#a frostiron shipper!! in real life!!

[theconfusedgrapefruit]

I found out my favorite rugby rookie is also a Fandom nerd and it's been so long since I met an IRL not-normie friend. I am normie passing but God is it boring sometimes. Picture me three hours into a five hour drive smelling blood in the water when she tells me she also used to watch the original xmen trilogy on repeat. Oh? I say. I loved the new ones too, it's nice to have hot young xmen to read fic about. She tells me she's read an embarrassing amount of avengers fic. I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours I say. She says she'll probably recognize the ship by name. I admit that I was deeply into frostiron for several years. The manic wheeze of oh my god that came from the back of the car. Imagine you meet a fic friend in real life and the first thing they do is name drop your OTP. I also read stucky, I say. We're both somewhere between delirious laughter and tears. She knows that all good fic writers for some reasons also write hockey rpf!!! Finally it's like a third language I never get to use I've been archiving fandom knowledge since I was 15

[ryal-is-reading]

Waking up this morning to see the Lokius fandom totally imploding is cracking me up 😂😂😂. The subset of crazy fans who threw violent hate at Sylvie and those shippers for being "selfcest" (a totally made up thing that, for the record, I've always thought Loki would down for *gestures at her FrostIron w Loki!magic clones bookmarks*) are now facing down the possibility of having been shipping "incest" this whole time 🤣 (again, quote marks...Thor and Loki have never been actually related).

People need to learn to separate real life from fiction, and to take things WAY less seriously. Jfc.

[dendrite-blues]

Given the events of today, this seems an appropriate time to tell an embarrassing story about myself.

Me, 2 me:

It’s about Loki, and 2012 fandom, and growing older. In retrospect, I suppose it’s not actually that funny, but the irony is pretty strong.

The first MCU movie I saw was Avengers 1. I had never read a comic book or seen a super hero movie. I just happened to be in the common room of my dorm when a bunch of nerd bros were going to see it, and a good friend insisted that I had to see it.

I was ENTHRALLED the entire time. Start to finish. Every joke, every fight seen, all the characters being introduced and meeting each other. The hot ass villain that stone cold just WHACKED a guy with his cane and drilled some motherfucker’s eye out. Like WTF?!

My mind was blown. I opened AO3 on my phone in the car ride back, I couldn’t even wait to get home. Mind you, AO3 had only been started like... a year before that. It was baby. I got it so I could comment on some BNF’s Sherlock fics in 2010, but stopped using it until 2012 because there weren’t any fics on there. For real! there were like, maybe 100 fics on there when I joined. I remember telling my wife it was a cool idea, but it’d never work. No way would they get the whole fandom to leave FFN. LOL!!

But there were stories already popping up on premiere night. There were stories from visionaries who’d written shit before the movie even came out. Bless them, they made my entire week!

I thought Tony Stark was fucking incredible, so I looked up his ships. Fell into Science Boyfriends. Didn’t so much like Stony. Fell even harder for team fic and found family stuff.

I remember when Howard Stark’s A+ Parenting was first used. I vividly remember Tony Stark Has a Heart being coined and abruptly being tagged on EVERY SINGLE FIC for a week. Fun times.

Anyway, time passes. I moved into an apartment with 2 roommates and my (now) wife. We were all fujoshi, and conversation in our house would have be completely indiscernible to someone who didn’t know the fandom lingo.

We all go to see Age of Ultron together. It was a great time, but as a Tony/Bruce shipper I was understandably distressed by the sudden yeeting of Bruce from planet Earth and essentially removing my OTP from the entire 2nd Phase of the MCU.

“What the hell am I supposed to read now?” I wondered. 

I still don’t feel any flutters for Steve, Tony doesn’t know Bucky exists yet, and I’m still living with some intense internalized misogyny that prevents me liking any straight ships.

So my roommate, quite reasonably, mentions Frostiron.

And this is where the story gets embarrassing, because I immediately wrinkled my nose in confusion and went on a five minute, idiotic rant about what a dumb, weird-ass crack ship that was. Tony and Loki? Excuse you? What, is that some kind of “ship the two hot fandom heart throbs even though they have nothing in common” ship? He threw Tony out a window FFS? He’s a VILLAIN.

Queue the laugh track.

And my roommate, bless her, she was a total champion and a good friend and she just completely let me get away with it.

She shrugged and said, “Welp, sorry I mentioned it.” and life went on.

FLASH FORWARD SEVEN YEARS AND TWO EXISTENTIAL CRISES LATER

I’m now a 27 year old Hollywood washout whose lost my career, my apartment, and all of my friends in a matter of months. I’m back home in the Bible Belt with my homophobic parents and experiencing the most intense depression, self hatred, and gender dysphoria of my life.

