age listed. I respect your right to privacy and I'm careful with my personal information as well. But I've also had an uncomfortable two days. If you've lasted through this venting session until now, you must understand that I'm upset by underage interaction. I'm setting my own boundaries and going forward, I'll own my side of the internet. No interaction from me, unless I know your age. Full stop - no exceptions. I think it is reasonable for me to suggest that you leave something on your blog that signifies you are not a minor, whatever that may be. Someone who I didn't block that stands out in my memory had a bio that said "90s baby." It was simple, direct, and left no doubt they were over 18. No age reveal and not even a name. If you put something like this on your blog it'll help explicit content creators feel more comfortable about their interactions.

I went on a spree this Monday and I admit to being heavy handed and aggressive about pruning followers. I had an emotional reaction due to work stress and I didn't think things through logically. I'm relieved for the chance explain myself and set new boundaries that I'm capable of sticking to in the future. But remember - the block button is on my side of the screen. At the end of the day, you might be unhappy with me for the block, but it's my button, it's my blog, and I'll use it as I see fit.

Thank you for reading.

[slurrmp]

not another info sheet. part II

                                       elenore white (doctor who)

BASIC INFORMATION

FULL NAME: elenore campbell white PRONUNCIATION: EL-a-nor MEANING: compassion, foreign REASONING: just a name that her mother really liked NICKNAME(S): ellie, nore, nelle PREFERRED NAME(S): ellie BIRTH DATE: march 6th 1992 AGE: 27 ZODIAC: pieces GENDER: female PRONOUNS: she/her ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: biromantic SEXUAL ORIENTATION: pansexual NATIONALITY: british/australian ETHNICITY: white CURRENT LOCATION: sheffield, united kingdom LIVING CONDITIONS: in a small flat that sits just above her small cafe in the city. TITLE(S): miss

BACKGROUND

BIRTH PLACE: albany, western australia HOMETOWN: sheffield SOCIAL CLASS: middle class EDUCATION LEVEL: finished high school FATHER: bernard white (deceased) MOTHER: patricia white (nee dunham) (alive) SIBLING(S): none BIRTH ORDER: only child CHILDREN: none PET(S): only pet she owns is the tabby cat that likes to sit on her balcony when she’s home. OTHER IMPORTANT RELATIVES: none PREVIOUS RELATIONSHIPS: she had a short term boyfriend when in high school, but because they traveled regularly she could never settle down properly. ARRESTS?: was once caught stealing from a local 7eleven when she was 16 and quite drunk. PRISON TIME?: none

OCCUPATION & INCOME

PRIMARY SOURCE OF INCOME: running and owning her own cafe SECONDARY SOURCE OF INCOME: none TERTIARY SOURCE(S) OF INCOME: she travels with the master - that’s her income APPROXIMATE AMOUNT PER YEAR: usually it depends on how well her cafe does. which it does, during both summer and winter months. around about 50k CONTENT WITH THEIR JOB (OR LACK THERE OF)?: it’s what she was born to do PAST JOB(S): went straight from high school to working in a local bakery, which didn’t really help pay the bills but was enough to help her keep learning. (desk agent with UNIT) SPENDING HABITS: hardly buys anything for herself. most of her furniture and clothes are second hand. what she does spend on are product for her cafe and also the occasional cat food for the stray tabby MOST VALUABLE POSSESSION: her father’s wedding ring, which her mother gave to her when he passed

SKILLS & ABILITIES

PHYSICAL STRENGTH: ellie enjoyed water polo when in school, so swimming was everything to her - which means that she is quite strong in her legs and arms. OFFENSE: no DEFENSE: yes. only when needed however SPEED: not much of a runner. however, will sprint if her life is in danger INTELLIGENCE: hated maths in school, as well as science. however, she is in no way stupid ACCURACY: terrible AGILITY: pretty flexable, can move around objects and people easy STAMINA: it’s fairly good TEAMWORK: there’s only one other person she depends upon TALENTS: can make a mean souffle SHORTCOMINGS: she’s very quick to trust, as well as wanting to help everyone LANGUAGE(S) SPOKEN: english, a little bit of swedish DRIVE?: yes JUMP-STAR A CAR?: no CHANGE A FLAT TIRE?: yes RIDE A BICYCLE?: yes SWIM?: yes PLAY AN INSTRUMENT?: she enjoys strumming a guitar PLAY CHESS?: no BRAID HAIR?: yes TIE A TIE?: yes PICK A LOCK?: no

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE & CHARACTERISTICS

FACE CLAIM: victoria pedretti EYE COLOR: blue HAIR COLOR: brown HAIR TYPE/STYLE: dead straight, however, with a bit of styling it will have a curl GLASSES/CONTACTS?: no DOMINANT HAND: left HEIGHT: 5′4″ WEIGHT: 58 kg BUILD: she’s short and skinny. but toned from all the water polo she played in high school, as well as all the training that she went through when she joined unit. EXERCISE HABITS: she’s terrible at keeping up with the gym, however running from a different species every week sure helps her keep fit. SKIN TONE: slightly tanned, however still pale TATTOOS: her star sign, pisces, on the inside of her middle finger. PEIRCINGS: ears ( double lobe ), helix, upper lip (however she never wears it in anymore) MARKS/SCARS: a birthmark in the shape of a what looks like a star on the underside of her arm. scar on her left thigh from falling out of a tree when she was a kid. a small scar on her right cheek (caused by the master) NOTABLE FEATURES: her blue eyes USUAL EXPRESSION: bubbly - bright - wide eyed CLOTHING STYLE: summer dresses mainly, bright and bold colours. during winter jeans and a fashionable jumper is what you’d find her in. when traveling with the master - it will depend on the planet, but always with sneakers or flat shoes. she learnt the hard way that sandals suck on a different planet JEWELRY: bracelets and a bangle that she’s had since she was a child. her father’s wedding ring, worn as a necklace ALLERGIES: most flowers, shellfish BODY TEMPERATURE: always running a slightly higher temperature than normal DIET: immaculate, considering she loves cooking most of her meals. however, after a hard day a work, she will get fast food PHYSICAL AILMENTS: had a broken leg when she was younger, however, nothing hindering her (yet)

PSYCHOLOGY

JUNG TYPE: entj ENNEAGRAM TYPE:   the peacemaker MORAL ALIGNMENT:  lawful good ELEMENT: water PRIMARY INTELLIGENCE TYPE:   logical-mathematical APPROXIMATE IQ: 127 MENTAL CONDITIONS/DISORDERS: a little bit of ptsd after her previous work SOCIABILITY: very out going and loves to meet new people EMOTIONAL STABILITY: perfectly stable (this eventually changes) OBSESSION(S): making sure that everything goes her way, that everything is perfect and that nothing is messed up PHOBIA(S): claustrophobic, fear of insects, open water ADDICTION(S): none DRUG USE: none ALCOHOL USE: limited PRONE TO VIOLENCE?: no

MANNERISMS

SPEECH STYLE: almost like a child - likes to use the abbreviation of words, especially when it comes to taking orders at work. however, when in business mode, she is able to speak ‘properly’ ACCENT: a little bit of that sheffield twang, however, she still has a hint of an aussie accent QUIRKS: bottom lip always finds its place between her teeth HOBBIES: cooking and baking is her life, going to the markets every weekend, binging tv shows that she’s missed through the week HABITS: has a habit of biting her nails NERVOUS TICKS:  pacing when she’s nervous DRIVES/MOTIVATIONS: to survive. she’s on her own now and she knows what’s out there, ellie is just trying to make a living for herself so that she can survive the next alien attack FEARS: dying. it’s a common one, but she knows what’s out there, losing her friends and her mother POSITIVE TRAITS:  strong willed, brave, will stand up for herself NEGATIVE TRAITS:  too trusting, willing to see the best in everyone, very stubborn SENSE OF HUMOR:  oh it’s dry but also a little dark DO THEY CURSE OFTEN?:  on and off CATCHPHRASE(S): what the hell is that?

FAVORITES

ACTIVITY: baking ANIMAL: otter BEVERAGE: white wine BOOK: war and peace CELEBRITY: george clooney COLOR: pastel grey DESIGNER: jimmy choo FOOD: roast chicken FLOWER: she’s allergic, but if she had to choose, lotus GEM: sapphire HOLIDAY: christmas MODE OF TRANSPORTATION: local transport MOVIE: 13 going on 30 MUSICAL ARTIST: sleeping at last SCENERY: a bright and sunny day in the park SCENT: flour, cookie dough SPORT: ice hockey SPORTS TEAM: pittsburg penguins TELEVISION SHOW: new girl WEATHER: spring VACATION DESTINATION: back to her birth place, australia

ATTITUDES

GREATEST DREAM: to become a world famous baker GREATEST FEAR: seeing earth fall into the wrong hands MOST AT EASE WHEN: when she’s in the kitchen. it is absolutely the place she goes to when she’s sad, stressed, happy, angry LEAST AT EASE WHEN:  backed into a corner, being accused of something that she didn’t do WORST POSSIBLE THING THAT COULD HAPPEN: being left behind on an alien planet by her travel companion BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT: opening her own cafe BIGGEST REGRET:  not settling down MOST EMBARRASSING MOMENT:  she told the kind of france to fuck off when she was having a bad day. safe to say that she isn’t welcome back in 17th century frace BIGGEST SECRET:  her love for the master TOP PRIORITIES: her cafe

[welllpthisishappening]

Like Being Submerged in Your Contradictions

She supposes she’s not surprised.

Clarke probably should have expected it. After all, her romantic track record is not really all that impressive. But. She hoped. And to say that she’s a little disappointed to find out sex with Bellamy is not as great as she wanted it to be is an understatement.

So now he wants to talk about it. Figures.

—

Rating: Mature Word Count: 4.4K AN: I have no excuse for this. Also, timeline? Background explanation? Never heard of them. Also, also…writing canon terrifies me on the reg and I binged this show very quickly, so if things are wrong let’s just…assume it’s canon divergence. Deal? Deal. I have far too many fic ideas and not enough time. This is also my first @bellarkebingo​ fic checks off setting: sanctum and future prediction fic. 

|| Also on Ao3 if that’s your jam ||

She’s sweaty. 

And out of breath. 

The sheets keep sticking to the back of Clarke’s left leg. Only her left leg. Which is admittedly kind of weird, but she’s also admittedly preoccupied with how much all of this absolutely, positively sucks to be too worried about the state or location of the bedding. 

Damn.

It was supposed to be better than this. 

Easier. Great. Time for themselves and a guaranteed few hours with no interruptions. No rush. No pressure. Less...whatever this was. Not easy. 

Not great, honestly. 

Pretty awful. Bumped knees and scrunched noses, no rhythm, hardly any friction, just—quick shifts and kisses that were over before they really began, like they were racing towards the finish line if only to say that they’d crossed it and she can’t cry. 

That would be insane. 

In the grand scheme of everything, this is not the worst thing that has ever happened to Clarke.

It doesn’t even crack the top ten. 

And yet. 

She’s marginally worried that she’s going to bite a hole through her lip, twisting it between her teeth while she tries to figure out where this went wrong and how this went wrong and it makes so much sense. They make sense. 

Together. 

They should have worked together. 

God, maybe she sucks at sex because her vocabulary is also pretty lacking. God, she hopes she’s not the one who’s bad at sex. No one else has ever mentioned that before. But, then again—most of the sex she’s had has been...fuck, she seriously can’t come up with descriptors right now. The disappointment that has taken root in the pit of Clarke’s stomach is far too heavy for her to do anything except acknowledge it, lips pressed together and breathing turning shallow and there’s a considerable amount of space between them. She’s at least seventy-two percent positive Bellamy is half hanging off the bed. 

Her right leg is starting to cramp up. 

She does her best to move without making it obvious, a slow shift and gritted teeth, but Clarke can’t help her hiss of pain when her calf muscle seizes up and maybe she’ll just stare at that one, particular spot on the ceiling for the rest of time. 

That seems like the only reasonable response. 

The bed creaks. 

“So, uh—” Bellamy starts, every letter sounding strained. “That was, uh—” “—Oh my God, stop it.” “No, Clarke, c’mon, that was—” “—I’m going to punch you, I swear.”

