#also I always have a theory of who my anons are based on recent activity and patterns with comments and such

[purplebehittindifferent]

do we have any player family backstory on the way anytime soon?( /nf , /lh!!) they said their family hates them and I’m curious how far this hatred really goes.

hai! I'm planning to a go a bit into it in the future of Reconnecting Epilogue... but we gotta do some more plot points before we get there.

for now I will say, Im a psychology nerd, especially child psychology, and the affects that absent parenting, and neglect have on a child affect them very much. it can cause outbursts, masking, sabotaging of rewards, loss of self worth, a- ahem. yes, many things... ill spare the rant.

anyway player gets all the lovely trauma, and it will show <3

[jilyandbambi]

So I don't necessarily think Daniel was malicious towards his daughters, but I do think he has said explicitly on the show that neither of his daughters are speaking to him currently. That suggests total estrangement. Beyond that, Daniel was a junkie. He may have wanted to be a good father, but drugs mess that up pretty hard and pretty fast.

Respectfully, Anon, you're missing my point.

I'm not trying to negate what the show has alluded to re: Daniel's backstory and relationship with his family, what I'm saying is that, with so little to go on wrt Daniel's backstory and given that it is still totally plausible (to the point of being quite common, if you can believe it) for one to have a great deal of love for a parent with a history of substance abuse, neglect, or one you've decided to go no-contact with, the accepted Daniel's Kids Hate Him fanon feels flat and lacks appropriate nuance (and imagination!!! which is more annoying to me, personally) for the fandom of The Complicated Relationships Show.

I know children (even grandchildren) of addicts whose parents still managed to create good memories with them even as they battled addiction. Are these relationships dysfunctional? Yeah. Were these good parents? Jury's out. But imperfect or even bad parenting doesn't mean it was all bad, all the time.

On the subject of Daniel's estrangement from his daughters, the fandom bases this on one throwaway line Daniel says during a highly charged rant at Louis, who has been baiting him off and on for days. What does Daniel say right before "My daughters don't even talk to me?" Some snarky remark about legacies being for execs and assholes in loafers (paraphrasing). I got news for you, peeps, two-time Pulizer winners who teach Masterclass seminars and who go through the trouble of publishing an autobiography/memoir care very much about their legacy, despite what they might say in the heat of the moment.

BUT, even if one wants to interpret this one throwaway line literally and run with the notion that both of Daniel's daughters have gone no-contact with him, the show's canon still leaves the "when's" and "why's" of this estrangement wide open.

Who's to say this has always been the case? What if it's recent?

Terminal illness affects families in different ways; what if one daughter couldn't deal with the news and is coping by ignoring him, and the other cut contact bc she doesn't agree with Daniel's decision to continue living independently instead of moving in with her or into an assisted living facility? What if the news of Daniel's diagnosis caused his kids to start smothering him as though he was already in hospice until one day he snapped, said some messed up things, and demanded they give him space, so they're giving it to him (albeit not the way he wanted it).

What if it has nothing to do with the Parkinson's? What if one kid is a semi-homeless addict globetrotting around the world just like Daniel did back in the day (if we assume DM chase happend) and is just so caught up in doing her own thing she doesn't even think to call anyone in the family, much less Daniel? What if the other kid has a partner who doesn't like Daniel and Alice (if she's real) and since marrying this asshole has distanced herself from her family?

What if--as I said in my original post--they're simply really fucking busy being grown and having their own lives and don't have time to reply to Daniel's 90 million daily texts, and "My daughters won't even talk to me" is just Daniel being a surly, dramatic old man who's had it with the depressed vampire he's ranting at, and also wants his girls to be faster texters?

Or, Daniel was a druggie fuckup who was too strung out to ever meaningfully bond with his daughters who, now grown, actively despise him. <- Sure. The popular theory works, too, obviously but there's no reason this has to be THE go-to fanon explanation since

We!! Don't!!! Know!!!! anything concrete about Daniel's past aside from his Pulitzers and drug use. So why not get creative and have fun with the blank canvas while we can?

[just-orbiting-you]

I like that other anons take, I’m newer to the fandom in the last few years and my opinion of Tae is that he is quite immature. He grew up slightly, you can see that, but the way he behaves in relation to social media is akin to someone younger. Jungkook himself coming off instagram spoke to me, I love him for doing that, and because he did (in theory) anything Tae posts is not seen or vetted by him. It actually comes across as rather sad that Tae posts that and JK doesn’t like it or comment. It speaks to a sort of one sided relationship. I think JK cares about Tae but it’s not that deep, it’s one based on the activity they are doing together, such as the premiere, or bowling. Not deep connection. JK has Jimin for that, and Jimin has spoken of this being a part of their bond.

Not sure of the logistics of the Hawaii trip but I can guess that JK went for the thrill of sky diving. It spoke volumes to me that when he mentioned it in an interview he just said he went sky diving, he didn’t mention Tae. It’s also that retelling of his trip with Tae and Wooga to the ski resort and they left him.

I think for years now, way beyond 2019, Tae has felt left out because of Jikooks way of being in their own world . You can see the evolution of that fairly clear in content. Even in the very last live you can see the petulant look on Tae when JK comes back at him about not listening to JM. He rolls his eyes like a child. He’s hooking his arms around JMs legs at one point too. JM often just humours this sort of behaviour, JK ignores it often now. It’s the same where Tae turned on a live at JKs door step when he was with Jimin, who tried to get him to stop. It’s these crossing of boundaries that makes him immature imo. I think JK has a playful side to him but in chapter 2 he wanted to be seen as a grown up, not babied, and Tae does not match that. Jimin does and you can see him being himself around Jimin, they match each other I think, you can see that in the trailer, they click, but that comes from years of intimacy. Those nuances that tell you they know each other like an old married couple. They have been given space to just be that in the show. No other’s around them to stop them being themselves.

I believe though that Tae too has a lot of love to give and I think and for years had no where to put it other than his members, but then he met Wooga, and miss Kim. I love that for him because he deserves love and someone for himself . That is why I get mad when people question Jikook because why would you not want that for them? If that’s what they have with each other, stop questioning everything they do. What they have is beautiful. I think Tae wanted that and he eventually experienced it.

really great ask, thank you for taking the time to write it out! i think chapter 2 gave us a pretty good insight into the member's dynamics, especially t@ekook.

It actually comes across as rather sad that Tae posts that and JK doesn’t like it or comment. It speaks to a sort of one sided relationship.

definitely. from the way that jungkook spoke about the movie premiere, skydiving, skiing as you mentioned, it just further perpetuates this notion that i don't think that tae has a deep relationship with jungkook.

i think jk just has always loved a lot of thrill seeking activities and you don't need to do that with people who are your closest, you know. the fact that the most recent stuff we have heard jikook often doing and t@ekook doing is: drinking and vulnerable discussions/advice on singing vs. hawaii and skydiving.

like clearly one is more sentimental, intimate and demonstrates a trust between the two.

i love that we are discussing tae's boundary crossing and jungkook's maturity because at face value you would assume it's the other way around. or even with how jungkook started doing lives last year. some may see it as immature, but i think he really had a goal there in sharing himself in the way he wanted. taking care to curate his image exactly how he wanted it and that meant taking down his instagram.

It’s the same where Tae turned on a live at JKs door step when he was with Jimin, who tried to get him to stop. It’s these crossing of boundaries that makes him immature imo.

this was honestly just a stupid move, we can see jungkook's building behind them in the video and i'm glad jimin was there to stop tae. but this is another moment where tae has to tell fans exactly everytime he is with jungkook or has seen jungkook. which just becomes odd after a while.

I think Tae wanted that and he eventually experienced it.

im not the biggest fan of the people he's surrounded himself with and i wonder if he is mature enough with others outside of bts. but i hope he did too.

[utilitycaster]

I saw your post about Bor'Dor and people wondering if there's a Twist of some kind and you mentioned Veth being one of the least popular characters for CR in passing. I think you talked about it elsewhere as well, and I had recently realized *why* I never really gave her a lot of thought. Because on paper she should be one of my favourite characters that I relate to the most--I read her comic and had a moment of "oh, I should really go back and reevaluate this character because damn". I took some time to think about it and I realized that, for me at least, the reason I never really gave her a lot of thought was kind of because of Sam, or at least the way he plays at the table. I find his antics distracting at best and grating at worst. I still mute his section of the ads whenever I watch because something about his energy just doesn't vibe with me. And like, I do love the moments where he does get serious and has a really good dramatic scene, but then a few minutes later he does something that takes me out of it again. This is of course, something that's a me thing, not a him thing. I'm fully aware of the fact that it's his game and he gets to play however he wants. Hell, if the others had an issue with it, they wouldn't have played with him in the first place. So I fully understand that it's just my own personal preferences regarding the type of humour and energy I respond to. But it is something I noticed after giving it some thought. I have hope with the Mighty Nein animated series I'll get to enjoy Veth's story a little more, since that was what happened with Scanlan (I went back to watch campaign 1 after watching LOVM, and I am having a hard time getting past the stark differences). So yeah, that's kind of the reason I never connected with Veth as much as I probably should have. I don't know if other people have the same views, but I'd be interested to hear why you think other don't like Veth (or at least don't respond to her as much as they do the other characters/players).

Anon, I am...not sure why you sent this. It feels like it really misses my point, and it's not something I can address. I've brought this up before but like, I don't always connect with the themes Sam tends to engage with, but I feel that when I've criticized his characters on other bases someone always brings up how they don't vibe with his sense of humor and like, cannot relate, can never relate, I actively enjoy the ASMR ad, and I don't know why I get unrelated Sam criticism - especially about his sense of humor, which is like...not even particularly weird or unusual nor excessive for the table. This is something that really needs to be a post you make on your own blog rather than an anon ask to someone who is getting a little weirded out that this keeps happening.

But I think more importantly my point is not "everyone needs to love Veth". There are plenty of reasons why Veth might not be someone's favorite character, and also it is completely valid to dislike a character based on your pet peeves! If you don't vibe with Veth as a character or Sam as a player, you are not obligated to try to rewire your brain to make it happen. But I do find it incredibly telling that "this character is secretly another race" pops up constantly as a popular theory, and then when a player actually took care and built a character based on that premise with all the implications it entailed, it was a comparatively unpopular choice. My point is "a lot of theories that hinge on there being some Big Twist Reveal really boil down to 'waaaah i think humans are boring and I play a kalashtar so I want someone else to play a kalashtar' without actually engaging in what the narrative would necessarily need to be to support this," and I find that a very, very strong argument against many of those theories as a result.