I’ve been so busy working to keep my head above water as a film worker that I haven’t seen a movie I didn’t help make for six years. I have no fandoms, I don’t even know what’s popular anymore. I go looking for anything familiar, anything that can reconnect me to a time in my life when everything didn’t royally suck.

I go to the MCU.

Now, it’s important to note that when I was into MCU before I did not know I was on the trans spectrum, or the autism spectrum, or the asexual spectrum. I thought I was just another slash loving lesbian that really, really liked to cosplay men, and maybe felt a bit sad that I couldn’t be like that all the time, and also kind of wished I could be masculine without going through scary, expensive surgeries, and OH MY GOD I’M NOT CIS OH MY GOD.

Ahem. So. I was processing that at the same time as my life was utterly imploding.

And I found intersex Loki. I can’t overstate how important to my recovery Loki fic was at that time. They felt my struggles, they felt my confusion, they embodied gender in a way I could only dream of, physically changing genitals and all, AT WILL! Whenever they wanted! It was a powerful fantasy, and an escape from the reality of being gender non-conforming in a conservative state.

But I’m sure the irony has already occured to you at this point, you see my dillema. 

Because the options for intersex Loki shipping are, by and large, Frostiron and Thorki. 

Now I had always been intensely squicked by Thorki. My family follows a similar dynamic to the Allfamily, with me being the golden child and my sister being the scapegoat. So I was (and admittedly still am) incapable of reading that ship without thinking about my actual sister, and that’s not sexy.

Which left Frostiron.

[pause for reader to laugh at my shame]

I naturally fell into a deep obsession with the ship, reading the top 80 pages of fic in less than two months. I started writing my own when I ran out of the kind of Loki I craved. I projected so much of my pain and frustration and feelings of isolation onto them, and I even got support and appreciation from the fandom community! It was amazing, and not at all something I expected.

...but in my heart I always knew the truth.

I had dismissed the ship outright years earlier. I thought I knew better. I looked down on the shippers as Tumblr hoes that would ship anybody hot regardless of character. I thought that just because characters didn’t get along in canon that there was no reason to ship them. I thought that you couldn’t possibly write a good story based on one scene. I didn’t bother looking deeper into the characters to see their similarities.

So basically, I’m a giant hypocrite!

If there’s a moral to the story, I guess it’s to be suspicious of your biases and that you can always change your mind. Years have passed but I still look back on that conversation and cringe. 

The one mercy is that I didn’t do it on the internet, so there wasn’t a record. I was allowed to leave that childish arrogance in the past, known only to me and my faithful friend who has been kind enough not to mention it.

But in my true heart... in the back of my mind... I know the truth.

I was an anti of the ship I’ve now written 500k about. And now you all know too.

Thanks to anyone who read to the end! I hope it was at least a little entertaining. Let this be a warning to the youngins. Careful the things you say, you never know what the future holds. Don’t be a clown like me!

[mischief-and-tea-by-the-sea]

Fic Writer Questions

I was tagged by @mcfiddlestan so yay! Fic-y question thingies.

1) How many works do you have on AO3?

57. About to be more than that, though, because I'm working on several next parts to several series, and I assume they count that as individual works.

2) What’s your total AO3 word count?

324,681. Again, that's about to go up several times.

3) How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Well, that gets fun because what I have on AO3 is mostly Marvel-related with one tiny Hannibal ficlet, one Bill and Ted, one M*A*S*H (that was by request and likely will never be a repeated fandom as much as I love the show), one Zohra Greenhalgh (Contrarywise and Trickster's Touch). Now, what I've written in the past as a fandom was Jay and Silent Bob, and that will NEVER happen again. But yeah, mostly it's Marvel and mostly these days Avengers-related with some X-Men still thrown in for flavor.

4) What are your Top 5 fics by kudos?

Hey Jealousy 378

Far away you were made in a sea just like me 354

(Mis)Understanding and a No-Good Woman 300

Saving the Future...Again 294

Supernaut 283

Yeah, I'm not that popular.

5) Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I respond to all comments I get. I know that for some people it takes a lot of guts to comment, and I think that needs to be acknowledged, even if it's a simple thanks.

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

I don't write a lot of angst, and usually by the end of a fic, I prefer to have it happy and not angsty. That said, I'd have to say that it's a toss-up between these small fics:

I know you’ll be a star In somebody else’s sky

Seemed like he knew me, he looked right through me

All the losing and the knowing

Sunset

Time After Time

I have angst in my stories. Some. They mostly seem to be sass and humor and romance and cuddles and sex and making out, but the angst is only a tool to keep the characters fighting and on their toes.

