#But I see the names of people who ran me off of livejournal and first tumblr blog

[doctorcanon]

As a Black person who's been in nerd spaces for almost 2 decades now, the whole "I've never seen fandom be so negative before!" is starting to get on my nerves. Its always been this way, it's just that now you're on the other side of it or you can't ignore it anymore.

I was there when ff.net writers tried to run Black fic writers off of those C3 communities back in the day. I was there in the Gaia Online days of "I don't accept characters played by people with dark skinned avatars", being proudly displayed on Barton Town threads. I was also there when congoers complained about Black people "ghetto-fying" con spaces. I had to delete my old blog after being branded the "Sally Donovan of the Sherlock Fandom" .

Yes, getting dogpiled and hated on because of some kid's false moral outrage can be super disheartening. Yeah, the community is much bigger and chaotic than we could have ever imagined. YES, social media and the general state of the world is affecting how we cope with things mentally and we should all strive to be kinder to each other.

But some of y'all are STRAIGHT UP LYING about how internet fandom used to be and how much you participated in it. Your old forum account with your "anti-yaoi" sticker and banner signature are still out there, you know. Some of you here STILL use the same names you did 20 years later and you're just as guilty as the kids you complain about now. IF NOT MORE.

[shadowfae]

We’re all pretty aware that the tumblr otherkin community is at a huge decline; I was wondering if you have any theories as to why that is?

American Protestantism, the decline of queer oppression in North America and the AIDS crisis, helicopter parenting, web 3.0, morality politics, and  Tumblr’s porn ban; roughly in that order and rolled up into one bombshell that was a few years in the coming but nobody really saw it and understood it until it was far too late.

That was a mouthful and probably only made sense if you follow current cyberpolitical theory. For some of you reading this, as with every other hot take I have this has a chance of being passed around, that alone is enough. But for others who had no idea what I just said and need the ELI5 version, let me explain that. Buckle up, this’ll be a long one, and will go into fandom history a bit as well because it is actually relevant.

As we know, tumblr is a very American-centric platform. Twitter is also this way, but less so, but tumblr has it bad. Now, I’m ‘lucky’ in the fact that I’m Canadian and a twenty minute drive from the American border, so that puts me in the ‘privileged’ majority. (I say privileged because I’m not really sure what else to call it. Most of the information going around about politics either directly affects me or indirectly affects me approximately one or two links of contact away. Someone who’s only influenced by American politics because it makes their sister’s online friends sad is not going to be privileged in that way.)

This means that American politics and their social climate overwhelmingly affects tumblr’s social climate. This also bleeds through into other fandom spaces, on twitter, instagram, and Pixiv to name a few places; but here’s where I spend the majority of my time so here’s what I’ve witnessed.

America’s main religion, as far as I understand (from the raised agnostic and currently neopagan view I have), is some weirdass capitalistic-Protestantism that is so many miles from what the actual Bible says that if I were a betting man and knew more about cults than I did, I’d say it’s some weird fucking cult and never set foot in the country again for any reason that isn’t gaming free shipping through a PO box. If you have no idea what I just said but are at least vaguely familiar with Christianity, this graphic explains it pretty well. So we can see there’s some glaring issues with that ideal.

The decline of queer oppression and the rise of queer rights in North America, which is to tenderly include my own country but we all know when people say ‘in NA’ they mean ‘America, and Canada where it applies because the right-wing Republicans are really good in the propaganda department to convince everyone that Mexico is a drug-lords-and-anarchy wasteland to the point where even I don’t actually know what’s down there other than bad drivers and heat’; means two things. One, it’s a good thing by a long shot and do not mistake this as me thinking queer oppression being lessened is a bad thing. But two, it means that thanks to the AIDS crisis, queer folks lost a lot of first-person sources as history.

The queer elders in NA who survived are typically either a) bitter anarchists who are often POC, probably still dirt poor and do recreational drugs or b) university-tenured TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists). Category A are the people who Republicans have deemed worthless in every way, because racism, queerphobia, ableism, and all the other ways to be wrong and different and Evil that they can’t handle, because Jeezus would never want them to actually learn to love someone who wasn’t just like them, and they don’t have the compassion to do better. Category B are the people who want to be different in just a teensie little bit, typically with TERFs they want to be lesbians, but they don’t want to challenge the status quo. They’re fine with the way things work, they just want to be on top oppressing others over ripping the whole damn thing down and building a more forgiving system.

Now, due to all those ‘isms and the cheerfully malicious aid of the Republicans, pun not intended but drives home the cruelty of it all, we also see the rise of helicopter parenting. The invention of the internet did not really help this. Basically what you’ve got is a whole bunch of parents who saw the civil rights movement, just got access to the internet and things going viral, know the world is changing, and like all parents, they’re scared for their children. Now instead of parents knowing one or two people in their classes who just went missing one day and everyone assumed they ran away, they hear about eight homicides in the city of kids going to parks at night and dying. The Satanic Panic was another event around this time that contributed to that, but I’ll let you research that one.

This means that all of these parents, instead of doing what their parents typically did and let their kids wander off for the day so long as they’re back by sundown, they can’t let their children out of their sight. There might be a freak accident where their child is decapitated on the playground swing! Their baby might get murdered by an evil Satanist walking home from school! Their dearest darling might go online and tell their address to someone who’s got a 100% chance of being a pedophile who will show up and kidnap them in the night!

…You get the idea. 

Combine those three things I just established, what we’ve got is a lot of queer kids who have a lot of internalized shame for being different and wrong, because they’re queer, and they can’t find spaces offline to be themselves, because all of the elders who would do that are dead and/or inaccessible and their parents won’t let them go to any clubs that aren’t school-related, which they’ll never find a GSA or queer club because Republicans, ‘isms, propaganda, and the war on Category A queer adults have all done their best to ensure that those spaces don’t exist.

So you have a generation of kids who I am the youngest of. The first generation on the internet. The late Web 1.0 (usenets and Geocities) and early Web 2.0 (livejournal was the big one, ff.net too, also 4chan but fuck those guys) generation. What we were taught was: trust nobody on the internet with your real info no matter how much you like them, this is a wilderness and any crimes that happen won’t be punished or seen so don’t put yourself in a position where you’re going to be the victim of one, and everything you put online is never getting taken down so don’t put anything up that you’re not willing to have on the front page of your local newspaper.

This worked out pretty well, actually! You had kids who knew that if they got in trouble, there was no backup coming to save them. Because the form that backup might take - parents and police - wasn’t going to help. Best case, they’d be banned from their friends and online support groups for being queer. Worst case, they’d be jailed and put in juvie and conversion therapy and turn to drugs and become evil Satanists just like everyone says they secretly are already. So they learned very quickly to take care of themselves. Nobody was going to save them, so they learned to not need saving.

And then, well, Web 2.0 shifted to Web 3.0. Livejournal died because parents - the Warriors for Innocence was the big name - went “gasp how horrible my children are being exposed to the evil pedos and homosexuals they’re going to do drugs and die of AIDS!”. Which is uh. It’s filled with a lot of bigotry, and I’m not excusing them - absolutely I am not - but you can kind of see where they’re coming from, if you tilt your head and squint.

Either way, LJ died, tumblr took its place, Facebook was fast taking off, and the fandom folks who had seen mailing lists go inactive, web admins take their fanfic sites down due to copyright, entire fandoms burnt to the ground in flame wars, said ‘fuck that we’re making our own place’ and that’s how AO3 got made.

That’s important. A lot of folks move to AO3, because well, the rules let them. The rules say ‘you can throw literally anything up here so long as it’s fan content and is not literally illegal, so we don’t get taken down’. It’s a swing for the first generation internet users, those kids who know this place is a wilderness and are carving out our own sanctuary.

But. The children under us. The children for whom AIDS is a nightmarish fairy tale, for whom the ghost stories are conversion therapy, for whom know they can’t really talk to their parents about being queer but can trust they probably won’t get kicked out over it. The children who haven’t spent ten seconds without supervision except online, and their reaction isn’t ‘oh thank god I’m finally free to express myself’ but ‘if I get in trouble, who will protect me?’.

And there’s nobody there. Because we went in knowing there was no backup. And that was fine. But now, the actual adults have figured out that hey uh, maybe we should make cyber laws? Maybe we should make revenge porn and grooming children over the internet crimes? And they grew up with that. They grew up learning that no, even if your parents are suffocating and controlling, they’re always be there for you! Some adult will always be there to protect you!

That isn’t the case. It’s not. But they expect it, because it’s always been done for them. They don’t really want to change the status quo, because that means doing it themselves. They can’t do that, because they don’t know how, they’ve been controlled for every single part of their lives thanks to helicopter parenting and without that control, they don’t know how to keep their lives together, and they demand someone come and control it for them, without restraining them.

Effectively, they want someone to ensure they never face the consequences of their actions. Helicopter parents will rescue you from whatever you did, because you’re their precious baby and it doesn’t matter if you punched a kid, you can do no wrong and the other kid clearly started it.

But being queer is doing wrong. Being queer is something Jeezus doesn’t approve of. So they want to make it something he could approve of! But if it’s too off what they consider to be okay, if it’s too different and weird and wrong and evil, that can’t do, that’s still bad, and they’re precious angels, and children, and minors, why are we the adults not protecting them and letting them see it? Why aren’t we being just like their parents  but queer-friendly, why aren’t we protecting the children?

The adults who taught us were the children of those who died as a result of AIDS. The eldest of my generation knew some of them personally. My therapist’s younger brother died at 20 of AIDS, and she told me what it was like. But they don’t have that. These kids of web 3.0, they don’t have that. What they have is over-controlling parents, and the expectation that someone will always be there to protect them but hopefully in ways that don’t hurt them this time, no real understanding of why Category A queer elders are the way they are, and so much internalized shame that they have to do some pretty fancy logic-leaping to keep them from collapsing entirely.

They can’t turn into Category A queer youngsters, because they don’t know how to unravel the system around them, because they’ve never had to actually make choices in their lives and live with the consequences, because they don’t have the example of how to do it. They can’t unravel their internalized shame because again, that’s hard and they don’t have their parents to take away the consequences and pain. It doesn’t come easy to them, so it may as well not come at all.

But, you ask, if Category A queer elders aren’t around to teach the kids, then how are they learning anything positive at all? Well, Category B, our university-tenured TERFs, who don’t want to change the status quo but want to just be at the top of it instead.

For a lot of kids who don’t know how to make hard choices but want to be queer, this is an extremely attractive option. But when they go online to queer spaces, a lot of them say fuck terfs, we don’t support your hate, and they go ‘yeah okay that makes sense’. They can say fuck terfs without ever actually questioning why terfs are bad. They’re Bad and Evil, just like drug addicts, just like fairytale nazis, just like the evil homophobes.

And we saw them say ‘yeah fuck terfs’ and we were like, ‘aight you got it’ and we never questioned if they actually understood us. They didn’t. They didn’t, and we didn’t do enough to fix it, because not enough of us realized the problem. So terfs got a little sneaky. They hid behind dogwhistles and easy little comments, hiding their rhetoric in queer theory that you’ll absolutely miss if you just memorize it and never actually question it and understand why that point is being made.

This goes back to America sucking, because their school system is far more focused on rote memorization over actual logic and understanding of the text. They’re engaging with queer theory the way they’ve been taught, which is memorize and don’t think, don’t question. Besides, questioning and understanding is hard. Being shown different points of view and asked what they think is not only hard but requires them to go against all of the conditioning that says to just listen and agree and never question it, which goes back to tearing the system and internalized shame down, and we’ve established they can’t do that so naturally they don’t do that.

This begets, then, the rise of exclusionary politics. They’re turning into Category B queer youngsters, because we told them ‘hey that’s a terf talking point what are you doing’ and they never questioned why. They learned you can do all sorts of things, just don’t say X, Y, or Z, because they never thought deeply about it.

The children who have grown on Web 3.0 do not want to do any heavy lifting to make things easier for themselves long-run. They want to do as little as possible and have things get better for them. There isn’t enough of us left in Category A, because Category B terfs are very good at recruiting young folks and Cat. A is overwhelming poor, dead, and easily dismissed in the system as evil and bad, so we can’t exactly convince the young folks to listen. If all of the young kids could agree to tear down the system, a lot more older folks might listen. Change always starts with the young, and there’s a reason for that.

But Republicans have figured out, if you get people fighting, they never put together a force that can actually stop you. TERFs, who want the exact same thing as Republicans but with themselves on top, are doing this to queer youth, and Cat. A elders can’t fight back because there isn’t enough of them and the odds are against them, and the young folk like me who follow their lead.

People can kinda handle gay people. It’s not so far from the acceptable normal that it’s impassable. But you want them to handle kinky people? Gay people of colour? Kinky gay people of colour? Trans people? Those are bridges too far to step across. The original idea was to get the foot in the door with marriage equality and inch our way through with racial equality, sex positivity, dismantling ableism and perisexism (forgive me if that isn’t the word for anti-intersex ‘ism), and see if we can’t patch up the system instead of inciting a civil war over this and have to tear down the system entirely.

Well, we might’ve managed that if not for AIDS being the perfect ‘Jeezus is killing all the evil gay people for being sinners’ propaganda machine. As it stands now, not a chance in hell. So long as Republicans and terfs keep everyone fighting, nobody has the power to dismantle their empire, and they stay in power.

So then, you ask me, “Lu what the fuck does that have to do with the decline of otherkinity on tumblr???” and now that you’ve got all that background knowledge, here is your answer.

Those children who want their experiences curated for them and the evil icky content they don’t like to be gone because it disgusts them and anything that disgusts them is clearly sinful problematic and should be destroyed, are what we call ‘antishippers’, or anti for short.

They like being progressive. Sort of. They learned what Republicans and terfs have honed to a fine talent: keep people fighting, hold them to a bar they have to constantly make or risk being ostracized, and harass the people who don’t play along into getting out of your sight forever. Sound familiar?

They learned of otherkinity, and particularly fictionkind, because web 3.0 means if something goes viral on one site, it doesn’t just go viral on that site, it makes it to worldwide newspapers and twitter and nobody ever, ever fucking forgets it. They realized the following: “Hey wait, if I’m this character for realsies, not only does it help me deal with the internalized shame I’ve done nothing to actually fix because that takes work, I can also tell these people who draw gross content I don’t like they’re hurting me personally, and that actually sounds credible, and I can shame them into stopping”.

If this is your first time here and that sounds sickening, it damn well should, and I am so, so sorry that any of us had to witness this, and I am more sorry I and everyone else who personally witnessed this didn’t realize what was going on and put a stop to it. I answer asks and browse the tags and clear up misinformation and it isn’t just a genuine desire to help. It’s damage control, and my own way of trying to deal with the guilt of not stopping this. I’m well aware I couldn’t have seen it coming, I was a teenager myself still learning and no one person has that much power. I still feel like I should have done more, and I’ll do what I can to fix what’s within my power to fix.

So back to the story. This all culminates around 2016 or so. Trump wins the election, and every queer person ever knows they’re fucked, and the younger generation’s only ever heard horror stories, never seen actual oppression that this could bring. We’re all scared. We all don’t know what to do. Nobody has any answers or any control over the situation.

So they lash out. They attack others for drawing things they don’t like, for challenging them in literally any way, for asking them to reconsider the vile shit they just said, for so much as defending themselves from the harassment they just got. And when challenged, they yell “But I’m a minor! A literal child! How dare you attack me, clearly you get off on this, you evil pedophile!” and they sling around every insult in the book until one sticks. Pedophile is a pretty good one, so is abuser, and sometimes zoophile works out too. Freak is great, everyone gets right pissed off about it.

The fact that Category A queer elders were called pedophiles and freaks is not a fact they know or care about. The fact that they are quickly making every fandom community super toxic is also not a fact they care about. The fact that the ‘kin community has words and terminology and they actually mean shit, and the fact that they’re spreading misinformation faster than we can keep up with, are not facts they care about.

So they come in, take our terms, make it impossible for us to find new folks. They realize our anger is easily a power trip, because we’re already made fun of, so they get off on the little power they can find and make fun of us too, and then when we get rightfully annoyed and pissed off, they can hide behind being minors.

Then tumblr implements their porn ban, because nobody’s stopping them, because it isn’t profitable to have porn on here. Considering most of the otherkin community, and most fandom communities, are full of adults who do occasionally talk about NSFW things, and the fact that they’re just banning everyone who so much as breathes wrong, this begins the start of a mass exodus, scattering already fragile communities to twitter, pillowfort, dreamwidth, and a few other places. Largely, twitter, where you can’t make a post longer than a snappy comeback and where the algorithm is literally designed to piss you off as much as possible.

So community elders have largely left, because they can’t stand the drama and the pain of what’s happened, and that’s if they didn’t get banned for being kinky furries who do talk about how their kintypes merge with their sexuality. Most community members have also left or stopped talking about being ‘kin, because they get associated with antishippers and toxicity and it’s just not worth it. Those of us who are left get drowned out by misinformation and trolls and wishkin and antishippers who appropriate our terminology because it supports them getting a power trip, and whenever we argue, we get called pedophiles and freaks and worse.

And now there isn’t much left. I hope we get to find a better place. Othercon was a good place to talk about it, I did a whole panel (it’s on Youtube!) about what we want to do about it. But I don’t really have any answers. 

But to sum it all up... America’s political climate ultimately culminated in destroying queer spaces, and we survived, and then people who wanted to destroy smaller communities to get on top showed up and we were all but defenseless against something we had never, ever dealt with before on this scale.

One of my twitter mutuals mentioned how kinning and otherkin are now completely separate communities. It’s really the best I can do to keep hoping that continues, until nobody realizes the words are at all connected to each other. It’s the best anyone can hope for, now. I hate it. I hate every part of this. But maybe we can salvage what’s left.