[writingmochi]

it is no problem at all ~

that is quite a young age to be exposed to such platforms. i am glad that your journey on starting anew is going well. it is hard to completely erase ones identity, as it is tied to you, but i believe you are doing a pretty great job.

yes, some fandoms can be quite toxic. while it is nice to bond with people over certain activities, there are people who always manage to ruin the fun for others. personally, i allow it to roll off of me at this point. i do not engage in fan wars or anything silly like that because not only is it a waste of my time and energy, but it is also completely pointless as most of these groups are friends in real life. after all, i am in it for the group, not the people who stan the group, so i do my best to support them as much as i can ~ however, i am glad that you have found joy in other interests. k-pop can be forever for some, but not for all.

the storyline is an interesting thing really. others make theories and others do not care. for me, i take note of the storyline, but i am not one to avidly keep up with it. i simply acknowledge that it is there and apart of the concept.

i can see your point with ateez and enha. enhypen’s storyline does have that webtoon. i believe that the company made it more complicated by marking lines between enhypen as a group and enhypen as characters in their storyline. so i am not entirely sure of the story myself… as for how hybe and kq treat their groups, they are rather different. they capitalize off of them in very different ways, but the most important thing in my opinion is the music and i do not have too many complaints in that department.

your ideas are very interesting and i can say that i would be invested in your career path as a creative director. i believe i saw a post where you created a group just for fun, street spirits? very cool and eye-catching.

unfortunately, this will be my last ask. i believe my time as your anon has been amazing, but all good things must come to an end. rather than simply revealing myself or ending with a grandiose gesture, i will pose a simple question to you. if you have the correct answer, then my reveal is complete ~

who in our group chat recently changed their icon to soobin? ~

signed, 🩻

lissie: hey xray! good job for lasting this much especially longer than my attempt lol my guess will be at the very bottom of the ask

yeah, i try my best with that especially knowing how big tech companies are technically "data mining" you for their business. i feel very uncomfortable with that and i much rather stay off the grid from social media platforms as best as i can. i don't know about your relationships towards social media but if you are the person i guess than you must have a good relationship with it unlike me (especially based on the others' testimonies of you when they're guessing about my anon attempt)

toxicity is everywhere in my opinion. but i guess you just have to pick between the lesser of evils you see. life is full of choices of course! also, having different interests is a very human thing to do because nothing lasts forever. we don't know how kpop as an industry will go in for the next five years because everything changes fast, especially with the existence of the information super highway currently (eg: slave contract abolishments, bts raising kpop up to the mainstream, etc)

i'm actually one of the theorists! i used to theorize for bts but after mots:7, i stopped because it doesn't seem to connect anymore. i want to try to theorize for ateez, but i have to keep up with so many things that i'll let other people take the spotlight while giving some comments from the side.

it is definitely interesting to see their strategy, especially as a business major who focuses on marketing. but that's what comes with competition: innovations that are good and bad. just like we see with twitter and threads, consumers are very fickle and they can change. i'm one of the fickle kpop consumers because i'm a multifan at best and a casual listener most of the time. yet we have to know that kpop idols are essential products for us to consume by hearing, seeing, and interacting which way you could do.

i hope so! i don't know if the music industry is my exact calling but I'll definitely work towards enhancing my creativity in my career in a way (there's a reason why i chose marketing as my focus). i was thinking of making a studio for game publishing, idk if i wanna it to be for video games or physical games but i know that i want it to be small-to-medium size and indie rather than it being extravagant like the big aaa game companies with examples of electronic arts or activision blizzard.

there's also a reason why i picked kq ent as the home of street spirit and it is definitely lore and concept! there is a missing market of girl groups with kq ent with the members between 00-03 liners (youngest in ateez and oldest in xikers). lore-wise, i'm trying to connect them to ateez's as best as i could without making to similar. while concept-wise, the group definitely has influences from le sserafim, newjeans, billlie, and a bit of kiss of life that putting them in hybe just makes it redundant...

not the call out to me with my grandiose gesture :") i felt like jigsaw when i'm doing my anon reveal (tbh the whole guess the anon between us felt like the saw movies but more pg-13) good job on keeping up because this is hard! hope you gain more insight on me and the others! i know i'm not as fun as the others lol but that's is just how i interact with people honestly...

soobin in weverse concert! hi lee @robin-obsessed !! hope you have a great time and i guess, take a rest to because it has probably been so exhausting for you~

[ashtraythief]

How do you get so much engagement? Not in a jealous sort of way, but more in a curious way of someone who seeks tips/advice on the matter. It seems these days fandom is much more…distant than it once was and it’s a bit discouraging, you know? I can barely get any sort of engagement, either on my socials or my ao3, but to know you have such a devoted fan base (such as me!) it fills me with hope that it’s possible :)

Any tips and/or ideas?

Oh wow, first off, thank you so much for your kind words!

As for engagement, I don't know if I have much wisdom to give there. Spn fandom is definitely getting smaller, has been for years. Even when I got into it ten years ago, it was already past its prime.

Gonna share what little knowledge I have under the cut.

So I am not the right person to ask about socials lol. I have very little engagement on tumblr actually. I know it doesn't look like it right now, but usually I go months without getting asks. And then I guess sometimes whenever I get one, other people see it and remember they can send me asks? And then I just get a bunch, of which I suspect several are from the same people 😅, and then things go quiet again. Usually, most of them are related to the underneath verse, which makes sense since it's an ongoing WIP, and people have questions (that I am very happy to answer, always! Even tho I can't give anything about the ending away 😅). I used to post fic links here, but I got so little engagement I eventually gave up on that. It didn't seem worth the effort of formatting the posts, but I also have no way of knowing how many people just check ao3 and how many click on a link on tumblr.

Twitter is a little different, but it's also gotten more quiet there. The end of the show didn't help and then recent events *cough*prequelgate*cough* accelerated the decline of J2 fandom especially. But I get some interaction with fic posting there, more than on tumblr anyway, so that's where I post new fics. I think it's helpful to screenshot the summary and attach it to the post for more info. Maybe? I've never done a survey on this lol. Definitely don't be shy about retweeting and reposting for timezone purposes and on different days. Some people follow so many accounts they won't see your post otherwise.

As for fic engagement, idk. A good snappy summary, enough tags for people to get interested but no overtagging? But like, I'm a bad standard here, I think. I've been in fandom for over 10 years, I've written almost 200 fics in all kinds of genres, so people know me. I've also participated in gift exchanges, challenges and auction fics, which is also something that gives you exposure. And I was lucky that one of my first big fics was popular. So I guess a reasonable amount of people know me as a J2 author.

Also supporting my theory of being known is that I recently posted a fic in a much more active fandom and I immediately had like four times the engagement I'd usually get for J2 fics, but still much less than the popular fics in that fandom.

And not all of my spn rpf fics get a lot of engagement either. It always depends on subject matter, pairings, trends in fandom etc. If you look at my fic list, you'll see a lot of fics with few kudos for a variety of reasons.

I still write them, even if I know not a lot of people are interested in them, but I still enjoy writing them. And I always think, if there's only one person whom I brought joy with my writing, it's worth it. But I definitely understand that more feedback is also more joy and good for our egos. And I know there are people out there who don't care about that, which is valid, but I think it's also okay to care about it.

Idk if this is helpful. I can try to give more specific advice for fic things if you have more specific questions, maybe off anon if you're comfortable with it?

Otherwise, thanks for your faith in me and sorry that I have so little wisdom to share 😅

[overthinkingfandom]

i don't know if you even answer question related asks but i thought i'd give it a go so - i've known about the stone (and staged finale) theory for quite a while now, but i've only recently been reading up on a lot of different interpretations of it (mostly for what the stone is being collected for) and from your posts i gathered you seem more inclined to believe that c!dream has some sort of hidden objective that no one in the audience could possibly know about or connect together like they have with this theory because there just aren't any dots to connect yet and that he can only accomplish said objective from inside the prison than any other interpretation as to why c!dream put himself in the vault.

i've wracked my brain for days now thinking about what this possible objective could be and i genuinely could not think of anything, my mind just draws blanks every time i think too hard. so i was wondering what you think it might be? if you have any sort of theory or idea about it, but if not thats totally understandable

Hey anon. I actually have a few posts in the works about those questions. But writing is hell and my mental health is not doing me any favors in that regard so who knows when they'll be done.

As a small disclaimer, I'm skipping over a whole bunch of evidence and explanations so don't be surprised if this all sounds tenuous. There's a reason why I want to make multiple posts about the stuff discussed here.

First, I should probably explain why I arrived at the conclusion I did.

I love strategy and game theory a lot. What initially drew me to DSMP was how Dream uses a lot of irl concepts from those fields in any conflict he's involved in, something which can be seen even as far back as the og Disc War.

I binged watched the first and second seasons and while doing so I kept myself a list of tactics and principles I noticed him using. It's actually this list which was the first thing to clue me in about the finale being fake. (The way he acts there is so dumb in ways that actively go against the planning principles he always used.)

Dream's goals (and subgoals) all share three distinct traits. They're Achievable (as in he would be able to get them while relying minimally on uncontrollable variables such as luck or other people). They're Specific (as in they can all fit into a binary of completed or not. There's no grey area of "kinda" completed). They're Decisive, (as in they're a result which can't be easily undone and/or they give him a distinct and new advantage).

He also uses win conditions. A win condition is something that once completed means your victory is assured no matter what your opponent does. They most often appear near the end of the conflict but not always (such as in the case of the Independence war, when the resolution is pretty long after the victor is clear.)

Ugh, making claims without examples and full explanations pains me.

I bring those things up because just like they're missing in Dream's stated plan during the finale, they're also missing from many of the offered alternatives. Creating a big bad villain in order to unite the server is not decisive, not achievable and only debatably specific. It also doesn't have any win condition involved.

(There's other stuff too, like how when Dream relies on an opponent's decision in order to achieve his goal he makes sure to block all their other options, something which we don't see here at all, but I also want to move on and talk about other stuff rather than letting it devolve into talking about his tactics.)

Dream is a rational player and he thinks getting locked up is a good idea, so much so he builds the prison for himself and orchestrates the finale. Because his goals are always decisive, this either achieves something or gives him an advantage. By itself, being locked up didn't achieve Dream anything so it must give him an advantage of some kind.

The reason why I assume it's based on some piece of information we haven't seen yet mostly has to do with the timeline of events.

The earliest we can track down the prison plan is Dec 4th. However, Dream has been been working towards being able to pull of the disc confrontation in other ways too and that we can track back to Nov 18 at the earliest. Two days after the Manburg vs. Pogtopia war.

That's as far as solid evidence goes, but that only accounts for his actions. If we look at his behavior we can see him changing from a long term strategy to a more short term strategy on Nov 5th, aka the day he switched to Schlatt's side.

On the surface it seems pretty simple, Schlatt offered him the revive book and Dream fought on his side in exchange. Except something about that deal doesn't add up right. There's so much inconsistencies to it and while some of them can be attributed to the change in writers or a change in plans behind the scenes, not all of them can.

Tommy said it best, how would Schlatt get his hands on the revive book? Why would Glatt not recognize it? Why would Dream go to all the trouble of disguising himself as Mexican Dream and visiting Glatt with the revive book?

Why would he say this:

Dream: "[Schlatt] gave me the revive book after- ...before he died." (23:48)

When listening to the clip you can hear this isn't CC!Dream stumbling on his words, it's C!Dream cutting himself off because he almost let something slip.

Something happened, after which Schlatt gave Dream the book. Something that both the character and the story are keeping a secret.

It's my belief that this something is the missing key information we need in order to make sense of Dream's goal. That this event wasn't just a thing after which Schlatt gave the book to Dream, but rather that during this event Dream gained new information which caused him to come up with the prison plan and believe it's a viable one.

If I had to bet, I would say this information is about something supernatural i.e. something which acts according to narrative rules rather than vanilla minecraft mechanics. The connection to the revive book is the most damning but even the stone gathering seems to point in that direction.

The people gathering stone all focus specifically on stone while cobblestone is unfitting. There seems to be some kind of specific purpose here. But as most people who hear about Stone Theory correctly point out, there's not much which can be done with it. Especially with the amount they've been gathering.

