#SHIT READS LIKE FANFICTION

[mirror-to-the-past]

I am but a measly 2:00:15 into the genre-defining "Riku is Gay" video, but like. Damn, Tennelle Flowers is a cinematic genius. I've remained so thoroughly enthralled by the tasteful spacing of audio commentary, clips from the games, and excerpts from the novels/writer interviews that I've hardly even noticed the time passing. What is this video laced with, man- I love video essays, but usually I have to rewind a gazillion times due to my attention slipping against my will.

That collage of comparison clips from KH2 Beast's arc and Riku's KH1-KH2 arc is killing me, man. Ever wish you could tattoo a part of a video to your forehead? Apparently, now I do.

[starkspi]

Trying to bribe @morningstarwrites with these sketches so I can read the new chapter earlier ha! Thank you for the inspiration, the challenge and the absolute joy this fic brings me. I’d kiss your brain folds if I could.

[chessb0r3d]

i cracked the code.

[brinnanza]

I won't post it cause I'm not tryna blow up their spot but I just watched an insta reel of a man in his early twenties getting a tattoo of the bite mark of his best friend, the stencil for which was taken directly from an impression of said teeth in the bff's bicep. like this kid pressed a big open mouthed kiss with his teeth to his buddy's arm and then his buddy GOT IT TATTOOED like wow the rituals are SO intricate have you considered just fucking him on the floor to keep it real

[batwynn]

Sometimes I randomly wonder what some actors think when they find fanfiction featuring their character. Not in the ‘oh nawr it’s PORWN!!?!’ Kind of way, but more in the: ‘huh, so that’s what people got from my acting?’ Or ‘Oh, that’s a different place that story line could have gone.’ Or ‘wait why didn’t we explore this in the show?’ Or ‘He Wouldn’t Fucking Say That.’

[gambeque]

therapy sesh

[sillygoofyqueer]

THIS IS GOING ON MY MAIN BECAUSE I JUST HAVE TO LET EVERYONE KNOW THAT THIS FANFICTION BROKE ME. I'M CURRENTLY VIBRATING. UNABLE TO THINK OR PROCESS ANYTHING. I HAVE SO MUCH ENERGY AND NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. LORD ALMIGHTY. @vinelark, YOU HAVE SINGLE HANDEDLY GRIPPED ME INTO THIS PLOT AND I'M THIS CLOSE TO SOBBING AND THANK YOU SO SO SO MUCH FOR WRITING IT AND I HATE YOU SO MUCH AND I LOVE YOU SO MUCH AND I WOULD WHIP OUT A RING FOR YOU AND I'D LEAVE YOU AT THE ALTER AND AND AND

[catrinaroseprince]

I feel like ao3 needs a specific “major character death” tag for supernatural that tells me if they’re gonna come back or stay dead because death in supernatural is kind of a non permanent issue. Like, I never know if I’m coming in on another Tuesday for the Winchesters or if this is the end when I see that tag.

[bumblingbabooshka]

Too many people taking the Tuvok chokes [Holo]Neelix to death scene as banal 'haha yay i hate neelix kill him' stuff and NOT enough people musing on and imbibing the homoeroticsm of Tuvok, going out of his mind with dark desire shared with him via Suder in a process already likened to a sexual act between them, writing and then roleplaying a scenario in which he can choke Neelix to death

[lgbtlunaverse]

After being in multiple fandoms you start noticing that certain subgenres and stockplots of fic are more common in certain fandoms than others. For example , bnha fics are more than twice as likely to be crossover fics as haikyuu fics. (6.6% vs 2.8%)

Sometimes these differences make sense. Mdzs has a ton of time travel fix-its because it's a story where shit went very very wrong. Haikyuu has a lot of university AUs because it's a between-period the manga largely skipped over in its time jump.

Other times though...

Can someone please explain to me why the premise of "there are animals-human hybrids who are second class citizens and can be owned by regular humans as part pet and part sex slave" was most prevalent in kpop boygroup rpf of all things???

[frownyalfred]

anti shipping DNIs and lists in fics are so wild. it’s like going to an ice cream store and ordering strawberry and while the worker hands it to you they start going off about how gross chocolate is and how much they hate it.

“Hi could I have a little superbat—”

“DRACO/HARRY IS DISGUSTING!”

“…..uh, okay. can I….can I just have some superbat please?”

[wesslan]

”they wouldn’t do that!” in this fic they would!

”they wouldn’t say that!” in this fic they would!

”that’s so unrealistic!” this is a work of fiction!

”why don’t they just do x? that way the problem would have been solved.” because i didn’t want them to solve the problem that way!

”that’s not how that works in the real world!” this is not the real world. it’s ao3.com.

”wrong. in canon they actually-” this is tagged non-canon-compliant. so i actually don’t care!