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic  during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Dreamshaper

Dreamshaper has 54 stories at Gossamer. Her stories often feature Mulder and Scully exploring their feelings in ways you really, really wish you could’ve seen on the show. I’ve recced some of my favorites of her stories here before, including Found in Memory, Just By Existing, Purpose, and Promise. Big thanks to Dreamshaper for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

I'm not at all surprised people are still reading X-Files fanfic! There's a deep catalogue of good and interesting fiction there, and the X-Files still has cultural significance. And of course there were the recent seasons to bring it back to mind. I think if you had asked me in 2000, I might not have supposed that it had this kind of staying power. So now I'm thinking of this interview as a time capsule--what will my answer be in 2040?

My own fic was not designed to have staying power. If anyone is reading it now, bless them, they are kind and patient. I would only recommend probably reading the first and last things I posted just to see what kind of growth is possible. The first time I ever posted fic, someone told me to never write again. I was a teenager. I was crushed but I went on writing anyway, and I worked hard to improve.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

I think of two things. As for the show itself, I still think of Mulder/Scully as the ultimate in romance. I can still picture certain moments from the episodes, from the movie. I look for pairings with tension that reminds me of theirs--an almost-regency level of UST, but with a modern element of danger.

As for the fandom itself, I grew up in it. My entire online life and the core of how I participate in fandom was formed here. I was 17 or so when I started writing and posting MSR. I was 18 or 19 when I started meeting fans in real life. I was fortunate enough to fall in with people who were equal parts gracious and nerdy, and while my own nerdiness is innate, I remember and emulate the kindness which was shown to me.

I have an entire side post to this question about how strongly I disagree with the current age stratification in fandom--this idea of not interacting across artificial age divides is tragic to me.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

ATXC, and mailing lists. I don't actually remember the names of all the mailing lists! I can picture myself sitting in my kitchen on my computer, and what the emails looked like--the font, the signature lines--but not the names. I can even remember specific conversations we had! One of them must have been Scullyfic, because I remember the first meetup being planned. Is that right? Was it the Scullyfic meetup? [Lilydale note: Probably was Scullyfic. There was a big email flurry when the first Scullyfic mailing list meetup was being planned.] My mind was absolutely blown by the idea of a fan con. Now I've led panels at a dozen of them.

I remember some of the arguments, too. It's funny that some of them are the same arguments I still see here and there, like whether or not criticism of a fanwork is valid. Real Person Fic being this unbelievably shameful thing you had to ask to be shown, and the doyennes of the fandom would have given you the cut direct at Almack's if they'd found out, you know?

This was also the era of AIM and ICQ. mIRC too, right? I spent a lot of time in channels. I absolutely loved when people started to be more open about themselves in chats. I was always so interested in how fandom fit into people's lives. Some people I talked to were moms, college students, people who had interesting careers, and they all just found ways to make fandom work for them. They had a need and were meeting it, despite the pressures of their offline life.

I don't know how to explain the impression that made on me, but--it normalized fandom. That seems obvious, maybe, but I hadn't known this was something you could integrate into your everyday life.

It also normalized the idea of women taking their own needs as primary, in a way that went beyond what I was exposed to in my home life, or through the feminism of the 1990s. There was this wild intersection of the--the domestic and intellectual life of women, and the playful life of women, just making itself known to me in a way I'd never seen before. That was enormous. Absolutely a foundational experience for me.

My experience was that ATXC and email lists were like, these surface-level interactions where people figured out, roughly, if your mind ran on a similar track to theirs, and then you were invited to make deeper relationships in more private corners of the internet. Social media filled both functions at once, I think, for a while. But the privacy was missing. I'm not surprised that Slack and Discord are starting to fill that private corner gap--everything old becomes new, etc.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

UST and monsters. This is still an unbeatable combination for me!

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I loved romance novels--I read so many of them. Somehow, before we even had a computer at home, I started to tell myself romance novel stories with Mulder and Scully as the lead characters. This was how I talked myself to sleep--I wasn't a good sleeper. Then when I got online and did whatever search led me to ATXC, I was just shocked. Shocked! Can't do the surprise justice, in this era where fanfic is relatively mainstream. Other people had also independently invented this thing I loved! But they wrote their ideas down! I jumped on the bandwagon immediately.

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

It's like my relationship to my childhood, frankly. Foundational, but I don't think about it all that much on a daily basis, right? I smile and reblog gif sets. I get nostalgic. I get embarrassed by social mistakes I made. I feel the way many of us do about memories from our teenage years. I wouldn't be who I was without it, but I'm not still in it.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

I was. I've spent 20 years in fandom! I did some beta work for someone who'd started writing slash--The Sentinel. The actual Sentinel, not just an endless loop of Sentinel AUs based on Sentinel AUs based on etc. I had some idea at the time that I was queer, but this was my first real exposure to romances that weren't straight. So I tore my way through the early 2000s slash fandoms as they developed: The Sentinel, Due South, Stargate Atlantis. Popslash, where a mix of good writing and absurdity ruled. Bandom, where I met my wife. Since then, many smaller fandoms.

It's hard to compare any of these things to each other, let alone to the X-Files. In each one, I was lucky enough to find a circle of women who were strong beta readers and good friends. I never wrote as much or for as long as I did in the X-Files.

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

I watched the new episodes. I've shown friends important episodes--I remember that a few years ago, another friend and I tried to hook a third friend on the show by binging some favorites--mostly shippy MOTW, so it was like, Arcadia, Triangle, Bad Blood. Fun stuff!

We finish watching and I'm like, well? And? And she says, that was fine, but I'm more of a man-pain, secret babies kind of person? I'll never forget it. She had no idea but she'd hit the nail on the head! We were wheezing with laughter. We went back and watched mytharc episodes, which was much less fun for me, but much more interesting to her.

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

I don't read X-Files fic often. I look at new things sometimes, and I've reread a few old classics, but my reading taste has changed so much. I still love straight romance, but it needs to be fast and sharp in a way that is hard to find.

I read fic in other fandoms when I have time. In the past few years, I've finished a degree, had a daughter, renovated a small Victorian and then sold it and bought another one during this pandemic--so time has been short. Currently I read some Untamed fic, some Good Omens fic, Magicians, Schitt's Creek...a sampler. Whatever friends are writing, whatever they recommend.

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

I never have a favorite of my own fics. I'm never satisfied. The second I post something, I'm always full of regrets. I've written fics that did very well and still hated them a month later. People have asked me over the years to move more of my stuff off Livejournal and onto ao3, but I do it really reluctantly and only by specific request. Everything's ephemeral! Let the old works diminish, and go into the West!

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

I have no oldies to dust off. I do periodically think of X-Files stories I would tell, but I don't have enough time for current interests--and so it goes.

Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

I do. I was most recently writing in The Magicians fandom. I posted a couple new stories in an old fandom last year--I'd written Good Omens fic fifteen years ago, and then again for the Amazon adaptation. I have a pile of original novels in various stages of completion, but I'm never happy with them. One day I'll figure myself out, perhaps, or I'll just keep writing myself this and that and leaving it all in a drawer.

What's the story behind your pen name?

So AOL had a character limit for user names--I think it was 10. I was a teenager at the time I was coming up with the one I'd use for fandom, so I went with Dreamshaper. It was kind of literal, in the sense that I was going to share the stories I'd been telling myself to help me sleep. But the character limit meant I went with Dreamshpr, which I later liked because of the alternate reading of Dream*shipper*. A reminder to the younger fans that we were the original shippers!

I would also come up with new pen names when I wanted to experiment with a fic that didn't fit my usual style. I don't remember any of them. I probably did that a dozen times, so, sorry to those poor completely abandoned stories.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

Giddygeek on tumblr and ao3. I'm most active on twitter, but largely about my domestic life with dips into fandoms or original writing; message me on tumblr if you're an old friend who'd like to reconnect elsewhere.

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

Just gratitude--I'm so glad that I found people to share an obsession with, and that they were good people, at a time in my life where that made a significant difference to me. I don't know where I'd be now without my time and my growth in this fandom!

(Posted by Lilydale on December 22, 2020)

[shirlleycoyle]

Before TikTok, Witches Traded Their Spells on This Ancient Internet Forum

Long before the witches of Gen-Z claimed TikTok as their digital coven, and even before the Geocities-scattered digital landscapes of Web 1.0, a thousands-strong community once formed via the world’s phone lines to trade spells, advise on sigils, and correspond on spiritual guidance. It was called the Pagan And Occult Distribution Network, or PODSnet: a slice of occult internet history that helped pioneer mass online collaboration.

Today, it’s easy to take for granted that online communities are only a few taps away, but in the 1980s and early 1990s, finding like-minded individuals in niche subject areas was practically revolutionary. And in the case of PODSnet, it provided an unusually free space to discuss the esoteric arts—for many of its members, for the first time ever.

"In the 1990s and 1990s, accessing the social media of the day was very different than it is today,” Farrell McGovern, a PODSnet cofounder who came to Paganism through books about quantum physics such as The Dancing Wu Li Masters, told Motherboard. “It was louder, slower, and connectivity was perilous.”

In the early 1980s, computing enthusiasts began using Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) to communicate with each other. These systems were a precursor to the World Wide Web, and although relatively primitive, paved the way for the always-on communication of today.

Because BBS ran on phone lines, discussions were asynchronous and often confined to local groups due to the dramatic costs of dialing farther afield than your own state. What’s more, the boards were isolated from one another: an analogy might be if every single subreddit needed its own website, and you could only speak to users in your immediate area.

But in 1984, artist and technician Tom Jennings created FidoNet, a network that could connect all of these BBS systems. With the advent of cheaper modems, FidoNet’s popularity exploded into a huge 20,000-node network that connected users all around the world. Eventually, something called Echomail was introduced by a system operator, or sysop, called Jeff Rush, allowing for the support of public forums.

Instead of simply picking up your smartphone, BBS users would have to connect their computer to a modem, which was linked to a phone line—translating digital 1s and 0s into audio information and back again to the modem and terminal operating the BBS.

Popular BBSes would frequently return a busy signal: unlike today, actually logging off was necessary because only one connection was allowed at a time. A successful login returned a screen of text and a list of messages grouped into categories, with the software tracking the ones you had read. Here, users would respond to text, download what they could, and hang up.

Here, a BBS called "Magicknet" flourished, but one problem in particular spurred its users to found their own splinter network: Christian fundamentalists had infiltrated the group to spy on members.

This infiltration led to a number of incidents, including McGovern being written up in the magazine of infamous cult figure Lyndon Larouche as a “well-known witch from Toronto”. Given the various tabloid-led "Satanic panics" at the time, founding an independent BBS was not only right for promoting lively metaphysical discourse, it was a matter of safety too.

“People were losing their jobs, child custody, etc,” McGovern told Motherboard. “People had to move to escape persecution in some areas: very much so in the Bible Belt, but in other places, too. Unless you were in a major metropolitan area, and even then, you ran some degree of risk if you were outed.”

McGovern was first involved in his local BBS scene around Ottawa in the mid-1980s. Working at a local computer store that sold Apple and IBM PC clones, McGovern set up the Data/Sfnet BBS to advertise the business. In doing so, he became a SysOp—a system operator who ran, maintained, and in many cases built a network—granting him honorary entry to the computing elite at the time.

Being based in Canada, McGovern was the first to help Magicknet go international before it split into PODSnet, which would swell to 10,000 members who accessed the BBS by dialling into the 93 "zone number"—a reference to Thelema, the spiritual movement developed by Aleister Crowley.

The logo of the PODSnet bulletin board system.

For author and occult store supplier Dorothy Morrison, who was raised Catholic but eventually joined a coven of practicing witches in California before forming one of her own, discovering PODSnet was an “incredible way to find so many people of like mind at one place”.

“It was a place where I could be myself, regardless of the fact I really was living in a very conservative, buttoned-down state,” Morrison told Motherboard. “It wasn’t just a safe haven for me, it was an escape from having to appear to be someone I wasn’t for safety reasons."

“When someone wants to burn you at the stake—at that time Missouri was not a place that would’ve taken kindly to Witches—you certainly don’t tell them where you keep the gas can,” she said.

The atmosphere on PODSnet was typically collaborative and friendly, said Morrison, and the most arresting dramas on the board she was aware of usually related to the enormous phone bills that came from connecting to the network. (Although once or twice these charges “damned near landed some folks in divorce court.")

But, like the internet today, there were hints of gossip, rumours, and fake news. One popular cause for the community was the supposed persecution of 9 million witches by Christians (The whole idea was based on bad scholarship, according to McGovern). At one point, there was a six-year-long debate on whether or not Kate Bush is Wiccan—perhaps one of the most heated internet disputes of its time.

Whatever the topic, much of these PODSnet discussions would have been lost to time were it not for a community effort to archive the cherished message board. Still accessible in its archived ASCII form today, PODSnetters worked together to produce what was perhaps the first mass collaborative online project of its type: a massive, crowdsourced digital grimoire  called the Internet Book of Shadows.

The name of the enormous seven-volume text references the catch-all "Book of Shadows," a name commonly used for tomes of spells and rituals, and the text covers the A-Zs of alternative spirituality from "Asatru to Zen Buddhism." Chapter one alone is 70,000 words long, and there’s a varied store of stuff available within, including an essay about bashing fluffy bunnies (the tendency among some well-seasoned practitioners to troll newbies, as opposed to bashing actual rabbits), a guide to cleansing rituals called "smudging," and an introduction to the suppressed traditions of Gnosticism.

Plenty of contributors to the Book of Shadows remain involved in esoteric spiritual communities today, and some, like Morrison, became authors in their own right.

One of Dorothy Morrison’s favorite contributions to the Internet Book of Shadows.

Morrison says the book of rituals, spells, stories, legends, and “other magic-related miscellany” took seven 5-inch loose-leaf binders to contain it when she once decided to print out the information the community had amassed. The community then began compiling the grimoire into downloadable digital files.

Once it was finished, PODSnet users agreed to offer the Book of Shadows as a gift, free of charge, to the community. While they were copyrighted, they were free to use and copy under the proviso that there was no charge for their acquisition—leading to later frustrations about unauthorized reproductions of the manuscript for profit.

“It’s probably the largest collection of pagan thought that was freely available to copy for non-commercial use,” McGovern added.

According to Dan Harms, an author and librarian at SUNY Cortland, magick practice has thrived on community-produced documents throughout history. Even during the print era, there was a “tremendous sort of traffic in books, manuscripts being passed back and forth between people,” chopping and changing aspects of the manuscripts they liked before copying them out.

“What was really different here, is that when the material was copied or created, it’s put up online for everybody to see,” Harms said. “It becomes a collective memory. It’s not something that’s stuck on somebody’s shelf, it’s something everybody can get into.”

Harms told Motherboard that communities like PODSnet were of enormous importance for establishing networks of occult practitioners and helped lay the groundwork for driving a boom in occult publishing.

“I was growing up in rural Kentucky with an interest in these kinds of arcane topics,” said Harms, who wasn't involved in the occult internet at the time of PODSnet but was an active Usenet user. “It was just so hard to find any sort of information – you would have to rely on the local library.  But the local library in rural Kentucky is probably not looking to fill up its shelves with books about magic and paganism and things like that.”

Today, what was once a recondite pocket of the primordial internet has hit the mainstream, with even the Financial Times covering the "WitchTok" phenomenon. Speaking with PODSnetters, there’s a sense that in today's online spaces, community and information exchange can often take a backseat to clout and hostility. “[But] how much of that is getting older and yelling ‘get off my grass’,” asks McGovern, “or true insight – only time will say.”

Whatever the case, PODSnet—which closed around the turn of the millennium before hopping to Yahoo Groups, LiveJournal, and now with its remnants on Facebook—proved that digital technologies can bring disparate people together in a meaningful way, where they are happy to create and produce for the good of their communities.

“I remember those I met along that journey, what they taught me—not only about the Craft, but about myself—and the connections I made," said Morrison.“I remember how fortunate I was that PODSnet was there for me. To a large degree, that experience formed the person I am today, and I'll be forever grateful.”

Before TikTok, Witches Traded Their Spells on This Ancient Internet Forum syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[kumoriyami-xiuzhen]

Hakuoki Drama CD Flower and Oni Translation

First post of the month! so as always, I’ll once again start by asking you to please support me if you can either on ko-fi, through paypal or patreon  for access to my blog post translations or just to support me (current special access is my translation of the seventh Saito Ginsei no Shou chater)... also let me know if you have any hakuoki drama cds that you’d be willing to share that are on my looking for list since i either do not have audio for those cds or do not have audio that i can share... 

btw, was there an image of the sky in SSL that matches the one here? sorta want it for something but can’t exactly remember if it was in the game cuz i haven’t picked up my vita in a long while since i screwed mine up....

also, to whom it may it concern: 中秋快乐! slightly delayed tho lol.

Anyway, this is my translation of the Hakuoki MesseSanoh store exclusive drama cd  - Flower and Oni “花と鬼.”

one of the dramas i found back in june... at the time, i coincidentally obtained CH translations of all the other Tokuten cds that were released with the ps2 Hakuoki Shinsengumi Kitan game (based on info from tokio-fujita’s drama cd livejournal page). no idea when i’ll get to those.... since all the ones that haven’t been translated yet are +10min long (i did somehow manage to obtain the audio for all of them months before i got the CH tls for em).

Also, there was one sentence missing in the tl for this. had the translation of it commissioned from @jokertrap-ran​. left that text in bold.

enjoy~ final edits will be done when i do a video for it (i’m 90% sure the sighs/laughter and other misc sounds weren’t translated properly in the text i found but oh well).

Hakuoki MesseSanoh Store Exclusive Drama CD Flower and Oni

Translation by KumoriYami

Kondou: Hah......to be able to relax on the porch/corridor/veranda while enjoying the flowers, it really is nice.

Souji: Areh? Kondou-san? What are you doing over here?

Kondou: Oh, Souji, do you want a cup of tea? Come, sit here.

Souji: Are you appreciating the flowers right now?

Kondou: Although there are assignments, and despite how every day is recently bloody [reword later], it's really nice to be able to appreciate the flowers like this once in a while

Souji: It's really nice, the sun is warming and shining brightly, and the blooming sakura are beautiful.

