#I based so many of my characters on just fanfic and fandom tropes

[mariathechosen1]

^^^^^^^^ THIS!!!

I’ve talking about this for so long!

Being a part of one minority does not shield you from harming another. I recognize that this post is about original fiction, but god this is genuinely a really huge problem in fandom:

A lot of you will marvel at queer representation….so long as it’s between two conventionally attractive white dudes.

In fandom, female characters are usually fit into several ‘acceptable’ categories. Either they’re shipped with another female character and become the lesbian couple of ‘sense’ that tell the main mlm couple to “get their shit together and just kiss already”, or all of their flaws and complexities are erased and they’re turned into the ‘girlboss’, a plot device at most. Female characters are almost always ‘the reasonable ones’, while the guys get to have actual personalities.

Or even worse, if a female character displays any flaws too difficult to just erase, they’re turned into the ‘bitch’. This is any female character who’s forced into the antagonist role in order to further the plot. She’s the one who tries to sabotage the main couple, or just someone who’s overly mean towards a ‘poor misunderstood’ male character. Female characters of color especially get pushed into this category, even if they’re the very opposite of this in canon.

What really ties these categories together is that the female characters are all turned into accessories. Either they’re emotional support, plot devices or just pure antagonists, they almost never have goals of their own.

Basically every fandoms I’ve interacted with force their female characters into these roles in one way or another, and it’s honestly real fucking disappointing.

“My story has so much gay rep in it!” Awesome. How are you treating your female characters btw

[letteredlettered]

Hello!! I've read all your hp works and I wanted to say that I love them all and they've made me feel feelings. The way you write drarry and just hp in general is very close to my heart.

That being said, there is a question I wanted to ask you as a writer. What does plagiarism mean and what does it constitute? Like... I hear that term a lot but just reading a definition is not making it clear to me. As far as I understand, copying someone's work, word by word is plagiarism. Does it also count as one if I copy someone's idea but just modify it a bit. Carry on is such a work and it's resemblance to hp and main pairs similarity to drarry are well known. Even hp itself has a evident similarity to Neil Gaiman's ‘The books of magic’ , at least as far as the titular character goes. It was also said that maybe jk stole the idea from there but Neil later said that it wasn't the case. So I'm guessing that's not plagiarism.

Let's take another example, I love you fic away childish things .. so if I wrote a fic with the same idea.. is that plagiarism? Or if I copy the plot? What if I liked a particular scene very much.. or a sentence very much and I used it as a base for a new fic.. or used that scene/sentence itself but in a different context is that plagiarism? I'm sure a lot of people have read Running On Air by eleventy7 in the drarry fandom. So if I use the sentence “Going away is easy, coming home is hard.” in a fic I write (maybe in another fandom or the same) does that count as plagiarism? Ofc I'm assuming that other people will know which scene or sentence I'm using on account of said fic being a famous work (in this case, fandom). But there could be a case where the source is not well known. What if I took something from a particular folktale of a community or country? Would that count as plagiarism? Jk Rowling herself has said that she used a lot of info while writing hp from various stories, folktales, religious books, lore and some good old tropes of said genre and pure imagination. Most of it was done unconsciously while writing. I guess it doesn't count as plagiarism if the place where you're copying from doesn't have a particular author (for eg folktales etc). Like.. God is not gonna sue me if I wrote things similar to some religious text. His followers on the other hand... yeah best not go there haha. But yeah.. what if I used different things from various sources, like.. just picking my way across it all and using them to write a story, just mish mashing things together like a collage and making something out of it. Will that be plagiarism? Or is that just being inspired by other art? On the other hand there is a saying that every art has a genesis and nothing is original. Every work is inspired by some other work be it art, music, writing or whatever. So where does one draw a line between inspiration and plagiarism?

I know it's a very long ask and I'm using a lot of scenarios but I wanted to cover everything that might come under the word 'Plagiarism'. What are your thoughts on it? What is included in plagiarism? Specifically, in writing.

If you made it this far thank you for reading where i essentially just ramble lol. I would like to know your answer and if you have any reading material on it please point me towards them. Thank you and I hope you're doing well xoxo

Plagiarism is copying word for word. It's one kind of stealing.

Copyright infringement is also a kind of stealing. That's a legal term about copyrighted material, but laws from some countries around this issue can maybe help clarify what is socially considered stealing and what is considered fair use. "Fair use" is also a legal term (at least, in the US); it refers to reasons you can use a copyrighted work without permission. I think that what many people socially consider "not stealing," even though its using someone else's ideas, falls under fair use.

Fanfic generally falls under fair use. The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW)--which is the organization behind AO3--argues that while fanfic uses things like characters and settings from copyrighted work, fic falls under fair use because it is creative and transformative.

The transformative part is important. If you copied Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone word for word and put it on AO3, that would be plagiarism. It's not transformed in any way. But if you write a story in which Harry and Draco fall in love, you're significantly transforming the story in a way that progresses the world of literature.

Other attributes of fair use (beyond whether the work is transformative) include whether the work is done for profit, whether the market for the original copyrighted work will be impacted negatively by the derivative work, and how substantially the derivative work uses the original copyrighted work. Fanfic uses the original copyrighted work quite substantially in many cases, but if it doesn't impact the market for the original copyrighted work and isn't done for profit, that shouldn't disqualify it from fair use. This is why it's extremely important never to ask for money for a fanfic, and why any author doing that should be reported to the hosting site.

Now, you asked about the Harry Potter series. While JKR may have gotten ideas about kids attending magical schools from other books, HP differs significantly enough that whenever she was sued for copyright infringement, she won her cases. Some might call JKR's books a ripoff of other books like it, but most agree that while not terribly original, these books do not count as stealing. (I would add, though, that just because someone wins a case doesn't mean it's not stealing. Disney steal shit all the time but wins cases because they own everything.)

You also asked about Carry On. I would say about that series, too, that it is substantially different enough from other books, that it doesn't count as stealing. There are just lots of books about kids secretly going to magic school, as it turns out. But I would add that even if there were more similarities to HP than there are in Carry On, Carry On could not be considered theft, because it is transformative.

Carry On, like Lev Grossman's The Magicians, is in a conversation with books like Harry Potter, books about magical schools and books with young, Chosen One protagonists. Carry On is not a fanfic; the characters are not the same; the set-up is not the same; the plot is not the same. But it is a book that asks questions about Harry Potter, and other books like Harry Potter. It's asking, what does it mean to be the Chosen One? Isn't there something sinister about a supportive mentor figure who pushes young people into war? Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games is also in a conversation with books that have young Chosen Ones, and it asks the same questions. Carry On further asks, isn't there a strange chemistry between the archetypal Golden Boy protagonist and the archetypal schoolmate antagonist? That's something tons of high school romance stories ask, and tons of HP fics, but it wasn't something that hadn't yet been done in a magical school Chosen One series--not with homosexuality--which also makes it pretty damn transformative.

You asked about using a line from Running on Air in a different work. This is plagiarism, because it's the exact words. Using that sentence in any work would be plagiarism. Using the exact sentence that someone else wrote, not matter how well known the work, is plagiarism. You likely won't be sued, but it's still stealing in most cases.

Now, it could be acceptable to use a phrase from the sentence to reference Running on Air. You'll see this in a lot of older literature. You'll see a little phrase in quotes that isn't credited, but your Penguin footnote will tell you they were referencing another author there. That was common because everyone was expected to have read the same body of work in certain cultures.

In fandom, lots of people will have read the same fics, so it could be a nod to another author to quote their work in a fic of your own. That's generally not the culture, mostly because the reason authors would do that had more to do with literary ideas that story telling, and most fic has a focus on storytelling. And, because fandom is a non-professional community where it's easy to reach out directly to the authors, if you do want to quote something by a different author, the author should be asked--again, because that's the culture.

Some material is so often quoted that it's idiomatic. If you say "I put away childish things" in a work, that may be from the Bible, but most people know where it's from, and even if they don't, it's part of our language now. Same would be true if I put in a work "Parting is such sweet sorrow," which is from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Few would call it stealing if I didn't credit such sentences, but if you're not sure whether it's idiomatic, a place where you're using the exact words should be credited with a footnote or citation.

You asked about using a line from a folk tale. As you say, folk tales often don't have known authors--but more importantly for your question, they usually don't have definitive versions. There are literally thousands of versions of Cinderella. If you used an exact sentence the Brothers Grimm used in their version of Cinderella, that would be plagiarism. Any exact language from an extant version of the story would be the same way.

A lot of what I'm saying is about how law works (particularly in the US), which deals with what might be socially acceptable in terms of whether something is stealing or not. But many cultures do have oral traditions that have a specific way a story is told. I would argue that's still a specific version, and if you're quoting the exact language, it's still stealing. But lots and lots of cultures have stories they like to tell but always tell it a little different, in which case you might be stealing ideas but not plagiarizing. And some things that are said enough, such as "Once upon a time" and "And they lived happily ever after" are idiomatic and not consider plagiarism.

But idioms touch on an interesting topic related to idea theft, which is how likely it is that you came up with something on your own, or that anyone could without the original text. The line you quoted from Running on Air is unique, but the idea that coming home is hard is commonly accepted. Indeed, there is an idiom that states "You can't go home again," which refers to the difficulty of coming home again.

Therefore, if someone said, "Going home is difficult," it might be a paraphrase of the sentence from Running on Air, but it might also be a paraphrase of the idiom, and it would be a little silly to call that plagiarism. Paraphrasing can be plagiarism, but it depends on a) how closely the paraphrase hews to the original, b) how much is paraphrased (as soon as you're paraphrasing more than a line, it really starts to be plagiarism), and c) whether someone could reasonably come up with it themselves.