He laughs. 

Clarke’s neck doesn’t appreciate the way she snaps it towards him — and maybe this whole thing is just a commentary on how old she is, or at least how old she feels and that second thing is ten-thousand times more depressing than any sort of disappointing sex with the guy she’s been wanting to have sex with for more than a century. 

Shit. 

Shit, shit, shit. 

“I don’t know what to be more offended by,” Clarke sneers, “you laughing at me, or everything that’s happened in the last fifteen minutes.” “Ah, c’mon, it was longer than fifteen minutes.” “Maybe we should have timed it.” Bellamy stops laughing. 

And Clarke feels bad — she does. But the disappointment appears to be evolving into something a little bitter and a little angry, clawing its way up her throat and threatening to spill out her mouth and she can’t believe this. 

Well, no—she can. That’s the problem. 

She can believe the shit and the garbage and something else that didn’t play out exactly the way she never should have let herself imagine it could be. 

Melodramatic idiot. 

“Yeah, that’s fair,” Bellamy mumbles. “You want to talk about it?” “About what, exactly?” “Clarke.” “Saying my name over and over again is not going to help.” “Yeah, I picked up on that weirdly enough. I, uh—that sucked, right?” “Did we get to the sucking?”

He lets out a strangled noise that almost immediately turns into something far closer to a groan, an arm splayed out over his still-tilted head. “No,” Bellamy agrees, and that’s a strange way to do that. “I don’t think we did, actually.” “Lame.” “That’s a word for it, yeah. Why?” “You’re really determined to talk about this, aren’t you?” Clarke asks sharply. He shrugs. He still hasn’t moved his arm. “People are going to be back here soon and they’re going to need—” “—They can wait a couple minutes.” “Really got a high opinion of your own in-bed prowess, huh?” Bellamy’s arm might be marble for all the moving it does, but Clarke can still see the dots of color that explode on his cheeks, in between every freckle and the few scars that have lingered on his skin. 

She’s not just Sanctum’s biggest idiot. She’s this place's biggest asshole. 

“Obviously not,” he grumbles. “Although, I haven’t heard many complaints before. And I—all I’m saying is that maybe that’s our problem. Thinking about...expiration dates. Time limits.” “Speak English.” “I could say it in Trig if you want.” Clarke might growl. The sound scratches at her throat and leaves her gnashing her teeth, one side of Bellamy’s mouth tugging up at the sarcasm. “Is this your way of flirting? Because it could use some work, honestly.” “That’s—this isn’t what I thought would happen.”

Clarke blinks. Once, twice, opens her mouth only to close it and, grand scheme, it is ridiculous for that to be the thing. But it is and has been and it’s been a goddamn century. “Have you?” she whispers, voice barely that. “More times than I’d be willing to admit.”

She cannot cry. She will not cry. If Clarke keeps repeating it — in her head — then she’s sure, eventually, she’ll believe it. She won’t cry. In bed. With Bellamy. In her room. 

Their room, really. 

Because that’s been happening too. In the days and weeks and months since the end of everything else — since shaky peace treaties and only kind of understanding the anomaly, of losses and the destruction of the flame and the creation of this, a tremulous calm that Clarke still can’t entirely believe is real, with cabins and curtains on windows and books on shelves that Bellamy built himself, there’s been this growing...thing. Unspoken, unacknowledged, because it didn’t really have to be. 

Just was. Like always. Intertwined live and his boots sitting just inside the door and her head on his chest when he’d fall asleep because it’s easier to breathe that way. 

And yet. Part two. 

It’s an exaggeration to suggest that Clarke has grown impatient — couldn’t possibly, not after already waiting so long, several lifetimes worth of pent-up emotion, but she might be a little greedy and the words felt like they’d fallen out of her. 

Maybe we could spend some time together. Just me and you. 

And Bellamy had smiled. That smile. The one she’d let herself think about sometimes, when everything else was going to shit, when the world was, quite literally, coming to an end, more than once, Clarke would let her mind drift and she’d remember that smile, the way it would stretch across his face, lighten the color in his eyes and leave the skin there slightly crinkled like it couldn’t possibly contain all the emotion there. 

For her. 

Emotion he felt for her. 

She really is Sanctum’s biggest idiot. 

“You might as well say them out loud,” Bellamy mutters, practically jerking Clarke out of her reverie and they’re going to have to wash these sheets. 

She can’t imagine how they got quite this damp when nothing really...happened. 

“What?” “Out loud,” he repeats. “If you’re going to be thinking such obvious thoughts, you might as well tell me what they are.” “I’m not thinking anything.” “It is rude to lie.” Clarke huffs — frustration mixing with something else that feels a little bit like betrayal because she’s starting to find it insulting how endeared she is by him. And his awful jokes. And the overall length of his hair. 

“I’ve got a question,” Bellamy announces, flipping onto his side so he can prop his head on his head. It makes his hair shift, curls that drift dangerously close to his brows, and Clarke’s moving before she’s really thought about it, fingers ghosting over his forehead and his eyes flutter shut. 

He exhales softly, some of the rather obvious tension around them dissipating.

“Just one?”

“At least one that’s been bothering me for the last century or so.” Clarke doesn’t respond, can’t over the rising dread in the back of her brain, the feel of it creeping up her spine. Bellamy grins. 

“Why’d you put me on the list?” he asks, and Clarke is glad she hadn’t said anything. It ensures that she can gasp dramatically, eyes going wide enough that they actually start to water. His expression doesn’t change. Eventually she’ll think that’s important. “Because,” Bellamy continues, “I’ve been going over it and you didn’t even ask. I mean—there were plenty of people who could have been on the list and—” “—Are you kidding me, right now? This is what you want to talk about?” He hums, ducking down to kiss the bridge of her nose. Clarke may melt. That won’t help the overall state of the sheets. “Well, you didn’t want to talk. So—what’s that old Earth expression? I’m taking the floor.” “I don’t think that’s right at all.” “Ah, well, an attempt is at least being made.”

Clarke clicks her tongue, but she can’t quite get herself to be frustrated and that is...something. She supposes. Hopes, maybe. 

She wants to hope, at least. 

That’s always felt like half the battle. “Can I keep going now?” Bellamy quips, eyebrows jumping when Clarke pinches his forearm. “I’m going to take that as a yes.” “Was my threat of punching you not really that threatening?” “No, it wasn’t, honestly.” “God.” “Anyway,” he says pointedly, “my question is still the same. Why? Because I—there were people you left off, and I understand why you did, but what was I bringing to the table?” “Just full of Earth clichés today, aren’t you?” “Technically, it’s night.”

Clarke yanks on the blanket, quick enough that she manages to take Bellamy by surprise and she lets herself gloat about that for approximately two and a half seconds before her gaze drifts to his suddenly exposed body and—

“You are staring, Princess.”

She cannot keep bouncing through emotions like this. Clarke’s mind feels like it’s racing, plummeting through some kind of time vortex where they can have conversations like this and moments like this and—“I can’t believe you just called me that,” she mutters, pulling the blanket up over her shoulders. 

Like that will help protect her. 

It’s a dumb metaphor. 

And one she knows Bellamy picks up on almost immediately. 

He didn’t really have to ask her to voice her thoughts. He’s always been too good at that. Disarmingly good, even. 

“Big guns, or however the saying goes,” Bellamy grins. 

“You really think this is working for you, don’t you?” “Nah, if it was working, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. But that’s kind of my point.” “Convoluted.” “A little. And you’re avoiding the question. Still staring, too.” Clarke hums, letting her head drop back to the pillow and she doesn’t try to mask the way her eyes move that time. She doesn’t actually move — is far too twisted in the sheets to even attempt that — but her gaze traces every inch of Bellamy, follows the curve of his shoulder and the slope of his back, lingers on the scars she knows and those she hasn’t mapped yet, more markers of time and years and they were supposed to have time tonight. 

Finally, 

And if this was all they were going to get, then—

“Clarke,” Bellamy presses. “I can’t actually read your mind.” “No?” “It’s weird, I know.” Her laugh doesn’t have much humor to it, is far shakier than Clarke would like it to be, but her lungs also don’t feel like they’re collapsing, so she assumes that’s a step in the right emotional direction. “Sometimes I used to think you could,” she whispers. “Those first couple of days after the bridge. Before the Ark came down and everything—” “—Went to shit?” “Always seems to, doesn’t it?” “I hope not. Still not an answer.” “You’re harping” “Curious,” Bellamy amends, sliding closer to her. There’s still space, enough that the heat coming off him isn’t more than a passing graze of warmth on Clarke’s cheek, and she’ll have to thank him for that at some point. For not pushing. For knowing. For understanding. 

Clarke licks her lips — dimly aware of the way Bellamy’s shoulders shift as she does, and she probably should have offered him back some of the blanket. 

She doesn’t. 

“I didn’t want to make it,” Clarke starts, and she can’t actually get her voice above a vaguely guarded murmur. He doesn’t blink. “I mean—you know that, right?” Nothing. 

She didn’t expect there to be anything. 

Her mouth is very dry. 

“But I—well, I just...we had to think about what people could do and what they’d bring to a bunker. You know—guards and engineers, doctors, all those things. I—” Clarke shakes her head, confusion rattling around her brain. “You know all of this.” Bellamy nods. “Yeah, that wasn’t my question, though. You picked ninety-eight names, let me fall asleep on that piece of garbage couch—” “—How long have you been holding that in?” “At least a hundred years? Can I finish now?” Clarke sticks her tongue out. He kisses between her eyebrows. “I do know all of that. Which is why it never made sense to put me on the list. Not really. Not after everything I’d done and—” 

Bellamy’s breath hitches, a sharp inhale through gritted teeth, and the emotion in the pit of Clarke’s stomach shifts again. She moves, arm darting out and palm flat on his cheek. He’d shaved a few days earlier, the growing stubble scraping at her skin and the feel of it is almost comforting. Grounding, even. Like it’s reminding her that he’s there and with her and that’s always been the case. 

She can’t believe the sex was so God awful. 

“I couldn’t,” Clarke rasps, “not—I wanted to do it right. After everything I’d done, too. Pick the best and make the right choice and I am...greedy.” “How do you figure?” “With you?” 

“That was a question.” “Yeah, well, it’ll sound insane otherwise.”

He chuckles, twisting his head so he can nip at the back of her wrist. It leaves another scratch of stumble against her, but Clarke’s lungs are evolving again and for as desperate as they’d been, now, twenty-two minutes earlier, this is somehow even better. This soft and almost tremulous thing, not quite cautious, but calm — all practiced ease and a distinct lack of personal space. 

She wants to touch every single inch of him. 

She wants him to touch every single inch of her. 

“Greedy,” Clarke says again, only a little disappointed that it sounds like an admission. Of what, she’s not entirely sure. Not yet, at least. “I couldn’t—no, that’s not even it, I wouldn’t do anything else. Because, well—you’re right, aren’t you?” “No applicable skills?” “I mean—no, that’s not true. You are—you can do so much, Bell, and you are...well, you won’t shut up about talking and people trust you. Way more than me.” “That does sound pretty insane.” “What did you keep saying? Will you let me finish?” 

He shifts again, crowds into her space like he knows he can now. Clarke’s fingers push into his hair — nowhere else to go, or so she will tell herself when she’s trying to forget about the less-than-ideal parts of this night — forehead finding Bellamy’s and there really more freckles on his cheeks she ever expects. 

“People trust you,” Clarke mutters. “And that’s—ok, yeah, I mean—” She stuttering now, stammering over words and explanations because both of those things are wholly founded in feelings and she’s still kind of coming to terms with that. 

Six years of radio messages are one thing. 

Actually living them is another. 

And she’s a pessimist. 

“Why, Clarke?” Bellamy asks, dragging the question across the curve of her jaw and her back arches when his teeth nip at her skin. 

“I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you.”

She doesn’t mean for the words to soar out of her the way that they do, half shouted and honestly meant and Clarke has to blink again. Her vision has gone a little glossy. 