Kondou: Yes

Souji: Nn, it's really nice [says comfortable/feeling well].

Kondou: haha, Souji, have another cup of tea.

(footsteps)

Souji: I won't be polite then.

Kondou: Nn, those footsteps are quite noisy.

Souji: Those footsteps, they're Hijikata-san's.

Hijikata: Really, everyone is like this......

Souji: Look, I guessed correctly.

Kondou: haha, that's really amazing.

Hijikata: What, it if isn't Kondou-san and Souji.

Kondou: You don't look that happy, Toshi, come have a cup of tea.

Hijikata: You two are really relaxed, to be drinking tea while enjoying the flowers. 

Souji: I think this is better than drinking, or it because we're not having sake that you're angry?

Hijikata: Kondou-san, this concerns the warriors who recently joined our ranks.

Kondou: Ah, it seems that a lot of people have gathered, so the Shinsengumi will get better and better in the future.

Hijikata: If only if that were the case.

Kondou: Nn, what's the problem?

Hijikata: I was training the new members just now. Although it's good there are many new recruits [says volunteers. if audio doesn't have xin in it, i'll change it to interested volunteers], a lot of them are lazy and completely useless, few of them can be used/can be put to use.

Souji: Isn't it your job to train them? Vice-commander Hijikata. [check for -san]

Hijikata: Souji don't just relax and drink tea, you should be training them with me. 

Souji: No/Don't wanna.

Hijikata: What?! For what reason?

Souji: Because I'm resting right now.

Hijikata: It doesn't matter if you are or aren't resting. If the executives don't take the lead, what is to be done? tell me [answer me]!

Souji: Really. Here we go again. It's because you take these arbitrary and out of place actions, that everyone gets annoyed [more literally: bored].

Hijkata: Oh, who's fed up with me [then]? I'll ask you to give me their names.

Souji: You didn't notice? Hijikata-san, you're unexpectedly slow.

Hijikata: Hey, I say [literal translation. i'm assuming this is more along the lines of 'say that again!']

Kondou: Come on, come on [im guessing the audio is 'ma, ma'], you two should let it be. Come, calm down and and look at the sakura......

Hijikata: don't say anything else Kondou-san, this is Souji's and my problem.

Souji: Sorry, Kondou-san, I don't want to bother you, you can look [at them] by yourself.

Kondou: Ah, is that so?

Souji: I've wonder, but is Hijikata-san's way of doing things really okay?

Hijikata: What? Souji. Do you have a problem/complaints with me? [Or] are you looking down on me/[Or it] just that you hate me?

Kondou:  What am I, your nanny!?

[will probably change that to ‘what are you, his nanny?’ for language flow]

Souji: No/That's not it? Anyway, I'm still the First Division Captain of the Shinsengumi.

Hijikata: If you're a captain, you should act like one, and take care of the team members.

Souji: I have taken care of it [that].

Kondou: To be fighting in front of beautiful flowers...... really what a headache. As a warrior/samurai, how can you not enjoy the cherry blossoms?!

Hijikata: What is there to look at/see, it's because of this that I work so hard.

Souji: You're not happy/Are you upset? I thought Hijikata-san was quite willing/happy to do this.

Hijikata: What?!

Kondou: Oh, right, I've thought of something good, both of you listen. As the chief of the Shinsengumi, I have a proposal.

Hijikata: What?

Souji: What?

Kondou: In order to promote friendlier relations within the team members, how about holding a hanami/sakura viewing party?

Hijikata: Kondou-san, do you know what time it is right now?

Souji: I approve/support that. I think that that the team members will improve after those that don't know each other are able to deepen their friendship.

Kondou: Nn, thats it/like that, I also wanted to say that.

Souji: That's just like Kondou-san, you're different from a certain someone who is difficult to deal with.

Hijikata: Souji, say that again!

Souji: What?

Hijikata: well, i finally understand. compared to those new guys, souji, you're the one that's useless.

Souji: If yo're too harsh, the new recruits will run away. Hijikata-san, drink some tea and calm down.

Hijikata: You!

Kondou: Toshi, take a teacup and quickly drink.

Hijikata: Ah.

Souji: then i should probably go back to training.

Kondou: You're going, Souji?

Souji: Yes, Kondou-san. But, don't let everyone run away from the training grounds again. [tho that's an accurate tl, i'm guess this should be more among the lines of "But I can't help it/it's not my fault if everyone runs away from the training grounds again/ But make sure that no one runs away from the training grounds again]

Kondou: Oh?

Souji: they all ran away as soon as they saw my face Why is that?

Hijikata: That's because you're way of teaching is extremely bad. Really, your swordsmanship is better than everyone else's/you are one of the best swordsmen, but why are you so incapable? Listen Kondou-san, rather than training other people, this guy loves fighting way more. Everyone was beaten to the point where they could't get up off the ground.

Kondou: Then it's understandable for why the team members are unwilling.

Souji: Ahaha, to speak of being gentle, I really didn't expect those words from the demon vice-commander.

Kondou: What, in fact Toshi is a very gentle man, right, Toshi?

Hijikata: Hn, who knows.

Kondou: That's how it is, be gentle to everyone.

Souji: Yes yes, but, i've really been gentle with everyone. Then I'll be going. Kondou-san, thank you for your hospitality.

Kondou: Ah, I'll be counting on you [tl literally: please requesting you. check audio]

Souji: Yes.

(souji walks away)

Hijikata: Hah, well, never mind that guy.

Kondou: Do you want another cup of tea?

HIjikaa: Ah, another cup.

Kondou: Then I'll have another as well.

Hijikata: Souji's way of teaching is extremely rough/cruel, so it's unclear if he's actually training other people, or using them for himself to practice.

Kondou: That's because he takes what he does for granted/his success for granted, which is why it's impossible for him to understand those who are unable to.

Hijikata: That guy is still a child, he sticks his foot into everything, but always gets bored immediately after.

Kondou: You don't quite understand souji.

Hijikata: everyone will probably run away again [?].

Kondou: If you're worried, you should go and see.

Hijikata: Eh, there's nothing to be done about that/no way around it then, I'll be going then/I'll be going.

Kondou: I'll go too.

Hijikata: No need, Kondou-san you should just stay here and relax.

Kondou: Nn?

Hijikata: It's because you're the face of the Shinsengumi. The trivial matters of the troop, it's best for you not to be involved in them at all, I'll deal with everything.

Kondou: Nn, is that so? I'm sorry.

Hijikata: the tea was verry good. Then I'll see you later.

(hijikata leaves)

Kondou:　Oh. It seems that the beauty of sakura has no effect on an oni. Heh. Good grief.

　 Hijikata Toshizou, Miki Shin'ichirō Okita Souji, Morikubo Shōtaro  Shōtarō Kondou Isami, Ōkawa Tōru

----

image from suruga-ya.

[talix18]

November 8

(There's a lot of padding in there.)

I have no free time today in front of a keyboard so I should be writing. Or working. Or listing all the things I forgot as I was half-heartedly packing. Or listing all the things I need to do before I leave so Mom isn’t disgusted when she comes to take care of the cats (Clean The Toilet). I managed to overpack without buying anything new but predictably, am not happy with any of it. This is one of my least favorite qualities about myself. Mom always hated shopping for jeans with me but I find my resistance to packing is incredibly annoying. I’m good at making sure the laundry is done so all of my options are open, but terrible at knowing what I will want to wear once I’m wherever.

I also managed to completely overlook shampoo and body wash on my first round of packing, which doesn’t bode well.

Is there some kind of rule against contractions I don’t know about? Word keeps putting blue squiggly lines under my contractions as if I don’t know what they are. I understand that writing all the words out will boost my count, but it’s not how people tend to talk.

Among the amenities at the retreat center where I’ll be this weekend is a working farm with baby animals. Yes, please, I would like to play with all of the baby animals. When life is complicated and ugly, baby animals are easy and adorable. My sister will be jealous when she sees the pictures with which I intend to spam her.

My sister is one of my best friends and I’m grateful for her every day. I’m not sure she would have chosen the way our lives have played out this far, but she is also unmarried and child-free (that part I’m pretty sure she’s okay with). If she dates, she doesn’t talk about it much with me, but I haven’t seen her in a relationship in over ten years. It was a brutal one. First love, first boyfriend, first break-up all in her mid-20s. Although my romantical adventures have been largely, um, unsuccessful, I am glad I got used to the idea of heartbreak young. (Even the song that turned me from a pop princess to a rock goddess was “Bringin’ On The Heartbreak” [MTV was born when I was in eighth grade and was my obsession for the next five years.])

Def Leppard is how I met my first boyfriend! We were in ninth grade, he was in my homeroom (both of our last names start with “H”), and he was wearing a tour shirt promoting the band’s second album. I was entranced. “You’ve seen them?” (Wanders off down a Randy Rhoads rabbit-hole.) I remember the conversation included something about Ozzy Osbourne and Randy Rhoads; either he’d seen them or was supposed to right after Randy died. Wikipedia tells me that Def Leppard opened for Ozzy at Merriweather, which is probably where A saw them; Randy Rhoads and all. (Now I am irrationally jealous at missing a show 38 years ago.) That’s probably where he got the shirt that made me talk to him; the shirt I made him leave with me when he moved away.

I should probably blame all my romantic misadventures on Def Leppard. They were a “heavy metal” (The lead singer joked “light alloy”) band that appealed to a slightly rougher crowd than I hand previously hung with. A introduced me to drinking beer in the woods by the elementary school (I was all of 13 or 14). The cops came and we ran to his apartment – his bedroom was on the ground floor and we climbed in through the window. We made out for a while to the Scorpions’ “Lovedrive”. A was a bad boy, and it took me a long time to get the taste for them out of my mouth.

A called every few months and my stomach would do flips at the sound of his voice. Did he ever actually say he was coming back for me or did I just make that part up?

My next boyfriend showed up when I was a senior and wreaked havoc on and off for the next seven years. He was a serial cheater and a pathological liar against which I had absolutely no defenses. I was a goody-goody. Teacher’s pet type. There was a pivotal moment one adolescent summer when the decision I made set the course for the rest of my life. I was hanging out in town with one of the tougher girls and her friends, trying to figure out how to smoke, and noticed it was 9:15. Curfew was 9:30, and I was easily a mile from home. I knew that showing up late would mean trouble. Was I going to say “fuck it” and keep hanging out?

I ran my ass off to make it home on time. Goody-goody. This probably kept me out of a lot of future trouble.

I fell hard for S – he was charming and charismatic and sang “Dixie Chicken” and made me laugh. He went to the Catholic boys’ school and was friends with my friend MB’s older brother. By that time I was solidly British pop new wave with some hard rock on the side (much like MTV itself). For the next absurd amount of years either he cheated on me or with me – he knew I would always be there. Until the night when he told me that he knew I was never going to find anyone who loved him like I did and he was ready to commit, but he had to tell me something first. His ex was pregnant and it was his. That was it for me. Finally. “Dixie Chicken” still gets me, as does the taste of Marlboro Reds and Bazooka bubble gum. (I started smoking when he broke up with me the first time.)

After my first college boyfriend (a good guy who is still married to the woman he dated after we broke up), I decided I wasn’t going to let anyone get close anymore. I was done with love; I was going to be one of those distant women who could never be possessed and never get hurt. I imagined veils and fog. If it was good enough for Stevie, it was good enough for me. At that time the idea of “if you want what someone has, do what they do” didn’t include the caveat of perhaps “asking if it was what they wanted and would they make the same choices again.” (I’m not saying Stevie’s not happy with her life, but 30 years ago she may have gently steered me another way.)

My old team leader just came by to chat and now my roll is slowed. She and I have worked together since I started here 17 years ago. My mind is starting to wander since I’m out of here soon.

I do want a partner – for practical reasons as well as romantic ones. I hate thinking that all the good sex is behind me, for one thing. It would be awesome to have help around the house – to have someone motivated to get something done when I just can’t get it in gear. (Much like this writing day. It was so easy yesterday!) (Five hundred more! Push through!)

I’m already annoyed because I’m not going to get my active minutes in today. It’s hard to be compulsive and unmotivated at the same time. I hate the feeling of being rushed – of not having enough time to get everything done. I want to get on the road before 4:30 because it’s Friday rush hour and I’m going around the beltway but I also want to clean the bathroom, scoop the litterboxes, and collect all of the paraphernalia I’ve forgotten to pack. It will be ridiculous if I have to level up a suitcase to go to a yoga retreat. Which is going to be interrupted by my service commitment, which is my decision, but ugh. I would prefer not to.

I’ve had an absurd amount of coffee today! The ideas should be flying out of me!

But where does a forty-ten-year-old meet people if not at work? There are people in all the meetings I go to but hardly any I’m interested in dating. My current working theory of relationships is that you should to the things that interest you. Whomever you meet along the way will have at least one interest in common. The problem with this theory is that carried to its logical conclusion, I’ve been in the wrong place for the past blah blah years. I must not be doing what I should be doing if I’m not meeting people I’m attracted to.

I mean, I know it’s all a crapshoot and our lives are run just as much by chance as by anything else. I can’t even complain about the cards I’ve been giving because I am way privileged. That’s something it took me way too long to figure out. I am a white woman who has always been housed and clothed and fed. I’m cis, I’m mostly heterosexual, and my body still does almost everything I ask of it. I have very little room to complain. I know that complaining about mental illness is something of a luxury – look at all the things going right that would otherwise take priority.

I have to thank the Internet for introducing me to people I would have never met otherwise. Yes, there are many cons to this big-data-driven lifestyle and I panic when my smart phone stops working. Social media absolutely has its negatives, but the people that I’ve met there are none of them. I met my first collection of Webpeeps thanks to FARK.com, but it was LiveJournal and Tumblr that expanded my world view.

(Does one last sentence complaining about being short on word count count as more words? I feel like it’s been all stops and starts today after the Randy Rhoads rabbit hole.)

(P.S. I’m ready to go - plus one big bag - at 3:50. I am the worst.)

[robinrunsfiction]

In the Middle of Summer - Chapter 1

Pairing: Ryan Ross x Reader, mentions of past Brendon Urie x Reader Rating: Teen Requested By: None Author’s Note: With regards to the AOL screen names, according to my research those are Brendon and Ryan’s old livejournal screen names. The dialogue in the instant messages? Real. Saved by weirdo me in 2006 on my external hard drive because I knew that it might make something interesting one day.

Spring 2005

“Hey (YN), how’s it going?” Ryan called when he spotted his friend sitting on the porch of her parents’ house.

“Hey Ryan, things are good. What’s up?” She asked, putting down her book as he walked up.

“Did I see Brendon walking down the street from this residence late last night?” He asked with a sly grin.

“Ryan, shut up!” She said in a hushed tone, hopping off the step and smacking him in the arm. "My mom is home! I can’t get grounded before prom!”

Ryan laughed at her reaction. “We wouldn’t want that because it’s gonna be awesome.”

“Did you finally ask Melissa?”

“Yea, I’ll get to it,” he said rubbing the back of his neck

(YN) laughed. “Uh huh, better get to it. Brendon asked me weeks ago. Bought me flowers and everything.”

“Oh yea? Did he bring you flowers last night when he gave you that hickey?” He asked with a laugh. (YN) gasped and pulled up the collar of her jacket.

“Shut up!” She squealed.

“(YN), who are you talking to? Oh hello Ryan!” Her mom called from the open front door.

“Hello Mrs. (YLN). You look well rested.” Ryan replied as (YN) glared daggers at him.

“Oh, well thank you Ryan,” she replied with a puzzled tone as she walked away from the door.

“You are such an ass!” (YN) said hitting him on the arm again as he cracked up. “I’m going to go finish my homework.” She said turning back toward her house.

“You already got in to college, what do you care about homework for?”

“I have advanced placement tests soon. Not all of us are gonna be famous rock stars.” She replied rolling her eyes.

“Alright, I’ll see you later. Oh, will I be seeing Brendon around tonight?”

(YN) flipped him off as she walked in the house and heard him laughing as he headed home.

“(YN), what did Ryan mean when he said I looked well rested?” Her mom asked as she walked into the kitchen to grab a soda.

“I have no idea mom, he’s weird.” He said as she rolled her eyes and retreated to her room.

~

“Ok, we have to get one of everyone together,” someone’s mom called from the group of parents that stood with cameras ready to snap photos of the teenagers in formal wear waiting anxiously and awkwardly for the night to commence.

Everyone shuffled into position for the photos. In the middle stood (YN), wearing a sky blue strapless dress, her hair pulled into an up-do for the night and a white rose corsage for her wrist. Brendon wore a tie that matched her dress, and looked downright dapper in his suit.

Ryan had finally mustered up the courage to ask Melissa to go with him and she accepted happily. Brendon, Ryan and a few others pooled their money to rent a limo to drive them to the event.

Once the parents were satisfied with the photos, they piled into the limo and headed to dinner and then the dance. On the way there, flasks were slipped out of jacket pockets and passed around.

When they walked into the rented hotel ballroom, they immediately ran into Spencer and his date, as well as their friend Brent. They found a table to sit down at where they watched people dance. 

After a few fast songs, “You and Me” by Lifehouse started to play and Brendon offered (YN) his hand. They went to the dance floor and swayed together to the music. He smiled down at her and kissed her sweetly. She was so happy to be at their last high school dance with him under the balloons and streamers that decorated the room. After the song ended they danced to a couple more songs before retreating off the dance floor. Brendon went to the bathroom and (YN) found Ryan leaning against the wall in the back. He had shed his jacket and his tie, and his shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows.

“Having fun?” She asked as she leaned against the wall next to him.

“Yea, it’s a good time,” he replied. “I heard Brendon got you guys a room.”

(YN) rolled her eyes at her friend.

“Wait, really? That’s so cliché, (YN)” he teased.

(YN) gave her Ryan a look and was about to sass him back when suddenly there was a flash which drew their attention.