So, if someone said, "Leaving home isn't difficult, but going home again is," that paraphrase is a lot more directly related to the original sentence and could be considered plagiarism. However, in a story without any other Running on Air references or similarities, I would assume an author came up with that based on the idiom and would never even dream of accusing them of plagiarism. But if the next two sentences were also similar to lines from Running on Air, I'd get suspicious.

In fact, the original line you quoted is close enough to the idiom that if I read it in a different story, I might assume that the author hadn't remembered that that line was from Running on Air. This has definitely happened to me--I used a line or phrase that I thought was mine, but I actually got it from somewhere else. If you're doing it consciously, you shouldn't. With paraphrasing, I think it's a little dicier; some would say if you're consciously paraphrasing anything it's a problem, but if you know you read that line from Running on Air but also know you've thought about that idiom about coming home a lot, it might be fine to say something sort of similar, as long as it's not the same and as long as you're not taking other things.

The same is true with ideas. You asked about Away Childish Things. If you read that fic and decided to write a fic about Harry de-aging, you might have been inspired by me, but it isn't stealing because de-aging is a common trope in fandom. You could've come up with it yourself or by reading any number of things. You asked about the plot; if you wrote a story in which Harry and Draco got to know each other by identifying illegal potions and then while doing some of that work together, Harry got de-aged and later Draco got de-aged, I would still say that this is a plot you could have thought of yourself. If you wrote a story in which everyone was infected by a potion that was like Imperius, meaning Harry only trusted Draco to help him, and Harry de-aged, and then to cure him Harry re-aged and then Draco de-aged, and could only re-age one year at a time, dealing with all of their Hogwarts years again and revealing Draco's history with his mentally ill mother and Muggle dating, I would say...okay, that's hewing pretty closely to Away Childish Things and feels a bit like you took something from me.

If you called a shop in your fic Tailored Tinctures, that's very specific, and I would say you took something from me. If you had an indicator solution in which you had to dip your thumb and your thumb turned cerulean to indicate a positive, I would say you took something from me. For these kinds of questions, it has to do with the amount you took but also the specificity of it.

As I mentioned, fandom has its own culture. Usually if you get an idea from someone else it's a very good idea to drop that author a line and say, "Hey, I got inspired, do you mind if I do?" But I don't do that when there are a hundred fics that all have the same idea, because by then it's starting to be fanon, and using fanon is not considered in this culture to be stealing.

Different people have different ideas about this, but I do feel that I'm pretty close to the general thought on this. Some people will say that any time you are inspired by anything you must credit, or you must ask, or you must never use it to begin with. But most of us are inspired by things all the time, and the only times we claim we aren't are the times when we really can't remember what the original inspiration was, or when things are so jumbled that ten different things inspired one idea. In those cases it isn't true that we aren't using other works, only that we can't identify them.

[fivelila]

💕Positivity prime time! Share five things you love about yourself, four things you're excited about, OR three people you care deeply about and why. Pass this along to someone whose posts make you smile💕

This is actually pretty cute, but since this isn't my personal blog, I don't want to talk about myself, so how about: five things I love about Five and Lila and why I'm so excited about them? 🤭

1) It was really unexpected - yes, I think a lot of us were surprised where the subway plot was going. Anyway, what was also unexpected for me was how much I grew to like Five and Lila as separate characters. Because my very first impression of both was not the best (back in time, let's say in 2020) and now I love them sooo much. Maybe it's a bit of a parallel to the fact that they didn't like each other in the beginning.

2) They awakened creativity - I think not only in me, but also in other fans. There have been so many great fanfics, fanarts and videos featuring them in the past two months. I love writing, but no one has inspired me as much as they have in a very long time. I've never written as often or had as many ideas as I do when it comes to their stories.

3) Great community - their fan base may not be huge like others, but I've met some great people in it! I've been part of many fandoms over the years, but this one is really very nice, helpful, supportive, and creative. I love that Five and Lila have such fans.

4) I love their story - while I would have loved to see another 10 hours of material with them, it wasn't hard to fall in love with their story even with the shorter footage. Their story has all my favorite tropes, all the fictional craziness I love, but there's also a piece of a totally human story that can happen to anyone (marriage problems, new love, healing trauma with the right person, etc.) which I find fascinating.

5) I love their contrast - I love the contrast of their characters throughout the story. Even if it was completely incomprehensible to some, I love how their characters are shown as completely insane and later completely vulnerable and in love. I get bored with characters who are either just black or just white. I love it when characters can play all the keys on the piano (yes, the reference is to Loki when Tom Hiddleston was talking about him).

[chronically-ghosted]

i totally agree that it’s ridiculous for people to write fics for films that haven’t been released yet, but the problem isn’t the smut itself. people have every right to write porn if that scratches the itch.

i think your main point is the most important: it’s impossible to write a thoughtful, inspired fic when we don’t even know the story it’s based on. no one knows who this character is or what he’s like.

at this point, everyone should just call a spade a spade and write pedro rpf. all they care about is seeing his face in different situations.

so my earlier post was not so much a statement on Pedro Pascal Character fanfiction/porn, but the commercialization of art and I interpreted the thoughts and opinions of others through the lens of the medium I most often express myself with, which is fanfiction.

let me be clear: i have no problem with smut - pwp or otherwise. people are allowed to write whatever they want, about whoever they want, with whatever tropes make them happy.

my overall focus (and granted it was probably very muddled by the end of those - what, like three reblogs?) was an interrogation of fanfiction as art, and the state of art in this modern era. and after doing some more thinking and listening to more people much smarter than me (thank you to everyone who dm-ed me directly to talk further about this), my opinion is thus: the creation of content (not art) is more ubiquitous today is not because we are getting more stupid as a society, not because of our failing attention spans, not because we are on the brink of moral collapse but because we physically do not have the mental strength to be intellectually curious as a direct result of constant, distracting, emotionally-draining stimuli.

i can explain what i mean below the cut with two primary examples, specifically regarding the shift in fanfiction cult, and yes, the prominence of smutty oneshots in the pedro pascal character fandom of which this blog is a part of.

I have been in various fandoms for almost twenty years. I have been writing fanfiction for almost that same amount of time. In recent years, I've noticed two trends that initially discouraged me, but that I now believe is a symptom of our adjustment to a modern, constantly online era.

A severe lack of engagement within the artistic artifacts of a fandom

The quality of the fanfiction itself (because yes I do consider fanfiction to be an artform) has gone down hill - mostly.

Lack of engagement:

Art is inherently created to be shared. This is especially true for fandom because the community lives or dies by how many people are interacting with each other and sharing ideas (news, theories, fanart, fanfic, etc). If you say a fandom is dead, it means there haven't been any new posts or fic about it in years. So I don't wanna hear it when people say, "oh write for yourself, you shouldn't be chasing engagement" because that is antithetical to the very concept of fanfiction.

In recent years, I have seen and experienced myself engagement in my work only so far as a like or kudo. This is not how it used to be. Message boards (yes I am that old) and niche fandom sites were constantly abuzz with media sharing and excitement, and everyone enjoyed some version of praise (unless you got hit by the antis but they're never fun anyway). Initially I blamed this drop in engagement on laziness: people just want the next thing, they can't be bothered to appreciate the hard work writers put in and they just see content and art as the same thing - stuff to consume.

But I myself am GUILTY of minimal reblogs and comments and I LOVE what I'm writing - the impact certain works leave me with is long, long lasting but for some goddamn reason, I can't sit down and praise the author's works. Am I lazy? Possibly, but this is also not an isolated behavior and it's on the rise: people do not have time to engage with fandom/fanfic like they used to. Most people I know have worked at least two or three jobs at some point in their lives to just to make rent. This gen z is the first generation in DECADES to be worse off economically than their parents. With an interest rate at 8%, who the fuck can afford the security of a home anymore? We work ourselves to the bone for scraps and the realization that The Dream has officially died. And so what do we want to do in the free time we do have? Engage with the very bare minimum. We want to read things that we can at best skim, things we don't have to think about or engage with in any meaningful way. We want a way to turn off the noise of the next apocalypse and sometimes the best we can do is the tap of a thumb.

Which brings me to my next point: what the fuck happened to thoughtful fanfiction?

But this question is inextricably linked to the points above: oneshots are easier to write, faster to write, and if you write fic that is basically "Mad libs porn" (without ever engaging in the actual medium because it is literally not released yet), you are doing the most minimal work for the most amount of engagement. But I can't fault ANYONE for doing that. It feels good to be told your smut is "so hot" or "this exploded my panties" and in this era where the time available to create is so fucking small and minimized of course you're going to write for the most popular character, whether or not you're interested in the source material because we want our art to matter to someone. Intellectual pundits loooove to lambast our "shorter attention spans" but fuck, when are we allowed the time to think - in between this "100 year storm" that's happened twice in the past five years, or the global pandemic that turned millions of deaths into a political punching bag, or the next video of a white woman crying wolf to the police over an innocent black man, or - or - or - or

In a day where reality and the world as we know seems to be holding onto a thread, we turn to comfort: comforting tropes (dbf to rape/kidnap fantasies), comforting fanfic (pwp), and comforting ways to engage with fandom. There is nothing wrong with wanting your art to be appreciated and there's nothing wrong with inherently wrong with pwp - but I do believe its symptomatic of a MUCH larger and more sinister movement within ALL art right now.

I come from the generation who banished fanfic authors for scrubbing off the filing numbers to their fics and publishing it as original content because, in our communities, they were selling out. Fanfiction is inherently an act of rebellion. Every time you write fanfiction you break canon, an established structure with its own rules and boundaries. So by trying to appeal to the masses, to curb your own writing to fit whatever is mainstream, you are doing a disservice to yourself AND to the art of fanfiction. If something you write becomes popular, wonderful, great, you are very lucky and there is nothing wrong with that either. But do not sell out your 13 beloved fans who WILL take the time to leave a comment, who WILL take the time to reblog because your weird little fic spoke to them on a fundamental level and now is with them for the rest of their lives - in favor of a 100 thumb taps.