Bellamy doesn’t respond. Which—yeah, that’s fair. He just holds her gaze for a moment before he noses at her cheek, a hand on her blanket-covered hip and Clarke wishes she didn’t close her eyes. She wishes she could watch every shift when he manages to inch even closer to her, the way his back twists and the muscles there tense, trying to do something without actually saying anything. 

So, she does, instead. 

“I picked people,” Clarke continues, “all those roles I knew we had to fill and I had—I was writing your name before I even really thought about.” “High praise,” Bellamy mumbles, mostly into the side of her neck. There are goosebumps on Clarke’s skin, breath coming a little quicker than it had a few moments before. 

“God, you’re annoying.” He hums, more kisses and wandering hands, and she’s got no idea when or how she moved onto her back, only that Bellamy’s forearms are on either side of her head and her fingers start tracing scars. On instinct. And something far deeper than that. 

“I just—” Clarke says, “it didn’t make sense not to have you on the list. To not give you…” “What?” “Time. To have a chance, just to...be. Even after the world ended.” “That happened eventually.” “Did it?” Bellamy nods, tugging lightly at the top of the sheet and Clarke doesn’t object when he pulls the fabric down. Maybe they should just throw it all away. Metaphorically. Literally. “What do you think we’re doing now?” he asks lightly, and Clarke genuinely isn’t sure how much more of this her spine will be able to take. 

She arches under him, certain her skin is actually starting to buzz, a low hum in the back of her brain and in between every single one of her ribs, like she’s about to burst from the inside out. 

“Having really bad sex?” Clarke quips. “Ha, ha, ha. What did I tell you before? When I woke up from the shitty couch.” “Why do you have so many opinions on this couch?” “An answer,” Bellamy says, but there’s a hint of something just on the edge of his voice and Clarke knows the goosebumps have betrayed her as soon as he laughs. 

“Bastard.” “Yes, that’s been fairly well documented over the years. Do you want a hint?” “Are you going to try and make out with me again or not?” He sighs — although Clarke can still feel the way his mouth turns up while he drags it towards her collarbone, alternating kisses with the soft graze of his teeth and the stubble that she’s really starting to be questionably into. 

“I told you if I was on that list, then so were you,” Bellamy says. “And I meant it Clarke. If you were trying to give me time to—” “—Live.” “Babe, seriously, the interruptions have got to stop.” Clarke has witnessed far more explosions than any single human being ever should, has dealt with radiation and death and destruction and an almost absurd number of apocalypses. Her body has been hers and not, some scars she doesn’t entirely understand yet, and even after all of that, the bullshit and the garbage and the distinct lack of time, nothing has prepared her for Bellamy Blake to call her babe while dragging his mouth towards the top of her right thigh.

She gasps. 

It’s a lame reaction, really. 

Although she had closed her eyes before. So, grand scheme. Again. 

“Yeah?” Bellamy asks, far too knowing against the jut of her hip. 

“I’ll kick you, I swear.” He chuckles, more warmth that fans across Clarke and her back almost audibly protests the contortions she’s putting it into, but something feels like it snaps in the very center of her and she can’t be bothered by the confines of normal human muscle mechanics. 

She tries to grind up, to cant her hips and force something — but that might have been their problem from the get. Forced into situations they couldn’t control, a distinct lack of options or time and now they’ve got both. 

And Clarke would pick Bellamy every single chance she got. 

“We’ve got time now,” he says, soft and so goddamn earnest Clarke is pleasantly surprised her heart doesn’t simply burst out of her chest. 

She’s glad. 

That would be messy. 

And probably the only thing that could distract her from what happens next — Bellamy sliding further down the bed, fingers brushing the inside of Clarke’s legs until his lips take over and she stares at that same spot on the ceiling. 

She doesn’t resent it quite as much anymore. 

“You know that right, babe?” Bellamy asks. “This is it. Every cliché we could come up with. The start of it all and the beginning of the end and—” “—Oh, that’s a good one,” Clarke interrupts. She’s a little breathless again, reaching a blind hand out to card her fingers into his hair. And hold him exactly where he is. He doesn’t seem all that inclined to move, honestly. 

“Yeah, I’m big on that one too. We get to go slow now. Be boring.” “Boring?” “Boring,” Bellamy echoes. “Linger, even. In every single thing we do. Get greedy with all of it because that’s what I want. I want to get greedy with you too, Clarke.”

“Yeah?” “Disappointing that wasn’t more obvious.” She laughs — soft and easy and the hope that rushes through both of her arms is barely contained by the tips of her fingers, a burst of energy and want and—“Just relax, ok?” Bellamy mutters. “Let me take care of you.” “What was that about things sounding insane?” “Rude. And the definition of insanity is doing the same thing while expecting different results, right?” “Yuh huh.” “So, let’s try something different.”

Clarke doesn’t get a chance to refute, no opportunity for the continuation of vaguely playful and slightly flirty banter. Every single word she’s ever learned, in a variety of languages, disappears as soon as Bellamy’s head drops and tongue darts out and neither one of them acknowledge that something in her back definitely cracks. 

Or how tight her fingers get in his hair. 

If anything, that second thing seems to spur him on. 

He makes this one, specific noise that Clarke will probably think about on rotation for at least the next one-hundred years, a rhythm that had felt impossible the first time they tried this. Although, to be fair, they hadn’t tried this. 

That was definitely their first mistake. 

Bellamy mouths at her, long swipes of his tongue that eventually turn to pressure and fingers and he must mumble something because Clarke can just make out sounds that almost resemble words and might be yeah, like that and fuck, you feel good. She closes her eyes again, can’t think of anything else to do when all Clarke wants to do is linger in the moment and the feeling. 

She rocks up. He pushes down. They settle into this and each other and it’s exactly the same as it’s always been, as it probably always should have been, but, for the first time, Clarke doesn’t feel like she’s running on borrowed time. 

She doesn’t even feel like she’s running, while everything is moving around her — she’s just...just. Content. Calm. She’s— “Oh, fuck,” she hisses, Bellamy's low chuckle far too pleased while she arches up and suggesting that she feels everything is absurd. Insane, even. 

And yet. Version three point oh. 

Clarke’s breath catches and her body goes tight before it all seems to shatter, a break that’s somehow overwhelming and perfect, rushing from the top of her head to the tip of her toes and Bellamy groans when her leg drapes over his shoulder. 

Both of her calf muscles are perfectly fine. 

And he doesn’t move immediately, lets the moment stay exactly the way Clarke wants it to, but then Bellamy is crowding in her space again and his mouth is on hers and it’s back to greedy and demanding, any sense of slow forgotten in how much they both want. 

Hope. 

“Smug does not look good on you,” Clarke mutters. It does not come out like the insult she wants it to, Bellamy’s lower lip stuck out when he nods. 

That makes it easier to catch between her teeth, though. So. Whatever. 

He talks even more as they start to move again, running his mouth with encouragements and promises and the word babe on loop, if only because Clarke’s hips jerk every time it happens. And it still might not be the best they could do — the nose thing is really going to be a logistical nightmare if they can’t figure out the proper angle to turn their heads for optimum kissing, but kissing also seems like something of an afterthought when it turns into just shared breath and shared space and Bellamy’s eyes close at some point. 

Clarke will also think about that.   

For a very long time. 

Which is what they have now. 

Together. 

She’s out of breath again, sweat clinging to the ends of her hair and the light that drifts across the floor is a little different than it had been earlier. The shadows stretch and the curtains flutter in a soft breeze, like the whole of it all is simply waiting for—

Clarke flutters her fingers, not much space between her and the arm next to hers and Bellamy’s wrist flips. “That was smooth,” he murmurs, hand finding hers. He’s smiling. She can tell. 

“Yeah, that was my plan from the beginning.” “Was it?” She hums, head falling to the side. She’d been right about the smiling thing. The same one she’d wanted when she asked for this and before she believed she could. Hers. Theirs, really. “Absolutely,” Clarke says. “You think it worked?” “I think it will.” “Yeah, me too.”

They do eventually put new sheets on the bed, but only after they’ve woken up from asleep in it, a tangle of limbs and feelings and the beginning of the end. 

[moonlitmoth]

50 Questions

Tagged by @maladjustedchangeling

1. What is the colour of your hairbrush? Hot pink

2. Name a food you never ever eat.  I hate mayonnaise and white cream based sauces (like alfredo) so much it’s a borderline fear. I hate fish, brussels sprouts, and asparagus. I love passionfruit flavored things but I’ve never been able to bring myself to eat the real thing because it looks so fucking weird. It’s like alien fruit. 

3. Are you typically too warm or too cold? My hands are always cold but the rest of my body is pretty normal.

4. What were you doing 45 minutes ago? Watching Paper Moon with my dad.

5. What is your favourite candy bar? I’m generally a sour candy fan, but I like Take-5, Twix, and Kit Kat bars. 

6. Have you ever been to a professional sports game? Just Dodger games. I actually like baseball (mostly playing it), it just takes too fucking long. I watch rugby on tv occasionally. 

7. What is the last thing you said out loud? Let me preface this with a story: When my parents were dating my dad tried to teach my mom a little German, and instead of saying “danke” my mom thought it would be funny to say “donkey” so it’s just been a longstanding thing in my family where instead of saying “thank you” we say “donkey.” So my dad just made me dinner and I said “Donkey, daddy.”

8. What is your favourite ice cream? Cookies and cream or cookie dough, but I also like coffee ice cream. I also really like the circus animal cookie one you can get by the scoop from Rite Aid/ Thrifty, but I started making my own by adding crushed up animal cookies to cake batter ice cream and adding pink food coloring and a shit ton of rainbow sprinkles. It makes me so fucking happy. 

9. What was the last thing you had to drink? Water

10. Do you like your wallet? Not really but a wallet’s a wallet. 

11. What was the last thing you ate? A beyond burger. 

12. Did you buy any new clothes last weekend? No. I keep thinking about buying myself come cute loungewear sets to wear around the house, but I really shouldn’t spend money on dumb shit right now given the current economic situation. 

13. The last sporting event you watched? Um I watched a rodeo on tv a few months back. One of those big international ones. 

14. What is your favorite flavor of popcorn? Kettle corn

15. Who is the last person you sent a text message to? My coworker/ friend

16. Ever go camping? Technically. I used to go every summer with my high school BFF and her family up to El Capitan State Park or Carpenteria (both on the beach) and camp at the grounds there. But it was hardly ever “roughing it.” Carpenteria’s just a little beach town so all we had to do was walk a block to go get our s’mores supplies lol I like camping though

17. Do you take vitamins? Yup

18. Do you go to church every Sunday? No, my family was never super religious in that way. I went to a parochial catholic school from K-12, so we had weekly mass anyway, so my parents didn’t have to take me. We mainly went on the big holidays like Easter and Christmas. 

19. Do you have a tan? Nope

20. Do you prefer Chinese food over pizza? Yes

21. Do you drink your soda with a straw? Sometimes. I prefer soda from glass bottles

22. What color socks do you usually wear? Whatever is least noticeable and compliments the shoes i’m wearing. 

23. Do you ever drive above the speed limit? Not really, too anxious. 

24. What terrifies you? Mainly that there’s no life after death. 

25. Look to your left, what do you see? My window

26. What chore do you hate most? Cleaning my room. I’ll clean other parts of the house to avoid cleaning my own room. 

27. What do you think of when you hear an Australian accent? Honestly, no offense, but I find Australian accents super fucking annoying, though not as annoying as South African English. Like, omfg I can’t stand it. 

28. What’s your favorite soda? Cherry Coke or Hansen’s Pomegranate soda, which is getting harder to find. 

29. Do you go in a fast food place or just hit the drive? Depends

30. What is your favourite number? 1017 because I’m a narcissist (my birthday), but also I have this thing where that number pops up a lot in my life. 

31. Who’s the last person you talked to? My mom

32. Favourite cut of beef? I don’t really think about it. Probably just filet mignon. 

33. Last song you listened to? New Order - Academic

34. Last book you read? Last one I finished was Waiting For the Punch by Marc Maron (I mostly read a lot of memoirs). I’m trying to read Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente, but it’s not really sucking me in unfortunately. 