“Hey guys, look over here for a photo” Spencer called and snapped another photo of Ryan and (YN) leaning against the wall. “Oh that will be great, I’ll get ya a copy.” He said before running off.

“Ryan, can we go dance?” Melissa asked as she approached Ryan, leaning into him.

“Sure,” he replied as she headed back to the dance floor. “(YN), have a good night, be safe.”

“You be safe,” she retorted in a sarcastic tone as Ryan walked away.

“Wanna get out a here?” Brendon asked when he came back, discreetly holding up the room key card.

“Sure, let’s go,” she said taking his hand and heading out.

Summer 2005

The end of the school year was filled with celebrations for the senior class. (YN) was preparing to leave for college, but before she could start to focus on that, she had to throw her annual Fourth of July party. She had been throwing Fourth of July parties for her friends since middle school when her parents started to let her buy fireworks from the stand at the corner store. It was an event she looked forward to every year.

That afternoon of her party, (YN) put out coolers full of soda, snacks and her parents fired up the grill as she waited for her friends to arrive. Brendon and Ryan were the first ones there. She greeted Brendon with a big kiss. Ryan gave her a dejected look once she and Brendon had separated from their kiss, so she gave him a hug as well. Not long after, more people showed up and everyone was having a great time talking, laughing and eating. Once the sun started to set, it was time to go to the park to watch the city's firework display.

"I can take 4 in my car,” (YN) called as the group gathered up blankets and coolers.

“I can take a few in my car” Spencer announced as well.

“I have my mom’s minivan” another girl called out. The convoy made their way to the park and staked out a large open space. Some of the families sitting nearby looked on disdainfully as the group of loud teenagers descended upon them.

(YN) found herself sitting on a blanket by Ryan, as she couldn’t find Brendon around at first. She kept glancing around and eventually spotted him talking to some other girls. She shot Ryan an annoyed look and he just shrugged in response. 

“We aren’t going to make it to the end of the summer.” (YN) said out of nowhere as she stared into space.

“You’re going away for school, are you surprised?” Ryan replied.

“No, it’s just annoying. He doesn’t have to act like he’s already single.”

“He’s making a mistake, but that’s his problem.” Ryan said with a reassuring smile. 

A few minutes later Brendon finally rejoined them and settled in to watch the fireworks display. Brendon wrapped his arm around (YN)’s shoulders, but she looked over at Ryan and rolled her eyes. She wasn’t going to forget what Brendon had been doing minutes before.

~

A couple weeks later Ryan had just gotten home from hanging out with Spencer and Brent and was turning on his computer in his room when he glanced out the window and saw Brendon walking down the street from (YN)'s house. He signed in to AOL Instant Messenger and saw (YN) was online. He hadn’t talked to her since the Fourth of July, so he felt he was due to give her some crap.

i_amclandestine: did I just see Brendon leaving again? you crazy kids

(YSN): yea, actually he just dumped me

i_amclandestine: ouch, sorry.

(YSN): whatever, I knew it was coming

(YSN): I should have done it myself when I had a chance :(

i_amclandestine: doesnt make it any easier

(YSN): you’re telling me. 

Ryan did his best to try to change the subject and get her mind off the heartbreak. She appreciated the gesture, and after chatting for about an hour she went to bed feeling much better than she was before.

~

The rest of the summer the friends spent as much time together before the gang went their separate ways. On a Friday night, they found themselves in the bowling alley for a sendoff party. (YN) was in front of the claw machine game, loading it with quarters in an attempt to win a stuffed green tiger. 

“Damnit!” She yelled, hitting her fist on the glass of the machine as the plush toy fell just outside the shoot. Ryan noticed and walked up next to her.

“You want me to win it for you?” He asked.

“No!” She shot back. “I wanted to win it myself, but I’m out of quarters.”

He reached in his pocket and pulled out some change. “Here, try again.”

She took a quarter from his outstretched hand and put it in the machine and started maneuvering the claw above the stuffed cat. She pressed the button, dropping it and it grabbed the toy, pulling it in the air. Ryan watched (YN) as she held her breath as the claw moved the stuffed toy over the shoot. As the timer ran out and the claw opened, the stuffed cat fell into the opening and she pulled it out triumphantly.

“Yes! I did it!” She shouted, holding the cat in front of Ryan’s face.

“Nice job! Although some would argue that I’m part owner of it since I did finance this.”

“Fine, I’ll let you have weekend visitation.” She said with a grin. He grinned back and a flutter went through her stomach. Was she starting to feel something for Ryan? He was Brendon’s best friend, she wondered if that would make any of this weird.

They went back to bowling and he sat down next to her and started playing with the stuffed cat. “Ya know, if you take this off to school with you, I’ll have to come visit you to get my visitation.”

“Well then sounds like I’m going to be that weirdo with a stuffed animal in her dorm,” she said with a smile.

The rest of the night at the bowling alley, she found herself flirting with Ryan whenever she got a chance. It felt good to be getting some attention for the first time since Brendon dumped her a few weeks before.

~

Ryan was working on a new song when he heard the phone ring and saw it was Brendon. The friends made small talk for a while until Brendon got to the point of his call.

“So I was talking to Gabe about his going away party. He said you and (YN) were kinda all over each other.”

“I don’t know why that matters, you’re the one that dumped her," Ryan retorted, irritated that Brendon would even bring this up.

“Come on! You know that’s kind of weird. Besides she’s gonna be going away to school soon, do you really think it’s gonna work out?” Brendon asked.

Ryan sighed. He really had hoped Brendon wouldn’t find out, and if he did that he would be ok with (YN) and him going out. The guilt started to eat at him. It’s not like things had gotten off the ground between (YN) and him yet. He ended the call and went to bed that night with a sick, sad feeling in his stomach. The next day he had resolved that he had to talk to (YN). That evening when he signed on to his computer and saw she was online.

i_amclandestine: (YN), are you busy?

(YN) was going through her clothes and deciding what to take with her to school, but was more than happy to take a break to talk to Ryan.

(YSN): not really, what’s up?

i_amclandestine: so, the relationship between us

(YSN): yea

i_amclandestine: are we only a short term thing for you

i_amclandestine: till you find someone in college?

She was taken aback. What was he trying to say? That he didn’t want to pursue anything these last weeks of summer?

(YSN): If that's what you want

i_amclandestine: well i was wondering what you were thinking

(YSN): I really have no idea

i_amclandestine: k, so i was thinking

(YSN): yea

i_amclandestine: i figured that soon as you go to college that we wouldnt be seeing each other for awhile maybe on hoildays and stuff but thats the only times i guess

i_amclandestine: and im sure that you would find someone in the school year

(YSN): I'm actually gonna be back more often than that

(YSN): but I guess I'm wondering where we stand then

She sighed, she felt that nervous feeling in her stomach again. She knew deep down where this was going.

i_amclandestine: I don’t know if i want to anymore

She felt the tears welling up in her eyes. How could she be so upset over something that never went past flirting?

(YSN): That's what I thought you'd say

i_amclandestine: ok, but friends still

(YSN): duh

i_amclandestine: good friends

(YSN): right!

i_amclandestine: better than friends

(YSN): where are you going with this?

i_amclandestine: nowhere, just checking

Ryan sat back and sighed, rubbing his face with his hands. He knew it sucked now, but she was a pretty girl with a great personality. She was smarter than he could ever hope to be, and it was in his own best interest to let her go off to school without him tying her down from a distance.

(YN) dried her eyes and put a My Chemical Romance CD in her player before turning back to her computer. Ryan was still online, but it seemed like the conversation between them was done for the night. She saw Brendon was online and felt compelled to talk to him. She needed a different male perspective. She filled him in on everything that was going on, not sure if Ryan had talked to him or not, but she wanted him to hear her side of the story.

(YSN): so now I have another "good friend"

part_time_lovah: you’re gonna be alright

(YSN): yea, I'm just disappointed and bummed out

part_time_lovah: yeah, but he's a good guy

(YSN): Brendon, I met you because of him. I’m aware he’s a good guy, I’m just thinkin I’m gonna take him out of my myspace top 8 for a while

part_time_lovah: right

part_time_lovah: well i gotta go to bed, night (YN)

(YSN): night, and thanks for being a good friend

part_time_lovah: you bet...i promised you that I’d always be there for you when needed

After that night, (YN) spent the last few busy days of summer packing and cleaning her room to leave for college. She spied Ryan around the neighborhood but decided to just leave him alone. After a few days she wasn’t mad at Ryan any longer, but she was still disappointed that he wasn’t willing to try with her. She was looking forward to the fresh start that college would provide.

Chapter Two

[gifsbysimplysonia]

Tell me about something crazy that happened to you

If you don’t want to read THE LONGEST TEXT ENTRY OF YOUR LIFE, do NOT click on the cut! 

THE RAVE - MILWAUKEE - BAMBOOZLE 2010 - JUNE 11, 2010

Mmkay, so the day after my birthday, I headed up to The Rave Milwaukee to see Good Charlotte at the Bamboozle Roadshow Festival, and it was my first time seeing them since October 2006, when I’d last seen them also at the Rave in Milwaukee :P 

Not even 3 minutes after arriving, I randomly ran into Tezzie my Fangirl Soulmate (one of the first friends I made on Livejournal back in the 00s; she was visiting all the way from Sweden and was a member a group of the most dedicated fans I had ever witnessed). I was trying to call the # she had given me and was leaving a voicemail as I began walking around the building, along the MASSIVE line that was already formed, full of TEENS and PRE-TEENS. And as I walked and talked…suddenly before me appeared a tiny ginger pixie :) We hugged, we smiled, and that was that. The very dedicated group was in attendance (though I believe there were more members): Krisse (Tezzie’s wifey), Tez, Ashley, Isabel & Jasmine. Tez was with her friend Ashley and they were going to Ashley’s car for something. I went with them and they were filling me in on everything. They and their friends had gotten to the venue at SEVEN IN THE MORNING and had been there the whole time (I think it was after noon by the time I arrived)!!! They were nice enough to let me in line with them.

When we first got in, we all rushed to the GC merch table. They were running this promotion where if you are 1 of the first 6 to go to the table and say “I wanna rep GC!” you get to go to the meet n greet. Being that Milwaukee was Krisse & Tezzie’s first show of the tour, they were going to try for it as the other girls had already got to go to a meet ‘n greet at a previous show. And wouldn’t ya know, they got THE LAST 2 PASSES??? How’s that for luck? The merch dude told me I could try going with them and telling them it was my bday because he’d seen them “let people in,” so why not give it a try? I thanked him for the tip and decided that’s what I’d do.

Meet n greet time rolled around at about 3 and I was SO READY to have to lay down this big sob story and BEG for them to let me into the meet ‘n greet. But when it came time, the lady from the Buzznet table told the lady in charge of the meet ‘n greet that it was my bday and I wanted to know if I could come in, and the lady just shrugged and said, “Sure, why not?” LMAO! As usual, I stressed for hours FOR NOTHING!We went up about 7 flights of stairs, no sh*t, to get to the very top of the venue. And once there, we waited a while for the band to show up. I took some video of Tez & Krisse, wanting to document their nervousness. They were very cute. Tez hadn’t seen the band in 2 years; 2 years and 2 months. Krisse hadn’t seen them in a year and 11 months. They were both SO NERVOUS. The guys finally showed up, late, but it was all of them. Being used to a7x and only getting 3 of 5 members of the band, I was really surprised! But there all 5 of them were :) The big bald security guy wanted it to be very organized so he immediately lined us all up and told us to have cameras ready, 1 thing to sign, and began pushing people through right away.Somehow, I ended up in line first, meaning before K & T. The lady who let me in took my camera from me and then I was going up to the guys, my ticket in hand for them to sign!

I was determined to be well mannered so I made sure to introduce myself to each member & shake everyone’s hand. First up was Paul. He told me I had a lovely name *blush* God bless him, he’s super cute. I was going to ask for a hug because “Paul hugs” are supposedly the best ever BUT the dude was MAD sweaty O_o I had no idea from what, so I didn’t ask. Deano was next and he gave a nice firm shake. I told the two of them it was my birthday and they replied with huge smiles and “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” like it was the best news ever. Totally adorable. Then Deano told me I’d like the new song they are playing and asked me if I’d heard it yet. I told him no and he told me it was called “Like It’s Her Birthday” so I should like it :) Then … there was Joel. Sigh. So funny to think JUST a few years before, I was totally gaga for the dude. I shook his hand, he stood there and for a second? I couldn’t figure out what he was staring at cuz it wasn’t my face, but I realized he was checking out my Vengeance University switchblade pendant :P Benji was next to him. I THINK I shook his hand and intro'ed myself but I’m NOT sure. What I remember about being in front of the Twins was explaining that I hadn’t seen them in 4 years so I was SUPER excited about seeing them live again, to which Benji replies, “I hope we’re not a let down.” O_o As I learned later that day, this kid is a total “Sour Patch Kid.” LOLI said, “Why would you say that?” He just kinda shrugged. So I told him, “You guys never let me down.” Joel liked that because he nodded and went, “Yeaaaaaah,” then held his right fist up for me to pound, so I did :P Then I quickly introduced myself to Billy and shook his hand. He said his name to me, as if I wouldn’t know it, bless him. And then I was being prompted to pose for my photo.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~LATER THAT EVENING~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After the show, behind the venue at the back door, we ended up all standing there with Benji, and he was just talking for QUITE a while. That’s never happened to me before. The longest convo I’ve had with someone famous lasted about … 3 minutes? And all I did was argue with the poor guy. But the girls talked to him for longer than that. They continued to talk to Benji, and understand Ashley, Jasmine & Isa had already been to a BUNCH of Bamboozle shows and they plus Tez & Krisse (and more friends they were meeting up w/at different shows) were going to quite a few more! They became known as “Team Good Charlotte,” that’s how used to seeing them people on Bamboozle got! Anyways, they began talking about how excited they were for CARDIOLOGY to hit in September and Benji was talking about how excited he was for us to HEAR the new album.And I wish I could tell you HOW the transition happened, but I honestly don’t know. All I know is one minute they were all talking about the album … and the next, Benji was talking about letting us hear some. I remember saying something like, “You can go on the bus and crack open a window while you play it,” before SCOLDING HIM about saying that’s what he’d do last time I saw them with regards to “The River” but then NEVER DOING IT :P He said he was sorry.But instead of going THAT route, Benji had a talk with this guy whose name is Danny (I think). The girls told me that he kept up GoodCharlotte.com and ran the GC Twitter account; he was also at the meet n greet taking video and photos. Anyways, he showed up and he and Benji talked, and next thing we knew?

WE WERE INVITED ONTO THE BUS TO HEAR A TRACK OFF OF THE UPCOMING GOOD CHARLOTTE ALBUM!

I know. I wouldn’t believe me if I were you either, but it’s absolutely what happened. Benji & Danny made it clear NO cell phones or cameras could go with us, though, so we all crossed the street so the girls could put their stuff away. I was waiting for my ride so I couldn’t put anything away so I just put mine in my bag. We went back across the street but instead of going onto GC’s bus, we were let onto “Danny’s bus.” He actually said “I’m such a diva, I get my own bus.” And as the last on board, even AFTER Danny, I got to close the bus door behind us and IT WAS HEAVY. I had given my bag to him and he had just placed it on the front passenger seat which I sat down on because I didn’t want to have to squeeze my fat a$$ past him AND past Benji & the girls who were all already seated on two couches and the “aisle” was so small, I didn’t wanna do it. But Danny looked at me and said, “You can come in. Come on, you can sit there,” and he pointed at a bench next to one of the couches, so I said, “Oh thanks” and proceeded to squeeze my fat a$$ past everyone, probably murdering everyone’s feet as I did.Anyways, I sat down in a solo seat. Across from me on the couch were Krisse, Tezzie & Benji. Next to me on a couch were Isa, Ashley, and Jasmine. Danny was standing in the driver area with a camera pointed at us THE ENTIRE TIME so we knew that it was all on video! He asked Benji what he was doing and Benji told the camera that he was letting us hear some tracks off of the new album.Benji played us the “intro,” cause GC always has an intro on their albums and then he played us the first track which I believe is called “Let the Music Play.” As a joke, I took a box of Kleenex that was on the window behind me and let the girls all take one because they SWORE they were going to cry. But y'know what? They actually did, bless them. At one point, Tezzie buried her head in Krisse’s chest as Krisse hugged her very tightly and I realized just how sacred this moment & experience was for those girls. And honestly? I felt so out of place. I felt like I was intruding, y'know? I just happened to be with the right people at the right time and get to tag-a-long for this episode and I am TRULY GRATEFUL for it.I bowed my head to listen to the song, and as I listened to the lyrics, tears rose in my eyes. Because once again, as SO OFTEN IS THE CASE with Good Charlotte lyrics, they hit me in my heart. In June of 2010, I’d gone through a LOT of crap in my personal life, and I just have felt so inferior and so bad about myself. Well, this song that Benji was playing us? It was talking about those feelings, letting me know AGAIN that I wasn’t alone in how I felt (which is what Good Charlotte’s music has ALWAYS done for me and it continues to do to this day):

“When the world tries to beat you down, let the music play.”

And THAT lyric just … hit home for me. So I got teary eyed, but the tears never fell for me. When the song was over, though, I had one of those moments where I actually was so overwhelmed with emotion, I HAD to say what was in my heart, which only ever happened with Eddy Guerrero.“Can I tell you something?” I asked Benji as he started scrolling for another song to play us, or maybe to shut off his iPod.“What?” he asked without looking at me.“I call Good Charlotte my 'gateway band’ because you guys led me to so much, musically. But it ALWAYS comes back to you because, lyrically, no other band GETS ME like you guys do, and that song right there? Just reminded me of that.”“Amen,” Ashley said, and I laughed to myself. I don’t remember if Benji had a reaction or not because I realized that Danny still had his camera pointed at us and I wondered about what I’d just said and if it’d end up anywhere.Benji then played us some of the track that GC is playing at the Bamboozle shows called “Like It’s Her Birthday.” The girls ALL ALREADY KNEW ALL THE LYRICS and were singing along :) I had just heard the song for the first time a couple hours before so I just sat there, bobbing my head like a jacka$$.