If you've made it here, thank you very much for reading. I've added some links to some additional references to see how this concept of "populist" art is having a serious negative down turn in the quality of art, but is also not any one individuals personal failings:

Why the world is addicted to background tv by Kayleigh Day

How Modern Audience are failing cinema by Like Stories of Old

Rupi Kaur episode of Rehash podcast

I'm always here to talk fic and art and what makes you excited about your writing. Much love and please rest. We need you here.

[messrsrarchives]

Let me scream this, fanfic is the only form of literature that is divorced from capitalism

oh how i wish this were true 😖 i literally JUST wrote about the politicisation and capitalisation of fanfiction for an essay comp with my uni (i won :3) and UGH.

theoretically? yes! and being separate from capitalism is so important,,, not just for fanfiction but for literature as a whole? to be separate from this idea of profit, of your voice and ideas being profitable and marketable, of having to fit into a predetermined box for your voice and experience and words to be heard? capitalism ruins literature. it ruins freedom of voice when we see the demographic of those getting published (and like,,, that historically) but also it limits creativity and ideas when your focus is now on what's marketable and what's trending, and we go through waves of the same tropes/story being told over and over and over again until the next big trend hits. capitalism prohibits creativity. and theoretically,,, fanfiction is devoid from that, right? because we aren't profiting from it, we aren't buying it, and theoretically everyone's voice holds the same power and we aren't restrained by what's marketable and who's louder.

BUT realistically:

i mean obviously the first point - people selling binds. instantly bringing capitalism into fandom. fanfiction becomes capitalised on a monetary level.

but money isn't everything here i think! i think we have ideals in fanfiction/fandom that aren't necessarily about profit, but still uphold capitalist values.

especially over on tiktok, we see the same ideals through followers, likes, 'influencers'. we see it when cosplayers call themselves actors and want to use fanfilms for portfolios, we see it when fanfilms ask for money *before* content, which goes against the whole "fandom content is shared with you, not made for you" ideal, we see it when people start gatekeeping their ideas rather than sharing like we used to, etc etc - ideals of capitalism infiltrating. we start developing this hierachy of those at the "top" with more influence and more power and whose ideas we follow more, and those at the "bottom" start becoming more like consumers than enjoyers. fanfiction - and in turn, fandom as a whole - becomes a market. (and we see the same concept with hits and kudos on fanfics and how this determines what ones people think are worth reading)

we see it when people start criticising fics - again, not monetary but rather the same ideals - and determining which voices and which experiences can be heard, whilst the others are pushed aside. "no you can't write about this because i think it should be done this way and xyz and therefore your voice is irrelevant and we're going to cancel your fic online". people start determining whose voice can be heard and what the "right way" to do something is, the exact way they do in tradlit which is obviously dependent on capitalism now (which is a big part of why there's been a rise in selfpub recently)

we see it in the puritanical view people take towards fandom and characters - in the way certain ideals are restricted as being "too immoral" to write about and we end up, again, cancelling people (see here: period typical misogyny = the author being misogynistic and thus getting cancelled??) - we start, again, determining right and wrong ways of doing things and turn this sharing of ideas for fun from a hobby based mindset to more of a "i am a consumer and i am unhappy with the product i have received" type of mindset, which then leads to people making their ideas and works more "marketable" to the "consumer", and suddenly these capitalist values have changed the very way we produce content. are we doing X this way because we want to, or because people will get mad at us if we do Y?

we see SO many capitalist ideals in fandom that even if binds weren't being sold and fanfilms weren't taking extortionate amounts of money,,,, i still wouldn't say fanfiction is divorced from capitalism. i'd say we definitely have signs of the hierarchy, the restriction, the consumer x producer dynamic, and i'd argue that likes/followers/"the next big fic" etc etc are all signs of how fanfiction is infact not divorced from capitalism.

BUT!! my final point is that:

as a concept, absolutely it is! and in most instances, yes. fanfiction is divorced from capitalism - fanDOM is where it gets a bit trickier. but i think the big transition from more anonymous and communal ideas of fanfiction to a more interactive social media based one (esp platforms with high traction like tiktok) has meant that a lot of capitalist values (which are prevalent on SM in general) start infiltrating fandom so naturally because it's what we're used to! we're so used to the traction and the power and the hierarchy and the cancelling etc etc that we don't even notice it really. but fanfiction starts becoming more mainstream, people want traction, they evaluate the "market" and determine the best way to go about "selling" their fic, jump on the more "profitable" trends, etc etc etc. capitalism. hinderance of individual exploration and expression to appease the masses.

so theoretically and ideally? yes, fanfiction is divorced from capitalism. but realistically and in practice? no, because fanDOM isn't, and it affects fanFICTION

[glitter-stained]

Some of the posts I see here y'all gotta stop seeing fanfics as "bad dc takes". Like, it's perfectly fine to not like a trope that's popular in fanfic, but you gotta stop seeing it as character meta is what I'm saying. Fanfic writers are not canon writers, they do not owe you canon compliant, and you don't get to assume that what they're writing comes from a place of ignorance when there are so many reasons to include/not include something in your fic.

Like, allow me to use my own fics as example since they're the only one I have background info on the knowledge and motivations of the author:

-I wrote a fic with Lazarus Rage in it once. Do I know it's not canon? Absolutely. Do I think it's necessary for the understanding of Jason's character? Not at all, I think canon Jason is more interesting without the pit rage. I just wanted to write it once because it looked cathartic and you know what? It was. It was super cathartic. I wanted to write a story about the progression of a depressive episodes and using pit rage to talk about the feeling of loss of control with intense anger issues and sensation of loss and deep self-hatred afterwards, and i thought writing this is gonna feel good and it felt good, for me and for the readers.

-I'm also currently finishing another fic, in which I've simplified Tim's relationship with Jason's a lot (basically Tim is still haunted by Jason's ghost and Dick is still his favourite Robin but the victim blaming is much less intense and there's an intense, genuine admiration for Jason and happiness to get him back). Is it because I hate canon and its complexity? No, I love it, I love when character relationships are fucked up and they make a mess. I'd love to explore that in a different fic, even have the prompt already. But I'm writing a really intense fic about trauma, taboo and lack of communication around sexual abuse, and there are so many characters pov and things happening and I have to do this right because we're talking about things that happen to real people and not being accidentally insensitive or sending a shit message is more important to me than perfect canon compliance, and it's just not the place for it. This story isn't about tim, and it's not about victim-blaming. It's a fascinating can of worms to open, but I'm not gonna open it if I don't have the space to deal with it because I'm not gonna let worms roam freely all over my fanfic when I can choose not to include the worms in my story, because it might rely on base material but it's still a finite story that exists within its own scope because I'm not a comics writer, I'm a fanfic writer and my story doesn't exist as a pure extension of the comics and I don't owe you canon compliance. And how boring would that be if we could only write canon compliant stuff! No more coffee shop aus, no powers aus, fantasy aus, no more non canon ships between characters that hated eachother until the day they died (but had so much sexual tension)... Fanfic is not one single entity that takes place in a simplified version of the canon universe complete with consistent lukewarm tropes and watered down understanding of characters. Fanfics are rich and diverse and yeah canon compliant is great and i want more of it but the universe is so much wider and that's what makes it rich! Do some people write fanfic and also don't interact with or know canon? Sure, plenty of them. Does that fanfic reflect their opinion of canon? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You don't know that. In the meantime, people are still creating extra content and enriching the fandom experience and if you don't like it, genuinely, the filter tags button is right there. That's not to say there are no racist or classist or sexist tropes in fanfics, but again that exists within the scope of that story. Bad writing exists in canon, and it exists in fanfics, and sometimes a story is canon compliant with a terrible message and sometimes a story is canon divergent with a terrible message and pushing away everyone who writes things that aren't canon compliant is not going to fix these issues in the dc fandom. Telling people to "not write the character at all if you're going to write them ooc" assumes your understanding of what is essential to the character is perfect and The Right Way to interact with a fandom and it's patronising and not only do you take the risk of looking like a moron the second you make a mistake, it is actual gatekeeping and the reason many people find getting into comics/fandom intimidating in the first place. (And it also shits on the potential of AUs like dark reflections, mafia etc. Of course Mafia Bruce who kills people is deeply ooc. These stories are still fun and it's not wrong to write them!)

"This story really should have addressed that thing that happens in canon" did it happen in the setting of the fic? No? Then shut up and let the fic tell its own story, it doesn't have to "address" anything it doesn't have space for. Again, don't like don't read is a thing. Fanfic enriches the fandom, it doesn't take away from it, but you know what can? Canon writing. I'm way more concerned with what dc is having batman represent nowadays than with fanfic I haven't read because I knew I wouldn't like it.

TLDR: It's understandable to be upset when people who don't interact with canon material at all try to assert their opinion on canon as the truth, especially if they call any attempt at disagreeing with the mischaracterization gatekeeping, but that doesn't make you immune to being a gatekeeper. Assuming you know a writer's knowledge and opinions on a character because of that one fic of them is naive and a misunderstanding of what fanfic is. Fanfic writers are still real people who give you cool stuff for free and you don't have to like it but you still have to be respectful about it, and all that negative energy you spend on rants about "bad character and" you've read in fanfics would be so much better spent on bad canon writing because these people do have the power to fuck your favourite character over and they do owe you canon compliance, and with the amount of effort some fanfic writers put into their fics compared to some of the writers who get payed to write canon, you guys could stand to be more respectful about fanfics.