Tho considering the timeline and how all three are gathering stone it's possible what they need it for isn't a one and done thing like a specific build but rather something that requires more stone for each person who joins.

But if the reason is supernatural in nature then there are so many more possibilities they could go to which could explain the insistence on stone and how no other block seems to get a similar treatment.

That's basically all I have as far as evidence based theorizing goes: Being in prison is somehow advantageous to Dream. Something happened with the revive book. Being locked up is just another step in the plan rather than the goal.

There are actually a few more leads which might provide us clues as to what is going on with the stone, but they require sifting through a lot of content and paying attention to the details so it's quite an undertaking which is still in progress. Though I will say there seems to be an underwater connection of some kind.

I've got a few pet theories that are more specific but are also way more speculation based. Although "specific" may be overselling it lol.

I think Dream's ultimate goal here may lead to the server's reset plot-wise. His goal is to unite the server but he always thought of it in the context of the early DSMP days, when there was chaos and fighting but they were all a big happy family at the end of the day. Trying to force everyone back to those days after everything is not really viable. But starting again from nothing? Maybe even wiping everyone's memories of it? Now that's way more doable.

How that's related to the stone gathering? Beats me. Maybe he's gonna build an underwater stone temple for satan and pray for the apocalypse to come.

[viscountessevie]

“Yes there are brown villains and no these are not the brown people to villainise”

I am confused though. Are they not allowed to be villainised at all? Doesn’t that depend on how one views their character?

I get that you like them. And that’s fine! But… I don’t. I do see them as people who were unfair and unjust to Kate and highly mistreated her. Just as I see Anthony’s faults in this entire situation as well.

That post, while making a valid point about white saviour complex, isn’t applicable to all fics I have read (of course, I have no way of telling which fic(s) OP was talking about when they wrote that). For example, a recent fic that I read dedicated 7 chapters to Anthony grovelling for forgiveness, whilst also recognising the mistreatment Kate faced at the hands of Edwina and Mary. The author went a bit further, and made Edwina say some awful things that makes Simon banish her from his house (that is where the fic is set).

Look. I am a brown person. Indian, in fact. I have absolutely no reason to hate Edwina for being brown since a) I love Kate b) I am brown myself. I don’t like her because of her actions in the show, and I don’t mind seeing versions of her that a bit more negative than what we saw in the show. Not every fic can be a fix it. That is why your sentence - these are not the brown people to villainise - didn’t make sense to me. It’s possible that I didn’t understand it correctly, and I apologise if that is the case. And I also recognise that the characterisation in the dark au had problematic undertones. But I am not talking about that.

Related to the tags on this post, similar comments on these two posts: #1 & #2

Hey anon, thanks for taking the time to write this in respectfully. (Just an update from last night: I am okay, everyone! But I was at a funeral and wake for my family friend great grandma who I also grew up with so I took some time to focus on that before answering this) Anyways anon, I think you kind of answered your own question and laid out both sides of the argument very well! However, I still would like to answer your first two questions and give my two cents on why I am pretty sensitive about the show portrayal of The Sharmas in post S2 fics: 

I think seeing interpretations of The Sharmas being just godawful family members and how some writers push extreme & harmful tropes on them (will give more examples below) gets me upset. This is based on my definition/scale of what "villainising" is. Personally, the word villain has extreme negative connotations. When I think of villains - my mind goes to truly horrible people who have committed vile actions that actively antagonises innocent people and the protagonists. [I also think of antiheroes but that's besides the point of this ask and post.]

Whereas I think Eddie and Mary are fallible and flawed characters though they come off two dimensional on the show (thank you writers -.-) and when some fic writers add the 3rd dimension that come across as portraying Eddie or Mary as villainous people who are actively antagonising Kathony, it just feels iffy to me. Because while Mary ignored Kate (and most likely Edwina at some points) cos of her grief, and Edwina throwing deep cut comments out of anger (I say shitty things to my sibs too but never that awful - my brothers do that to me tho soo,,,anyways that's for another time but I ALWAYS apologise)

I said 'these' brown people in the original tags as reference to the Sharmas (Papa included) shouldn’t be villianised to the extreme I’ve seen them portrayed. They aren't the cartoon villains that some people are making them out to be! 

Do you guys remember that crack theory going around a while ago where Edwina comes back in S3 to kidnap Neddy like what the fuck is that?? And I know some of my mutuals took part in this ironically and I was just able to block the tags at the time (I do not respect the people who ran with it unironically tho)

 But I think something about Papa Sharma, sweet sweet Papa Sharma who reminds me of my dad from the way Kate describes him and also me imagining him as Sendhil Ramamurthy, I mean look at him: 

Just having THIS GUY being portrayed as a kidnapper and murderer in the Dark AU was not it! I know we aren’t talking about that in this post but I want to explain why after all this time I spoke out to Mimi’s anons about the portrayals of The Sharmas. This was me being pushed off the edge after turning a blind eye for months and the frustration just build up, accumulating into the ask I sent in the ‘#1′ post linked above. Hence, I brought up the portrayals of Edwina and Mary too. 

That being said, I will back up these sections of this ask: 

Doesn’t that depend on how one views their character?.... I do see them as people who were unfair and unjust to Kate and highly mistreated her. Just as I see Anthony’s faults in this entire situation as well.... I don’t like her [Edwina] because of her actions in the show, and I don’t mind seeing versions of her that a bit more negative than what we saw in the show.

You’re absolutely right that interpretations come from how people view them and of course, people are welcomed and allowed to have their own opinions. I did preface my original ask on Mimi’s blog saying as much that no one should be policing anything. I just wanted to point out how harmful the extreme ends of the Sharma portrayals in fics have been lately which is why I don’t read them at all. I only read authors who mesh Book and Show Sharmas well or Pre-S2 fics because I know majority of the S2 fics will make me upset.  

I think the fic you referenced sounds okay because of course Miss Edwina ‘Half-sister’ and ‘More kind hearted than you’ Sharma would make comments that would have her yeeted from Simon’s home. 

For me personally, I just need/will read fics that acknowledge that yes, Edwina and Mary fucked up but are trying to do better. Some people reducing them to one dimensional villains is just reductive to me. I agree not everything can be a fix it but I just feel robbed that we never got a full resolution on the show and everyone was just ‘okay’ so fix it fics fulfil that for me which is why I don’t read the ‘break it more’ fics as I call them ahhaha. But yeah they make me uncomfortable. 

Most of all, I think my frustration and sadness comes from missing the era before S2 where the main Sharma (well Book!Sheffield) fics in the tag were wholesome family ones and now I can barely find any in the flood of the S2 canon fics. 

Hope I got my view across and why I don’t think they should be villianised they way I define it in my head at least! Thanks to everyone for reading this and again to the anon for giving me their pov I appreciate it even if I don’t fully agree! 

[peachymess]

I was gone for a quite some time and you're pro AA now? /gen! No hate but all I remember was your posts about how their interactions aren't about AA but about Armin alone and how he could be affected by Bert. What changed? Also glad you're well now awesome!

Hei, anon! A lot does, indeed, happen, over long periods of time. I wasn't a big fan of AA (though, it was never on the NOTP list, or if it was, it was nowhere near the top). And it's still not my cup of tea to actively ship - I just think it's neat. I've gone from finding it boring and a little forced, to loving that it exists. Sure, in the posts where I expressed my disinterest in the past, I'd sometimes tagg it "anti-ship", but this was so pro-shippers didn't have to see unfavorable opinions of something they liked; not because it was active hate. (And I didn’t even talk about it unless I was asked.)

Anyways, I've gone from feeling like Armin can do better - because Annie as a character didn't particularly impress me - to now being grateful for them finding together because it looks healthy and happy and built on mutual respect. I couldn't think of a better match for him now that we look at everything in retrospect. Because as I've always said: in the end, I want what's best for him, I want what makes him happy.

Now, when you say scenes, I'm assuming you mean scene, because I don't think I've talked exessively about their other scenes, just the crystal one. Because I never thought ALL AA scenes were "about Armin alone". No, of course the scenes are there to build on Annie as well. I might have made the point that the scenes weren't romantic in my eyes, but never "about Armin alone". Now, the crystal scene I DID analyze the scene to be about "Armin BEING alone". Almost wonder if you have me confused with someone because I only spoke about that one scene, only when asked, and I did NOT agree with the Bert theory at ALL. I was asked several times on my thoughts about the scene where Armin talks to Annie's crystal, and I felt strongly that in that scene, what Isayama was showing us, was Armin's isolation. Not budding romance. I won't reiterate that whole analysys, but I feel like the first part still stands. That scene, without the shippy aspect, still stands as one that's there explicitly to tell us several more important (imo) and relevant things.

(And for the record, I have always been vocal about my distatse for the Bertolt theory. If you saw me talk about it, I'm sure it was to explore the different possibilities; "either Armin did X because Y, or because of Z - but in that case, then---". I've always expressed how problematic that theory would be to the characters' agency. I actually big time hate that theory, and I'm almost upset you would think I advocated for it. I HATE hate that theory and always have.)

However, the ship part also turned out to be valid! Not only that, but there was so much AA that I flat out didn't hear about! It's only recently that I was even told about it all! See, I stopped reading the manga years ago, because my nerves couldn't take it. For good chunks of the archs ever since 90, I have only read summaries of. Always kept an eye on it, but yeah. I needed to take a big step back for my health. And oh boy, there was actually a (basically) explicit AA confession scene in there! I felt like a big idiot when I learned that, because some time ago, I was asked if I thought "the confession scene" was actually romantic. Like, did it canonize them. And I thought they meant the scene where Armin talks to the crystal, and that the "explicit confession" was when he said: "I wanted to see you" or whatever it was. And I even ended up "arguing" in the notes with someone that no, it hadn't been a very "clear" romantic confession. They meant it was obvious. ... When in reality, there was an actual confession scene and we were talking past each other. If I could re-do my answer, I'd tell the answer this: YES, that confession scene seemed romantic to me! ...I still don't think AA pre-timeskip + cystal scene is enough to make for a thoroughly built interest. They'd need more content for me to go "ok, Isa has established AA enough now that I buy it if they get to together". So me not believing it at the time of the crystal scene,... well, I stil lstand by that.

Over time, more AA content happened, making for stronger and stornger arguments, so I was won over in the end. Though, my dear anon, here's a kicker for you: I might have been less against it o begin with, if you aren’t just basically fed content ONLY from the ships you like. Because you see what you looking for. And, not being the AA community, I didn't come into contact with a lot of content that would have swayed me. I've always been big on canon. I started loving eremin for its canon bond. ... And for the same reason, I struggle to ship it now, based on later canon. For once in fandom history, a shipping community actually did what we ask them to: stick to their lane. Nobody from the AA community ever "bothered me" by showed me the video of Marina talking about Annie being Armin's obvious girlfriend, from way back when. Nobody told me the english translation of "you're actually a sweet person" or whatever it was, was much softer and sweeter in original. Etc. What I'm saying is there's a lot more AA content than I ever thought. And that has a lot of power to sway. ... Yet, I think what sold it for me, anon, was when Mikasa left Armin to die on the battle field (if that has been Eren, just saying...). His "childhood bestie" left him to choke and die... While, upon being told, Annie, said "I'll get him back" and went for it. That was the moment she started growing on me. It's actually... I'm actually obsessed with that moment. I'm so grateful to Annie, I can't stop obsessing over it. Fucking thank you, Annie. THANK you. I'll never not be upset that Mikasa and Levi left him there, and I'm lowkey shocked that not more people in the fandom had a reaction to that. I don't have as much of a need to discuss the manga online anymore. I have my opinion and I don't feel the need to make others agree. So I hesitate to even pop the lid on this can of worms, but yeah... Honestly, there's a lot of EMA salt there for me and Annie stands as the safe haven and someone who actually, *truly* sees Armin in the wake of the ending... so... I'm very glad he has her.