35. Favourite day of the week? I like the hope of a Friday night, knowing I’ve got 2 days to do something fun even though I’ll probably do nothing lol

36. Can you say the alphabet backwards? Probably but like who cares?

37. How do you like your coffee? Iced. I mostly like giant vanilla or pumpkin ice blends from Coffee Bean.

38. Favourite pair of shoes? Black chelsea block heel ankle boots. I’m also wearing my leopard slip on sneakers from H&M a lot. For my birthday this fall I’m planning on buying myself some over the knee boots and some Fluevog Cubist Cupcake boots (the witch boots of my dreams). I’m so excited.��

39. The time you normally get up? Normally for work it’s 6:15am but these days more like 10am

40. What do you prefer, sunrise or sunsets? I’ve suddenly become a morning person the past few years. 

41. How many blankets on your bed? 2 on top of a comforter.

42. Describe your kitchen plates. They're my grandma’s. Just white with turquoise polka dots around the edges. 

43. Describe your kitchen at the moment? Uh..too small for the amount of people in the house. White, traditional cabinets with tan granite countertops and my grandma’s ugly lace curtains hanging on the window over the sink. 

44. Do you have a favourite alcoholic drink? I rarely drink but I mix myself a Dirty Shirley sometimes. 

45. Do you play cards? No

46. What colour is your car? Grey

47. Can you change a tire? Yes

48. Your favourite state? California, bitch. I don’t think I can live anywhere else. 

49. Favourite job you’ve had? Haven’t had it yet

50. How did you get your biggest scar? I cracked my head open as a kid by falling backwards onto our coffee table while watching the cartoon version of Sleepy Hollow. Had to get staples in my head and everything. 

I tag: @hausdushades @lyannawinterfell @crumboftheearth @copper-jay @maryreadings @nyxmalum

[dorkery]

I manifest, briefly, to write about this miniseries WHICH I HAD EXTREMELY HIGH HOPES FOR, and it disappointed me so much I’m compelled to write an actual review about it. In summary, of course. If I did it in-depth, it would probably have to be on my proper blog (oops shit I haven’t updated that in ages).

INTRO ABOUT JAPAN AND WWII (skip this to get to actual review of series)

TOKYO TRIAL. Ah. The Asian parallel to Nuremberg. Media about Japanese war crimes and the subsequent actions (the trial, the rehabilitation of criminals, the adoption of Unit 731 research by American forces, the conflicts between the Japanese Imperial Army and its victims) is not as extensive as the war in Europe. In fact, the Tokyo Trials themselves were not as punitive as the Nuremberg Trial (for a host of bureaucratic reasons, but also the lack of systematic eradication of Japanese citizens, but this is a very simplified explanation). And most media about the Japanese occupation is usually Chinese or Korean (understandably) even though the Japanese did a good job fucking up the Philippines, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and so on. Also, much media about the Japanese occupation, I find, tends to be about the overall general existence of the Japanese occupation force, rather than specific historical figures (I am making a blanket statement here, I’ve watched limited amounts of Korean and Chinese language media on the Japanese occupation). There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but the lack of quantity then leaves a viewer chomping on the bit for some good historical drama. 

Part of it, probably, is due to the relative mystery of the Japanese occupation when compared to the Nazi occupation. Nazis, the Holocaust, the Third Reich are everywhere in media and have been researched and shared to death. Not so for the Japanese invasion (well, probably in English). The Rape of Nanking (book) was probably THE thing that shone a spotlight on Japanese atrocities, but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the overall Japanese action in Asia (newsflash: the Japanese ALSO tortured the people in countries that were not China, even though yes, I will readily admit they especially tortured the Chinese populations in countries that were not China). 

There is so much Good Shit TM from a edutainment perspective on stuff you can squeeze out of the Japanese invasion. DID YOU KNOW??? THE JAPANESE ARMY CYCLED - ON BICYCLES - FROM THE KINGDOM OF SIAM TO SINGAPORE OVER 2 MONTHS, CAPTURING ALL THE TERRITORY THEY CYCLED THROUGH (because the locals supported the Japanese invasion at the time - Asia For Asians! was the propaganda they put out which was total bullshit, the locals would eventually discover), AND THEN ACCEPTED A BRITISH SURRENDER. THE KING OF SIAM AGREED TO LET THE JAPANESE USE THEM AS THE BIKING ENTRY POINT IN EXCHANGE FOR “DON’T INVADE ME BRO” AND ALSO “can I have some northern malayan territory”. THE JAPANESE AGREED. You can’t make this shit up. And this is the non-atrocity part of it. The atrocity part is as vicious, but differently so, from the Holocaust (which I would prefer not to get into as that’s an entire essay in and of itself - summary: the Japanese bayonet everything - EVERYTHING - and also Contest to kill 100 people with actual Japanese swords as promoted by Mainichi and Nichi Nichi Shimbun and also soap water drinking stomach bulge boot step interrogation technique ok let’s stop this here)

You get what I’m saying. It’s an entire period of history that has not been harvested for good quality drama. And I don’t need fabricated romantic bullshit (I’m looking at you, Embun (even though you were damned good, you’re STILL BULLSHIT)). I’m talking Schindler’s List-type films, with history and gravitas and nuance. Most historical movies have immature script-writers who basically paint the Japanese occupiers as monsters (not necessarily inaccurate, but painfully one dimensional). (Digression: Recently I watched Kanang Anak Langkau which was about a Malayan (and then Malaysian) Ranger who helped fight off the Communists after the Japanese occupation ended and, man, the entire movie was flat... except the Communists??? Like, they were clearly terrible but they were well-portrayed and had great actors. So. Opposite problem. Asians are really bad at war films that aren’t Classic Period Dramas.)

As a citizen of a Japanese-occupied country, with YEARS of history textbooks dedicated to the Japanese occupation, and a generation of Japanese war survivors either dead or unwilling to discuss their experiences, in a region with... pretty bad recording of this sort of history, I think you get my interest and fascination with this entire chapter. And since I’m in a country that isn’t the centre of the Japanese invasion (i.e. China and Korea) it makes even more sense that I’m interested in the occupation and action in countries like the Philippines, Malaya and so on.  

ACTUAL REVIEW OF TOKYO TRIAL MINI-SERIES

OK. Sorry. I had to get that off my chest. SO. Tokyo Trial.

This is actually the second piece of media about the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal on video that I’m aware of (that’s been dramatised). The first one was a movie, also called TOKYO TRIAL, and it was a Chinese production (in English) from a Chinese perspective. The protagonist was the Chinese judge on the bench, Justice Mei. Tokyo Trial the Movie (TT(M) from here on out) was heavily dramatised and abridged in order to make for (well, attempted) excitement, action and historical legal thrills. It gets bogged down at times with some typical pacing problems (typical for Asian films). Like a good historical legal thriller, it focuses on victim testimony and the arrogance of the accused and of course it culminates in the feel good moment where you can watch outraged/distraught Japanese war criminals reacting to their sentences. Overall not a bad movie to watch, but not really great. Made interesting only by the righteousness of the protag and the severity and outrageousness of the subject matter. But it suffers from some stuttered pacing and an extremely narrow Chinese POV (understandable, given the protag and the production). 

Now. Tokyo Trial (Mini-Series) (TT(MS) from here on). 

Pros: Very beautiful. Decent Actors. VERY BEAUTIFUL.

Cons: Literally everything else.

HOW. HOW DO YOU CREATE A MINI-SERIES ABOUT THE JAPANESE WAR CRIMES TRIAL WITHOUT FEATURING JAPANESE WAR CRIMES????? 

Astounding. I’m truly astounded. Where to even begin.

1. The protagonist

GUESS WHO IT IS. No really, guess. In a movie about the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, guess who the main character is. I guarantee you won’t get it.

It’s the Dutch Judge.

WHY? 

The Judge, btw, doesn’t even have any kind of personal or professional link to the Japanese occupation. Even when the protag is asked by a stranded German diva about how he must have suffered during the Nazi occupation, he admits that he didn’t have it as bad as others. His family is entirely intact although they were in the Dutch East Indies when the Japanese invaded.

2. The focus of the series

can you fucking guess

it’s the goddamn judges

the entire series is about the trials and tribulations (pun fucking intended) of the GODDAMN JUDGES

DURING SERIOUS TESTIMONY OF VICTIMS AND THE ACCUSED, THE SHOTS ARE OF THE CONCERNED/CONSTIPATED FACES OF THE JUDGES

The mini-series, 4 episodes long, opens with the Dutch Judge writing to his wife and giving some decent introduction to all the major players. And then it brings into focus the various justices from around the world who will be partaking in this historical undertaking. 

The President of the Tribunal is Sir William Webb, Australian. He looks great but suffers from terrible lines and staging. BTW all the characters are extremely one dimensional WITH TWO EXCEPTIONS: The British Judge (who veers between an ally, a one-note antagonist, but is then redeemed as an anti-hero - clearly the deuteragonist) and the Chinese Judge, who is soft-spoken, well-mannered, firm but not unyielding, a clear contrast to the fiery and righteous protag of TT(M). Honestly, I think he would be the best portrayal except... halfway through, Irrfan Khan appears as the Indian Judge, and honestly Paul Freeman was so good as the British (Scottish) Judge. 

The entire series is about the judges politicking amongst one another and trying to argue about whether crimes of aggression (or crimes against peace) are valid grounds for a case, as these crimes have never existed before (cue arguing about the precedent set by Nuremberg). 

Our intrepid (barf) protag intersperses the tense boardroom confrontations (really can barely be called that: a serious point is brought up in court, they adjourn to their chambers, they START to argue, and then the Tribunal President immediately says ok let’s all go retire for the day before any interesting or insightful conversations can begin) with one-on-one interactions with (1) a German pianist diva whom he admires as he plays violin (their duet sucks btw) (2) a Japanese intellectual who hangs out at the beach (they have zero onscreen connection and exists only to instill doubt in the Dutch judge’s mind as he contemplates the trial) (3) various judges as they begin gossiping over the latest judge to pose drama in the chambers. 

That’s all. Honestly. That’s the content of the mini-series in a nutshell.

3. The pacing and the script

god it’s so 

MEALY

Every scene, EVERY SCENE, is played as grave and solemn

You think this isn’t bad? Every single scene begins with thoughtful pauses and long poignant looks, even over such lines which you can picture your grandpa and uncle just quipping at each other (”The marathon begins” “I’d rather hope it would be a sprint”).

Mealy = the actual script is so awkward. It doesn’t sound like human beings talking. It’s a mouthful. ugh.

Pacing = Example: in episode 3, probably, literally 3 scenes side-by-side, 2 judges talking to each other as they walk down a path. Each scene is: A asks B about C. And then it is immediately followed by D asking C about B. CAN YOU IMAGINE??? They don’t intersperse the shot at all. It’s just 3 conversations in a row gossiping. 

Pacing 2 = time passes but badly. Suddenly a year has passed, but we don’t get a sense of it unless we’re told; there’s no difference in appearance or speaking manner among the judges. there’s no real development at all, except for the position of the Dutch Judge whose position on crimes of aggression changes as he gets pulled in several ways by several people, and you end the series without any feeling of resolution or satisfaction. AT ALL. I feel like you end where you start in terms of the arguments and everything.

4. Reflections

I’ve discovered that this mini-series was nominated for an emmy in 2017 for best series. I’ve also discovered 2 reviews (ONLY) online for this series, one on a blog and on one iMBD, both praising the series for being good for history buffs that showcases an unknown part of history.

i) That is not accurate. It is a terrible series that showcases the politics and drama of the tribunal judges, and not of the japanese war crimes. literally nobody needs to know, or care, about the judges of a war crimes trial (british, canadian, US, NZ judge conspire to get the president replaced, he leaves, US judge is chosen as his replacement, HE COMES BACK, NOBODY CARES) (aside with Blakely the US lawyer and what he’s trying to accomplish in court with his controversial and it’s not explained and ignored later)

ii) Historic footage is interspersed, meaninglessly. This includes the footage of the accused and 2 victims giving testimony, I believe. It is THE MOST INTERESTING part of the series. The footage used is minimal. And it just doesn’t gel with the whole series as a whole.

iii) This show was made by a Japanese crew and NHK so. 