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

I've got several series going now, so I won't count them in since technically, none of them have ended yet. I thought about putting that Never Piss Off a Telepath; Or How Logan Opened His Mouth and Said a Stupid Thing just because that's one of my funniest fics, I think, but I would have to say that the happiest ending may be in Two Turtle Doves, which is a Charles Xavier and Raven Darkholme as children/brother and sister at Christmas fic, and the ending still really makes me smile a lot when I re-read it.

8) Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you’ve written?

I haven't yet, technically. I started an X-Men/Avengers/Wicker Man (1973 version) one after all of the Brian Michael Bendis AvX bullshit storyline, and I may eventually finish it. I was angry. I wanted Steve Rogers to pay. I lashed out in the fic. Or was going to. The other crossover I'm planning (and even hinted at it in Spinning on that dizzy edge (I kissed his face and kissed his head) will be a Tony Stark/Chris Knight (Real Genius) fic, taking place not long after Chris graduates and is working for Darlington. I've got another one in mind that I've made notes for that's an Avengers/Flash Gordon (1980 version with all the flash and color and Queen songs), and then I just finished watching Boardwalk Empire, so there's a 1920s Marvel'verse AU, though I guess that's not really a crossover.

9) Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Hahahaha! Funny you should ask. I received my first ever hate on To get it right even a little / and that little grudging and awkward the other day. In fact, the hate was the first comments I got. I've deleted it, and I did report it but AO3 couldn't do anything about it because the person who commented used a name but wasn't logged in, so they couldn't have their IP traced. But it was all full of "you should kill yourself" and "I hope you're raped" because they claimed to be a Stucky shipper (in fact their moniker was "stuckygirl") and that Steve and Loki were a horrible ship because Loki is just a nasty greasy villain. Blah blah blah. I was more amused by it than anything, especially since there's a chance that the person who commented was a stalker of one of my besties who keeps trying to lash out at them and may well have decided to lash out at me as well. Who knows? Who cares?

10) Do you write smut?

Oh yes. As much as I can get away with. Smut is life. Smut is harmony in the universe. Smut is KFC's 7 herbs and spices.

11) Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I don't think so. I have no idea how to figure that out.

12) Have you ever had a fic translated?

Again, I don't know. How would I find that out?

13) Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Nope. I've rp-written before, but I've never co-written a fic.

14) What’s your all time favorite ship?

I don't just have one. Sorry. FrostIron, WinterFrost, FrostShield, WinterIron, Stucky, Stony, Scogan, IronDiamond, DiamondFrost, DashingFrost, DiamondClaws, and I may soon get to see how much I love DiamondShield.

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

That may be the X-Men/Avengers/Wicker Man one. I have to feel the anger to finish that one off, I think, and I've pretty much decided that neither Brian Michael Bendis nor AvX exist, so.

16) What are your writing strengths?

I think humor and sarcasm are two of my biggest strengths, to be honest. I didn't realize it till I started adding it in almost organically, and that's pretty much where it is for me. I'd say the ability to convey emotions, expressions, touch, and romance are right up there, too.

17) What are your writing weaknesses?

Well, outside of the writing itself, trying not to be discouraged by people's lack of comments and kudos on my fics to the point of not writing is a writers block-inducing weakness, but I think I'm getting over that mostly these days. Trying to find the right balance between explication, "showing," and description, though I've also recently decided that description is not a weakness because I want to make the settings pretty visual.

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

I think there's a fine line that this concept dances on. I LOVE to do it, but I also now want to make sure that it works smoothly into the story. I try and provide translations in the notes when I do it. I try not to overdo it, but I think it's necessary. It's the same thing as writing in accents. That's also dancing a fine line because you want to give a flavor of the accent, but you don't want to overwhelm the readers with dialect and accent. Not unless you're Stephen King and you've just written Dolores Claiborne.

19) What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Okay, the first fanfiction I ever wrote was when I was about 13, and it was a Children of the Corn Mary Sue. It was in pencil. Wrote it start to finish. And it has since gone to the gods in the circular altar.

The first fandom I consciously wrote for was Jay and Silent Bob, and yes, I still have those stories, but they no longer exist online since @jcrewguy blessedly took down his sites. Those fics will never see the light of day again because I don't like the movies anymore.

20) What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Nope. They're all my babies, and I love them equally. I can't pick a favorite.

Tagging: @scottxlogan @elvenferretots @mistressofmuses @izhunny @jcrewguy @chaotic-hypnotic-erotic @kleenexwoman and honestly anyone else who wants to do this.

[sweetchikacherryco]

I. AM. SHOOK. The Black Panther trailer came out and all my anticipation went from 100 to 1,000,000 real quick. I need T'challa in my life especially after Cival War. Spider-Man was adorable and I'm a firm shipper of either super fam, Frostiron fam or science fam (lotta fams in the mcu) , but black panther was bringing sexy back in a black catsuit. Can't wait. Spider-Man: homecoming will just have to hold me over until then.