[gallaghersgal]

hello everyone! tysm for 1,500 followers, this means so much to me as someone who took almost a YEAR off of writing. the support i get and the friends i've made here mean so much to me! so LET'S CELEBTATE 🎉🎉

celebration masterlist here. looking for my main masterlist? it’s linked up top under "writer" <3

p.s. special shoutouts to my beloved moots at the bottom <3

❀ GENERAL RULES & INFO ❀

you can send in as many requests as you’d like!

if you don’t want spam, block/filter #maggie's 1.5k

it’s not required to be be following @gallaghersgal but it would be appreciated. if this is your first time interacting with my blog, come check me out!

also not required but if you like my content, go check out @carmenberzattosgf @thecapricunt1616 @mouseymilkovich @carmybrainworms and @notsonian they're great writers and even better friends! <33

this blog is NSFW, 18+ only, and so is this celebration! minors will be notified of this, then blocked if they don't unfollow. i'm not mean, i'm just not comfy with you reading my works underage.

anon is on, by sending an anon ask you are telling me you are 18+

my inbox is open now, so feel free to go send in asks!! celebration requests close Friday, August 23rd at midnight!

❀ REQUESTS ❀

send me in a character + prompt for a blurb! i am accepting prompts from this au list, this trope list, this smut list, or this other smut list.

please include the number or prompt, and the list it's from since there's more than one!

for this celebration i will write for any character from shameless, the bear, marvel cinematic universe, daredevil, all star wars trilogies, the mandalorian, and the clone wars. i will also write any of oscar isaac, pedro pascal, or barry keoghan's characters, or any formula one driver.

i will also write sydcarmy 😚🧚🏻‍♀️

i will do my best to write ANY character from the fandoms listed above, i know i have a wide range of followers! however, i am more likely to lean towards requests for the characters listed here.

please limit your request to one to two prompts, or one au/trope + one prompt. i will have a lot to write, so this will help me get your req done quicker!

requests missing a prompt or character will be deleted. general requests not w/o a celebration prompt will be saved for afterwards.

❀ GAMES ❀

send a 💒 + a self description for me to ship you with someone from any of the media listed here. please include the fandom/media you want a ship from, as well as preference for male/female character or of you have no preference.

send a 💿 for a 5 song playlist based off your blog! or add a character from the listed medias for a playlist based on them.

send a 💌 to shoutout a writer, or to self promo your own fic! i will read & reblog, or give my thoughts on their writings <33

send a 💘 + three characters or people for me to play fuck, marry, kill with

send a 🌸 and ask me any question you have about a blurb or fic of mine!

that's all! enjoy the celebration!! sappy shoutouts to my fav pookies below <33

@tinyphantomsalad THE first mutual i made on here that i'm still talking to. the man i run my filthiest porn by, and he doesn't bat an eye. the love and respect for you i have is insane. what are we at now? four years? feels like four hundred. i love u endlessly.

@thelazyhero-ttums the one that's in my corner 24/7. only irl i have on this god forsaken site, bc you're just so so special. how do you think 7th grade maggie with her hand written leo and calypso fanfic feels about 1.5k? thank you for being with me for all of it.

@devils-dares thank you for sticking by my side even with my change in eras!! and for vibe checking so many fics you know nothing about <33 ur a real one pooks

@carmenberzattosgf im thankful all the time that u messaged me first bc how else would i have someone to get up to dm shenanigans and share my ideas with?

@thecapricunt1616 my sweetest capri, i'm so happy we're friends, i love reading your messages and i LOOVEEE your moodboards my queen

@mouseymilkovich ur a real one cause who else is gonna send me 1926284 ethan cutkosky edits? i love hearing all your plot bunnies for speechless, i can't wait to see where you take the series!

@carmybrainworms i hope you're enjoying your time in the ocean, and i'm so glad i brought u over to the dark side with my lip fics. ur the sweetest silliest ever and ilysm

@l4long-winded & @emotionoitme we haven't talked much yet, but i'm so excited to share more ideas with each other! you're both amazing writers who i'm so glad to call my friends

@notsonian u are genuinely the sweetest, i love talking to you about our ideas (esp the mkverse!) and i love love looovveee your fics! keep up the good work <33

[therealtsk]

What Your Favorite Worm Ship Says About You

some people have found my crusty, old ass tumblr post on this very topic, so im making a new one with my updated opinions! Cause those are, in fact, allowed to change. Enjoy! Taylor x Lisa: you recognize the obvious fact that these two have more natural chemistry then any of the actual relationships in Worm, and you're into relationships that could be dysfunctional or healthy with one push in either direction. also something something sun lesbian moon lesbian. Taylor x Rachel: You love dogs, and you want a girlfriend who can kick your ass. You're also into bomber jackets. I respect you. Taylor x Alec: Sadly, you do exist, and you did make it weird. Go away! Taylor x Amy: You read altpowers on the daily and complain about canon worm being too grimdark. Solid odds on you having never read worm. To be clear, it's worse if you have. also something something FBI OPEN UP Taylor x Victoria: You like the vibes of Lisa and Taylor's dynamic, but you want them to be a little more heroic and a little less dysfunctional. But only a little. Taylor x Clockblocker: You're straight and liked that one joke that cropped up. I also haven't seen any of you in a hot minute, thank god. No offense but this ship is mad boring.

Taylor x Sophia: You've come to realize that Sophia is a great character who gets done extremely dirty by the rest of the fandom. Also, rivals to lovers. Taylor x Emma: This can go one of two ways. Either you adore childhood friends to lovers, or you love enemies to lovers. Either way, you're obsessed with hurt and/or comfort fics. Taylor x Theo: You actually read Worm and recognize that Theo is criminally underrated in the fandom. Now just stop shipping him with Taylor and you'll complete the next step on your journey to enlightenment.

Taylor x Simurgh: I can't say for sure you're a anime fan, but you're definitely at least a little bit of a monsterfucker. also something something inherent eroticism of being world-destroying power couple. Taylor x Greg. You read Worm SI's unironically and get really defensive when people say that Greg is an incel. Completely unrelated, you haven't spoken to a woman other then your mother in five years. Taylor x Cherie: I've been informed this is a ship. I've yet to be informed as of a reason why I should like it. Cherie likers stay mad!

Lisa x Rachel: I don't remember the last time I saw this ship that wasn't also tagged as a polycule with Taylor, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're an OT3 enjoyer.

Lisa x Victoria: You’re into the “enemies to lovers” trope, but more of the "Spiderman x Black Cat" type then the "you murdered my entire home town but i can't help but find you sexy" type. Also you have a thing for blondes

Lisa x Faultline: Your ideal relationship dynamic is bickering married couple. You're also into heist movies.

Lisa x Simurgh: You have a thing for smart girls... who hate you. Also, you really liked Part of the Whole.  Contessa x Alexandria: You're fucking based. Also something something inherent eroticism of girlbosses winning. Contessa x Numberman: you're friends with Peri and enjoy memes about pants and math. Numberman x Jack Slash: You think serial killers are hot and are starved for m/m ships. Danny x Eidolon: You're losersexual and are starved for m/m ships. Also you frequent r/wormemes. Danny x Miss Militia: Honestly, i think you all died out. I couldn't be happier, this ship is fucking dumb. Amy x Literally Anyone Besides Taylor: listen, there's like a hundred different jokes i could make here, but all of them boil down to amy fans always defending the rapist for some reason so let's just agree amy defenders are fucking cringe and move on Dragon x Defiant: You understand that this is unironically the only healthy relationship in worm with some of the best character growth and romance in the entire story, and a majority of all of it happens off screen. You're extremely bitter that so many fanfics do both of them so dirty they get beaten into different characters. Alec x Aisha: You like the idea of this ship, cause two pranksters making everyone miserable is the kinda vibe you enjoy, but constantly run into the issue that Alec is...well. Alec. That or you're into Alec's brand of shit, in which case, FBI OPEN UP Aisha x Missy: You read It's Cold Out There Every Day. I did too. Fuck, this fic is so good. I'm going to go cry about the ending again. Lily x Sabah: Yes, you know the age gap is a little problematic, you just want to be happy with your relatively healthy canon lesbians goddamn it Purity x Literally Anyone: You don't understand why people keep calling you racist. You're not! You're just weirdly defensive of the hot milf who murders people of color and seem to constantly bring up that Kaiser didn't actually believe the nazi propaganda he was peddling. You are racist btw Taylor x Brian: You...are Wildbow

[multi-fandom-lunatic]

as someone who has delusions I don't think those white women are delusional but I do think they're like. Really irritating lol. Like I get where they're coming from to an extent (I myself have fantasised about just being a fairy queen or whatever in a palace because I am tired of capitalism lmfao). However I also don't really get why they're fantasising about a misogynistic man choosing them. It's like the opposite of how white Christian women will clutch their pearls when they go outside because due to white supremacy's view of white women, they've made themselves believe they're so vulnerable that they're the only people cis white men will prey on/attack. And a lot of these authors and FMCs are white, they usually leave no space for poc and if they do, then it's usually the moc who's the big hunky toxic love interest. In romantasy poc aren't allowed to be soft apparently, they must always appear aggressive/more masculine/flirty so that the demure white woman can swoon over them (if they're men) or scoff at their trying to find romance (if they're women). Yes, in real life misogynistic white men will usually choose white women as romantic partners, but white women don't see them as misogynistic. So across all genres of media, we still see white women try desperately to push poc out. They either push canon characters of colour out of romances with healthy white male characters and insert themselves/white ocs, or they find another white character to ship their white fave with. I feel like romantasy, as it currently stands as a commercialisation of fanfic, is a culmination of white fans' behaviour because fandom is not only misogynistic, it is usually racist as well.

I think the delusional part of it for me (though, I admit, poor choice of word) is them believing that this misogynistic man will change for them. Stop being misogynistic for them. Stop being a shitty person for them. It's really about being the exception to the rule.