But someone knocked on the bus door & Benji and Danny had to get going so we didn’t get through that whole track. As we all got up to disembark, I imagine everyone was as overwhelmed and feeling surreal as I was. We got outside and thanked Benji SO VERY MUCH for allowing us to be a part of that. Outside there were a couple of girls leaning against a tree, very obviously wanting to go up to Benji but for some reason, not doing so? And they were giving us the Evil Eye BIG TIME! Funny thing is, I recognized them from A7X shows.Danny took testimonials from the girls on his camera about what we all just heard. And he told us that he would upload the video THAT NIGHT if that was ok. None of us argued. I don’t think he ever did upload anything, BUT, to all of our surprise, the quickest clip ever of us on the bus that night ended up in a Good Charlotte music video for Counting the Days:

I am FOREVER GRATEFUL to have PROOF that this totally insane thing happened to me. And it only happened cuz I was hanging out with the right people, but they were nice enough to let me 6th wheel it with them and it was one of the best birthdays/memories and craziest experiences of my life. 

Sometimes I think I live a really small life but then I remember stuff like this and I’m like, “How many people can say that they got to chat with a member of their favorite band, were invited onto a bus to preview brand new music NO OTHER FANS had heard at the moment, AND ended up in one of the band’s music videos??” 

I mean, maybe that’s a really big pool and I don’t know it, but I’m just grateful I can be included in it. And in addition to getting to attend a meet n greet I was NOT scheduled to go to and meet the band I refer to as “my heart band,” this day FOR SURE was one of the craziest of my life :) 

[brihana25]

Fourth Wall? What Fourth Wall?

So.

Yesterday evening, I learned that if you want an entire fandom to lose its collective mind at the same time, all that needs to happen is for a showrunner to show up, join and post on Facebook groups about their show. 

Jon Hurwitz joined at least three Cobra Kai groups yesterday.He joined the three I’m also a member of. And I absolutely 100% freely admit that I’m one of the fans who lost their mind. My reaction was, and still is, HOLYFUCKINGSHITDELETEDELETEDELETEANDRUN!!!!

I had that same reaction last weekend, when Hayden Schlossberg showed up on my personal Facebook page, too. It literally took six people (@switch842, @halfashot, @entropic-wanderer, @queeneve84, @outforawalkbitkah and @thatsweetbobbyfacetho - THANK YOU) to convince me to breathe and talk me down off the metaphorical ledge. I freaked the ever-living fuck out.

It’s terrifying. Fandom and TPTB aren’t supposed to interact with each other. That’s Rule #1 of fandom. You don’t talk to TPTB. You don’t give things to TPTB. You don’t ask TPTB questions. You stay in your little corner, hiding behind the 4th Wall, and they pretend they can’t see you. 

Them’s the rules. i didn’t make them. But I learned them. I lived them. And I did it very, very well. Because that’s just how things were done. 

It was safer that way. 

Fandom is our Fight Club. And the first rule of fandom is ... you don’t talk about fandom. Especially not in front of the people who run the show. You just. Don’t. Do it. 

You don’t mention fanfic, you never admit you write it, and you never ever ask them to read it. You don’t mention fanvids, you never admit you make them, and you never ever ask them to watch them. You don’t mention fanart, you never admit you create it, and you never ever show it to them.

But now ... they’re there. TPTB are walking among us. They’re seeking us out. They’re watching what we do. They’re reading what we say. They’re looking at what we make (though still not reading our fic, thank holy fucking God). And it’s fucking terrifying.

One of the groups Hurwitz joined is the one I’ve posted every single one of my vids to. Not that I think he’ll watch them, because honestly, why would he? But this was my first thought when Schlossberg showed up on my page last week ... HOLYSHITWHATIFHESEESTHEMANDSUESME?! 

And that fear is real. It’s part of who I am. It’s part of who we all are. Because it hasn’t been that long since showrunners and production companies were suing fans for what we did. Fic writers were sued (and called dirty, rotten, thieving, no-talent, soulless wannabes, and worse ... Diane Gabaldon, back in the day, called us kidnappers and murderers ... and don’t even get me started on Max Allan Collins and Lee Goldberg). Zine publishers were sued. Vidders were sued. 

So, we ran. We hid. We kept doing what we did, but we did it in secret. We had email groups that we could lock them out of. We had irc channels and newsgroups so we could stay anonymous. We congregated on locked LiveJournals and members only message boards. We shared our love and our creations with each other. We hid them from everyone else. 

Because it was safer that way. TPTB hated us. They hated us. And we were terrified of them. 

But these guys ... they don’t hate us. They like us. They know us. They call us by name. They talk to us. They share our art with each other and with the fandom at large - with credit. They were us. They are us. 

They’re people. They’re fans. They want to read our ridiculous, tongue-in-cheek, satirical arguments about whether the Crane was legal, whether Johnny is a demon or a saint, whether Daniel deserved to die for getting Johnny’s weed wet, whether Kreese was trying to kill Johnny or just almost did. 

They want us around. They like us. They love us. 

And it’s fucking terrifying. 

[fishsupportgroup-blog]

Good Omens Fandom Welcome Pack (4/3/17)

Yo my dudes!!!! So I got a message from @dirktective-assassina who just found out that there’s a good omens fandom so I figured I’d try and pull together some resources as an up to date fandom welcome pack :D It’s pretty long and comprehensive so I’ve put it under the cut.

So first things first: the ship name of Aziraphale/Crowley isn’t Crowaphale or anything like that but is Ineffable Husbands. We also sometimes use Air Conditioning (like A/C if you see?) although this is less used now than it was, largely because of the way tumblr tagging works versus livejournal and it’s a bit of a hassle to traipse through posts of people’s air conditioning not working, but there are still posts on that tag and it's a good way to find older fan-works. Other wise we generally just tag as Good Omens.

As with a lot of fandoms with a slightly longer history, livejournal used to be the main site for the good omens community and we transferred across bc, let’s face it tumblr is a hell site but it’s also a hell of a lot more accessible than livejournal. However, there are still a lot of things going on with livejournal!!! my main resource there is the Lower Tadfield Air Base: Fighting off Armageddon since 2003! The Good Omens Holiday Exchange is also organised on livejournal, I’ve linked to this year’s entries :)

Which brings me onto fic!! (Some of these fic will be explicit but they all have warnings at the beginning). Two fics always recommended in older fic rec lists are The Sacred And The Profane, and A Diamond Sky Above Titanic (although, personally, they’re not really my favourites). Also, The Lower Tadfield Air Base has a good fic tag :) Finally there’s this post which also adds some extra links and info on joining the good omens fandom, it also has a gen fic section if that’s more your cup of tea.

My main source of fics however, comes from our Lord and Saviour, Archive Of Our Own. Just take note when you’re using the search tool you fully type in Aziraphale/Crowley rather than letting it autocorrect you to Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens) then you’ll only get 217 works in comparison to the 1178 fics available and all the fic of Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens) is filed under Aziraphale/Crowley anyway. If that makes any sense?

Personally, I’ve been horribly remis in tagging my own favourites because I’m fairly useless. However, I know I love Fridays by ylc. If you like human! aus then I also really love Ordinary People by daeger which has a wee Jewish painter Crowley :D

Ruby Tears by @not-a-space-alien is also a really good fic in highlighting the fandom’s perspective on Crowley: essentially in that he’s a HUGE FUCKING NERD who tries so hard to look cool and suave and is actually just very vulnerable and sweet and loving. Aziraphale, on the other hand, is very much an oblivious banana that’s too self-obsessed to really recognise this and has an incorrect view that Crowley is The Adversary and should be thought of as such. There has been A LOT of AMAZING meta on this, I would really recommend @futureevilscientist‘s essay on The Arrangement as p. much essential reading. They also have a tag for meta which I also really recommend.

My final fic to recommend is HAS to be the Crown of Thorns series by @irisbleufic (often shortened to cot). For me, this is The Fic, you know, and I feel like it really defines the Good Omens fandom in many ways. It’s based on the fanon that after the events of the apocalypse, Aziraphale and Crowley moved into a cottage on the South Downs together. All the details of the fic are in the introduction :D Other Iris fics to recommend are Regulars and What to Say (and How Not to Say It) if like me you’re trash for 3rd person pov. Finally as someone from York I’m honour bound to mention Promises to Keep.

We also have some Amazing artists in the fandom, people like @kogla and the like are just so great to have posting content for us!! basically just turn to the good omens tag and follow some of the suggested blogs (see below) we’re always posting everything :D One of my faves is this one by @6utton (who also gives me my raffles fix). @lunasong365 has also sent me this beautiful video and their playlist of other videos :‘) You also have the good omens tag on the hell site of deviantart

Also in terms of art, @askajcrowley is utterly brill, they don’t post much anymore but when they do I cry because they’re great.  If you want a really interesting view of how fandom has changed over time, go back through their posts as far as you can, it’s seriously worth it. In terms of fandom changing, the Good Omens fandom has generally imploded; it did used to be a very big active fandom, with a lot of ask blogs and a much greater focus on the other characters besides Aziraphale and Crowley. The current day fandom does feel bad about not talking about the other great multifaceted characters but we don't tend to do much to rectify it, as not-a-space-alien highlights in this post.

The older fandom also used to have A LOT of discourse surrounding fancasts. Oh God. Suffice to say if I ever see another post casting Bajkfbgjgiug Cskjfbgkjfba/Tom Hiddleston in all the roles I will actually throw up. This trend lead to our Worst Meme, Cage Omens: in which all the characters are played by Nicholas Cage. This meme likes to make a reassurance every now and again, so FOR GODS SAKE DONT SUMMON IT. (We all secretly love it).

Speaking of fancasts, we should probably mention adaptations. When the news of the latest adaptation came forward, a lot of us were very apprehensive because We Have Been Here Before. Lots. Like 5 Times. (I think in like ‘02 there was going to be one with Robin Williams but It was just after 9/11 and everyone ran as fast as they could from apocalypse based media). However, this one does look like it’s going ahead and will be airing next year maybe :) We do also have the beloved radio adaptation, which we will all suggest had it’s flaws but was also p damn brill. (The BBC sometimes replay it around Easter?)

However the discourse over fancasts did actually raise some pertinent points to do with race, with a lot of people feeling really uncomfortable with how white the suggestions were for characters that have no explicitly stated race. This is especially the case in regards to Aziraphale where there might be inbuilt preconceived conceptions of a white angel. This post and @a-poc-alypse‘s commentary on the subject I think is really important. I think the fandom now makes a concerted effort to try and produce more diverse art and the like, and I think we are better than we were, but it is something we have to actively work towards rectifying.

Other discourse of far, far less importance is in regards to their wings. Essentially, a lot of older fanart has Crowley with bat like wings which a lot of the fandom disagrees with, and there’s a lot of discourse about the colour of their wings too. Traditionally, Aziraphale is depicted with white wings and Crowley with black, but as is oft pointed out within the fandom, the colour of their wings is not stated and, given the significance of heaven and hell just being names for sides with no tangible distinction, and that demons are of angel stock, this separation has been questioned. Basically, the consensus now is play around with it!!!!! My head canon is that Az has owls wings and Crowley has duck wings :D

As for Hogwarts Houses, no one actually knows tbh either of them could fit into any house I think? We've had a lot of discussions and I think the ultimate conclusion we’ve come to is just go with what you want. At the moment I think I like Gryffindor Crowley and Ravenclaw Aziraphale. Some good Harry Potter AUs are Potter Omens by sadaf, St. Joseph of Cupertino, Home Life and Social Habits of British Muggles, and the Legacy of James Bond by Interrobam, A Look into a Magic Mirror by athousandelegies, and Saturday by Elvendork.

This leads to another point which is the links Good Omens have with other fandoms. There are Obviously the links with Supernatural given that their Crowley was literally named after ours, but there are also a weird amount of Wolfstar (Remus Lupin/Sirius Black) crossover fics and a lot of them involve them all sleeping with each other?? Anyway. I’ve also noticed that p. much all the Raffles fandom tend to be Good Omens fans too.

Finally you have the Shakespeare/Marlowe fandom so there are a lot of jokes in fandom at the moments about Crowley/Shakespeare (ship name: Snakespeare). I’m laying the blame firmly on @macdicilla and this post.

Music!! I LOVE @ajcrawly‘s The Ritz Does Not Admit Nightingales but 8tracks is useless for UK pals atm. Every playlist of Good Omen will have Queen and A Nightingale Sung in Barkley Square, I’m sorry I don’t make the rules.

And then there are the blogs!!:

@audiomens (with transcripts of the radio 4 adaptation)

@incorrect-good-omens-quotes

@thisbutgoodomens (taking posts and making them Good Omens, tag them if you think there’s a post they would appreciate!!)

@goodomensheadcanons

There are the blogs I’ve mentioned above, like @not-a-space-alien and @macdicilla (you can’t have one without the other), and @futureevilscientist, @irisbleufic, @kogla, @lunasong365, @askajcrowley, @a-poc-alypse, @ajcrawly

Also worth following are, @milkythefrozen, @pridoo, @maniacalmole, @ladylier, @thisisadecisionimayregret, @la-petite-robe-jaune, @sous-le-saule, @rocksalive, @nemeankitten, @everything-good-omens, @fyeahgo and tbh there are heaps more, I’m sorry if I’ve missed you off, I have a memory worse than like 99% of the population (according to my educational psychologist). If you want to be added just put a reply or message me or smth :D

Finally, I’d like to thank @not-a-space-alien for their welcome kit, @futureevilscientist for theirs, @ladylier for giving me ideas to talk about, @lunasong365 for showing me their playlist, and @a-poc-alypse for pointing me in the direction of their tags.

Okay. I think that’s it?? If you have anything further to add just post it below or message me or put it on the tags or replies whatever basically. If you disagree, or I’ve got something wrong, or you want to be added/taken away as a source then don’t hesitate to tell me!! (but please don’t send me hate, I’m trying my best and I’ll work hard to compensate)

:D

[ruluxe]

1, 2, 3, 20 and 26 ^-^

1. Talk about the first ship you ever had

Mm.. well the first ship I ever had would be 5980/8059. That’s Gokudera Hayato/Yamamoto Takeshi from Katekyo Hitman Reborn. It’s a funny story really because before them, I wasn’t aware of this whole fandom thing or shipping. I had this thing for silver-haired characters which made me watch khr in the first place and I immediately fell in love with Gokudera. I ended up reading a bunch of fics (first time I found out about and read fanfiction too) and there were a lot of Gokudera x Reader fics but I didn’t enjoy how personal and self-inserted the x Reader fics were, but I did enjoy the way he was written. This dates back to reading fic on LiveJournal, Lunaescence, some Dream fanfiction website (I forgot the name djfs), FF and Wattpad. I don’t read fics on these sites anymore lol. Anyway, I wanted to write my own fic mainly just because I wanted to write Gokudera so I wrote a Gokudera x Reader fic and to this day, it still gets a lot of likes and reviews (I’m embarrassed by it, but who isn’t embarrassed of their first fic?). After that, I ran out of fics to read and I started seeing this 8059 every time I searched for more fic and when I googled what that was I came across the pairing. I was so intrigued that I thought I’d read a fic (I had no idea what shipping was lol) and the very first one was Cigarettes and Cinnamon by LindenMae. It was so good that I was convinced these two belonged together, so I read more and more and eventually came across many amazing fics. (Across the Universe by Doomcake being my ultimate favourite fic in the fandom; it’s so true to their characters, so real and it has made me laugh and cry and just. It really is the perfect fic. [also if you’re reading this, I noticed you updated and I swear I am gonna read the shit out of that chapter just as soon as I get the time. I’M SO EXCITED!!]) I went back and rewatched the anime, read the manga and it was like I could see all these things that made it so obvious they were meant for each other. I fell in love with them. Then I started reading meta and I found out there was a community for this, thus entering the world of fandom. I met many great people, many brilliant authors and it was a pleasant experience, most of the time. Now, a few years later, I may not be active in the fandom anymore, but that’s the ship that started everything, that’s the ship that led me to know so many amazing people that it’ll always be a part of me. 

2. Talk about three of the most important ships throughout your life.

Well we’ve already talked about 8059, I don’t need to tell ya’ll how perfect I think they are for each other. I can’t really say that any ship I’ve shipped has ever come close in comparison? The ship is important to me on a personal level but since then, I haven’t really had much of a personal connection with ships especially since I don’t tend to ship often. Also, I’ve only been shipping for about five years now so it’s not like I’ve had much time to rack up a list. I suppose second on the list would be Aomine/Kagami from Kuroko no Basuke, since I’ve written a lot for them as well but since then, I’ve come to see connections with Aomine and Kise and I ship them too, as well as ship all three of them together so I’ve been conflicted a lot throughout that ship but again, shipping them I’ve met many great people in both fandoms and wouldn’t change who I ship or the process for anything tbqh.

The last one would probably have to be… whew I have a bad memory so I’m probably forgetting a lot, but Galahad/Hausen from Gangsta. comes to mind, simply because my friends and I created that ship and from it formed a small fandom which dragged a lot of amazing, unsuspecting people into the loop. For that I feel very proud and grateful even if the hype didn’t last that long. I think that’s what makes it special? There were no wars, no discourse. Everyone collectively agreed that despite there not being much material to base the ship off, they made a lot of sense together? I still ship them and I really wish that the manga would resume so I could see them again and the fandom could be active once more.

3. What’s your current OTP?

Uh hm.. current otps. Well I don’t have many from current shows since I’ve taken a break from fanfiction writing and reading as well from watching anime. Most of my current ships are JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure related; that’s the first fandom I got hooked on since KHR. KnB and Gangsta. But even so, my ship tastes vary and change often and the list is too long to type tbh lol. I’d have to say I’m still shipping my old ships you can find on my ship wall. I guess I’m pretty set in my ways. Maybe it’s bc I’m old lol. Nah, I just view shipping differently. Not every anime/movie/show needs to have a romance especially when it doesn’t make sense, but that’s just my opinion.