... So, what can I say. I recently learned Armin was a total gentleman when Annie ate pie, they had a sweet goobye, Armin landing in Annie's palm, the way she looked at him when he stepped up at the end, a CONFESSION, and such leveled normal dialogue, etc. There's more reason to accept AA into my heart now than "a long time ago", anon. I was wrong, AA was endgame and I'm happy about it.

[chibimyumi]

【Response to this post: “What does ‘transgender’ mean?” Explanation through a Pizza and Kuroshitsuji.】

Dear Anon,

I am by no means qualified to make statements about you since I don’t know who you are, but do allow me to suggest a few ideas.

The sexuality that comes to my mind from your ask is something that falls within the spectrum of Asexuality, named ‘Graysexuality’. As for what this is... I think it might be best if you read up on it a bit more if you’re interested, because this is too broad. But for now, I think this website might be helpful.

What you experience is not mainstream at all and rather complex, so forgive me for starting this post in what seems like a “Chibi, where the hell are you trying to go to?”

⚠️Disclaimer: EVERYTHING I will say below is simply food for thought. This post is by no means an essay to convince you (or anyone else) what sexuality you are.The below are simply SOME aspects from which you can consider whether asexuality applies to you. In the end of the day, whether you are ace or not, depends entirely on whether or not you feel comfortable calling yourself as such. ⚠️

1. Enjoyment of Romance vs Participation of Romance

The role of Fiction

First of all I would like to touch upon you saying that you do enjoy reading romance in fiction, but are horrified at the idea of actively participating in a romantic relationship.

I think your “I like it, but I also hate it” is a very normal thing. Fiction is a means through which people explore possibilities that would be impossible, dangerous/scary, or undesirable in real life. That is the whole point of fiction; that we are able to experience a life that doesn’t exist for us, or to re-live a life through someone else (who is just like us, or reversely, very different). That is why fiction matters, oh, people who have not noticed yet.

Perhaps active participation of romance is to you something that is ‘undesirable’ or even ‘dangerous/scary’, and that is why you enjoy it in fiction in the same way some people like reading dystopia stories. For example: “do people want to live in Victorian England where serial murders occur and people need to fight tooth and nail just to get by?” Well, I SURE HOPE NOT! But I know my blog audience consists mostly of Kuroshitsuji readers, and yet we are all here anyway.

Q1: Now, my first question to you is: “Do you perhaps only like the ‘idea of romance’ but not ‘romance it self’? Is ‘romance’ to you personally like ‘murderous 19th century England’? Exciting in theory, but terrible in practice?”

2. Allonormativity and “the broken aces”

Allonormativity - Socialisation and Romance-crazed-society

Our society is BONKERS about romance and treats the ‘achievement of romance’ as a person’s ‘holiest achievement’. Why? Because society wants us to make BABIES. But it can be a pain in the arse (literally), and many people might actually not want it. What did society do? Tell us that we WANT IT and sell us stories of GREAT LOVE sugarcoated in ✨romance✨. (A reminder that the notion of ‘romance’ being linked to ‘marriage’, and by extent, ‘procreation’ has not always existed in human society. It is since the more recent history that humans have come to think of these things to be intrinsically connected.)

Growing up, what is the most persistent question we hear? “Do you have a Boy/Girlfriend?”, “what is your type?”, “is that your partner, or are you JUST friends?” All these questions hold assumptions that it is ‘natural’ for people to want to be in a relationship. In particular, the last phrase also contains two very loaded words, namely 1. ‘partner’, and 2. ‘just’.

Partner: When the question about ‘partner’ is raised, people usually don’t ask:  “My partner in what...? Partner in crime? Partner in business?” That is because there is a silent assumption that this refers to ‘romantic partner’. If you do ask what ‘partner’ should refer to, however, the answer will be a variant on: “you know.... your PARTNER, your ‘lover’”. The word ‘partner’ is actually just a term for someone we are supposed to work in a team with. But over time, a ‘partner’ has come to be interpreted as the ONE person you want to bang AND are supposed to be ‘in a team with.’ It is assumed that “you can’t be someone’s partner if you don’t want to kiss them, and share the rest of your life with.” The suggestion that comes with this word is that ‘if you don’t have a romantic partner, you are alone.” (How often do we hear people say: “I don’t want to be alone” when they actually mean: I don’t want to NOT be in a romantic relationship?) This is also where ‘your other half’ as a term comes in; there is an assumption that you are ‘incomplete’ without someone you want to bang (and have babies with).  

JUST: As I have said before in this post, the word ‘just’ is a linguistic signifier that something is ‘trivial’ or ‘less important’. In this phrase, the ‘friend’ is assumed to be “not a partner” and likewise “less important than ‘partner’”.

Where am I going with this? As we can see, growing up we have been fed great stories of romance that brainwashed us with the idea that “it is normal to want a ‘partner’, or otherwise you are without someone to be in a team with.” You will be the ‘loner’ and excluded from ‘normal society’. This is allonormativity, wherein not being romantic is condemned. This is why many people rush into relationships, and often rather stay in a bad/abusive relationship than walk away; for fear of being ‘excluded’.

  “The sad, traumatised, broken aces”

The next thing I would like to throw out also as food for thought is about the knee-jerk reaction of “did something happen in the past?” when someone says they are not interested in dating or sex. There seems to be a common assumption that if someone doesn’t want ““to love and be loved””, there is something wrong with them.

I really don’t know you, so I am forced to make conclusions based on the little information from your ask. Please by ALL means ignore me if I am wrong, but this is just food for thought:

Q2: “is it possible that you suspected something was ‘wrong’ with you, but have no ‘trauma’ to explain this ‘wrongness’ about the way you feel? And did this suspicion that you are ‘abnormal’ lead you to visit a ‘doctor’, who in turn might have reinforced the idea that it is “odd to not want to be in a romantic relationship without prior trauma”? In other words; were you confronted with allonormativity but find yourself not to fit this norm? (If your doctor did instill the idea in you that it is ‘odd’ to not be romantically inclined without trauma, please tell them to educate themselves on asexuality, please. Please.)

In case it wasn’t clear what I am trying to say: someone does not need to be ‘broken’ to not (always) desire romance and/or sex.

3. Chocolate vs Water

There is a also common misconception among even the people who are familiar with the term ‘asexuality’ or ‘ace spectrum’: namely that asexuality is the same as abstinence or the absence of desire for sex/romance. This however, is very far from the truth.

I would say that sex and/or romance to allo people is like water; it is a necessity. Without water, they feel like they lack a basic life necessity to stay sane and healthy.

To ace people however, I suggest romance/sex is chocolate. Some people like chocolate, some people don’t. When someone says: “I don’t like chocolate”, they are usually met with disbelief: “WHAT, you don’t like chocolate?! What’s wrong with you?”

Ace people who DON’T like chocolate just don’t want it, and they’re not ill or something. They don’t need a sob story of how they choked on it or had an allergic reaction when they were little. These people do not have to hate on chocolate though. Perhaps it is like: “sure, chocolate looks pretty in food art, but do I want to eat it? Nah.”

Ace people who DO like chocolate eat it happily sometimes, but they will survive fine without chocolate. It’s something you must ‘feel like’. Just imagine car-sickness for now. You might love chocolate, but you might not even want to see it when you’re car-sick. You don’t ‘feel like it’.

4. Afterword

Dear Anon, I have rambled quite a lot, but I hope it is comprehensive. Again, I am not trying to impose any labels on you, I am simply trying to list and unpack a few ideas that may not have been considered yet. Again: whether or not someone is x/y/z-sexual depends on whether they feel that label fits them, after all.

To other people, perhaps it is interesting for you to consider these things too? Have you too been battered with allonormativity? Are sex and/or romance water to you, or chocolate?

Anyway, I hope this helps a little bit! (*´▽｀*)ノ

[not-poignant]

This is sortve a personal question so no pressure if you don't have the spoons or aren't comfortable answering! I was just wondering, early into posting your fanfic and original fic, how did you deal with seeing views rise but not getting comments or kudos to use as feedback? If you experienced that? I recently started an original fic on A03 and I'm struggling a little with the anxiety of not knowing if anyone is enjoying it, even though I know I'm supposed to write for me. Love your work ❤️

Hi anon,

Okay so, I think there’s two things going on here. Firstly, original fics on AO3 do terribly unless you already have a decent fandom or following (and not just on AO3, but off it, on Twitter or Tumblr or wherever people can follow you - so you can drum up interest or gauge how interested people are in your original writing). That’s just the way that is.

Let’s be clear, I never wanted to write original fiction on AO3, I didn’t make an AO3 account to do that, I just sort of ended up doing it, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone writing original fiction who wants that fiction to be discovered. Idk how I ended up here, but I’d be the first to say it’s not the smartest way to promote original fiction. (I have to say that, to beat all my author friends from telling me how much of an idiot I am for doing it this way, lmao, my only response is I love fandom and it’s fun).

The vast majority of readers on AO3 not only aren’t interested in reading original fiction on AO3, they actively go out of their way to avoid it.

There’s also things that a lot of fanfiction readers don’t like taking risks on: reading a story that’s only OCs (especially in the context of roleplay OCs, because authors don’t always work hard enough to make characters like this accessible to strangers, so what is fun between two people or a group of people, doesn’t read well to outsiders), reading stories that have too much exposition (not many people read fic for reams of exposition, though there are exceptions - but obvs this is what published fiction does that fanfic can generally skip), original short fics and drabbles (especially ones that aren’t explicit), etc.

When I first started posting Game Theory, less than 10% of of Shadows and Light active readers (i.e. people who comment and leave asks etc.) came over to try it. Tbh I think, initially, it may have even been like less than 5%. Eventually Game Theory came to stand on its own, but I had to work at that, over a long period of time (and I was frankly blessed with some truly amazing individuals who worked hard re: word of mouth, without my knowledge), and to this day my original fiction on AO3 still performs terribly compared to my fanfiction - I’m lucky it performs well overall, but if you compare kudos on say, The Golden Age that Never Was to like...The Ice Plague #2 or even Eversion, it’s pretty damning. 

The upshot of all of that is...AO3 is already working against you when it comes to original fiction. It’s amazing that AO3 allows original fiction, and some people still think it shouldn’t.

Okay! Now to the actual second part, which is how to cope with just not getting any feedback at all. This is more complicated. Honestly, a huge chunk of what might be happening may all be down to how many readers respond to original fiction in general. Overall, multi-chaptered fics do better than oneshots, unless the oneshots are explicit PWP, for example. There are some exceptions, but you can bet that those exceptions are ‘author who is traditionally published put some side work on AO3 and already have a huge-ass fucking following.’ There are I think well over 17,600 original fics on AO3 that have zero kudos. That’s nearly 1/3 of all of them. You are not alone.