All in all, from an entertainment perspective, Tokyo Trial failed to be compelling, interesting or noteworthy. The actors were bogged down by a bad script and weak direction. If you want to watch a show about the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, watch the older Chinese movie - less accurate but way more entertaining, and it ACTUALLY focuses on Japanese war crimes.

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

Spider-Gwen: Ghost Spider #4 Thoughts

 The very, very, very end of Spider-Geddon and...a surprisingly great issue!

Covering this comic is very strange for me because I’m coming at it from two places mentally speaking.

Firstly I’m jumping into the fourth and final tie in issue to an event comic having not read the prior three issues.

Secondly I’m jumping into Spider-Gwen, a series I abandoned long ago, back in volume 2 issue #10 to be precise, which was published over 2 years before this issue was. It also had an entirely different writer/artist team back then.

Frankly I picked this up purely because I knew Mayday and some RYV characters were going to be in it. In that regard the issue was rather pointless, they cameo and do little else.

However I’m actually glad I bothered with the comic all the same. I was expecting this to be fluff and filler at best. An insufferable worshipping of Gwen Stacy, as so many comics (including Spider-Gwen itself) was when Spider-Gwen got big back in 2014-2016.

To my delight that wasn’t the case.

I admit to being rather lost with some plot points such as Gwen having a symbiote (this was brought up in Spider-Geddon #2 but it was unexplained there too) and how exactly Gwen can transverse dimensions.

However the rest of the issue was mostly good. Now I read Secret Wars: Spider-Verse, Web Warriors and Spider-Geddon #0-5 but I didn’t read any other Spider-Gwen or Ghost Spider issues so to me Gwen’s sense of loss over Noir and Spidey-UK felt rather unearned and cheap. It wasn’t that I didn’t think she’s be upset over losing a comrade but the deep sense of loss and words towards little habits within their respective relationships didn’t ring true to me. However that may have come up in issues I didn’t read so I’m willing to be corrected on that.

But based upon my reading Gwen feeling as sad as she did was a bit of a stretch. I also felt the milking of Spidey-UK’s death from a reader point of view was questionable because...did anyone honestly love that character? Spider-Man Noir I can understand, he has a fanbase (and this issue hammered home how asinine a decision it was to kill him back at the start of this event) but Billy Braddock? Who cares really? He was used for some cheap pathos in Web Warriors and that was about it. Now that being said I did love the idea behind him being buried in Lady Spider’s dimension as she was English (although if memory serves that was never confirmed outright, she may have simply lived in 1800s New York). I did wonder where the Hell Lady Spider was throughout this event though.

The addressing of Noir’s death though was much more necessary and as stupid as it was to kill him I do give Marvel credit for having an issue which addresses that. His fans deserved at least that much, particularly I think the Noir/Felicia shippers who are undoubtedly out there. I also very much appreciated how May, MJ and Felicia had different reactions to his death respectively.

Another great thing was that the general addressing of grief, sadness and death in the issue felt respectful. It felt real even though as I said the specifics of Gwen’s relationship with Noir and Spidey-UK didn’t quite ring true. It’s like it would’ve been perfect dialogue and execution if used for another character’s death.  A small detail I especially  liked in this regard was Gwen’s drumming as a coping mechanism. One of my major complaints in Latour’s issues was how Gwen’s hobbies and passions were underused and underdeveloped. She was a drummer but that didn’t factor that much into the stories I read. So to see McGuire embrace that is as welcome as Miles’ artistic talents in ITSV.

Now I admit, those of you who recall my thoughts on Latour’s Spider-Gwen book might be calling me a hypocrite here. Because another of my frequent complaints was how doom and gloom and glum Gwen typically was in that series from the outset, yet here I’m praising that.

I think the distinction is this. Latour came out the gate defining Gwen as grieving and guilt ridden, reeling from a tragedy that happened an undisclosed amount of time ago (but still making with the yuks and gags). Not only was this tonal whiplash but it also was a shitty way to set up a new ongoing series. It began world building for Gwen in media-res of extenuating circumstances and circumstances which were incredibly derivative of Peter Parker.

Where McGuire succeeds in this issue is by having not only a distinctly different tragedy but also the benefit of this occurring both after Gwen’s world has been built up and in the aftermath of a huge event. It’s totally realistic and earned that there would be a mourning for fallen warriors after a war. It’d be disrespectful for that not to be the case; in fact it’s kind of disrespectful that that mourning happens in a tie-in issue not the main book!

By having this issue actually deal with the aftermath it re-contextualizes the prior issues of the event. Spider-Geddon as a whole was definitely a bloated poorly written inconsistent mess. But this issue as a coda treats it with the weight the main book never had. There is an emotional realism to the story even though we are dealing with something as wacky as inter-dimensional travel and totem vampires.

This emotional realism is pulled off so well you even feel a little something for Karn’s death, you even feel bad he died alone and so violently even though again, no one is a fan of that character. No one gives a shit about him.

Part of this realism comes from McGuire from this one issue apparently being an inherently better writer than Latour ever was, at least for Spider-Gwen. Latour in all this works I’ve read emphasises style, and wants you to ‘watch’ the story unfold rather than feel like you are right there with the characters. You can ‘see’ Spider-gwen is upset but McGuire takes you inside her head and writes her grief from the inside out. Latour might’ve used internal narration but he rarely pulled this off, probably because he was too busy making a clown show on the side with stupid ass Spider-Ham cameos, wacky humour about the Bodega Bandit or building up Evil Daredevil instead of you know, the ACTUAL main character.

His Spider-Gwen work felt a lot like watching things sort of just happened rather than experiencing things unfolding like in this issue.

What further enhances this story is the deliberate or accidental metatext behind the story. No I am not talking about how Stan Lee had recently died when the issue came out, though that did make me tear up thinking about it.

Gwen has been rebranded Ghost Spider (though her recap page doesn’t quite admit that weirdly) and this is an issue about Gwen dealing with ghosts, dealing with death, spreading the grim news as a reluctant messenger of death. That angle just works in this issue and if embraced would work brilliantly as a new element to the character to latch onto. In no small part because, as the issue itself acknowledges, Gwen Stacy’s legacy is inherently linked to death.

That might be admittedly a radical departure from the punk rock youth vibe the series began with, but not only was that rather squandered by Latour (with bullshit like Hipster Electro and Hipster Kraven the Hunter, go fuck yourself seriously!) but at the end of the day that vibe is perhaps rather...shallow...for an ongoing character...??????

Other elements of the issue I liked was the artwork. It’s not much like what Rodriguez was going, which was I admit very distinct and gave Spider-Gwen’s series a unique identity. But this art is still lovely and works very well for the subject matter. What is particularly nice was the different period outfits Gwen adopted as she made her travels through the multiverse. Also, though this isn’t strictly ‘art’ per se, the word balloons at Karn’s funeral have a cool moment where everyone speaks a salute to Karn and the combined word balloons look like a spider. That was just a cool touch.

My final note is that McGuire has one of the best Peter Parker moments I’ve seen in a long time, and considering the quality of Spencer’s run that is not damning with faint praise (as it would’ve been just over a year ago). In the scene Spider-Gwen and 616 Peter discuss Gwen needing some time off and Gwen asks if that is selfish. On the one hand this is a little bit derivative of Peter Parker, King of Guilt and Responsibility. On the other hand I guess most heroes would ask this of themselves. Peter Parker surprisingly gives a very mature answer.

Now this answer is very much in character and logical for Peter, but it’s also something too often writers neglect in favour of writing Peter in a repetitive manner that renders him a caricature. Peter acknowledges it is selfish but that that is not wrong, He says the world will always need saving but the heroes get to pick their battles and have to sometimes rest, that indeed they deserve it.

Though a mere moment in a story not about him McGuire writes a Peter Parker who truly feels like a mature adult, that feels like the Peter who is truly the sum of his experiences.

Were this teenage or college aged Peter he wouldn’t have been likely to say that. If it was friggin Slott’s Peter Parker definitely not (even though he’d have still gone to play with Miles in the park rather than do his actual job). But a Peter Parker who’s insanely experienced and knows his limits? Yes absolutely he’d know he’s entitled to down time and more importantly needs it. It’s demonstrative of how guilt is present in his character and yet is not the defining trait. Responsibility is, and there is a responsibility to himself. Spidey-UK even echoes such a sentiment earlier in the story.

So with all that said I must admit this issue was a tremendous triumph from where I’m standing, I’d recommend you read it and would go so far as to call it the best issue of Spider-Gwen I’ve ever read sans her debut.

Does it change my feelings for Spider-Geddon as a whole?

No, it still sucked and was still pointless beyond resurrecting MC2 Peter (which in my book makes it worth it, sorry Spidey Noir fans, I’m sure he’ll be back eventually) but this last issue took it out on an unquestionable high note.

[leilas-digital-scrapbook-blog]

Giving Love a Bad Name – Confessions of a Fanfiction Writer

I know we’re supposed to blog about our major projects this week and I promise I will get to that soon, but I’d like to go off book for a moment to address something that’s been bugging me since last Thursday’s class. As someone who’s always tried to engage with fandom in as creative a way as possible, I hoped a class on user generated content would offer a fresher perspective than the usual amount of prejudice and self-righteous superiority that sadly seem to accompany the subject of fanfiction even amongst people that make stories and their passion for it their bread and butter.

Guess I should have known better.

In the world of professional writers, fanfiction is still a filthy word. It sums up everything that’s wrong with the people you’re sharing your stories with: the obsessiveness, the entitlement, the disregard for boundaries, the penchant for making everything about sex. Worse, gay sex, as unspeakably dirty as it’s hilarious. Be warned, writers: if you make it big, your stories will inevitably become a free-for-all at the mercy of those people. A worse fate than even George R. R. Martin could wish on his own characters.

I’m used to seeing the world of fanfiction belittled and disparaged, of course, and I’m the first to admit that the community is often its own worst enemy. But for some reason it still hurt a little to sit in class and listen to people I’ve come to like and respect during these past few months buy into every bad stereotype associated with the form. Not because I felt called out (though yes, I do write fanfiction from time to time, and I happen to quite enjoy reading it too), but because of the underlying assumptions that 1. something that’s not 100% original cannot be art, it’s a violence in fact, especially if it twists someone else’s creation into something it was never meant to be (in this case, queer representation); and 2. there’s something wrong with creating exclusively out of love, without ever expecting to be paid for it. And I have Strong Opinions on that.

So let’s talk about fanfiction.

Actually, scratch that, let’s talk about my favorite subject – yours truly. As you may have gathered by now, I love fanfiction. A whole fangirly lot. My gateway drug into it was my obsession with Lost about 10 years ago and its pesky habit of offing every character I was foolish enough to get attached to. But lo! Someone was keeping them alive through their stories! I felt blessed. I got to spend more time in a world I loved, and I stopped flirting with the idea of giving up on the show every time another character I liked bit the dust. Everybody won.

Even more than as a fan, though, I appreciated the world of possibilities that fanfiction opened up to me as a non-native speaker. I come from a small town in the north of Italy; the access I had to foreign books in their original language was limited, and if I wanted to read something in English I’d have to spend quite a lot of money on one of the very few novels (usually chunky airport bookshop thrillers or housewife romances – not exactly my preferred genres) that shared a single shelf in the bookstore with German, French, Spanish titles. But fanfiction was free, accessible, and there was so much of it. If I didn’t like a story, all I needed to do was move on to the next. Suddenly there was an infinite library of engaging stories to help me make my English better. True, they didn’t all read like a published novel would – there’s a lot of unpolished, error-plagued, stream-of-consciousness-y material out there. But there are also so, so many beautifully written works, and believe me, even for a non-native speaker it’s very easy to spot the difference.