20. Talk about a ship you feel alone in shipping.

Hm… I don’t know if there are any? I’ve always managed to drag someone along with me into a ship so there’s never been a time where I don’t feel alone. As far as rare pairs go, Galahad/Hausen would probably have to be the closest thing to it, although Matsukawa/Hanamaki from Haikyuu!! comes close but the fandom is so big, there are people out there that love them. I try not to get involved in big fandoms. I like staying in my own little bubble of ships that I enjoy, so even if I was alone in shipping them, it would never really feel that way.

26. Have you noticed a pattern in your shipping? Is there a romantic dynamic you’re more drawn to?

Probably? I tend to like the pairings where at least one of the characters has a tragic story? Simply because these are the characters I seem to love the most in anything, they tend to end up being one-half of a ship. Especially if their other half is in some way their saviour. But then there are a few ships – the bro-ships – that I really love too. The ships where they’re both just so in sync, two halves of the same whole, etc.

And then there are my guilty pleasure ships which tend to be non-healthy relationships to which I won’t advertise bc I wouldn’t want to have the Moral Ship Police come crashing into my inbox.

Ask Me About Ships!

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Sophia Jirafe

Seven of Sophia Jirafe’s fics are at Gossamer, but more of her X-Files stories are at AO3 (as sophiahelix). I’ve recced some of my favorites of her stories here before, including Stones and Bones. She was active in the fandom during the show’s run and has never strayed far from fandom in general. She co-founded Glass Onion, a great multi-fandom mailing list that now has nearly 1,000 fics from 100 fandoms at AO3. Big thanks to Sophia Jirafe for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

It did initially, but so many old shows are on streaming now and getting discovered by new people, it makes sense.

I did get a comment from someone who said my first story under this name, posted in early 2000 when I was a college freshman, was older than her by a couple of months, and THAT took me aback.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

It was my first fandom, discovered when I was 17 and searching for info about the show on the school library computer, and it really shaped my whole life! I met a lot of people I still know today (mostly in non-fannish venues like FB, though I do still have some connections in fandom), and learned a lot about writing and just life generally, since I was younger than most of fandom at the time.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

I started off on a tiny forum at a website called Squirrel’s Nest, but I kept seeing people thanking Scullyfic in fic headers and eventually I was able to join the mailing list (which was capped to 500 members). Scullyfic was everything to me — I made friends, betas, discussed the show, learned about all kinds of things on Off-Topic Fridays, etc. A lot of those friends, I would email with or more often chat on AIM (individual or these sprawling group chats that would go on all day), and then at the end of 2001 we started migrating to Livejournal. I was getting into Buffy more by then, but it was still mostly the same crowd of people I knew from Scullyfic.

What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

I feel like it started me on a whole life path really — finding that my deep obsession with fiction could be channeled like that and shared with other people, as well as deepening my writing. Online fandom has been a major part of my social life for over 20 years now, and I love the mix of getting excited about things with friends and also the creative outlet.

My corner of X-Files fandom in particular was just very calm and enjoyable for the most part, full of older professional women who were happy to be friends and give me advice about all kinds of things, and it really set the bar for me with my online interactions. Now I’m almost 40 and trying to be that person for my younger friends, as well as having no patience for toxicity and in-fighting in my fandom spaces.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

A combination of the creepy conspiracy angle and just adoring Scully. I remember how mysterious and fascinating the show seemed when I discovered it right before S5, and there was no way to find out more except to keep watching and hoping they explained. Scully was so smart and tough and beautiful and interesting, and as a teen I was just captivated by her (and the UST, though I didn’t care about Mulder as much).

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I ran across it a couple times early on but felt embarrassed by the concept, but then I read the first in Karen Rasch’s Words series and suddenly it clicked for me. After a while I started daydreaming my own conversations between them, very similar to what happens to me now when I’m getting into a new pairing, so after reading tons of recommended fic by big authors, I started writing my own (the 3-4 stories I posted in high school are all wiped from the internet now, though).

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

Good memories, though because it was my senior year of high school and college, I know a lot of it is just tied to that time in my life, and also being in my very first fandom. I will rewatch episodes from time to time, but I basically never revisit former fandoms because they’re kind of like exes, even if I finished on a good note. I also think my taste in fic has changed (and there isn’t the same novelty of “characters I like getting together omg!”)

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

So many! None of them had quite the same combination of excellent central architecture (especially pre-AO3) and a really high level of discussion and friendliness without being enormous, but I’ve loved them all in their own ways. I’ve done fandom on LJ/DW, Tumblr, Discord, and now on Twitter, and I think I miss the mailing list days the most. You didn’t have to repeat yourself so much in multiple conversations, you weren’t character limited, and the discussion was all in one place, with personal stuff more confined to your side conversations. Discord is a little like that, but it moves too fast and there’s too much noise for my taste.

Who are some of your favorite fictional characters? Why?

Heh, after X-Files I went through a whole phase of faves in the Scully vein — Buffy, Aeryn Sun, Kara Thrace, etc. Like many people I’ve shifted primarily into m/m in the last decade (Sherlock, YOI, and recently The Untamed have been my major fictional fandoms, along with a lot of sports RPF), but for non-fannish shows I’m always looking for awesome new female characters, like Elizabeth on the Americans, Peggy on Mad Men, Nadja on What We Do in the Shadows, etc. And I do LOVE Killing Eve and have written a little f/f over there.

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

I’ll rewatch favorite episodes occasionally, and I keep thinking about a full rewatch but it takes so much time! I never saw the second movie, and I didn’t finish the first of the new seasons because I was hating it, so it’s a little hard for me to think fannishly about them when I disliked basically everything after “Je Souhaite” so much (as far as I’m concerned the show ends there).

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

X-Files no, but yeah I’m still very active in fandoms.

Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors?

I lost all my saved fic several computers ago, but I recall loving “Blue Christmas” by Plausible Deniability and “Diamonds and Rust” by MustangSally (obviously everything she wrote was great).

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

Looking at my X-Files fic, I can’t believe how short it is and how comparatively little of it there is (I have lost track of a few ficlets). It felt like such a big deal to finish anything back then! I think my favorite remains Alphabetum, which involved a tricky structure and 5 elements given by people as part of the Scullyfic Improv challenge, where you had a week to write a story around those elements.

My favorite of my recent fic in fictional fandoms is probably the GoT/YOI crossover novel I wrote a couple years ago, for a completely opposite experience to this (and proof you can grow as a writer with a lot of effort!)

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

It’s honestly hard to imagine going back (like I said, I usually don’t), but I guess I could get inspired by something.

Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

I certainly still write, and I do have to give credit to XF fandom and Scullyfic in particular for giving me the start I got, where I really wanted to be writing good fiction. The few things I wrote in high school were just me jamming out romantic cliches, but the people I was lucky to know in XF fandom showed me that “just” fanfic can still aspire to be high quality. I am a much, much better and more disciplined writer than I was back then, but I might never have started on this path without fandom friends encouraging me.

Where do you get ideas for stories?

Usually just daydreaming about emotional dynamics between characters/people, but sometimes something specific in canon or real life (I write a lot of RPF) gets me going, or maybe something I read.

What's the story behind your pen name?

When I wrote for X-Files, I picked “Sophia Jirafe” combining my favorite first name with a fancy spelling for my favorite animal (I was 18! Don’t judge!) Over on Livejournal, my friend Jintian and I initially shared an account with the same name as our website, double_helix, and when she got her own account I changed to sophia_helix, which is now sophiahelix just about everywhere. A little clunky, but I like the continuity (and I do run across old friends who remember the name).

Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?

The friends I’ve known for a very long time know about it, but we have never talked about it in depth. My husband, who I met not long after getting into fandom, also knows about it, and he’s encouraging and also a writer so we talk all the time. I told my mom in college and she was pretty dismissive, so we haven’t talked about it since (but my younger sister knows and is cool about it).

When I was younger, it was something I shared readily (I bonded with a new friend in law school I saw looking at LJ), but now I don’t really bring it up with new acquaintances.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

I just made a Carrd the other day with all my various fannish addresses (Twitter, locked fannish Twitter, AO3, Tumblr)

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

Just that it really was a high quality fandom — so much excellent long casefic, so many cool down to earth people, just generally a great launching place for a young fan. The friendships I made with older people were really important to me, and it makes me sad to see a lot of younger people now getting upset about the idea of anyone over a certain age being in their fandom spaces. I hope someday fandom can get back to appreciating that people of all ages can be the fandom type, and that everyone brings something different to the community.

(Posted by Lilydale on December 1, 2020)

[dankokaji]

[FFX -Will-] Quatervois (FF Kissing Battle 2017) (Baralai/Yuna)

Written for seventhe’s Final Fantasy Kissing Battle 2017 on livejournal.

Prompt: Baralai/Yuna, many paths to the same destination

@lifeofkj this is for you, 

as you continue to inspire me with your stories

Rating: PG

Warnings: Spoilers for FFX-2.5 novel

Word Count: 3647

Yuna’s hand hovers over his door, her knuckles just shy of the knock. She had woken up from a fitful nightmare no more than a couple of hours after she had decided to try at sleep. The events of last week still plague her mind, of Sin’s beckoned return and the inevitable shadow it casts.

Sighing, she drops her hand, and folds her arms. ‘What am I doing here…?’

Yuna left the comfort and safety of her home island to visit Bevelle on a fool’s errand, concerned by Tidus’s ailing health; in the end, she let herself be carried away by the Council’s plight. How Baralai manages to maintain his calm, even during moments of extreme stress, Yuna does not know, but she envies him for his initiative.

While everyone had been reduced to a mindless panic over Sin, Baralai acted quick to dispatch his Senders, banishing it within the first hour of its conception. Confidence and resolve raises his shoulders, instead of burdens them. Less people are calling upon the High Summoner now, hailing the Chancellor as their new hero. She can’t blame them, not when she sees how he throws himself into the heart of social media as the icon of progressive politics. Baralai shines so brilliantly in the limelight that it repels her, casting light over the shadows in her heart.

‘How can I face him?’

Yuna thought they had managed to come to an understanding, despite her persistent cold shoulder to his repeated summons. Their personal interests and private associations are always at conflict, and as always, Baralai never holds it against her, even while they stand at a crossroads, in which she had been the one to conjure it. Sometimes she wonders what that man sees in their fragile, complicated friendship; that being the least of her problems. Being here in Guadosalam, so far away from everything from the events of last week, makes it easy to forget it ever even happened. Pushing Tidus away by ending their relationship, surviving the invasion of Sin, hosting a vigil of all the lives lost― she thought that had been the end of it, at least for awhile.

But Baralai had to prove her wrong.

She bolted, at the high point of the meeting, right when he highlighted the primary causes of the Beckoning phenomena. He cited her actions, vanquishing Sin and then disassembling Vegnagun, as the two catalysts for the Farplane’s imbalance. After the dissolution of the Summoners, no one saw the point of continuing the Sending rites, therefore the pyreflies had no guide to usher them to the Farplane, thus overflowing the surface world with more fiends. Add Vegnagun and its leech of the Farplane’s energy to fuel its cannon, no wonder Spira wound up like this.

And then Baralai proceeds to flip that argument on its head, stressing the importance of Summoners and refuting the memory of Beclem’s cruel words.

“We need Summoners more than ever. They are responsible for recycling the energy that flows in our world, ushering the pyreflies of the deceased to rest within the Farplane. It was a grave mistake to believe Summoners are irrelevant then, and now we are paying for that ignorance in light of the Beckoning epidemic.”

Yuna felt shame, fear, and frustration all at the same time, the fact that she were to blame when she only did what she believed had been right. No one could have predicted this kind of turnout... not unless you were a suicidal psychopath the likes of Seymour. If Baralai’s statement were to leave that room, the people of Spira may turn on her, the leader of an unpopular organization of scapegoats. For that reason, she had been avoiding Baralai all day, brushing off Tromell and Kurgum's fretting concern, and Wakka and Paine's insufferable looks. But by the end of the day, she knew. Baralai never outright attacked her, only provided an objective thesis. His ability to separate his emotions from his profession, she wants to know his secret, because she can't do it, not anymore.

'Enough is enough. If I don't talk to him now, I'll never get around to it.' As much as she wants to avoid this, she must, and so she knocks, and she waits.

For a fleeting moment, she wonders: 'Is he asleep?' A part of her prays that he is, so she could use that as an excuse not to face him, but then she hears his voice answer, dashing her fickle, delirious hope to ashes.

“...come in.”

Yuna takes a deep breath, rewraps the cotton robe around her frame, and twists the doorknob, slipping inside. She finds him seated at a coffee table with his back turned to her, contemplating over the documents spread out before him, his hand busy with the pen.

“My apologies, Scisero. I meant to wrap this up earlier, but I happened to remember some things I wanted to write down…” Baralai does not even take a moment to fix the open collar of his silk bathrobe before he turns to face her, expecting her to be his Guado advisor. Now he stares at her in surprise, startled by her presence in his room. “Lady Yuna, good… Good evening.” He rises to stand, one hand on the edge of the table, where a thin stack of papers flutters to the floor. Embarrassed, Baralai stoops to recollect them. “Ah, sorry about that…”

“N-No, it's alright, I… it's me who should apologize…” Yuna manages a feeble reply, caught off guard by this rare moment of clumsiness from the most composed gentleman in Spira. She shouldn't find that cute, but she does, and so she stifles the smile.

Baralai straightens up on his feet, clearing his throat, setting the papers aside. “To what do I owe the visit?”

She watches him lean on the edge of the table, crossing his arms over his partially exposed chest, and she realizes how this must look. She came to his bedchambers in the dead of night, clothed in only a bathrobe and a sheer camisole. No wonder he acts so guarded.

She blushes, self-conscious.

“I… I wanted to apologize, for earlier… I ran out on your meeting, right when you reached the key point of your presentation. I'm sorry. You must be upset with me.”

“Upset? No…”

Yuna looks up at the sound of his chuckle, seeing his soft smile.

“I was worried. For some time, I thought I said something that upset you.”

“You did. I mean, I know you didn't mean to, but I― Did you really mean it? Did you… Do you honestly think… it's my fault, that we're in this current state…?”

“Lady Yuna, even the noblest of intentions can lead to negative consequences." His forthright words carry more impact than she ever expected they would, and she finds herself at a loss for words, uncertain of how she should feel. So adept at switching between the faces of friend and politician, that he often bewilders her. "I only stated the facts. I don't blame you or your actions; I praise you, in fact, for only you and your Guardians could have accomplished any of those feats. But it doesn't soften the truth, that we are all at fault for failing to notice sooner.”

His kind words render her speechless, and in the ensuing silence, Yuna catches him watching her, feeling self-conscious. She averts her eyes when he attempts to initiate eye contact, afraid that he can read her.

“We've come so far from where we used to be, and yet here we are, stuck at yet another impasse…” Baralai chuckles, thoughtful. “I abandon the Yevon name to start anew, and you go ahead and adopt it not long after. Coming from the woman who gave away a highly confidential and controversial sphere to the Youth League, I am quite surprised. What inspired this change of heart?”

Yuna remains silent on the matter, not ready to open that can of worms.

At her cold response, Baralai sighs. “...was that all you wished to talk to me about?”

“Ah, yes. Sorry to have bothered you… I… I, um, shall be going back to sleep now...”

He smiles, amicable. “It was not a bother. You can come to me anytime.”

His words make her pause. With one hand on the doorknob, she weighs her options.

She meant to walk out and never look back, but… They are alone, and she can ask him anything. When will there ever be another chance?

“...No. That wasn’t… everything...”

Dropping her arm, she scavenges the courage to turn around and face him. His posture has not changed; he still stands there, leaning on the table with his arms crossed. Only the expression on his face changed, regarding her his usual mild-mannered smile. “C-Can I ask you something? Your meeting today… it got me thinking…”

She walks forward, one tiny, timid step at a time, with her head bowed and her gaze glued to the floor, tracing the path of her feet. “Spira’s been thrown in a state of confusion, and you… somehow, you… You were able to make sense of everything.”

Now, Yuna raises her eyes, scavenging the courage to look him in the eye. “Could you help me understand something that happened in Besaid... one year ago?”

“Certainly.”

She blinks, startled by his immediate acquiesce. He accepted it without so much as a second thought that she wrings her hands, self-conscious. “I― I-I must warn you, it’s a long story… a-and, you must be tired―.”

“It’s quite alright.” Baralai smiles, appeasing her of her rapid, anxious thoughts. “I wouldn’t have said yes if I weren’t in the mood. Here. Why don’t you take a seat?”

He motions to the one other chair in the room, and she accepts his offer, sitting across from him as he follows suit. “Um, where do I start…”

“You can take as long as you need.”

She frowns. That’s just being far too gracious.

“...After we parted ways, I went back home after deciding to leave the Gullwings. I prepared myself to face the matrons, to speak with them about that day I felled Sin. I had been avoiding the truth over my victory against Sin, the dissolution of the Church, because…” She chokes up, sensing her throat constrict.

‘I was selfish. It was too personal for me to share... If I talked about it, I would have had to acknowledge that he―.’

“Lady Yuna?”

His concerned voice anchors her back to the present, and she swallows. “I-I couldn’t tell them. I wasn’t ready to tell them. For two years, I couldn’t… When I joined the Gullwings, even after I scoured every inch of Spira, I still couldn’t find… what I was looking for. I could have looked longer, I know I could. That thought crossed my mind many times, but… I felt that I looked enough. Our battle in the Farplane reinforced that feeling.”