The second part is down to you. And this stuff I can’t answer, because this is more complicated. Some of it is going to be you sitting down and looking at the quality of the fic, or how much hard work you’ve done to promote it (i.e. are ppl on your social media interested, for example?), and how much work you’ve done to introduce strangers to your characters (remember, they don’t have the benefit of a TV show/movie/fandom to introduce the characters for you anymore), because just putting a fic in the world is not enough if you don’t have a fandom to attach it to, unless you’re somewhere like Wattpad (and even then, I daresay the number of fics that have no comments/faves is HUGE). There’s a reason publishers make the commissions they do, and it’s partly because they have access to readerbases who will take risks on what they’re publishing. AO3 doesn’t really have the same base for original fiction, it doesn’t even want to.

Some of it will be down to how much you’re enjoying writing the fic (if it’s meant to be ongoing). Could you keep putting chapters up with no feedback? I’ve done it before (back on LJ, when no one gave a shit about my writing lmao and in the earliest days when I didn’t promote it through any communities), but I’ve also pulled and stopped fics that didn’t do well enough, because I needed that sense of fandom collaboration to keep going. This is deeply personal. Sometimes the story alone is enough to keep you going. But creators do enjoy feedback, so sometimes it’s not, and that’s okay too. It makes it more painful in the moment, but it may make you more likely to grow in the direction of attracting more readers in the future, and growth is good.

Some of it will be time. How long has the fic been up for? A day? A week? A year? Almost half of the entire kudos on the Shadows and Light stories came once the story was finished. I’m not saying wait a year, obviously, I don’t know anyone that patient, I’m just saying...it takes time for people to discover things. It takes even more time if people have no signposts to follow, and since people use fandoms as signposts to find things on AO3 (when they’re not using highly individual kinks anyway), you can see how being in origfic sets you back. You have fewer signposts.

I’m not gonna lie. It’s hard. The metrics support that it’s hard. 17k fics with not a single kudos is no joke. Dealing with it isn’t easy. Generally speaking I get depressed for a good long time, and then I take a step back, remember that in the grand scheme of things this really doesn’t matter very much, make myself some tea and go outside to stare at trees and clouds (I am just Like That (TM)). And then I decide if the story is still worth it, if I need to take some time, or if I need to work on something else.

You go story by story, and you keep working at it, unless you decide you don’t want to anymore, and then you’ll find something else you enjoy just as much. It’s not an easy process, but I don’t think anyone who ended up writing ever ends up with an easy process, alas. I wish you luck out there in the word mines, it can be a hard journey sometimes.

[tonya-the-chicken]

Ok, someone (@gucciasswitch ) dared me to do whole list and who am I to resist

1. What was your first OTP? 

Probably Royai. FullMetal Alchemist was my first anime I watched on TV and I immediately fell in love with relationships between Riza and Roy. I used to fantasize about them all the time. I still do love them.

Also I remember I wanted Zuko to end up with Katara

2. What is your current OTP?

Definitely EnjiRei. I think about them and their family all the time. That's just what I do when I ship - I maladaptive daydream. What I like about them is ice and fire aesthetics is how fucked up everything is but Rei still somehow can forgive him or at least try to? He somehow remember her favourite things? I want to know more about them. Like, how exactly Enji found her? What happened to Touya?

I also like BakuCamie, ShinTsuyu, ZenNezu, still Royai, Huwumi, Natsuo x his girlfriend, maybe MomoIida, Jeankasa, Sabigiuy, Levihan, Miritama, Levifar

3. Do you have any OT3/OT+ ships? What are your favorites?

Mmmmmm, probably no. Though, I once saw OchaTodoDeku and it looks wholesome

4. What is/are your favorite trope(s)?

Tropes, tropes... I like what is called "unsexy erotica" by some author on ao3. Like, when characters are processing their feelings and it's the end it's not really sexy though it still somehow amazes me. It's not really a trope though, I saw only one fanfic with that.

I love redemption arcs made well, bad people turning good and having the love no one ever gave them before (duh)

5. What is/are your least favorite trope(s)?

Definitely soulmates au, it makes me cringe somehow. Or is it not a trope? Whatever

6. Do you have a certain kind of ship you’re more attracted to?

I often ship canon ships. Also for whatever reason I enjoy different-sex couples more often. Also if I see a person with fire powers I'll connect the dots them with someone with water/ice, it's just math... Jk... Unless

7. Are most of your ships “pure” or “problematic”?

Actually, they are mostly pure. But also I ship EnjiRei and someone gonna send me anon hate for this, ehhh

8. Who is the most shippable person you can think of?

Objectively it will be the main character of any series cause they have the most interactions. For me personally it's Enji cause I love him right now and I like to explore his relationship with everyone, like, I can occasionally ship him with Hawks, All Might, Burnin', Rei and some OCs

9. Are there any fandoms you don’t have any ships for?

The ones I am not in, duh. Actually, I am not really active shipper... In one punch man I don't ship anyone? But it's not like I am really in fandom khkhkh

10. Do characters have to have canon interactions for you to ship them?

Yeah, if it's not ship with OC (obviously). There can be exceptions like hetalia cause characters are basically countries

11. What makes a great ship in your own opinion?

Logic and some shared life philosophy/goal/struggles. Or just deep feeling and will to understand one another. Dunno

12. What drives you away from a ship?

If I don't understand why, basically. Also any mentor x student relationships are very big no-no for me. I don't like this power dynamic when one person is doomed to see another as they are above them. And also incest is nah

13. Is there anything you ship but refuse to interact with the community for?

Probably EnjiRei? I am kinda scared cause I don't want people to treat me badly based on that, ya know? Actually, I am trying to be more open about it cause fuck society, I am tired of your shit

14. Has a fanbase ever made you ship or not ship something? Why?

I stopped shipping eruri cause I got very fed up with fans being nasty, I guess. Like, they always tried to prove that it is canon and I just got tried and switched to levihan?.. Also I probably started to ship huwumi because of fanbase. I just never thought of the ship. But the most important deed is that fanbase brought me Dabi is Touya theory. Thank you, strangers on youtube

15. Do you like/participate in ship wars? Why or why not?

Define "ship war"? I sometimes enjoy observing people arguing but mostly I am annoyed when someone shit on character or ship. So sometimes I guess I can write something like "bitch can you stop" but usually I try to stay out of it. I guess I am pro-shiping and anti anti most of the time

16. Are there any ships you just can’t/don’t understand? What are they?

Ereri, Dekumight, RoyEd... Do you see the pattern? I highly dislike mentor x student ships. Also incest ships are no-no even if everyone is an adult for a simple reason - I actually have brothers and this shit creeps me out

17. Are there any popular ships that you just don’t like? What are they?

Ereri. It's the only banned tag I have (edit: not anymore, I am trying to ban enji antis). Also probably RoyEd but FMA fandom is not really active or I am not really into it

18. What is your favorite unpopular ship?

EnjiRei........

19. Do you prefer fluff, angst, or smut for your ships? 

It depends. I mostly don't like smut just for smut but if there's some feelings and processing of them, ya know... Angst goes well with everything though I recently found out I kinda dislike seeing violence and suffering in fanart... I actually like comedy more than pure fluff, I am kinda Mr Nighteye and believe in power of humor

20. Do you prefer bigger fanbases or smaller ones?

Bigger ones cause bigger fanbase = more content to CONSUME

21. Have you ever received hate for a ship you liked? 

The most close thing to hate I received was this: https://tonya-the-chicken.tumblr.com/post/189156146100/you-ship-enjirei-and-call-urself-a-feminist

Nothing more probably...

22. Do you have any ships that you ship, but would never want to see as canon?

I think no. I am quite ok with any of my ships becoming canon

23. Have you ever had a ship become canon, but you didn’t like how it was portrayed?

Nah... Though it still can happen since many of my fandoms have actively running mangas/animes

24. What is your favorite canon ship?

Define "canon ship"? Probably Royai

25. What are your favorite ships from a dead fandom?

Sweden x Ukraine from Hetalia. I used to ship ot hard XD I had a whole blog dedicated to it! I just don't know dead fandoms, ok

26. What are your favorite shipping scenes?

Nothing in particular but when a characters does something stupid/risk his life to save/help their love interest. Like, when Zenitsu wet to spiders forest to save Nezuko... Or when Jean saved Mikasa from titan.

27. What are your views on reader x canon ships?

You do you, I guess, but my opinion is NO

28. What is your best shipping advice?

Have fun yourself and don't ruin it for others. You are free to block anyone and anything, it doesn't make you a bad person. And also try to think critically about views shared on social networks, like, not everything in true.

I'll also add here about media affecting reality: aS A fuTuRE PSyChoLoGisT I can say that YES, THEY DO AFFECT EACH OTHER. But often Internet can't get all the nuances and ends up censoring everything. In university we had an assignment where we analyzed modern media. And TV news collected around 30 media risks meaning that materials can affect (usually child's) brain in negative way. What now, are we supposed to not show violence and war? "Destroy everything that can traumatize a child" is a bad solution because of many reasons. Kids are not supposed to read 18+ content, kids are not supposed to spend time on Internet without parental control, kids are not supposed to watch a lot of stuff without an adult's presence. But they do and it's not fault of people who create 18+ / "problematic" content.

29. Do you like OCs (Original Characters)?

Yes, I do, if it's not self-insert OC, you know? I have some myself but usually not for shipping

30. What are some of your favorite shipping blogs?

What is shipping blog?.. Ok, I guess that people who post about ship or what??? Eh...

I'll recommend you to just look up blogs I follow, whatever, I'm tired

[9w1ft]

☔️

it’s been about a month now since TSL shut down. i’ve been thinking of how best to summarize my thoughts on the odd things that happened to me there and i’ve decided it’s best to split my thoughts up into a few posts. this is my first!

so, for starters! drumroll pleaaaaaase 🥁 i would like to clear the air.. i am very excited to say that i have properly identified and spoken to the real KalindaKing!

you may or may have noticed before the app shut down, but KalindaKing actually @‘d me in one of her final posts on the app, saying she had seen my theory but that sadly she is an only child.

unfortunately, yes, KalindaKing was not Kimby Kloss. i uhh, take it she herself confirmed it for me recently!

actually, about a month after posting my theory, a mutual of mine tipped me off to a social media post that seemed to be from someone who might be KalindaKing (the gist of the post was, to paraphrase, i saw a theory that i’m karlie’s sister. i wish!), and i had been keeping tabs on it for some time. the post did not get any traction (no likes, no shares) so there was no way to verify if it was related, but doing some digging and cross-referencing photos and whatnot i was left plenty suspicious.

So about 3 months went by after i had my lede on who it could be, and then 48 hours away from app shutdown KalindaKing @‘d me on TSL... so i decided to take the jump and direct message the suspicious person on social media. and, we had a match! it was her!