”any person in their situation would do x instead!” this is a fictional character in a fictional setting with a fictional mind that i am putting a fictional scenario.

hope this helps!❤️

[you-me-we-04]

Sometime I see stuff from a centred fandom (911) and just feel the need to gently remind everyone that the author is dead so people can interpret the show however they like and it is a Fox turned ABC procedural drama and at the end of the day it's not that deep (like they 100% are making the show up as the go) and while it's cool when things from the past come back I can almost guarantee they are not working from some master plan (like a game of thrones would). If you watch any of the season 7 production you can tell everything was done on the fly.

Also the characters are just at the end of the day fictional characters and I'm sure the fictional character of Evan Buckley will not be offended if someone writes a silly little fanfic using the name Evan rather than Buck.

[achillean-heartbeat]

Ugh i read an entire fic of one of my fave ships but the dynamic was written in such a specifically perfect fucking way that i KNOW every single fic for this ship i read after this one is gonna taste like sand because my brain wants THIS EXACT FIC again and again and again

[regulol]

My doksoo headcannon is that whenever they read a book or watch a show Han Sooyoung would make fanfiction for Kim Dokja's favorite character

[hms-no-fun]

i have an intense love/hate with godfeels because it is beautifully written but it also makes me viscerally uncomfortable. something something disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed probably. engaging with that discomfort teaches me more about myself and is definitely worth it for something like godfeels. any advice for constructively engaging with media that Pisses You Off, by no fault of the creator? what would you say to your haters in good-faith, if you could?

well, to be fair i have said plenty to my haters in good faith previously, but that was a very direct response. if you and i were having a polite conversation amongst the two of us, my first question would be "how far did you get?" godfeels has been going for six years now (!!!), and it's gone through many phases in that time. i'm at a point now in my life where if someone tells me gf2 didn't click with them, i'll probably nod and say "yeah it's rough around the edges, there's a lot of stuff i'd do differently today." the most vocal contingent of haters i've ever gotten were the handful of people who dipped at gf2.2 when june got superdrunk and accidentally murdered a bunch of people, assuming the story was going to be about how cool and based that decision was. anyone who's actually read gf2 to completion should find that misconception laughable. it also makes a difference if you finished gf2 and stopped there, or started 3.1 and fell off, or if you got through chapter 8 and fell off, or if you're currently reading Double Album. each of those is a slightly different conversation with its own pros and cons. whether or not i'd try to talk someone into continuing their read depends entirely on those questions (and also how self-confident i'm feeling in the moment).

i guess i would say to someone who is not enjoying godfeels that they should stop reading godfeels. it's an extremely heavy story that digs into a wide variety of traumatic subject matter. it is also deeply personal in a lot of ways, which is perhaps a weird fit for a Homestuck fanfiction. so i can understand someone from the wider fandom hearing about godfeels as "the June Egbert fic" being disappointed that it's not fluff. i've documented in the past how gf2 emerged out of my dissatisfaction with the image of "Hairclips June," whose transition exists off screen and whose acceptance by her friends is an obvious expectation. i kind of feel bad for how that shook out in the long term since, between the lengthy hiatus of hs2 and the broader strangulation of the post-canon movement during the pandemic, the canonical "Hairclips June" story (or at least "June Who Doesn't Suffer 100% Consequences" story) doesn't seem to exist. i don't mean literally canonical, i mean "seeped into the fandom's collective unconscious" canonical, like Detective Pony. there are plenty of fanworks that do a good or at least interesting job with June, but they're not *about* June in quite the same way godfeels is. it's entirely possible that such a thing DOES exist and IS popular (i freely admit to being out of touch with modern fanworks), but for better or worse godfeels still seems to be the thing that comes up most often-- and not always in a positive light.

for a while now i've been working on an "Author's Introduction" which on the surface is an attempt to contextualize the phases of godfeels for new readers, but in actuality is more of a history of/commentary on the post-2019 fandom and the so-called "Homestuck Renaissance." i see this as necessary because godfeels is an extension of that moment, in particular the loudly recuperative pro-Vriska boosters and their exquisitely galaxy-brained VrisRezi meta. then gf3.1 responded to the fandom backlash, chapter 8 responded to my experience watching every foundation of my post-transition life crumble during the pandemic, and then Double Album is an exploration of building yourself and community back up in the aftermath of tragedy.

it's not that this context is necessary to understand or appreciate godfeels, just that i think it helps put things in perspective. when i started gf1, i hadn't written fiction in nearly 7 years. today, the series is sitting just shy of the 500,000 word mark. at every step of the process, the quality and ambition of my writing has increased exponentially. there's a reason i've written Double Album as a jumping-on point for new readers-- besides being better in virtually every way that matters to me, it's also largely shorn free of the baggage that can make godfeels a hard sell for folks. whether or not it actually SUCCEEDS as a jumping on point is another conversation entirely.