I think it's really deeply rooted misogyny. White cis Christian women have been like the ideal woman model historically. They've been seen as pure and therefore good. This is rooted in misogyny. And along with white cis Christian women being the Gold Standard, so is being a white cis hyper masculine man. White women fantasising about these kind of men is really just due to the patriarchy (oh wow! the patriarchy strikes again!). They don't want to be mistreated, they just want do know that they're desired. Like "I have a white cis Christian hyper masculine man, therefore I'm important". But in books, wanting a guy that is acceptable to want isn't entertaining so they make the dude the villain and morally grey.

And this completely pushes POC out of the romance picture. So, POC women have to be indifferent/completely uninterested in romance (and they count this as a "yay feminism!" moment), and them being indifferent to romance means they must obviously not be soft, right? They simply have to be tough, because to them soft = romance and tough = no romance. And POC don't have a place in romance so they simply have to be tough, right?

And the hunky toxic MOC is such a tired trope. POC are ALWAYS seem as more masculine (based on Eurocentric beauty standards) and therefore aggressive. And even in fandom, you'll notice that characters who are white and protective are seen as significantly less aggressive than character who are POC and protective (I've actually been planning to write a rant about this on one of the characters from my fandom, but anywho).

It's insane how many vaguely badass white woman x hypermasculine MOC ships there are in Booktok books. And each time they're hailed for being representative of POC while falling into tropes that are rooted in racism. There's a weird thing where people feel the need to choose between bad representation vs no representation at all (this is more prevelant in queer rep, but the point stands). They forget that good representation is an option and settle for these mediocre at best, shitty at worst representation, which then because popular because white people tend to think any representation = good representation (ignoring whether it's good or bad).

A lot of the tropes that are used in Booktok today are rooted in racism or straight up exclude people of colour (which is also racist, but I feel the need to clarify), so they create these tropes for POC that end up also being rooted in racism, because the people that are creating/popularising/consuming these tropes are mostly white people.

And this isn't just limited to Booktok. There's genuinely good representation in media that is swept under the rug by fandoms uplift white characters. This is a bit of a tangent, the point is important. You might have heard of the Disney show The Owl House. Main character Luz Noceda finds herself in the demon realm and has a bunch of adventures there. What I'd like to focus on is that in a show starring an Afro-Dominican-America girl, who is arguably the most likeable and interesting out of the entire cast, her arc and character as a whole is overshadowed (in the fandom, not the show, which is important to clarify) by Amity and Hunter. Amity, who is a reformed mean girl with shitty parents (she's well written but the trope is a bit overdone IMO) and Hunter, who has the least substance out of any TOH character. Somehow, the two most poorly written main characters in the show (who, surprise surprise, are white) overshadow a very interesting, likeable and relatable POC protagonist. And I should clarify, being relatable is not something authors should desperately be trying to achieve in their characters, but it baffles me how a character who is perfect to project yourself onto (keep in mind TOH's audience, which is mostly neurodivergent queer teens who are heavily involved in fandom) managed to be an underrated character. I don't think I'll ever forgive the TOH fandom for that. Anyways....that was a bit long, but this is definitely applicable to Booktok. Even the characters that should be the fan favourite by all the metrics that make white characters a fan favourite are completely thrown aside to favour white characters.

And I guess the above ties in a belief that I have that fandom is not queerphobic but can be racist. My example from TOH would be my example, but also how fandoms react when a live action film of their book is announced and their white character is going to be played by a black woman.

Holy shit this got a bit tangenty, and I still have stuff to say about fandom not really being progressive but just being dominated by white, usually queer people. But I'll save that for another time. Thank you for popping by, Booktok anon. I had a lot to say about this one, lol.

[bookworm-1196]

Part 5 of my yearly wrap up : my 30 favorite ships that I shipped throughout the year

1. Percabeth (Percy and Annabeth from the PJO & HOO series by Rick Riordan) the first ship I ever shipped I want a love like theirs

2. Locklyle (Lucy and Lockwood from Lockwood & Co series by Jonathan Stroud) I love slow burn couples in book series where you see the characters evolve over the years and where the romance isn’t the main plot

3. Herongraystairs (Will Jem and Tessa from the the Infernal Devices trilogy by Cassandra Clare) always thinking about them in some way shape or form I want a love like theirs

All these ships are my Roman Empire btw they all share the top spot there’s no ranking

4. Pip and Ravi from AGGGTM by Holly Jackson - badass intelligent talented girl x supportive funny guy who loves her like it’s breathing trope you will always have my heart (funny that seems to be a consistent pattern with these ships lol)

5. Malec (Magnus and Alec from the Shadowhunter Chronicles by Cassandra Clare) yes I know they’re everyone’s favorite along with Herongraystairs I’m basic bla-bla-bla but have you considered that they’re popular bc they’re such a top tier ship? All the ships I mentioned are ships I could write an essay or multiple essays about just get me all the books they’re in so I can quote stuff and around ten to twenty hours and I’ll write an essay of 292749299171883902883 words about how much I love them

6. Pandalily (Pandora Lovegood and Lily Evans from the Marauders fandom loosely based off of the HP series) I’m writing a fic about them I have to put them in the top 10 even if I’ve been relatively inactive in the fandom and when it comes to actually writing my fic (sorry I’ve been busy with school and existential crises lately)

7. Wolfstar (Sirius Black and Remus Lupin from the Marauders fandom especially from the fic All The Young Dudes by MsKingBean89 because in that fic the angst and the slow burn are unparalleled)

8. Jegulus (James Potter and Regulus Black from the Marauders fandom, especially from the fics crimson rivers by bizarrestars, only the brave by solmussa and art heist baby! by otrtbs) not the biggest shipper bc i read too many fics of them in too short a time and got jegulus overexposure and needed to take a break from reading fanfics for a while but in those three fanfics especially crimson rivers and only the brave they’re incredible

9. Dorlene (Dorcas Meadowes and Marlene McKinnon from the Marauders fandom) I want to write a fic about them next. In my head they’re sooo imgonnagetyouback by Taylor Swift coded

10. Kanej (Kaz and Inej from Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo) soulmates in my opinion but not in the “they were destined for each other” SJM way but in a “their souls fit together like pieces of a puzzle and everything falls into place perfectly because their love is just so cosmically powerful, they weren’t destined for each other but they loved each other so much from now on they will meet and love each other in every lifetime” kind of way if that makes sense (same goes for all the ships here especially Herongraystairs)

11. Herondaisy (otherwise known as James and Cordelia from The Last Hours by Cassandra Clare) the unrequited lining the angst they’re just so perfect

12. Kitty (Kit and Ty from The Dark Artifices and soon to be The Wicked Powers main couple by Cassandra Clare) I love angst and pining and an excruciatingly long slow burn so you know I love Kit and Ty

13. Nick and Charlie from Heartstopper by Alice Oseman - it seems like your typical teenage love story but it’s actually so much more than that at the same time, I want what they have

14. Everlark (Katniss and Peeta from The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins) a beautiful love story

15. Sizzy (Simon and Isabelle from The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare) I love them so much

16. Firstprince (Alex and Henry from Red White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston) RWRB is perhaps one of my favorite romance books ever and I love the “exchanging love letters” trope

17. Helnik (Nina and Matthias from Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo) I knew Matthias was going to die bc of spoilers from before I read SoC but it still hurt so much

18. Solangelo (Will and Nico from HoO, ToA and TSATS by Rick Riordan) the sun and the star wasn’t one of my favorite books of the year but I still love them

19. Ruegard (Clarisse and Silena from PJO by Rick Riordan) I joined TikTok this year and discovered they were shipped by a pretty big part of the PJO fandom and now I need to reread PJO.)

20. Eva and Celeste from It Goes Like This by Miel Moreland - I highly recommend this book it’s abt a queer sapphic band who get broken up and now they come back together to perform one last time. The main couple, Eva and Celeste have such a beautiful story I don’t want to spoil anything

21. Teo and Aurelio from The Sunbearer Trials by Aiden Thomas - they got together too soon in the second book in my (very very biased towards excruciating slow burns) opinion but I loved them in the first book

22. Kit and Theo from The Pairing by Casey McQuiston - the fact that we have two Kits and two Teo/Theos on this list but in different ships (also two Wills) is kinda funny. I really loved their story and I want a love that’s so profound but also so fun like theirs.

23. Thomastair (Thomas and Alastair from The Last Hours by Cassandra Clare) I love them so much

24. Ghostwriter (Lucy and Jesse from The Last Hours by Cassandra Clare) they’re a big part of why Chain of Iron is one of my favorite TSC books but also their relationship conflict in CoT about not being able to kiss for a weird illogical reason was just not believable

25. Gracestopher (Grace and Christopher from The Last Hours by Cassandra Clare) some people ship them but in a platonic way some people ship them in a romantic way I understand both sides and honestly as long as we got to see the two of them develop a close bond based on love and trust it doesn’t entirely matter. Unfortunately CoT broke my heart

26. Ineffable Husbands (Aziraphale and Crowley from Good Omens) I watched Good Omens at the end of 2023 and read Good Omens the book at the start of January 2024 I still think of them from time to time and I’m not really up to date on s3 news but apparently s3 is going to be much shorter 😢 again that thing I said about loving excruciating angst and pining

27. Rosekiller (Evan Rosier and Barty Crouch jr from the Marauders fandom specifically in the fic “I’m not going to teach him to dance with you” by greensenne (not 100% sure I haven’t messed up the name of the fic but 100% sure that’s what the fic author is called if ever you want to check it out. It’s a no Voldemort AU with lots of Speak Now by Taylor Swift vibes) they’re Wolfstar but evil/morally gray Slytherins depending on the fic basically)

28. Jurdan (Jude and Cardan from The Folk of the Air series by Holly Black)

29. Fierrochase (Alex and Magnus from Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard by Rick Riordan) I discovered the TSC fandom bc I kept reading Pinterest posts with “Magnus and Alec” in them and thinking huh I don’t remember that part of the story from Magnus Chase and also why is there consistently a typo in Alex’s name?? I love their dynamic so much I NEED to reread MCGA next year

30. Edwin and Charles from the Dead Boy Detectives TV show on Netflix (why does Netflix keep cancelling shows I love? I watched it and then right after Netflix cancelled it)

Honorable mentions go to Just for the summer by Abby Jimenez my second favorite romance book I read this year after The Pairing.