Can i just say she is just as delightful as she was on TSL? it was an honor to chat with her. turns out she is an active moderator under the same username on another app by the same company.

actually, 😂 the KK part is really a funny coincidence.. see, the moderator who went by the username KalindaKing on TSL originally created that username for herself because she is a moderator on the Kim Kardashian Hollywood app under the same username (she gave me permission to say that), and, alliteration, so go figure! it would appear i exquisitely took my conjectures a twist too far.

this moderator is a professional, so she did not disclose that much to me, but I was able to learn that the ‘TheSwiftLife’ account was the responsibility of her and someone else. She mentioned that Social (ie twitter/fb) was run by her. Someone else was helping out on the TSL app, ie, that account that gave out those persnickety taymoji gifts on the app. 🤨

for those of you who followed my theory closely, this newly confirmed information has likely allowed you to come to the same heartening conclusion that i did: this means that the “message to taylor” function on the app is in all likelihood indeed something that only taylor can see, or, isn’t accessible to just any glu employee. yes, those personal private messages to her were in fact kept private 🥰. that is to say, leading up to my big guess post, i had disclosed the content of my guess (that kimby was KalindaKing) using this function, asking for the go ahead here on tumblr. my theory is whoever the someone is that was helping out with the TheSwiftLife account did not have access to my secret messages, and that’s where the miscommunication between me and them occurred. oops...

if you are new here, you are probably wondering how sound this logic could be. it would also seem to be completely possible that the TheSwiftLife account simply didn't know i existed / had never read anything from me / had never interacted with me through the app.

to that i say:

i now have proof that at least one moderator from the app read my theory back in October 2018

i now have proof that the same moderator @‘d me in response to the theory 48 hours before the app closed on February 1st, despite having know about it for three months.. so i take it that it merited addressing

let me walk you through a sampler of five ‘interactions’ that occurred with me and TheSwiftLife between August and October of last year:

interaction one: 8/1 Puzzle Heart..

after showcasing some interest in the taymoji gifts and crafting my theory of what they meant, i had seen a through line in terms of the overall message being conveyed but was unsure of any of this was real. i posted here on tumblr for the taymoji gods to send me sign, and the TheSwiftLife account gave out a puzzle heart with the flavor text “put the pieces together” the chances of that taymoji being picked to be given out are, i would say, 1/128 chances. the gift giving was mainly from within a pool of the 64 song-based taymoji packs and always of one of the two rare taymoji from either pack, so, 64x2=128

interaction two, 8/29 Rabbit...

following a week of ttb using the emoji rabbit to welcome some anons into the kaylor fandom, TheSwiftLife gave out a rabbit with the flavor text “Fell down the rabbit hole...”

interaction three: 9/12 Pixels..

things felt surreal following the rabbit... so i asked TSL here on tumblr to show me a sign that proved they knew me and saw me. i said there was one taymoji out of them all (of which there are 653) that represented me. i had hoped for the pixel art heart taymoji, as it says in my profile here that i am a pixel artist... i assumed if TSL wanted to respond to my request, they’d poke around my blog and make that connection. 13 days after i made the post, they gave out that exact one. in response, i mentioned what a lovely birthday present this was, as it was coming 13 days before my birthday (i’m born on 9/25)

interaction four: 9/21 Balloons...

between the pixel heart and this next gift, i came to the conclusion that kimby could be spearheading the TheSwiftLife account (given an interaction between this blog and kimby’s instagram stories involving a yacht company), and, as i love cheesy things, i made the extra (flawed) assumption that, given KalindaKing appeared to be a pen name, it would be super duper ingenious if the KK stood for Kimby Kloss. i sent this prediction in the “secret message for taylor” function on TSL, assuming (incorrectly) whoever was on the other side could read it, and posted here on tumblr simply that “i know who you’ve been, and i take it you want me to share?” The next gift that TheSwiftLife gave out were a set of red balloons from the Mine pack, with the caption “Speak now if it’s your birthday this month”

interaction five: 10/1 Umbrella...

even so, i was very hesitant to go through with pushing my theory. it felt, again, unreal. so, i put up one more test... i asked here on tumblr something in the form of a riddle. I decided to phrase a request for them to give a taymoji in the form of a question. knowing the full range of taymoji possibilities, i picked the flavor text of a taymoji that had never been given out, and a double-rare one (which weren’t given out often) the umbrella, and put out my question: do you have my back even if it rains down on me? and the next gift given out was the very umbrella i expected, which has the flavor text “Don’t worry. I’ve got you covered!”

this span of time in particular (not limited to, but especially) is why i have a hard time not believing kaylor is real. why would taylor’s team let any of this fly, that is, why would they allow a bubbly and vocal kaylor experience this if kaylor wasn’t true?

i encourage everyone to look through my blog archive from August to October to see how it played out! it won’t take that long and i think it’s more interesting than just this post. it’s a sweet slice of time... happening before the political post, and then, the ‘wedding’ thing.

and: if you are to believe that this is all just coincidence, then you have to logically assume that every of the above interactions happened at random, with TheSwiftLife drawing from a catalog of over 100 possible choices each time, and accidentally giving something relevant each time. i am not even going to cover the many many other strange alignments between what i post on here and what kimby posts on instagram. the probability of these taymoji is enough.

even taking out of account the probability of the timing of each, and just looking at it like a kid’s math problem, it’s quite a rare outcome.

what is the probability of insinuating 5 specific symbols and drawing those 5 specific symbols out of 5 bags with 128 different symbols inside each, one after the other? 1/128 x 1/128 x 1/128 x 1/128 x 1/128 = 1/34,359,738,368

a one in 34 billion chance of it happening if it happened randomly.

you only think 3 out of the 5 coincidences above are legit? well that still an over one in two million chance. only believe in one of them? still just an 0.8% chance.

and i picked these five interactions because they hilight five times where there really couldn’t have been multiple “applicable” taymoji responses. i tried to cut out that grey zone for you, because there’s plenty of grey examples to pick from. i suppose with the balloons, they could have picked any birthday-looking taymoji and accompanied the gift with the same caption.. but in that case, it means you have to calculate the chances of them writing the birthday messaging after what happened with the pixel heart... and i don’t know how to calculate that...

i’m not even talking about how some of the taymoji given out twice coincided with celebrity appearances in the world of kaylor. i don’t know how to calculate the probability of karlie saying she’ll go to a taylor concert before a marching band hat is given out, and then her appearing at nashville the day after the marching band hat was given out again. or the paul mccartney coincidence, or the hayley kiyoko coincidence, just to name a few of the most straightforward. i’m not even gonna mention all that business about the app notifications freaking out on my phone (for which i have an excel spreadsheet up my sleeve for later should i decide to nerd out that much)

i don’t even need to touch that.

some epic sh*t was positively afoot, my darlings.

but i digress. pending, you know, ‘proof’, we have no surefire way to know about the who (or who all behind it) all of this is, but, i don’t think we need to be sure of that for the time being (uwu*). i just want to re establish that while KalindaKing was a glorious misfire, the mystery of the app still very much remains.

in my upcoming post (i need to buy myself some eyedrops or something because my eyes are redder than that st. louis park sculpture right now), i would like to rewind for a sec and set the question of who aside and refocus solely on what we learned from the gifts and what we can possibly take away from the experience as a whole.

for now, this is me saying, kimby, oops! sorry i thought you were KalindaKing and sorry for not triple checking with you. my double check was not enough. but i’m glad i took the plunge, because, better an oops than a what if, right? and i hope, at least you got a good laugh out of it! and also thank you lovely sisters ☺️ for you know, clearing the way for me to make this post. at least, that’s what it looked like to me. 📯🕊

[theexistentiallyqueer]

Sorry to bother, but where do autistic and adhd brains overlap? Because both are neurodivergent (and beautiful, I agree) But how can I find out which behaviour belongs more to me being autistic (got diagnosed this year) and which is adhd? (No Matter What Deadline, after several years in hostile environment (failed university, then call center work) I panic. Hard.) How do I disentangle adhd and autism to find out what strategies to use to function better?

Please don’t feel like you’re being a bother, because you’re not! Honestly the fact that someone is coming to me to ask ADHD questions makes me teary-eyed, because I’ve fought so hard to learn to function with ADHD that people Asking Me Things like I’m a trusted expert just makes my heart grow three sizes, the opposite of the Grinch.

I’m probably not the best person to ask about how ADHD and autism overlap specifically, especially if you’re taking this from an autistic POV. And I’m also not a behavioral expert, which is a very strong preface. But I can (and am very happy to) talk a bit about my experiences with ADHD and how I’ve learned to make things work for my brain.

I’m going to put this under a cut, if that’s okay with you, anon. It got kind of long and I don’t want to overrun anyone’s dash. And you can always, always ask me ADHD questions, and I’ll try my best to answer.

My ADHD tends to manifest specifically in the following ways:

Extreme hyperfixation that has its own varying degrees (e.g., I’m really into Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but I have so lack of interest in Byleth/Claude that my lack of interest feels like an actual void)

An inability to process feelings regarding things other people care strongly about that I don’t. If we’re using the same fandom example: I could rant forever about how Byleth/Edelgard gives me ALL THE FEELS, but if I friend I care about started to talk about Byleth/Claude, I would immediately lose all interest in the conversation and struggle to react in a way that doesn’t present me as a selfish monster who doesn’t care about the person I’m talking to.

I tend to monopolize conversation if I’m given the opportunity because I LOVE getting the chance to talk about my hyperfixations. If someone cuts me off when I’m really into a topic, I get incredibly irritated and have to try to restrain from myself from acting petty in response. The number of times I have smiled my mouth is a knife and said, “ANYWAY, as I WAS SAYING…” is beyond count.

I don’t recognize or remember people until I have something meaningful to associate them with. I also don’t tend to notice things that don’t clock themselves as Important in my brain. I usually describe this as “background furniture.” Even PEOPLE become background furniture. A girl I work with mentioned a person on her team had quit, and I’d literally walked by that person’s desk earlier that day and didn’t notice it was empty, because that person and the entire space they occupied was background scenery.

If something affects or touches me personally, it hits me Very Personally. I had a complete fucking breakdown watching the video of Philando Castille’s shooting, because I heard his daughter crying while she watched him getting shot and went down onto a spiral of personal loss over my own father to gun violence and started to immediately correlate the two. Separating ADHD brainness from my  whiteness is complex and hard and (said sarcastically) so, so much fun.

The direct inverse of that are things like: I’m talking to my mom, who’s telling me about a high school friend of hers just got into a horrific vehicle accident and is in the ICU. My mom then goes on to give me regular status updates on this woman I don’t know. I get out of work, and she talks about this woman’s surgery. I get out of work, and she talks about this woman’s family’s attempt to find an adequate rehab center. They find a rehab center, and my mom shows me how her friend decorated her daughter’s room. My mom shows me a video of the girl working with a physical therapist, who gets her to push herself upright with a walker and take her tentative steps. “Awesome!” my brain thinks. “Great!” my brain thinks. All of it spans over several days, weeks, months. I have nothing to do with this constant influx of information. I don’t know how my brain should file it. I don’t know this woman who was injured. I feel for her in theory because no one should ever have to go through that even though so many people do, but I haven’t ACTIVELY PRETEND like I personally am invested in the situation or else my mother gives me Concerned Eyes because I seem to be In A Bad Mood Today.

When it comes to organization, I tend to lean towards hyper-organization rather than hypo-organization. By which I mean I over-organize to combat the fact that ADHD often results in disorganization, and disorganization results in chaos, and chaos gives me COMPLETE PANIC ATTACKS. At work at one point, I had my emails auto-tagging every incoming email based on the email type, on top of tagging for my clients. Every label had a different color, and it all made sense to me, because I’d made it. When my team had cover my stuff on a day I was out, my inbox was such a horror show that it left them feeling drained and distressed.