so i guess all of that is to say, if we were having a private conversation just the two of us, i freely admit that godfeels is a wildly disjointed story on top of being extreme and often emotionally masochistic. i am proud of this work from start to finish, but it fundamentally is the process of its authorship in a way that a thoroughly drafted and edited novel simply isn't. i used to publish chapters the instant they felt done to me, with only minimal revisions. these days i let chapters bake a lot longer and put much more thought into how they fit into the larger whole. i kinda miss the old way but the new way results in much better work.

i'd be curious to hear what exactly it is that Pisses You Off about godfeels, and why you nevertheless feel it's a worthwhile reading experience. you ask me for advice on how to constructively engage with media that pisses you off, but i don't have any because in general i don't engage with media that pisses me off. i stopped reading fanworks after 2020 because everything that survived seemed to cater only to the sector of the fandom that harassed my friends out of their jobs and platforms. i found their interpretations/extensions of canon lacking, their tendency for straightforward fluff rather grating. i COULD have made that everyone else's problem, but what would be the point? i wasn't the target audience. i didn't enjoy the work, so i stopped reading it. i'd rather move on to media i enjoy than suffer through media i don't.

BUT. there's a fine line here, because it actually takes a lot to Piss Me Off. i don't really believe in rules or standards in art as Inviolable Laws Of Nature. my measure of whether something is good has a lot less to do with its inherent quality and a lot more to do with the balance between intention and execution. it rarely matters how amateur something is, if it meaningfully accomplishes the thing it set out to do then i'll probably like it (or at least respect it). i look for expressions of authenticity, moments where the artist and the medium are in perfect sync. there are plenty of critically praised pretty-looking movies and games with big production values that i don't particularly like. sometimes that's because they're a naked moneymaking enterprise disguised as art. sometimes it's a problem of too many cooks in the kitchen. and then sometimes an artist is just full of shit and doesn't really know what the hell they're talking about (i like to call these people "Californians"). mostly, i just embrace that art-making and art-viewing are inherently subjective experiences, and i find little value in numbered rating systems of any kind.

a lot of my favorite movies and albums underwhelmed me my first time through. they challenged me in a way that i at first interpreted as incompetence, but have come to see as brilliance. there's stuff i found alienating in high school and early 20s that i find deeply relatable in my 30s. as a film student i've had so many conversations with so many people who have wildly different takes on the same movie that i've completely given up on the idea that anyone is an objective arbiter of what's good and what isn't. the only real thing is if it works and if it works for you. i search for the best in everything, because at the end of the day i'm just here for the love of the game and i don't much enjoy hating things. for media to really Piss Me Off, to elicit a genuine I Hate You response, it has to be more than just, like, poorly edited or whatever. it has to embody a repulsive worldview, be a tool of jingoistic propaganda, or otherwise act as an extension of corporate greed and wealth extraction. these days i reserve my hatred for that which has connection to real Power and exerts a mass cultural Influence, or that otherwise blindly reproduces the same problems.

i think it's far easier to critically engage with work you don't like when you search for the things that work, rather than the things that don't. when it works, when it really clicks, you see what they were going for, and only with that perspective can you see why what doesn't work doesn't work. all i ever ask is for readers to take my stuff as it is, good and bad, and judge it on those terms. i find your use of "comforts the disturbed, disturbs the comfortable" funny and fitting. art that wants to be for everyone is art that cannot be for anyone. it is a perfectly round grey sphere that all who gaze upon it can agree "exists" and "succeeds at what it's trying to do." good art is imperfect, because it is the result of a perspective you may not share. i've never wanted to make art for the masses. i want to make the kinds of things that i wished existed when i was younger. there are a surprising number of people who feel that godfeels positively affected their lives, and i know that i have very little to do with that. godfeels is an object that exists in the world. i had ideas of what it was when i wrote it, but i can't control what anyone else sees no matter how much digital ink i spill trying to explain my original vision. if it truly comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable, then on some level i must have succeeded in what i was trying to do even if the path to getting there was spotty and rough.

i did the best i could at every stage of writing godfeels. i would do things differently today, but i also wouldn't be here at all if i'd done it differently back then. i try to extend this grace to other artists as much as possible, that we're all just figuring it out as we go along. but i also know that everyone goes to art for different things, and finds value in different aspects of its expression. really, all i ever want is to have a conversation about the object without the looming specter of Respectability Politics and Moral Hazards. it's when people start acting like godfeels is Dangerous, and that i'm dangerous by extension, that i start having opinions about where critics are fucking up. tell me what it does or fails to do. point at the text and show me you've read and comprehended it by citing your sources and arguing through the text instead of around it. absolutely fuck off with the moral hand-wringing about Transgender Representation and Glorifying Violence and Perpetuating Toxic Stereotypes. it's a fucking Homestuck fanfiction, for god's sake.

but anyway you're not doing that, so, good job! i'm glad you find the experience of reading godfeels illuminating even if it pisses you off. i hope you found this lengthy answer enlightening, and maybe a bit annoying also. consistency is key, or so they say