[qulizalfos]

🤔, 👻, and 🛏 for the ask game !!

hi bee my beloved🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶thank you so so much yay!!!!!!!!

🤔 - are there any new characters you want to write about? ABSOLUTELY🥳🥳in terms of fanfic i’m planning to feature the rest of the party in ch2 of cosmic and hopefullllyyy a few other st characters that don’t often make it into my fics!! i’m actually sooo excited!!!!!HDICHAJDIWJSHWHSJ. and just for the next year in general im excited to branch out characterwise 💛 plus i’ll more than likely end up writing for new fandoms<33 (ik i have like 4k of a 911 fic sitting in google docs rn that is staring at me at all times forever . but also. i can’t wait to write for more fandoms overall YAYYAY) and for original writing, im going to finish my short story and finally pin down a first draft of a novel concept i’ve been messing around with for a few years(?) ehheehehehweee

👻 - is there a new genre you’d like to write? HORROR MY BELOVED🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶i wanna weave it into as many of my works as i can because it’s something i usually didn’t go for as a writer before but as of late i have become Fascinated. also it’s just such a broad genre that there’s so much potential for different stories there. i’m SOOOO. oudhskdhshxbsusjjwhejsjwjsndhxjwjqjhs!!!! you know!!!!! keysmashed again but im on my phone and it autocorrected to sandwich. kicks rocks. anyway both of my main original wips are based on horror (if loosely) and i’m having a lot of fun so far so i can’t wait to continue :]

🛏️ - is there a new trope you’d like to write this year? 😈😈😈hehee😈. hmm i will just say Timeloop. and leave it there💛🫶😈😈 yippee teehee etc!!😈😈😈😈😈

<33 THABK YOU SOOOOOOOOIOOO much for the ask ilysm hope you’re doing well🫶🫶🫶

[queengiuliettafirstlady]

🧡 𝗗𝗜𝗙𝗙𝗘𝗥𝗘𝗡𝗧 𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗩𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗘, 𝗦𝗔𝗠𝗘 𝗟𝗢𝗩𝗘 2 - AN ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSE (AU)-THEMED OTOME CONTENT CREATION CHALLENGE

For the second time, @xxsycamore and I are bringing to you a week-long exploration of the trope Alternative Universe! (link to last year’s challenge here)

→ GENERAL RULES

Works of all forms are welcome! Fanarts, fanfics, headcanons, etc.

Limited to otome fandoms - mobile otome games such as: IkeSeries (Ikemen Vampire, Ikemen Prince, Ikemen Villains, Ikemen Sengoku, Ikemen Revolution, Ikemen Genjiden); Tears of Themis; Obey me!; Mr Love: Queen’s Choice; Light and Night; Voltage games; Mystic Messenger and others, as well as console otomes.

This challenge takes place between June 19th and June 25th, 2023. The deadline for posting your works is July 15th (until midnight, UTC+2).

Instead of making the masterlist after the deadline, @xxsycamore who is in charge of it will try to create the post in advance and update it regularly during the challenge. Don’t hesitate to contact us if your work was done within the deadline but wasn’t featured in the masterlist. Or, if you prefer not to be featured on the masterlist instead!

When posting your works, use the tag #different universe same love ccc - you can as well tag @xxsycamore and @queengiuliettafirstlady in your posts! It will help us find your work easier!

Posting to other sites is allowed - as long as you mention the challenge and its creators.

Reblogs are appreciated!

→ CONTENT RULES

This challenge features a list of 14 AU prompts, two for each day, plus 7 dialogue prompts which you can match to your liking, if you want to. You’re free to create a work based on whichever AU you like more for that day. You can also create works for both AU prompts, and you can also mix the two prompts into one work! Whatever suits your preferences :) You can create more than one work for the same prompt, too!

You can find the lists of prompts on the banner above, as well at the bottom of this post.

Under the cut, you will also find a short explanation of each AU prompt, just in case there is anything unclear about them.

Any additional rules are up to the content creators. You are free to choose the rating(make sure to mark your NSFW works accordingly, and if you’re minor, make sure not to interact with such!), and also the genre (the challenge’s main focus is romantic love, but it is not obligatory for your work to be of such genre), all characters and ships included are up to you (OCs, character x MC, character x character, etc.)

You’re free to take requests from your audience using these prompt lists, again please make sure to mention the challenge and its creators.

You’re absolutely free to post your works for this challenge after its deadline, July 15th - but please note that they won’t be featured in the masterlist!

The final and most important rule is to have fun and not pressure yourself about full completion of the challenge. Do only as many works as you wish! :)

Here is a free-to-use banner/header for the challenge!:

If you have any additional questions, we’ll be happy to help. There is no such thing as a stupid question, so don’t hesitate to get in contact with us! We wish you happy creating!

→ THE LISTS

Day 1 - June 19th- Bodyguard AU | Mafia AU

Day 2 - June 20th- Angels and Demons AU | Pirate/Mermaid AU

Day 3 - June 21st- Social Media AU |Coffee/Flower shop AU

Day 4 - June 22nd- Celebrity AU | Bookstore AU

Day 5 - June 23rd - Forbidden love AU | Soulmates AU

Day 6 - June 24th- Office AU | Circus/Magic AU

Day 7 - June 25th- FREE DAY (an AU of your choice!)

Dialogue prompts:

“Him? Are you kidding me? He’s not even my type!”

“We didn’t even exchange numbers! I’m such a fool.”

“We should have never met.”

“Ah, it’s you again! Do you come here often?”

“I’ll be waiting at our spot. Make sure no one sees you.”

“Promise me we will always have each other.”

“Maybe we’ll meet again someday.”

Under the cut you’ll find a short explanation of each AU:

Bodyguard AU - character A is appointed to protect character B

Mafia AU - an extension of Mobster AU, with a mafia setting - typically involves rivalry and enemies-to-lovers tropes

Angels and Demons AU - typically depicts the forbidden love between character A who is an angel and character B who is a demon. You can also write about Fallen angels/Ascended demons.

Pirate/Mermaid AU - an AU that features merfolk characters or pirates - or both!

Social Media AU - an AU where the characters meet on social media and begin their friendship/relationship online.

Coffee/Flower shop AU - typically resolves around a small business that character A either owns or works at, and their loyal customer, character B; but they can also be both customers, or coworkers.

Celebrity AU - placing your character(s) in a setting where they’re famous. Other characters could be their fans; working with them, meeting them by chance…

Bookstore AU - similar to Coffee/Flower shop AU.

Forbidden love AU - a setting where the characters are forbidden from being together for whatever reason.

Soulmates AU - a setting where everyone has One True Love and the ways of finding it varies depending on the creator. An example of a popular Soulmate AU is “Your soulmate’s name is written on you”.

Office AU - a setting where the characters work together in an office.

Circus/Magic AU - a setting where the characters either work in the circus or are magic users - the latter involves anything fantasy-related, basically.

FREE DAY - The last day of this challenge is for you to choose your own prompt! It can perfectly well overlap with an already existing prompt. Maybe your favorite Alternative Universe wasn’t in the list above? This is your chance to include your idea in the list :)

ONCE AGAIN, HAPPY CREATING! WE CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOUR CREATIONS 🧡

[sapphia]

Speaking of copying and plagarising and all that good stuff, how do we feel about the copying and distributing of fan content as a preservation method?

Fanfiction is an old enough medium that we've seen huge losses of content only preserved through site caches and saved stories, which is a true loss to fandom history. This is the reason why I've left up the vast majority of my fanfics, despite no longer being able to take pride in the skill of my writing from a time so very long ago: it's a little timecapsule into not just my own history but fandom and fanfiction history. Fanfiction is absolutely all about trends and in-things, be that the content it's writing about or fanfiction concept trends, and one day we're absolutely going to want to remember that people were writing these sorts of stories en-masse.

Although there are already many author's whose work we've likely lost because they've self-deleted or removed for censorship over the past 30 years (literally, that's how old ff.net is), we've yet to see the biggest total-time-capsule loss that could happen to fanfiction history--the mass-deletion or wipe of ff.net content from the post-fanfic boom (such as if the site is ever killed or if the administrators do another largescale purge as with the M+ bans and subsequent porn crackdowns). Some stories have been preserved through reposting by the authors, and some have been saved by fans who downloaded them to archive or for their own personal offline use.

Not all of these have been reposted--some day in the future there will be a lot of work put in to trying to trace down and preserve many of the pillarstone fics of the fanfiction communities from these times. And it's crazy to think that some of my fics, with their modest reviews and low hitcounts, are a part of this history, whether it's because someone out there someday will desperately what to reread a crackfic about a naruto character reading other characters bedtime stories, or because I was one of the many people writing harry potter fanfiction tropes that grew and evolved and developed into other things that we are still seeing in modern fanfiction today.

And even further into the future--how do we feel about reposting AO3 and other fanfiction works now? Sure, AO3 seems safe at present, but it won't always be, and many of the authors from its early years have orphaned, or worse, deleted, their immensely-popular stories.

When does copying and plagarising and reposting works without permission move into archiving? There are many fanfictions from the 2000s we will never recover because no one would have ever dreamt to copy them and put them anywhere else without the author's permission. That's a horrible thing to do to an author! But you simply cannot rely on an author to preserve their own work if you are wanting to ensure it will be available for any purpose in the future, be that research or discussion or consumption or any other reason. The author may not be alive. They may not be aware anything is happening to their story at all. They may be the writer of My Immortal and turn out to be a horrible person who deleted everything and likely would have deleted her base fic too had she had access to the account to do it.