Let’s talk about socialization! I have a rocky relationship with my childhood best friend. When I discovered social justice in college, I started picking fights with everyone over everything Problematique. The first major fight I had with my best friend at the time was because she felt I was over-aggressive towards a mutual male friend of ours. She was probably right, because I know the kind of bullying behavior I later developed. I thought I learned from it. After the 2016 election, I messaged her on FB, thinking I had a sympathetic ear, to say that seeing her mother post constant messages of support for Trump and sharing stuff dismissing Trump’s sexual assault allegations was particularly hurtful considering I’d told my friend that my mom had been sexually assaulted.. I’m not going to share what she said, but she wasn’t in the wrong. We didn’t talk for several months after that.

Speaking of her! When she started dating the guy she’s now married to, at one point I asked her if they’d had sex yet. I asked it because I thought it was a thing you were Supposed To Talk About as friends, and also because I was, in a way, morbidly curious, because I’m grey-ace and queer. She confirmed that they had, but I still felt so icky and uncomfortable about that for so long afterwards. It was only after I started to understand that I’m not cis and not allo that I really understood why: I was forcing myself to perform what I thought female friendship was based on how it’s portrayed in media, and it’s only once I began to understand that I’m on the ace spectrum and that I’m nonbinary that I really started to understand how forced mainstream conversations of attraction are.

I’m loud! I’m loud! I’m loud! I’m loud all the time! I live with my mom and I socialize with my mom and when we’re in public spaces and I’m talking about something that interests me, she always, always, always feels like she has to shush me. What makes it ironic? If there are other people being loud around me, I can’t function. I can’t process the noise. It’s EVEN WORSE if they’re speaking in another language, because if it’s English I can process the words at least, but if it’s another language, it’s just pure, inescapable sound that I know has meaning but can’t intuit, and if I can’t understand something, that’s as bad as dying.

From what I’ve read about autism, here are ways I THINK my ADHD traits overlap with autistic traits:

I can’t read facial expressions. I think I have a better concept of emotional nuance in facial expressions than someone who’s strictly autistic, but I’ll still panic when I see a smile that isn’t bland enough. RDS (rejection-sensitive dysphoria) will kick in. They hate me, they hate me, they hate me, is the track my brain will play on repeat until I’ve drunk myself into oblivion. Whenever someone smiles, I mistrust it immediately.

Eye contact is incredibly fucking frustrating. I understand that it’s expected, but it’s SO UNCOMFORTABLE. Why do we need to stare into each other’s eyes to understand one another? How can you people write whole treatises on the sanctity of locking gazes and finding an instant intellectual bond without realizing that eye contact that’s not called for is personally invasive?

I can’t understand flirting vs not flirting to the point that I’m absolutely paranoid someone is flirting with me, at which point I usually become hostile if I think they ARE, because DON’T FLIRT WITH ME. TALK to me!

I hate, hate, hate unsolicited physical contact. If I’m in a state of over-expression, I hate it even more. I’m not physically withdrawn, because I love hugs, and cuddles, and human touch. But when I’ve spent the entire day listening to other people talk and I have to walk into a room where people continue to talk, if someone touches me, it’s fucking No-Oh-One.

Someone is interested in a thing I’m interested in. We’ll use Persona 5 as the concept, because this honestly happened recently. I talk with the guy whose desk is across from mine about Persona 5 all the time. He’s also excited about Royal. I started going into my Sophia theory that I’ve really only lobbied at @softspokensansa. I could see, I could viscerally see, the interest drain from his expression. BUT I HAVE AN IDEA SO I WILL TALK ABOUT IT ANYWAY, and then afterwards I felt incredibly resentful that I was being filtered through a cookie-cutter drain.

It’s painful–it’s really painful!–to try to talk about my spiritual ideas with other people. I have a side blog I just started and am preppy myself to share, and I’m absofuckinglutely TERRIFIED everyone is going to write me off without looking at what I have to say. IT’S THE RSD AGAIN! Nothing I ever said has actually mattered before, so why should it now?

I feel, constantly, like I’m halfway between a point of reality and a point of something. What that something is is indefinable, but regardless of it, I exist.

I’d like to direct you to two very positive youtubers I know; I meant to do this earlier, but now feels right in terms of how I’ve written: How To ADHD and Amethyst Schaber.I credit both of them in helping me find a safe place with ADHD before diagnosis. There are stories other than yours that matter.

I wish you the best, anon! If you think you’re autistic and ADHD: given the comorbidity between the two, you probably are! And ADHD is just as beautiful, complicated, and misunderstood as autism is.

If anyone reading this can speak to living as both autistic and ADHD, please respond so I can lift your voice. And to my anon: you’re beautiful completely. I hope my story has helped you in its anyway, and I hope that you find yourself at a place of peace. It’s a struggle to get there, but it’s worth it, every step of the way.

[mittensmorgul]

I recently read a fic on ao3 and it was funny and great and then I thought of a few major changes that would make it even more hilarious. Problem is, I don't know the etiquette here. Should I just go ahead and write my own version? Add a link to the original story and credit it as inspiration? It was based on a prompt so the idea isn't exclusively the author's I suppose. Anyway I'll only be borrowing the start scenario (which is the prompt) and there will be no other similarities. Please help

Hello there. I’m gonna start what I expect will be kind of a long essay by saying there is an awful lot to unpack here… Starting with the fact that there is a chasm of difference between taking inspiration from a prompt fill fic and imagining an entirely different scenario, and starting that from a mentality of “I can do better than you.” The first is at the root of all of human creativity. We all bounce off one another and take inspiration from each other, and the entire history of human storytelling is essentially one long conversation. But the second part of this historically leads to fisticuffs. No, really. Google “famous literary feuds” for all the reasons why.

It’s not so much a difference in practical terms, but in your approach and understanding here.

So this is why I saw this ask in my inbox late last night and decided I needed to go to sleep rather than trying to answer you right away. But now I have coffee, so let’s give this a try. :P

I’d start by asking what the source of the prompt was. Was it a tumblr post? A prompt from a prompt list? Even one of those “pick a pairing and a prompt and I’ll write a short ficlet” posts? If so, you’re probably free to use the prompt by going back to the original fic prompt list. People publish those as jumping off points to write fic, and they actively WANT people to use them this way.

If the prompt, however, was given to a specific author by someone, you might want to at least ask that author if it would be okay for you to write something of your own based on the prompt. And at least try not to frame it as “I can write something better than you did” when you ask. That’s just rude and demoralizing for the author who’s already published a fic for that prompt, you know?

I get fic ideas all the time from random places, but there’s a different etiquette for each of them.

Sometimes a random tumblr post will give me an idea, and I’ll go talk to the OP privately, both because it’s FUN to talk about someone’s wild headcanon with them, and because you’re approaching the person who had the initial idea with courtesy and in the spirit of collaboration, rather than from this place of “stealing their idea.” The first builds good fandom feelings, while the second tends to do the opposite. I have a couple of experiences here that will hopefully illustrate the difference.

A few years back, when Lizbob was running the Great Meta Scavenger Hunt during s12, it led to the creation of the Great Fic Writer Scavenger Hunt. The theory behind it was that any number of authors could take the same fic prompt based on a single trope paired with a single distinctive character trait and the results would all be entirely unique stories. The intent was to prove that just because an idea had been written before, it becomes a new story when written by someone else, you know? And it was TRUE.

http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/tagged/the-great-fic-writer-scavenger-hunt/chrono

We had DOZENS of authors participate, and despite all writing “the same story” every week, NONE of the resulting stories were even remotely the same.

On the other hand, I posted an insomnia-inspired headcanon a few months ago, and within five minutes after posting it, my insomnia brain– with an assist from a more rational point of view thanks to lizbob– had taken that little notion and spun it out into long fic in my head. I went back to my original post to laugh at myself in a reblog, announcing that I was gonna write long fic of the thing and for people to stay tuned for more, but other folks had already reblogged the original with comments to the effect of, “Someone should write this fic!” The worst thing was that other authors were tagged into it. As if my highly specific headcanon was suddenly communal property. Because the implication behind it– whether it was the truth or not– felt like “I like this headcanon, but have decided that I don’t want the OP to actually write this story because I like XYZ author’s writing better.”

And I know that was not the intent of the folks who added those comments to my post, but as someone who actively writes fic for this fandom, it felt like a slap in the face.

Now if those same people had replied, “OP please write more of this!” or “What a cool idea!” or even if they’d come to me privately and said, “Hey this is a cool idea, do you mind if I use it to write a longer fic?” I would’ve been HAPPY about it.

Can you see the difference here, anon?

The result was a rather frustrating back and forth where I was told that because I posted the idea in public it was effectively free real estate for anyone else to squat on. I mean, isn’t that what we’re all doing with the source material we base all our fan creations on anyway? We don’t ask the Supernatural writers for permission to use their characters, their settings, their intellectual property to create our own stories and art, right?

But the difference here is apparently too subtle for some folks to grasp. The Supernatural writers aren’t part of our fandom community. And the culture within fandom operates on different rules. Fandom creators are not source creators, and yes we all collectively “steal” from the same source, but it sort of defies the underlying premise that fandom creators as a whole are operating on the same level to suggest that “stealing” from another fandom creator is the same thing.

From my understanding, the entire point of fandom creators doing what they do is to build a community together around the thing we all love. There is a way to do that in good faith, through collaboration and the free sharing of ideas and creations.

I hope this makes sense.

The result of all of that was that I set aside another project I’d been wanting to write and instead began spite writing my own headcanon post. It was like pulling teeth at first, because there was so much Bad Fandom Feeling attached to the concept that the words just didn’t want to come. It’s FINALLY flowing now, though (after several months of the aforementioned teeth-pulling), and is nearing 18k words. I’m hoping it’ll be done and ready to post by the end of March, so I can FINALLY go back to writing the thing I’d originally wanted to work on before this nonsense blew up.

I’ve also unfortunately been one of the authors tagged in on someone else’s headcanon post in the past. I know the folks who do this think it’s flattering, and they’re just excited about an idea and want to read more of it, but the correct etiquette is ALWAYS to approach the OP in PRIVATE before taking their idea and writing it yourself, or pointing another author in the direction of the post and suggesting they write it for you.

I can guarantee you that 99 times out of 100, the OP will actually be flattered you enjoyed their idea so much you want to read more of it if you frame it from a place of appreciation and excitement, rather than from a place of selfish entitlement or superiority.