Fanfiction also gave me the chance and motivation to practice my English writing in a way school never could have done. I’ve been writing my own stories since I could hold a pen, but I didn’t dare write in English until I was a fanfiction-loving teenager. It was a marketing decision, really – my first foray into writing fanfiction was for a fandom so small that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out I’m the only Italian representative, so if I wanted any kind of feedback on my work I’d have to suck it up and try my hand at writing in a language that didn’t come natural to me. I would never argue that the feedback I got on my works made me a better writer – contrary to popular opinion, the fanfiction community is made up of the nicest, most supportive people, and alas, you’ll never get a comment on everything you did wrong with your structure or even just pointing out common grammar mistakes from them (though I was lucky enough to have someone explain to me how dialogue punctuation works differently in English than in Italian, so I guess something can be learned even from the Internet). It did motivate me to keep writing, though, and that made me a better writer. If you think I’m being too dramatic, dishing out this monster of a post nobody asked for just to declare my eternal devotion to fanfiction, it’s because it’s personal to me. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been told that I write in English as well as native speakers, and fanfiction is a big part of why that’s true. I doubt I would even be in this course if it wasn’t for it.

And then, of course, there’s the gay thing. I’m not going to argue about how heteronormativity sucks and representation matters because I’m sure everyone’s as sick of talking about it as I am, but please try to understand how it felt for a gay person like me, used to be depicted in media as a plot device or token secondary-character representation if at all, to be able to step into a world where queerness was the default for once. Where queer protagonists had meaningful queer love stories and queer friends and got to save the world from the Apocalypse too. Or to fight the Empire or go to Hogwarts or everything else fictional straight people have had a right to do since the dawn of storytelling in addition to romancing the hottie of their choice. I’m not asking you to feel as passionately about it, of course, but (especially if you’re straight) you might try and empathize the next time you think a fanart of two boys kissing is something deserving of your amused contempt.

I hope I’m not coming across as the person that screams “homophobe” at everyone who disagrees with her because I guarantee that’s not what I’m trying to do here, but I think the general distaste for slash says a lot about the way our society sees heterosexual relationships as love and homosexual relationships as sex. Yes, there’s a lot of gay porn in the world of fanfiction. But you know what you’re most likely to find? Romance. Not in the saucy literary sense of the word, but in its simpler, most literal acceptation. Fanfiction is just one more way for humans to express themselves, after all, and love has always been front and center in our art. Love, not sex – even if it’s gay. In fact, explicit material doesn’t even make up the majority of what you’ll find on a fanfiction website. Don’t worry, I don’t want anyone to taint their souls by visiting one of those dens of iniquity so I pulled some stats myself. Here’s the number of works for each rating in three of the most popular fandoms on Archive Of Our Own, the current go-to website for the fanfiction community (sorry Fanfiction.net) – Harry Potter, Supernatural and the Marvel Cinematic Universe as of 9/3/2019:

Even counting both Mature and Explicit works as straight-up porn (which I don’t think is quite fair, but that’s a discussion for another day), they only make up less than 1/3 of the material. Kinda disappointing, for a medium that’s supposed to be all about filthy graphic gay sex. Imagine if only one in three musicals actually featured singing and dancing, or superheroes weren’t in the majority of superhero movies. They’re lucky fanfiction is shared for free, or I’d be screaming for my money back.

Maybe I’ve just been brainwashed by SJWs, though, and this has nothing to do with my being an immigrant or a lesbian. Maybe my inability to see what’s so bad about appropriating someone else’s intellectual property for your own amusement is a cultural thing. I apologize – as mentioned, I’m Italian, and we all know Ancient Roman culture was basically just a ripoff of everything those inventive Greeks came up with. It’s in our blood. Hell, our 2€ coin, the biggest, has the face of Dante Alighieri on it, a writer most famous for having written 14.000+ verses of self-insert real-person-fic in which the girl he fancied as a teenager, his favorite author, and God himself all fall over themselves to tell him how awesome he is and he gets to prophesy an eternity in Hell for his political enemies. Talk about wish-fulfilling entitlement. Not to mention all those creatively arid Renaissance “artists” celebrated for stealing characters from the Bible and Greek mythology (seriously, the fact that Greece hasn’t unleashed an army of lawyers on us yet is nothing short of a miracle) and putting them in their cheesy paintings. Other countries can rely on a much stronger moral backbone and endless imagination – I’m sure Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, those creative geniuses at Disney and countless others never had to resort to something as cheap and despicable as borrowing other people’s characters to tell the stories they wanted to tell.

Either way, I can’t help it – I see the prospect of creating something that will resonate with people so strongly that they’ll make it a part of themselves, that it’ll compel them to make more art, to reach out and connect with other fans, as something incredibly beautiful rather than scary. Maybe this is my usual naiveté speaking, and I will come to eat my words. It’s certainly disturbing that a bunch of entitled fans bullied the Mass Effect developers into changing the series’ ending, and sending actors explicit fanart of themselves is straight-up harassment, but is fanfiction really the problem here? Or is it social network culture, with its power to destroy all barriers and foster hive mind? To give resentment a platform to spread and be heard? I promise that the average fanfiction writer wouldn’t campaign to get an ending changed. They’d just roll up their sleeves and write a better one themselves.

[hopevalley]

I just want to thank you for keeping this public. I have promoted you on Twitter and will continue to do so. I want to help in any way I can.

I debated all morning on how to reply to this. I know this is reference to Melinda making her blog private for Tumblr users only, and I think it’s important for me to express my opinion on that situation.

But first: thank you for the Twitter promotion! I have a Twitter account, but I admit I rarely use it (because I find it confusing to use lol). It’s @july_skies !

Regarding Melinda’s decision to privatize her blog: I support it. She works hard on her content and deserves to feel that people who like it will be capable of supporting it in a direct way (reblogs specifically). Nothing sucks more than making stuff and seeing that nobody’s looking at it or enjoying it, and whether or not that’s what it seems like to (general) you, that’s how it comes across when people don’t reblog her stuff. It’s depressing. It’s like she’s throwing her hard work right into the void.

While I’m on the subject, I’d like to talk about content creation a little more, to help give you guys a better idea of fandom and your place as a consumer of fanworks; I know a lot of you might be new to the concept, and you can’t know if nobody thinks to tell you.

For my “credentials,” let’s just say I’ve been a content creator for more than half my life and there’s something we lifers call fandom participation or fandom engagement. They are more or less the same thing, and the terminology boils down to us answering this question: “How is the fandom at large engaging with our content?”

In the last handful of years, participation is down across the board. When I first got into writing fanfiction I’d get at least 40 comments on anything I wrote. Many of my works ended up with 60+ comments on them! 

Now I’m lucky if anyone comments at all, especially in this fandom. Again, it’s a problem everywhere, but I still get comments on fanfic I posted five years ago in other fandoms; meanwhile, this one remains relatively silent. 

I post on AO3 for two big reasons. 1) ACCESSIBILITY. AO3′s site layout is easy to read! It’s easy to format! It’s friendly to people with issues seeing small print! And then we have 2) I do it to give people the option of commenting anonymously (in case they’re shy or nervous).

Having an account there isn’t required at all. People just choose not to engage with me when I post fanfiction.

It feels bad to spend hours of your time on something only to see 0 notes/comments/likes/reblogs/whatever on it later. Four ‘likes’ doesn’t feel that good either. Did people actually like it? Are they pity-likes? Do they even care? People mindlessly ‘like’ a lot of things; maybe they did that with your content, too. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy seeing ‘likes’ but a ‘like’ is more or less an acknowledgement that they’ve seen the content, not that they enjoyed it or want more of it.

Also, likes/kudos don’t draw in more readers: comments do. When a reader’s scrolling down the front page of their favorite AO3 fandom, they click on the ‘fics that look like they might be ‘good’ and even though it’s not always TRUE that the ‘best’ stories have the most comments, a lot of readers filter by the number of comments! 

Comments tell other readers: this is worth checking out!

Let’s look at a quick example of one of my ‘fics:

This is from my AO3 account, a random WCtH fanfic. It’s not a long one, but it’s not short either. It’s a reasonable read in terms of time spent to read it, and as you can see 185 people clicked on it, 14 people ‘liked’ it (kudos are “likes”), and I have two comments: one of those comments is @trash-god and the other is me replying to her comment.

Her comment isn’t ‘less than’ because she’s a close friend, but she and I spoke at length about this story on Discord and her comment was just a nice little ‘addition’ to that conversation. Sure, the story’s about characters not many people care about, but look at that: 185 hits on the story. 14 likes. And only one person who read it took five seconds to leave a comment? Really? What about the 13 other people who ‘liked’ it?

What this says to me as a creator is that the ONLY person who is going to comment is the one person who might feel obligated to, and if that’s the case, why don’t I just save my stories to show her privately? Why bother posting them out into the void to hear nothing but silence from everyone else?

This is the direction that @whencallstheheart is coming from. What’s the point of spending hours creating these things when nobody interacts with you? Posting to silence feels bad. And look, to put it into perspective, editing gifs to post, writing fanfic, doing write-ups, maintenance of a blog, site, or social media presence: it’s super time-consuming. 

Melinda and I both work full-time jobs as it is. My job hit full busy season and I’m even getting overtime now. I’m in training to take over the department next year and I’m tired at the end of the day. When I get home I have eight cats, a house to take care of, and a spouse, not to mention my in-laws live right next door and need help sometimes. We also have a property we just planted 1500 trees on by hand that we have to monitor, and my husband owns a house we rent to someone that needs work done on it, too. Sometimes, life is busy.

And don’t get me wrong! I enjoy creating, just like I’m sure Melinda does. I feel awful if I can’t “create.”

But if my choices are:

work for five hours on a fanfic or episode write-up only to get 4 likes on it, OR

play a video game or watch a movie or read a book or sit on the deck watchin’ the sun go down while I work on a crocheting project…

The latter definitely appeals to me more knowing I have to get up in the morning to go back to work again. My time is worth something. Neither Melinda nor I are getting paid to create this content. We put it together for free, in what spare time we have, in the midst of our own chaotic lives. My website costs me a chunk of money every year to keep up and running ad-free, and I could get all 1500 trees weeded in the amount of time it takes me to put together an episode write-up or decent fanfic.

All content creators ask for in exchange for their free labor is a sense of community, and that can be anything from:

comments on fanfics you enjoyed, even if they are just to say, “I read this and enjoyed it.” 

messages that say, “I really like how [this edit you did] turned out.”

reblogs on Tumblr, retweets on Twitter, emails to website owners

you can even create your own blog and use it to begin conversations with those creators!

You guys have been pretty good about engaging with the show itself through us, but don’t forget to engage with the content you enjoy seeing that comes about because of the show. 

Fandom content keeps the show alive even when it’s not currently airing, and supporting content creators keeps them creating. Everyone wins, then!

To talk specifically about written content...

Readers are the ones who ensure more material is created. Hands down.

And again: I love writing!! I DO. I’ve been writing seriously for more years of my life than I haven’t been writing seriously! But it’s disheartening to post a fanfic and get my one obligation comment.

Now, it’s fine if you don’t read fanfiction or even enjoy it. It’s also fine if the things I’ve posted aren’t to your specific tastes. Trust me, I get it; nobody is obligated to comment on my fanfiction, and I don’t want anyone to feel that they should be.

But please know this: if you do enjoy something, whether it’s fanfic or edits or something else, you NEED to engage with it, or it WILL disappear. People don’t like talking to walls. It’s frustrating and it isn’t a good use of their time.

(This is one of the reasons I haven’t bothered doing a novelization of the series. It could be fun, but for 0 comments it’s not worth spending the time on.)

Again, you guys have been great when it comes to engaging with the show material, particularly while the show is airing. It’s been fun speculating with you and hearing all of your different thoughts. I know sometimes Tumblr doesn’t make it easy to communicate, either, and you’ve all done a great job of getting around that.

But in between seasons things get slow on this blog and it’s hard for me (or anyone running a blog) to feel motivated to provide content of any sort if you’re not going to take the time to engage in it.

I’ll never mark this blog as private, but if I get to the point where I can’t get any engagement from the fans, I’ll shut it down. The point of having a “fandom blog” is to interact with other fans.

I enjoy providing content to you guys, but if participation drops off to nothing, I’ll be taking that as my signal that the audience is gone and my time would be better spent elsewhere. 