Yuna stops to take a deep breath, losing the strength to continue. ‘I can’t stop here. I must…’ 

“But, the moment I arrived at Besaid, I… I found him. He was waiting for me. The person lost to me, my Guardian… The Fayth of Bahamut returned him to me, for one lifetime. It made me… so happy...” She trails off, sensing the tears well up in her eyes, and she hesitates to wipe them away, for fear that would expose her.

“Congratulations.” He smiles, reclining on the back of his chair with a casual cross of his arms.

To her relief, he spares her any comment on her tears, and she sniffles.

“Of course, I couldn’t... be happy for long. His return threw all of my priorities into question. I wanted a life with him, more than anything, but… I knew I couldn’t keep running away from my responsibilities either, so… While the dinner preparations for my homecoming were underway, I spent the entire night with them. I told the matrons everything, and they begged me to restore the idle clergy. I managed to avoid giving them a straight answer by telling them I needed time to think about it, and I…”

She pauses to giggle, overtaken by the fond memory. “I convinced the Besaid Aurochs to lend me their boat, The Ace, so I could be alone with… him…”

“Ah.”

His knowing smile makes her want to self-combust from mortification. “Y-Yes, I― I-It’s been so long, I― I just wanted to, erm…”

He laughs now, waving her off. “You don’t have to explain yourself."

“Yes, um… right.” Yuna clears her throat, composing herself. “Y-You can stop me anytime you want me to, in case you get bored or―.”

“No, no, continue. You have my undivided attention. After all, I want to believe there lies a point to all this gratuitous context.”

“...so, we, um, drifted out into sea, but not too far from Besaid, and we had… a long talk about everything. The passage of time between us, what I must do now that Spira has settled into the Eternal Calm. We ended up disagreeing… on a lot of things, actually. I shouldn’t be surprised. We always tend to disagree on things... The distance between us made it even worse... And then, a terrible squall hit Besaid overnight, and we were stranded somewhere farther out at sea where we couldn’t see any stretch of land. With our boat nowhere in sight, most likely destroyed due to the storm, we struggled to keep the aquatic fiends at bay, until eventually… I don’t know how, I passed out at some point, but we woke up on an island eerily similar to Besaid. We didn’t know where we were, and we couldn’t find any people, let alone a village, but... Little did we know at the time, we were marooned on an island summoned by an Unsent Summoner from a thousand years ago. A Dream version of Besaid, not unlike Yevon’s summoning of Zanarkand.

“As we continued to explore it, we found statues of old deities I never heard of. I don’t remember all their names, they were etched on the stone... Luchera, Guard, Kush… Ifarnal… to name a few. They were positioned in such strange ways that we couldn’t understand if they were meant to lead visitors astray or protect the children from getting lost.” Yuna stops there, becoming aware of her rambling. Because of that, she catches the rapt expression on his face, of him immersed in thought.

“Fascinating… To think there might have existed a completely different type of religion worshipped by the people who lived before Yevon’s time. Gods and deities separate from the Fayth we knew… How did their mythology come to exist…?”

She giggles, amused. "That’s something I never thought to ask. Maybe I should have...”

“Who?”

“Ifarnal. The Unsent Summoner I mentioned earlier. He inhabited the island with a woman he called his ‘Aeon Core,’ a different kind of Fayth. Not a stone statue, but a being who could exist after death. Like a fiend. She introduced herself to me, after I came in contact with her Summoner. He, Ifarnal… helped me restore Tidus to his original state, after he…” Yuna panics, cursing at herself for getting carried away with details.

‘Oh, no, I’m slipping… I shouldn’t have gone that far…’

“Tidus was… mortally wounded… by a bomb disguised as a blitzball…”

Baralai’s eyebrows rise at that. “Really?”

“Yes. Ah, one of Ifarnal’s other Aeon Cores, a human who was part machine… I think it was human… When it saw us, it probably confused us for hostiles trespassing on their territory. Its mind might have still been stuck in the time of the Machina War…”

“I am relieved you two made it out alive, then. But… What did you mean when you said, ah… Ifarnal, was it? He helped you restore Sir Tidus to his original state? You couldn’t have healed him with your magic?”

“I… didn’t have my staff! I was in a panic, and I couldn’t… put myself in a proper state of mind…”

“So, what did he do? This Unsent that felt compelled to help you?”

Baralai looks unconvinced, and she starts to sweat. She must divert him with another topic of interest.

“...ah, um… he bestowed upon me an ancient technique… of summoning, unique to Bevelle. Tidus is… not like the rest of us. He’s from Zanarkand, a dream version of Zanarkand that Yevon summoned with his city of devotees. He managed to exist outside this Zanarkand by riding Sin, and… because of the Fayth. They sustained his mortal life during his time in Spira.”

“...I see.”

He hums, thoughtful.

She doesn’t know if that’s a good thing, so she waits.

Even though Yuna only revealed a portion of the truth, would he be able to figure it out?

“Does that mean… His life is not his own, then? He can exist so long as the Fayth wishes him to, but even then… The Fayth departed from our world after you vanquished Sin. Why is that? They didn’t have to leave us, did they?”

“I only spoke to Bahamut at length, but they all seemed to say… That they were tired of dreaming. They wanted to sleep, after so many years…”

Back then, Yuna didn’t understand the depth of their suffering. Not an inkling. But now… She wishes she didn’t. She scorns them and criticizes them, even though she empathizes with them to avoid the glaring flaw in herself.

“That makes sense. I don’t blame them, honestly,” Baralai says with a wry smile, bringing her back to the present. “Hm... That begs the question, though...”

“What?”

“Is Sir Tidus a beckoning?”

Her breath stops, and she cradles her hand over her wavering heart.

“...No.”

“Did he die, then? In that explosion. You were being awfully vague about that part.”

As much as Yuna wants to flee from this room, she had been the one to dig this hole. Now she must lie in this bed that she made, hoping she can die in it. Anything to avoid his soul-piercing questions. “...Yes. But he is not a beckoning. I can assure you of that.”

“What is that, if not a beckoning?” He sounds more weary and annoyed than anything else, least of all condescending, but she can hear his sarcasm in the rhetoric. It evokes that feeling of guilt and shame, but most of all―

‘No. I don’t… regret anything…’

“He… is a dream. He’s my dream now, not the Fayth’s anymore. I’ve been… summoning him all this time. Ifarnal taught me how.”

“Lady Yuna.”

Baralai opens his mouth, about to say something, but then thinks better of it and sighs.

She senses he must be revising the words in his head. Soon, she will be wishing he never spoke at all.

“Lady Yuna… Why do you keep doing this to yourself?”

Ire rises in her throat, and she bites back the spiteful frown, incensed by his tone. “It’s my choice. I don’t expect you to understand.”

She knows she made a fatal mistake the moment those words flew out her mouth. The kind amber glow in his soft eyes darken to pitch black, and he looks away, propping his cheek on the end of his fist. The way he stares off into space frightens her, because she knows what kind of thoughts he tends to harbor. He once carried the shadow of Shuyin, after all, and she can see a trace of him now, of the rage outlined in the tension of his jaw, the intensity of his gaze.

“You love him, but you can’t find it within yourself to let go, can you?”

Something snaps within her, in which his words open the floodgates and she can’t hope to keep them shut any longer.  

Yuna crumbles into herself, allowing her tears to flow free.

~

Yuna dreams of the ocean.

She dreams of sleeping, feeling the waves rock the wooden, creaking walls of The Ace in its gentle, strong embrace. As the boat sinks for the last time and Yuna sinks further into the bed, she stirs, curious by the sudden loss of swaying. Inside this sparsely-decorated cabin, sunlight filters through the porthole, blanketing her in warmth. Darkness swathes her surroundings the moment she opens her eyes, blinded by the candlelight bleeding into her blurry vision, before someone’s hand reaches out to dowse the wick. She stares up at the broad back of her bedside companion, watching him brood in silence. The scent of sweet smoke fills the room, tickling her nose, and she sneezes.

Sensing him turn to look at her, she feels shy under his fond gaze. 

“Bless you.”

“Th-Thank you…”

“Did I wake you? If so, I apologize.”

“Ah, it’s alright… Um, I’m sorry… I fell asleep on you…”

“No worries. I assumed you were tired. You unloaded quite a lot of baggage there.”

She blushes, self-conscious, and before she can formulate a witty retort, he reaches out to stroke her head, brushing her long, messy hair out of her face. Her heartbeat races, and stills again when his hand begins to slow, projecting his timidity as well as her own. He lifts a lock of her hair between his fingers and touches the tail end of it to his lips, lingering on the gesture.

“Goodnight, milady. I shall see you in the morning.”

Scarlet heat blooms in her cheeks, and she squeaks in response. Thank the Fayth he cannot see her face in the dark.

Baralai smiles and drops his hand, standing to exit the room. In the quiet echo of the door’s close, another one opens, and she tries to deny it by burying her blushing red face into the pillow in vain.

‘I didn’t even finish telling him the full story. Oh, well… Maybe next time.’

[hayleylovesyou2]

Bobby Died.

This morning work was cancelled after what felt like a too-long-holiday with too-much-time alone … I found the article “When An Ex Dies” (http://www.nextavenue.org/no-place-grief-ex-dies/) in my FB feed, detailing the unexpected death of an ex-husband - father of her children, remarried with a teenage son - and finding her place in the grieving process. They were no longer friends, didn’t talk much, but their lives were intimately intertwined for longer than not.

Then a google search uncovered a Hello Giggles piece on the death of an ex-boyfriend, hospitalized for 28 days before dying of heart failure, and the strange space that occupies.  Once inseparable, but never married. Close with family, but that was 2 years ago. Would he have wanted her there? Was she allowed to be with his family? She had a month as he was hospitalized to wrestle these questions.

It made me think about what happens when we’re socially denied the right to our feelings. our experiences. What happens when we’re alone with our pain and not allowed to grieve.

Because more than what happens when an ex dies, I wonder.

What happens if an ex dies, and no one knows you existed. And he died quickly. 

And horribly.

I used to joke “boyfriend” was a strong word, though that’s what I call him today. It’s easier. Feels true. But in the moment before Facebook, there was no “it’s complicated” to point to. Did we date? We did go “out” once or twice. Whispering in halls after class, a subtle graze on the shoulder, little secret pinch at our mutual work. After visits at 2am, or nights he didn’t go home. We knew what the other looked like without any clothes. Mostly, we wrote. Corresponded like old-fashioned pen-pals in an emerging digital age. Livejournal, Xanga, Myspace, Deviant Art, OkCupid, AIM. He was a beautiful writer, photographer, creator. He could turn a phrase in the way that sparked my heart and ignited my brain, activating my desire to create that had waned in a dead, ill-matched-to-me place. He inspired me to write as much and as well as he did. I’d churn out content in hopes for a comment, like, response. Experiment. To impress. We’d chat for hours in our separate rooms on our separate giant desktop computers about how isolating being somewhere we didn’t feel like we belonged felt, and why we stayed, our plans to get out. His brain worked the same way my brain did. Neither of us had a southern accent. We liked the same films, music, politics. In any other city or timeline - in a healthy world - this would sound eye-rollingly mundane. But in my accidental religious college I felt trapped in, landlocked in a rural corner of a rural state that was so far from what I wanted and where I wanted to be … it felt like magic to have found him. And to have found him by accident. At the last possible second. It was a psychic, emotional, intellectual connection. Bobby meant the world to me. But we didn’t date. I wasn’t his girlfriend. His friends didn’t get it, and were kept out of the loop. No one knew what I thought I knew. That my love for Bobby was true.

But I was not the love of his life.

He had a crush on a gentle British soccer player named Jenny, who he told me about … later. His blog posts, vague odes to love … we’re not about me, as I had thought. Hoped. Wondered. But his love was also unrequited, and that didn’t stop the sleepovers. Pinches. Hours crafting kinetic poetic essays on AIM.

We met on a media-arts trip to Dallas. I had seen him, but we’d never spoken. He was classically attractive - over 6ft tall, awkward and hunchy. A recently nerdy chubby boy who had no idea what effect he could have on a girl. In Georgia … at that school … I naturally assumed the worst, about a blonde boy with big steel-blue eyes. Everyone was conservative, Baptist, liked hunting, sports, and the other things that didn’t impress my bitterly equally stereotypical 90s-gothy-art heart. But we’d moved into the aughts, and the Iraq War was underway, and I’d given up on finding anyone who made me feel anything other than invisible, impossibly lonely, terrifyingly hated. So that day in Dallas, i wagered I was ½ way to L.A. And I started driving west, away. But I got a call that some of the “yearbook kids” wanted to go with me to see Margaret Cho, a show nearby I’d found, that the “newspaper” crew had all turned down. And yeah, traffic was bad. And sure, I’d left all my clothes at the hotel. So I figured we’d go see the show, THEN I’d run away. Just in time, I picked them up. And that’s when I first met Bobby, and fell.

My CD case was filled with bizarre mixes from the expiring gasp of Napster’s bastard child, and film soundtracks. And usually Cats, just to piss people off. One previous attempt at college friendship led to a girl I was driving up the mountain to mock a really dumb song by an awful band about pinball (and the wizards who sure could play it) while I tried not to beat myself to death on the steering wheel. So I fired up a “weirder” CD* - Kill Bill soundtrack I think - to defiantly be me in front of these strangers I was sure were about to offend me. (*Obviously this is hardly a weird soundtrack, but this is Georgia, 2003.)

But Bobby knew what it was, basic though now it seems. Excited. We talked about the movie enthusiastically, the first person I got to discuss it with, the whole drive there. The rest of the car was offended by Cho - half the audience walked out when she tackled Iraq - but Bobby and I easily agreed. It didn’t matter it wasn’t funny. Nothing had been funny in over 2 years. And we both found we weren’t easy to offend, at least not with rebel trappings of sex, drugs, and political whims. We parted that night with lingering eye contact, a shy smile. A plan to see a movie the next night while everyone else watched football.

I stayed. I didn’t run away to LA.

The next night, during the final Matrix film, our pinkies teased, curious and unsure, creeping back and forth around excuses to pass popcorn and fake scares, until we finally held hands. After, in the hotel, I wanted to show him something in another room. I’d never felt that kind of clean attraction, never felt it so confidently, boldly. We talked close. Then forehead to forehead. Then lips to lips. Talking, still. Giggling. We kissed. 

Until a yearbook kid, jealous? perhaps? barged in and told Bobby they had all decided to leave for home, immediately, so pack up. I could come, too, but they wouldn’t wait. I had driven 4 other members of newspaper, so I ran to their rooms and desperately tried to convince them to leave. Or Bobby would stay, if one of them would trade. But of course not, disappointment reigned. I offered to leave my car. They called me selfish. Bobby left. I stayed.

Our time was short. 3 months, tops. We saw each other, touched each other, he took me to the homecoming dance as my first, proper date. We danced. He was an early adopter of the White Stripes, such a relief from a sea of Creed, and we’d talk, listen, dream. But for the crush I had on him, he didn’t have the same on me, despite our mental connection, and as I slowly (very slowly) let that settle in … I didn’t take it very well. I took it very not well. So not well I can’t really remember the next phase. Before you judge too harshly, a sad girl who blacked out when another flawed human didn’t turn into a prince, a savior, turning this story into a fairy tale. Please understand how dire it had been right before he appeared. Sometimes I think the universe sent him to me to keep me safe, from running away, to finish out a final semester in one piece. A little kindness, a booster seat. Bobby was always meant to be short lived.

The last night before winter break he said he was going to come over, then said he was coming with friends. I bribed older kids to buy me $50 worth of beer. Also picked up a party platter, so they’d like me, I was scared of his friends. It was a redemption, a chance to reconcile. But he didn’t come. I texted, he stopped replying. Called more times than socially acceptable. But at 2:30am the doorbell rang. Bobby had come! He cared! And I bounded to greet him … only it wasn’t him. It was a strung out stranger, raging, who started hitting me, tried to push his way in. I fought him off and locked the door, called 911 who told me it wasn’t real. Called Bobby, who finally answered and told me I was lying for attention, insane. My parents got me the next day. And I never returned to Georgia.

I started a new school in January. I knew it was necessary, but I was still in love with Bobby. We kept talking, blogging, calling. I was lonely and would photograph my new surroundings and send the pictures to him, for critiques.  We’d set concert dates that fell apart hours beforehand. I shipped him t-shirts as surprises he never admitted receiving. I visited near spring break with a box of gifts, $100 of books and tschotskes that I individually wrapped and carefully decorated with quotes from his favorite books, songs, Jack White, films. I dropped it off at his dorm, but he said he never got it. He said it was stolen, and i was an idiot for leaving it. He had told me he’d be there, so I sat outside awhile and called, waited, asked his hallmates where he was. Said I made him look like an asshole, a bad guy, and he was done dealing with me. I still believe he had the gift, maybe threw it away without opening it in a fit, but something always felt off about his recounting of events. Later I learned he had fallen in love with a girl he followed to Honduras, and was at a concert with her that day. It was all over a then secret blog, one I found after he was gone. I was at a new school and met new people. Hurt, changing, our connection faded out. In person, I never saw him again, though sometimes I’d quietly and secretly check in.

My birthday 2006, he messaged me. First time in forever. He apologized, said he often thought of me, and hoped i was well. I cautiously wished the same. He had decided to stay in town a year after graduation to stay with his friends, I was a super-senior due to the transfer and in no rush because I had essentially started all over again. He got his first job as an AD on a small feature shooting in town and was writing again. I ran my school film committee, and was wrapping up a degree with a minor in cinema. I saw a future unfold in front of me, how Bobby would return to me, where we’d reunite, as collaborators at least, in film, in Los Angeles, CA. We chatted on FB and joked about films, pop culture, cylons. Do you remember the early days of social media? When Facebook would email you when you got a wall post or comment, but it just would just say “Bobby posted on your wall!” to send you to go and check.

And in late January 2007, I received a series of these emails saying Bobby had commented on a photo, posted on my wall. But he must have deleted them, I never saw what he said. I was newly embroiled in a tumultuous, confusing relationship and didn’t reach out to ask, though it struck me more than it should. He also seemed to be in a new relationship he was pretty into, posting vague poetry and odes to love. He posted on Valentines Weekend 2007 that he was fixing something that was long overdue. To do it right, finally. It sounded confident, optimistic, resolute.