I’ve talked about this before, but this is how I have always approached fic writing. I got my first idea for a long fic from the Valentine’s Day Collab fic that Winjennster ran back in 2015. I told her I had an idea based on her prompt that I wanted to write as a much longer fic than would fit into the 3k limit for the collab, and she told me to go forth and be fruitful with my words. Actually, I think her exact words were more like “HELL YES! YOU DO THAT!” or something, but the spirit was the same. :P

The next fic I wrote (Project Beyonce) was inspired by a series of tumblr crack posts about “what sort of tumblr blogs would each member of TFW run?” And I reblogged them with commentary about how this would make a hilarious fic, because they were that sort of “conversational thread” of crack headcanons where that sort of addition was more than welcome. Not to mention I was already on friendly terms with the other participants in the thread, so it wasn’t strange for me to zoom in out of the blue and announce I was writing fic inspired by those posts. Even though my fic was set in an AU, and the only commonality was the fact that Dean and Cas were on tumblr. Nothing else about my fic was even remotely similar to the canon crack headcanons from those posts, and I don’t think that anyone involved in the original threads was upset that I’d written fic based on Dean being Cas’s favorite tumblr anon…

My first DCBB (Revenge of the Subtext) was inspired by a crack post made by @nicelimabean. One single sentence about Jensen and Jared walking into a con dressed like Sam and Dean and covered in dirt and blood, and suddenly I had 80k of fic running through my head. I sat there and stared at her post for like five minutes and then went immediately to the chat bubbles to ask– nay, beg– to use her post as a fic prompt for the DCBB. We talked it over for a good long while, both of us growing more excited as the ideas spun out, and long story short, not only did I make a wonderful fandom friend, she ended up beta reading for me and being an ongoing source of encouragement and support in fandom. We even met in person at a con (!) and spent the weekend cackling about how everything felt like a reference to RotS (since at the time we were the only two people on the planet who’d read the fic or even knew what it was about, because DCBB rules of secrecy).

Since then, I’ve gotten ideas for fic from tumblr (and always asked the OP for permission to write their idea– like for fic such as Plotbunny which was based on the combination of ideas from @bluestar86 on a WONDERFUL way to confirm Dean’s bisexuality in canon and Lizbob’s long desire for an Easter Bunny episode, combined with the fact that Easter fell on April Fool’s Day last year… to ideas for The Terminal Job based on chats with @truebluecas about an airport AU WHICH I AM SO SORRY STROB I STILL HAVE IT ON MY LIST TO WRITE AND I SWEAR I WILL WRITE IT EVENTUALLY D:

I’ve also had the reverse happen, where someone read one of my fics and was inspired to write their own fic based on Revenge of the Subtext. They approached me in private with the idea and asked for my blessing to write it. Honestly, I was FLOORED that anyone would be inspired by my words like that, and eagerly encouraged them to write their idea. I’ve also had people give me fic ideas in comments on AO3, in chats both on tumblr and Discord, which turned into longer conversations and eventually more fic (or at the very least to ideas on my To Be Written list). But I always ALWAYS ask permission from the other person or people before writing their ideas. And I have NEVER been told that I was not permitted. People are usually PLEASED that their ideas are deemed worthy by another writer, you know? It’s exciting!

This also goes for art inspired by fic, but in a slightly different way. If someone (anyone!) was inspired to draw something based on something I wrote, I will UNIVERSALLY BE THRILLED that my words inspired someone’s creativity in a different medium. But the key here is it’s a different medium. Nobody ever has to ask permission to art my fic. But that’s not the same as wanting to rewrite my fic into a different story, you know?

Not to mention, collaborating and asking permission and sharing the enthusiasm for an idea or a story like this with others has the potential to boost ALL of your creations. You could build resentment in fandom from other creators, or you can all lift each other up. Starting from the standpoint of communal excitement can result in mutual promotion of each other’s works, you know? Do you want a built-in cheerleader for your work, to build connections in fandom that will eventually support ALL of your works? Then your approach to sharing ideas this way is the key that could potentially unlock that door, or conversely lock it behind you. Your choice, really.

Wait, what was I talking about again? OH right. The whole entire point of fandom. We’re all of us in this same boat, sailing the seas of our chosen Source Material together. You can use your creative abilities for Good, to build communities up, or you can be That Asshole who tries to build themselves up while effectively shading or demoralizing other fandom creators in the process.

So what I’m saying here isn’t necessarily about your desire to write something based on someone else’s idea, but more about the approach you take to it. It costs zero dollars to be polite about it and approach it from a direction of good will and joy in creating for the thing we all love together, you know?

[questions-for-christians]

a few months ago, I hit a really difficult bump in my faith that just made day to day life unbearable -- until I just stopped caring. I've dealt with body image and confidence issues for as long as I can remember, and as soon as I stopped caring about God, I started to be as confident as I've ever been. I look at myself in the mirror and love what I see. I love everything about myself. If my happiness is supposed to come from Christ, why did I suddenly become happy as soon as I stopped caring?

That is an excellent and insightful question. Exactly the kind of question that I like. Not to mention that this could so easily be a question from my younger self. You don’t happen to have a time machine by any chance?

While I cannot hope to perfectly answer, I can perhaps offer a follow-up question. As you have shared a little from your life, would it be okay if I shared something from mine too?

There is a question here but I am going to start with a story. If you don’t fancy reading the story, skip down to “the question” - no one will know.

Another thing it took me ages to learn

One of the many things that it took me a long time to figure out was this - many of my issues about God were actually issues with His people. 

The church is excellent at adding so much extra heaviness to the light burden of Christ that it is a wonder we can still even recognise it. I shall illustrate that with the story I promised you.

Personal story time

I suffer from varying degrees of anxiety and depression. I have done all my life. I am (I have recently discovered) dyslexic, dyspraxic, depressive, and probably a lot more besides. Like you, I looked at myself and hated what I saw. 

I was a (mostly) open-minded (mostly) cis (totally) white male with long hair that liked alternative music - not a good fit for the churches I was going to. I’m still like that today but a lot more chill and I like myself.

My early years were spent in a church that actually taught that depression was caused by not having enough faith that Jesus loved you. I knew that was false but I could not explain why. 

I started to have questions. Questions, cause trouble. It was not the questions that made me leave but seeing the true face of the “in-group” and the way I was seen as utterly unworthy and would, at best, be merely tolerated. 

After I left, I found myself in a similar church where (just like the first) being a Christian seemed to get harder and harder. The truth is, I had failed to learn anything and was going to repeat my mistakes a while longer - with the same results.

Two groups theory

It was while I was in this second very similar church, that I started to notice that there were two groups of people. One group had mastered the invisible extra rules. The “good” group got to speak at the front, lead things, and were offered all sorts of church support. They were the minority that seemed to have it all together and were the example the rest of us failed to live up to.

The others were still struggling to “be spiritual” and were told to be more committed. I was well and truly in the “failure” group.

Questions lead to anger, apparently

Eventually, I questioned the leadership too much and got my head bitten off. I was shouted at by two men who should have know better and not even for a deeply probing or controversial question. Just expressing doubts in the people themselves based on my past experience. It was humiliating and silly. 

Not for the first time, the mask was off. I had again seen the true face of the elite. It was not pretty. The example of the “spiritual group” was not as flawless as they claimed. They were just as broken as the failures but with the added twist that no one could see it.

I refused to go back and - if I am honest - they probably did not want me to. 

If you have read my Tumblr before you could probably see this plot twist coming. I still ask a lot of questions.

The ah-ha moment

For the first time ever I was churchless. Like you, I was less stressed and more productive. Out from under those extra rules, life was easier. 

That was when I started to investigate the Bible for myself. I still had questions and the only way to get answers now was to go looking for them. The “ah-ha” moment was when I first started to discover whole passages of scripture that are the exact opposite of what I had been taught in two mainstream denominations.

I started to see that the reason being a Christian was hard was that I was trying to be something other than Christ-like - I was trying to be a middle-class white cis neurotypical extrovert team-member while I was actually far too punk, anxious, introverted, needy, and nerdy to do half of that.

The discovery

That was when I start to notice how alternative (and nice) Jesus was.

Jesus taught - care about people and let Me take care of the rest. 

The Church taught - turn up on time, dress the right way, pray the right way, put your hands in the air the requisite amount during worship, dance from time to time if the music is suitable (charismatic church culture is weird), attend the extracurricular activities, volunteer for things… If you performed to a minimal level then you could advance in the club. Demonstrate you are spiritual and you can get promoted. 

None of that nonsense was in the Bible. Jesus picked a set of neurotic, working class, failures who between them had exactly no qualities for leadership or spiritual behaviour. 

The disciples repeatedly failed to understand, questioned the wrong things, doubted what they saw, forgot lessons, got uptight about stuff that did not matter, panicked, stressed, stole, lied, cheated, and bickered among themselves about who was the favourite. 

Jesus choice of follower was the “failure” group. I was in the “failure” group.

For You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; You take no pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.

Psalm 51:16-17 [Berean Study Bible]

The church had it backwards

Slowly, I came to understand that the church had things backwards. There were two groups in Jesus time too. The “failure” group which He loved to spend time with and the group that were sure they had it all together with which He argued and offended and generally made look pretty silly by knowing the scriptures better.

Somehow the churches I was in had “accidentally” put the people Jesus would not have liked so much in charge of teaching His message and sidelined the people He would have chosen to do the job.

Being a Chrisitan was not hard - pretending to be one of the “religious elite” was! Ah, now it all made sense.

Happy ending (of sorts)

Like you, anon, I went from a dedicated follower to having no more time for God. I did not stop there, however, and once I had seen it was His “wife” I could not get on with, I realised that God was actually quite nice. (Not “wife” technically, the group that thinks of itself as His bride. I’m being a bit facetious here.) 

I joined a group of rebels who met without permission on a Monday. Like me, they had grown tired of the church too. Together, we formed a new church like group with a single rule that everyone should be able to contribute (and then take questions).

Today, following God is easy. I just do my best to accept and care for everyone and let Him take care of the rest. I see that we are all probably wrong about some part of doctrine and so ask questions of myself frequently. I will probably always be wrong about something and not that is okay. The whole point of Grace is that it is fine to be wrong so long as I am kind. I’m still learning to be kind but that’s another story.

The question

We finally get to the question I promised you. Is it possible that once all the pressure to conform to church norms was gone, the source of your anxiety was gone too? If so, could it be that Christ is okay, but many of his fan club are demanding jerks?

The reason I ask is that this was what I found to be the case. It took me a few repeated bumps in the road to figure that out because I can be a slow learner. 

The Jesus I read about - especially with some historical and cultural context to back it up - was all about gender, racial, and socio-economic equality. He did not care if you were a traitor (tax collector), prostitute, working-class ignoramus, or outcast - he had time for everyone. Well, except stuck up religious leaders - those He gave a hard time too.

Some general advice

Nothing crushes your spirit quite like trying to be someone you are not. I had to learn that the hard way. It took me until my 30s to even get a clue about that one. I suspect that the reason you are enjoying being you, for a change, is that you also stopped trying to be what you were told is a “good Christian”. 

If I can teach you anything from my failures, I hope it is this - the “good Christian” that many churches teach us to be is a lie - no one can be that. The ones that seem to be “making it” are a mix of outright fakes and exhausted people trying too hard. Take it from another person with body shame issues - that stuff is bad for you.

I pretty certain that God will not mind if you take as long as you need to do some self-care. I’m convinced that He loves you and wants you to be mentally healthy. I might offend some church leadership types by saying this but take as long as you need to love yourself like He does. 

There may be no need to go back and join the fake-it-till-you-make-it club. Honesty is good for you. On that front, I have found that church groups for and by the marginalised often have much more authenticity due mostly to having to fend off the mainstream nonsense that condemns them. There’s no hurry though. For me, staying away from Christians for a while was actually helpful.

Above all else, is this advice which Shakspere said best.

This above all: to thine own self be true,And it must follow, as the night the day,Thou canst not then be false to any man.

I’m not sure I have answered your question but I do hope that I have raised some questions that can help you find your own answers. Please do check back in with me to let me know how you are getting on. I’d like to know.