So if you’re here and you’re enjoying things, don’t forget to take a little time out of your day to let your content creators know! Not just me and Melinda, of course, but your favorite people on Instagram, Twitter, and other sites as well. ♥ You might be surprised how happy they’ll be to receive interaction from other fans.

And another plug for fanfiction, because 1) they always get the short end of things considering how hard it is to amass the creative energy necessary to tell a good story, and 2) I noticed it’s the #2 page on my website getting visited: if you’ve enjoyed anything you’ve read for When Calls the Heart, tell the author! Here’s the section for WCtH on AO3! Is English not your native language/you’re not confident in your ability to write English? No worries! I’ve gotten many thoughtful comments in other languages and from people who spoke limited English, and trust me: I treasured every one. If you’re just not sure how to comment on fanfic, send me a message and I’ll give you some tips!

I don’t intend this as a slight against my anonymous friend up there AT ALL; I think it can be hard to be in fandom, especially if you’re newer to the scene. There’s a lot of history that’s long gone by now and missing out on it means it’s harder to step into fandom without also accidentally stepping on toes.

Sometimes we take for granted that we have an almost unlimited supply of fanfiction, gifs, memes, blogs, and so on at our disposal. But none of that comes from thin air and it never did. It’s the cumulative hard work of millions of people throwing their hearts and souls into something they’re passionate about in an effort to engage with other fans.

I hope this helped put things into perspective a bit!! Sending love at all of you that stuck around this far; I know it was quite a bit of a ramble LOL!

[tessatechaitea]

Text Adventure Review: “Border Zone”

The main reason I'll probably need to pause the game is to masturbate when I meet the sexy double agent and type, "Fuck sexy double agent then fall asleep".

In the picture above, try not to read the three chapter titles because there's a spoiler in the third one that says "The Assassination." I'm going to forget that's a plot point and start playing "Chapter 1: The Train" because Marc Blank suggested that's what I do. CHAPTER ONE The protagonist (that's you! The person you play in the game! Or it's me! I'll probably go back and forth using first and second person pronouns so please don't be confused by my amateurish writing style) is just a regular non-spy person who does a little importing and exporting across the Iron Curtain. This game is from 1987 so nobody remembers what the Iron Curtain is anymore. It really wasn't that important anyway, at least not to those of us living on the Western side of it and never had to really think about its implications on the people trapped on the Eastern side of it. Am I supposed to have enough time and compassion to worry about the state of other peoples' worlds when I can barely keep my world from disintegrating?! If you want Levi's, people dumb enough to be born in countries annexed by the USSR after World War II, maybe you should have thought about that up in heaven when God was asking you what uterus you wanted your soul implanted in! Idiots. The train story begins, as all good espionage train stories do, with a probably dying secret agent breaking into your compartment to hand you the documents that will stop the assassination if only you can get them to another secret agent by responding to a coded phrase with a coded phrase of your own. I think I've practically got this part of the game won! Except I've forgotten both of the phrases already. I should probably restart and make a note of them, right? Okay, I've figured out what the secret agent will say to me and what I have to respond and I've even translated the sayings into Frobnian because I understand how Infocom games use their non-digital printed material as copy protection! Somebody without the phrase book that comes with the game wouldn't realize that the American agent is telling you the English codes but his contact is Frobnian! I'm so far ahead of Marc Blank right now he would say something like, "Whoa! That guy is super far ahead of me! And totally not a virgin." As an experienced business man who has dealt with border control for my entire business life (the fictional me in the game! What, you think I actually work for a living?!), I know that I can't just keister the document. The searches at the border are brutal. And I don't have a fake mustache so I'm flummoxed already. Plus the wounded agent left a big blood spatter on the floor of my cabin. So to even make it out off the train so I can meet my contact, I've got to clean up the blood and figure out what to do with the document. The blood was easy but to keep the document, I had to get caught a few times to figure out where the evil trench coat wearing man's interrogation weaknesses lay! Or lie (I knew I should have phrased that differently. Stupid lie/lay is worse than who/whom). Because apparently even if you flush the document down the toilet underneath a huge nervous stomach shit, the border patrol will dig it out and bust you. So I cleaned up the blood by doing all of the boring and inane steps like turning on the faucet and wetting the towel and turning off the faucet and scrubbing the floor and returning to the bathroom and flushing the towel. In Infocom games, it isn't enough to just tell the protagonist to clean up the blood and then, like a normal adult human being, the protagonist would think, "Oh yeah! I know how to do that! Let me get right to it!" I guess Infocom games are less about ordering some jerk around and more trying to pretend that you are that jerk and that that jerk is kind of stupid. After cleaning the blood, I had to figure out what to do with the document. No matter where I tried to hide it, border control sniffed it out and traced it back to me. So the only thing to do was to tear it up and shove it up my ass! I mean throw it out the window. But that meant I couldn't complete my mission which really wasn't my mission anyway and why did I care if some ambassador was assassinated?! I didn't ask for this responsibility! It's not my fault if somebody dies today. It's the fault of the clumsy American agent who got himself shot, stumbled upon a useless dolt to complete his mission, and then fell off the roof of the train! I should just throw the document out the window and get on with my life! And maybe I will! But before I did that — you know, just in case my conscience berates me continuously for the rest of my life — I figured I should probably keep some photographic evidence of the document. After doing so, I couldn't help worrying about how there was another picture left on the roll of film and I was probably going to have to completely restart this stupid game when I realized I needed to take one more picture before removing the film and hiding it up my ass from the border patrol. Stupid Infocom games always have me worried that I'm in a walking dead with a roll of film up my ass scenario! Being the super chill American businessman turned spy kind of Lothario I am, I totally and easily complete my new mission and probably fuck a hot double agent too! But not the young girl I handed the roll of film to! The double agent was probably older than that!

I know this screenshot is different from the previous screenshot! But the Apple IIe copy I found crashed when you examined your clothes or photographed the document. And the Commodore 64 version seems to think people who play Infocom games are already wasting their lives so why not make every move take an interminable amount of time. So I wound up playing the browser MS-DOS version on Archive.org.

For an Infocom game, that first chapter was simple! All you had to do was act like a boring idiot who totally wasn't involved in political espionage at all and you succeeded! I bet every nerd who tried their hand at this game beat Chapter One. But the next chapter will be different because the player takes on the part of the American spy! What greasy nerd knows how to act suave and sophisticated and super sexy? I mean aside from me! I was born to play this role! CHAPTER TWO You begin the story of the American Spy after he falls from the roof of the train. He claims he jumped for it but when I was the businessman, I know what I saw! I'm a clumsy oaf! I mean he's a clumsy oaf! No, wait. I guess I am the clumsy oaf! And I'm not clumsy at all! I totally jumped for it and looked hot doing it. Now I just have to survive the freezing weather and try to get past the border patrol or else I'll die out here in the ... BORDER ZONE! Hopefully I'll also get another chance to fight my rival Viper to the death! Ew, I'll show him! Or her! Or not! After playing this chapter for about ten minutes, I realize it does every single thing I don't like in text adventures: time limit, characters that go about their business while you're off in other areas, and a puzzle that relies on knowing so much about the timeline that you have to play the scenario dozens of times to work it all out. I feel like I've got the gist of what you have to do (although I'm probably wrong on one key point because I haven't played more than a handful of times) but I'm not sure I'm willing to keep at it. After you bail from the train, the border guards begin searching for you. So you've got some guys in a vehicle driving around and a pack of dogs (not to mention the searchlights and fences at the border) hunting you down. Early on, you have to get to a small house because it has a parka in it to keep you from freezing to death. You have to time this with when the guards arrive to talk to the owner so he's distracted while you sneak in the back. There might be more to do inside the shack other than gather up all the crap in the storage room but, as I mentioned, I haven't really explored the scenario yet in multiple ways. As a spy, you have an explosive pen on you. It has a timer which means I have to figure out how long to set the timer for and where to stick the pen to get something further in the story to happen. I feel like I have to stick it on the guard's automobile so that it explodes near the border, distracting the guards at the spotlights so I can make a run for the other side. Realizing that that might be the solution is what has really made me dread continuing with this game. Another puzzle is to get the dogs to stop following you. I'm fairly certain you do that just by putting on the work boots and trudging through the swamp a ways before leaving the swamp in a new location and leaving the boots behind. If there are any other puzzles (aside from staunching your bleeding gun shot wound), I haven't found them. I suppose the biggest one is sneaking about to get the pen on the guard's car and figuring out how long to set the timer for. Do I want to bother with that? I feel like that's the big puzzle that allowed Infocom to tack on hours and hours of gameplay to Border Zone. Because now I have to follow the car around to see where it goes and how long I'll need to set the timer for and where I'll need to be when the pen blows up. I have other things to do with my life, Marc Blank! I mean, they're not very important things. But they're things I'd rather be doing than messing around with the timer on my imaginary explosive pen! I'm not cut out to be a spy, especially when that spy has to know things he couldn't possibly know on the first playthrough of this game. Does Marc Blank know how real life works?! Oh, your argument is that this is a game and not real life and that maybe I should chill out about it?! Well if this game is a game and not real life, why the fuck does everything keep moving along even when I'm not entering any commands?! Who wants to play a text adventure like that?! Even Bioshock doesn't demand that kind of effort out of the player. Bioshock is the only other game I could come up with. It isn't even a fair comparison. If Border Zone were a first person shooter, I'd absolutely finish this chapter! I could see the guards moving and physically hide from them. I could observe how everything moves in the game by following them around. But in a text adventure, it's fucking impossible. Sure, the game tells me if the dogs are to the north or the west. But when I'm hiding behind the shack, it sure would be a lot easier to figure out what I'm doing if I could see the guards interacting with the owner of the shack and milling about searching the premises! I don't think my imagination is good enough to handle this bullshit tension. I'm so fucking stressed out right now!

Apparently you can get close to the border without doing any of the stuff I previously mentioned except stealing everything from the storage room.

It doesn't seem like I've done enough before getting to the border but I guess I should explore this area a little more before writing Marc Blank a letter about how terrible some of his decisions were early in his career. I suppose I need to use my explosive pen here to blow a hole through the fence which I won't be able to climb through because the guards will hear it. Unless I time the explosion to blow when both guards are at the same spot, killing them? Then can I rush through in the chaos?! Figuring out the answer to that means doing math, I bet! That's because you get a timer and a little ASCII display of the guards' motion as you watch them. This is way too hard! I miss the Infocom days when you could just type "kill thief with sword" and hope the random number generator gave you a good result. Once you get through the fence, you can climb up a guard tower where there's a bolted ladder leading up to a locked door with a guard inside. But even if you can hide on the metal bit bracing the ladder, knock on the door, and shove the stupid guard off of the tower, you still can't jump across the border from the top of the tower. You just wind up dead. Which is when I thought, "Hey! I need the exploding pen for this part! I bet I can just climb over the fence and save the explosives for this scene!" And I was almost completely and absolutely right except for a few small details which would have frustrated the fuck out of me if I hadn't gotten completely lucky on restarting Chapter Two to try out my new solutions. You see, there's a small shed in the forest near the shack. A small shed that is almost impossible to find due to my apathetic attitude toward mapping Border Zone and the way every location is described as "You move 100 yards north and find you're still in the snowy forest. What did you expect, jerk?!" Sure, the shed has been drawn on the map that came with the game so that people who actually purchased Border Zone would have explored long enough to find it. And I have access to that map because everything is free on the Internet. Right? Am I making a terrible assumption there? Um, anyway, when I restarted, due to not having mapped, I couldn't remember exactly how to get to the shack before the guards got there. While stumbling around lost, I found the shed with the rubber gloves and bolt-cutters inside. And like in most text adventure games that aren't Infocom, the main puzzle was simply finding the right items where they were hidden. Because as soon as I found the bolt-cutters, I knew I had this chapter beat. What I didn't know was that the border fence I'd previously blown up to get through was electrified! Luckily, I had found the rubber work gloves right there with the bolt-cutters. Marc Blank practically gave that puzzle's solution away for free! Idiot. He should have hid the gloves somewhere in the forest where you weren't ever clued in to dig in the snow. That's more like a proper 80s text adventure! Of course, that's not Infocom's way! Infocom wants you to succeed! They want you to realize you wasted the pen explosive and needed a new solution where you use the pen to blow up the tower so that it falls over the border fence with you inside of it! But at least in the actual solution, you still get to push that stupid Frobnian Nazi off of the tower. Eat snow, grumblebutt!