When do we take works out of the hands of authors and say: This. This is important enough for us to save, whether you want it or not?

When does plagarism become preservation?

[darkstarofchaos]

For the character ask game, I'm not sure how many numbers you're willing to do for a single ask, so you can just do as much as you want from this. For Prowl - 2, 3, 7, 8, 12, 15, 16, 23, 25

I don't mind a bunch of numbers! Gives me an excuse to ramble, lol. And to rant, because Prowl deserves better.

2: Favorite canon thing about this character?

His willingness to look Optimus in the face and tell him he's being stupid, and to do his own thing to mitigate the stupidity if he has to. Mostly applicable to IDW, but Optimus needs a foil so badly in G1 that I've pretty much transplanted it into G1 Prowl when I write him. Not in its entirety, because G1 Prowl isn't IDW Prowl, but I like that he has his own opinions on tactics and morality and doesn't just go with the Autobot collective. His job is not to be a yes-mech; it's to keep people alive and win battles. If his commander is making stupid decisions, what benefit is there in standing back and letting it happen?

3. Least favorite canon thing about this character?

Making the police car an actual cop was the most boring decision anyone could have made. In stories where the Cybertronians choose their alts, especially, there are so many more interesting things you could say about his character by giving him a pre-war job that's completely unrelated to his Earth alt. For example, I like to think he chose it for tactical reasons: it's a common black and white vehicle, thus perfect as a disguise, and the sirens let him "legally" break Earth traffic laws in an emergency. It's far more interesting if his alt is a result of strategy and reasoning instead of, "I guess I'll take the one that matches my old job description."

7. What's something the fandom does when it comes to this character that you like?

I like that people took the little tidbit about Prowl having trouble with the unexpected that has exclusively appeared in two bios (that I'm aware of) and made it reasonably common. Would be really nice if they treated it seriously instead of making it comic relief, but maybe it does get treated more seriously these days. I don't read a lot of Prowl fic.

Let's talk about why.

8. What's something the fandom does when it comes to this character that you despise?

The image compilations of Prowl getting punched. The prick jokes that litter every TF Wiki page for every G1-based Prowl. The fanfics where Prowl is an uncompromising jerk or straight-up hate sink because the author needed a mean Autobot. The conversations and hypotheticals that make Prowl the source of any amoral action the Autobots take. The people who distill him down into Essence of Asshole and strip out every positive or sympathetic quality he has.

"Prowl gets villainized for being sensible" is one of my most hated fanfic tropes. Grab just about any fic where a Decepticon defects or earns the Autobots' sympathy in some way, and Prowl will be the only one who's unhappy with the situation. Which is perfectly reasonable because that is an enemy and he has no reason to trust them, let alone like them. But because we're supposed to sympathize with the Decepticon, that makes Prowl the villain. The other Autobots aren't naive and unreasonably forgiving, Prowl is just a bad person.

And it's not just IDW fics. G1 Prowl didn't get a whole lot of screen time, and thus no chance to develop his own personality, so he gets slapped with the same portrayal. Never mind the fact that when he does show up, he's one of the nicest characters - sure, he gets in on trash talking the Decepticons (though far less than some of the Autobots), but he's always helping out around base, shows concern for others, and pretty much stays out of interpersonal conflict. And yet, in stories based on a cartoon that has Powerglide, Gears, Cliffjumper, and Optimus Prime himself, I am expected to believe Prowl is the Autobots' resident jerk. Not gonna happen.

12. What's a headcanon you have for this character?

As I mentioned earlier, it's kind of quasi-canon that Prowl has trouble dealing with the unexpected. It's never appeared in any actual media, but it does come from official sources, so I wouldn't call it a headcanon. But I do headcanon that he has some pretty severe anxiety in dealing with people because of it. Things like math and physics are reliable; if something doesn't do what you expect it to, it's because you lacked information, and you can remedy that. You can update your calculations based on the results you actually got, or try to find out what you were missing the first time. Given enough data, you can predict just about anything as long as the results are consistent.

People are not consistent. You can make some sweeping generalizations about them based on categories - social groups, behaviors, readily obvious personality traits - but you can never say with certainty that someone will react in a specific way to something. Once you've known them for a while, you start to understand them and can anticipate them with a reasonable degree of accuracy, but that's assuming their behavior is genuine and consistent. If they're messing with you or pretending to be something they aren't, your data is inaccurate, and you can't correct it unless you know it's inaccurate.

People are the only things in the natural world that can deliberately give you false data about what to expect from them. So yes, I think Prowl has social anxiety. And probably some form of people-centric agoraphobia or anthropophobia.

(I also headcanon him as biromantic asexual. It has nothing to do with the above, and actually predates the anxiety headcanon).

15. What's your favorite ship for this character? (Doesn't matter if it's canon or not.)

If I had to pick just one pairing, I guess I would say Jazz/Prowl. Which is ironic, because for a long time, it was one of my least favorite Prowl pairings. Not because it was particularly objectionable; it was just everywhere, and I couldn't see it working. I think of Prowl as the kind of person who needs a steady, reliable partner who will let him have his routines and respect his desire to plan things before doing them, and Jazz's thing is more spontaneity and flexibility. He seemed like one of the worst partners for Prowl, especially with how I developed Prowl's disorders over the years.

In the end, though, that spontaneity is what brought them full circle to a pairing I can support. Because I do think Jazz would be willing to compromise and accommodate for Prowl's needs, and that Prowl could eventually trust that he's not going to suddenly change how he acts around him. It's a rather tenuous case of opposites attract, and requires patience from both parties, but I can see it working now.

16. What's your least favorite ship for this character?

First, an honorable mention goes to my immediate impulse, which was Constructicons/Prowl. I get why people want IDW Prowl to have someone on his side, and I don't think the Constructicons meant any harm. But Prowl was forced into the team through a series of traumatic events, the Constructicons like him for things he hates about himself, and being a part of Devastator seems to have contributed to his psychological decline. It wasn't a good or healthy situation for him, and I feel like the Constructicons having romantic feelings for him actually makes it more uncomfortable for me.

That being said, I'm going to have to go with Optimus/Prowl as my absolute least favorite ship. Optimus is very strongly motivated by morality and will generally take what he perceives to be the most moral action in a given situation. Pair that with someone like Prowl, who is willing to cross lines when he feels he has to, and you already have a relationship on rough ground. The only way things can work between them is either for Optimus to accept Prowl's "moral failings", or for Prowl to change a fundamental part of himself. There is literally no option that doesn't require one of them to compromise their principles or change who they are. And since Optimus isn't the kind of person who will do that, the only hope for a relationship is to "fix" Prowl. And that gets into abusive territory, because Optimus has power over Prowl in both the physical sense and in their professional relationship. He also has social power, because because Prowl is unpopular and Optimus is exactly the kind of person you wouldn't expect to be capable of abuse.

And yes. For the sake of argument, it could be toxic from Prowl's side too. He could try to hurt Optimus by throwing his mistakes in his face, or by blaming him for everything that goes wrong. But Optimus has a great deal of confidence in himself and the support of pretty much everyone, while Prowl is isolated and already isn't proud of things he's done. He is far more vulnerable to abuse than Optimus is, socially and psychologically, and he just doesn't deserve that.

23. Favorite picture of this character?

Mmm. I guess I would have to say this one, since it inspired an entire story that I'm still working on. There's actually another one that I like better (which also spawned an in-progress story), but I'd have to do more digging to find the link for that one. Might do it later.

25. What was your first impression of this character? How about now?

When I started watching G1, the Autobots were just a conglomerate of near-identical personalities to me. Prowl was just one of the generic background bots who got a few minutes of screentime in one episode and was otherwise relegated to a support role. I was mildly interested by some of the fanfic portrayals I saw, but I definitely preferred the Decepticons, so I didn't read much where he was a main character unless there were Decepticon MCs too. And most of those fics were written by a couple authors whose endings were consistently disappointing, so after I stopped reading their stuff, Prowl just dropped off my radar.

Nowadays, Prowl is my favorite Autobot (well, second favorite after Skyfire). Thanks to IDW, I kind of see him as the Autobot version of Starscream (narratively if not in personality), but he's also a fascinating character in his own right. I love that he doesn't conform to the Autobots as a whole, he's fun to write and analyze, and he was the one good thing I got out of the IDW comics. 10/10 character, deserves better.

[frostbitepandaaaaa]

Answer the Questions and Tag 5 Fanfic Authors

thanks for the tag @andorerso and @quarantineddreamer

1. How did you get into writing fanfiction?

weirdly enough.... exactly like B-- i was a young, weird little girl who wanted to live in Brian Jaques' world of Redwall so i wrote little stories of my own in that universe. shit, i could not have been older than 9 or 10. it just kind of sprouted from there.

2. How many fandoms have you written in?

published fics? six. (x files, game of thrones, mad max: fury road, star wars/rogue one/andor, avatar the last airbender, harry potter) unpublished? maybe three or four more than that.

3. How many years have you been writing fanfiction?

when i started publishing fanfic... oh my god it's been like 19/20 years now.

4. Do you read or write more fanfiction?

write. i go through phases, of course, but i am such a picky bitch. my phases usually end up like this:

step one) i read everything there is to read based on a certain niche trope that i am in the mood for at the time.

step two) wow! that was great. what a feast!

step three) ...okay i'm still hungry and these fics didn't quite scratch this very, very niche itch i have so--

step four) *chuckles* i'm in danger.