The same Valentines Weekend of 2007, I was to go to a protest in Washington D.C., but I pulled out at the last minute. I had a feeling in my chest, a dread, an inner scream too loud to ignore, but too deep to let out. So I lied and said I had a funeral to attend on Tuesday, throwing my favorite aunt under the bus. I felt weird, dark, scared. I was convinced something bad was going to happen – it was icy, maybe there was going to be a wreck? I was low on money, I said. They were mad I flaked, and left me alone, behind.

Now you could say I saw it immediately, but it took me a full 3 days to “see.”

His post had a lot of comments, maybe everyone knew what he was talking about, or it was a quote I had missed, I speculated. I talked to my co-worker (who I ALSO had had a huge crush on) about him, told him about Bobby, how I had loved him. That they were both talented. Maybe we’d all work together some day. This was Friday.

There were an unusual number of pictures on FB about Bobby. I smiled. I loved Bobby. These were great pictures. I should ask him what he wrote on my wall.

There were an unusual amount of comments about Bobby. About Bobby being a good guy. I smiled. Bobby was a great guy. Not even weird, everyone knew it. We’d had our pain, and troubles, but I loved Bobby dearly. This was Saturday.

Then in the early AM … all my friends in Washington DC … I it. I saw the “was.”  Bobby ‘was’ such a great guy.

Even then, I was like “what did Bobby do? Did he get in trouble? Is he not a good guy?”

“Bobby was a great guy, I’m shocked by the news, I don’t believe it.”

WHAT NEWS.

“Bobby was so kind, he didn’t deserve this.” Comment after comment, picture after picture, reality came into view.

Bobby had died over Valentines Weekend, 2007.

Bobby didn’t just die. He died badly.

And Bobby didn’t die in an accident, though that is what they told his aging dad.

Bobby was murdered. Brutally. 

Murdered running for his life after his girlfriend, who he was naked in bed with the morning after Valentines day, was killed at close range.

Murdered by her ex, a sad man who seemed confused he couldn’t own someone, a weak man sent by the devil to take two bright, shinning lives, when he found them in her home when he showed up unannounced. So went to his car, grabbed his good-ole-boy gun, and shot them both more times than is needed to kill someone. She was in the bedroom. Bobby made it to the front lawn. I couldn’t breathe. He was gone. His Facebook status was updated in the wee am to “Bobby is dead.” 

A memorial group was set up, in it’s haste called “Bobby: You Won’t Never Be Forgotten” and a girl from the car that night in Dallas kindly added me. No one knew what to do. So jokes were made.

And there was a funeral. It was Tuesday.

—-

He was my highest match on a dating site in the whole southeast for years. When we met, we were 84%. And the thing about the dating site was … they didn’t delete his profile. It stayed up almost 10 years. This year, 2016, was the year it finally disappeared. And this year … we matched at 99%. I know that is who I am with who he was, but still. 99%.

I live in LA now … and I think I live here for him. He would’ve been so much more successful than me, so much more easily. But I think I fight for him. I need to make something for him, because he couldn’t. I need to be something, someone. Because he never will.

And I think of Bobby everytime I hear Jack White. Sometimes I hate it. Sometimes it hurts too much. I had a White Stripes song in my head just last night. I guess that’s part of what triggered this today. It’s so easy to get laughed at, getting emotional at songs from a band who are currently pretty basic and passé. Wanting to tell, but think no one cares?

What do you do when you loved someone who died, and you’re not allowed to love them?

I don’t know if Bobby wants my love, or appreciates it, or it matters to him in death. If he’d want me to keep talking about him, or pretending like I have a right to a piece of him. But based on the last time we really talked, I hope he would understand. And appreciate. And that this love … though not a reciprocated romantic love … was still valuable.

Because I will always deeply love Bobby. And in 6 weeks, he’ll have been gone 10 years.

I don’t want to be trapped by the past. Caught up in pain. This year I want to honor Bobby in a positive way … by making something for him. To honor him.

I hope I can.

[isaidhay]

This morning, after learning work was cancelled after what felt like a too-long-holiday with too-much-time spent alone, with myself, to think ... I stumbled on the article “When An Ex Dies” (http://www.nextavenue.org/no-place-grief-ex-dies/) in my FB feed, detailing the unexpected death of an ex-husband - father of her children - remarried with a teenage son - and her place in the grieving process. They were no longer friends, didn't talk much, but their lives were intimately intertwined for longer than not. A google search also uncovered a Hello Giggles piece on the death of an ex-boyfriend, hospitalized for 28 days before dying of heart failure, and the strange space that occupies.  Once inseparable, but never married. Close with family, but that was 2 years ago. What is her place? Would he have wanted her there? Was she allowed the proximity to actively grieve? She had a month as he declined to tackle these questions. It made me think about what happens when we’re socially denied the right to our feelings. our experiences. What happens when we’re alone with our pain and not allowed to grieve.  Because more than what happens when an ex dies, I wonder. What happens if an ex dies, and no one knows you exist.  I used to joke “boyfriend” was a strong word, though that’s what I call him today. It’s easier. Feels true. But in the moment before Facebook, there was no “it’s complicated” to point to. Did we date? We did go “out” once or twice. Whispering in halls after class, a subtle graze on the shoulder, little secret pinch at our mutual work. After visits . We knew what the other looked like without any clothes, but mostly we knew how the other one thought. Mostly, we wrote. Corresponded like old-fashioned pen-pals in an emerging digital age. Livejournal, Xanga, Myspace, Deviant Art, OkCupid, AIM. He was a beautiful writer, photographer, creator. He could turn a phrase in the way that sparked my heart and ignited my brain, activating my desire to create that had waned in this dead, ill-matched place. He inspired me to write as much and as well as he did. I’d churn out content in hopes for a comment. Experiment. Try to impress him. We’d chat for hours in our separate rooms on our separate giant desktop computers about how isolating being somewhere we didn’t feel like we belonged felt, and why we stayed, our plans to get out. His brain worked the same way my brain did. Neither of us had a southern accent. We liked the same films, music, politics. In any other city or timeline - in a healthy world - this would sound eye-rollingly mundane. But in my accidental religious college I felt trapped in, landlocked in a rural corner of a rural state that was so far from what I wanted and where I wanted to be ... it felt like magic to have found him. And to have found him by accident. At the last possible second. It was a psychic, emotional, intellectual connection. Bobby meant the world to me. But we didn’t date. I wasn’t his girlfriend. His friends didn’t get it, and were kept out of the loop. No one knew what I thought I knew. That Bobby was the love of my life. But I was not the love of his.  He had a crush on a gentle British soccer player named Jenny, who he told me about ... later. His blog posts, vague odes to love ... we’re not actually about me, as I had thought. But that didn’t stop the sleepovers. Pinches. Hours on AIM. We met on a media-arts trip to Dallas. I had seen him, but we’d never spoken. He was classically handsome - over 6ft tall, blonde, huge blue eyes, awkward and hunchy. A recently nerdy chubby boy who had no idea what he was about to be able to do to women. In Georgia ... at that school ... I naturally assumed the worst about my peers, more because I didn’t want to be there and I assumed they all did. Everyone was conservative, Baptist, liked hunting, sports, and the other things that didn’t impress my bitterly equally stereotypical 90s-Daria-gothy-art heart. But we’d moved into the aughts, and the Iraq War was underway, and I’d given up on finding anyone who made me feel anything other than invisible, hated, fundamentally wrong. So in Dallas, i wagered I was 1/2 way to L.A. And I started driving west, away. But I got a call that some of the year book kids wanted to go with me to see Margaret Cho, a show nearby I’d found. And traffic was bad. And I’d left all my clothes at the hotel. So I figured we’d go, THEN I’d run away. Just in time, I picked them up. And Bobby was there.  My CD case was filled with bizarre mixes from the dying gasp of Napster’s bastard child, Limewire, and film soundtracks. And usually Cats, if I felt mean to my passengers. One attempt at college friendship led to a girl I was driving up the mountain to aggressively mock a really dumb song by an awful about pinball (and the wizards who sure could play it) while I tried not to beat myself to death on the steering wheel. Like, she couldn’t believe it was a song or a band existed that would play it, then requested some Creed or DC Talk. I couldn’t believe I was in a place so wrong-for-me I had to defend that ‘The Who’ existed. So I fired up a “weirder” CD - Kill Bill soundtrack I think - to defiantly be me in front of these strangers I was sure were about to offend me. But Bobby knew what it was. Excited. Agreed. We talked about the movie enthusiastically, the first person I got to discuss it with, the whole drive there. The rest of the car was offended by Cho - half the audience walked out when she spoke out against Iraq - but Bobby and I agreed with her. It didn’t matter it wasn’t funny. It seemed important. And it was really hard to offend us. We parted that night with a little smile. A plan to see a movie the next night while everyone else watched a football game.  I didn’t run away to LA. The next night, during the final Matrix film, our pinkies teased each others, curious, creeping back and forth around excuses to pass popcorn and fake scares, until we finally held hands. After, in the hotel, I wanted to show him something in another room. I’d never felt that kind of clean attraction, never felt it so confidently, boldly. We talked close. Then forehead to forehead. Then we kissed. And we didn’t stop.  Until a yearbook kid (I was newspaper, you see) barged in and told Bobby they had all decided they were leaving that night instead, so pack up, he was driving. I could come, too, but they wouldn’t wait. I had driven 4 other members of newspaper, so I ran to their rooms and desperately tried to convince them to leave, too. But they didn’t. I offered to leave my car. They called me selfish. Bobby left. I stayed and cried.  Our time together was short. 3 months. We saw each other a lot, touched a lot, he took me to the homecoming dance as my first, proper date. He was an early adopter of the White Stripes, such a relief from a sea of Creed, and we’d talk, kiss, listen. But for the crush I had on him, he didn’t have the same on me, despite our obvious mental connection, and as I slowly (very slowly) let that settle in ... I didn’t take it very well. I took it really quite very poorly. It got really dark. And please understand how dire it had gotten right before he appeared. Sometimes I think the universe sent him to me to keep me safe, from running away, to finish out the semester at school in one piece.  The last night before winter break he said he was going to come over, then said he was coming with friends. I bought a bunch of beer, because I’d been 21 a solid 6 weeks and COULD. Also picked up a party platter, so they’d like me. And waited. He didn’t come. I texted, he stopped answering. But at 2:30am the doorbell rang and I bounded to receive him ... only it wasn’t him, it was a strung out stranger who started hitting me, tried to barge in. I fought him off and locked the door. My parents got me the next day and loaded me up.  I started a new school in January. No one knew I was leaving, but I was relieved to never come back ... except I was still in love with Bobby. We kept talking, blogging, AIM’ing. I was lonely and would photograph my new campus and scan the pictures to him, for critiques. He was impressed. We’d set concert dates that fell apart last minute. I shipped him t-shirts I thought he’d like, but he never admitted receiving. I visited with a box of gifts, $100 of books and tschotskes that I individually wrapped and carefully decorated with quotes from his favorite books, films, songs. I delivered it, but he said he never got it. He said it was stolen, and i was an idiot for leaving it at his door. He had told me he’d be there, so I sat outside awhile and called, waited, asked his hallmates where he was. He said I made him look like an asshole, a bad guy, and he was done. I still believe he had it, maybe threw it away without opening it, but something always felt wrong. Later I learned he had fallen in love with a girl he later followed to Honduras, and was at a concert with her that day. It was all over a then secret blog. I was at a new school and met new people. Hurt, changing, our connection faded out. In person, I never saw him again, though sometimes I’d check in. My birthday 2006, he messaged me. First time in a long time. He apologized, said he thought of me often, and hoped i was well. I cautiously wished the same. He had decided to stay in town a year after graduation to stay with his friends, I was a super-senior due to the transfer and in no rush to get out, now that I could do-over college right. He got his first job as an AD on a small feature shooting in town and was writing again. I ran my school film committee, and was wrapping up a degree with a minor in screenwriting and cinema theory. I saw a future where we’d reunite, as collaborators, in LA. We chatted on FB and joked about cylons. Facebook used to email you when you got a wall post or comment, but it just would say to go check them out, not what they said.  In late January 2007, I received a series of these emails saying Bobby had commented on a photo, posted on my wall. But he must have deleted them, I never saw what he said. It drove me batty. But I was newly embroiled in a tumultuous, confusing relationship and didn’t reach out to ask. It was probably nothing. He also seemed to be in a new relationship he was pretty excited about. He posted on Valentines Weekend 2007 that he was fixing something he had long longed to. To do it right, finally, put everything right. The same Valentines Weekend of 2007, I was to go to a protest in Washington D.C., but I pulled out last second. I lied and said I had a funeral to attend on Tuesday. I felt weird, dark, scared. I was convinced something bad was going to happen -- it was icy, maybe there was going to be a wreck? I was low on money, I said. They were mad, and left me. I saw it immediately, but it took me 3 days to “see” it. His post had a lot of comments on it, I saw it and speculated. I talked to my co-worker (who I ALSO had had a huge crush on) about him, told him about Bobby, how I had loved him. That they were both talented. Maybe we’d all work together some day. This was Friday. There were an unusual number of pictures on FB about Bobby. I smiled. I loved Bobby. These were great pictures.  An unusual amount of comments about Bobby being a good guy. I smiled. Bobby was a great guy. Not even weird, everyone knew it. We’d had our pain, and troubles, but I loved Bobby dearly. This was Saturday. Then in the early AM ... all my friends in Washington DC ... I saw the “was.” My eyes let me see the “was.” Bobby ‘was’ a great guy. Even then, I was like “what did Bobby do? Did he get in trouble?” “Bobby was a great guy, I’m shocked and horrified by the news.”  WHAT NEWS. “Bobby was so kind, he didn’t deserve this.”  Bobby had died over Valentines Weekend, 2007. Bobby didn’t just die. He died badly. Very badly.  And Bobby didn’t die in an accident, though that is what they told his elderly father.  Bobby was murdered. Murdered running for his life after his girlfriend, who he was naked in bed with the morning after Valentines day, was also murdered. Murdered her ex, who found them in her home when he showed up unannounced, and went to his car, got a gun, and shot them both an insane number of times in cold blood. She was in the bedroom. Bobby made it to the front lawn. I couldn’t breathe. A memorial group was set up, and a girl from the car that night in Dallas kindly added me. There was a funeral. It was Tuesday. I hadn’t lied. ---- I had no one to talk to. And no real mutual friends with Bobby. The only friends who knew who I was only remembered the drama, or I assumed they would. I reached out with . They didn’t want or need me in their grief. But there was no place to put mine.  I put on a shirt of his he had left at my house. A ringer T with Mr. Rogers face, smiling. It said “You’re Special.” I’d wear it under my clothes everyday like secret underwear for the next several weeks. I couldn’t figure out how it happened, but I needed to know. What I saw in my head, the placement, the timeline, didn’t make sense. That week I’d have a dream as if I was watching it in real time. I understand now. I saw how it happened. It was horrible. I attended the funeral, saw some old teachers, friends, but I was alone in it. They didn’t know how I knew Bobby, just that we had some classes together. It was nice I came, they thought. I should sit in back, the front was reserved for his close friends. It was an open casket. I tried to get near, to look at him, but I fell down. I couldn’t get near. I kept buckling. I held onto an old newspaper co-worker, from behind, and looked around her to hold myself up. She commented I was always quirky. I flashed back to him sleeping in my bed. I thought of him sleeping, naked. He looked like he was sleeping. I felt ashamed. Ashamed to see that. I couldn’t tell anyone that. Even that I knew what he looked like asleep. He was buried with a t-shirt I had bought him. It was one of his favorites. I saw new pictures of him in it. He was buried along with photos he had displayed in his room. Including the first gift I ever gave him ... I blew up a picture he took and framed it. It was with him at the end. No one new that was also a part of me, either. I don't know why he had both. If he just really liked them. Or if he also liked them because there was also something good of me. I’ll never know, and probably not, but it helps me to believe. Over 300 people attended the funeral. Everyone loved Bobby. But it was a terrible funeral - a preacher who never met him excited to scare a bunch of young faces about drugs, adultery, hell. Hymns instead of White Stripes. Cold. It had nothing to do with Bobby. His friends would later have their own memorial. I wasn't invited ... they didn’t know me, didn’t know they should. A week later, i got a heavy fever and went into a hard dream, and the pain sort of lifted. Like I was in a warm bear hug. I felt like Bobby visited me, and apologized he had to wait so long to get to me, the list was long, and that he didn’t know it would hit me like it did.  But his death did hit me. It still hits me. He was my highest OKCupid match in the whole southeast for years after. When we met, we were 84%. And the thing about OkCupid was ... they didn’t delete his profile. It stayed up almost 10 years. This year, 2016, was the year it finally disappeared. And this year ... we matched at 99%. I know that is who I am with who he was, but still. 99%. I live in LA now ... and I think I live here for Bobby. He would’ve been so much more successful than me, so much more easily. But I think I fight for him. I need to make something for him, because he couldn’t. I need to be something, someone. Because he never will. And I think of Bobby everytime I hear Jack White. Sometimes I hate it. Sometimes it hurts too much. I had a White Stripes song in my head just last night. I guess that’s part of what triggered this today.  What do you do when you loved someone who died, and you’re not allowed to?  I don’t know if Bobby wants my love, or appreciates it, or it matters to him in death. If he’d want me to keep talking about him, or pretending like I have a right to a piece of him. But based on the last time we really talked, i hope he would understand. And appreciate. And that this love ... though not a reciprocated romantic love ... was still a valuable love.  Because I will always deeply love Bobby. And in 6 weeks, he’ll have been gone 10 years. I don't want to be trapped by the past. Caught up in pain. This year I want to honor Bobby in a positive way ... by making something for him. To honor him. I hope I can do him justice.