I'll accept my Champeen of Infocom crown now.

Chapter Three The first two chapters were way too easy for Infocom games so I'm really nervous about this third chapter. Have I just gotten more brilliant as I've grown older or did Marc Blank save all of his dreadful Infocom ingenuity for this final chapter?! Hopefully this chapter doesn't have dozens of NPCs whom I've got to track across multiple playthroughs just to figure out where I should be every minute of the scenario. I really do prefer text adventure games with static environments that simply react to the things I do. I'm already stressed out thinking about my race against the clock to save the ambassador! Remember when I didn't even care if the ambassador died during the first chapter?! Why am I suddenly invested in saving that asshole?!

In this chapter, I'm the sexy double agent!

The sexy double agent is also — and this is a huge spoiler for all you Infocom fanatics who just haven't, for some reason, gotten around to playing all of the Infocom games — Viper, the man in the trench coat trying to get the documents back from the importer/exporter in the first chapter! If that's the case, you'd think I could just go to a coffee shop and hang out for the rest of the game. If I'm trying to stop the people trying to stop the assassination, then can't I just stop trying to stop those people so they can stop the assassination?! Maybe if I just hit "z" and "enter" until this chapter ends, everything will work out for the best! Seventeen in-game minutes later, the ambassador has been shot and killed. What the fuck?! How incompetent are the American spies? I guess that's why I'm a double agent. Because I'm double the agent all of these other jerks are. I guess I need to get to work saving the day all by myself! If only that stupid American businessman had given me the documents, I could have saved the day myself. Except when I did get the documents in Chapter One, the game still ended with the ambassador getting assassinated. I should just get on with saving the day already. I bet when I'm done, I'll run into Topaz (that was my secret agent name in Chapter Two, apparently) and we'll share a deep, passionate kiss. I do run into Topaz chilling at a coffee shop exactly like I was planning to do!

I guess Topaz doesn't feel the same way that I feel about him.

Topaz is probably still important to the story, so I decide to leave him alone for now as I got about my double agent business of stopping the assassination that I put into place. It's actually not too hard to do if I don't mind sacrificing the rest of my double agent career. I meet my contact, learn the sniper's password, figure out what window he's sniping out of (by checking the apartment directory, you just have to find which eastern facing apartment is empty on the fifth floor (maybe other floors at time but it always seemed to be the fifth floor on my multiple restarts), and go shoot him in the back. But that puts a lot of suspicion on you and you wind up pushing papers in Siberia. Better to trick Topaz into stopping the assassination! I guess that's why you have to save his life in Chapter Two. To do that, you have to get him to chase you back to the sniper's nest without getting caught by him or the local police. At one point, you get to push over a hot dog vendor's cart so it really feels like you're in an action movie and also that you're a fucking prick. Once you lead Topaz back to the sniper, the difficult part was not also being killed by Topaz. After making him a huge hero, he kept shooting me in the face because he's a huge bastard whom I wish I never helped cross the border now! At first I thought, "Well, this is an Infocom game. It was bound to get difficult at some point! And I guess one or two moves away from completing the game is as good a time as any to get stuck." But then I thought, "Well, even though the sniper doesn't let me move or do anything, and the sniper's apartment is completely bare, maybe I can try to hide so Topaz doesn't fucking murder me when he kicks in the door?"

Oh fuck. Easy as that, was it?!

And with that final move to hide in plain sight, I fucking defeat Marc Blank! You stupid son of a bitch! You thought you were so clever, didn't you? "Oh, look at me! I'm an Infocom imp! I write the hardest text adventure games in the world and I only mattered for like four years in the mid to late eighties because I hitched my star to the most boring entertainment ever! Only stupid virgin assholes would keep playing the games I wrote, the dumb bastards!" Hey! Fuck you, Marc Blank! How did that Marc Blank imaginary soliloquy get away from me so badly?! Anyway, suck on this, Marc:

Seriously though. I can't believe I beat this game without any hints. I'm fucking chuffed.

SCORES Game Title: Not great since it basically drove me away from this game for years. I suppose if you're into espionage stories, it's a great title because it's so evocative of crossing a border! That's like the hardest challenge in the espionage genre! I think. I'm not a fan so what the fuck do I know? My favorite espionage movie is Run, Lola, Run. Does that count as espionage? I guess that's more heist fucks time travel while fingering romance's anus. Puzzles: As far as modern day Interactive Fiction "rules" go, the puzzles in Border Zone are terrible. Nearly all of them rely on playing through and losing dozens of times to see how the NPCs react to different situations. It's the only way to learn how they behave so you can act accordingly. But compared to a non-Infocom game, the puzzles were generally satisfying. Because of the way the game works, I'm not even sure some of the things I did were solutions to puzzles or just wasting my time. Did I have to go through the swamp to lose the dogs or could I have just done everything quicker? Were there alternate ways to solve puzzles or were things like the binoculars and the wood saw in Chapter Two just red herrings? Generally, once I saw the way the other characters reacted, it was long before I figured out how to thwart them. I believe Marc Blank was relying on some puzzles to be difficult due to the player losing track of the story. Like in Chapter One, you can get all the way to the end and still get caught when you try to pass the documents to your contact because you were wearing the stupid white carnation the entire time. But once you realize you seem to have done everything correctly and some guy on the platform is still following you, it's not hard to realize you need to not stand out and to keister that stupid flower until you actually need it. Gameplay: Fucking annoying. I hate adventure games where the story continues no matter what you do. I hate timed adventure games. Border Zone decided not only to use those two aspects I hate but to invent a third one that — Hey! Guess what?! — I hated even more: time passes even when you're not typing! Is there a word that means both "innovative" and "Goddamned fucking annoying as fuck"? Whatever it is, Marc Blank should copyright it. Graphics: Normally for a text adventure, I'd say none and be done with it. But this one did have graphics! It had a little ASCII bit to show two guards marching around the base of three towers! And it absolutely did nothing for me because the dumb guards barely even notice you when you cut through the fence silently instead of blowing a huge hole in it. Hell, even after blowing a hole in the fence, the idiots keep to their regular patrol only slightly more alert due to hearing an explosion. Concept: I think I more than adequately covered my apathy toward the concept. I will compliment Marc Blank for his work in making a game about a really stressful experience into a really stressful experience. Good job, jerk! Fun Time: I keep forgetting to track the amount of time it takes me to play these games. Maybe I'll get better at it eventually. But I think I spent maybe six hours (at most. I might even drop that to four or five) playing this game over the last week and a half? I did think about it more than that though. But not a lot more. And the third chapter which I thought would be dreadfully hard took the least amount of time of all. Probably not even an hour. The good news is that the amount of "fun time" I had with this game is equal to the amount of time I played it. That doesn't often happen. Usually the "fun time" gets expended quickly and I force myself to trudge through the rest of the game, adding the experience to the long list of things I'll regret when a doctor finally says to me, "You have three months to live due to your malignant finger cancer caused by typing."

[faireladypenumbra]

The Undergrad Novelist: Junior (Almost Senior) Edition. I Wrote a Novel in College- Let’s Talk About That

If you have been following this blog for any amount of time, you should be familiar with my Undergrad Novelist project, which I started in 2015 (really-really! Undergrad Novelist turned four years old this year) as a means to discuss my experience in college while I drafted several novels, one of which (Chimehour- as usual) I began in 2013. This past year, I published and finished my beloved novel: it’s done well, and I’m almost done with college. Closing doors on both feels final, stepping away from this chapter in my life. In some sense, that’s why this edition of Undergrad Novelist isn’t a list of advice so much as it is the story on why I started this blog at all.

Before we discuss that though, I will first take you back. It is 2013, I am 20 years old, art still charging on my fingertips, but not quite ready for use. I have piled books upon books of research on a book I do not quite have the shape of yet, so all I do is read, and research, and consume, and think endlessly- unprompted by much except for a sudden, driving desire to create something big and beautiful and unlike whatever it was I made before.

In some ways, Chimehour helped strike the match that led me to college. I had danced around the concept a couple years (many of my high school buddies were already on their second year when I finally started), but finances had not been easy to come by, the job market was poor, and worst of all- my local university was in the lurch. I was told at 19 not to bother with a Humanities degree when my closest accessible school was this close to shutting down their English Department. Chancing my time and effort on a novel set a fire in my soul that writing alone didn’t quench. I loved research, I loved writing this way- I wanted more of it.

And I have thrived in university. I have graduated from one school and lived beautifully at Nicholls State, whose incredible English department has been incredibly supportive of my every endeavor. I publish in their literary magazine, I have presented at the university’s symposium on a professional scale, and now the academic summit on a state level. I have a whole world of potential just teeming with life, edging right beyond the doors of undergrad. I have not found a dead department and poor career choices in an English major, but the kind of magic that I unraveled in my first novel.

These days, I get asked a lot if I’m a Creative Writing major- I’m not.  I did start a History major, but quietly veered into a Literary Studies degree by Junior year, minoring in History and (possibly) French if all pans out. I felt very early on that my college experience and creative fiction were not as compatible as I wanted. Besides, what could academia teach me about being creative that I did not already know?

As it turns out, a lot. And probably more the expected. I finished a novel in my Junior year of college: I’ve written several novellas since then too, the only thing slowing me down at this point being the sheer amount of papers and projects I have to create for the late stages of my undergraduate career.

And if you can absolutely avoid it, don’t do what I did.

“Wait,” you might say. “Don’t write a book in college at all?”

Well, not if you can help it. If writing gets into your soul and you have to write a book during your college years, don’t deny yourself the chance to do it. But writing a book in college was the hardest thing I ever decided to do. It was a bigger goal than I ever intended on making it, and though I have no regrets about finishing Chimehour in my college years, I do have some reservations about how I did it and what my goals where- though these are, I suppose, reflections you reach after you finish your first book.

Writing a novel, and then another novel, in college was a challenge and I sacrificed so very much to simply make it happen. Some of that drive was built into the idea that was going to run out of time: that nebulous idea of time that you suffer from in your 20s, while some of your friends get great jobs and have kids and start careers. And there you are, sitting around in your pajamas in your childhood bedroom, planning out the latest phase of a novel. What are you doing? You’re gonna run out of time.

It was never really the human limitations of time that alarmed me, but the fear that I would fall behind somehow. This isn’t a new fear: I always felt the pull of falling behind as a homeschooled child, wondering if my peers had some edge that I didn’t (a clue: no). Perhaps if I wrote a book, it would prove I could play as hard as other people. If I studied, and wrote, and did everything absolutely perfect, maybe then it would show through that I was some free-range wild child.

In writing Chimehour, I hoped at least to prove myself just as capable as any college aged-person- probably more than capable, and in the process on doing that, I forgot something so pivotal to my writing, the only piece of advice I will offer for this reflection on my Junior year of college. Enjoy yourself.

In the past five years, while I toiled and fussed and sobbed over a novel, I have also tried to slowly, surely write other things. I have dabbled more and more in short fiction (which I’m discovering I don’t suck at) and more in sharing my poetry (which I might just be good at). I have blogged with Academia and through my own personal space here for what is now four years, and each new piece, I have sharpened my skills with knife-like precision. I felt my writing getting better, but that strength was outside of my novel work.

That’s not to say that my novel is bad: not at all. But in the five years I spent polishing it, I ignored and underplayed much of the work I had done all of this time. I wrote Chimehour at the age of 20 and have grown so much from it since. It just took awhile for me to see that. It’s been a little over six months since I finished my novel, and my current impression of my work is one of distance. I am so very proud of my novel, I am so proud of the things I did while I wrote my novel, but the world did not end and begin with Chimehour. My writing has only gotten stronger, and who knows what might happen once I finish undergrad. I have scores of books, just waiting to come forward now.

But please, be brave and do what I feared doing. Finish your works but know that a single project is not the end of the world. You can always, always, always write more words. This has been the Undergrad Novelist: see you for our last edition in 2020.