5. What is one way you’ve improved as a writer?

i feel like i've gotten a lot better at plotting and pacing. it's weird, because i never felt like that was really an issue for me before, but i've realized that until i started writing for rebelcaptain, i was heavily a 'vibes-based' writer. which i feel that i still am in many ways, but with rebelcaptain i am going back and resequencing, cutting/adding/shortening and deleting way more than i have in the past in order to maintain tension and pacing better. wether or not these things are actually improved is another matter altogether, but i feel like they are. (and is a big reason why all of my multi-chapters take forever........ sorry about that. it's me slicing and dicing my drafts). the world building aspect of Star Wars is also really cool-- wanna a certain setting? just fucking make it up! no one cares. and as a setting slut, i love this for me. <3

6. What’s the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project?

australian cattle stations.

7. What’s your favorite type of comment to receive on your work?

i don't discriminate, but the comments that compare me to other works/creators (i've gotten Bronte, Justified, the Coen Brothers and others). those both make me so happy and so mad because how???? no way. not me. @justwandering-neverlost also left my favorite comment ever, before we were friends-- that i inspired her to be a better writer. and now look at us! she can't get rid of me! bet she regrets that. <3

8. What’s the most fringe trope/topic you write about?

me and my western/small/rundown town settings. you can pry that shit from my cold, dead hands. also... storms.

9. What is the hardest type of story for you to write?

modern aus honestly. i start one in order to give myself reprieve from angst and plot and shit and all of a sudden i am having hours-long breakdowns about how this character would fit into this setting and how this character would react to this this thing in this time and all of a sudden the fluffy little modern au has grown 5000 legs and now is a hydratic millipede of hellish proportions that i have to methodically find a way to domesticate without cutting off more legs because two more grow in its place and--

10. What is the easiest type?

you want angst? pining? idiots in love? i got you.

11. Where do you do your writing? What platform? When?

i write anywhere-- on my phone in my car in between appointments at work. at my desk at home. on my couch. in the bar. in my bed. on the patio. i use ulysses. i love the formatting options and just the simple UI in general. it allows you to be as organized or unorganized as you want (very unorganized in my case). as to what time... i'm trying to get better about only finding writing strides at like... 11PM on Tuesdays but alas.

12. What is something you’ve been too nervous/intimidated to write, but would love to write one day?

any historical au. i would love to do one cause i love research and world building and all that but... uh... see my complaints about modern aus above and you can see why i have avoided those. it's one of those 'i've never tried [insert addictive drug here] because i know that i would like it too much and it would ruin my life' sort of situations

13. What made you choose your username?

i was like 8 or 9 years old and wanted to get into a Harry Potter chatroom and everything i picked was 'already taken'. cue me just smashing two words together and never really looking back.

no pressure tags: @justwandering-neverlost @chipthekeeper @luciechat @fulcrumstardust @incognitajones

[poolnoodling]

Fanfic Writer Interview

Thank you @detta-pica for the tag!!! this is a perfect way to jump back into fandom after a bit of a break :) super duper flattered you'd think of me, thank you.

How many works do you have on AO3?

only the two! after my debut this august. i hope for there to be maaaannny more in 2025 :)

Your top 5 stories by kudos/likes:

as i only have two posted works the order of kudos is:

nightcalls - JJK, satosugu, 8.4k words

unsurprising this is the higher of the two as this fic is porny and you guys are dogssss LOL i love it. i actually don't remember writing this fic because the conception-to-posting timeline was such a weird and short blur and i was down with a summer cold.

i'll often have an idea of a scene and branch off from that - with this one, i think i just liked the idea of a teeny forbidden meeting in the dark, specifically the climbing through the window. i don't remember when or how it turned abo but i surprised myself as i'm VERY particular with the trope! but i love how it turned out and you guys did too :') writing ST's POV was also particularly enjoyable for me.

2. my sea is blue (my sea is you) - JJK, satosugu, 10.9k words

my baby. my fondness for this fic has really grown since posting. and your comments are just - fuckkkk. still makes my day. i'm proud of myself for this once, but particularly i like the pacing, the chronology, and how i blended different tropes - it feels an easy story to me, and gentle, and warm, and deserved.

i sort of wrote this fic specifically for ao3 - i started with the idea of sharing a bed (classic) and thought fuck. ok. just write something and POST it. forget all the untouched WIPs (some of which i have had for YEARS) and just POST something finally. i just wanted to gauge what kind of response i'd get, if any, and more importantly how i'd feel about having my work out there in the open. it really was a springboard for me and it totally paid off <3

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

YES! every single one. i am so grateful when someone takes the time to tell me they liked my work because they literally don't need to, at ALL, but they DO, and i want to let them know i'm thankful for that. comments mean so much to me, and the interactions in the comment sections are my favourite of all - especially discussions!!

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

unposted and incomplete but probably the 3 part stsg canon fic i'm cooking, which figures. i'll likely leave the ending angsty/ambiguous - not even a spoiler, it's just that i wouldn't even attempt an all-round happy ending for HI arc because really, the tragedy is too irredeemable for me to work that particular miracle lmao

What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

probably MSIB - definitely leaves you with the warm fuzzies

Do you write crossovers?

i wouldn't necessarily write a crossover where i'm blending characters from multiple fictional universes - that's maybe a stretch too far for my brain to infer those dynamics/interactions. BUT i have definitely written characters from one fandom into the fictional universe of another - so aus yes but specifically established fandom x established fandom instead of regular non-canon themes. for eg i have about 10k of a STSG walking dead au in my drafts (based from a very sophisticated end-to-end storyboard i scrawled in the back of my notebook during a 3 hour finance meeting - cooking on the clock is fkn hilarious)

i also have scrappy pieces here and there where i've mashed whatever nerdy obsessions i've got going on into whatever ship i'm fawning over - dig hard enough in my drafts and you'll find a 50k BTS/skyrim/demon slayer draft from lockdown LMAO

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

no! not yet LOL. and tbh i'd reject that kind of shit PRONTO. it's never made sense to me why someone would leave hate on someone else's brainchild when they can just....... exit the tab

Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

fuk yea brother. intercourse is boring for me and difficult to write so i'd probably say i focus heavy on foreplay/build up, especially first times!!! i've actually stalled at multiple WIPs because i got to the intercourse part and lost all braincells.

literary wise, i like to write smut more towards the """poetic""" end of the spectrum rather than the more literal, action-by-action portrayal (though there's definitely a space and time for this too) - but really this is just a conscious cheat because i find smut generally pretty hard to write.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

i absolutely doubt it!

Have you ever had a fic translated?

no but would be completely open to this :)

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

ah. no. and i'd genuinely love to because there are some fkn amazing authors out there who i genuinely really admire, and whose ideas and techniques i think would blend so good with my own. HOWEVER i'd be the worst to collab with, and this is purely down to time and scheduling. i write fic on stolen time and as a result tend to take ages to produce something whole - if i ever found myself with a more open schedule i'd certainly be up for it, but don't see this happening sadly :(

What’s your all-time favorite ship?

such a hard question?! i don't actually HAVE that many ships but should probably say stsg because fuckkkk the tropes. the tropes you guys. there's just so much that's tasty about it. i won't get into it here but literally what is not to love?!? OTHER than this i'm a huge fan of televised media's most canon gay ships aka hannigram and stucky i'm a simple woman with simple pleasures what can i say

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

oh man. there could be quite a lot, but for fandoms other than stsg.

stsg-wise, there's the walking dead au i mentioned which could've reaaaally popped off but it would've been a behemoth of a thing that required time i don't have, PLUS i fell off TWD train as quickly as i got on it so the interest isn't necessarily there anymore. plot cooked though

What are your writing strengths?

i like this question. personally i think i excel with characterisation when i want to, and especially when it comes to dialogue. i genuinely find it so fun extrapolating from source material in terms of characters/personalities, really getting in their shoes, inferring their reactions, their speech, their psyches. i'm good at writing banter, and bickering, and teenhood, those sorts of back-and-forths, and i'd like to say there's realism in my interactions too, or at least i've been told this. i'd say writing angst is a strength of mine, though i haven't exactly released any yet, so this remains to be seen....

i also like my metaphors (maybe a bit too much), my silly flowery language, i like making writing PRETTY because i'm a shallow woman who struggles to exercise creativity when it comes to plot!

What are your writing weaknesses?

i've always said that i have difficulties with pacing. a lot of my WIPs are stalled because i struggle with scene length, the application of "filler" scenes, time passage, keeping it exciting... i usually get there in the end, but it's pacing i have to pay extra attention to, work on the hardest, and would probably appreciate feedback on the most if i ever showed my work to a beta reader.

then WORLDBUILDING. this is specific to aus. i could never truly enter the world of fantasy unless borrowing from an existing universe in an au type thing, which i have done before! but don't ask me to INVENT - i just don't have the brain for it! i'm not hugely plot orientated - and when i do have good ideas, they usually stay as that.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

i'm a typical useless brit and know no other languages so would probably leave this alone for fear of totally butchering something and offending. there is absolutely a place for this - i just wouldn't trust myself to execute it. there are so many ways to convey a character talking in a different language without running the risk of inserting a shitty google translation which i'd no doubt end up doing

What’s a fandom/ship you haven’t written for yet but want to?

hmmm. honestly i think exploring nanami x haibara would give me so much room to drag my readers into an absolute pit of delicious pining and angst so probably that! i'd like to do this actually. opens notes app

this is really making me think.... probably CSM i could see myself venturing into. lots of fun and fucked up dynamics to play around with there. aki-centric i think.

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

i have 30k of a canon hannigram fic sitting in my drafts that is completely shapeless and TOTALLY unfinished but fuck did i cooooook. idk what it is about hannigram that turns me into a poet but i fkn ate and it will likely NEVER see the light of day but it's probably what i'm most proud of, or what i enjoy going back and reading the most :) maybe i'll shape it up one day, we'll see.

thanks again for the tag! this was fun. as you can see i can fuckin yap for england given half the chance

i'm tagging @ihavethegrimoire and anyone who sees this and fancies having a go!! <3 <3